Michael Soto
Two of the most significant American literary institutions of the twentieth century were located at 27 rue de Fleurus and 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris, France. Most readers will quickly recognize the first address as belonging to the apartment home shared by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas from 1903 to 1938; the second housed the Shakespeare and Company bookstore between 1921 and 1941. Today both locations boast commemorative plaques marking the significance of the buildings’ otherwise nondescript facades to Euro‐American cultural history. (Shakespeare and Company remains in business at a new location, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, across the Pont au Double from the Cathédrale Notre Dame.) Separated by a mere 10‐minute stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens – and just a stone’s throw from the still‐trendy cafes on the Boulevard du Montparnasse – 27 rue de Fleurus and 12 rue de l’Odéon are regular stops on Paris walking tours and they figure prominently in dozens if not hundreds of city tourist guides.
We take for granted that so much of American modernism happened “over there,” that the writers who came of age with World War I were a “Lost Generation.” In this essay, I consider a few of the social forces that render membership in a Lost Generation seemingly unavoidable, and I explore some ways in which the notion might push our understanding of American literary modernism in new directions. My particular focus is the economic turmoil that followed World War I. American writers, I argue, tap into the unease surrounding the global fiscal crisis beginning in 1919 and they deploy the figure of a financially ravaged Europe to symbolically imagine a withered global civilization. The best‐known writers of the Lost Generation, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Stein, considered what it meant, in terms of individual psychology and in terms of social identity, to inhabit an economically distressed world. The unrelenting strain of financial instability even occasioned literary efforts to preserve linguistic stability. Indeed, as I argue below, Stein’s trademark avant‐garde prose falls victim to the pressures that made her postwar European existence so financially unpredictable, even at the height of her popularity and commercial success. When it comes to money, Stein can be quite un‐Steinian; indeed, Stein writing about money conforms to the Lost Generation stereotype about financial malaise even though she often critiqued the Lost Generation cliché.1 A key question hovers about this discussion, then: How are we to understand Lost Generation cultural expression while protecting and preserving our critical position in relation to the movement’s mythologies?
The rise of Lost Generation discourse (and sloganeering) in the aftermath of World War I points literary scholars and more casual readers alike to key demographic shifts in Europe and the Americas. The unprecedented loss of life – among both military combatants and civilians – exacted lasting demographic consequences in those nations that were most profoundly affected by the war’s efficient means of destruction. A quick survey of the war’s military casualties (see Table 9.1) underscores the scope of the human tragedy; not represented on this table are the untold millions of civilians who also died from disease, starvation, exposure, and violence.
Table 9.1 World War I military casualties.
Source: US Senate (1923).
| Country | Mobilized forces | Killed and died | Wounded | Prisoners and missing |
Total casualties | % of forces |
| Allies | ||||||
| Belgium | 267 000 | 13 716 | 44 686 | 34 659 | 93 061 | 34.9 |
| British Empire | 8 904 467 | 908 371 | 2 090 212 | 191 652 | 3 190 235 | 35.8 |
| France | 8 410 000 | 1 357 800 | 4 266 000 | 537 00 | 6 160 800 | 73.3 |
| Greece | 230 000 | 5 000 | 21 000 | 1 000 | 27 000 | 11.7 |
| Italy | 5 615 000 | 650 000 | 947 000 | 600 000 | 2 197 000 | 39.1 |
| Japan | 800 000 | 300 | 907 | 3 | 1 210 | 0.2 |
| Montenegro | 50 000 | 3 000 | 10 000 | 7 000 | 20 000 | 40.0 |
| Portugal | 100 000 | 7 222 | 13 751 | 12 318 | 33 291 | 33.3 |
| Romania | 750 000 | 335 706 | 120 000 | 80 000 | 535 706 | 71.4 |
| Russia | 12 000 000 | 1 700 000 | 4 950 000 | 2 500 000 | 9 150 000 | 76.3 |
| Serbia | 707 343 | 45 000 | 133 148 | 152 958 | 331 106 | 46.8 |
| USA | 4 355 000 | 116 516 | 204 002 | 4 500 | 323 018 | 8.1 |
| Central Powers | ||||||
| Austria‐Hungary | 7 800 000 | 1 200 000 | 3 620 000 | 2 200 000 | 7 020 000 | 90.0 |
| Bulgaria | 1 200 000 | 87 500 | 152 390 | 27 029 | 266 919 | 22.2 |
| Germany | 11 000 000 | 1 773 700 | 4 216 058 | 1 152 800 | 7 142 558 | 64.9 |
| Turkey | 2 850 000 | 325 000 | 400 000 | 250 000 | 975 000 | 34.2 |
| Totals | ||||||
| All | 65 038 810 | 8 528 831 | 21 189 154 | 7 750 919 | 37 468 904 | 57.5 |
A few European powers experienced war casualties that outnumber the prewar population of the nation’s largest city; for example, more Russian soldiers died during the war (1.7 million) than the entire prewar population of Moscow (1.6 million). With human losses such as these in mind, war‐era European intellectuals repeatedly identified the tragedy underway as die verlorene Generation, la génération perdue, or la generación perdida. (The Soviets appear not to have adopted a Russian variation of the phrase.) The demographic losses quickly acquired symbolic status: To be a lost generation signaled not just the senseless forfeiture of human life, but also a spiritual bankruptcy and more broadly the decay of Western civilization. It is in this context that Gertrude Stein labeled Ernest Hemingway and his peers in her trademark, bell‐ringing way: “You are all a lost generation.” The phrase that Hemingway made famous as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926) has a number of mythical sources, some of them seemingly contradictory, most of them pointing to a conversation between Hemingway and Stein (and sometimes a third party), but all of them set amid the landscape of war‐torn Europe.
