# Points of View (Sherman)/On Falling in Hate

The vision of life attained by men of letters is ordinarily attended by one of two major emotions: the emotion of love, which attends a vision of the beautiful; or the emotion of hate, which attends a vision of the ugly. Both of these emotions sharpen the eyesight.
The ancient proverb which declares that love is blind is only a half truth: love is only blind of one eye. The expression "blind hate" also contains only a half truth: hate has one powerful eye. When either of these passions is present, it insatiably sets about discovering new objects to feast upon. The lover collects and broods upon the graces of his beloved from the rising of the lark to the going down of the evening star. The husband who thoroughly loses his temper with his wife at the breakfast table busies himself all day long recollecting and amassing all the grievances that he has felt against her during the last ten years; and he returns at night in a sullen rage and with an almost superhuman insight into the deficiencies of his helpmate. So men of letters set out with gusto and find a relish in every wayside berry; or they set out on the ​satirical foot with a bad taste in their mouths, and for a whole generation occupy themselves with malicious caricatures of their mistress, Life.
We midwesterners, for whom the centre is Chicago, have now for a good many years been falling ever more and more deeply in hate. There has been some rivalry at other centres, but I think it may be said that we now excel all the rest of the country in the special vision which attends this passion. Whatever can be seen under the intense glare of animosity, we are revealing to the critical inspection of our countrymen.
Authors in our locality feed on lion's marrow. We are partial to a fierce and sanguinary symbolism. There is a real propriety in the general acceptance of the slaughterhouse as the chief symbol of our spiritual activities. As a midwesterner to whom Chicago has decisively said "thumbs down," I often think, for example, with what veracity and power Carl Sandburg has represented literary criticism in the city under the figure of a hunky sweeping blood from the floor of the shambles at a dollar and a half a day.
It is consistent with our special literary vision and temper that we are making peculiarly our own a new type of novel. There are three main stages in the fictional treatment of the "sex interest." In the first stage we have the novel of courtship, which ends at the altar, with soft candlelight falling on the rosily tinted altarpiece, "Marriage." In the second stage, we have the novel of conjugal adventure, ​which begins at the altar and widens over the various labyrinth of family life and relationships. In the third stage, we have the novel of conjugal disaster, which begins with divorce and widens over the field of individual and social disintegration. This we are making our own.
The third type of novel, it should be observed, is not a love-story at all. It is a hate-story. There is customarily an elaborate pretense that the hero is seeking a felicitous "self-realization" through union with some new and more perfect affinity—some young milliner, some shop girl with silken ankles, whose spirit is more exquisitely attuned to his than that of the fading middle-aged woman who has borne his children. But any one who reads our midwestern fiction thoughtfully sees clearly enough that this is all bosh. The young milliner and the shop girl are only transient mirrors of our hero's megalomania. The real and vital theme of our typical midwestern novels is: "How I fell in hate with my first wife, how I snubbed her, how I showed her up, how I shipped her." It is a grand theme. It is a rich and rather new vein for American writers; and already we have worked it so industriously that we have produced important results. We are beginning to be recognized as masters of disillusion. Midwestern is beginning at last to have a definite connotation in national letters.
I will illustrate the point by a contrast.
In reading recently a lot of minor English poets I was much struck by the fact that whenever one ​of them lacked a heart-ravishing trochaic epithet for anything—for April or a hedgerow or a tuft of violets—he called it "English," and let it go at that. He said: "an English April," or "an English hedgerow" or "English violets"; and he could count on his readers for the rest. Though they might hate the British government and be cold to the British Empire, when he said "English" their hearts would thrill to an immemorial loveliness. They would feel beauty descending like dew upon all these familiar objects from the hearts of English men and women who have loved them for a thousand years.
So in America, whenever a writer wishes to bring home to his readers in a single heavily charged epithet the quintessence of materialism, flatness, monotony, crassness, violence, revolt, disgust, he almost instinctively nowadays calls it "midwestern," and lets it go at that. He says "midwestern materialism," "midwestern monotony," "midwestern crassness," "midwestern violence," "midwestern disgust;" and his reader feels disillusion descending upon the prairie lands and the prairie cities from the hearts of midwestern writers who have hated their environment with an increasing hatred for the last thirty years.
Carlyle praised Byron for having had at least the good sense not to be happy in this most miserable of worlds. On the same principle, we should praise our own eloquent apostles of disillusion: Mr. Garland, Mr. Herrick, Mr. Dreiser, Mr. Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Hecht, Mr. Bodenheim, ​Mr. Halderman-Julius and the rest. They have had the good sense not to be supinely happy in this most defective world; and they have raised a wail to rival that of Philoctetes. By that wail they have forced the Midwest into the centre of the national literary consciousness.
