It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
And in his heart of hearts the boy knows this is true. Here, in the closing pages of The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain solved his riddle of grief, and clothed his soul in the only invulnerable armor of despera-tion. Good and evil, like reality itself, are only illusions, such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with the best gift of the Artist who saves it to the last--extinction..
Like Hailey's comet in 1835 and 1910, whose appearance Mark Twain saw as setting the beginning and the end of his life, the luster of his genius flashed forth now and again against this darkened sky of fatalism. He wrote and spoke with sparkles of his old wit, and few were aware of the encircling. Oxford gave him her degree of Doctor of Letters in 1907, and his birthdays became national events. In his famous white clothes he seemed a kind of ghost from America's buried life, recalling the nostalgia of her youth, revisiting these glimpses of the modern city and its vast industrialism. But his great creative genius had almost gone--that energy which he spent and squandered so freely, when he had it, with the recklessness of the Old West. For Mark Twain the artist had always been a kind of pocket miner, stumbling like fortune's darling upon native ore of incredible richness and exploiting it with effortless skill--but often gleefully mistaking fool's gold for the genuine article, or lavishing his strength upon historical diggings long since played out. If latterly he seemed to deny his role as America's great comic spirit, perhaps the key can be found in his last travel book: "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."
8.2 Simpletons abroad (American literature abroad)
England had welcomed the American writers of the classical period, and continued to read them for some time after they had begun to be neglected by the American public. In a middle-class English home about the year 1900, Emerson would stand on the shelves next to Carlyle, Longfellow next to Tennyson (with signs of being more frequently read) and Lowell next to Matthew Arnold. The new generation rejected them all, the Bostonians along with the native Victorians. To the younger English intellectuals of the time, the only transatlantic authors worth reading, except Whitman and Thoreau, were the new social realists, from Garland through Norris to Upton Sinclair. Dreiser's Sister Carrie was a critical success in London, when published there in 1901, although it had been arousing such a bitterly quiet condemnation in New York that the author--till then a successful journalist--found that his articles were "being rejected by all the magazines.
The English were usually hospitable to American writers as persons, often more hospitable than they were to imported books. During there was a large American literary colony in what was still called the mother country: it included the aging Bret Hart, Henry James, Harold Frederic, Pearl from Boston (who wrote under the name John Oliver Hobbes), Howard Sturgis (author of the fine but neglected Belchamber), Henry Harland (who founded and edited the Yellow Booty, and, for his last two years, Stephen Crane. Most of these authors had a more appreciative public in England than in the United States; for example, Bret Hare's new books continued to be read in their English editions long after most Americans had forgotten that he was still a living author. Stephen Crane, who could not complain of being neglected at home, could justly complain of being pursued there by scandals that the English found beneath their notice. Henry James, with no larger audience in London than in New York, at least found more of the happy few to understand his work. The same hospitality in later years would be shown to Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Hilda Doolittle ("H. D."), and T. S. Eliot, the last of who became a British subject in 1927, like James in 1915 The Correspondence of Samuel L.Clemens and William D.Howells. 1872-1910. Vols. 1-2. Harvard Universily Press, 1960 .
At the turn of the century, some of the larger American magazines were printing English editions; that of Harper's was edited by Andrew Lang and had a British circulation of 100,000. Many American books crossed the Atlan-tic. In the October, 1904, issue of World's Work, Chalmers Roberts broadly asserted that ten American books were being published in England where one had been published twenty years before. He was not surprised by the fondness of the English public for the genteel writings of James Lane Alien, a phenomenon remarked upon by many critics. What amazed him was the English success of American rural novels like David Harum, Eben Holden, and Mrs. Wigs of the Cabbage Patch, all of which he described as being "intensely foreign and full of detail quite unintelligible to the average Briton."
Shortly after 1910, however, the British public showed signs of losing in-terest in American fiction, except for commodities like the works of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs (who afterward claimed that the globe-girdling adventures of Tarzan had been translated into fifty-six languages). American magazines discontinued their London editions. As for the serious American novelists, English critics learned to say that they were ten or twenty or fifty years behind the times. A few critics, however, had begun to discover the new American poets--Robinson, Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay-- sometimes before they were known in the United States; for example, Robert Frost had his first two books published in London.
