Sophistication
My text is from Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (iv. i. 116) and from Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not... (II. i. 196; ii. i. 215).
Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys; Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’ That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that any class could be so Low as that.
Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace.
‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’
‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it”... you might have done something to bring us together.’
Tietjens said:
‘That’s, of course, true.’
And my subject is—what else with such a text?—Sophistication.
Not sophistication in the original unencrusted meaning of the word, but in the overlaid current understanding of it—an emotional rather than an intellectual condition. It is a condition very hard to define, since it is emotional, yet sufficiently easy to recognize—and admire. To be sophisticated you must be blasé; you must be witty; you must not take anything, especially vice, very hard; you must be gay and casual about problems that unsophisticated people are earnest about, though you may (here you are reaching rarefied heights of sophistication) be as earnest as you like about things that average people consider trivial. You must show familiarity with the world of High Society, but also amused disdain for it; you must know, and prove that you know, everything about ordering a dinner in such places as Ciro’s (Monte Carlo), the Ritz (Paris), and the Café de Paris (Biarritz). You should also be able to let fall—now and then, very carelessly, merely because you cannot at the moment think of the English word—a French or an Italian or even a German word or phrase; but it is not excessively important that you should do this correctly or even appropriately; the effect will be the same anyway. Among contemporary writers Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank are sophisticated; and so is Michael Arlen, and so is Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer).
There is one small drawback to sophistication: it is impossible without an audience. One cannot pleasurably, perhaps not possibly, be sophisticated all alone by oneself. One cannot think of a man getting into an unshared bed as sophisticated—I mean to say, of course, after his valet has left him. Fiction is full of people marooned on desert islands; but only one writer, M. Jean Giraudoux, has ever thought of thus marooning a sophisticated character. It was a delicious and fantastic idea, which made Suzanne et le Pacifique an irresistibly funny book.
This disadvantage, however, is not grave, since sophisticated people are rarely alone, even at night, and in public are sure of an admiring audience. We all admire sophistication in real life, and we admire it still more in novels. This is partly because it is never quite so perfect and finished in the former as in the latter, but chiefly because there is a touch of envy in our admiration for sophistication in life, whereas we share flatteringly in that displayed in a novel. We, too, love Iris Storm fastidiously and consider Sylvia Tietjens’ complicated vices with tolerant weariness. We, too, are of the haut monde and are very offhand about it. We, too, have lived very, very hard and exhausted everything and have come to look with a mellow amusement on all intensities. It is delightful.
Unluckily for me, I do not know any sophisticated people in real life. I have jealously seen them about, in restaurants and places, but I do not know them—or perhaps I should say that they do not know me. But I know sophistication in novels, none better. The sophisticated novelist must be very sophisticated indeed to satisfy my fine trained taste. Any momentary lapse into ingenuousness, and I am on him like a wolf. Thus, among the writers I have mentioned, and among others whom I have not, I salute most especially Mr. Michael Arlen; and this because, more perfectly than the others, he knows how a sophisticated novel should be written: to wit, in a baroque and decorative prose. Mr. Firbank and Mr. Van Vechten may also know this; but they lag far behind Mr. Arlen in turning their knowledge into achievement. They do not discover such felicities as: ‘... and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination’; or, ‘The stormy brittle sunlight, eager to play with the pearls and diamonds of Van Cleef, Lacloche and Cartier, aye, and of Tecla also, chided away the fat white clouds, and now the sun would play with one window of the Rue de la Paix, now with another, mortifying one, teasing another, but all in a very handsome way.’ There you have the authentic manner for sophisticated prose.
