Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/143

 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