The Great Boom and Bust
LYDENBERG, JOHN
The Great Boom and Bust The American Earthquake. By Edmund Wilson. Doubleday. 576 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of English and American Studies, Hobart cmd William Smith...
...and Hollywood, and San Diego, the jumping-off place...
...others are vignettes of unknowns, "the little man" who was being discovered in the Thirties...
...Above all, we are made to feel the excitement of new plays, new movies, new music, new art, new night clubs, new buildings—and just plain newness...
...This is a richer, more varied book than my comments may have implied...
...A railroad barge, pushed by a tug, conveys used discolored freight cars, all labeled Wabash and Reading...
...The pieces of reportage, social criticism, satire, reminiscence and rumination collected here are probably his most occasional and most casual...
...but somehow they didn't matter then beside the glittering novelties...
...The third section, "Dawn of the New Deal, 1932-1934," is weaker and less interesting than the other two...
...The book is divided into three sections...
...Today, when the historian describes the steady decline to the Bank Holiday and the slow pull out of the depths, he writes with the big picture in mind...
...Not the least is the high proportion of his occasional pieces that merit reprinting...
...Wilson, then, saw the scattered pieces of a crumbling economy as isolated fragments, or as separate episodes in an incomprehensible nightmare...
...satirical fantasies on the ginning old grads of the days when the Big Three were big and bright...
...I came to the book dubious that there was much gold left in Wilson's twice-mined hills...
...Wilson's writing is never trivial or uninteresting...
...reflections on the significance of Charlie Chaplin...
...Sometimes Wilson strikes the note of Dos Passos: "The river is oily gray...
...downtown is a dull gray wall...
...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of English and American Studies, Hobart cmd William Smith Colleges Edmund Wilson has many distinctions...
...I remained to cheer...
...I suspect that there are few other accounts of the depression which can as effectively give a reader who does not remember those days the feeling (not understanding) of what it was like, then, to the more alert and sensitive participants...
...Wilson explains in the introduction that the pieces in it were once reprinted in The American litters (1932), but we can only be delighted to have them available again...
...But its neat dogmatism could make no sense out of the booming, buzzing confusion of Rooseveltian pragmatism...
...And so in the last section, Wilson goes from Washington back to his childhood home in Talcotville, New York, to write nostalgically about the past and the old stone houses...
...The second section is "The Earthquake, October 1930-1931...
...comments on the great murder trials...
...they are too close, too involved...
...There were, indeed, masses of people living lives of gray desperation...
...They do not give an ordered picture of the depression...
...But, slight as many of them would seem standing alone, grouped together they give an amazingly vivid impression of the social and intellectual scene between 1924 and 1934...
...it conveys the disorder of Washington without adequately suggesting the sense of purpose, the feeling of hope, the new meaning (from whatever point of view one saw the reforms) achieved after 1933...
...True, we occasionally taste the ashy underside of the Jazz Age, as in Wilson's account of the Gray-Snyder case...
...Alfred Steiglitz, Emil Jannings, Flo Ziegfeld...
...The Follies, 1923-1928" contains what we would expect: descriptive bits about Broadway...
...The inferno is always easier to do than purgatory...
...Indeed, their effectiveness is increased by their haphazard, unintegrated character, and by the very fact that their author made no claim to a full understanding of the implications of what he was describing...
...More often, we hear the note of Fitzgerald: "In the back streets of Newark and Schenectady, little girls in the green hats of Michael Arlen are dancing the Charleston on the pavement...
...The impressionism that served so well for the earlier sketches here makes for undesirable fragmentation...
...Some contain accounts of well-known people—Hamilton Fish, the Scottsboro boys, Eisenstein...
...The Marxism with which he viewed the early years of the depression had the virtue of giving a bite to his observations, an urgency to his pictures of the social fissures...
...Although obviously written by one man, they give an impressnon of being random and un-selected reflections of a confused society in a state of dinintegration...
...I think this is partly to be explained by Edmund Wilson's Marxist leanings at the time...
...They include reportorial accounts of Washington, Detroit, struck industrial towns, Kentucky mountain slums, Boulder Dam under construction, L.A...
...If this latest collection of casuals is not so rich as The Shores of Light or Classics and Commercials, it yet bears the Wilson trademark: It is wide-ranging, open-eyed, tough-minded, and consistently interesting and enlightening...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 18
