IF THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION had had time and manpower enough, it would surely have investigated American authors in 1920, although it would have reached its conclusions before a formal inquiry even began. The BOI would have realized that there had been a change, a significant change, just as there had been a change in the relationship between labor and management, just as there had been a change between radicals and law-enforcement officials. The BOI would have noted that, all of a sudden, traitorous or lurid sentiments were bursting from the page for all to see; it would have condemned the fact that filth was replacing literature, perversion replacing tales of proper societal behavior. It would have condemned the writing as un-American and determined that if people were capable of such rebellion in novels, poetry, and drama for the stage, perhaps they were equally capable in real life.
As a result of the Great War, men and women of letters had become preoccupied with politics and social criticism; in the former they leaned more leftward than ever before, and in the latter they were scathing. There were no terrorists among them, no anarchists or Bolshies, at least not as far as anyone knows, but neither were there Eagle Scouts, Rotarians, Chamber of Commerce boosters, flag-wavers, members of the newly formed American Legion, or any other celebrants of the grand ol’ status quo. In many cases, the sympathies of the artists seemed to lie with the groups that threatened the United States more than with those that praised it uncompromisingly. But artistic violence, or at least opposition, whether it be verbal or visual, was not the concern of law-enforcement officials. It was, rather, the product of men and women of thought and careful expression, not propaganda of the deed.
However, it was not just the pessimism of the postwar years that fueled the artists of 1920; it was a desire to explore more profoundly than ever before the hidden corners of human nature. Such European authors as Zola, Flaubert, and Hardy, among others, were already doing that. It was time for American authors to follow their lead, time for more mature and probing work.
With few exceptions, the art that left the greatest impression in 1920, and is still studied today for both its stylistic innovation and cultural hostility, reflected the views of the lost generation: disenfranchisement, it was, set to page and stage and in many cases canvas. Such painters as Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, among several others, were taking apart the pieces of humanity and putting them back in different sizes and shapes and even places, creating images that startled, captivated, and appalled. Conventional notions of composition and shape, of color, placement, and conveyance of meaning, were ignored, even destroyed, forcing Americans to look differently at what they saw both in the museum and on the street outside. The revolution in painterly vision left more destruction of tradition in its path than a tornado leaves after it rips through a trailer park.
AROUND THE TIME THAT HARDING defeated Cox, copies of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street were being delivered to America’s bookstores. It was an appropriate coincidence. The novel could easily have been set in Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio. Instead, according to historian Nathan Miller, Main Street
satirized Gopher Prairie, a thinly-disguised portrait of Sauk Center, [Lewis’s] hometown in Minnesota, where “dullness is made God.” … the lodge members in their comic regalia, and the women of the uplift societies—were skewered for what Lewis saw as provincialism, emotional poverty, and lack of spiritual values. The publication of Main Street ranks with that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the few literary events with a profound political or social fallout, for it established a new way of looking at small-town America.
Relating the wistful thoughts of the novel’s heroine, Carol Milford, Lewis wrote, “The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot.” Carol was a student at Blodgett College, “a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities.”
What was so blasphemous about Main Street was that it had been standard practice at the time, and for generations preceding, to idealize small-town America. It was viewed as a fortress that housed old-fashioned morality, older-fashioned values, and the principles that, at least on paper, had been the foundation of the United States ever since those papers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, had been written.
But the fortress had been penetrated. Main Street left no axiom unexamined, no bromide unshattered. To Lewis, places like his hometown taught conformity in their schools more effectively than they did any academic subject. The accumulation of material goods was venerated; the striving after intellectual goals was looked at suspiciously, a goal of socialists, that kind of person. And as for one’s so-called friends, the trustworthy, rock-steady, benevolent men and women of Gopher Prairie, the people who made it such a cheerful place to live, Lewis warned against turning one’s back to them, warned that they would cheat and lie about their neighbors at the slightest prospect of gain for themselves. Even for the simple joy of gossiping, reveling in the power of possessing information unknown to others. Small towns, small minds, and, when opportunities for gain presented themselves, small treacheries. If Lewis’s masterpiece could be reduced to a single phrase, this would have been a good candidate.
