Linda Wagner‐Martin
Modernism remains a complicated, and complicating, concept. Based on the reality of language actually spoken and of characters drawn from lives closer to the real than might be thought, and shaped by fragmentation and juxtaposition rather than the linearity of chronological time, the texts that created American modernism were as varied and as surprising as the literary works that had been published throughout the entire nineteenth century. Modernism seemed to unlock the creativity of thousands of writers, and countless new publishing houses welcomed the diverse efforts.
Modernism was an attitude more than an historical period or a single stylistic emphasis. In the search for stability, which stemmed from the devastation of belief after scientism and the catastrophic World War I, writing became its own kind of religion: such authors as Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot believed that the value of a human being rested on his or her aesthetic vision. To “Make it new” was not only Ezra Pound’s rallying cry; it became the slogan for the many writers and artists at work early in the twentieth century.
Very recently, Ira Nadel stated, “Modernism is about movement.” More precisely, modernism is about the
acceleration of culture […] replacing the metaphors of an older regime or spatial organization (distance, perspective, stasis) are new terms such as waves, circuits, shocks, turbulence, torque and short circuits […] Film, moving at 24 frames per second, introduced new witnesses to speed creating truly moving pictures. Jazz tempos, “thriller,” or detective stories designed to be read on speeding mass transit […] and to be finished by one’s destination, further manifested speed as part of the modernist experience.
(Nadel 2013: 74)
Nadel’s emphasis reminds us that to be modern was never simply a choice of replacing formal metrics with vers libre. It was, rather, a means of changing the mind’s realization of what could exist in the twentieth century.
Changes in the poem may have been the most visible genre experiment, but changes in the novel created a global impact that made the United States into the international center of innovative writing. Without discounting the immense contributions to modern aesthetics made by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and others in England, the honest critic sees how quickly US writers had usurped the palm from the Mother Country. When Jean‐Paul Sartre called William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway the stellar trio of novelists in the world, he did not add a footnote about James Joyce (Sartre 1957: 88). When Faulkner and Hemingway both won the elusive Nobel Prize in Literature – within only a few years from the end of World War II – the receiving of that accolade ensured that the American novel was secure in its reign.
Nadel’s concept of speed explains, even if perhaps too easily, many of the stylistic changes between fiction written in the late nineteenth century and the core texts of modernism. Because speed was considered crucial, the literary work grew shorter: background information was truncated so that delineation of character became central. The characters’ speech provided accurate ways to view emotional states. As dialogue became the mainspring of a modernist scene, some of the trappings of earlier fiction fell away.
“Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate peace,” says Hemingway’s wounded soldier in his In Our Time (1925) vignette. Readers learned to burrow in to a figure’s consciousness, never knowing what that character looked like – or perhaps finding that character unnamed. Reminiscent of the modern poem, short fiction found its own suitable pace and rhythm. Hemingway’s somber wounded soldier will never be mistaken for the sprightly innocent of John Dos Passos’s “Camera Eye”:
and I hadn’t the nerve
to jump up and walk outofdoors and tell them all to go
take a flying
Rimbaud
at the moon.
(Dos Passos 1930: 311–312)
The terse movement of the early Nick Adams in “The End of Something” is vastly different from the opening lines of Gertrude Stein’s famous portrait, “Susie Asado”:
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.
A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.
(Stein 1922: 13)
To return to the opening In Our Time vignette, Hemingway’s journalistic prose consolidates the spoken words of the wounded soldier: “Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine‐gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot” (Hemingway 1925: 63).
Part of the accessibility of the modernist text was that readers could enter it from a number of perspectives. Writers who wrote fiction also wrote plays and even poetry; and the reverse was also applicable. E.E. Cummings, known as an idiosyncratic poet, was also praised for his 1923 novel, The Enormous Room. T.S. Eliot moved from longer and longer poems into verse drama. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote plays as well as poems. H.D. wrote a number of novels along with the “imagist” poems that gave the movement its name. Gertrude Stein wrote portraits, plays, poems, non‐fiction, and fiction with little regard for readers’ preferences. William Carlos Williams also showered the literary world with works in all the major genres, as well as history (In the American Grain [1925] and mixed‐form books like Spring and All [1923]). William Faulkner began his writing career as a poet, as did John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. Without question, however, the difficulty of these writers’ achievements in whatever genre they chose meant that few of their works would ever make a popular “bestseller” list. Modernism became known as an elitist literary form. In the words of John T. Matthews, modernist artists and writers “aimed at offending ‘bourgeois society.’ [Modernists wanted to] strip away habitual beliefs and values, and to demand acts of self‐scrutiny and metaphysical exploration.” They did this by creating works that prided themselves on “being difficult, by deliberately being hard to understand.” Accordingly, in some lexicons, modernist art bespeaks “a rich tradition of artists speaking to one another through acts of fierce concentration on the work of art itself” (Matthews 2009: 283).
