Conclusion

Modernism’s Familial Relations

The repurposing of Theodore Irwin’s “Slanguage: 1929” in transition’s “Revolution of the Word” issue marks not only an acknowledgment of the aesthetics of vernacular modernism, but also an early sign of its incorporation by high modernism. Largely confined to the popular realm during the 1910s and 1920s, by 1929 the Mencken-influenced strain of vernacular modernism would begin to cross-pollinate the work of its high modernist relatives. This was the beginning of what Michael Denning has called “the ‘proletarianization’ of American culture, the increased influence on and participation of working-class Americans in the world of culture and the arts”: and it marked not only a politicized entrance of working-class Americans “into the world of culture,” but also the attention by the producers of culture to the lives, conditions, and subjectivities of working-class individuals.1 For example, in 1934 Philip Rahv and Wallace Phelps, editors of the Partisan Review, attempted to articulate a political aesthetic that could draw on both proletarian realism and modernist narrative forms, arguing that “the measure of a revolutionary writer’s success lies not only in his sensitiveness to proletarian material, but also in his ability to create new landmarks in the perception of reality.”² While politically committed writers on the Left were imbibing modernist aesthetics, high modernists were increasingly drawn toward proletarian subjectivities and the vernacular language that accompanied them. Following a decade and a half of focus on working-class readers and language, vernacular modernism provided a model for writers in the 1930s.

Writers and critics of the period explicitly acknowledged this debt to their vernacular modernist predecessors. Take, for example, John Dos Passos’s celebrated U.S.A. trilogy (1930, 1932, 1936). When he collected the three volumes in 1937, Dos Passos added an introductory section, titled “U.S.A.,” that included the evocative phrase, “But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”3 Dos Passos’s attention to vernacular language throughout the three novels is one of the more notable achievements of U.S.A., and this did not go unnoticed by critics of the time. In a 1930 review of The 42nd Parallel, the first novel in the trilogy, Edmund Wilson writes, “For the method of The 42nd Parallel, Dos Passos has perhaps gone to school to Ring Lardner and Anita Loos; he is, at any rate, the first of our writers—with the possible exception of Mark Twain—who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness. . . . He still has moments of allowing his people to contract into two-dimensional caricatures of qualities or forces he hates; but, in general, we live their lives, we look at the world through their eyes.”⁴ What is striking about Wilson’s comment here is that he effectively sees Dos Passos as an extension of the “unfulfilled” promise of Lardner, whose failure to translate his talent into more ambitious works frustrated Wilson, Fitzgerald, and others, as I outlined in chapter 2. Still, Wilson, who had been working on his canonizing modernist history Axel’s Castle since at least 1928, clearly had the experimental principles of modernist aesthetics in mind when he reviewed The 42nd Parallel.⁵ Additionally, Wilson’s language here (“we live their lives, we look at the world through their eyes”) echoes Virginia Woolf’s review of Lardner’s You Know Me Al as well as her theoretical writing on modernism. What Woolf had seen in Lardner’s 1916 humor novel about a semiliterate baseball player, Wilson sees in Dos Passos’s “novel of the highest artistic seriousness.” Twenty-first-century critics of modernism might find the link between Lardner and Dos Passos obscure and unconventional, but for Wilson, whose formation of one of the earliest modernist canons has continued to exert influence on thinking about the boundaries of modernism, Dos Passos’s work was a direct outgrowth of a vernacular modernist line running through Twain, Lardner, and Loos, and The 42nd Parallel all but fulfilled the promise of Lardner’s vernacular aesthetics.

In addition to Dos Passos’s completion of The 42nd Parallel (published in early 1930), the year 1929 includes not only Irwin’s “Slanguage,” but also a number of other instances of what might be called vernacular modernist crossover. This is the year that Ring Lardner’s collection Round Up was published by Scribner’s and the year Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest appeared to great acclaim from Knopf. It was also the year of Michael Gold’s first book of sketches, 120 Million, and of Claude McKay’s second novel, Banjo. Clearly, the success of vernacular modernism at the end of the 1920s was setting the stage for its 1930s adoption by high modernist figures like Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep (1934) more obviously recycles Joycean aesthetic paradigms and fuses them with a Yiddish-inflected English reminiscent of Anzia Yezierska. Zora Neale Hurston’s work (begun in the mid-1920s, but more fully realized in the 1930s) extends Fisher and McKay’s experiments with language, narration, and propriety into what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called a “speakerly text.”6 Ultimately, a host of writers of the 1930s, some instantly canonized, others adopted more recently into discussions of modernism, began experimenting in earnest with variations on what H. L. Mencken called the “American Language” and its modernistic “steady reaching out for new and vivid forms.” Even Mencken revisited his magnum opus for a final 1936 edition of The American Language, largely rewritten and with a considerably expanded section on “American Slang” and a much more diverse appendix of “Non-English Dialects in America.” But despite the many prominent signs of vernacular modernism across the American literary landscape, perhaps the most explicit example of this symbolic integration of vernacular and high modernist form is found in the fiction of William Faulkner.