They have almost, I think, persuaded the country that it is going to be, as Dogberry would say, damned into everlasting redemption by men from these parts.
I for one do not agree with the critical sages who hold that we midwesterners are destroying literature. Whatever you may say of Chicago as a literary centre, you can't say of it, as you can say of one of our older literary capitals, that it is dead. Our midwestern literature is crude, hot, egotistical, hateful; but it ig quick, not dead; the pulse of life beats hard and fast in it. It is blind of one eye; by a kind of barbaric and brutal hate, it is blinded to most of the beauty and grace and promise now present in these midlands. But with its great illuminating passion of hate it has thrown a flood of new light upon the sort of man that the average American of our generation is. It has shown courage and talent in breaking through his superficial protective respectability and exhibiting the weltering chaos of his miscellaneous hungers and discontents. It has broken the long conspiracy of silence. This is a great service, which will be recognized by and by.
But this service of satire and iconoclasm, we midwesterners perform too exclusively in the spirit of ​hatred and violence and journalistic sensationalism. Chicago tends to encourage "journalistic" sensationalism by recognizing and rewarding nothing else. Chicago authors—in this respect, to be sure, resembling Baltimore critics—feel obliged to yell in order to make themselves heard above the street cars and the newspapers. Now, a yell is often a necessary act. It is often an appropriate act. But a yell lacks one of the fine qualities of literature: it lacks charm. It seems to originate in fear or hatred, and it tends to provoke hatred and fear—unless it is promptly followed by notes of reassurance. Midwestern satire has not merely stripped the average man naked but has skinned him alive. He will remain a pitiful and abhorrent object till he gets a new skin. And the Chicago writers generally haven't the faintest notion where a new skin is to be had.
By those who profess knowledge of this recondite subject, I have been informed that the only way to get a woman to tell you anything of vivid interest about herself is to persuade her that you love her. Before you reach that point, she will give you gossip and scandal and even intellectual propositions of possibly some academic interest; but she will reveal none of the delightful things about her heart—none of the finer perfume and subtler fragrance of personality. I have often thought of this secret while vainly seeking year after year through the works of the midwestern novelists for anything that Henry James, for example, would recognize as the portrait of a lady. Presently I began to ask myself; "Has ​none of our midwestern novelists ever made the acquaintance of a lady? Is the type extinct? Is its literary interest exhausted?" I abandoned that quest. Then I searched a long time for the portrait of a girl or of a woman who should reveal the delightful things about her heart—something of the finer fragrance of personality. I found plenty of women and girls who gossiped and intrigued and bored and tormented their lovers and forced their husbands to jump out of the window on the wedding night; but at the moment I can't recall a solitary midwestern heroine with charm enough to intoxicate a moderately critical schoolboy. That is a terrible indictment of a fictional movement which pretends to be realistic; for in the real world there are plenty of women and girls with charm enough to intoxicate even highly critical schoolboys.
If you follow this argument, you will not conclude that the women who are sitting for our novelist lack charm. You will conclude that they have not been persuaded to reveal their charm—which is a very different matter. The cynical, satirical, brutal, and barbaric mood of our midwestern "realism" excludes at present from midwestern fiction the possibility of meeting there a heroine to whom any particular person could think for an instant of losing his heart. And one fancies the midwestern women of these novels saying of their midwestern men: "They talk a lot of loving; but, Lord, what do they understand? They talk about falling in and out of love. Hitherto, they have only fallen ​in and out of hate. Egotistical pigs—they have never loved anything but themselves. We will wait a bit before we cast our pearls."
I have fallen, like our Mr. Anderson and like our Mr. Hecht, into symbolism. What I have said about marriage may, of course, be taken as literally as one pleases. The new sport invented by our novelists, called Snubbing the First Wife, is as fashionable in fiction as Mah Jongg in society. But all this about falling in love and falling in hate is really symbolical. It represents the present relation of American literature to American life. I mean to insist that there is something profoundly feminine about the charm of a city or a province or a natural division of the country or a national culture. The essentially feminine element is this: that the city or the province or the national culture will never yield up its charm, will never impart its finer fragrance, except to true lovers—to those who come saying: "We do not fathom you; we love you." To philanderers and cavemen the city will remain a bedizened harlot and the country a buxom or bedraggled wench—with either of whom one may have adventures and fall in and out of hate and become tremendously learned in the psychology of aversion and the vocabulary of disgust. But the delightful things that sleep in the heart of the city, the fragrant things that sleep in the heart of the province, will wait—wait for true lovers.