Chapter VII : Waldo
Frank
For a brief period in the early 1920’s, some critics in the
Frank’s character was composed
of elements in conflict. He was a mystic who believed that humility and a
passive yielding of the self to experience were essential to the attainment of
truth; he was also an egoist, and greedy for fame. He possessed impressive
intellectual gifts, but associated intellect with emotional barrenness. Wisdom,
he thought, was intuitive. He believed in love, but his life was strewn with
broken relationships, for he required of friends an intensity of commitment
that left no room for differences, a demand for an uncritical admiration that
was often impossible to sustain.
It is difficult to come to terms
with a career like Frank’s. From the beginning, his work was vitiated by vanity
and solemnity, and his flaws soon proved larger than his talent. His compulsive
self-promotion led him repeatedly into falseness. In his posthumously published
memoirs, for example, he tells us that in the early 1920’s he made a list in
his notebook of the writers who had meant the most to him. They included
Aeschylus, Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare,
Rabelais, Cervantes, Spinoza, Goethe, Stendahl,
Balzac, Dostoevski and Whitman. “Let a man know
these,” he had written,, “and win within himself
response to these, and he is a man indeed .... nor
need he then read any other book.” The list, the older Frank comments, was “careless
and conventional.” In fact, he admits, Goethe and Plato had meant little to him
and he had not been able to finish Lucretius.3 Here
then was a successful writer of thirty-five, no callow youth, who in his
notebook lied to himself about a subject of great importance, and lied
pompously. Even his memoirs, written after the age of seventy
and at the end of a cruelly disappointed career. memoirs
in which Frank conscientiously strove to understand the causes of his failure,
are riddled with pathetic self-deceptions, rave press notices from old
scrapbooks, and grossly inflated claims of personal significance. To the end, “greatness”
was Frank’s terrible narcotic.3a
Yet much of worth and interest
has been buried with Frank’s reputation. Although the demands of his ego often
led him into posing, into seeming a self-enraptured mystagogue,
Frank was in some respects the true visionary he so badly wanted to be. He
wrote seriously, with originality and penetration, on the state of American
industrial culture in the twentieth century. He was capable of remarkable
prescience, and was an authentic forerunner of such later critics of industrial
culture as Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse,
Jacques Ellul, Philip Slater and William Irwin
Thompson. 4 Much of what they would write about
the aberrations and compulsions of that culture in the 1960’s and Seventies is
to be found in Frank’s books and essays of the 1920’s and Thirties. Frank had a sympathy for and knowledge of other cultures, particularly
those of
Frank was by turns a novelist,
playwright, biographer, essayist, philosopher, journalist, poet, historian,
critic, travel writer and, briefly, in the Thirties, a political agitator—too
curious, too impatient, too driven by his personal daemon to settle in any one
vocation and make his mark in it. But for all his range, there is a thematic
unity to his work, and one tenaciously held conviction. “The machine,” he wrote,
“in psychological content, is closer to magic than to science. A society whose
faith is in machines is one which obeys shamans, however disguised, and turns
the scientist into magician.” 7
Early in his career, Frank used
the word magic in a contrary sense. This magic was “cosmic consciousness,” the
result of a transcendental perception, at once humbling and inspiring, of a holy
relationship to one’s fellow men, to nature, and to God’s universe.8 Magic of this kind, if permitted to do its work,
would bring into being the religious democracy of which Whitman had dreamed—not
a body politic, and still less a joint stock company for the promotion of
material well-being, but a national community of souls within a world community
of souls. And the application of this magic would result, in some sense Frank
was not able to define, in the transcendence of the machine.9 There were, then, two kinds
of magic, white and black, divine and base, and all tendencies might be
referred ultimately to one or the other. They were the antipodes of Frank’s
world.
Like Whitman, whom he claimed as
a master, Frank strove to reconcile a sense of individual potentiality and
worth with a sense of community. His method of reconciliation he called “unanism,” a term he appropriated from an early favorite, the French writer Jules Romains.
10 All of Frank’s works, whether “history” or “story”—that
is, cultural criticism or fiction—were meant to convey an image of a culture as
a “living organism,” a “collective living being.” 11
Frank suggested that individual human beings were not “isolate [sic] manifestations,”
but “acts of a single spiritual Organism.” 12
In his novels of the early 1920’s, Frank attempted to dramatize the spiritual
interdependence of human beings. The unanismic novel,
as he conceived it, would be idealistic and prophetic, “lyrical,” and although
individuals would be portrayed in their isolation, the emphasis would be on
their potential for mutual recognition. Frank, like Whitman before him, would
affirm.