The reason why the authentic manner is baroque, even rococo, heavily encrusted with ornament, is a melancholy reason. (‘That was a gloomy reason,’ Mr. Arlen would say). It is that there is a certain lack of body in sophistication. To eschew the passions—or perhaps not to eschew them, but to smile at them—to be polished, suave and unobtrusively superior, is delightful, but limits one a bit. Emerson’s assertion that the exclusive man excludes no one but himself is doubtless an exaggeration; but it is certainly true that the exclusive man does also exclude himself. The technique of sophistication in literature is even more exacting than the technique of the drama. Let no one fancy it easy to write sophisticatedly. It is extremely difficult. A considerable proportion of the writers in two continents is attempting it; yet one can count the successes on the fingers of two hands. There is no mistaking the genuine article in sophistication, for the very simple reason that the false is always ludicrous, sometimes violently so, sometimes faintly. English, French and American bookshops, and once a week the Saturday Evening Post, are half full of hilarious attempts at sophistication. It would be a mistake to deplore them; they add to the gaiety of nations. If you care for clear laughter with no malice beneath it, and must give up one book or the other, which would you sacrifice, Alice in Wonderland or The Rosary?
Sophistication in literature, then, as (I presume) sophistication in real life, is immensely difficult of attainment; it demands a special skillful technique, a wary sense of humour and a narrow selection of material. Therefore, as I have already suggested, its manner becomes of great importance. To avoid a lurking sense of impoverishment you must be provided with decorative flowers to pluck by the wayside. The luxuriously appointed cruise around the world on the Arabic (22,000 tons) is not enough; you need those side-excursions to Capri, the Balearic Islands and the foot-hills of Java. Once again I salute Mr. Michael Arlen. His is the manner. One can be sophisticated without it—Mr. Ford is, and M. Paul Morand—but how much better to have it!
Let us turn now to the two novels from which I have taken, almost at random, my text. The novels themselves I selected with considerable care; for, while their sophisticated qualities of course overlap, there are certain examples of sophistication in The Green Hat that are wanting in Some Do Not... and a few in the latter book that one will not find in the former. Moreover, the two books are done in very different manners.
What, except any one of a score of others from the same book, could give a more admirable condensed example of sophistication than the passage I have quoted from The Green Hat? The narrator introduces you to two ladies—for no reason at all except your amusement and his own. One lady has a title, the other has not. Excellent! He—I have to call him ‘he’ because I do not remember that his name is once mentioned in the book—pokes good-humoured fun at both, but more especially at the one with a title, and then goes on innocently (innocently!) to reveal the fact that he comes from the lower classes and does not know how to ride. You will go far to find a rarer expression of sophistication. For—do you not see?—the narrator, at his ease in the homes of the great, is smiling at class, is actually smiling at riding. This is, by consummate inversion, raising snobbishness to a fine art. And all in such high spirits.
You do not get the high spirits in the two passages I have quoted from a rather long marital conversation in Some Do Not... (you will look for them in vain in that novel); but you are given a very pretty example of sophistication nevertheless. Sylvia Tietjens is of a most awfully good family, and her husband of an even better one. People in society are not, by plebeians, supposed to throw things at one another. Sylvia does throw something—a plate of food—at her husband. Good! Moreover, it hits him. But observe! He does not upset the dining-room table and hit her back. He remains perfectly calm. And as for Sylvia, she drifts slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace (good touch, that!) and remarks that she is bored! bored! Here, too, you are high in the scale of sophistication. For it is obvious that to commit a breach of manners, to do something that simply is not done, and then only to feel bored, is far more sophisticated than to break one of the ten commandments, usually the seventh, in the same spirit. Also I call your attention in passing to the contents of the plate that Sylvia threw—two cold cutlets in aspic and a few leaves of salad. At once elegant and efficient.
The second passage, too, is admirable. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ are not popularly supposed to be addressed by a gentleman to his wife; nor is the wish that she may rot in hell. Yet when Sylvia suggests to her husband that, to ensure their mutual happiness, he ought to have addressed her in this manner, he says reasonably: ‘That’s, of course, true.’ Which is all the more to his credit in that for twenty pages his uniform has been dripping with oil from the salad that hit his shoulder.