Critics, on the whole, were not fond of Main Street. One New Yorker, Deems Taylor, normally a music critic, said the book “owed much of its success to its offering culturally insecure Americans … ‘a set of consistently contemptible and uncultured characters to whom [they] superior must feel.’”
And Walter Lippmann, the dean of global-affairs columnists who virtually never wrote about literature either, accused Lewis of merely “inventing stereotypes … substituting new prejudices for old … marketing useful devices … used by millions … to express their new, disillusioned sense of America.” In addition, critics charged, Lewis’s prose tended to ramble; he was less interested in telling a single, unified story than he was in accumulating incidents to make his accusations—piling on, rather than proceeding artfully. And those accusations were more often than not too harsh, his characters more parodies than flesh-and-blood mortals—such was the consensus.
The fact that men who were not normally book reviewers, men of more prestigious rank, raced into print to denounce Lewis is telling, indicative of the threat that Main Street posed to the conventional values to which they subscribed. But Taylor was wrong in his specifics. Lippmann was wrong. Their condemnations were publicity for the book, their judgments more suitable to the days of “lassies in sunbonnets” than to the present. For what Lewis was doing was writing a new kind of fiction, helping to create a new literature, one of the purposes of which was to stir emotions, examine motives beneath the surface, and reinforce the newly forming biases that were the basis of the lost generation.
After a slow start, Main Street had sold 200,000 copies before 1920 ended. Within a few years, the total was up to three million, and the book has not stopped selling, or being studied in both high school and college, ever since. A spokesperson for the publisher whom I contacted claimed not to know how many copies of Main Street are being sold these days, a patently and inexplicably false statement, but the number is surely in the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds.
Former small-town newspaper publisher Warren G. Harding could have lived on Main Street. He looked the part, espoused the cautious means of proceeding from day to day. “What is the greatest thing in life?” he once asked; then answered for himself: “Happiness. And there is more happiness in the American small village than in any place on earth.” He could have taken the physician Will Kennicott’s place at the side of his contrarian wife, one-time Blodgett student Carol Milford, whom he married later in the story.
Carol Milford Kennicott, try though she did, could never make herself comfortable in Gopher Prairie. She had married Will in good faith; but when she could no longer bear the stagnation of her hometown, or her husband’s complacency and inability to appreciate art of any kind, she left him for two years of war-related work in Washington, D.C. She returned to her husband and others she knew in Gopher Prairie not so much because she wanted to, but because there was nowhere else to go. As the 46-year-old poet Robert Frost had written five years earlier, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Gopher Prairie welcomed her back, but she was not feeling what she had hoped to feel; there were times, in fact, when she seemed more discouraged than she had been before her out-of-town sabbatical.
Less than a year after leaving Washington, when the Kennicotts’ first child, a little girl, was born, Carol led husband Will to the hospital nursery and
pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. “Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It’s a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you would arrest anarchists; you’d arrest all these children while they’re asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars.”
Her husband might have agreed with her, or perhaps did not. After all these years of marriage, his disputes with Carol had become lifeless. “Yump, probably be changes all right,” he yawned. And that was the end of the conversation.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS JUST BEGINNING to make a name for himself as a short-story writer, but his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, full of the angst and emptiness of the lost generation, was still six years away. It might not have been published at all, however, had it not been for the urging of F. Scott Fitzgerald—impressed by Hemingway, then later dominated and ridiculed by him, the beggar turning vindictively on his benefactor, Fitzgerald pleaded with his editor at Scribner’s, the famed Maxwell Perkins, to take his friend as a client. Perkins was dubious at first, but began reading Hemingway’s short stories in 1920 and finally, in 1925, published a collection of them, called In Our Time.