Frank’s philosophy-cum-aesthetic
might have been suited to the writing of prophetic verse, but applied to the
novel it could only result—as indeed it did—in the production of a series of
philosophically dubious potboilers. If large groups are the “organisms” of
life, then the individuals who compose these organisms are reduced to the status
of attributes, or “acts” as Frank put it, and are drained thereby of volition
and dramatic interest. While the unanismic aesthetic
proclaimed its confidence in the capacity of people at some time in the future
to become “true persons,” it denied them that capacity in the here-and-now. It
was, then, double-edged, claiming for itself an affirmative attitude toward
life while simultaneously denying full humanity to human beings as it found
them. The unanismic aesthetic perfectly reflected Frank’s
ambivalence toward American life, his dissatisfaction with himself, and his
unhappy tendency to “symbolize” people. 13
All of this is clearly seen in
his 1920 novel The Dark Mother. The
story concerns the spiritual trials of David Markand,
a youth from a
Rennard makes
repeated forays on Markand’s innocence, striving to
make the boy see the world as he sees it, a place in which creative and
intelligent people differ from the common herd as “gods from maggots.” David
can only protest, “I am certain you are wrong. I feel these things—the love and
brotherhood—the many people creating and creating ....
They are not so very different from poets and inventors. I feel that.” 15 At the end of the novel David finally breaks with
Tom, and the lawyer, a perfect match to the soulless city, becomes a success.
David’s terrible strength, we now see, consists in his stolid refusal of
negative suggestion, in his very immobility.
Mark and Rennard
are two opposed states of mind fleshed out as human beings. Frank was himself
both hopeful and despairing about the possibility of genuine brotherhood in a
society devoted to industrial production. Markand,
with his “deep, mute sense of life,” blessedly free of doubt, was in part an
idealization of Sherwood Anderson, but he was also Frank as Frank wished to be,
a mystic and an affirmer of life. Rennard, the
intellectual driven to cynicism out of despair, was Frank the harsh analyst of
society, whom the novelist regarded
as his worse self. Frank’ a imputation of evil to Rennard is an indication of the discomfort which his own
pessimism caused him.
One of Frank’s
deepest concerns was with the change which the machine had brought about in the
relationship of the worker to the artifact he
produced. Tom says to David at one point, “could your ideal artisan work in a
factory? He worked with his soul and his hands, the artisan you admire .... There is no place in labor
[now] for the man who wants to love while he works.” 16
In the novel, such sentiments are expressed as petulant outbursts. We are to
think of them as rationalizations of Rennard’s
impotence, overborne without serious difficulty by the strength of David’s faith.
But the arrogant Rennard, scornful of the industrial
masses and convinced that the “swarm” are fools, is not very different from the
Frank who in one essay snarled at
The culmination of the aesthetic
of oneness was the 1922 “experimental” novel City Block. 18 As Frank wrote in a
terse note to the reader, the block was to be conceived of as a “single organism.”
City Block is composed of a series of
episodic short stories, each of which forms a chapter in the spiritual life of one
of thirty or more characters. The novel is a sort of urban
But in City Block, in compliance with the requirements of the unanismic aesthetic, characters are at crucial moments
released from their prisons of silence to soar to speech. When they do give
utterance to their yearnings it is in a startling transcendental patois,
fervent and mystical, which we recognize immediately to be the author’s own. A
writer less determined to affirm than Frank might have made City Block into a fine novel. In its
evocation of the dread and mystery of the city, Frank’s novel resembled Henry
Roth’s Call It Sleep, and there are
interesting similarities, too, between City
Block and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, both of which depict
the life of the alienated and crippled spirits of the great city. But Frank
would have found West’s comic pessimism unhealthy if not corrupt, for comedy to
Frank was not a necessary component of a balanced view of life but an
indulgence, an abdication of moral responsibility.
Frank’s novels were, as Paul
Rosenfeld delicately put it, the unhappy result of a man seeking “to function
in a direction contrary to the one naturally his own.” 19
Frank’s inability to create a believable character, his lack of a saving sense
of the comic, and the tendency of his imagination to run to platonic forms,
were limitations which would be least evident in a genre he would his own, the
discursive “history,” which combined speculation, history, literary and
cultural criticism, reportage and prophecy. In such “histories” as Our America (1919), Virgin Spain (1926), The Re-Discovery
of America (1929), and America Hispana (1931) Frank did his best work. Some of these
books were once highly admired. While Hemingway loathed Virgin Spain, the book met with wide approval in
In all of these “histories,”
even in Virgin Spain, Frank’s central
preoccupation was with the question of whether America—first North America,
later the entire Western Hemisphere—was to be the theater
of man’s transcendence of the burdens and divisions of history. In being drawn
to so large and even grandiose a theme, Frank was, of course, hardly alone
among American writers. His concern with an American destiny conceived in these
terms unites him most obviously with Whitman, and with Hart Crane, to whom for
a time Frank served as mentor; but it also places him in the company of a long
line of writers in the American prophetic tradition. Frank’s contribution to
that tradition consisted in placing the machine at center
stage in the drama, and in enlarging the stage to include
In all of Frank’s “histories,”
the physical place of the drama is no mere setting. It is more important than
the nominal actors,for it is
the Whole of which they are parts. An important step in Frank’s procedure in
any work was a poetic-intuitive examination of the landscape’s details, a hunting out of significant metaphysical clues. “Spirit of
place” is a phrase to be taken literally when reading Frank.
