like two hundred other high schools west of the mountains. It was new, it was well equipped, it was average in size, having in those days about a thousand pupils. All sorts of people went there – I can remember the daughter of a millionaire coal operator, a future All-American halfback, a handsome Italian who later became a big-time mobster … The atmosphere of the school was prosperous and middle class. Everyone was friendly.
Most of the young Americans who arrived in Paris in the 1920s had been chiefly brought up, like Cowley, in cities and suburbs. If, like McAlmon, they came from rural areas of the USA, they had usually lived and worked in Chicago or New York before moving on to Europe. Their experience was symptomatic of what the whole American nation was going through, for by the early 1900s, for the first time in the history of the USA, the flow of population towards the cities was greater than that to the West. Even such Westward movement as continued was now largely urban in character – people were congregating in the new towns that had been spawned by mining operations or railheads – while in the East the exodus from the countryside was all too visible. The census returns clearly documented the shift to the city, while stories began to circulate of whole rural regions where buildings had been abandoned and were going to ruin. The wilderness was reclaiming farms carved out of it during the previous 250 years.
Writing in 1921, the American social historian Lewis Mumford observed that ‘today more than one half the population of the United States lives in an environment which the jerry-builder, the real estate speculator, the paving contractor, and the industrialist have largely created’. This process, said Mumford, had been going on since the 1880s. Whole cities, such as Pittsburgh where Malcolm Cowley was educated, had jumped overnight from a somnolent provincialism into the midst of the machine era. Consequently they were quite destitute of those cultural traditions and institutions which a more slowly developing community accumulates. Even their physical layout – the strictly rectangular arrangement of streets – discouraged a cultural life, for every street was a potential thoroughfare or trading artery, and the tendency towards movement and commerce vastly outweighed the inclination towards the creation of a community with roots.
The move to the cities had been accompanied by the break-up of traditional family structures. John Dos Passos’s novel The 42nd Parallel (1930), one of the most ambitious pieces of fiction written by a member of Cowley’s generation, describes a set of characters moving inexorably to the American cities from small-town beginnings. In every case they lose touch accidentally or deliberately with parents and siblings, and obliterate most traces of their origins.
At his Pittsburgh high school, Malcolm Cowley aligned himself with the ‘literary crowd’, those boys who ‘made good marks in English Composition, read books that weren’t assigned for reading, were shy, noisy, ill dressed and helped to edit the school magazine’. Like all literary crowds in all schools at all times, ‘we brooded … we yearned … we dreamed of escape … We admired and hated … these people competent for every situation, who drove their father’s cars and led the cheers at football games and never wrote poems or questioned themselves.’
Perceptive and literary-minded adolescents in urban America during the early 1900s had particular reason to feel disillusioned with the society in which they were growing up. The cities were expanding relentlessly year by year, the streets were increasingly busy with automobiles, and middle-class life had become secure and unexciting. The grand American Dream of the perfect society was leading inexorably towards what Cowley calls ‘an intolerable Utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama’. His generation, or those members of it with eyes and minds, could perceive that they were being carried all too smoothly ‘towards a destination we should never have chosen for ourselves’.
Sherwood Anderson, contemplating the American Dream from a vantage point in Paris during his visit there in 1921, came to the same conclusion. He wrote in the notebook he kept during this vacation: ‘We … have all been fed upon the notion that it is our individual duty to rise in the world. No doubt this philosophy has worked out with a certain splendor for a few individuals but on the other hand it may have much to do with our national weariness.’
The weariness was not exclusively American. English writers had experienced much the same malaise, the same despair at ‘progress’, half a century earlier. In the 1870s Matthew Arnold had complained of the destruction of individuality by urban life, and John Ruskin, William Morris, ‘aesthetic’ writers and artists such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, the ruralists like Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, and even children’s authors such as Charles Kingsley and Kenneth Grahame, had offered a variety of escape routes from the dehumanising industrial monster. In the USA the emergence of this anti-urban sentiment had been delayed; the movement to the cities had begun by the 1870s, but the vast immigration to the USA from Europe during that period and the immense possibilities of ‘get-rich-quick’ that city life offered to immigrants (demonstrated by such families as the Steins and the Guggenheims) had distracted attention from the more insidious consequences of urban growth. While Arnold was preaching against the horrors of city life in England, Americans were reading Horatio Alger’s urban fairy tales of poor-boy-makes-good, and were remembering Benjamin Franklin’s precepts about self-improvement through hard work. Not until American society began at last to settle into something like a fixed pattern at the beginning of the twentieth century could it take candid stock of itself.
Malcolm Cowley’s generation, growing up just before and in the early years of the First World War, might – as other generations had done elsewhere at times of self-doubt – have turned for consolation and guidance to its country’s great authors. But the USA had scarcely had time, in its relentless haste towards material goals, to produce more than a handful of great writers. In any case, Cowley and his friends were not encouraged to read them: in high school they were given an almost exclusively English literary diet.