The label requires us to read Hemingway’s novel as a part‐for‐whole version of an entire generational experience, so that the narrative projects Jake Barnes’s individual psychological and physical loss onto the whole of postwar society. “‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” sums up the cynical double‐speak of an entire civilization not sure if it deserves the mantle “civilized.” The proliferation of dejected postwar fiction during this era (a tendency that also makes its way onto postwar film) insists that the personal be understood as social, and vice versa. In his anti‐war memoir The Enormous Room (1922), E.E. Cummings took inspiration from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), but Cummings meant the grotesque French prisoner‐of‐war camp at La Ferté‐Macé to be seen as an allegory for his anguished mind and for bureaucratic absurdity simultaneously. The idea that a writer mines personal trauma and physical danger in this sneering way seamlessly evolved into the public persona that Cummings handled playfully and that Hemingway meticulously cultivated until it blew up into the “Papa” myth. Even writers more commonly associated with specific regions of the United States, including Willa Cather and William Faulkner, took a stab at jaundiced, Papa‐style war fiction, long before such a creature existed. Claude Wheeler, the protagonist of Cather’s Pulitzer Prize‐winning war novel, One of Ours (1922), dies in battle “believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be” (Cather 1991: 370). Cather’s skeptical narrator – and presumably her equally skeptical readership – labor under no such misconceptions. Nor do Claude’s comrades‐in‐arms: The survivors do not share Claude’s romantic notions of heroic sacrifice; as the narrator informs us, by the time of their return voyage across the Atlantic, the American troops “are not the same men who went away” (Cather 1991: 367).
Over one million US troops fought with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I; if those men assembled in one geographic space, they would comprise the fourth largest American city at the time (after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia). Most of that million eventually returned home safely, but with a new outlook on war and a changed perspective on European and American society. Their brief overseas experience became the distorting lens through which life was seen and judged. As historian Harvey Levenstein demonstrates (1998), American soldiers stationed abroad returned home with the stereotype that the French betrayed loose morals and curious fashion and cuisine choices. But for a small subset of American soldiers, including the intellectuals who comprised the cultural Lost Generation, the European experience reinforced the notion that a debilitating Puritanism overshadowed American social life. The journey overseas provided a critical prism through which one might view American history and cultural practices. Henry Adams anticipates a more widespread critical cosmopolitanism in his famous juxtaposition of American “facts” and European “feelings”; for Adams, the Louvre and Chartres represent the “highest energy ever known to man,” whereas such “energy was unknown to the American mind” (Adams 1918: 385). In the United States, Malcolm Cowley asserts of his Lost Generation that intellectuals “had found no way of escape” from the shadow of American mediocrity; to remedy the situation, Cowley offers the example of cultural critic Harold Stearns, who prescribes immediate and enduring expatriatism: Stearns’s “answer was simple and uncompromising. A young man had no future in this country of hypocrisy and repression. He should take ship for Europe, where people know how to live” (Cowley 1934: 79). In their voyages overseas, both Adams and Stearns exemplify a broader American search for value and relevance. In this sense, the expatriate model represents the continuation of a cultural nationalist project that defines American literature from its faltering beginnings.