Then, the next year, Scribner’s published The Sun Also Rises, a tale of tedious people that is among the most tedious of twentieth-century classics. The book became the first of a shelf-load of successes for Hemingway that included, among others, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast—all with vastly different plots, yet most featuring at least a few characters from the lost generation. “This is a hell of a dull talk,” says a woman in The Sun Also Rises, accurately summing up the conversation Hemingway has presented in the book. “How about some of that champagne,” she says, just as accurately summing up the hobby of choice—virtually a vocation—for all the characters. If it weren’t for abuse of bulls in the ring in Pamplona, Spain, nothing would have happened in Hemingway’s volume at all. It is difficult to write purposeful books about purposeless people.
His entire body of work enabled Hemingway to join Lewis in winning the Nobel Prize. Lewis won it in 1930 but refused to accept; Hemingway accepted his own trophy twenty-four years later. “For a true writer,” he said in his speech in Oslo that, in a way, described the literature that had changed so drastically in the twenties,
each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done, or that others have tried and failed. Then, sometimes, with good luck, he will succeed. … It is because we have had such great writers in the past, that a writer is driven far out, past where he can go, out where no one can help him.
AS A NOVELIST, FITZGERALD GOT the jump on his friend, publishing This Side of Paradise in 1920, one of only four full-length books, not counting short-story compilations, that he would manage to finish. The book’s protagonist, Amory Blaine, is, like the author, a Minnesotan with a high opinion of his own abilities. He attends Princeton to have his opinion confirmed; then, according to plan, he will become a successful author.
In brief, This Side of Paradise is the story of two of Blaine’s love affairs, one in Minneapolis with Isabelle, which ends with his returning to college at Princeton; and the other, which begins at Princeton and ends with his beloved Rosalind deciding to marry a far wealthier man than he. He develops a crush on another young lady, and then another, but neither lasts nor means nearly as much to him as the first two relationships.
The result of it all is a distraught, and surprised, protagonist.
Women—of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvelously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience—had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.
At the novel’s end, Blaine’s summary of his life to date is a sad one, despite being uttered to himself under “the crystalline, radiant sky. ‘I know myself,’ he cries, ‘but that is all.’”
This Side of Paradise was the biggest seller of Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Unfortunately, he was deluded by the book’s success into thinking that all of his work would be so profitable, and that he was, therefore, capable of the same kind of wealthy lifestyle of which he wrote. But it was just that: a delusion. And it was not just literary profits that misled him. A movie producer optioned This Side of Paradise for $3,000. But the movie was not made and the money not paid, the producer forfeiting on the project and the story remaining between the covers of the book version. Still, Fitzgerald continued to believe that financial woes, which would in fact worsen for him, were a thing of the past.
Nineteen-twenty was probably the apogee of Fitzgerald’s life, both professionally and personally. In addition to This Side of Paradise, Scribner’s also published Flappers and Philosophers, Fitzgerald’s first book of short stories; and then later in the year, seven months to the day after his novel was released, he married Zelda Sayre, the free-wheeling, universally pursued but deadly addled, nonsensically poetic belle of Montgomery, Alabama. Somehow, he believed he could lead a stable life with her. Another delusion.
Actually, the year before they wed, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford tells us, “she wrote to him that if he felt he had lost his feeling for her, if he’d be happier without their marrying, she would release him from whatever promises had once been made.” It was an offer he should not have refused.
And she added: “Somehow ‘When love has turned to kindness’ doesn’t horrify me like it used to—It has such a peaceful sound—like something to come back to and rest—and sometimes I’m glad we’re not exactly like we used to be—and I can’t help feeling that it would all come back again.”
After years of alcoholism, which fueled the couple’s frantic, argumentative, high-volume, bar-hopping, glass-smashing, fountain-bathing mirth, Scott died in the arms of another woman, his Hollywood mistress, in 1940. He was forty-four years old.
