by Bryson, Bill
Edgar Rice Burroughs had a tamer life than Grey—then again who didn’t?—but wrote racier stuff. Three years younger than Grey, Burroughs was born in 1875 into a well-off family in Chicago, but he was something of a black sheep and struggled to find a role for himself in life. He went west as a young man and tried storekeeping, ranching, panning for gold, and working as a railroad policeman, all without success, before he discovered he had a knack for writing stories. In 1912, at the age of thirty-five, he produced his first hit, Tarzan of the Apes.
Burroughs was no hack. He used pulp fiction plots but wrote with a certain panache, as if he didn’t quite understand the genre. Here are the opening lines to Tarzan of the Apes:
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own sceptical incredulity for the balance of the strange tale.
It is not perhaps Tolstoy, but it is certainly far removed from the usual simply worded, straight-into-the-action openings of most cheap fiction of the day. In a career that lasted almost forty years, Burroughs produced some eighty books, including twenty-six Tarzan novels, a great deal of science fiction, and a few westerns. All his efforts were characterized by exhilarating action, lightly clad females, and an unwavering attachment to eugenic ideals. Tarzan himself could have been the poster boy for the eugenics movement. Tarzan, as many readers will surely know already, is the story of an aristocratic English infant who is left orphaned in the African jungle and is brought up by apes. Fortunately, because he is white and Anglo-Saxon, he is innately brave, strong, decisive, and kind, and clever enough to solve any problem. He even teaches himself to read—quite a feat considering that he speaks no human language and doesn’t know what a book is when he first sees one. Thank goodness for racial superiority.
The creation or maintenance of superior beings is something that preoccupied Burroughs throughout his career. Nearly all his outer space books are concerned with the breeding of master races on Mars or Venus.* In Lost on Venus, he writes admiringly of a society in which “no defective infant was allowed to live” and citizens who were “physically, morally or mentally defective were rendered incapable of bringing their like into the world.” Back on Earth, writing as himself in an article in the Los Angeles Examiner, he insisted that the world would be a better place if all “moral imbeciles” were systematically eliminated. He even titled one of his books Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid. Oskaloosa was the birthplace of Harry H. Laughlin.
As time went on, Burroughs became increasingly slapdash. He recycled plots and was often arrestingly careless with his prose. His lone novel of 1927, The War Chief, begins:
Naked, but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide, and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior leaped and danced to the beating of drums.
Four paragraphs later we get:
Naked, but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide, and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior moved silently among the boles of great trees.
Occasionally he just slipped into drivel. Here is a Martian warrior named Jeddak whispering sweet nothings to Thuvia, Maid of Mars, in a book of that title in 1920:
Ah, Thuvia of Ptarth, you are cold even before the fiery blasts of my consuming love! No harder than your heart, nor colder is the hard, cold ersite of this thrice happy bench which supports your divine and fadeless form!
Such passages could run on for some time. It hardly seemed to matter. People were still devotedly buying his stuff when Burroughs died in California of a heart attack in March 1950, age seventy-four.
Among serious writers of fiction, only Sinclair Lewis enjoyed robust sales in the summer of 1927. Elmer Gantry was far and away the bestselling fiction work of the year. A satire on evangelist preachers, it was roundly condemned across the nation, especially by evangelist preachers. The fundamentalist firebrand Billy Sunday, apprised of its content, called on God “to strike Lewis dead,” which doesn’t seem terribly Christian of him. The Reverend C. S. Sparkes of the Congregational Church of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s own hometown, bitterly contrasted Lewis with the saintly Charles Lindbergh, saying that Lewis possessed a mind “that is dead—dead to goodness and purity and righteousness,” while Lindbergh was “clean in mind and soul.”
Elmer Gantry was banned in several cities—in Boston, selling it was made an indictable offense, as opposed to just a misdemeanor, as an indication of how severely disagreeable it was—but of course such prohibitions merely made the book seem more juicily desirable to those who could get it. The novel sold 100,000 copies on its first day of sale, and was cruising toward 250,000 by the end of summer—numbers that not even Grey and Burroughs could count on.
Elmer Gantry was the fifth in a string of critical and commercial successes for Lewis that made him the most admired writer of his day. The others were Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Mantrap (1926). In 1930, he would be the first American awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. Not everyone was a fan. Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to his editor, said: “If I wrote as sloppily and shitily as that freckled prick I could write five thousand words a day year in and year out.” Though Lewis had no sense of it just yet, 1927 would mark the apex of his career trajectory. His later novels would fall out of fashion, and he would end up a hopeless alcoholic, so racked with delirium tremens that he would be confined in a straitjacket.