With the publication of his In Our Time in 1925 and The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Ernest Hemingway became the most talked‐about young writer in the United States: unlike the free verse poets who were sometimes ridiculed, however, Hemingway was often envied. Reading a Hemingway story was like entering a stage filled with active drama. The characters were already assembled, their emotional interaction filling the air, and when the reader entered the scene, his or her role was to interpret the dynamics of the action. No other American writer had ever created such a synergy of tempo and action, leaving the “story” suspended in the open air of the sometimes undescribed place and setting: the reader had to both participate in and create the narrative. The involvement Hemingway demanded was unique.
Hemingway’s fiction worked without either explication or explanation. The reader’s sympathy that attached itself quickly to the jilted girl in “The End of Something” proved the efficacy of his stark, streamlined method. Even though the point‐of‐view character is the boy who is leaving her, Hemingway creates his need for freedom from their relationship in negative space. Similarly, when the young son in “Indian Camp” comes to realize that his doctor‐father, set to deliver the Indian woman’s baby, is a flawed human being, Hemingway has included enough disappointing scenes before the conclusion – particularly the sight of the dead husband in the upper bunk – that the reader anticipates the boy’s disillusion. The reader knows early on:
Just then the woman cried out.
“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.
“No, I haven’t any anaesthetic,’ his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”
The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.
(Hemingway 1925: 16)
When Hemingway moved into the writing of his novels, which ranged from the drama‐like The Sun Also Rises through A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) to the novella that won him the Nobel Prize, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), he continued using his impressionist and emotion‐driven prose. The sonority of poetry bound the disparate characters into the finely meshed narrative: though none of Hemingway’s novels won national awards, the Swedish judges for the Nobel responded to the fact that his prose had changed the world.
With the divided opinion that greeted The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway was forced to admit that his unadorned characters – presented without a narrative voice to aid interpretation – were difficult for readers. He intended Lady Brett Ashley to be a paradigmatic New Woman, independent and free, having proved her bravery during the Great War and having survived a brutal husband. Brett should have been the earliest icon of 1980s feminism. But what many readers saw instead was a chic, short‐haired, promiscuous woman, given to making love with wealthy Americans like Robert Cohn (a Princeton graduate), her British fiancé Mike Campbell, and the young matador Pedro Romero, all the while professing her great love for war‐injured Jacob Barnes, the Hemingway/Nick Adams character. (To add to readers’ dislike of Lady Ashley, the numerous drinking scenes in the novel made clear that Prohibition, now a law in the United States, had driven this assemblage of characters to France largely so that they might drink and drink and drink.) The time was 1926; besides defying the American law about alcohol and the universal law about sexuality, The Sun Also Rises was read by some as a thoroughly immoral work.
Because Hemingway began The Sun Also Rises describing Robert Cohn, readers expected that man to garner sympathy. Yet put as he was in two‐character scenes with Barnes, Cohn, always spouting effete innocence, remained ineffectual. There was also the question of his Jewishness. His ethnicity, his prestigious university degree, and his access to money made him uncomfortably different from the veteran Jake Barnes – working hard at journalism for his income, not college educated, stoic about his war wounds – a man who became the center of his friends’ lives and emotions because of his patient, wise demeanor. After this development of Cohn as a negative force, when Brett Ashley goes away with him, she loses the natural positive force of her own character.
One of the most famous sections of the book is its ending. Pressed together in a cab, Brett and Jake are once again in erotic compatibility. He has just paid her hotel bill after she has left Pedro Romero, saying she would not be “one of those bitches that ruins children.” (By this point in the novel, however, because of Hemingway’s careful building of her character, the reader sees her as exactly that.) She then laments to him, “Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.” To which nostalgic comment he replies, “Yes … Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (Hemingway 1926: 243, 247).1
Hemingway’s pared‐down style was so influential that readers today sometimes fail to realize how innovative his fiction was. Other writers learned from it, and imitated it, though usually with less successful results. In the case of detective writer Dashiell Hammett, who published serially in The Black Mask, reviews of his novels made the point that he wrote as effectively as did Ernest Hemingway.2 Beginning with The Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929) and running rapidly to The Maltese Falcon (1929), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934), Hammett cast a shadow of tersely designed interchanges between his private detectives and their lovers – who often were themselves the criminals. Whether the Continental Operative (known as “Op”) or Sam Spade or Nick Charles, Hammett’s laconic tough guys on the side of right were seldom approachable, and seldom happy. Considering that The Maltese Falcon became the paradigm for the American detective novel, one must flash to the end of that book, when Sam Spade turns in his beloved Brigid O’Shaughnessy because she had murdered his partner “‘offhand, like that.’ He snapped the fingers of his other hand.” Interrogated by his young secretary, Effie Perine, who could not believe that Spade had turned in his beautiful lover, Spade’s flat replies mark the tough and terse pattern of twentieth‐century romance. Earlier in this concluding scene, when Brigid thinks Spade’s love for her will save her from being charged, he tells her, harshly, “I won’t play the sap for you.” But they kiss lingeringly. Then the police come to Spade’s door and he congratulates them on their arrests, before saying abruptly, “Here’s another one for you” (Hammett 1999: 583–584).
