ANNAN’S dreary, unpleasant and brilliantly ugly novel was published in April. There were three printings in the first week. Five in the second. In contradistinction to “small-town stuff,” it was “big-town.” New York of the middle-lower class. And it was New York. Stenograph and photograph could verify every word uttered and every portrait. The accuracy of its penny-gossip was amazing. It was apotheosis in epigram of the obvious.
The determined ignoring of all beauty; the almost fanatical blindness to everything except what is miserable, piddling, sordid, and deformed in humanity; the pathetic loyalty to the sort of “truth” which has a place in economic statistics if not in creative art—the drab, hopeless, ignoble atmosphere where swill was real enough to smell and where all delicacy and functional privacy was sternly disregarded, caused a literary uproar in the reading belt, and raucous applause among all Realists.
There are good Christians and good Jews, both admirable and loyal citizens of the Republic, good scholars, good soldiers, good men.
There are intellectual Bolshevists among Christians—degenerate fanatics, perverted Puritans; and among Jews are their equivalents.
The bawling Christian literary critic who assaults with Bolshevistic violence all literature except his own is a privileged blackmailer and commits legal libel.
His Jewish confrère is no more vulgar. Both are only partly educated. They live parasitically upon the body of literature. They are cooties.
The several more notorious ones welcomed Annan. They liked what he wrote because it was what they would have written if they could. Later, if he didn’t continue to write what they liked, they’d bite him. They had no other means of retaliation.
One, named Minkwitz, who made a good living by biting harder and with less discrimination than the usual literary cootie, wrote a violent article in praise of raw realism, and crowned Annan with it.
A female pervert on a Providence, Rhode Island, periodical discovered that there was a “delicate stench” about Annan’s realism which she found “rather stimulating than otherwise.”
The joylessness of the novel appealed to the bluenose. He read it and ordered his family to read it. They’d better learn as much as possible about the “worm that never dies.”
All crack-brains read it and approved.
Then the Great American Ass read it. All Iowa borrowed it from circulating libraries. Oklahoma read it. And finally Nebraska placed upon it the official chaplet of literary success.
Finally everybody read it—everybody from uplifter to shoplifter.
And it became a best-seller in rivalry with the exudations of the favourite female writer of the Centre of Population—a noisy and bad-tempered woman whose only merit was that she unwittingly furnished scientific minds with material for healthy laughter.
Thus the first novel of Barry Annan, purposely un-serialised as a ballon d’essai, ascended to the skies like the fat, bourgeois and severed soul of Louis XVI, amid a roll of revolutionary drums.
The unusual aspect of the case was that, technically, the book was nearly perfect; the style admirable and with scarce a flaw. Now the Great American Ass understands nothing of literary workmanship. Style means nothing to him. Yet he bolted Annan’s book and seemed to enjoy the flavour. Seemed to. For one never can know anything definite about an ass.
From the Pacific coast Betsy Blythe wrote Annan. She had read the novel. That, ostensibly, was her theme. She applauded his fame, expressed herself as proud to be numbered among the friends of such a celebrity.
Then there was some gossip about herself, the company,—inquiry as to how he had liked the pictures which she assumed he had seen in the East.
Then there was a paragraph: “What are you doing to our Eris, Barry? I suppose it’s what you did to me, to Rosalind, to every fresh and attractive face which possessed ears to listen to your golden vocabulary. Still, I don’t see how you had time: you saw her only that one afternoon in the projection room, she tells me.
“But I suppose you’re as deadly by letter as otherwise. Like measles I suppose we all have got to have you. Eris had it harder, that’s all.
“But I’m going to tell you that when she recovers,—as we all do,—you’ll be surprised at the charming creature she is turning into.
“I honestly think she is the most intelligent girl I ever knew. She not only looks but she sees. She learns like lightning. The odd thing about her is the decided quality in her. Her mind is the mind of a gentlewoman. As for the externals—trick of voice and speech and bearing, it scarcely seems as though she acquired them. Rather they seem to have been latent in her, and have merely developed.
“Yet she tells me she is the daughter of very plain people.
“Well, Eris, in her way, is already a celebrity on the Coast. She has become quite the loveliest to look at out here. And she is a natural actress. There, my friend! Am I generous?
“Alas, Barry, she worries me. I like her, admire her, but—it seems ignoble in me—I can’t stand the competition. We can’t go on together. She’s too pretty and too clever. It seems impossible to bury her under any part, no matter how rotten.
“There’ll come a time when the Betsy Blythe Films will mean only Eris.
“If she’s going to become as good as that she ought to have her own company. She couldn’t stand such competition; nobody could; and I’m not going to.
“I don’t want to bury her; but if we go on playing together she’ll bury me. It’s right that we should part, professionally. It’s only fair to both of us.
“That darned Albert Smull is responsible. He’s been out here three times. When it comes to casting the company, outside of myself, what he wants is done. And he’s mad about Eris.
“The last time he came out here, his partner, Leopold Shill, came with him. Between them they do two-thirds of our financing. Well, while they were, as always, perfectly friendly to me, their interest was in Eris. How the devil am I to make it plain to them that Eris and I ought not to be in the same company?
“I could explain it to her and she’d understand. But Albert Smull and Leo Shill would misunderstand, utterly, and put me down as a jealous cat.
“So ‘that’s that,’ as Eris has it when she’s made up her mind. I’ve made up mine. I’ve got to kiss her good-bye. But when I do I’ll kiss a future star. I’ll say so. You tell ’em.
“Good-bye, you philandering but lovable egoist. I like your rotten novel—not spontaneously—but because if one only could like that sort of sob-stuff it’s the stuffiest, sobbyest story I ever snivelled over.
“BETSY.
“P. S.—Your dowdy, disagreeable aunt, Mrs. Magnelius Grandcourt, is in Pasadena for her health—maybe her temper, too—and she was nasty to me because I’m in pictures.
“Of course I don’t mind: nobody pays any attention to those old dames who ruled New York a decade ago. All that ended with the war. She knows darned well where I belong.
“But the funny part of it is that she’s taken a majestic shine to Eris. She’s stopping with the Pelham-Cliffords at their handsome place near Pasadena, and the Pelham-Cliffords are live ones and they let us shoot some scenes on their place.
“That was how your aunt had an opportunity to be nasty to me. But exactly why she condescended to patronise Eris, I don’t know.
“She continually asks the P-Cliffords to ask Eris over. Eris goes occasionally. I asked her point-blank why that peevish old party was so amiable to her, and she blushed in that engagingly confused way and said that your aunt knew her great grandmother.
“Apparently there was quality in the forebears of Eris, or that dumpy old snob wouldn’t have made any fuss over the great grandchild of somebody who died years and years ago.”