Mark Twain's Satire

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.

But interest in American culture was also growing in a quite different circle, that of the younger avant-garde writers. Finding not much hope in Europe after the war, they were looking for new material, new ideas, and new ways of life. A sort of romantic Americanism became the vogue among them after 1920: they were connoisseurs of American films, especially Westerns, they read the advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, they dreamed of living in a New York skyscraper (though few of them, in life, got beyond making a single brief voyage), and they even dressed in what they thought was the American fashion, wearing belts instead of suspenders and shaving their upper lips; whereas the young Americans who were running off to France in those years were connoisseurs of French books and French wines and liked to wear little French mustaches. These were superficial signs on both sides, but they were an indication of tastes that proved to be lasting. The young American writers were deeply influenced by French literature in the Symbolist tradition; the young French writers were looking for American books that would express the picturesque qualities they found in American life; and when the books began to appear in translation, after 1930, they seized upon them enthusiastically.

The Index Translationum, published for eight years by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, lists the titles and authors of all the books translated into the major European languages between 1932 and 1940. During that period there were 332 French translations of American books in the field of general literature. Jack London stands at the head of the list with twenty-seven titles, and James Oliver Cur wood follows with twenty; both these adventure-story writers were old favorites with the French public, although their day was passing. Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Allan Foe have fourteen titles each; Ellery Queen has ten detective stories; Pearl Buck has nine of her books; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis Bromfield, and Henry James all have seven. Farther down the list are the new authors that the younger generation was reading: William Faulkner with five titles, Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett with four, John Dos Passes and Erskine Caldwell with three. None of these last reached the broadest French public, but all of them had what Lewis and Bromfield and Pearl Buck failed to achieve, that is, a direct influence on the style and content of the new French writing.

Faulkner, comparatively little known at home, had gained an amazingly deep and lasting French reputation. Andre Gide called him "one of the most important, perhaps the most important, of the stars in this new constellation"; and Jean-Paul Sartre was more extreme in his praise: "For young writers in France," he said in 1945, "Faulkner is a god." Many French critics were disturbed by what seemed to them the completely foreign quality of the new American novelists. The newspaper man in Gide's Imaginary Interviews says:

I grant you Hemingway, since he is the most European of them all. As for the others, I have to confess that their strangeness appalls me. I thought I would go mad with pain and horror when I read Faulkner's Sanctuary and his Light in August. Dos Passos makes me suffocate. I laugh, it is true, when reading Caldwell's Journeyman or God's Little Acre, but I laugh on the wrong side of my mouth. . . . If one believes what they are saying, the American cities and country sides must offer a foretaste of hell.

But if one believes what Flaubert said a hundred years ago French cities also must have been an abode of the damned. All these American novelists, except possibly Caldwell, were students of Flaubert; they had been applying methods learned from him to American materials. Now their books were being studied in turn by Flaubert's countrymen.

Most of the other European countries followed either the French or the British pattern in their choice of American books. A novel that was a best seller in England, like Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, would also be a best seller in Germany and Scandinavia. An author admired by the French for his intensity or his technical discoveries would also be admired by other Latin nations. Almost everywhere there was a lack of interest in American literature during the years after 1000 and a birth or rebirth of interest at some moment after 1920. This new interest appeared earlier in the northern countries, because they liked Dreiser and Lewis, and later in the Latin countries, which showed more interest in younger writers like Hemingway and Faulkner. There were, however, national variations in the two general patterns; and in Russia after the Revolution the variations were so wide as to form a new pattern of their own.

Germany between 1890 and 1945 was another special case that has to be considered in some detail. In the Kaiser's Germany, Mark Twain had been by far the most popular American author; there were exactly 100 translations of his various works between 1890 and 1913. After him came Anna Katharine Green, the early detective-story writer, with eighty-one translations; then Bret Harte, Frances Hodgson Burnett, F. Marion Crawford, and Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur. More than half the novels of American origin translated into German during the twenty-four years before the First World War were the work of these six writers. The most admired American poet was Walt Whitman, although his greatest popularity would come later, during the early years of the Weimar Republic. Emerson was the favorite American essayist.

