The Twenties: Salute to an Ancien Regime
Chamberlain, John
"The Twenties: Salute to an Ancien Regime" "SO WE BEAT ON, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." But to those of us who have been there already, le temps retrouve :snot always le temps perdu. Nostalgia has...
...But the twenties, even before Brooks or Parrington had gotten well into the job, took the rediscovery of classic American literature to its heart...
...Hemingway, on sex, doesn't fit the stereotype of .the twenties any more than Fitzgerald...
...But Lindbergh and the other fliers were actually quite in the spirit of an era that was fascinated by skills...
...The automobile lost its market when the depression struck, and the businessman got all the blame for that...
...If the twenties had been so gawdawfull\ materialistic, the United States would still be dressed in mourning clothes...
...Van Wyck Brooks himself put together a sustained career by writing a many-volumed history of American literature...
...The stereotype says he got his just comeuppance when Dick Whitney, the floor broker of the Morgans, went to jail and when the good Saint Franklin drove the money changers from the temple and put a reformed Joe Kennedy in as first boss of the SEC...
...of today's New York Times...
...The twenties were oil men trying to steal Teapot Dome and Elk Hills...
...they were Florida building lots, sold while they were still under water...
...Without the car the millions who now live in suburb and exurb would be piled in on top of the urban tens of millions...
...Decentralization would have been impossible: the automobile is needed not only to take people out of the city, but to haul commuters away from the suburban train stops...
...Babbitt was, well, a book about a Babbitt, but it was also a book about a love affair with a city, laughable if you like in the form that it took 'but not nefarious in origin...
...The twenties are comprehensible, too, if you mention Old Joe Kennedy, the Wall Street freebooter who, in the immortal words of Joan Didion, raided the country for provender to pay for the Hyannisport compound in which his sons were raised to be idealists on papa's (and other people's) money...
...In his own personal quest, Scott Fitzgerald, fantastically faithful to Zelda, remarked on his need for personal relationships that would be complete...
...he was a businessman who wanted to give value for value...
...Nor is there anything casual about the disastrous affair that ends with death and a walk in the rain in A Farewell to Arms...
...It wasn't only Hoover who thought there would be a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage in perpetuity...
...It took death to cut short Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon...
...But was the newspaper kingdom of the twenties that way, even in the Place of the Wild Onion...
...The twenties began with a genre which we called the Quest Book...
...The twenties was the age of the automobile, which is, enough to damn them with the Naderites of 1974...
...And it does not seem so strange in retrospect that Gene Tunney, the conqueror of Dempsey, beguiled himself by lecturing to college students on Shakespeare...
...Edna St...
...when the decade was over the opposite had become true...
...The will to achieve was, of course, mocked by critics who nonetheless had the will to create some of the most memorable of our magazines...
...Nostalgia has generational overtones, and everyman's past is his own...
...Aesthetic considerations came in with the Chevrolet, which, more than the Stutz Bearcat, was the twenties' car...
...The young man or woman comes out of school seeking Life...
...The twenties, in journalism was the age of jeu d'esprit: archy, the lower case cockroach, and his friend Mehitabel, the cat, dispensed a columnistic wisdom that puts our own Tom Wicker and his colleagues to the blush...
...And who but a dedicated man could regard a good hotel as a Work of Art...
...Melville scholarship goes back to Raymond Weaver and Lewis Mumford...
...Joe was supposed to know all the tricks from first-hand experience...
...On the contrary, the twenties represented positive will...
...Does anybody remember the somber look of towns in the days when Henry Ford was offering his customers any color car they wanted "just so long as it is black...
...The big bad businessman is remembered as the culprit who plunged the country into the worst of historic depressions...
...The "big four" of Lewis's books present vivid examples of the human will, pushing forward on the assumption that will is free...
...Think it over a bit and give the twenties credit for a genuine accomplishment in putting people on wheels...
...In this he was like most people in the twenties...
...Again, the twenties—they are always the Roaring Twenties—are comprehensi ble if the tale is of the Jazz Age, when diamonds, besides being a girl's best friend, came as big as the Ritz...
...True, he wrote about promiscuity from hearsay, but the glow on Ingrid Bergman's face in the movie version of For Whom the Bells Tolls is not that of a casual experimenter in sexual relations...
...when the wheat was no longer needed he still owed his shirt and his overalls for the land he had bought on credit...
...The scientist hero of Lewis's Arrowsmith took shape from Paul de Kruif's gallery of Microbe Hunters, men of intense application...
...the twenties not only gave us a modern American literature that is now a staple of the schools, they also rediscovered Stephen Crane, they reinterpreted Mark Twain, and they brought the reputation of such expatriates as Henry James and Ezra Pound back home...
