Maturity in American literature.

Faulkner, John

OUR LITERATURE HAS REACHED MATURITY NOW; a finished, full-fruited maturity that stands on a par with the older literature of the older world.

Stanley Young, senior editor with Harcourt-Brace, one-time reviewer with the New York Times, and an author in his own right, has classified the present literature as the first important phase since Uncle Tom's Cabin. The late Edward J. O'Brien said of our present literature that it was born of the last war. Thus the definite strides in our literature seem to coincide with our wars. It must be because in all crises, human life is cheap and always, where we find life cheap, we find human lives and human emotions treasured, and priceless. There, where we must live our lives fully in a few short moments, we haven't the time for fanfare, and subterfuge, and useless words. We must express ourselves, if we are worth the expressing, in simple, commonplace language that we can understand, and that we can make others about us understand, too. We find that if we are not worth the expressing, no one has the time to listen, that high-sounding phrases and carefully chosen words are but breath blown into unheeding and unhearing space. We find that fundamentals are the only important things; like food, and cigarettes, and a drink of water. Simple things, for fundamentals are always simple. We discard hypocrisy; we take our tongues out of our cheeks. Simplicity and truth have become sublime.

The reason that our strides in literature spring from our participation in wars is the same reason that all human effort makes giant strides then. We are geared higher, we live faster, mature quicker, because we are stripped of the dead weight of superficiality. War, the greatest crisis, is the greatest leveler of human values. It cuts the artificial supports from under us, and we emerge with truer conceptions of the worth of ourselves and our fellows. We realize then that fine words don't make fine history, that splendor is not even worth the polish. The fact is brought home to us that the history worth the recording, the stories worth the telling, is a saga of simple lives, and simple deaths. And literature worth the name is a true history of a people, perhaps personified in a single character against an authentic background of time and place.

From the tales of our simple people, who come to our attention in our wars, and remain indelibly with us thereafter, we have learned that life does not follow a plot, and that the stories worth the telling are based on truth. From them we have learned to demand authenticity in our reading. We have learned that true literature must be authentic. We remember then, that long before the day of the printed word, the history of the nations was handed down by word of mouth in tales of folklore that are carefully recorded on parchment now, and treasured as the literature of that age. These tales are all pointed as to meaning, and carefully exact in detail.

I think possibly the beginning of the phase in our literature that reached full sweep after the last war, was the recording of the simple tales that the Negroes told each other in the years following the Civil War. The recordings were made in the Negro's own limited vocabulary, and in faithful exactness to his own dialect. They tell the story even better than the Birth of a Nation. The books that contain those tales of folklore still grace our bookshelves, the pages are well-thumbed, and we still read them frequently with nostalgia for they are the days that are gone. The flowery-worded, well-plotted romances of the same period sit in undisturbed dust. We smile disparagingly when we think of them, their rifles, are no longer familiar, their authors are forgotten. They are not authentic, they are not even simple; they are valueless. But those tales of folklore, those honest, simple tales, are a part of our history, they are a part of us, worth the treasuring and the handing on. They are our literature of that period, simply told, and authentic; as simple told as the darkies who told them, as authentic as the ideals of Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris who recorded them in faithful exactness.

War gives an impetus to writing on which the subsequent writings coast until another war gives another impetus until the writings emerge into maturity as ours have now. War always gives a certain freedom to writers, sometimes the subsequent period takes it away.