Here, too, you perceive, you get inversion. These characters outrage, and thereby show themselves above, the conventions. They always react to stimuli in the opposite way from which average people react. They are violent when we should expect them to be well-bred, and serene when we expect them to be violent. Another example: to ingenuous people the disease called syphilis is a shameful thing, to be considered with horror and never to be mentioned aloud; to average people it is an aesthetically disgusting malady and therefore not an available subject for conversation. But the characters in sophisticated novels talk about syphilis as carelessly as though they were talking of a family-tree.
But is there not in this, you may by now inquire, just a little monotony? Once the trick is apparent, is it not almost as wearisome to watch a man invariably do the unexpected thing as to watch him do the expected? There is. Oh, it is! It is more wearisome. Because when the expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such behaviour is emptiness.
Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There is no probing of truth below the glitter. There cannot be, since the glitter is achieved through a superior disregard for truth. One would not mind this if the literature of sophistication set out only to be elegant amusing nonsense. (And I ought, in justice, to say here that if Mr. Ronald Firbank were somewhat more amusing, his contribution to such literature might fulfil that requirement). But too often it pretends to be investigating truth. And this pretence, even though in some cases it signify only a crowning sophisticated inversion, is impertinent and annoying.
The Green Hat lies open before me at the page of press comments which the publisher has seen fit to append. I read: ‘The Green Hat is the novel of the year.’... ‘The most memorable novel I have read during the past year.’... ‘I call it the finest novel of the last five years.’... ‘Heavens! what a lot that man knows about men and women—especially women.’
If after this broadside one feels slightly giddy one should not hold it against Mr. Arlen, who of course is not responsible and who distinctly calls The Green Hat a romance; but one would have thought that even reviewers might have had a little more insight than this into what they had pleasurably read.
For, leaving on one side the delightful manner of the book, consider the material of which it is cleverly built. What and whom have we got here? The identical material of those interminable melodramas which the French (probably in an impotent attack on the tyrants of their national life) call ‘literature for concierges,’ and which in England was dear to the hearts of Ouida’s public. A glossy world of high society; some one (just as in Under Two Flags, and in how many other long-forgotten romances) assuming, for quite inadequate reasons, some one else’s sin and suffering bravely as an outcast until a third person blurts out the truth (the original touch being that in The Green Hat the victim is the heroine instead of the hero, that she suffers from a husband’s syphilis instead of from a brother’s embezzlement, and that she dies at the end of the book); the cruel father separating youthful lovers who never, never forget one another (though, for the sake of modernity, during their separation the heroine, not the hero, leads a scandalous life—which, mind you, is never described, since its reality would have been squalid) and come together at last, when, in a final triumphant burst of renunciation, the heroine surrenders her lover to his wife and commits suicide. Sheer melodrama, as false, as quite properly false, as Scènes de la Vie de Bohème or Scaramouche—precisely that sort of thing, in fact. And the characters: can you see Hilary, or Guy, or Napier, or Venice? Have they three dimensions? Can you walk around them? Of course not. You’re not (I give Mr. Arlen credit for intending) supposed to be able to. And Iris, the radiant, the well-beloved, what is Iris? What but a very young man’s dream of a woman—experience plus innocence, a prostitute with the soul of a virgin? Go back a generation and you will find her in Mr. Le Gallienne’s The Quest of the Golden Girl.
Well and good. I have no objection to any of this. I enjoyed the book immensely. But, please, let us not take it for something else than it is.
I know almost nothing about Mr. Arlen, I have never even seen his photograph; yet I feel a pleasant personal liking for him. He provided me with an amusing book couched in a delightful style; and I do not for a moment believe that he himself takes it more earnestly than I do or considers it anything other than an agreeably up-to-date fairy-tale. If I have pointed out that the material of which it is constructed appears to me melodrama, not drama, sentimentality, not sentiment, artifice, not life, it is only because I wished to express my opinion that this is true of all the literature of sophistication, which—not here, but elsewhere—frequently presents itself as something more significant.
A reading of Some Do Not... does not leave me with a similar affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a masterpiece.