The part‐for‐whole slippage invited by Lost Generation literary output – a few writers speak for the Lost Generation, and the Lost Generation speaks for America – reverberates in the scholarship of the period, so that a small group of mostly young, mostly white, mostly male American writers stands in for the bulk of American modernism. In his seminal memoir Exile’s Return (1934), Cowley observes that Lost Generation writers, because they were born sometime around 1900, “fell into the habit of identifying themselves with the century” (Cowley 1934: 8). As I have discussed elsewhere (Soto 2004: 46ff.), the institutionalization of American literary scholarship from the mid‐twentieth century forward viewed the small group of expatriates as larger‐than‐life examples of avant‐garde posturing; the Lost Generation, according to this line of thought, produced a body of literary achievement that rivals contemporaneous European movements. Eventually, the Lost Generation – capital letters firmly in place – served as a model for approaching, evaluating, and archiving similar literary generations, including the Beat Generation, the Silent Generation, Generation X, and so on. Indeed, these later movements often invited the comparison, and, following the Lost Generation model, their intellectual leaders highlight moments of social, economic, or cultural uncertainty that give rise to youthful revolt and heterodox cultural posturing against the (philistine, puritan, square) older generation. In the case of the Lost Generation, the specific sociocultural conditions of wartime and postwar Europe and the United States yield the backdrop against which the coming‐of‐age experience stands in sharp relief. Cowley’s narrow model of physical and psychological uprootedness emerges from this context as the paradigm for twentieth‐century American avant‐gardism.
About those specific sociocultural conditions: World War I threw most Western economies into chaos, with disastrous effects among both the former Allies and the former Central Powers. For a number of reasons, though, the French currency was particularly bruised during the postwar years (see e.g. Dulles 1929; Tsiang 1959). Between 1919 and 1926, the value of the French franc relative to most currencies fluctuated precipitously; during this period the franc lost 80% of its value against the major world currencies (Dulles 1929: 1). Just after the close of hostilities, at the beginning of January 1919, one US dollar could purchase 5.43 francs. In 1921, the year that Ernest and Hadley Hemingway moved to Paris, one US dollar could purchase between 11.32 francs (on 25 May) and 17.18 francs (on 4 January), and during the calamitous summer of 1926, just before the publication of The Sun Also Rises, one US dollar could purchase nearly 50 francs (the high on 20 July was 49.22 francs) (Dulles 1929: 455ff.).
Owing to such volatility, Hemingway’s scrupulous attention to the precise number of francs spent at the various cafes depicted in The Sun Also Rises offers but an abstract realism; the novel records little in the way of meaningful monetary precision. Even so, the novel’s broader, symbolic point holds true: some American expatriates cynically view basic principles of morality and human identity as data points in a fluctuating open market, as commodities to be bought and sold at unfair exchange rates. The Sun Also Rises insists, less cynically though sometimes tentatively, that the core of human existence must remain apart from and transcend mere commerce. The novel’s ethics largely emerges from its narrator’s relatively even‐keeled assessment. Hemingway strategically uses the word “exchange” during one of Jake Barnes’s rambling, drunken soliloquies to hint at an inseverable tie between economic turmoil and moral decline:
I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution and punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything and that was good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy.
(Hemingway 1954: 152)
Hemingway scholars have long highlighted this passage in relation to Jake’s moral and financial soundness (Donaldson 1971), in relation to Jake’s unconscious desire to transcend utilitarian exchange (Cheatham 1992), and in relation to Jake’s public performance of masculine sexuality (Leland 2004). These scholars appropriately excuse Jake’s slippery logic (learning = experience = taking chances = money) by highlighting the inherent decency and transcendent aim of his larger ambitions.
To these provocative insights I would add that the passage points to Hemingway’s obsession with cultural nationalism: The Steinian repetition of “pays” – absent from the original holograph manuscript (Hemingway 1990: 402) – calls our attention to an embedded pun on the French word for “country” (pays) at the same moment that the French government sought, in vain, debt forgiveness from the United States and other war creditors. The financial assertiveness of American expatriates – for better and mostly for worse – stands as the macho alternative to a feminized French weakness. We eventually realize that Jake forgoes the sordid exposition recounted here in favor of a more mature (because more realistic and grim) vantage. The analogy – which, following the cliché, renders France as feckless and feminine – serves as an implicit critique of the shortsighted global forces that punished the war‐torn nation, one that anticipates France’s continued decline into economic dependency.