Hemingway produced no novel in 1927. He was mostly preoccupied with personal affairs—he divorced one wife and wed another in Paris in early summer, just about the time Lindbergh was flying in—but did come out with a volume of short stories, Men Without Women. Dorothy Parker in The New Yorker called it “a truly magnificent work,” adding, “I don’t know where a greater collection of stories can be found,” but the book didn’t stir the same public excitement as Hemingway’s debut novel of the previous year, The Sun Also Rises. Also well received, but not runaway commercial successes, were The Bridge of San Luis Rey by a new writer named Thornton Wilder, and Mosquitoes by another newcomer, William Faulkner.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the other American literary giant of the age—to us, if not to his contemporaries—produced no book in 1927. Instead he made his first trip to Hollywood, lured by a commission to write the screenplay for a movie called Lipstick. The fee was $3,500 up front with a further $12,000 on acceptance, but his completed script was deemed inadequate and turned down, so the bulk of the fee was never paid. Fitzgerald also had a screen test, but he didn’t do well at that either. In the end, the trip to California cost him far more than he earned. Fitzgerald was fading fast in 1927. The Great Gatsby, published two years earlier, had been a failure. Unsold stacks of the book sat in the warehouse of Charles Scribner’s Sons, his publisher, and would still be there when Fitzgerald died, broke and all but forgotten, in 1940. Not until the 1950s would the world rediscover him.
The publishing industry was in a state of interesting flux in 1927, and that was largely owing to a long-standing prejudice. Traditionally, publishing was closed to Jews (except at menial and dead-end levels). All the old firms—Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Putnam’s—were solidly white and largely Protestant, and their output tended to be carefully conservative. That began to change in 1915 when a young Jewish man named Alfred A. Knopf, the son of an advertising executive, started the imprint that still bears his name. Knopf brought America the works of Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Thomas Mann, and many others. The preponderance of foreign authors was explained simply by the fact that many American agents would not deal with a Jewish publisher.
All this cast the conservatism of the old-line WASP publishers into sharp relief. Charles Scribner’s Sons, a family firm founded in 1846, boasted for years that it never published a word that would make a maiden blush, but now found itself struggling to keep up with changing mores. In early 1927, when Maxwell P
erkins, its most celebrated editor, was working on Hemingway’s aforementioned volume of short stories, he felt he had to alert Charles Scribner II, the firm’s head, that the book contained certain words that might shock him. Perkins was so old-school that he could not bring himself to utter the actual words but wrote them down. One word he couldn’t even write down. (There appears to be no record of what words he wrote or whether any of them made it into the finished book.)
Interestingly, although Scribner’s was squeamish about publishing profanities, it had no hesitation in 1927 in publishing one of the most violently racist books of the decade, Re-forging America, by the amateur eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s previous book with Scribner, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, hints a little more clearly at where he stood on matters. In Re-forging America, Stoddard argued that America should create a “bi-racial” society, by which he meant not one in which people mingled harmoniously, but rather the very opposite: one in which whites and nonwhites were kept separate from cradle to grave so as not to risk cross-contamination to the detriment of either. The book was favorably reviewed in several places.
While Knopf was carving out a lucrative niche for itself among foreign authors, another new Jewish firm was finding great success by discovering—or in some cases rediscovering—American writers. The firm was Boni & Liveright, named for brothers Albert and Charles Boni and for Horace Liveright, and for a short while it was perhaps the most interesting and dynamic publishing house in America. The Boni brothers had until recently run the Washington Square Bookshop, a leftist hangout on MacDougal Street, and Liveright was a bond salesman. Although the three founders didn’t have a lot of expertise in publishing, the firm quickly made a name for itself.
The men squabbled endlessly, and by the early 1920s both Bonis had departed, leaving Liveright (pronounced, incidentally, “live-right,” not “liver-ight”) as sole head. In the three years 1925 to 1927, he produced what was perhaps the most dazzling parade of quality books ever to emerge from a single publishing house in a concentrated period. They included An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson, In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (who then eloped to Scribner’s), Soldier’s Pay by William Faulkner, Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker, Crystal Cup by Gertrude Atherton, My Life by Isadora Duncan, Education and the Good Life by Bertrand Russell, Napoleon by Emil Ludwig, The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard (forgotten now, but he was soon to win a Nobel Prize), The Golden Day by Lewis Mumford, three plays by Eugene O’Neill, volumes of poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robinson Jeffers, and a work of cheery froth by Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Purporting to be the diary of a dizzy gold digger named Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes wasn’t great literature, but it sold and sold and sold. James Joyce was said to be enchanted by it.
Liveright was a great publisher but a terrible businessman. He gave advances that were too indulgent, employed far more people than he needed to, and paid them more than he should have. Because of his bad business decisions, Boni & Liveright made profits of just $1,203 in 1927 and was in serious danger of going out of business.
Liveright exacerbated matters considerably by investing heavily, and generally unsuccessfully, in the stock market and on Broadway. In 1927 he found temporary salvation from an unlikely source. He brought over from London a play that had been a big success there: Dracula. For the American production, he selected a little-known Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi. Although Lugosi had been in America for six years, he still spoke little English and learned his lines phonetically, without really understanding what they meant, which gave him interesting diction. Lugosi had started his career playing romantic leads, but in 1926 he played a villain in a small but memorably named movie called The Devil in the Cheese. On the strength of that, it seems, he landed the role of Dracula. On September 19, the play opened at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut. After a successful two-week tryout, it had its formal premiere at the Fulton Theatre in New York on October 5, just before Lugosi’s forty-fifth birthday. In what may have been the best idea he ever had, Liveright hit on the gimmick of having a nurse stand by at each performance to help those who fainted, to emphasize just how terrifying an experience Dracula was. The ploy worked brilliantly. Dracula was a huge hit; it ran for a year in New York, then toured for two years more, making Liveright a lot of money when he most needed it.