Perhaps less ironic than Hemingway’s dialogue at the conclusion of The Sun Also Rises, Hammett’s effect in The Maltese Falcon is similar: the world‐weary detective who has seen so much of life will not compromise his principles – even for love. When Brigid implores him to stand by their love, he says matter‐of‐factly, “Making speeches is no damned good now … I don’t care who loves who … I can’t help you now. And I wouldn’t if I could” (Hammett 1999: 581).
Dismissive of traditional romance, Hammett uses Sam Spade to write what Ross McDonald called “a fable of modern man in quest of love and money, despairing of everything else. Its murders are more or less incidental […] [He creates for us] tragedy of a new kind, deadpan tragedy” (McDonald 1993: 254–255). What Hemingway saw as irony, McDonald sees as outright humor. This kind of summation is echoed in the 1948 work of French critic Claude‐Edmonde Magny, who links Hammett with Hemingway (though she devotes much attention to the former, calling his method “the aesthetics of the stenographic record,” written with “the nakedness of a police report”) and finds in both novelists the gist of modern American literary excellence. She explains that their work is not exotic, or geographically interesting, so much as it is inclusive. The American novel
portrays vagabonds, inveterate drunkards, the unemployed, tough guys stripped of all romanticism – simple victims of economic misfortune, caught in the determinism of an inflexible social structure; black people separated from white people by barriers even more insuperable than those of poverty; men who do not know how to read or write and who can barely speak well enough to express their most basic needs. All of them, however, are endowed with an incontestable human reality; all of them, in Christian terms, “have a soul.” Because of this, the American novel restores to us, almost unintentionally, a certain idea of man, independent of the accidents of class and condition. Truly classic in spirit – classic in the same way as Chaplin’s movies, which make people laugh in Shanghai as well as in Romorantin – it is more nearly universal than our eighteenth century literature because it truly encompasses all races and all classes […]. It demonstrates the principle of a new humanism.
(Magny 1972: 40, 45)
Magny comes back to these general points somewhat later, saying that American fiction has given the world a literature that illustrates “an art of ellipsis” (Magny 1972: 49). American modern writing has the aim of showing rather than saying; it tells the reader “that the less one says the better, that the most striking artistic effects are those born of the juxtaposition of two images, without any commentary, and that the novel […] should not say too much” (Magny 1972: 48).
Not to privilege Hemingway’s and Hammett’s spare effects as the only innovative example of the American writer’s freedom to shape language, the reader finds a plethora of verbal pyrotechnics in the first 30 years of John Dos Passos’s writing. From the taut impressionism of his One Man’s Initiation – 1917 (1920) through the lush almost graphic sensibility of his Manhattan Transfer (1925), Dos Passos played the poet which he began as, in order to wrest the truly modern from American speech. In the portrait of New York City, which Manhattan Transfer became rather than a traditional novel of manners, he began the march that would eventually give him the great trilogy of U.S.A.3 Different in style and theme, the three books – The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) – incorporated four kinds of writing: the prose poems of the autobiographical “Camera Eye” segments; the rapidly flashing “Newsreels” which were based on newspaper headlines, snatches of popular songs, overheard conversations; the extensively researched “Biographies” on such figures as William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford, Eugene V. Debs, Luther Burbank, Bob La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, and others, arranged and lined as poetic prose; and the text itself, in Dos Passos’s journalistic prose. The text was also widely based, telling the stories of characters as diverse as the socialist Mac who headed for intellectual and social freedom to Mexico, the creator of the field of “public relations,” a teacher with red leanings, women of more elite backgrounds, a pilot with wanderlust – and the skill of Dos Passos’s understanding of the speed necessary to create a modern pastische, a world of his own, came through vividly. The books of his trilogy covered American life from 1900 through 1929, though the political dissatisfaction that could be deduced from both characters and biographies kept Dos Passos’s version of history going into the 1930s, as did the separate novels’ dates of publication.
For readers (and other writers) intent on finding the new, appreciating the craft and deviations from traditions, Dos Passos’s USA was Mecca. The set of three novels had two crucial weaknesses, however. Their accumulated pages numbered over 1200, a total which meant that teaching the books was difficult (as was requiring students to purchase them). The central narrative, referred to above as the “texts,” treated a number of characters who were in themselves not particularly interesting. J. Ward Moorehouse, for example, was a better icon for illustrating the occupation of an advertising magnate than he was a believable character. Janey Wiilliams became a predictable, dissatisfied woman.
The life of Dos Passos’s trilogy came to exist in the separable parts rather than in the main narrative. The poetic “Camera Eye” sections were always imaged as scenes; the author never relied on an “I” narrative. Those sections begin with Dos Passos as a small boy, remembering: “The first time He came He brought a melon and the sun was coming in through the tall lace window curtains and when we cut it the smell of melons filled the whole room” (Dos Passos 1999: 27).4 Styled around phrases written as heard language to the young boy’s ears – “Longago Beforetheworldsfair Before youwereborn” – there are a few of these, several during later boyhood when the protagonist worries that he has not been baptized, that other boys will make him fight (“the bloody sweet puky taste” of his injuries), that as a college man he remains an inept, Prufrockian figure instead of an acceptable tough guy.