It was not a diet they relished. ‘The authors we were forced to read,’ writes Cowley, ‘and Shakespeare most of all, were unpleasant to our palate; they had the taste of chlorinated water.’ Among all their assigned reading, Washington Irving offered the sole hint of what might be done with native American materials – his ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ showed that an American valley could be ‘as effectively clothed in romance as Ivanhoe’s castle or the London of Henry Esmond’. There was also Hiawatha, but it was difficult to take that seriously; Hemingway was among many boys who wrote a parody in high-school days. Longfellow’s Indian legends seemed as remote from daily experience as the Greek myths.
Cowley’s teachers did not encourage him to make explorations in American literature. They gave the impression that the USA was beneath the level of great writing, that ‘literature in general, and art and learning, were things existing at an infinite distance from our daily lives’. The term ‘literature’ meant English literature, largely of the nineteenth century, with the addition of the Scriptures and the classics. At Oak Park High School, Hemingway’s required reading included English narrative poems from the ballads to Sohrab and Rustum, the Greek myths, and stories from the Bible. These were taught in the so-called Oxford Room, a mock-medieval affair of stained glass, high-backed chairs, and exposed beams, decorated with an incorrectly copied Greek inscription and a line from the Canterbury Tales: ‘And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.’ In Hemingway’s time the school plays included Beau Brummell and Robin Hood.
Even the pupils’ own writing was infected with this English blight. At that time in American schools, says Cowley, ‘a definite effort was being made to destroy all trace of local idiom or pronunciation and have us speak “correctly” – that is, in a standardized Amerenglish as colorless as Esperanto’. Some of the instructors had themselves only acquired this ‘correct’ speech through effort and practice, and they now set forth its rules with pedantry, ‘as if they were teaching a dead language’.
This wa
s all the more damaging since most outstanding writers that the USA had so far produced had been characterised by a strong regionalism. There had been a Knickerbocker School of early nineteenth-century satirical writers, gathered round Washington Irving in New York; a Transcendental School at the village of Concord, Massachusetts, in which the principal figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; a Charleston School of mid-nineteenth-century South Carolina writers; a Hoosier School of novelists and poets producing accounts of rural life in Indiana; and others. The very best American writing, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and the book that Hemingway regarded as the beginning of American literature, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), transcended regional differences and interest. Yet even writers with an apparently pan-American appeal like Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe had been regarded by many of their readers as remote New Yorkers, virtually ‘foreigners’. The literary movement that was going on in Hemingway’s youth, the Chicago Renaissance, was distinctively Mid-Western.
But local characteristics were fast vanishing, and in some instances had entirely gone already. Lewis Mumford observed that by 1921 even small New England towns like Concord itself had become mere ‘mummy-cases’, empty shells, as agriculture moved to the wheat-growing West and the population shifted to the cities. He regarded this as especially tragic since it had taken the culture of New England ‘more than three centuries before it had borne its Concord fruit’; what hope was there for the new urban society?
Another contributor to the symposium in which Mumford’s essay appeared, Clarence Britten, took a similarly pessimistic line:
The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we have had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization in every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and telegraph, the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising – all have scarcely standardized themselves before they have set about standardizing everything within their reach … In the Old South, Birmingham loves to call herself ‘the Pittsburgh of the South’ … those once spontaneous fêtes of the plains, the ‘Stampede’ and the ‘Round-Up’, have been made so spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St Louis and elsewhere.
But right or wrong, the repression of regional differences was what many Americans wanted. Harold Stearns, the editor of the symposium to which Mumford and Britten contributed, observed that the desire not to identify with a particular region was a natural extension of the immigrant’s repudiation of his background in the Old World: ‘We deliberately sought a new way of life, for in the circumstances under which we came into national being, breaking with the past was synonymous with casting off oppression.’ The only significant difference that was still respected between twentieth-century Americans, declared Clarence Britten in his article, was money. Families ‘may continue to hold their place only on the condition that they keep their money or get more … no matter how quickly come by’.
So it was that when Malcolm Cowley and his contemporaries tried to write about their lives and their surroundings, they did not have the words in which to do so. They had been schooled into using ‘a language not properly our own’, a correct Victorian English, and there did not seem any way in which this language could be used to describe the environment they actually inhabited, a jerry-built society that was energetically repudiating such culture as past generations had achieved. Certainly Cowley’s and Hemingway’s high-school instructors believed in Art and Literature, but they held up these concepts like dead objects in a museum, artefacts of a remote people, which had nothing to do with their pupils’ daily experience. As F. Scott Fitzgerald says in This Side of Paradise (1920), young Americans were coming to consciousness in ‘a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas’.
Hence Hemingway’s enthusiasm for journalism, and for newspapermen. In journalism it was acceptable to write in a plain American style resembling the language that was actually spoken. Yet even here there were severe constrictions on individuality. ‘Tell your whole story in the first paragraph,’ Hemingway was told by the Oak Park High School instructor in journalism. ‘Leave the least important things till the end. The editor may have to cut your stuff.’ And the urban reader, exhausted and bored by his day in factory or office, may yawn and turn the page before he gets to the last paragraph of what the journalist has written.