Years earlier, Zelda had decided to revive a passion of her youth—although one to which she had not given so much as a thought since she was a little girl—and become a ballet dancer. Never mind that she had reached the over-the-hill age of twenty-eight, she would make up in dedication what she lacked in adolescent suppleness. And she tried, oh how she tried, with a maniacal, pointless energy, working at her exercises with the zeal of her younger self, as all the while Scott ridiculed her with the zeal of a committed drunk. She “practiced in front of the great ornate mirror,” Milford says, “sweating profusely, stopping only for water, which she kept beside the Victrola, and ignoring Scott’s remarks as he watched her leap and bend. He hated the large glass that reflected her, doubling the portraits of angst. He called it their ‘Whorehouse Mirror.’”
Every muscle in her body ached throughout every day of her attempted comeback, and the harder she attempted to execute her moves, the more she realized that she was no longer capable of them, no longer capable of her dreams. But what else was there for her to do? Scott had no answers, and so she kept at it, sometimes screaming at what her body would no longer permit of her. But it was not just her body that had lost its ability to do as she pleased; her mind, which had long been slipping away from her, began to accelerate its pace, until finally she lost it altogether and was committed to a mental hospital. She lived there in a state of dull, medicated felicity until 1948, eight years after her husband died. Then, for reasons unknown, a fire broke out in the kitchen. “There was no automatic fire alarm system in the old stone and frame building and no sprinkler system.” Medical personnel saved a few of the patients, but Zelda was not one of them. The hospital was consumed in flames and burned to the ground so quickly, it might have not been there in the first place.
Engraved on Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s tombstone are the famous words that bring to a close Scott’s shortest but most enduring novel, The Great Gatsby. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
BEFORE THE FITZGERALDS CRASHED, THEY had become the embodiments of the wild side of the twenties, the sin-without-atonement, drunkenness-without-hangovers, war-without-emotional-reckoning side. To look at the photographs of them, so fashionably and expensively attired, is to think of mansions on Long Island, hotel suites overlooking Central Park, villas in the south of France. It is to think of deep blue water in swimming pools, perfectly mown grass on private tennis courts and on gently sloping lawns that reached from the front porticoes of mansions to the edge of Long Island Sound. It was an image that the Fitzgeralds, Scott in particular, did much to encourage.
But a careful reading of his work reveals that he knew, even accepted, the phrase that Gertrude Stein had coined and passed along to Hemingway. He knew, when he was sober, that he was lost. He knew that his wife was lost. Sobriety, then, was the curse of unbearable knowledge to them both. Never once in 1920 did he use the phrase “lost generation” in his public writing, but in his first novel he didn’t have to.
“Here was a new generation,” Fitzgerald mused in This Side of Paradise, showing remarkable insight for a man of twenty-four, “shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery [sic] of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride: a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all the gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
It proved the epitaph for an era, written by one of the first men to realize that the era would require one.
THE FRENCH WERE ONE OF the two countries battered most in the war. More than a quarter of a generation was lost. “1,315,000 [men] had been killed in action—27 percent of all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven, a figure that does not include the wounded: those left blind, or legless, or armless, or with no limbs at all.”
As for Great Britain, it would mourn the passing of what it referred to as an entire generation; although strictly speaking it was less than that, the death toll was appalling. More than 908,000 men, most of them between their late teens and mid-twenties, gave up their lives on one battlefield or another, while another two million were injured, some seriously and permanently. In his BBC documentary Voices from the Great War, Peter Vansittart said that “As a small boy in Southsea, I saw streets disfigured by ragged, unwanted ex-soldiers, medalled, but ill, blind, maimed, selling matches, bootlaces, notepaper, trundling barrel-organs or standing with a melancholy dog or monkey. … Their wretchedness suggested that, in overcoming Germany, they had earned some monstrous penalty now being … enacted.”
In 1914 alone, it has been estimated, more than thirty percent of Englishmen between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were killed. Before the war was over, one out of every eight men of all ages who lived in the British Isles would lose his life because of the fighting, either because he was in the midst of it or was too close at the wrong time. Although it is not certain, civilian deaths probably surpassed 100,000.