Usually paired with one of the inventive “Newsreels,” montages of actual quotations from news media as well as film newsreels, the “Camera Eye” sections grow less personal as the three novels progress. By the time Dos Passos comes to the years of World War I in 1919, he is placing more emphasis on the Newsreels, for their juxtaposition of wide‐ranging parts allows ironic impact. It is also evident that Dos Passos wants to chart the economics of both going to war and waging war; he spends much of the “Biographies” space on the political and economic leaders of the world.
One of the first “Camera Eye” segments in 1919 is drawn from Dos Passos’s months driving an ambulance in the European war: “remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead/three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Recicourt” (Dos Passos 1999: 446). Critics agree that of the three books, 1919 is the strongest, probably because readers have an easier time identifying with the persons and events from World War I than they do playing Jazz Age professionalism or Marxist politics during the first book and the third.
Dos Passos lived until 1970, well after the deaths of both Hemingway and Faulkner, and decades past the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He kept publishing novels, though the usual rubric from reviewers was their calling these works “conservative.” They were not conservative in any aesthetic sense, however, because they still ranged widely through American culture and its artifacts, drawing on unexpected styles to convey what to Dos Passos still seemed to be ironic juxtapositions. In the several collections of Dos Passos’s immense hoards of manuscript material rest a great deal of cut‐and‐paste pages (actual newsprint set against the author’s typed responses to newsreels and other media bulletins), and even as his readership dwindled throughout his later writing, he was hard at work to use the real in his fiction.
Modernism worked in part through moving the reality captured so importantly in the realist writing of Jack London, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, James Weldon Johnson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others into configurations more distorted – and therefore less real – through a kind of a lens equally real, that of the emotions. Theodore Dreiser was one proponent of writing fiction that seemed realistic but privileged a viewpoint that clarified psychological intricacies. Henry James drilled into the real in different ways. A bit later, Sherwood Anderson drew from the real but incorporated his insights into characters that seemed fantastic – the shapes of figures he called “grotesques.” Among the experimental writers early in the twentieth century who did the greatest inexplicable embroidery on reality was Gertrude Stein, seemingly less interested in craft than she was in celebrity.
With the comparative fame that greeted her poem collection, Tender Buttons, in 1914, Stein sailed into prominence through associations with the acknowledged modern American writers. It was Sherwood Anderson who wrote voluminously about Stein’s great prose, also penning countless letters of introduction to her for his young writer friends. It was Hemingway who typed out pages from her long novel about Jewish life in urban northern cities, The Making of Americans (1925). It was Thornton Wilder who courted her and her companion Alice B. Toklas, offering them his Chicago residence as they toured America after the phenomenal success of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). More importantly for any consideration of aesthetics, it was Stein’s privately published Three Lives, dating from 1909, that marked the truly innovative prose her untraditional methods of writing guaranteed.
Stein had studied as an undergraduate at the Harvard Annex (later named Radcliffe), with William James as her friend and mentor. (Under James, she did a thesis that studied manifestations of anxiety in students both male and female.) She went on to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, but the course of study for obstetrics and gynecology offended her, so she did not obtain the degree. Surrounded by important philosophers and psychologists of the late nineteenth century, Stein absorbed more than a rudimentary knowledge of the way minds worked: when she drew the portraits of “Melanctha,” “The Good Anna,” and “The Gentle Lena” for her 1909 book, she was creating reality through both her authorial descriptive prose and the characters’ speech.
Stein, as an upper‐middle‐class woman of Jewish descent, wrote as a scientist: both Anna and Lena were German working women, whereas Melanctha was African American. There was nothing autobiographical about these portraits, but their existence showed Stein’s interest in the lives of women and the social coercions that shaped them. Lena bears children until she dies – married to a thoughtless husband who doesn’t realize she is going to die. Anna works and works for the approval of her male employers; she relinquishes what might have been a satisfying lesbian relationship in order to work doubly hard for her employer. Anna, too, dies. It is only Melanctha, somewhat surprisingly, who tries to hold her own with Jeff, the doctor she seems to love, in their lengthy Socratic dialogue. She realizes she can never outwit his verbal persistence, but she tries. Eventually, Melanctha, too, dies.
Melanctha, however, has a voice:
About what you was just saying Dr. Campbell about living regular and all that, I certainly don’t understand what you meant by what you was just saying. You ain’t a bit like good people Dr. Campbell, like the goodpeople you are always saying are just like you. I know good people Dr. Campbell, and you ain’t a bit like men who are good and got religion. You are just as free and easy as any man can be Dr. Campbell, and you always like to be with Jane Harden, and she is a pretty bad one and you don’t look down on her and you never tell her she is a bad one. I know you like her just like a friend Dr. Campbell, and so I certainly don’t understand just what it is you mean by all that you was just saying to me.