It was also the making of Bela Lugosi, who devoted the rest of his career to playing Dracula. He starred in the 1931 movie and a great number of sequels. He also changed wives often—he was married five times—and became addicted to narcotics, but professionally he did almost nothing else for almost thirty years. Such was his devotion to the role that when he died in 1956, he was buried dressed as Count Dracula.
For Horace Liveright, Dracula proved a reprieve, not a solution. The firm went under in 1933, but by then its good work was done. Thanks almost entirely to Knopf and Liveright, American publishing was vastly more cosmopolitan and daring by the late 1920s than it had been just a dozen or so years before.
After an uninspiring spring and summer, Broadway was stirring promisingly at last. Two plays of lasting note were in rehearsals in September. One was Funny Face, with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Starring Fred and Adele Astaire and Betty Compton, mistress of Mayor Jimmy Walker, it would be a great hit and would run for 250 performances. Among its songs were “My One and Only” and “ ’S Wonderful.” Jimmied into it in a burst of topical exuberance was a role featuring a “Lindbergh-esque aviator.” (The 1957 film version was completely different and cut the aviator. It also preserved just four of the original songs.)
Far more influential was a complex musical about life on a Mississippi riverboat. Called Show Boat, it would change musical theater forever. As one theater historian has put it: “The history of the American Musical Theatre, quite simply, is divided into two eras—everything before Show Boat and everything after Show Boat.”
Show Boat was based on a novel from the previous year by Edna Ferber, who had just recently—and quite late in life—become extremely successful as a writer. Forty-two years old in the summer of 1927, she was from Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper. She was small and round, never married or had a partner, and carried a sharp tongue. Once the camp author Michael Arlen, seeing Ferber in a double-breasted jacket, said, “Why, Edna, you look almost like a man,” to which Ferber replied, “Why, Michael, so do you.” Thanks to her wit, Ferber was welcomed to the Algonquin Round Table, the informal luncheon club of wits who gathered every weekday in the Algonquin Hotel, and professionally embraced by George S. Kaufman, the most successful comedic playwright of the day. They collaborated extremely successfully on a string of comedies.
However gifted Ferber was with comedy, her skills as a novelist have not weathered well. The novel Show Boat is “a kind of hilarious anthology of bad writing” in the candid words of John Lahr. In evidence of Ferber’s propensity to write “like a teenager on diet pills,” Lahr cites this passage: “The Mississippi itself was a tawny tiger, roused, furious, bloodthirsty, lashing out with its great tail, tearing with its cruel claws, and burying its fangs deep in the shore to swallow at a gulp land, houses, trees, cattle, humans, even.” But it was a different age, and many found the book enchanting. Among its greatest fans was the composer Jerome Kern, who all but begged Ferber to let him make it into a musical. Ferber was doubtful that it could be done, but she allowed him to try. The result was what the theater historian Gerald M. Bordman has called “perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever written.”
Kern was born in New York City in 1885 (the same year as Edna Ferber) into a prosperous household. His father was a successful businessman, and young Jerome was well educated. He trained in musical theory and composition at the New York College of Music, though he spent his early years working in Tin Pan Alley. His ori
ginal specialty was creating new songs for imported plays—interpolations, as they were known in the trade—but soon he was cranking out original scores. Kern might never have become famous. He was booked to sail on the Lusitania in May 1915 on its last fateful voyage, but he overslept.
It was an extraordinarily busy time on Broadway. An average of fifty new musicals a year opened in the twenties. Kern was amazingly prolific—in 1917 alone, he wrote the music for five plays and a number of incidental songs as well—but he also developed further ambitions. In the same year he wrote: “It is my opinion that the musical numbers should carry the action of the play and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them.” This was, improbable though it may seem today, a revolutionary notion, and it was Show Boat that would make it a reality.
Kern could do with a hit. He had already had one notable failure in 1927. Lucky had opened on March 22 to mixed reviews and closed two months later (on the day Lindbergh landed in Paris). The play apparently had one wonderful song, “Spring Is Here,” but Kern neglected to get it published, and it is now lost. Of Kern’s five most recent plays, just one, Sunny, had been a real hit. The others had mostly been disappointing. Dear Sir closed after just fifteen performances. So Show Boat was both a crucial production for him and a bold gamble.
It had a complicated plot, it covered a span of forty years, and it addressed the highly sensitive issue of race—not the obvious makings of a night of lighthearted entertainment. Show Boat began rehearsals in the second week of September, almost three months ahead of its scheduled opening on Broadway, which was much, much earlier than would normally be the case, but its epic production numbers required careful preparation. With music by Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, choreography by Sammy Lee, and sets by Joseph Urban, Show Boat debuted at the National Theatre in Washington on November 15, then moved on to Philadelphia, and finally opened on Broadway at the new Ziegfeld Theatre on December 27. Rio Rita, the play Charles Lindbergh never quite saw, had to move out to make room for it. The reception everywhere was ecstatic.