The terms that France finally obtained on its war debts – a 65‐year payment plan – sent the franc into a tailspin in early 1926 (Levenstein 1998: 267–268), ushering in a period of American expatriate economic muscle flexing and boorishness, centered mainly in Paris. Beginning in 1926 and lasting through the heady days of the stock market boom in 1929, Paris hosted 250 000 American tourists each summer (Levenstein 1998: 275). The large majority of these visitors belonged to what Levenstein describes as the “fun‐loving middle class” (Levenstein 1998: 268), a group who indulged in the desperate city’s liberal attitudes toward drinking and sex. Whereas an earlier generation of visitors saw France as a site of cultural pilgrimage, the new American tourist saw France as a “cultural” playground. Recalling Sinclair Lewis’s first ever visit to Paris, Stearns wrote in 1935, “How much [Lewis] saw, or remembered, of historical Paris that first visit might be put into a very small page of a very small notebook. But I saw nothing to object to in that. He was on vacation; and, after all, where can one better spend a vacation than in Paris?” (Stearns 1935: 206). The gulf between Henry Adams and Harold Stearns is wide indeed.
The gulf between an idealized and a degraded Paris – between the prewar and the postwar city – emerged as an important motif of Lost Generation writers, symbolic of what intellectual historian Oswald Spengler dubbed in the title of his influential book The Decline of the West (1918–1922). Following his appearance as the character Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises, Stearns even managed to evolve into a kind of debauched relic sought out by American visitors to Left Bank cafes. American expatriate writers more generally figured into the tourist myth. As the Literary Digest put it in early 1930, “Who goes to Paris and does not seek out the Dome? There gather our literary and artistic expatriates – if they are not at the Coupole, The Select, or La Rotonde” (quoted in Levenstein 1998: 240–241). These Boulevard du Montparnasse cafes are a routine stop on the literary tourist itinerary, often as part of the same stroll that takes visitors past 27 rue de Fleurus and 12 rue de l’Odéon.
During the summer of 1925, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented an apartment at 14 rue de Tilsitt near the Arc de Triomphe; three summers later they took an apartment at 58 rue de Vaugirard, across the street from the Luxembourg Gardens (and about a three‐ or four‐minute stroll to the Stein–Toklas home). For all of his reputation as a flamboyant reveler, Fitzgerald in fiction takes a dim view of American revelry in Jazz Age Paris. He published “Babylon Revisited” in the Saturday Evening Post in early 1931, while coming to terms with the Great Depression and with Zelda’s recurring mental breakdowns. The short story’s narrator follows the fortunes and the thoughts of Charles Wales, a widowed, recovering alcoholic, as he reconstructs his debauched Parisian memories and their troubling aftermath:
So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word “dissipate” – to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.
He remembered thousand‐franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred‐franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab.
But it hadn’t been given for nothing.
It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember – his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.
(Fitzgerald 1951: 389)
Widely viewed as one of his greatest achievements in short fiction, Fitzgerald scholars have long looked to “Babylon Revisited” as an example of the writer’s views on the ghostly persistence of past trauma into the present, on the inability of individuals and societies to escape their troubling histories. It depicts the Jazz Age toll on its most ardent revelers.
Fitzgerald’s short story further insists that historical conditions impose tragic burdens on those who make the mistake of resisting history. In the passage quoted here, currency references (1000 francs and 100 francs) quickly allow us to see Wales’s profligate spending, but in a manner akin to his own alcohol‐blurred view. During the 1920s, 1000 francs might be exchanged for anywhere between 20 and 200 US dollars. The short story’s indeterminate chronology renders exact accounting impossible. Still, currency volatility registers a debasement of the French economy and existence, and at the same time it records Wales’s personal psychological turmoil. Wales exchanges transcendent values for evanescent valuta, a trade that he subsequently (and permanently) regrets.
We can now see with ample clarity the lazy Babbittry and more vicious xenophobia that animated countless moves overseas. Nowhere do America’s misplaced cultural values register more memorably than in Anita Loos’s satiric novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). The deceptively naive flapper Lorelei Lee preys on the desperation of European women to obtain her hard US currency and on the desperation of European men to obtain her less quantifiable assets. In exchange, they will part with family treasure or personal dignity acquired over many years or several generations. When Lorelei and her sidekick Dorothy find themselves in London, the destitute English aristocracy try repeatedly to obtain a financial lifeline from the American tourists; at one point, Lorelei records in her diary, Lady Shelton “tried to sell [the pair] some shell flowers she seems to make out of sea shells for 25 pounds. So we asked her how much it was in money and it seems it is 125 dollars” (Loos 2014: 35). The humor at Lorelei’s expense – her failure to understand that European currencies are in fact money, and that a five‐to‐one exchange rate reveals a national economy on the brink of collapse – masks the cruelty of the dire economic situation; Dorothy’s venomous remark, that “in America we use shells the same way only we put a dry pea under one of them and we call it a game” (Loos 2014: 36), underscores the unequal financial footing, predicated solely on the accident of nationality, that gives two working‐class US southerners considerable leverage over landed European gentry.