(Stein 1909: 84)
Repetition dominates all elements of Stein’s Three Lives. Familiar with the speech patterns of lower‐class speakers, Stein replicated those patterns, but without condescension. Here Melanctha’s reverence for Dr. Jefferson Campbell takes on the tone of irony, however, because in their customary roles, Dr. Campbell lectures the woman whose mother is dying – hence his frequent visits to their home. The repetition occurs throughout the novellas, both in the speech of other characters and in Stein’s descriptions. For instance, when she portrays “the good Anna,” she repeats over and over “The good Anna […] led an arduous and troubled life.” “Anna Federner, this good Anna, was of solid lower middle‐class south german stock” (Stein 1909: 9). After an illness, followed by surgery, Anna “worked away her appetite, her health and strength, and always for the sake of those who begged her not to work so hard.” To her thinking, in her stubborn, faithful, German soul, “this was the right way for a girl to do” (Stein 1909: 14). Soon, Anna is described as having a “worn, thin, lined, determined face,” and by the end of her story, the word good appears infrequently, and it is said that she has an “irritable, strained, worn‐out body” as she dies (Stein 1909: 45).
In “The Good Anna,” as in “The Gentle Lena,” there is little dialogue. What Stein creates is the insistent hammering away at what might be seen as a character flaw, rather than a positive personality trait – “goodness” for Anna, whose hard work leads to her demise, and “gentleness” for Lena, whose adaptability leads to constant pregnancy and eventual death.
While Stein’s prose here is less flamboyant than her poems appearing in Tender Buttons, it still smacks of the new. Readers had found her poems often indecipherable. (Titled “Orange,” the entire work is “Build is all right”; the opening of “Shoes” begins: “To be a wall with a damper a stream of pounding way and nearly enough choice makes a steady midnight. It is pus.”) Stein was right in following the deeply personal paths language could take, and in her almost unchecked experimentation, she earned her early fame as “the Mama of Dada.”
Readers’ reactions to Stein’s shockingly experimental writing may have been intensified because she was a woman. So long compartmentalized into the category of “local color,” women who wrote were often denied parity with men who authored all forms of literature. For Stein to become a leader in impressionistic language play, the writer who pushed the boundaries of not only tradition but the avant‐garde, seemed somehow unsuitable. But two of the bestselling American women writers understood well how exciting Stein’s breakthroughs were. For Ellen Glasgow, deemed a southern traditionalist, there was little hope of being considered modern; she was content to have two publishers bring out her matched set of novels as she landed among the bestselling novelists of her time year after year. From her early recalcitrant portrait of the contemporary southern woman (Virginia, published in 1913), through the next 20 years, Glasgow broke records for sales (among her bestsellers were Barren Ground [1925], The Romance of a Plain Man [1909], Life and Gabriella [1916], The Romantic Comedians [1926], The Sheltered Life [1932], and In This Our Life [1941]). A writer who cared deeply for equality for women, for the possibility of heterosexual romance, and for the ways life operated in the American South, Glasgow drew both female characters and male with accuracy and some acerbity. She was a highly successful novelist, but she soft‐pedaled the irony modernists usually employed.
Edith Wharton was a more polished case: her uses of irony underlay nearly every novel and novella she produced. Always skeptical of the fairness of society in the United States, she drew the plots of her best novels to scrutinize the misuses of power that left some characters (often, women characters) ground under the wheel of public opinion. In The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton reified the themes she had first told in the story of Lily Bart (The House of Mirth [1905]). There, the upper‐class society defies human kindness to shove the newly‐poor Lily out of competition for the best possible husband material, material defined on the basis of the man’s income and, a second category, his snobbishness. With the death of Lily Bart, Wharton moved into seemingly more genteel, less sentimental novels. But her deftness in the use of irony made even her seemingly obvious narratives multilayered.
In the double plot structure she designed for The Age of Innocence, she used the conventional romance between Newland Archer and May Welland, approved by the highest circles of New York society (signaled metaphorically by the meshing of “New” with “land” and then of “Well” with “land”), and set against that stolid mating the passionate love Archer came to feel for the divorced European cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Over and over, Wharton draws the stifling coercion of Newland’s marriage to May; here, in an after‐dinner scene, the two are alone, as he realizes “that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.” As he opens a nearby window, she exclaims, “Newland! Do shut the window. You’ll catch your death.”
“He pulled the sash down and turned back. ‘Catch my death!’ he echoed; and he felt like adding: ‘But I’ve caught it already. I am dead – I’ve been dead for months and months.’” […]
‘Newland! Are you ill?’
He shook his head and turned toward his arm‐chair. She bent over her work‐frame, and as he passed he laid his hand on her hair. ‘Poor May!’ he said.
‘Poor? Why poor?’ she echoed with a strained laugh.
‘Because I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you,’ he rejoined, laughing also.
For a moment she was silent; then she said very low, her head bowed over her work: ‘I shall never worry if you’re happy.’
‘Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!’”
(Wharton 1920: 546)
A scene that might have passed as innocent here becomes an indicator of Archer’s frustration, and as May’s careful responses show, she is fully aware of his thoughts of Ellen Olenska. Married two years, she and Newland are walking through the paces that society expects. Wharton crafts more and more open conflicts as the novel moves to its stoic conclusion: Newland Archer loses Ellen Olenska, who returns to Paris. Even the coda, appended after May dies and Newland accompanies his son to France, shows that his wily yet determinedly proper wife has, without question, won.
