Red Brick Literature

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

You can readily note the effect of too much city dwelling on a man, and you can almost as easily tell when too much city dwelling lies behind a book. The effect is similar, except that the man may get over it, while the book cannot: it is finished.

The signs of too much red brick, too much granite and steel, too much roar and rattle in a book are unmistakable, especially too much red brick. The overurbanized book is intelligent, its thought moves quickly, it is vivid, it is clever, and sometimes smart. Its style is nervous, and though it may be bad, it is never dull. But dust gets into the lungs of the cockney book and produces a thousand tiny irritations that prickle out in oversensitized words. The never-ceasing patter of hurrying humanity, the crash and groan of machines, make the authors irritable, and their books are irritable. We have now a school of irritable poetry, and we are getting a school of irritable fiction. In the irritable novel every one is disagreeable (including the author), no one is virtuous or wants to be, breakfast conversations consist chiefly of sneers, and nasty smells and ugly sights are as common as fresh-smelling linen in Victorian homes. In irritable poetry the phrases "I am weary," "I am angry," "I hate," "I am bored" recur with some regularity. The poems themselves are swift successions of painful images like sparks of anger shot out by a departing pedestrian whose foot has been trod on in the crowd. The utterance is broken and feverish like conversation in a packed and swaying surface car. There is no clear beginning and seldom an end.

In red brick literature there is also a curious lack of purpose, like the apparent lack of any important purpose in so much swarming, chattering city life. The poetry is material for poetry merely: vivid, tensely vivid lines, fragments that record the unpleasant impact of sensations upon a mind made sensitive by jars, rattles, and inescapable contact with millions of men. It has the inconsecutiveness of a plunge into a subway for a ride to the next station, or crossing Broadway at Forty-second Street. The novels, too, are purposeless in any large sense—vivid transcripts of experiences that are typical of nothing but the unhappiest of a thousand apartments, narratives where the energy of the author goes into sensitized studies of behavior, precisely as one may spend a roaring subway trip focussing the mind upon some face across the way, until the last wrinkle or blotch has found a word to describe it.

Red brick literature, indeed, tends always to the morbid, if we use morbid in its usual modern meaning, a brooding on the evidence of the senses. Or it escapes morbidity by being smart or sensational. It needs air, space, light, repose, meditation, solitude.

We do not complain of cities. They are at the worst necessary evils and at the best the testing grounds of the intellect. But taken in continued, unremitted doses, become a daily, yearly habit, city life is—not fatal, for the thought of some illustrious London cockneys, and even more distinguished Parisians, makes us pause at that word—but overstimulative to the literary person. It makes him unduly conscious of an ego which minute by minute is rubbed and scraped by the egos of so many others. It makes him unduly concerned with mediocrity, since where there is not even a bench without a man or a woman sitting on it mediocrity is forced upon him.