Idema found support for his arguments in the sociological landmark Middletown by Robert and Helen Lynd, a survey of what was later revealed as Muncie, Indiana, recording, among other things, the impact of new industries on a middle-American town—in particular the roles of the radio, the movie projector, the phonograph, the telephone, cosmetics and, above all, the automobile. In Echoes of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald remembered exactly that: “As far back as 1915 the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him ‘self-reliant.’ At first, petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down.”3 The automobile had become “a house of prostitution on wheels,” according to one Middletown judge, while “Sunday driving” was denounced by the town’s ministers.
Partly, the Great War was responsible. John Peale Bishop, a classmate of Fitzgerald’s at Princeton, certainly thought so: “The most tragic thing about the war was not that it made so many dead men, but that it destroyed the tragedy of death. Not only did the young suffer in the war, but so did every abstraction that would have sustained and given dignity to their suffering. The war made the traditional morality unacceptable; it did not annihilate it; it revealed its immediate inadequacy. So that at its end, the survivors were left to face, as best they could, a world without values.”
Disillusionment, in particular in regard to religion, stands out in the American novels of the period: in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire, Winesburg, Ohio, Dark Laughter and Windy McPherson’s Son, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. And, as Edmund Wilson noted about Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned: “[T]he hero and heroine are strange creatures without purpose or method, who give themselves up to wild debaucheries and do not, from beginning to end of the book, perform a single serious act: but you somehow get the impression that, in spite of their madness, they are the most rational people . . . wherever they touch the common life, the institutions of men are made to appear a contemptible farce of the futile and the absurd. . . . The inference is that, in such a civilization, the sanest and most credible thing is to live for the jazz of the moment and forget the activities of men.”
After the automobile, and perhaps even ahead of it, the expansion of education was regarded, by the Lynds at least, as the most secularizing force, in particular higher education. “Education,” they wrote, “is a faith, a religion.” It had the effects it did partly because, in taking them away to university, higher education helped young people break with home traditions. But it was not only that. “Education appears to be desired frequently not for its specific content, but as a symbol.” It stood in many people’s minds for an openness to alternatives to traditional (religious) values and in this way “replaced religion as the most significant guide to life.” Fitzgerald captured some of this, too, in his story “Benediction,” where Lois explains to her brother, a Roman Catholic priest and monk, “I don’t want to shock you, Keith, but I can’t tell you how—how inconvenient being a Catholic is. It doesn’t seem to apply anymore. As far as morals go, some of the wildest boys I know are Catholics. And the brightest boys—I mean the ones who think and read a lot, don’t seem to believe in much of anything anymore.”4
Science mattered too. The Lynds concurred with Fitzgerald on evolution. In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine says of the older generation, “They shuddered when they found out what Dr. Darwin was about.” In Middletown, the Lynds discovered that “[t]he theory of evolution has shaken the theological cosmogony that had reigned for centuries.” Alongside this came the rise of modern psychology. In his book Only Yesterday, published in 1931, the American historian and editor of Harper’s Frederick Lewis Allen put it this way: “Of all the sciences it was the youngest and least scientific which most captivated the general public and had the most disintegrating effect upon religious faith. Psychology was king. Freud, Adler, Jung and Watson had their tens of thousands of votaries.”5
Idema went on to say that, despite the undoubted attractions of the changes overtaking America in the 1920s, a price was to be paid. There was, he said, an “extraordinary increase” in neurosis, in divorce, in sexual and emotional conflict, which was reflected in both the literature of the time and in the personal lives of the authors. Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire was originally to be called No God. One contemporary said of Fitzgerald, “When Scott ceased to go to mass he began to drink.”6
Idema argued that Anderson’s books mainly chronicle “the American loneliness” that accompanied the weakening of traditional religious practices, and that the same is true, to an extent, of Ernest Hemingway’s. “It was given to Hawthorne to dramatize the human soul,” wrote John Peale Bishop. “In our time Hemingway wrote the drama of its disappearance.” More than that, though, Idema said Hemingway was especially concerned with the breakdown of religious communities and that the young replaced them with new communities that had their own secular rituals.