Part of Edith Wharton’s phenomenal success in the mainstream literary marketplace – which was often closed to women writers – accrued because she drew believable male characters. Both Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth and Newland Archer here were figured as plausible, even heroic, yet Wharton’s many women readers understood that both men had failed their beloveds. Reviewers who liked Wharton often compared her work with that of Henry James; yet some of her plots were ironic versions of James’s novels. Wharton and James were close friends, and she knew his fiction intimately. She also knew that his novels were seldom about his women characters. She used the scaffolding of her being compared with James to reach a steady literary plateau from which to write her poised yet ironic works.
Willa Cather walked a middle road between the “woman writer” Ellen Glasgow and the acclaimed literary force Edith Wharton. She was originally described as a local color novelist, writing about the western prairies – O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) – but in the early 1920s she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her unlikely war novel, One of Ours (1922). The following year she published A Lost Lady, a book that F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended to everyone within hearing.
Cather’s war novel was a combination of domestic fiction, centered on the family and the love Claude Wheeler felt for his mother and their life together on the farm, and the briefer section which showed Claude Wheeler’s development during his military service. Cather’s novel was unlike many American novels that were implicitly protest novels (Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers [1921], One Man’s Initiation – 1917, and 1919, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and many of his stories in both In Our Time and Men Without Women, and Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay [1926], among others). Even though Cather’s protagonist is killed in battle, One of Ours leads the reader into a kind of equanimity: through his mother’s reading of his letters from the front, she realizes that Claude has found both purpose and friendship. She feels that his service has brought him to a personal closure, and her grief is therefore tempered.
Cather’s extensive description of Claude’s life running the farm fuses the positive with the negative. At one point, pre‐war, Claude thinks that the people he now associates with, in contrast to the friends that he had made in college, “worked hard with their backs and got tired like the horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say” (Cather 1922: 84). Despairing of any intellectual life, Cather’s protagonist later in the military finds men who are his equals; he admires the young violinist Gerhardt, even though he, as the commanding officer, issues the order that kills many of the men serving under him. In the last battle, as they hold a small part of the line, “He felt no weakness. He felt only one thing; that he commanded wonderful men” (Cather 1922: 298).
When Willa Cather turned away from the subject of war to valorize the railroad builders who made the West a crucial part of the United States’ economy, she chose an unexpected emphasis for A Lost Lady. Instead of complete veneration for old Captain Forrester, the railroad builder, Cather depicts the difficulties of the honorable man’s failing health and failing fortune; she privileges instead what his young wife Marion endures. What Fitzgerald admired about the book was that its narrative voice belonged to Niel Herbert, the young neighbor boy who adored Marion. As Herbert grew wiser, he found Marion’s behavior scandalous, but eventually he came to understand how dependent any romantic love is on financial health. His adoring descriptions of Marion Forrester change after she is widowed: left impoverished by the death of the Captain who is much older than she, Marion survives her life, and moves on. The narrative modulates. What might have been a narrative of sexual blame becomes a kind of testimonial – to Mrs. Forrester rather than to the captain. It goes without saying that Nick Carraway performs the same kind of service for Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.5
More easily termed “romantic” than any of the writings of Hemingway, Stein, or Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novels were the somewhat sensationalized accounts of American college life. Unfamiliar to most readers, the youthful excitement over freedoms – to drink, to live alone, to have sex, to cut corners in academic study, to travel – seemed exotic to many American readers. Both Fitzgerald’s first two novels – This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) – had been bestsellers; his short stories, soon collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), appeared everywhere. At the age of 24, Fitzgerald became a celebrity, and that celebrity status only increased once he married his southern belle, Zelda Sayre. Living intermittently in New York during the early years of marriage, the Fitzgeralds became America’s golden couple, representing the Jazz Age, the culture of flappers and their sheiks, unfettered youth, and beauty. They also defied Prohibition, the Comstock laws, and all manifestations of public morality.
The Great Gatsby, a smaller financial success than his earlier fiction but a greater critical one, is a testimony both to Fitzgerald’s seriousness about his art and to his increased understanding of the directions that modern fiction was taking. The craft of the book – its remarkable economy and disciplined attention to details that take on symbolic significance – marks it as a remarkable advance. In many ways, Fitzgerald’s themes went back to his beginning in This Side of Paradise, with its concern for “a new generation […] grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken” (Fitzgerald 1925: 304). But there were important differences in technique. Like Joseph Conrad in his Marlow stories and, as we have seen, Cather in A Lost Lady, Fitzgerald here uses Nick Carraway as the narrative consciousness for Gatsby’s story and thereby gives the reader contrasting perspectives that call both Gatsby’s and Nick’s motivations into question. The complex texture and structure of this short novel about the tragic consequences of an American’s naive optimism make it evocative beyond its length.
