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The best writer in America at this moment (though for the moment he happens to be in Paris) the most conscientious, the most master of his craft, the most consummate, is my young friend, Ernest Hemingway. The two worst writers that I have met in Paris (I don’t, of course, meet any banal ones!) are Waldo Frank and Robert McAlmon).1 Mr Hemingway, with immense labour and excruciating thought and knowledge, turns out a short paragraph. Mr McAlmon pours out streams of written matter that will result in three or five volumes of the Contact Publishing Company. How Mr Frank works I do not know.
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And the great need of our modern world is just knowledge.
***
So the great need of our time being the saving of time, any soul that can give us very quick, irrefutable and consummate pictures confers a great boon on humanity.
Joseph Conrad gave you Malaysia, South American republics; the Secret Service, the pre-Soviet efforts of Russian revolutionaries, the Congo, the Sea – and above all the English public school frame of mind. Hudson gave you La Plata, London through its birds, the Sussex Downs by way of thistle-down. Doughty has given you Arabia of the Desert; Clarendon the Great Rebellion; Defoe, the Plague of London; Cervantes, the death of altruism – of Christianity itself. It is up to the writer of today to give us today.
To that extent fierce young writers of the type of Mr McAlmon with his admirably photographic gift of observation, his torrential flow of barbaric and harsh words, and his belief that what is wanted is the Document, compiled just anyhow – to that extent these violent ignorers of the past are justified. It is an admirable thing that the atmosphere of the Middle West, that mysterious Prester John’s land, should be given to the world. For the incalculable Vote of the unknown Middle West probably sways the United States and regulates her intercourse with the world at large. So a documented picture of this region is at least as important as a documented compilation of the history of Rome under the Caesars.
The passionately egotistic young writer of these broad fields may then be right in harshly shouting, ‘I am Me!’ and in setting down without thought any sort of old rendering of any sort of old happening to himself, mental or physical. Having suffered from not very wise parental controls he is subconsciously passionate not so much to grab his parents’ possessions and powers as to bash his parents’ knowledges. So, before writing books he will determinedly refuse to read the books his parents read.
He is in such a hurry to be doing that not only will he not take time to observe the rules of the game; he will shout as a doctrine that the game has no rules, language no laws, books no structural necessities, sentences no necessary cadences. He will lose thus a great deal of time. For what we have learned in the past has been mainly how to shorten. All the self-disciplining to which my generation of writers subjected itself had that for its sole object – the getting of what our Egos had to say as expeditiously as possible into the mind of a reader who wants to see as little of you as possible. Any man can get a gun from his shoulder to the ground beside him, but a long way the quickest way is the three motions of the ‘Order Arms’ of the drill instructor.
You come with that to the eternal problem that faces Youth – and that in the end causes the passing of Youth. That is the selection of those rules of the Past that are really practical. For Youth cannot get through on mere volition, on mere energy – or cannot get very far though. And the problems of Art – the problems of not being a bore – are so very complex that one is very foolish if one ignores all the pointers that all the dead have found into the labyrinth that the thing is. The problem of not being a Bore….
It is all really in that. Youth undisciplined will, truly, get through a certain way on the strength of its charm and of its necessary newness. But Time is a long thing and after the youngest man has been talking to you prolixly for several hours you will find yourself wishing that he could be a little shorter. But that time has not yet come for my Middle Western writers and the consoling thing to think is that there does exist a whole band, a whole school, a whole swift-footed posse of young, rude, wild, impracticable but impassioned practitioners on paper.
How far up the sands this tide will get heaven knows. Far enough, I imagine, or I should not be here extolling it. And it has this striking characteristic in its favour. The Egotistic Document has been common enough in the past. Every man, proverbially, has it in him to write one book: about himself. But these Middle Westerners continue and their Egotism is objective. Mr McAlmon does not for ever write about the inner processes of Mr McAlmon; he turns his fiercely didactic Me to the rendering of his Middle Western surroundings. About, say, Dr Carlos Williams there is very little of the introspective; about Mr Hemingway there is none at all; young women like Miss Djuna Barnes are no diary writers of the type of the European Marie Bashkirtseff. Their egotism takes the form of making them insist on writing in their own way.
That is all right: it is a Method, like another. It implies no doubt a lack of the sense of proportion; but I take it that a sense of proportion would in the Middle West be destructive to its possessor. In the face of those vastnesses of territory and population if one realized one’s own minuteness, one would never attempt the gigantic task of a realization of it all. And the European young writer – the English young writer, in particular – has probably much too much of that sense. He realizes proportions – of Class, of Achievement, of Venerability, of remote Time – to such an extent that he is apt to attack nothing and to fall back on the little, fiddling, Peter Pannishnesses that are the negation of effort. From that dismal form of modesty the young American is preserved from suffering. He has all the luck….
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New York Evening Post Literary Review, 3 January 1925, 1–2.
1 [Robert McAlmon (1896–1956), expatriate American ‘lost generation’ writer living and publishing in France.]