Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412)

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Cummings’s experience was fairly typical. He and a friend reached Paris, where they were accidentally separated from their group of ambulance volunteers and enjoyed a splendid five-week holiday before officialdom caught up with them. Cummings went to the Ballets Russes and saw Petrouchka and a Satie ballet with sets by Picasso, bought the poetry of Remy de Gourmont and Paul Fort, and had an affair with a poule named Marie Louise. Coming from a Unitarian family at Harvard, he decided that Paris was a ‘divine section of eternity’.

  When he was finally assigned to an ambulance unit near the front line, Cummings found himself in a district where military activity was almost non-existent. He spent most of his working hours cleaning mud off vehicles and aligning himself with his friend William Slater Brown against the despotic section chief, an American who objected to their desire to fraternise with the French. Cummings and Brown soon got into trouble for writing letters expressing their willingness to join the French army but their reluctance on moral grounds to kill Germans, and for Brown’s allegations in letters home that ‘the French soldiers are all despondent and none of them believe that Germany will be defeated’. They were both arrested and interned in a transit prison camp in Normandy, from which Cummings was only retrieved by his family with considerable difficulty. The consequence was his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), a prose account of his experiences there. The best American book to come out of the war, it has almost nothing to do with the ‘real’ war of the trenches and the battlefields. Even those Americans who actually fought, says Cowley, ‘retained their curious attitude of non-participation, of being friendly visitors who, though they might be killed at any moment, still had no share in what was taking place’.

  So, for the young American would-be writer who had been through these experiences, by the early 1920s ‘the country of his boyhood’, says Cowley, ‘was gone and he was attached to no other’.

  *

  One day Gertrude Stein went to a garage to collect her car, Gody, which had been taken in for repairs. It was not ready, and the proprietor lost his temper with the young mechanic who was supposed to have done the job. ‘You are all,’ he told the lad, ‘a génération perdue!’ Gertrude Stein was struck by the phrase, and when Hemingway next called at 27 rue de Fleurus she repeated it to him. ‘That’s what you are,’ she said. ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.’

  Hemingway expressed polite doubt, but she would not budge: ‘You are. You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.’ He thought this was nonsense, and said so. ‘Was the young mechanic drunk?’ he asked. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Have you ever seen me drunk?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘but your friends are drunk.’ ‘I’ve been drunk,’ Hemingway revealed, ‘but I don’t come here drunk. The boy’s patron [who had made the remark about the lost generation] was probably drunk. That’s why he makes such lovely phrases.’ Gertrude answered: ‘Don’t argue with me, Hemingway.’

  He gave up, but he was irritated. ‘That night walking home,’ he continues, ‘I thought of Miss Stein … and egotism and mental laziness … and thought who is calling who a lost generation?’ Yet the phrase had an undeniable ring, and a little later, when he had finished his first novel, he quoted her words as an epigraph at the front of the book: ‘“You are all a lost generation.” – Gertrude Stein in conversation.’

  Harold Loeb (original of one of the principal characters in the novel) agrees that ‘some of us were “lost” for a time, separated from our traditional moorings and attached to nothing whatsoever … But at least ours was a generation that had set out to discover, a generation that had chosen to dare.’ Malcolm Cowley allows that Stein’s remark was pretentious, but says his generation was lost in another sense: ‘School and college had uprooted us in spirit; now we were physically uprooted [by the war] … dumped, scattered among strange people. All our roots were dead now.’ And, as suddenly as it had begun for them, the war ended.

  *

  The Armistice at first induced a sense of relief. ‘We were still alive,’ writes Cowley, ‘and nobody at all would be killed tomorrow.’ It soon appeared, however, that the ideals for which the war had supposedly been fought were ‘dissolving into quarrelling statesmen and oil and steel magnates’. Young Americans returned from Europe where they had celebrated peace by reeling through the streets with champagne, only to find that the Prohibition amendment had been passed, as if, says Cowley, ‘to publish a bill of separation between itself and ourselves’, as if to say that ‘it wasn’t our country any longer’.

  The young men who had served in the war had to go back to the USA because at first there was nowhere else to go. Most of them congregated in New York, which Cowley calls ‘the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you met came from another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have … a past more distant than last night’s swell party’. They hung about Greenwich Village, homeland of ‘the proletariat of the arts’, where everyone was poor. They mostly had friends living there already who had written them letters enchantedly describing the bohemian life. Also, New York seemed to be the only city where a young writer could get published, since the ‘little magazines’ had mostly shifted there from Chicago during the war.

  Some people had reached the Village before war service. Cummings had got there after leaving Harvard in 1916, financed by his wealthy classmate Scofield Thayer. He shared a Village studio that had a high ceiling and a peephole in the door, and told his friends that it was a former gambling den. Here he painted and made experiments in unpunctuated and uncapitalised poetry – cautious efforts at modernism. Snatched away again from the Village by the army draft a few months before the end of the war (for his ambulance service and imprisonment had not made him exempt from military call-up), he wrote nostalgically from camp in New England a poem about New York life, first published by Harold Loeb in Broom:

  by god i want above fourteenth

  fifth’s deep purring biceps, the mystic screech

  of Broadway, the trivial stink of rich

  frail firm asinine life …

  the little barbarous Greenwich perfumed fake

  And most, the futile fooling labyrinth

  where noisy colours stroll …

  When Cummings left the army in January 1919 he went straight back to the Village, this time moving into a garret up seventy-four stairs with no running water or heating.