Often referred to as a romantic, Fitzgerald developed the tactic of creating a sense of non‐reality, or of combining the real and the persuasively unreal. Even though the story of James Gatz, a man who has made himself into “the great Gatsby,” is far from romantic, Fitzgerald embeds romantic moments within the story. The first glimpse Nick has of Daisy and her friend Jordan, for instance, is not only other‐worldly, it is evanescent:
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
(Fitzgerald 1925: 8)
With sure, poignant movement, Fitzgerald draws each character with only a few strokes of the brush. When Daisy intrigues her cousin Nick by lamenting (“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it”), her sorrow is palpable. The disappointed and perpetually unfulfilled Daisy becomes the object of men’s adoration at that moment – Nick’s adoration as well as, years earlier, Gatsby’s. The essence of romance seems to color the early pages of the novel, which quickly reveals its underbelly of shoddy sex between Tom and Myrtle, its financial greed among members of Gatsby’s cohort, and its empty posturing within New York’s high society.
In his recent study The Dream of the Great American Novel (2014), Lawrence Buell describes one set of conventions that readers have used to cast The Great Gatsby in that niche – of a romantic treatment of a traditional, unsurprising, American dream. Buell states: “The long‐embedded assumption of the United States as a project in the making, forever grasping after – and fighting about – the elusive promise of freedom, equal rights, equal respect for all” (Buell 2014: 463). The Great Gatsby is a work that illustrates what Buell calls “enshrinement by reinvention.” In Fitzgerald’s transformation of James Gatz into Jay Gatsby, dirt‐poor youngster changed into wealthy, well‐dressed, and impeccably mannered Oxford war veteran, Fitzgerald assured readers that such changes were possible. The ending of the book, however, brings the hyperbolic changes tumbling to the ground: no one attends Gatsby’s funeral; no one laments his murder; no one apologizes for Tom’s implicating him when in reality Tom’s wife was Myrtle’s killer. Even Daisy abandons the man she had once loved, years earlier and into the present. The dreamlike quality of the story of Gatsby’s rise is underscored by his father’s failure to understand, as he shows Nick the photograph of Gatsby’s house while standing in that very house, that any American dream is illusory.
For William Faulkner, American life existed far from those vaunted dreams. In his relentless focus on the Mississippi South that he knew so thoroughly, he walked a fine line between criticizing the area’s visible prejudices and acknowledging that African American lives in the South were nightmares of persecution. Early in his writing career, Faulkner achieved this message by drawing African American characters who were more honest and humane than the white figures of their imaginary cultures. When he created the Gibson family as foil to the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury (1929), Dilsey Gibson took over the novel as its confident central presence. Later in his writing career, Faulkner spoke more stridently about where nobility resided: by the time of his Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948), readers who were his friends and associates had trouble believing the intent of his fiction. In two of his 1930s novels, Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the later clarity had been introduced. Both of those novels illustrated the corruption resulting from the blatant racism of the powerful white southern society.
Born in 1897 in Jefferson, Mississippi, Faulkner was unquestionably a son of the South – a region considered both mysterious and uncivilized. The oldest of four boys, he naturally seemed obsessed with his region – he asked for stories about history, especially those that included his ancestors; he probed people’s memories for details about each happening. All writers start with their early years in their imaginative reservoir – their recollections and their experiences from childhood – because that reservoir provides the accurate fabric of memory. Although Faulkner later spent time in New Orleans, New York, and Paris, as well as in the Canadian Royal Air Force, his life as a southerner was his main source of memory.
Wherever he was, Faulkner was more of a listener than he was a storyteller. When Sherwood Anderson portrayed Faulkner in a short story, this was the characterization he chose to use. And when Faulkner describes Anderson’s influence on him, he then told the story about Anderson’s advice: “to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born […] You have to be somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn. You’re a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from. But that’s all right too. It’s America too” (Faulkner 1965a: 8).
Faulkner’s great love for the South included its ecology and its natural world. As his fiction “The Bear” (1931) and other chapters of Go Down, Moses and his moments of characters’ isolation in Sanctuary (1931), Pylon (1935), and Requiem for a Nun (1951) show, Faulkner was most at home in the wilds of his terrain. Much of the poetry he wrote during the first 15 years of his career as a writer illustrate the traditional imagery of the British Romantics he loved (“Soft hands of skies / Delicately swung the narrow moon above him / And shivered the tops of trees”). From one of his longer poems, all natural elements come to life:
Bees break apple bloom, and peach and clover
Sing in the southern air where aimless clouds
Go up the sky‐hill, cropping it like sheep,
And startled pigeons, like a wind beginning,
Fill the air with sucking silver sound.
(Faulkner 1965b: 19)
Faulkner read avidly from contemporary books that his friend the young lawyer Phil Stone purchased for their reading (such works as Cather’s My Ántonia, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], H.D.’s Hymen [1921], Mencken’s The American Language [1919], as well as novels by Maxwell Bodenheim, Waldo Frank, Zona Gale, Edna Ferber, and others). Educated sporadically by visiting college classes, Faulkner could find what he admired through his absorption of O’Neill, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Caldwell, Williams – Faulkner’s first poem collection appeared from a press that often brought out the latter’s books – and he trusted his friends, Stark Young and Sherwood Anderson among them, to help him find his way as a writer.