There were new American novelists, too, but they had few English readers during the First World War; one of its effects was to keep the two countries apart intellectually, even after they became allies. In 1920 the English publisher of Main Street was so little impressed by Sinclair Lewis' American success that he began by merely importing a few hundred sets of printer's sheets; it was not until later that he had the novel printed in England. Main Street was never popular there, although it was more generally liked in Australia, which, more than New Zealand makes its own choice of American books. Babbitt, however, was the English best seller of 1922; and when its author next visited London he was received like the general of an Allied army. "England," Lewis told his hosts, with his redheaded gift for speaking his mind, "can no longer be the mother country to American lit-erature, any more than she can be the mother country to American politics or American life." The English listened, protested, argued with one another, and came to believe that Lewis was right.
Babbitt was the beginning of a new era, during which American books were not only read but imitated. On their different literary levels, Heming-way, Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Damon Runyon, and Dash ell Ham-met each had English disciples, who sometimes improved on their various models. Graham Greene, for example, wrote English gangster novels that had a psychological depth lacking in his American precursors, except Hem-ingway. A younger Englishman, Peter Cheney, stuck to his models closely, so much so that one of his stories was included (1945) in a French anthology of the new American writing. The editor had learned of Cheney's national-ity before the volume went to press, but had kept him with the others because of his American style. By this time, however, styles and influences were flying back and forth across the Atlantic; and the English imitators of the American hard-boiled novelists--Graham Greene especially--were finding American imitators in their turn. Among poets the transatlantic relations were even closer. T. S. Eliot was the strongest early influence on the new English poets of the thirties such as Auden (before he came to live in the States), Spender, and Manlike; while Auden in turn set the tone for American poets in the forties.
The American vogue continued year after year. In 1938 an English publisher reported that all the novels since Babbitt with a sale of more than 100,000 copies in England had been of American origin. American maga-zines were also read: especially Time (which had two English imitations), the Readers Digest (with an English edition), and the New Yorker, which, in the brighter circles, was quoted more often than Punch. In 1942 one-quarter of the new trade books listed in English publishers' catalogues had been written in the States. By 1946, however, the percentage of transatlantic imports was beginning to decline.
In France it was still growing. Not only were the French translating or planning to translate dozens of the more prominent American novelists and the plays of Eugene O'Neill; they were also discovering and publishing, in the midst of a paper shortage, American books that had been largely neglected at home; for example, the fantastic Miss Lonely hearts, by Nathanael West, which had been published here in 1933 and had promptly gone out of print. At the same time they showed a renewed interest in the American classics. The first French translation of Moby appeared during the German occupation, together with a somewhat fictionalized biography of Melville by Jean Giono; and a translation of The Scarlet Letter was published in 1946.
The French had read most of the American classical authors when they first appeared, but had forgotten them sooner than the English. There were a few striking exceptions: notably Cooper and Poe, who were carried over bodily into French literature and remain an integral part of it. Among the Americans writing at the turn of the century, Henry James had a few care-ful French readers, and exercised a still undetermined influence on Marcel Proust. Jack London had a wider public; he inherited the French popularity of Bret Harte. .Edith Wharton, who lived in France, had most of her books translated; they were praised in the terms that are usually applied to estimable but unexciting French novels. Most of the other living American writers were little known even in Paris; and their country was regarded, in general, as the literary home of cowboys, miners, trappers, and the inimitable Nick Carter, whose weekly adventures were then appearing in France, as in fifteen other foreign countries.
The First World War, which tended to separate us intellectually from the English, thus marking the end of what might be called the second colonial period in American letters, was an occasion for renewing old literary ties with the French. Much has been written about the flight of American writers to Paris during the twenties; it is not so generally known that there was a smaller but influential movement of French writers and scholars in the opposite direction. The migration began under French government auspices, with professors from the Sorbonne encouraged to make American tours and lecture at American universities. They were shortly followed by a selected group of French postgraduate students, some of whom carried home with them a wide knowledge of American authors. Chairs of American Civilization and Literature were founded at several of the French universities: at Paris (where Charles Cestre was the incumbent), Grenoble, Lille, Aix-Marseille, and elsewhere. French students working in the field produced what is probably the largest group of scholarly studies of American literature that exists in any foreign language.
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