  Cowley and his friends intended to ‘continue the work begun in high school, of training ourselves as writers’ in the Village. Despite the need to get jobs and earn money, the dislocation of war had left them with ‘a vast unconcern for the future and an enormous appetite for pleasure’, and for a time sheer hedonism prevailed. ‘We danced to squeaky victrola records … we had our first love affairs … we were continually drunk with high spirits, transported by the miracle of no longer wearing a uniform’. Cowley recalls how the Villager would

  wake at ten o’clock between soiled sheets in a borrowed apartment … On the dresser was a half-dollar borrowed the night before from the last guest to go downstairs singing … enough to buy breakfast for two … When the second pot of coffee was emptied a visitor would come, then another; you would borrow fifty-five cents for the cheapest bottle of [bootlegged] sherry. Somebody would suggest a ride across the bay to Staten Island. Dinner provided itself, and there was always a program for the evening. On Fridays there were dances in Webster Hall attended by terrible uptown people who came to watch the Villagers at their revels … On Saturdays everybody gathered at Luke O’Connor’s saloon … On Sunday nights there were poker games … There were always parties, and if they lasted into the morning they might end in a ‘community sleep’: the mattresses were pulled off the beds and laid side by side on the floor … so that a dozen people could sleep there in discomfort … Always, before going to bed, you borrowed fifty cents for breakfast.

  But this Village version of the vie bohème could not go on for ever. Allowances from families soon ra
n out, and there was a limit to how long one could subsist ‘on borrowed money, on borrowed time, and in a borrowed apartment’. After that, it was time to support oneself as a writer – or try to. One might perhaps get hold of a friend who worked for the Dial, the only literary journal that was both mildly sympathetic to the Village ethos and could afford to pay its contributors. But even the Dial funds were strictly limited; all one was likely to get from it was, says Cowley, ‘half a dozen bad novels to review in fifty or a hundred words apiece’, for which one would be paid a dollar per novel when the review finally appeared – and this might not be for three or four months. Meanwhile, the thing to do was sell the review copies for 35 cents each, which often seemed more than they were worth.

  Soon it was time to get a real job. In any case, the attractions of the Village would begin to pall, for the ‘Greenwich Village Idea’, as Cowley calls it, the twentieth-century version of Mürger’s garret life, was fast becoming – in a diluted version – the lifestyle of the middle classes all over the American continent.

  By 1920 ‘bohemian’ had become a fashionable word. Wives of businessmen in Milwaukee and Pittsburgh patronised ‘bohemian’ antique shops, browsed in little ‘bohemian’ bookstores, and gave ‘bohemian’ parties. ‘In Philadelphia,’ writes Cowley, ‘young married couples … would encourage their guests: “Don’t stand on ceremony; you know we are thorough bohemians.” All over the Western world, bohemia … was making more converts.’ The Village was beginning to seem like an imitation of itself, an ersatz way of dropping out.

  Consequently, says Cowley, soon after the war people in the Village were talking about ‘the good old days of 1916’ and assuming that they would never return. There had also been a collapse of political idealism. Before the USA entered the war, Greenwich Village had plenty of political life: socialism and even anarchism had rubbed shoulders with ‘free love’ and ‘free verse’; meetings had been held in support of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as ‘Wobblies’); and the IWW leader Bill Hay wood often held forth to an audience of avant-garde poets and Cubist painters. But in 1917 the Draft Law suddenly forced people to decide how radical they really were. Political revolution had no place in the lives of those – the majority – who accepted Woodrow Wilson’s call-up and joined the fight for ‘democracy’. Some Villagers evaded the draft and fled to Mexico, and others allowed themselves to be imprisoned as conscientious objectors, but the IWW was virtually destroyed when it set itself in determined opposition to the USA’s participation in the war – many of its leaders were sent to prison under new legislation against ‘sabotage’, while other prominent IWW figures hastily left the country. To many American radicals it seemed that Wilson had drawn the USA into the international conflict largely because it provided him with an excuse to crush the labour movement. A character in Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel observes: ‘It’s a plot of the big interests, Morgan an’ them, to defeat the workers by sendin’ them off to the war. Once they get you in the army you can’t howl about civic liberty or the Bill of Rights. They can shoot you without trial, see?’

  After the war socialism was still a live issue. The Village was deeply concerned about the case of Eugene Debs, a socialist leader imprisoned in 1918 for attacking the Wilson Administration’s prosecution of persons charged with sedition under the wartime Espionage Act; and active fury was aroused when Sacco and Vanzetti, two labour leaders who had been convicted on dubious evidence of murder during a payroll robbery, were finally executed in 1927. But by the 1920s the political atmosphere was repressive; much could be contemplated but nothing could be done.