Faulkner’s progression differed from that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald: he waited until he had written several novels before he attempted short stories. His movement was from the long poem sequences into the novel, and when Soldiers’ Pay appeared in 1926, he joined the group of anti‐war novelists who reported on casualties rather than triumphs. In 1927 Mosquitoes appeared, followed in 1929 by his first truly “southern” narrative, Sartoris. Already dismissed by his first publishers – since neither of his first books sold – Faulkner gave up attempting to be a successful novelist and wrote instead his modernist masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. Elliptical, fragmented, packed with resonating scenes that provided the characterization of the four Compson children and their weak, misguided parents, his novel stunned both the literary world and any reader who attempted to follow its story. “Stunning” was not the route to bestsellerdom, but it marked William Faulkner as a force to be reckoned with: the French critics, particularly, appreciated his versatility with the idiomatically precise American language.
All the elements of modernist expertise came together in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner showed his own versatility as he stayed in the character of the two Compson brothers – the oldest child, Quentin, and the middle boy, Jason. Their family position was held in anguished place by the fourth child’s birth, a mentally deficient son who never attained language. Benjy had been renamed once his family identified his condition; his original name, Maury, was in honor of his mother’s brother. The referential meanings start to accumulate from that moment; the dominant reference pattern is taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, alluding as it is to the dominant female power of Macbeth’s queen and the insistent destruction of both family and country. If Mrs. Compson as the wife and mother of the four central characters should be the heart of the family, Faulkner instead draws her as heartless, self‐centered, and oblivious to all the children’s needs. In her place stands the ineffectual Mr. Compson, an alcoholic who tries to care for Quentin, Caddy, Jason, and Benjy. But the real – and only – caretaker for the family is Dilsey Gibson, the black woman who literally slaves for the wealthy white family.
Faulkner’s testament of sorrow for lost land, lost social position, lost success despite lineage, and lost dreams contrasts vividly with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In the earlier novel, readers can find some promise. They have given up on the wealthy Buchanans, the arrogant Tom, and the frivolous Daisy, but they still hope that Nick can return to his roots and find both solace and success. Faulkner, in contrast, damns all his characters. Quentin commits suicide because he cannot figure out what his father’s language – and behavior – means, though he waits till the end of his first year at Harvard to kill himself. Caddy, having been thrown out of her husband’s house when their child is born too soon, and similarly rejected by her mother, who does not allow her name to be spoken, earns her living and the support checks she sends to her by‐then draconian brother Jason the only way she can, as a mistress to the world’s rich. Benjy, once castrated at the direction of that same Jason, is finally institutionalized. Jason, after the death of the father whose name he bears, pretends to run the Compson house, but the keys remain firmly clutched in his mother’s hands. Only Caddy’s daughter, named for her beloved older brother – Quentin – has any chance to succeed, but she runs away at the first opportunity. Like her mother, Quentin is uneducated, untrained to be anything but a sex object in the genteel, patriarchal South where her family once knew prominence.
Years later, when this difficult novel was finally reprinted, Faulkner was asked to write an “appendix” section so that readers might have more context for the fragmentary scenes and plotlines. Given as he often was to creating history as background for characterization, most of the long section was only obliquely helpful, but for the character of Dilsey, Faulkner wrote a two‐word sentence that has become famous: “They endured.” As the true support for the crumbling Compson life, the African American woman – the scion of her own respected family – was the acknowledged center of southern life. It was a truth that readers in 1929 did not want to accept. To help with that trajectory of achieved meaning, in 1936 Faulkner wrote perhaps his best‐known novel, Absalom, Absalom! Here he brings Quentin Compson back to life as his protagonist‐narrator, showing him during that early year at Harvard as he tells the story of not only his family but of the South to his Canadian roommate, Shreve. The revitalization of the Compson history, pared down to its Civil War roots, helps ease the bitterness of his brilliant story in the earlier The Sound and the Fury.
That brilliance is often illustrated by the dramatic changes in Faulkner’s use of American English to characterize Quentin and Jason – and by his choice to give Caddy no section of the book at all. The voiceless sister who tries to care for Benjy, who tries to support Quentin as he wanders through his adolescence, is represented only through her prominence in the scenes of sorrow as she attempts to teach Benjy to speak. Later, she duels unsuccessfully with Jason as she tries to see her daughter – all these scenes end with her voiceless frustration. But from the scattered and intentionally fragmented scenes of the first book – in which the reader sees the disappointing existence of the Compsons – to the second book of Quentin’s last day alive, to the third book of Jason’s vocal brutality and then to the fourth study of Dilsey and the remains of the Compson life,6 Faulkner proves himself the master of American language, as well as of modernism.
Book III, Jason’s book, opens with his abusive language: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you’re lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a chair unless they’ve got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her …” (Faulkner 1929: 180). Jason’s blatant cruelty, aimed at comedy, contrasts remarkably with the monologue of the truly sensitive Quentin, which comprises Book II:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire, it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s […]
(Faulkner 1929: 76)
Working with the basic elements of fiction – characters, plot, nuance, metaphor, language, and arrangement – William Faulkner created a work that illustrated the modern even as it created a surprisingly painful American story.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (REGIONAL LITERARY EXPRESSIONS); CHAPTER 5 (THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR I).