by G. J. Meyer
There were also, inevitably, lesser souls for whom Paris was an ideal setting in which to strike a romantically antiromantic pose, hangers-on eager to look artistic and lost and all the rest.
It is both fitting and ironic that Ernest Hemingway popularized the idea of the Lost Generation and became its supreme symbol. He ticked all the boxes: a midwesterner who entered the war as an eighteen-year-old volunteer ambulance driver, witnessed horrendous carnage before being wounded himself, and after recuperation in the United States moved to Paris in 1921, committed to becoming a literary artist. That he was tall and muscular with movie-star good looks, became a chum of such Paris institutions as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and happened to be both supremely talented and utterly devoted to his craft—all these things helped. He was perfectly equipped to become an idol to young Americans yearning for liberation from they weren’t quite sure what, the ultimate antiromantic romantic hero, the personification of an idea and an ideal.
The ironies of Hemingway’s identification with the Lost Generation are manifold. They begin with the fact that the notion of a Lost Generation originated not with him, or with any of its other supposed members, but with a Paris garage owner who was talking about one of his mechanics. They end with Hemingway’s rejection of the whole idea as unfair and ridiculous, his denial that he and those like him were part of any such thing.
It happened this way. One day in the early 1920s, Gertrude Stein, the self-anointed queen of avant-garde expatriate Paris, complained about the service she was receiving to the proprietor of the garage that looked after her Model T Ford. The proprietor put the blame on a mechanic who had served in the war, berating him as a typically useless member of a génération perdue.
“That’s what you are,” Stein said later in telling Hemingway of the incident. He was then her starstruck young protégé, an unknown would-be author unpublished except for his work as a newspaper correspondent.
“That’s what you all are,” Stein continued. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”
“Really?” Hemingway’s tone would have been skeptical, impatient, probably a bit indignant.
“You are. You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death….”
“Was the young mechanic drunk?”
“Of course not.”
“Have you ever seen me drunk?”
“No, but your friends are drunk.”
“I’ve been drunk. But I don’t come here drunk.”
“Of course not. I didn’t say that.”
“The boy’s patron was probably drunk by eleven o’clock in the morning. That’s why he makes such lovely phrases.”
“Don’t argue with me, Hemingway. It does no good at all. You’re all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.”
Despite his protests, the phrase obviously had some sort of interest for Hemingway. Perhaps he meant it when he called it lovely. He made it one of a pair of epigraphs (the less important of the two, he would insist) in his first novel, attributing it to Stein. But it rankled him forever after; he continued to regard it as an insult. Some fifteen years later he would write that thinking of Gertrude Stein and her anecdote put him in mind of “egotism and mental laziness versus discipline.” It made him wonder “who is calling who a lost generation.”
His last words on the subject were few and blunt: “The hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.”
Nonetheless, he could never have denied that Paris in the twenties was a magnet for talented young war survivors like himself, that many were there at least in part because they felt genuinely alienated from home, or that their alienation was connected in some way to the war and the changes both in attitudes and objective reality that it had wrought.
Two bona fide members of whatever Hemingway might have permitted his age cohort to be called were E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos. Both entered the war as Hemingway did, as volunteer ambulance drivers. Both were expelled from the ambulance service when their opinions of what the Allied cause looked like at close range became known to the authorities. Dos Passos returned home, where he wrote Three Soldiers, a 1921 novel that depicted the war as irredeemably vicious and army life as dehumanizing. It was hailed by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “the first war book by an American which is worthy of serious notice.” Cummings, absurdly, was imprisoned by the French as a suspected spy. He immortalized the degradation to which he and his fellow inmates were subjected in The L-Shaped Room, recognized ever since as a minor classic. After he was released and his health recovered, he like Dos Passos returned to Paris.
On the fringes, destined to become a symbol less of the war generation than of the Jazz Age, was Fitzgerald. In 1917 he had dropped out of Princeton (where he was on academic probation) to join the army. He was commissioned a second lieutenant but discharged in November 1918 without having left the United States. Thus he had little to be disillusioned about, at least where personal experience was concerned. He had the good sense not to pretend otherwise. By 1924, when he finally joined the great literary migration to France with his wife and baby daughter in tow, he was one of America’s most popular, and extravagantly well-paid, authors. He and Zelda lived and partied in a style commensurate with their princely income. Hemingway became Fitzgerald’s friend, but took him to task for compromising his stories to make them acceptable to top-paying magazines like The Saturday Evening Post.