Faulkner has always represented an anomaly in American modernism. While figures like Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Stein, with their continental associations, are easily incorporated into larger narratives about transatlantic and transnational modernism, Faulkner remains resolutely provincial—a writer who never expatriated himself from the United States, who wrote from an explicitly regional perspective in a region that was much farther from European and transnational sensibilities than, for example, William Carlos Williams’s New Jersey.⁷ In this way, Faulkner has long stood as the most specifically “American” of the American modernists, and as a chronicler of the U.S. South with roots in Southwestern humor, he too has been linked quite explicitly to Twain and the traditions of American literature from some of the earliest critical considerations of his work.⁸ Faulkner himself acknowledged his debt to Twain in a 1955 interview, where he called Twain “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs, we descended from him.”⁹

Like many of the writers considered in The Word on the Streets—and many of the canonical figures of the period as well—Faulkner straddled the line between high and popular, and his engagement with popular culture is already the subject of a significant amount of criticism.¹⁰ He wrote a great deal of genre fiction, including the detective novel Intruder in the Dust (1948); detective stories published in the collection Knight’s Gambit (1949); the sensational crime novel Sanctuary (1931), which he called “a cheap idea . . . deliberately conceived to make money”; Pylon (1935), a text seemingly in dialogue with the early 1930s explosion of aviation pulps; and If I Forget the Jerusalem (1939), which features a character who writes for the romance pulps.11 Even Faulkner’s more celebrated texts exhibit traces of popular influence; Christopher Breu, for example, has even outlined the importance of the pulp construction of masculinity to Light in August (1932).¹² Critics have also noted how easily Faulkner’s work was appropriated by mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Indeed, a number of Faulkner’s novels of the 1930s ended up in pulp paperback editions on drugstore racks in the 1940s and 1950s alongside the works of Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler.¹³

But Faulkner’s engagement with popular fiction goes beyond the mere recycling of genre formulas as literary fodder; his work is emblematic of the interconnectedness of experimental vernacular and high modernist modes. Beginning with the Lardneresque letters in his first novel Soldier’s Pay (1926), Faulkner’s work attends to the complexities and experimental possibilities of vernacular language. As with the high modernists of transition, Faulkner seemed acutely aware of how the vernacular voice and the modernist voice together create the interlaced complexities of American modernism. Indeed, Faulkner’s linguistic approach often makes the stylistic and syntactical boundaries between narration, interior monologue, and dialogue quite permeable. While later works would explore in more depth the complexities of history and narration, Faulkner’s celebrated novel The Sound and the Fury, which appeared only a few months after transition’s publication of “Slanguage: 1929,” demonstrates the interrelated modes of American modernism, suggesting that high and vernacular modernism have an interdependent relationship and that the story of American modernism remains incomplete without the explicit acknowledgment a plurality of modernistic voices.

Modernism’s various interrelated strands appear in The Sound and the Fury’s narrative structure, one of its most influential features. Told in four different voices, The Sound and the Fury moves from the most difficult and subjective narration (of Benjy Compson) toward a more comprehensible and objective, but perhaps less “truthful,” third-person narration. The two central sections of the novel are narrated by the brothers Quentin and Jason, whose narrative styles and situations could not be more different. Quentin’s sensitive and introspective nature contrasts strongly with Jason’s brash and angry misogyny. However, these two central sections, in effect, form the “heart” of The Sound and the Fury and posit the stylistic adjacency of the high modernist subject with the vernacular modernist subject. Quentin and Jason, therefore, form two sides of the coin of American modernism: Quentin’s Joycean stream-of-consciousness sits beside Jason’s slangy, hard-boiled narration, suggesting not merely the interdependence of these two modes, but also the familial connection between high modernist and vernacular modernist aesthetics.