...Along with Vernon Parrington, another voluminous literary historian, he decided to recover for us a usable heritage...
...The formula was provided by Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street...
...I wanted to be a literary critic in those days, and I dutifully read all the books...
...Van Wyck Brooks had lamented at the beginning of the decade that the "sustained career" in American letters was an anomaly...
...Vincent Millay, e.e...
...Imagine what New York City would be like if, in addition to accommodating its present eight million, it were forced to supply bedroom space within its confines for the people now living in Scarsdale, Bronxvil le, the Jersey Oranges, Connecticut's Fairfield County, and the western half of Long Island...
...The theory that Wall Street's loans to the Allies got the United States into the war may have some weight, but war loans certainly didn't start the guns firing in 1914...
...Am I making the point that the quests of the twenties were serious, and the period full of Purpose...
...Babe Ruth, so it is alleged, could point to the exact spot in the bleachers where he would deposit a home run, and Charles Lindbergh not only flew the Atlantic but, even more remarkable, hit Le Bourget field near Paris on the nose...
...some aspiring Ph.D...
...The "Cats-by look" is real, but is it the inner savor...
...The art and the life of the period went in tandem...
...We have been consuming their capital, in business and the arts, ever since the politicians decided the great years must not happen again...
...Edmund Wilson combined criticism, reportage and the writing of intellectual history for a career that would extend through six decades...
...any tribute the nostalgia hunters pay to them will be deserved...
...We would have to build skyscraper apartments to reach the moon...
...after all, they had the exuberance of a healthy animal...
...But a period, if it is to be presented as demonstrably decadent, must have a demiurge toward dissolution...
...Lexicographers differ about the Indian origin of the word Chicago, some saying it means skunk and others insisting it means wild onion, but in any case the vision of journalism in The Front Page fits the skunk-onion stereotype by being exceedingly wild and overpoweringly malodorous...
...Oh, yes, the journalistic twenties were comprehensible enough when you mentioned Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's raucous play, The Front Page, which dealt with life in a Chicago city room...
...The twenties never had that...
...Scott's drinking fits the stereotype of the twenties, but his attitude toward sex does not...
...The Lindbergh saga was of a piece with the Bobby Jones golf saga, or the Jack Dempsey boxing story, or Big Bill Tilden's tennis exploits...
...The twenties did roar a bit...
...they were bobbed hair and Clara Bow, the "it" girl...
...His girls, as he said, were always warm and promising, but he couldn't take any of them casually...
...The Times's Carr Van Anda, greatest of managing editors, did not skimp on crime and court reporting, but his idea of a real news beat was the Einstein formula or the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb...
...Mencken and Nathan laughed at the booboisie...
...they were bootblacks speculating in a market that required only ten dollars down on a hundred...
...Smog is admittedly a problem, but if it hadn't been for the internal combustion engine, what sort of country would we now have...
...they were the day of the big murder trials (Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray...
...You could say that the twenties were the most creative years of the century...
...if Scott had lived he would have found other "lasts" to dramatize...
...They wore petting shirts in This Side of Paradise, and Ring Lardner's ball players were appropriately obtuse...
...Colleges, prior to the early twenties, were devoted to exhuming the eighteenth century...
...I have seen all of these things documented, but were they the twenties...
...It was the Federal Reserve Bank, a political creation, that provided the credit that eventually toppled the market, The farmer went broke because he had mortgaged his acres to supply wheat for the politicians' war in Europe...
...Has anyone read Sinclair Lewis lately, in seriatim fashion...
...The seeker is Floyd Dell's Felix Fay in Mooncalf or the Dell "modern girl" in Janet March...
...If you want to understand the will-to-persist of Golda Meir and the Israelis of four wars with the Arabs, you had better go back and read Ludwig Lewisohn's novel about the making of a Zionist in the twenties, The Island Within...
...But as one who grew up in the Coolidge years, let me assure a generation that knows the twenties only through the stereotypes of flapper, ganster, and bathtub gin that the decade was one of high and sober seriousness...
...of the New York World did considerably more for the soul than the Op Ed...
...The crime news, deriving in good part from the bootleg industry, set a pattern of lurid reporting for the new tabloids and gave some substance to The Front Page Roaring Twenties stereotype...
...I hope my evidence from literature and journalism gives the coup de grace to the notion that the twenties were crassly materialistic...
...The newcomers to publishing weren't in it for the money, but they made money, quite in the spirit of the dynamic times...
...The magazines were usually little, but they managed to bring forth a host of young writers who put as much effort into perfecting prose and verse as Boss Kettering spent in his lab to take the knock out of gasoline...
