I Remember, I Remember-1929

...Fitzgerald was not the leader of a "lost generation," writes Arthur Mizener, "except in the sense that explorers convinced that El Dorado is over the next mountain range may be said to be lost...

...A writer was once regarded as a person with a special gift and a member of a noble calling...

...His lyric panoramas are in the best tradition of whitman, as, for instance, his likening of the very rich and very beautiful Nicole Diver to a sort of majestic tugboat with millions of American Dreams in tow: "Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil...

...But best of all was I . ~ n Samson who could demolish with an epigram the most precious nostrums then circulating among the intelligentsia...

...It told the story of a postal clerk who dreams he is President of the United States, only to find himself beset by makebelieve problems that would haunt the life of a wide-awake president forty years later...

...From having been, in a sense, a profession with its own standards and values, publishing has largely become dominated by purely business considerThe Alternative February 1974 9...

...Gertrude Stein may finally have been a better judge of painters than she was of writers...

...Two points might be made in Fitzgerald's defense...

...The songs we sang (or whistled) were by Gershwin and Porter, the former represented by Porgy and Bess (which had opened the year before) while Cole Porter's Fifty Million b-~renchmen was the smash musical of the year, and the hit song of 1929, "You Do Something To Me," came from the show...

...Elmer Rice's Street Scene opened the year on Broadway, at the same time the Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street was presenting four maginficent one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill, and Eva I~ Gal]ienne's Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street was presenting superb productions of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Ibsen for two bits, the fourth part of a dollar...

...But I knew that street only from a reading of populist literature...

...First, when it came to writing about young people, the "ideas" of his time were not very informed, and certainly not exciting...

...With a few more years of The Love Machine, Sex and the Single Girl, The Playboy Book of Sex, may we not soon be reaching the point where a gigantic book burning will be welcomed as a much-needed cleansing operation...

...Mass education, mass democracy, mass communications, the commercialization of so much of life have had their effect, needless to say, on book publishing as well as everything else...

...He became a reformer among reformers...

...And Gatsby is brought side by side with James J. Hill for their likeness...

...girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Fiveand-Tens on Christmas Eve...

...When Hitler ordered his spectacular book burnings, educated people in all countries reacted with horror, for the reason that the book was regarded almost instinctively as the repository of truth, as the means by which the highest achievements of civilization are recorded and preserved...

...The relationship between the dreamer and the dream: all else is irrelevant in Fitzgerald's world...

...But that part of my memory must be reserved for another--more reverential--occasion...

...Time and again Gatsby reveals a sort of infantile regression in search of what he calls "the past...

...Has all this permissiveness brought us better books, more inspired writers, a more just, a nobler society...

...Fitzgerald wrote intensely about a single, peculiar decade, but he used those years to expand on the American Dream as an ongoing spectacle--in which, of course, he himself shared...

...coal pits of Pennsylvania...

...Or we would challenge the Schaeffer Brothers to uphold their defense of Spinoza as the greatest philosopher of all times...

...Other hits of the year included a bit of Future Camp so that later generations could "tiptoe through the tulips" with Tiny Tim on late-night television...

...Anthony Patch was the grandson of Adam J. Patch, Civil War cavalryman and robber baron, who at the age of fiftyseven "determined . . . to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world...

...it was clucking its collective tongue at the wonders exposed in Ripley's Believe It Or Not;, but it was also reading--at the very top of the best-seller fiction list--All Quiet on the Western Front, mass kitsch for a mass audience that had ignored such earlier literate World War I novels as Three Soldiers (by John .Dos Passos) and The Enormous Room (by e. e. cummings...

...Beauty he personified as a beautiful woman...

...In the long fight against censorship which culminated in the Supreme Court decisions that virtually eliminated any effective control over what may be printed or distributed, the book publishers, through their association, played a leading part...

...In their fight for an end to all restrictions on obscenity, isn't it possible that the publishers have succeeded in vulgarizing the book, with the consequent undermining of the respect which the book and their profession have traditionally enjoyed...

...But that was not the prevailing rhetoric in 1929, that blessed year when Dos (as his friends called him) was maturing as a writer with 42nd Parallel...

...Nostalgia can be defined as pleasure derived from someone else's memories...

...When Broadway ventured into high drama, however, it usually ended in a pratfall...

...But America had other things on its mind...

...when Dos Passos was gasping his last revolutionary breath with Airways, Inc., a noisy dramatic interlude on Grove Street which Edmund Wilson treated more kindly than it deserved...