  The Village sensed these things acutely, but they were felt elsewhere in America too. Sherwood Anderson wrote in his notebook: ‘In Chicago … faces seen on the street … are tired faces. America wants something it cannot find. The old belief in material progress is lost and nothing new has yet been found.’ And McAlmon bluntly sums up the American atmosphere in 1921 as ‘postwar despairing’.

  *

  The unrest among young American intellectuals was expressed with considerable force in the symposium that included Lewis Mumford’s and Clarence Britten’s essays on modern American life. Entitled Civilization in the United States, it was assembled during 1921 by a group of New Yorkers under the editorship of Harold Stearns, and appeared in print the next year. Despite its grandiose title it was concerned with one simple question: why was there no satisfying career open in America to talented young men?

  Stearns, born in 1891, was a Harvard-educated literary journalist and critic who had visited Europe just before the outbreak of war, had worked on the Dial, and in 1919 had published a study of liberalism in America. For the symposium he assembled thirty contributors, and allocated to them such topics as the law, science, economics, sex and advertising, as well as intellectual life and the various arts.

  He gave the task of writing on ‘The Intellectual Life’ to the critic and literary historian Van Wyck Brooks, who took a thoroughly pessimistic line, summing up American writers’ experience as ‘sterile bitterness, a bright futility, a beginning without a future’. According to Brooks there had always been abundant literary talent in the USA, but very little of it had come to maturity. He asked of how many contemporary American authors it could be said that their work showed ‘a continuous growth, or indeed any growth’, and judged that the typical American writer never fulfilled his youthful promise. Brooks went on:

  Shall I mention the writers – but they are countless! – who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines? The poets who, at the very outset of their careers, find themselves extinguished like so many candles? The novelists who have been unable to grow up, and remain withered boys of seventeen? The critics who find themselves overtaken in mid-career by a hardening of the spiritual arteries? Our writers all but universally lack the power of growth, the endurance that enables one to continue to produce personal work after the freshness of youth has gone. Weeds and wild flowers! Weeds without beauty or fragrance, and wild flowers that cannot survive the heat of day.

  Brooks ascribed this failure to ‘something wanting in the soil’. American writers, he argued, had been insufficiently nourished by the arid society in which their roots had tried to grow. More specifically, he blamed it on the wrong sort of education and expectations, the fact that the USA had chosen to stimulate the competitive rather than the creative spirit, so that it was almost impossible to find a scientist or scholar who, for the sake of his subject, ‘will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering president of some insignificant university’. Brooks thought that Walt Whitman was the sole instance of the ‘force and vivacity’ that American literature ought to have produced; Henry James, for all his qualities, was both an exile and ‘a man of singularly low vitality’. Even Whitman ‘folded his hands in mid-career’.

  Brooks was following the party line of Stearns and the other contributors, who had met fortnightly for discussions while writing the book. It is possible to read the history of American literature up to 1920 in a different light, to see the achievement of the best nineteenth-century writers – such as Melville in Moby Dick and Twain in Huckleberry Finn – as reflecting with chilling accuracy the struggles of individuals against the repressions of American society, and the self-destructive compromises they have to make in order to survive within it. Whitman, for all his noisy complaints, was perhaps in the end an irrelevance. Maybe American writers had not really failed but had been too honest, had discovered the barrenness of the society they inhabited – a discovery that was likely to make them fall silent or lapse into trivia. Brooks assumed that it was the ‘sustained career’ that made a nation’s literature, but such a career was just as likely to be evidence of a self-sufficient literary profession in which authors and critics live in each other’s pockets and promote each other’s work. Such a body of professional writers and critics had been found in London since the eighteenth ce
ntury, but had played almost no part in the birth of literary modernism just before and during the First World War. The principal figures in the modernist movement were two Americans, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and an Irishman, James Joyce; while these three were at work, the English literary establishment had chiefly concentrated its attention on the Georgian poets. The USA lacked a close-knit ‘literary world’ like that of London, but arguably this was to its advantage.

  Another doubt about the self-flagellation of the contributors to Civilization in the United States is expressed by Harold Loeb, who, after reading the symposium, wrote to a friend: ‘These writers all gnash their teeth because America is not France or Germany or England; it seems to me it is rather a cause for rejoicing. What is sadder is that Europe is being Americanized which I am sufficiently romantic to regret.’

  Eight years after the symposium was published, Gertrude Stein touched on the issue of the USA’s headlong plunge into industrialisation and the problems it had created for writers and artists. She came up with an idiosyncratic observation that was just as pertinent as the long-winded self-reproaches of Stearns’s team. Answering a questionnaire in the magazine transition about why so many American writers had come to Europe, she wrote: ‘The United States is just now the oldest country in the world … the mother of the twentieth century civilisation … Your parents’ home is never a place to work.’ It was nonsense to suggest, as Stearns and his contributors did, that the USA was a young nation with growing pains. It had become an urban society long before anyone else, and had now reached the geriatric stage. Europe was only just beginning.