Beginning with Our America, the physical hugeness of
the American continent was for Frank a source of both hope and disquiet. There
was something alienating and inhuman about such dimensions. Small places had
obvious advantages. “At almost every point of a small and narrow space,” Frank
would write of the Holy Land in a late book, Bridgehead, a report on
But it would be different in
lands enclosing great distances. In such vast geographical units as
Thus, it would seem, Frank’s
unease with
Frank’s version of the American
past was similar to Van Wyck Brooks’ in
Up to this point, the view of
the American experience sketched by Frank in 1919 is a remarkable anticipation
of that which D. H. Lawrence would adopt in the 1920’s in his Studies in Classic American Literature
and elsewhere. 25 But Frank’s purpose was prophetic
and patriotic, and much of Our America
was taken up with a search for omens of change. Perhaps industrialism simply
represented the completion of the three-century-long American pioneering
project; perhaps a new epoch still lay ahead. But at the end of Our America Frank predicted nothing. What
finally moved Frank toward affirmation—for in spite of his doubts, he did
affirm—was not hope, but an imperative: another thirty years like the thirty that
had just passed, he said, would kill any chance for the necessary miracle. 26
There were likely to be moments
in the life of the modern man, Walter Lippmann wrote
in 1929, “in which he finds that the civilization of
which he is a part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth.” 27
In Waldo Frank’s case, this sensation was not limited to moments; there were
long intervals during the 1920’s when his mouth was a dust bowl. America by the
mid-Twenties seemed to him simply a bad farce, a “comedy of commerce,” as he
called it in one essay, that did not quite succeed in masking the continuing
and deepening tragedy of industrial domination. Increasingly, Frank favored the word “jungle” to describe the American
situation instead of “chaos.” Whereas “chaos” implied unpredictability and at
least the possibility of imminent change, “jungle” spoke of primeval
beginnings, and eons of painful development ahead.
His essays of the decade were
flagrantly inconsistent. Like a man obsessed with a game of solitaire
, the rules of which are such that the right cards will never come up,
Frank tried again and again to formulate a believable scenario for escape from
the industrial jungle. He might decide that the machine was a remnant of a
dying cultural order, thus rejecting a miraculous transcendence in favour of a more
probable process of evolution. Sometimes he would concede the machine’s almost
certain place in any imaginable future order, but would hypothesis
the existence of a future race of
mechanics, each in possession of “the consciousness of a Spinoza.” He would
momentarily decide that the machine was actually European, not genuinely
American at all, in fact alien to the national temper.
At other times, with a complacent realism, he would embrace the machine, see it
as the sine qua non of future
American development, and chide those sentimentalists who would evade the
machine’s reality by retreating to a bucolic past. 29
Such anguished confusion was the
result of an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile two tendencies in himself, already noted: one toward the world and into
engagement with it, and the other, usually dominant, away from the world and
into a realm of spirit. Frank would sometimes insist that he was no mechanophobe who would wish the machine out of existence.
But he often intimated its demise. In an imaginary dialogue between the shades
of Cervantes and
Increasingly, Frank’s criticisms
of contemporary American society were accompanied by Delphic utterances of this
kind. The future, he had maintained in Our
America, belonged to the poets, not the politicians and engineers. Frank’s
task, then, was to etherealize a history that had so
far run relentlessly to the material, to suggest an American myth which would
be the direct opposite in its meanings and implications of the commercial myth
of the 1920’s. Thus, as one skyscraper after another was topped off, Frank
envisioned their destruction.