The Civil War gave us a few tales. They were all too few. Those it did give us were touched with truth but restrained in the writing to conform to the dictates of nicety when nicety itself was the lace handkerchief, and crooked little finger, and lowered lashes that screened a natural wholesome interest in life, a wholesome interest that was fed on innuendoes and whispered misconceptions that bred an artificial social life against which literature was carefully censored until there only remained a plot wherein a hero whispered high-sounding phrases to a heroine who listened in longhaired weeping, and then the hero rode away to return just in time to save the heroine and the old home from the evil intentions of the rich villain. And they, the hero and the heroine, lived happily ever afterward. The plots were all the same, in fact, it was the same plot, the only plot that writers were allowed to use then. Facts were barred from writing, suggestiveness was used in their place; and suggestiveness is distortion; to some it means license, to others it is nausea, to all it is distasteful, at best it is only a trick. But the appearance of suggestiveness in literature was, at least, an evidence that our literature was growing, that it was seeking some outlet from the well-grooved plot that had for so long curbed its efforts at fuller expression. Some saw the need of a truer literature, some discerned, even then, its inevitable maturity. They argued for the right to tell stories in the truthfulness of exact detail. They quoted Shakespeare and the Bible as their authority, but we frowned fearfully upon any attempts to depart from the one plot, for then, in the public eye, every writer wore a flowing tie, and baggy clothes, hid the weakness of the chin behind a beard, and was a seducer of women, and a destroyer of morals. In the departure from the plot, we foresaw license with a wholesale use of unprintable words that would make our literature fit only for a tightly covered garbage can. Those who guided our literature, watched its growth, studied its urgings toward a maturity of truthfulness with the attendant necessity for freedom with words, also kept a finger on the pulse of the reading public. They discovered, at once, the one point on which the controversy hung, and they alone realized the two different meanings put on the term, freedom with words. It was not that the readers were satisfied with the one plot they read over and over, but that they were afraid of what would happen with the story tellers allowed unbridled freedom with words. The writers, arguing for the right of expression, quoted their Shakespeare and their Bible, but they, in an effort to prove their own right to freedom with words in self-expression, gave undue emphasis to the single words in these two unimpeachable sources that we found objectionable in everyday life. In their eagerness, they left out the truth, and beauty, and simplicity of the whole sentences that contained the words.

Then came the last war, from which we emerged with a new set of values, a truer conception of worth, a higher regard for our fellows, and a closer bond to them. We had also developed a well-defined yearning for truth, and we soon found that same yearning common to all of us. At last, we were ready to look before we condemned. The words, themselves, were no longer of first importance. Our only stipulation was that they must tell an honest story.

The first of our mature writings came then. With the first flush of freedom in expression, we, of course, overdid it. We wrote words to shock, and laughed with heady laughter at the shocking. That period was soon over though, for it did not fit our finer sense of values. It was like the first bottle of wine after prohibition. We over indulged and woke up with a headache. Then stabilization set in, followed by honest, unhampered effort. We were writing, at last, with both feet on the ground. Now, we have a mature literature of our own that is excelled by no other on earth.

Into our maturity we brought the remembrance of the few simple-worded truths we had learned where life is cheap. We remembered that truth is better for being stripped of its cloak of sophistication. We learned that truth is worth the preserving. We had learned that truth, itself, is beautiful.

We brought this to our writing in honest, earnest effort. We left the treasure ships moored in Portugal, and the diamonds in the blue mud in Kimberly. We stopped putting high words in our heroes' mouths, for we had found that our hero is no longer a hero, he is our neighbor, and maybe our neighbor is illiterate and doesn't know any high-sounding words. He doesn't ride a white charger, either, or have to get out of sight to fight for the fortune that he uses to pay off the wicked squire. The main battle is the one for life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is fought in our backyards, and the story of it is worth the telling. And there is no beginning to it, and no end. It began with Adam, and it will end with time. There is no plot. Simplicity forestalls a plot; and the background is the careful and authentic detail of our neighbor's daily life, against which he moves throughout our story. The truthfulness of our stories can be vouched for by anyone who reads them, for he can place himself and his own backyard in place of the pictured ones of our neighbors'. Our readers are our neighbors. We are writing the history of our people without the dryness of dated incident. Our stories are complete in detail, they are faithful in characterization. Our work is permanent for its truthfulness. It is authentic. It is mature.

And that we have at last taken our place in the literature of the nations is attested by the fact that three times in the last eleven years, the Nobel Prize in literature, the ultimate recognition against a field that covers the world, has been awarded to American authors.