Idema showed, for instance, in The Sun Also Rises, that the protagonist, Jake Barnes, finds in trout fishing and bullfighting “the peace he does not find in the church.” “In the novel,” he writes, “religion no longer functions for Jake and his peers. Trout fishing and bullfighting become its secular substitutes. They function like church rituals and, thus, replace them. In an important sense, then, The Sun Also Rises depicts trout fishing and bullfighting as secular (even pagan), psychological, and private—not religious.”7 Idema goes on: “An efficacious ritual, whether sacred or secular, integrates thoughts with emotions. Second, ritual binds the anxiety of individuals.”
The critic Irving Howe had this to say about Anderson’s Winesburg inhabitants: “They are distraught communicants in search of a ceremony, a social value, a manner of living, a lost ritual that may, by some means, re-establish a flow and exchange of emotion.” In an early Hemingway story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” the prolegomenon to The Sun Also Rises, the main character, Nick Adams, engages in a number of rituals in preparation for trout fishing—splitting off a slab of pine, putting up his tent, gathering grasshoppers properly. Carlos Baker, professor of literature at Princeton, says that one of Hemingway’s father’s favorite words was “properly.” “When in the outdoors with his son, everything had to be done in the proper way, whether building a fire, rigging a rod, baiting a hook, casting a fly, handling a gun, or roasting a duck or a haunch of venison.”
Henry Idema compares all this with what the Lynds observed in Middletown: “When religion began to decline, people sought out secular ‘centers of “spiritual” activity.’” The Lynds mentioned the “service” and “civic loyalty” ethic of the Rotary Club and even the town’s (very successful) basketball team. “‘Rotary and its big ideal of Service is my religion,’ said one Sunday school worker in Middletown. ‘I have gotten more out of it than I ever got out of the church.’”8
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway was more specific in comparing bullfighting with church ritual. He insisted on the ancient origins of both, compared matadors with altar boys and wrote that bullfighting “takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal,” “gives him an ecstasy that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy.” Bullfighting also creates a community, he said, a temporary community “moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds.”9
But the most obvious effect of secularization from the 1920s to the 1980s, says Idema, is America’s obsession with affluence and its symbols. Sherwood Anderson faced this issue in Winesburg, Ohio, where money replaces God as the unifying symbol in the life of Jesse, the main character, who nonetheless suffers a nervous breakdown. But it was Fitzgerald, above all, who best described this new surrogate religion. Fitzgerald himself was raised a Catholic but came to regard money, not religion, as the source of secu
rity. In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” one character says of his hometown: “The simple piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed—had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before them, his parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy.”
SOMETHING GORGEOUS THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD
And then there was Gatsby. At one point a short story, “Absolution,” was going to form the first part of the book, a picture of Gatsby’s early life. It was not, in the event, included in the final version, but tells the story of Rudolph Miller, a young boy growing up in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, forced by his strict Roman Catholic father to confess the sin of lying to the local parish priest. The boy is fearful of this encounter but finds to his amazement that the priest has the humanity to show him that he himself is in an even worse state, and rambles on about an amusement park with a big wheel “made of lights turning in the air,” urging the boy to go and see it. “All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes wide open and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.”
Fitzgerald returned to this theme several times, once in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in which a group of men in the fictional town of Fish gather each evening to watch the passing of the seven o’clock transcontinental express train from Chicago: “The men of Fish were beyond all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven at the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of dim, anaemic wonder”—here, too, was something gorgeous that had nothing to do with God.10
THE NEXT GREATEST POWER TO FAITH
At one point in his career Wallace Stevens broke his right hand in two places after provoking a drunken fight in Key West with Ernest Hemingway, cracking the other man’s jaw and getting knocked to the floor himself. At another point, discouraged from drinking alcohol by his wife, he turned himself into a connoisseur of teas. This may make Stevens seem like a colorful bohemian, but this was a man who, from 1916 until his death nearly forty years later in 1955, was a three-piece-suit-and-tie businessman, head of the fidelity and surety claims department at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. Stevens is not easy to pigeonhole, and that certainly applies to his artistic activities.