The same humorously ironic structure informs Lorelei’s shopping trips elsewhere. In Paris, she notes that “we saw some jewelry in the window and it really seemed to be a very very great bargain but the price marks all had francs on them and Dorothy and I do not seem to be mathematical enough to tell how much francs is in money” (Loos 2014: 53). Our ability to see through the irony and laugh at Lorelei’s uncultured naivety parallels her superior financial position vis‐à‐vis the struggling Europeans. Upon her arrival in France, Lorelei picks out “a French gentleman who was really in a very gorgeous uniform and I gave him twenty francs worth of French money and he was very very gallant […] Because I really think that twenty francs is quite cheap for a gentleman that has got on at least $100 worth of gold braid on his coat alone, to speak nothing of his trousers” (Loos 2014: 51). Lorelei’s imperialist view of the “gentleman” borders on modern‐day slavery. She knows without doubt that she can buy his services. The ultimate irony is that while the Europeans in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by all appearances work hard to earn a living, even demeaning themselves for American tourists, Lorelei and Dorothy live off their wits and their feminine charms. Lorelei’s “work,” if we can call it that, looks strikingly like the world’s oldest profession.
When Blondes was first published, English avant‐gardist Wyndham Lewis noticed the similarities between Lorelei’s untutored narration and Stein’s experimental prose, and although Lewis meant the comparison as an insult to Stein, he mishandles narrative tone and thus misplaces the reader in relation to text. Lewis understood Lorelei to be Loos’s “victim” – much as he saw Melanctha (from Three Lives [1909]) as Stein’s victim – the unwitting dupe whose diminished agency pales in comparison with the author’s or reader’s superior knowledge (Hegeman 1995: 527–528). And yet for all of her careless prose and cultural insensitivity and social cluelessness, Lorelei succeeds at everything she tries. Her combination of pluck and common sense allows her to master virtually every situation, whether this requires not buying seashell flowers or gaining the eager assistance of a gallant Frenchman. Lorelei understands quite well how to leverage her Americanness; the attributes that allow a cosmopolitan readership to laugh at her expense – her unearned social position, her fashion‐forward sensibility, her clumsily handled US currency – simultaneously give her every practical edge. The worldly sophistication that generates cultural critique in the fiction of Fitzgerald and Hemingway fails to target American boorishness in Loos’s novel. Lorelei Lee may not understand the difference between a franc and a pound, but she knows how to walk away from a shell game when she sees one.
Despite the notorious difficulty of her prose, Gertrude Stein sought to advance her career with pluck and common sense that Lorelei Lee might admire. During the summer of 1936, Stein fulfilled an ambition later recalled in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937): to be published in the Saturday Evening Post, then the most prominent of the many glossy magazines that paid large sums to a wide range of now‐canonical American writers such as Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edith Wharton. Although the Saturday Evening Post was frequently disparaged for encouraging easily digested, cookie cutter fiction, its editor, George Horace Lorimer, commissioned Stein to pen a series of predictably quirky short essays on the touchy subject of money, just as the country was pulling itself out of the Great Depression. On matters of economics, Lorimer and Stein shared a staunchly conservative worldview. Both committed Republicans, they supported the doomed presidential campaign of Alf Landon that November and bemoaned the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Stein’s money series reads like a treatise in favor of severe austerity measures in the face of long‐term financial crisis – except that one must wade through typically Steinian prose to get to her belt‐tightening recommendations. The first and longest essay in the series, simply titled “Money,” was published in the issue of 13 June 1936. The folksy opening paragraph introduces a Steinian tautology: “Everybody now just has to make up their mind. Is money money or isn’t money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money, anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what makes everybody go crazy” (Stein 1936a: 88).
Of course, to label this repetition of the word “money” a Steinian tautology is to dismiss the very premise; thanks to Stein’s influence, we know that repetition need not be thought of as mere repeating. We can allow Marjorie Perloff’s observations to stand in for the legions of critics who rehearse the liberating logic of repetition in Stein’s prose: “Repetition, variation, permutation, the miniscule transfer of a given word from one syntactic slot to another, one part of speech to another, creates a compositional field that remains in constant motion, that prevents closure from taking place” (Perloff 1990: 153). Here Perloff reinforces the widely held view that Stein does not, in fact, repeat so much as redeploy and reimagine language; the malleability of words opens up previously unavailable meanings in each new context, including the compulsory newness of historical time as it marches inexorably forward alongside narrative time. For Perloff and many others, Stein is simultaneously Heraclitean and proto‐Derridean: Stein playfully reveals that you can’t stand in the same linguistic river twice. As Perloff declares, “repetition generates meaning” (Perloff 1990: 152). Equivocation forecloses closure.