To begin with, there is the style. We have often been told that Mr. Ford is a master of style; and so, in truth, he is. But of what use is style all alone by itself? The style of Some Do Not... is the grand style, simple, sonorous, purged of affectation, well suited to such a novel as War and Peace; but it is not the right style for Some Do Not.... Indeed, in my opinion, no style is the right style for that novel. Some Do Not... has for me all the defects of the literature of sophistication, with none of its virtues. It is false and pretends to be true; it is artificial without being witty; it is romance without glamour; it is essentially literary; it is without any more sense of humour than that required to keep it from becoming ridiculous; it has not a touch of spontaneity; it is as dreary as it is well done.
In a negative way the thing is perfect—ever and ever so careful. Mr. Ford introduces an incredible Irish priest by saying that he ‘had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of Irish life’—thereby protecting himself from the start; he would have been incapable of writing ‘across the breast of her dark dress’; and it goes without saying that in his creditably meagre use of foreign words he adopts none of the original spellings that star Mr. Arlen’s romance (aristocracie, giggolo, and the like). Mr. Ford’s prose is compact, sober, and restrained. But, since this is true, it becomes the more important to discover what it is all about.
I am unable at present to obtain a copy of If Winter Comes (one of the advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad); but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s novel, as I remember it, and that of Some Do Not... Mark Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married, though (If Winter Comes not being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife was merely stodgy and insensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness (bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia was—oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband (unappreciative devil he was, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity. Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’... do that kind of thing). In neither case did the hero’s wife—or any one else except those few fine spirits—believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself profitably embusqué, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the old round—a good deal hampered in this by all those embusqués who had pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in general—but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of general hysterics reached in If Winter Comes. The endings, naturally, are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united; Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more unassumingly than before, to the war—presumably to be killed.
Here, as unmistakably as in The Green Hat, we have the artificial stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’s Pamela, has such feverish importance as in Some Do Not... been attached to the question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted to this problem, and to its answer—‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What possible difference could it make to me?
I am aware that I have written about Mr. Ford’s novel in an insufficiently cool manner; but the truth is (as you may have guessed) that the book exasperates me. All this cheap sensationalism masquerading as a serious study of life! If Winter Comes was atrocious, but it was too silly to be excessively annoying. By the time one reached the piled-up anguish of the court-room scene one was in the best of spirits. But Some Do Not... is too carefully done to be silly. Its material is that of any ten-twenty-thirty melodrama; but its style is that of Madame Bovary. It arouses the same distaste as in the fairy-tale the vulgar servant wench who had dressed herself up as the princess.
Even so, I have perhaps not accounted adequately for my conviction that Some Do Not... is fundamentally false. The stuff of melodrama sometimes is the stuff of life, as it is sufficient to read the daily press to discover; and occasionally a great genius builds up truth out of just such material. He does this, of course, by creating real characters. Once a character comes alive, the most improbable things may happen to him, and no one cares—or doubts them. But Mr. Ford is not a genius, and his characters are not real. He describes them neatly and pungently; he even visualises them for us, until they stand out as sharply as the waxwork figures at Madame Tussaud’s. But that is the end of it. They will not come to life. And even if Mr. Ford were the genius that he is not, they could not come to life in that stifling atmosphere of sophistication, where effect is everything and one eye is always on an audience. But then, if Mr. Ford were a genius he would not give us that atmosphere; he would have something too important to say to trouble with anything so small, superficial and glittering as sophistication.
The truth about the literature of sophistication is, I think, that, since it is at bottom a form of showing off, it can have no dealings with truth. In his choice of material the sophisticated writer selects what is false—not, like that occasional genius, for some other reason than its falsity, or for no reason at all, but precisely because it is false, and therefore sure of an easy effect. There is tawdriness in this, of course. I wonder whether there is not a trace of still another quality. Children especially delight in showing off. Can it be that there is something a little ingenuous in sophistication?