*
It was scarcely better at university. During his time at Harvard, Malcolm Cowley found himself studying Goethe’s Dichtung and Wahrheit and Elizabethan drama while remaining entirely ignorant of the place where Harvard itself stood. Why, he vaguely wondered as he passed a Roman Catholic church on the way to morning classes, was Cambridge so very Irish? Why were the houses near Boston Old North Church an Italian quarter? Who had built the elegant mansions on Beacon Hill? ‘I didn’t know; I was hurrying off to a section meeting in European history and wondering whether I could give the dates of the German peasant wars.’
Still the process of depersonalisation went on. A Jewish boy coming to Harvard on a scholarship would leave behind not only the whole tradition of rabbinical literature but also his memories of street gangs in his Brooklyn childhood, and his family’s struggle against poverty. He had four years of leisure in which to discover himself, to write. ‘But what he would write in those four years,’ says Cowley, ‘were Keatsian sonnets about English abbeys, which he had never seen, and nightingales he had never heard.’
In Cowley’s day Harvard was largely occupied with trying to copy the ‘aesthetic’ style of Oxford in the 1890s. Undergraduates read the Yellow Book, discussed Walter Pater and Beardsley, displayed crucifixes in their bedroom and declared that they found the Church ‘voluptuous’. They posed as Decadent poets and wrote sonnets to a chorus girl, addressing her as ‘little painted poem of God’. E. E. Cummings, four years older than Cowley, studying at Harvard immediately before the First World War, was enthralled by the sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and decided to follow his example and become a Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter. He wrote lines about ‘prayer-pale stars that pass to drowsing-incensed hymns’ and lakes ‘enchapleted with lilies white’. At Princeton there was a similar fashion for Swinburnian verse. In This Side of Paradise Amory Blaine is introduced to The Picture of Dorian Gray and reads Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, and Keats. By 1915 E. E. Cummings was aware of Gertrude Stein, and quoted from her Tender Buttons in a Commencement exercise at Harvard – but only to raise a laugh, which it duly did. Similarly at Princeton people burlesqued the free-verse experimenters whose work was being published by Harriet Monroe. An undergraduate poet in This Side of Paradise writes a piece of vers libre which is simply a list of contributors to Poetry, and concludes by stating that had he not immortalised them in his own poem they would soon be forgotten. At Harvard, Cummings duly read his way through Poetry but thought that Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay were too colloquial, and only admired Ezra Pound, especially liking ‘The Return’, a poem in thoroughly un-contemporary language about the classical gods and their tenuous relationship to the modern world.
In McAlmon’s Post-Adolescence, characters at a Greenwich Village party discuss the low self-regard of American literature:
‘Lackeyship to England … We fête all these English novelists and poets, who are second rate in their own country …’
‘Rats,’ Peter exploded … ‘That’s the attraction of the foreign thing, and doesn’t at all mean we’re lackeys to England intellectually. We have the energy at the present moment, and any country is ours to learn from if there’s anything to learn.’
Harold Stearns, editor of the symposium about American life in the early 1920s, took the same line – that ‘whatever else American civilization is, it is not Anglo-Saxon’. The pretence in the cultural sphere that ‘we are still an English Colony’ was only, said Stearns, believed by ‘certain fin
ancial and social minorities’, and had to be swept away if the USA was to achieve any genuine national self-consciousness.
The writers who were coming to maturity during the First World War knew this, but did not know what their generation could do about it. Already, says Malcolm Cowley, they had become like a summer growth of weeds, precociously unfolding new leaves while the roots ‘slowly dried and became brittle’.
*
Ideologically the First World War scarcely interested them. It was not a matter of saving their own lands from an invader, merely an abstract struggle concerning world democracy and the rights of small nations, which, says Cowley, ‘apparently had nothing to do with our daily lives at home’. But it did seem to offer first-hand experience. ‘We were eager to get into action.’
Those who were too young to fight or too impatient to wait their turn enlisted, like Hemingway, in the Red Cross or one of the American ambulance services, which in effect meant serving in the French or Italian armies. It was largely an exercise in dressing up, of putting on the uniform of a foreign country. In Cowley’s case the game went one stage further, since by the time he got to Paris the demand for ambulance personnel had slackened; he and others joined the French military transport, driving munitions trucks. So the front line came in sight: ‘Here was death among the flowers, danger in spring … real … near at hand’.
E. E. Cummings, signing up with a Red Cross ambulance unit the day after the USA entered the war in April 1917, told his family: ‘It will mean everything to me … to do something I want to, in a wholly new environment … I only hope I shall see some real service at the front.’ Yet the drivers’ and stretcher-bearers’ experience was not entirely real. They were non-combatants, spectators around an arena in which ‘real’ soldiers were being killed. ‘We were seeing a great show,’ says Cowley, ‘collecting souvenirs of death, like guests bringing back a piece of wedding cake or a crushed flower from the bride’s bouquet.’
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 16