...and second, Fitzgerald may have overcome this deficiency in his best fiction, e.g., in The Great C, atsby...

...We are the only people who talk fondly about a national dream...

...there was some sorrow mixed with the joy...

...Who says life doesn't imitate art...

...It was the year when (on October 24) Wall Street "laid an egg," as Variety put it...

...It was also a year in a decade given over to High Hyperbole, an affliction of poets and young people made noxious only when uttered by elder statesmen and other demagogues...

...where Mencken and Nathan (and other celebrities from the political and literary life of the city) dined on a Sunday evening;, Luchow's an emporium of Gemutlichkeit, where a string quartet sent forth Viennese melodies which, on a cold clear night, could be heard at the Crusader Cafeteria directly across the street where we held forth late into the early hours arguing the problems of the world, most of them still unsolved, dammit...

...Having attained complete permissiveness, a state of affairs in which the works of the Marquis de Sade have become as readily available as those of S h a k e - - e , and the Playboy Press feels justified in publishing a book that triumphantly announces the death of the Puritan ethic, perhaps the time has come to ask how much has really been gained...

...For that a post-graduate course was provided by the "lions" of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue (not the stone effigies guarding the entrance) who held forth on almost every subject under the sun with an authority that defied the scholarship of the ivied academies...

...For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California...

...Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, he telling them in Latin (out of Aquinas) the meaning of holy charity which usually netted him a saw-buck which (even in those pre-Depression days) was a lot of bucks...

...when Hemingway was producing his best shorter works (perhaps indebted to l~rdner, although he probably didn't know it...

...The Association, it might be noted, maintains a group called the Right to Read Committee which acts as a special guardian, so to speak, of the rights of publishers and distributors to handle any sort of book they feel they can sell...

...It was fun to be alive then with Hoover just settled in the White House as we debated the revolution---"of the word" (a recent Paris import)--in the corridors of bohemia...

...We bathe in warm fellowship as we join in singing "After the Ball" (which even grandpa might have difficulty recalling) or "Shine On Harvest Moon" (which may be grandma's moonshine, not the astronauts...

...To which Samson retorted: "Only in a nation of upstarts, where 'proper connections' with the 'higher powers' are daily made between man and man, can its foremost philosopher democratically slap God on the back in the manner of a ward politician...

...Sadly, my street--Fourteenth Street---was undergoing a transformation, was a victim to the bitch-goddess Progress...

...Nor was it, as the later chroniclers called it, "the year of the great swing leftward...

...No one mocked the philosophy of Pragmatism with more telling effect than did Samson...

...But there was "serious" drama, too...

...And the Marx Brothers---all of them, in the life and in the flesh--were cavorting in Animal Crackers...

...When not thus engaged--or in between--I was busy with productions, in my own little theatres variously situated on Charles Street, Washington Square, and East Ninth Street--writing one-act plays of miners in the soft (hard...

...Although he was probably the only genius American Marxism has so far produced (he had nothing but contempt for the contemporary collectivisms that went under the names of Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Levestonism, and Trotskyism), he found the prevailing Liberalism in thought even more appalling...

...This refreshment, however, we took most often after a visit to Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre where among its more glorious moments, I once saw the only production in this country of a play by I_~pe de Vega (The Gardner's Dog)--and what a magnificent spectacle it was...

...What links them is beauty, the contemplation of some "orgiastic future"--as concrete and fleeting as dawn in New York City which turns momentarily the heads of all-night gamblers, or as abstract and fulsome as the "promise" of Daisy Buchanan, a word which always enters Nick Garraway's description of her...

...Caesar has recently divulged that he wrote the lyrics for Gershwin's "Swanee" years before he had ever been south of Fourteenth Street, adding: "I'm glad I wrote the words before I saw the river...

...men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads...

...it did not touch my life...

...It was also the year when F. Scott Fitzgerald his reputation established with Gatsby---tried his hand at drayma with The Vegetable, produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in a corner of Greenwich Village...

...He objectified her as the end of America's travail...

...Skinner), but he took on John B. Watson, the daddy of the movement, whom he polished off with this cutting remark (heard in a Labor Temple lecture in 1929): "Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.' Watson says, ~rhere are white rats, therefore I don't think.'" After allowing a moment for this to sink in, he added with a flourish: "How long will it take the followers of a thoughtless psychology to learn the difference between a man and a ratT' Another time he took on the great William James whom he quoted from The Varieties of Religious Experience as having said: '%Ve and God have a business with each other . . . we are saved from wrongness by making proper connections with the higher powers...