Frank’s myth would first of all
reassert the relevance of the American Indian experience and culture to the
present day. Something of this sort had occurred to him in Our America, but he then rejected the idea. The pioneer, he said in
that book, had never really been in a position to avail himself of the, Indian
culture, for although he had in some respects reverted to a primitive condition
in the West, he could not “become
once more a primitive man.” 31 In The Re-Discovery of America, published
ten years later, this clear statement was obscured by ambiguity. The American
West at the time of Andrew Jackson had been “in touch with aboriginal
“What is the meaning,” he asked
in one essay, “of our cities of rectangular streets? What is their effect on
our souls?” At the outset, the essay seemed to promise no more than the common
lament that despite man’s innate love of curves, “the American urbanite has
elected to spend his days in a grid-iron.” But straight streets were a good
sign after all, for they expressed no more than a necessary resistance to the “geological
tempo” of America, a tempo far more intense than that of Europe. (Thomas
Jefferson was a member of the 1784 committee that started the gridiron survey
in
All of these hopes for an
American regeneration and a re-emergence of the Indian spirit are present in Hart Crane’s The Bridge (and “Atlantis” is the title
of Part VIII, the last part, of the poem). The two men discussed these ideas
often, each amending and adding to the other’s. Crane
intended, as he wrote in one letter, to bring about a “mystical synthesis of ‘
But in Frank’s own career, this
spiritual flirtation with Indian culture was only a phase, a first step toward
a far more ambitious attempt at cultural synthesis. In America Hispana he indicated the
direction in which this quest would lead him—southward. For the most part,
however, he was content in that book to limit himself
to cultural reportage and interpretation; it was the least prophetic of his
histories, and perhaps for that reason his most solid performance.
The 1930’s were for Frank a long
digression from the American cultural themes that had occupied him in the
Twenties and would again. He plunged into the literary-left politics of the
popular front, visited Russia and wrote about it in Dawn in Russia, a book which was much more tentative in its
contents than in its title, extended the Markand saga
of The Dark Mother in a dreadful
novel called The Death and Birth of David
Markand, and went on the stump to speak for Earl Browder, the American Communist Party presidential candidate
in 1936. Frank’s literary reputation, which had dropped precipitously in the
late Twenties, was by the late Thirties almost nonexistent in the
Even that fame, poor consolation
for a man who had been neglected by his own country, had waned by the time
Frank made his last attempt at synthesis in The
Rediscovery of Man in 1957. Here the metaphysical psychology which had been
present in his work from the beginning received its fullest treatment. Frank
held that the triumph of the scientific world-view after the seventeenth
century had not expunged the cosmos-oriented faculty in man, but had only
driven it into the unconscious to be explained away as “subjective illusion.” 38 But it was still there, and its greatest achievements,
he asserted, lay in the future. While cosmic consciousness had been achieved
only fitfully in the past, and then at the cost of denying the self-consciousness
of the ego, as in the Eastern religions, the two might in the future be fused,
with cosmic consciousness in the ascendancy.
But this would be possible—and
here was Frank’s ultimate solution—only after the completion of the
technological project, for only then would the limitations of the scientific
world-view become apparent. Only when man had succeeded in mastering the
production and distribution of goods, in controlling population and regulating
the earth’s resources, would the “mystic sense of the Whole,” the “latest and
least developed sense of man,” at last flower. And
because the technological project was furthest along in
Frank’s scenario conformed to the
prophetic scheme of Whitman in Democratic
Vistas, with the religious democracy succeeding the materialist democracy.
It also paralleled the line of speculation which in the 1960’s Herbert Marcuse would briefly pursue in One-Dimensional
Marcuse the
pessimistic Hegelian rejected this possibility after entertaining it; such a dialectic pronounced its own hopelessness on both
theoretical and empirical grounds, chiefly because of its inability to
demonstrate “the liberating tendencies within the established society.” Frank
the American transcendentalist insisted with more faith than logic that growth
was always a “positive response to multiple negations,” and so, in a sense, the
more negations the better. But Frank added another element. The Anglo-Saxon
civilization of
The concept of a hemispheric
destiny was an old one for Frank. It might be glimpsed in Our America, in passages contrasting the ethos of the Anglo-Saxon
pioneers with that of the Mexicans of the American Southwest. It was there in
shadowy form in Virgin Spain and America Hispana.
When it finally received full treatment in The
Rediscovery of Man in 1957, however, there seemed nothing in the current
situation to which Frank could point as a sign of future possibility. The Cuban
Revolution, the most significant event in
Frank went to
Frank did not welcome the Cuban
revolution naively. He was fully aware of how an autocratic revolutionary
leadership, initially defended as a temporary necessity, might develop into a
permanent instrument of oppression. But he thought that there was at least a
chance that the revolution would bring to realization on one small island
Bolivar’s vision of the New World “as the lay ‘city of God,’ whose justice and
peace would be in global contrast to the old world of misery.”45 The Bay, of Pigs invasion occurred just as Frank
was completing the book. In a postscript written after the invasion, Frank
warned that a