Quentin’s narration has long been connected to the work of Joyce and other transatlantic modernists, but Jason’s status as a modernist narrative lens is less clear. However, the rubric of vernacular modernism allows for a more nuanced understanding of Jason’s narrative, which draws on the conventions and language of the hard-boiled crime story (and, to a slightly lesser degree, the comic “Ringlish” of Lardner). Jason’s section operates as a kind of ineffectual detective story in which he attempts to thwart his niece’s plans. Its memorably misogynist opening—“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say”—sets the stage for Jason’s failed quest to curb his niece’s sexual escapades.14 Read in isolation, this opening would seem to support Faulkner’s connection to the colloquial tradition of Twain. However, it also strongly resembles the opening to hard-boiled pioneer Carroll John Daly’s 1923 slick magazine cross-over “Paying an Old Debt” (briefly discussed in chapter 4), where the reformed criminal narrator opens with a suspiciously similar phrase: “Once a criminal always a criminal, there’s them that say that.”¹⁵ Daly’s pulp writing is rife with these sorts of idiomatic vernacular expressions, and when Jason echoes them, he has, for all intents and purposes, walked out of the pages of a pulp magazine and into one of the most celebrated novels of American modernism.

This is not to suggest that Faulkner somehow had read and intentionally quoted the largely forgotten Carroll John Daly, even if he would become friends with Black Mask writer Dashiell Hammett a couple of years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury. Instead, it opens up the possibility of thinking about Faulkner—and, by extension, the rest of American high modernism—as fully aware of the experimental possibilities offered by the vernacular language of the street. These two parallel passages demonstrate an interconnectedness that has largely been ignored; with this in mind, Faulkner’s praise of Anita Loos, Gilbert Seldes’s and Virginia Woolf’s admiration for Ring Lardner, and Gertrude Stein’s fascination with Dashiell Hammett all make a great deal more sense. These writers were not slumming in genre fiction or mining popular culture for transformable ideas; instead, they saw a world where the “slanguage” of contemporary America—Mencken’s “lush and vigorous thing called American slang”—was a part of the larger modernistic “revolution of the word.”

Like the “Slanguage” feature in transition, The Sound and the Fury brings high modernism into direct (and in this case, familial) contact with its vernacular parallel. As Jason’s narration follows Quentin’s in The Sound and the Fury, so is Irwin’s “Slanguage: 1929” surrounded in transition by Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts” and Stuart Gilbert’s commentary on Joyce. The ultimate conceit of Faulkner’s novel is that the “story” of the Compson family remains incomplete without these varied voices. Although Jason’s chapter might be easier to follow than Quentin’s, Faulkner’s placing of these two chapters together emphasizes that both are aesthetic constructions, formal and linguistic experiments, and that Jason’s vernacular language demonstrates an equal disdain for the staid conventions of realism. While these brothers and their two parallel forms of experimentation would have to be compartmentalized in 1929, the American cultural drive toward becoming both vernacular and modernist would subtly unite these strands by the mid-1930s.

This brief consideration of the novel Faulkner regarded as his best should not be seen solely as a way to justify the readings of the noncanonical texts that occupy the majority of The Word on the Streets. Instead, The Sound and the Fury suggests that the interconnected nature of “vernacular” and “modernist” was a very present part of modernist literary culture in the United States, particularly in the years following 1929. As critics of modernism, we must not read popular texts merely as a way to ground our readings of the well-established and occasionally overemphasized canon; rather, we must think about reconstructing a literary matrix in which Faulkner and Daly, Roth and Yezierska, Hurston and Fisher, Dos Passos and Lardner can exist side by side, each offering versions of a self-consciously modernist literary production. That some of these writers courted a popular audience should not exclude them from discussions of modernism. Instead, with new attention on modernism’s complex relationship to the marketplace, the rubric of vernacular modernism allows for sophisticated and nuanced formal readings of the popular texts that were as comfortably placed in the mainstream reading consciousness as they were in the libraries and writings of high modernist heavyweights. Simultaneously, with its emphasis on the modernist touchstone of language and the influential popular linguistics of H. L. Mencken, vernacular modernism acknowledges the experimental qualities of American slang and the powerful influence it exerted on popular writing in the modernist era. Ultimately, this study hopes to contribute to ongoing discussions of the relationship between high and low culture, between modernism and the popular, in ways that challenge the traditional elitism of the modernist canon and acknowledge the formal and thematic complexities of popular texts themselves. Such an understanding of broad literary experimentation makes possible a dismantling of persistent boundaries around modernist writing as well as new understanding of American modernism—its writers, its modes, and its readers—defined not by its emphasis on exclusion but by cross-racial, cross-ethnic, and cross-class experiments in vernacular language.