Such, though, is not always the case. I would suggest, in fact, that Stein operates in a suspiciously un‐Steinian fashion in this particular instance. In this opening paragraph the word “money” appears eight times – the word occupies a full one‐seventh of the larger 56‐word statement – but it acquires two and only two highly contingent (and politically narrow) meanings within the wider logic of Stein’s argument. There is money that accurately signifies real value because it is earned industriously and spent frugally, and money that is gotten artificially, illogically, and unjustly – taxed and spent with no real understanding of value except as pure abstraction. Which is to say, there is money and there is “money,” which is not money at all.
To drive home the distinction between money and “money,” but without requiring irony‐supplying quotation marks, Stein deploys a series of heavy‐handed figures of speech. The most elaborately developed figure looks like this: The hardworking father of a family understands intuitively that one doesn’t spend money unless absolutely necessary; the US Congress, however, fails to grasp this obvious point. “The natural feeling of a father of a family is that when anybody asks him for money he says no,” Stein writes. “Any father of a family, any member of a family, knows all about that” (Stein 1936a: 88). Stein contrasts such matter‐of‐fact reasoning with the dissolute tendencies of Louis XV, who “just spent it and spent it” (Stein 1936a: 88). She also contrasts sound money sense with her young nephew’s storytelling embellishments: “when my nephew was a little boy he was out walking somewhere and he saw a lot of horses; he came home and he said, oh papa, I have just seen a million horses. A million, said his father, well anyway, said my nephew, I saw three” (Stein 1936a: 88). The New Deal Congress, Stein maintains, behaves as irresponsibly as a French monarch or a silly child; if American society is a family with the Congress at its head, then Congress is an abysmal parent. She concludes the short essay, “So, now please, everybody, everybody everybody, please, is money money, and if it is, it ought to be the same whether it is what a father of a family earns and spends or a government, if it isn’t sooner or later there is disaster” (Stein 1936a: 88).
As the series continued through the summer and into the fall, Stein further drove home the point that there is money and then there is “money.”2 Along the way she also critiques unemployment relief programs and what some now call “class warfare”: “It is easy to get rid of the rich,” she offers, “but it is not easy to get rid of the poor. Wherever they have tried it they have got rid of the rich all right and so then everybody is poor and also there are there more than ever there of ever so much poorer” (Stein 1936e: 78). For good measure, Stein also throws in a dash of vaguely racist attitudes about French colonial immigrants. (“All the Indo‐Chinamen in Indo‐China want to come to Paris to live like that,” she says of immigrants who receive unemployment relief; Stein 1936c: 32.) You have perhaps noticed by now that Steinian repetition renders the word “everybody” infinitely malleable: “everybody” means at times “anybody,” and at other times it means something else entirely; for instance, “everybody” typically doesn’t include New Deal politicians. But when it comes to the word “money,” Stein epitomizes the same transactional certainty found in the Saturday Evening Post advertisements adjacent to her essays: advertisements for B.V.D. Swim Suits, for Oh Boy! Skates! (offered as an incentive to those who sell two or more Saturday Evening Post subscriptions), and for Kool Mild Menthol Cigarettes.
In 1936, if Gertrude Stein were to smoke fashionably on the beach while reading the Saturday Evening Post, the enterprise would set her back $5.15 in money – without the quotation marks. (A pack of Kool Cigarettes cost the reader 15 cents, a B.V.D. Swim Suit cost $4.95, and a copy of the glossy magazine cost a nickel.) Stein’s unrelenting distinction between real money and the “money” spent by politicians cares little for abstract values – she dismisses abstraction as misguided politics – and insists instead that a pack of Kool Cigarettes is exactly three times as valuable as a copy of the Saturday Evening Post. Had Stein wished to buy a B.V.D. Swim Suit with French francs, though, how much she spent would be dictated by when she made the purchase. In June 1936, the swimsuit would cost 75.09 francs; by October the same suit, still priced at US$4.95, would cost 106.28 francs.3
In September of that year the recently elected Popular Front government devalued the franc to bring the currency more in line with the US dollar and the British pound and in so doing to boost exports and tourism (Mouré 1991, chap. 7). Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Popular Front monetary policy – which devalued the franc years after similar moves by the United States and most European governments – was its abandoning of the gold standard in favor of a free‐floating currency system, something that had only happened previously during the immediate tumult of World War I. This move unfixed the franc and led to a slide that continued throughout the twentieth century; or, to echo Perloff, the change created a monetary field that remained in constant (downward) motion. Stein’s rearguard view of money, and her defense of fiscal austerity, might be understood as a linguistic effort to mitigate the unpredictable outcomes of unprecedented economic change.