France, the Riviera no less than Paris, was by then chockablock with famously creative or soon-to-be-famous Americans: Cole Porter, Thornton Wilder, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Malcolm Cowley, and Archibald MacLeish among many others. They were there for as many reasons as any assortment of talented men and women have for going anywhere: the sunshine of Antibes or the somber beauty of Paris, the company of interesting people, the parties, the wish to be somewhere other than the United States. If they were lost, it was not to an extent conspicuously greater than that of most human beings in all times and places. They did have certain things in common, among them a view of the war that Woodrow Wilson could never have recognized. They saw it as a tragedy, a waste, a prolonged act of folly that had accomplished less than nothing at a cost beyond anyone’s ability to reckon.
With this came the suspicion that a civilization capable of producing such a catastrophe, and incapable of stopping it once it was under way, might itself not be worth much.
It was Ezra Pound, thirty-three when the war ended and therefore not far from being a member of Hemingway’s generation, who expressed this suspicion most memorably. He wrote of the young men who had
walked eye-deep in hell
believing old men’s lies, then unbelieving,
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
And of how
There died a myriad,
And the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization…
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
But the last word belongs, once again, to Hemingway. He has the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms say that, after all the bloodshed and all the bombast of the war years, such words as “glory, honor, courage, or hallow” had become obscenities to his ears.
It was hardly the effect that President Wilson had intended to achieve when he deployed those same words.
Chapter 22
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Compromise or Betrayal?
FEBRUARY 14, 1919, has been called the high point of Woodrow Wilson’s life. That is a large claim to make about a career that included election and reelection as president of the United States and leading the nation to victory in the most terrible war the world had ever seen. It is not ridiculous, however. Wilson himself might not have disputed it.
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On February 14 he was still at the pinnacle of his popularity and prestige—still the hero of the Western world. And on that day, at Versailles, he presented to the nations represented at the peace conference his covenant for the League of Nations and received clear signals that their approval was not going to be a problem. It was an achievement, he himself could have had no doubt, that was going to change the world for the better as far into the future as anyone could claim to see.
His destiny had been fulfilled.
There was, however, another, darker sense in which February 14 stands as the zenith of Wilson’s career. His appearance before the peace conference’s third plenary session, and its embrace of the covenant, was the last unalloyed triumph he would ever know. From that point forward, the arc of his life would bend increasingly downward. Before the month was out, he would be embroiled in the disputes, and faced with the opposition, that by year’s end would leave him a defeated and embittered man.
But on February 14 all that lay ahead, not only unforeseen but unimaginable. It is a measure of how he was still perceived in France, two months after his arrival, that at the end of the day’s proceedings, as he and his wife left the Versailles palace, they walked to their limousine on red carpet laid down for their exclusive use in spite of rainy weather. Their path was lined with potted palms, and at its end President Poincaré and Premier Clemenceau stood waiting to say bon voyage. The Wilsons were departing immediately for the port of Brest, where the George Washington stood ready to carry them home.
Not that his work in Paris was finished. Far from it; work had not even really begun on the treaty needed to bring the war officially to an end. The Council of Ten was far from agreement on what that treaty should entail. Therefore Wilson would be returning to France, and as soon as possible. It was inconceivable, at least to Wilson, that any settlement could be worked out without his direct involvement. He assigned Colonel House to attend the council meetings while he was away, embarrassing Secretary of State Lansing by doing so.
The president was hurrying home because he had to. The last session of the Sixty-Fifth Congress was slated to end on March 3. If he failed to be on hand to sign the appropriations bills that had not yet been passed when he departed for France, much of the government would eventually be brought to a halt. But it would be a flying visit. He would spend twice as many days at sea, coming and going, as on American soil. Then it would be back to work on the treaty that was to draw a line under the Great War and open a new chapter in the history of mankind.
As the George Washington steamed out of Brest that night, his success with the league covenant was only one of Wilson’s reasons to be satisfied with what had been accomplished thus far. Clemenceau had been persuaded to abandon his demand for the creation of an international army for the purpose of keeping Germany permanently in check. The Supreme Council had agreed, at Wilson’s urging, to grant the world’s lesser nations two seats, to be filled on a rotating basis, on the league’s executive council. Everything appeared to be developing nicely.
There were difficulties, of course. That was to be expected, and even an issue as heated as the colonial mandates had been dealt with in what everyone appeared to regard as a satisfactory fashion. What was in a way the most awkward difficulty had not come up until February 13, just a day before Wilson’s departure. Japan’s two representatives on the Supreme Council, who usually had little to say, caught the other members off guard with a proposal that could only have shocked European and North American ears in 1919. They wanted the covenant, which in best Wilsonian fashion declared small nations to have the same rights as mighty ones, to acknowledge the equality of races as well. This produced an uproar. The reaction of Australia’s prime minister was only a little more extreme than most: if any such statement were adopted, he said, he would take the next ship home. Wilson, who shared the concern about the “yellow peril” that had made the issue politically sensitive on the U.S. West Coast, had nothing to say. The proposal died without serious discussion, leaving the Japanese quietly unhappy. It would be interesting to know what the Japanese thought when, after reading the covenant aloud to a largely uncomprehending plenary session the next day, Wilson told the assembly that “we are all brothers.” Colonel House, untroubled and true to form, afterward told the president that “your speech was as great as the occasion.”
