My love affair with American naturalism
D.J. Taylor
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) must rate as one of the bleakest short stories ever written, a kind of Winterreise gone wrong that wears its air of resolute determinism like a Red Sox sweatshirt. A tenderfoot, accompanied by a wolfish dog, is making his way along the Yukon Trail. It is 75 degrees below — too cold to be out, so cold that spittle freezes in the air before it reaches the ground — but the newcomer marches on regardless. And then, all too foreseeably, disaster strikes: Our man fails to notice the sinister, candy-textured surface of the ground beneath him, and, without warning, his feet plunge through the ice into an underground stream.
There follows a dreadful race against time. The tenderfoot, watched all the while by the puzzled dog, knows that only heat will save his chilled extremities. Alas, being unversed in London’s ways of the wild, he builds his fire beneath a frosted tree. Just as he is halfway through thawing out his frozen feet, the inevitable happens, and a branch collapses: The fire is instantly extinguished under half a ton of snow. You can guess the rest, but in some ways, the real message lies in the final paragraph. Here, the dog, having established that its master is dead, simply lopes off down the trail to basecamp, where it knows there will be other sources of warmth and food.
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If several other of London’s stories strike more or less the same note — there is a particularly bracing one about a boatload of stranded sailors who, deciding to opt for cannibalism, cut the cabin boy’s throat five minutes before the rescue ship heaves into view — then “To Build a Fire” has always struck me as an example of naturalism in its purest form: “naturalism” being defined as the sight of unappeasable natural forces working themselves out in defiance of any human attempt to stay their hand. The average man or woman, on this reading, is merely a type of insect clinging desperately to the cliff face until the wind sweeps in and blows them away.
Naturally, naturalism allows for substantial differences in style and setting. Emile Zola, writing about Second Empire Parisians drinking themselves to death, is a naturalist, and so is Thomas Hardy, who once remarked that the death of a child could never really be regretted, given what they had avoided by not staying alive. Even a British “society” novelist such as Anthony Powell, author of the 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75), falls into this category, if only for his insistence on an inexorable destiny. Human life is preordained, he insisted, as each step in the dance is foreshadowed by the one that came before.
But Powell’s drawing rooms and London pubs are a far cry from the Yukon Trail. Americans, it has always seemed to me — Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, James T. Farrell, and John Steinbeck — do naturalism better than their European counterparts, respond more effectively to the artistic challenges it poses, and, it goes without saying, stack the cards even more purposefully against their ground-down characters. Part of this, inevitably, has to do with the environments about which they wrote. If, on one level, the machine-age America of the late 19th and early 20th century was a sort of ant heap in which swamps and prairies were being turned into cities at such a speed that it was sometimes difficult to establish where they began and ended, then, on another, it was still uncomfortably close to the elemental landscapes on which it was founded. Grampa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) lives in a supposedly civilized country, but he is old enough to remember when Oklahoma was in Indian Territory.
Most of Steinbeck’s novel takes place in the summer. And yet, the hallmark of most of the classics of American naturalism is their wintry backdrop. Hurstwood in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), making his way back from a trip to the Hudson River to find bleak end-of-year twilight coming through the windows of the empty flat and his disillusioned mistress gone! The small boy in Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) whose frozen ears snap off after a night spent sleeping in a derelict factory! Farrell’s Studs Lonigan dying of pneumonia after a daylong traipse around the cheerless streets of Chicago in search of work, leaving a bankrupt family and a pregnant girlfriend to pick up the pieces! Even here in the modern age, it’s noticeable that Annie Proulx reserves some of her most devastating special effects for winter — see, for example, “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” included in Fine Just The Way It Is: Wyoming Stories III (2008), whose hero Archie freezes to death in a prairie shack.
What makes American naturalism different from, and arguably yet more desolate than, its European cousins? One answer lies in the nature of the destiny waiting to greet its characters. Fate, in Hardy’s novels, is a matter of cosmic judgment — the “President of the Immortals” finishing his sport with the heroine of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In Dreiser, fate is much more matter-of-fact. Hurstwood has merely reached a point in life when he is unable to struggle any further against the forces that oppress him. Realizing this, he goes off to gas himself in a Bowery flophouse. But there is nothing personal in what happens to him. It is simply how existence works here in early 20th-century America.
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Another, though, lies in straightforward material distinctions. There were plenty of late-19th-century English naturalist writers — George Gissing is an obvious example — keen to show the futility of trying to resist the awful fate that lies before you. Their characters’ tendency to avoid the absolute bedrock destinies of the people in Dreiser and Steinbeck has a legal explanation. To a character in an early American novel, bereft of a Social Security system, pennilessness can mean death. Alternatively, the Joads’ future at the end of The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t bear thinking about. An Englishman at least has the comparative security of the workhouse to fall back on.
To return to “To Build a Fire,” a story that has had me in its thrall since I first read it as a teenager, Richard Ford once used the introduction to the Granta Book of the American Short Story to tick off Stephen Spender for suggesting that the lure of American literature lay in its essential loneliness, the sound, as he suggestively characterized it, of the wolf howling in the darkness. This, Ford complained, was patronizing and old-fashioned. I can see his point while, as an Englishman, rather agreeing with Spender. There is a Cormac McCarthy novel in which a character gets on his horse and rides “down the long main street into America.” The English equivalent would be: “He got on his bicycle and crossed the bridge into Surrey.” London’s naturalism is the snow-encrusted trail, the wolf’s glinting eyes glimpsed at the edge of the firelight, and the day breaking cold and gray, exceeding cold and gray. I know which I prefer.
D.J. Taylor is the author of, most recently, Orwell: The New Life.