After the war, the Germans were eager for books that dealt with American industry, the power by which they felt they had been defeated and especially eager for anything that dealt with Henry Ford. What they looked for in American books was information first of all, but they were better pleased if the information was presented critically; therefore they joked Theodore Dreiser (who was for several years the most popular American libraries), Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and, in general, all the critical realists. Hemingway was admired by the younger German writers who would later go into exile, but most of them were puzzled by his habit of understatement. When a German novelist wants to convey sadness or mild regret, he is likely to say that he was overwhelmed by waves of intolerable grief. When Hemingway wants to imply that his hero was overwhelmed by waves of intolerable grief, as at the end of A Farewell to Arms, he says that he "walked back to the hotel in the rain"; and the Germans did not know what to make of it. Thomas Wolfe, who never used a little word when he could find three big ones, was an author more to their taste. Loofy Homeward, Angel appealed to young people of all political faiths, before and after Hitler's coming to power. There were good as well as sinister qualities in the German youth movement, and some of the better ones were mirrored at a distance in Wolfe's hero.

The strength of the Socialist and Communist parties under the Weimar Republic helped to create a public for American authors with radical sym patties: not only for Upton Sinclair and Jack_Lqndon, but also for John Dos Passos, whose books at one time had a larger circulation in Germany than in the United States. Another writer admired by the German radicals was Agnes Smedley, whose autobiography, Daughter of Earth, is comparatively little known in her own country, although it has been translated into fourteen languages. In Germany, where it was called Eine Frau Allein, it was especially popular among women seeking courage to lead independent lives.

Miss Smedley's various books on the Chinese Revolution were also widely read until 1933, when they were all withdrawn from circulation. It was the same with Dreiser Sinclair, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, none of whose works appeared in Germany between 10,33 and 1946; they were the best known of the many American authors who suffered from Hitler's burning continued to be published in spite of his having written the anti-Nazi It Can't Happen Here. The Index Translationum shows that five of his novels were translated into German between 1932 and 1940. There were eight translations of Pearl Buck during the same period, more than of any other serious American author; perhaps her work was thought to be politically harmless because it dealt with China and, unlike Agnes Smedley's, made no plea for the Chinese Communists. Very few American books were published in Hitler's Germany if they dealt with contemporary Europe or America in any thoughtful fashion, no matter whether their authors were radical or conservative. The German public was still curious about our literature, but was offered, in general, only romance, adventure, mystery, and sentiment.

The Index Translationum lists 297 German translations from American originals in the field of general literature, a figure not far from the French total of 332. There is, however, a difference in quality. Nearly half the German list consists of Westerns and detective stories, with Max Brand, a mass purveyor of cowboy fiction, standing at the head of it with twenty-six titles. Historical romances were popular as an escape from daily life under a dictatorship: Anthony Adverse, 'Northwest Passage, and especially Gone with the Wind, which by 1941 had achieved the huge German sale of 360,693 copies; then it, disappeared from the bookstores with the demand for it still unsatisfied. Grapes of Wrath was circulated with official approval after Pearl Harbor, presumably on the ground that its picture of the Okies would serve as anti-American propaganda. Instead, what it proved to most of its readers was that American peasants at their most destitute could travel about the country in automobiles, and that American writers were free to speak their minds in epical novels, at a time when German literature was being stifled. American books were read hungrily after the war ended, although few were available. Daughter of Earth was republished and even serialized in a Berlin newspaper; Thorn ton Welder's The Sin of Our Teeth was the hit of the German theaters.

In Sweden, and the other Scandinavian countries, there was not much interest in American literature before the middle twenties, although there was great interest in a few American writers. Mark Twain in particular enjoyed the same popularity as in Germany. The chief librarian of the Royal Swedish Library, Mr. O. H. Wieselgren, said in a letter that he was given the Swedish translation of Huckleberry Finn as a birthday present when he was ten years old.

I read the book [he continued] so that I learned It by heart. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, was translated in 1906. Sinclair since that time has been very widely read, and his social views have a great importance for the working class in our country. The Harbor, by Ernest Poole, was translated in 1915 and met with great interest. But the most admired of all American authors in Sweden has been and is still Jack London. His first books carne in translation in 1909-10, and since that time he has appeared in innumerable editions. In public libraries he is still the most sought-for American author.

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