...And when he took after the Behaviorists, he didn't waste time on the pygmies (thus he surely would have regarded Dr...

...I'm glad I wrote my plays before I saw Pennsylvania...

...The temptation to draw parallels between the twenties and other eras of American growth was for him irresistible...

...Withal, it was a glorious year because I was so much involved in it, acting (as a peon) in b~sta (uptown at the Garrick), and when that folded (which it soon mercifully did) I managed things backstage on lower Seventh Avenue for the Irish Theatre's productions of O'Casey's Silver Tassie and Synge's Playboy...

...But the 1929 I remember is all mine for I lived it, grew up in it, and it probably helped fashion me as no other year of my life did...

...Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, sought a "Platonic conception of himself," and Platonic forms, of course, can draw man inward as well as outward...

...After a Labor Temple (or Library) session we would often go down to our favorite Village restaurant (The Black Rabbit) for stimulating conversation fueled by a Prohibition libation called a <tpunchino," a concoction made up of equal parts of black coffee and ether (or so we were told...

...chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories...

...b'hitehead" was at his best on a late Sunday afternoon after he got through putting the bite on the princes of the Church as they left St...

...Luchow's, where the Wurzberger really flowed...

...But we never lost our sense of fun, or our insatiable curiosity for things stored away in books and in other people's minds...

...Man can pursue beauty too single-mindedly and be imprisoned by it, as John T. Unger is literally imprisoned by his sweetheart's father (in "Diamond as Big as the Ritz...

...It was a wonderful year...

...In that "leftward" year the reading public was getting its belly laughs from Chic Sale's The Specialist, a hymn to the nation's vanishing outhouses...

...It was a year in which Ring ~ e r ' s mastery of the short story was being seriously discussed even among the literati...

...I had never been farther away from New York than New Jersey, and the coal mines of the Keystone State were as far removed from me as was the Swanee River from Irving Caesar...

...We did not go there to satisfy a '~thirst," that we did on Second Avenue where we imbibed a confection known as an "eggcream," a delicacy that has gone out of the life of the City much as the joy went out of the booze in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh...

...If a dealer in obscene books or magazines in New York or a small town in Ohio was brought into court, the Association of American Publishers, along with the Civil Liberties Union, could be counted on to help in his defense...

...To Fitzgerald, man was drawn forward and sometimes seduced by beauty, not, as the naturalists would have it, pushed forward and sometimes crushed by conditioning, education, and habit...

...It was fun writing them, producing them, directing them...

...Thus, William Carlos Williams was convinced (in 1925) that America was "the most lawless nation on earth," and Dos Passos demanded that the Widener Library 8 The Alternative February 1974 at Harvard--his alma mater be burned down...

...Here 'WVhitehead," a gentle panhandler would teach us the wisdom of the philosophy of his namesake, as well as the epistemology of Vahinger's As If...

...He can live too many lives trying to find it and end up like Jay Gatsby, a phantom without a past, or to a lesser degree like Nick Carraway, "enchanted and repulsed by the inexhaustible variety of life...

...He compared the Midwesterner arriving in New York City to "Dutch sailors" who first set eyes on "a fresh, green breast of a new world...

...Who has profited...

...It is surprising that Fitzgerald is the only great novelist to have depicted this dream as distinctively romantic and distinctively American...

...Yet Fitzgerald knew that the American Dream has one consolation: only by pursuing it can any of us achieve that "heightened sensitivity to life...

...Walking with Daisy, "Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place among the trees---he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder...

...he was a custodian of the word...

...A 1929 production of Thackeray's "Becky Sharp" with a cast of 100 lasted for one whole week...

...Fitzgerald understood that motion depends upon beauty, and that ambitious persons-not successful or happy persons---have the clearest appreciation for her...

...In spite of their protestations about freedom, it is probably fair to assume that the publishers' participation in all this was not entirely free of self-interest, but do they, as a whole, stand to profit from it either...

...The Republic of Letters was a concept which had meaning not only for writers, but for publishers as well...

...But 1929 was not all cakes and ale...

...half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tracters--these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole . . . . " Fitzgerald regarded the effect of beauty on man's imagination with a romantic mixture of fascination and fear that distinguishes him from just about any other American novelist...

...Where had stood the magnificent Academy of Music there was now looming before us the stone face of the future Con Ed building with its post-medieval clocktower hovering over the a r e a . But Luchow's was (and still is) across the street...