Stein’s best‐known references to money reinforce competing images. On the one hand, she mastered her tightfisted ways during the world wars and passed on her penny‐wise advice to those she cared about; on the other hand, she is always willing to bail out a friend in need, particularly if an artistic career hangs in the balance. Stein records both approaches to money most famously in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which of course proved the lone unambiguous commercial success of her career, and she reflects further on the role of money in light of her newfound celebrity and financial achievement in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). “I had never made any money before in my life,” she recalls of her triumph with Alice B. Toklas, “and I was most excited.” Commercial success during the New Deal era prompts further, expressly political considerations:
Almost every once in so often there is a movement to do away with money. Roosevelt tries to spend so much that perhaps money will not exist, communists try to live without money but it never lasts because if you live without money you have to do as the animals do live on what you find each day to eat and that is just the difference the minute you do not do that you have to have money and so everybody has to make up their mind if money is money or if money isn’t money and sooner or later they always do decide that money is money.
(Stein 1993: 41, 42)
Quite obviously, we find here a continuation of Stein’s Saturday Evening Post financial treatise. Once again, “money” in these various repetitive contexts loses its metaphorical dimension and instead possesses an inviolate essence. Word corresponds exactly with idea: it is the thing itself. Roosevelt’s Keynesian notions of demand‐side stimulus and Stalin’s Marxian notions of displaced labor value for Stein amount to the same erroneous relationship with a tangible object (never mind that she agrees with Marx on the human–animal divide). Elaborate theories of value and exchange vanish in the certainty that money is money.
In this stubborn, instrumentalist view Stein is demonstrably wrong. Money is always a metaphor, a trope; money exists to stand for something else. The more typically Steinian displacement of meaning from one nexus of contingencies to another – the shifting network of time, of comprehension, of words themselves that allows an expressive unit’s meaning to evolve, to exchange one sense for another – embraces the classical idea, sometimes formulated as a deep suspicion of money, that language is always a metaphor, always a trope. Language exists to stand for something else. Is this something else also something real? Stein scholars tell us “no,” but when it comes to money, Stein herself says “yes.” When it comes to money, Stein isn’t just a conservative; she’s a classicist, having less in common with John Maynard Keynes than with Ron Paul.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Stein scholars valiantly but somewhat vainly attempt to reconcile her conservative political views with her avant‐garde linguistic posturing. Michael Szalay, in his New Deal Modernism (2000), offers a rare exception to the rule. Szalay acknowledges that Stein is a “conservative, socially reactionary” writer, linking her politics to no less a right‐winger than Ayn Rand (Szalay 2000: 83, 88). By bringing Stein’s work into conversation with Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, Szalay highlights what he calls its “autotelic,” organicist model of aesthetics, the privileging of art and literature in which all constituent parts contribute with perfect logic to a self‐sufficient whole. As one of the rare human artifacts that, according to Stein, emerge from the human mind rather than from human nature – as we saw in an earlier example, money separates humans from animals – money plays a key role in Szalay’s analysis. “Rand’s paranoia that writers like Stein were trying to evacuate the English language of meaning emerges in Stein, ironically enough,” he writes, “as the paranoia that Roosevelt was trying to evacuate money of meaning” (Szalay 2000: 89). Stein, as we have seen, labors furiously to restore meaning to money, even at the expense of pinning the word down with brute force.
The historical conditions that give rise to Lost Generation sloganeering and to the dejected postwar literary expression for which it is famous at times outstrip the creative powers even of its most daring writers, as the case of Gertrude Stein demonstrates. (One likes to think that Stein would write differently about money in the post‐World War II boom years.) But as I hope this essay suggests, there remain valuable avenues for approaching Lost Generation writing on its own terms, particularly in light of the historical and intellectual frameworks that the writing explores formally and thematically. Because Lost Generation writers so regularly authored Künstlerromane – narratives in which disaffected younger artists live out their disaffection spatially, often in terms of expatriation or in terms of a move to the big city’s bohemian enclave – literary scholars have long undertaken geographically sensitive biographical studies of novels and memoirs. The literary walking tour might be seen as a commercial offshoot of the critical approach. Such natural and profitable (in multiple senses of the word) literary critical enterprises point forward, I hope, to more theoretically engaged biohistorical and biosocial work. Michel de Certeau’s thought‐provoking distinction between the “strategies” and the “tactics” that govern the experience of everyday life provides one potential model (Certeau 1984), one that remains in the back of my mind when I imagine cultural shapers and their audiences strolling near the Luxembourg Gardens (then and now). We have, in fact, already seen tantalizing glimpses of how the so‐called spatial turn enters into the work of Lost Generation scholarship.