He was one of the finest exponents of an art form that blossomed throughout the twentieth century—a poet who wrote fascinating and exquisite prose. He used his prose above all to explain art and literature. One of his chief arguments was that in an age when God is dead, the arts in general, and poetry in particular, must take over—because God, like poetry, is an imaginary construct, and the greatest satisfactions to be had from life lie in the exploration and exploitation of the imagination. He also argued more clearly than most that the two rival phenomena that would replace God in the modern world were poetry and psychology. He was adamant that poetry was the better option.
Stevens was a slow starter. He and his siblings were read to from the Bible every night by their mother, who sat at the piano on Sunday evenings to play and sing hymns. At Reading Boys’ School in the early 1890s, because of his poker and football activities he failed his exams. But he soon made up for lost time, winning prizes, delivering a prizewinning oration at school, entering Harvard in 1897 (where he met and was taught by George Santayana) and publishing his first poem a few months later, in January 1898. He would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award and an honorary degree from Yale (the “greatest prize for a Harvard man”).
Stevens was exceptionally plainspoken in his prose, and confidently advocated placing poetry at the center of life. He considered Christianity “an exhausted culture” and thought that “loss of faith is growth.” As he freely admitted, he entertained a “vast premise” that the world might be “transformed in and through” a great work of art. “God and the imagination are one. After one has abandoned belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”11
His work abounds in sentiments that directly address our theme:
Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns . . .
And:
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
. . .
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now . . .12
“The paramount relation between painting and poetry today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince. Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains. . . . The extension of the mind beyond the range of the mind, the projection of reality beyond reality, the determination to cover the ground, whatever it may be, the determination not to be confined, the recapture of excitement and intensity of interest, the enlargement of the spirit at every time, in every way, these are the unities, the relations, to be summarized as paramount now.”13
“In an age of disbelief, in a time that is largely humanistic (much the same thing), in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief. . . . I think of it as a role of the utmost seriousness. It is, for one thing, a spiritual role. . . . To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as though they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. . . . What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed. . . . Thinking about the end of the gods creates singular attitudes in the mind of the thinker. One attitude is that the gods of classical mythology were merely aesthetic projections. They were not the objects of belief. They were expressions of delight. . . . It is one of the normal activities of humanity, in the solitude of reality and in the unworthy treatment of solitude, to create companions, a little colossal as I have said, who, if not superficially explicative, are, at least, assumed to be full of the secret of things. . . . However all that may be, the celestial atmosphere of these deities, their ultimate remote celestial residences, are not matters of chance. Their fundamental glory is the fundamental glory of men and women, who being in need of it create it, elevate it, without too much searching of its identity. The people, not the priests, made the gods.”14
Later, Steve
ns said, during a lecture: “My purpose this morning is to elevate the poem to the level of one of the major significances of life and to equate it, for the purpose of discussion, with gods and men. . . . The gods are the creation of the imagination at its utmost. . . . It comes to this, that we use the same faculties when we write poetry that we use when we create gods . . .15 In the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give. God and the imagination are one.”16
This must be one of the most sustained attempts in modern literature to seek out a way to live without God. Stevens was not afraid to contemplate “big” questions; he well realized that appetite is a crucial ingredient in the fulfilled life. And so, at the same time that he was making grand claims for the arts, embracing that “vast premise” that he spoke about, he was equally ambitious in setting out what poetry is, its exact place in our lives, how it helps us, what it can achieve. “A poet looks out at the world,” he said, “somewhat as a man looks at a woman,” a statement at once poetic and designed to get everyone’s attention. He firmly insisted that poetry is
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend.
The role of the poet, he insisted, “is to help people live their lives. . . . Poetry should provide the resistance to the pressure of reality through the activity of the imagination.” Nor was he afraid of any elitist implications. “It is a world of fact given to us by someone with a range of sensibility greater than our own, a poetic sensibility. It is an enlarged world of fact, an ‘incandescence of the intelligence.’ Like light, it adds nothing but itself. Close to the heat of that light, we can be said to live more intensely.”17 “Enchanting should be understood literally, as singing the world into existence.” At its best, poetry “offers an experience of the world as meditation, the mind slowing in front of things, the mind pushing back against the pressure of reality through the minimal transfigurations of the imagination.” There was, he thought, a kind of “soul-peace” to be had through poetry.18
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 29