There seemed every reason to be confident about what lay ahead. The crossing was not as restful as the overtired president and his physician must have hoped—the seas were so heavy that the usual naval escort had to be abandoned—but the Wilsons found pleasure in fellow passengers, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. News of the covenant appeared in American newspapers the day after Wilson left Paris, and the response was favorable. Joe Tumulty, monitoring the coverage from the White House, sent a cable that must have seemed a confirmation of what the president already believed. “Plain people throughout America for you,” it said in verb-swallowing telegraphese. “You have but to ask their support and all opposition will melt away.”
The president’s secretary, if the best of servants, proved in this case to be the worst of prophets. Doubts about the league, the reality of which Tumulty’s message obliquely acknowledged, were widespread in the United States and not going to melt away. Some of them had already hardened into outright opposition. Wilson and Tumulty could take a kind of comfort in the unexpected death, on January 9, of the most potent of the league critics and the man most likely to win the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, Theodore Roosevelt. He died in his sleep at his home in Oyster Bay, on Long Island. With him no longer on the scene, the Republicans had no clear standard-bearer. Their opposition to the league seemed fated to be diffuse.
It might have been, for a time at least, if not for the way the president began to conduct himself almost from the moment of his arrival in the United States. His problems began with a bargain worked out before his departure from Paris. He had been planning, upon his return to Washington, to address a joint session of Congress and use his oratorical powers to cement congressional and popular support. Colonel House, knowing how weary Congress was of being lectured like a class of unruly schoolboys, managed to dissuade his master from doing any such thing. How much better, he said, to invite the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee to the White House for dinner and an informal discussion. In return, the prospective guests would be asked to withhold public comment on the covenant until they had met with the president.
It was a reasonable proposal and readily enough accepted. What turned it into a problem, and the first of a sequence of missteps, was what happened when the George Washington docked at Boston on the foggy morning of February 24. Ending the voyage at Boston was necessary because of a New York longshoremen’s strike. Turning necessity into an opportunity was Tumulty’s idea. He said the local Democratic organization could guarantee an enthusiastic welcome. This would provide food for thought for Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was to become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when the Sixty-Sixth Congress was seated in May and the Republicans took control of the Senate. Tumulty was confident that a big turnout in support of the president would have an improving effect on Lodge’s thinking, especially if, as seemed certain, the senator intended to run for another term. Wilson agreed, with misgivings, and preparations for a grand occasion were set in motion.
February 24, a Monday, had been declared a public holiday in recognition of the president’s visit. The newspapers would report that two hundred thousand people turned out to cheer the president as his ship entered Boston Harbor. His reception was an echo, and a loud one, of the uproarious welcomes he had received when visiting Paris, London, and Rome two months earlier. It is understandable if he took this as confirmation that he, more than anyone else on the planet, was in deep touch with and spoke for the aspirations of common people everywhere, the people of the United States above all.
After a simple welcome at the pier, a fifty-car motorcade carried the president through streets lined with well-wishers to a luncheon with dignitaries including the governors of all the New England states. The last of the planned events was a speech—what the president himself had warned would be brief and anodyne remarks—at Mechanics Hall. It was filled to capacity with seven or eight thousand cheerily welcoming people.
Perhaps it was the sheer force of this welcome that encouraged the president to say more than he had intended. His speech was short as promised but anodyne only up to a point. It began with positive rhetoric about how the selflessness of the United States had made her beloved around the world, how the nations gathered in Paris had been inspired by America’s example to behave selflessly themselves, and how the conference from which he had just returned was on course to spread liberation throughout the world. “Now we will make men free,” the president declared. Perhaps it was unnecessary, even malicious, for influential Republicans and even some Democrats to take offense at what he said next: that the United States could reject the great work going on in Paris only by limiting herself to “those narrow, selfish, provincial purposes which seem so dear to some minds that have no sweep beyond the nearest horizon.” The Associated Press certainly found these words provocative. The account that it sent to newspapers around the country said that Wilson had “thrown down the gauntlet.”
In any case, it was the speech’s combative elements that league skeptics focused on. They pointed to what appeared to be the president’s wish not for consultation and conciliation but for a showdown. “I have fighting blood in me,” he had pridefully if rather obscurely said, “and it is sometimes a delight to let it have scope, but if it is challenged on this occasion it will be an indulgence.” He meant that if getting the league approved came down to a fight, he would welcome it. This was braggadocio, oratorical strutting. It set the pattern for what lay ahead: belligerence on Wilson’s part, disdain for those members of Congress who failed to do as he demanded, and anger on both sides.