...George Hotel in Bermuda on the mysteries of his business...
...No doubt Main Street derived from what Carl Van Doren called the tradition of revolt from the village, but Carol Kenn icott wanted to bring Maeterlinck to the hinterlands, which, if an Irish bull may bepermitted, was not a defeatist ambition...
...Absolutely nothing...
...I once watched Sinclair Lewis, in the company of his wife, Dorothy Thompson, query the proprietor of the St...
...We had plenty of good journalists for export in those days...
...The pols let the war start by their blunders, and when it was all over they made the encore of the war inevitable by saddling Germany with an unpayable debt at Versailles...
...They were also Al Capone and other racketeers, called into being by the insatiable thirst of a country club set that had taken over the morals of Greenwich Village for its generic Appointment in Samara...
...Oh, yes, they were all of these things, and many more like thcm, the gawdawfullest collection of harum-scarum bizarrerie that ever happened before the advent of the late nineteen sixties, when pot took over for bathtub gin and when lesbians crawled out of the Well of Loneliness to become respected examples of women's liberation...
...I tried to tell those journalism students something about a time when New York City had seventeen newspapers, not three...
...But it was the politician who made 1929 a certainty...
...As for Scott's friend Ernest Hemingway, he had a compulsion to idealize his women (in sleeping bags or out...
...Publishing, of course, was one of the big enterprises of the twenties...
...A critic of American business at the outset, Dos Passos learned, as others of us learned, that it takes a creative instinct to bring in a Spindletop oil gusher or to carry over the continous strip process from the rolling of cracker dough to the rolling of steel...
...John Dos Passos, one of the world's great travel writers, worked in many genres, turning to biography of Jefferson's contemporaries when he lost the fictional urge...
...should get permission, if possible, to do his thesis on the effect on literature of the Boni brothers, Albert and Charles, Horace Liveright, Pascal Covici, Ben Huebsch, Max Perkins, Harrison Smith, Donald Friede, Alfred Harcourt, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Bennett Cerf, Richard Simon, Max Schuster, Clifton Fadiman, and a dozen others who brought the spoil of literary Europe to America and took chances on our own Glenway Wescotts, Elizabeth Madox Robertses, Dos Passoses, and Thomas Wolfes...
...He had lamented, circa 1915, that America lacked a "usable past...
...Not too long ago I tried to talk about the newspapers and newspapermen of thetwenties to a generation that doesn't even remember Eisenhower...
...they were hip flasks of Jersey Lightning at football games when the Yalies, to please themselves and Westbrook Pegler, rose as one raccoon...
...What did the businessman have to do with all this...
...The Greeks and the Romans loved their cities, too...
...Waldo Frank perceived the "multitudes in Whitman...
...It was an even younger girl who died, tragically and romantically, in Stephen Vincent Benet's The Beginning of Wisdom in the twenties...
...Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth (see Dods-worth ) was no Babbitt, but he was no market-playing Joe Kennedy either...
...It almost wore me out to listen, and it must have bored Dorothy Thompson half to death, for she was watching an exhausting reportorial performance for what must have been the eighteenth time...
...Jay Gatsby's reach for the green light at the end of Daisy's dock may have been romantic deception, but Gatsby didn't know it...
...But the inner spirit of twenties' journalism is better explained by the character studies of newsroom types that Henry Justin Smith, the managing editor of the Chicago Daily News, put together in his now forgotten book, Deadlines...
...and the Op...
...If the city rooms of the twenties had been totally populated by Hechtian Front Page types, we would have had no Paul Scott and Edgar Ansell Mowrers, no Dorothy Thompsons, no Raymond Swings and, to take a step down, no Vincent Sheeans to report the coming of Hitler...
...cummings, and Robert Frost in poetry produced book after book...
...The "quest- is for beauty in work and love and social organization, stupid in its anti-marriage-vow feeling and witless in its trust in utopian socialism, but hardly cynical in the way the sixties were cynical (who was it who said, circa 1969, "I am in the movement to meet chicks and get laid...
...Hemingway would have understood and approved the question, "What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died...
...The novels of the time prove it...
...You can find some commentators of the twenties who took the Lindbergh solo flight to Europe as a symbol of escape from the sordid realities of the age of Al Capone...
...If Lewis's fraudulent preacher Elmer Gantry is a deviation from the rule, his Ann Vickers, the early women's libber, represents a return to willful dedication...
...Who, aside from Bernard Baruch and Robert Young and maybe Dwight Morrow knew that doom lurked at the end of the mor,t, purposeful decade of our disappointing century...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