Describing what he calls a “poetics of exile,” Gerald Kennedy pushed the biohistorical approach to Lost Generation writers down to the street level, bringing a prior era’s preoccupation with the setting of literary texts into fruitful contact with geospatial cultural theory. Kennedy proposes that literary depictions of Paris in particular might be understood as simultaneously literal and figurative (much as I have proposed for accounts of the interwar European economy). In a discussion of The Enormous Room, Kennedy observes, “The phrases which constitute this imaginary city are mimetic, but what they ‘represent’ are the psychic and emotional conditions under which [E.E. Cummings] has contemplated Paris or his own mental image of Paris. These fugitive references, supposedly to a real city, thus mirror certain changes in the writer’s own consciousness and sensibility” (Kennedy 1993: 4). The writerly identification of emotional states with the landscape is so embedded in cultural history that we have, over many centuries, formulated a critical vocabulary to capture the affinity between the two. (In addition to “setting,” we might think of “idyll” and “pathetic fallacy.”) What Kennedy adds to more traditional literary criticism is a nuanced understanding of the broader cultural work performed by an individual’s awareness of place and a writer’s textual performance of the spatial experience. Significantly, Kennedy aligns the writer’s project with the cartographer’s: both cultural workers give us a set of codes with which we assimilate the vast data – most of it seemingly without value, some of it immensely symbolic – of our everyday geographic experiences. The condition of exile forces writers and readers to recalibrate everyday experience according to a compass without a true north: “In the difference between the immediate scene of exile,” he offers, “the ‘unreal’ site of expatriation (as Stein would have it), and those real, remembered scenes of homeland, one confronts the anxiety of the ungrounded self” (Kennedy 1993: 27). Such are the conditions in which modernist writers must shore up fragments against their ruins.
Rebecca Walsh similarly delves into the day‐to‐day experiences of individual writers, tracing recurring patterns in Lost Generation writing as seen from a bird’s‐eye (or cartographer’s) view. Walsh’s instructive point about Stein’s shifting view of her “native” geography – that “we can locate a more complicated set of dynamics in Stein’s relationship to questions of belonging that stem from her uneasy ability to sustain affective personal attachments to the American landscape” (Walsh 2015: 100) – invites further efforts to explore national identity in relation to geospatial modernity. The question of national belonging, already vexed in a post‐Treaty of Versailles landscape, takes on a mercurial aspect in Stein’s shape‐shifting language. Walsh moves beyond Stein’s reflexively triumphalist nationalism, including the smug politics that underpins Stein’s money series, by emphasizing how her “indeterminate, wandering” text “undermines American exceptionalism and the environmental determinist principles that buttressed it” (Walsh 2015: 100).4
Walsh evocatively labels her approach a “geopoetics of modernism”; the critical tool helps us to understand not just the wandering children of the Lost Generation but also their more homebound counterparts. After all, most of us have never set foot in 27 rue de Fleurus, and yet we can appreciate the difficulties that Stein faced there when she concluded her money series with dejected musings about nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century “organization,” by which she meant collectivism of the sort exemplified by New Deal social welfare policies. “What are they going to try next, what does the twenty‐first century want to do about it?” she asks. “They certainly will not want to be organized, the twentieth century is seeing the end of that, perhaps as the virgin lands will by that time be pretty well used up, and also by that time everybody will have been as quickly everywhere as anybody can be, perhaps they will begin looking for liberty again and individually amusing themselves again and old‐fashioned dirt farming” (Stein 1936e: 78). We can also appreciate the intellectual blind spots that might come with expatriate status; after all, to write nostalgically of “old‐fashioned dirt farming” in the midst of the dust bowl severely undermines Stein’s neoliberal political message.
My final point is also the most obvious: spatial analysis is always political. Stein was wrong about monetary policy, as she was wrong about New Deal social programs. But my own casual references to fashionable Paris streets always threatens to cross over to a blasé indifference to the less fashionable quarters of the metropolis. My clinical listing of the cold, hard facts of war casualties always threatens to cross over to an instrumentalist view of human sacrifice. My strict accounting of unstable currency references threatens to cross over to mere historical curiosity about numerical abstractions. The writers of the Lost Generation importantly remind us that behind our fixation on the details of the postwar expatriate experience lie stories and lives that defy neat summing up.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 5 (THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR I).