AMONG THE MOST TROUBLED, AND talented, of those who did not serve in the war was David Herbert Lawrence, more commonly known by the initials of his first and middle names. He was a schoolteacher in his early thirties, and thus old enough to escape conscription, when England first began to fear not merely defeat but annihilation. Given his nook in academe, there was little he could do other than write about the prospect. But he did not do so in a conventional manner. Even though he worked on his book from 1916 through 1918, the most bruising, brutal, battle-wearying years of them all, Lawrence did not write what one would call an anti-war novel, of which, he knew, scores would be produced in the years ahead. Instead, he reached more broadly. In Women in Love, the title notwithstanding, his purpose—or one of them—was to vilify the entire nation in which he lived, its values and ideals, its weaknesses and hypocrisies, all of which, in Lawrence’s view, made it susceptible to the Great War’s needless violence.
A novel offensive to British society in some manner was to be expected from D. H. Lawrence. His previous book, The Rainbow, issued in 1915, contained scenes so sexually explicit for its time, although hardly for ours, that it was declared obscene. The author was not sentenced, but his book was punished to the maximum extent of the law. The publisher was ordered to stop manufacturing it, and authorities seized as many copies already in existence as they could retrieve and burned them. One can only imagine Lawrence’s reaction to the expense and energy of so trivial a matter as a book-burning a full year after the war had begun.
For more than a decade, a copy of The Rainbow could not be legally secured in Great Britain. In New York it was available legally, but in privately published editions, which sold in small numbers and only to those who knew the book existed in the first place. As far as the author was concerned, he was left where he had so long dwelt, on the perilous brink of poverty.
In The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen finds the British educational system to be “sham, spurious”; she rages, with her country on the battlefield, that such “organised fighting” might send the whole universe “tumbling into the bottomless pit”; and decides that “[s]he hated religion, because it lent itself to her confusion. … There was then no Jesus, no sentimentality.” For good measure, if even more bad publicity, Lawrence threw in a lesbian affair for Ursula and a few hints of heterosexual sodomy.
And then, five years later, in 1920, came Women in Love, the sequel to The Rainbow. In the main, Women in Love is concerned with the affairs between two couples. One is Ursula and a troubled intellectual named Rupert Birkin, whom Lawrence might have based at least partly on himself; the other is Ursula’s sister Gudrun and the business tycoon Gerald Crich. As might be expected, the love scenes were even bolder than those published five years earlier. For instance, Ursula and Birkin, in the midst of foreplay:
She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into herself. She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction.
Ironically, though, it was the hint of men in love that most upset at least some of the readers of Women in Love and almost all of the authorities. At one point in the story, Birkin is ill and Gerald comes to see him. “The two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other,” Lawrence tells us. And a few lines later:
Gerald really loved Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was too unreal;—clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken seriously, not quite to be counted as a man among men.
If it had been Gerald who had traced with his hands the loins and thighs of Birkin, the British Isles would have exploded with indignation. As it was, the book created controversy enough for its time. Most reviews were negative, and even many of those that were positive criticized Lawrence for going too far. Said one commentator, throwing his share of logs onto the furor, “I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.”
As Lawrence wrote Women in Love, his apparent bisexuality erupted. All around him young men were dying—lean and strapping, handsome and bold; the criminality of such waste left him unhinged, and would in time go so far as to affect his physical well-being. In 1912, at the age of twenty-seven, he met a married woman named Frieda Weekley, and he would spend the rest of his life with her. They lived in adulterous sin for two years, making Lawrence an even more disdainful figure to many, before marrying, after her divorce became final, in the summer of 1914. That he loved her is undeniable. But Frieda believed that, within a few years of their vows, her husband had had at least one affair with a man, a farmer named William Henry Hocking. Lawrence’s discovery of his attraction to men as well as women, which had been building in him for years, left him secretly tortured, painfully ambivalent.
On the one hand, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not.” And, “I believe the nearest I’ve come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about 16.”
On the other hand, Lawrence professed to despise the men who loved the Brandwens in Women in Love, claiming that it was difficult to write about them, as he found their latent homosexuality malodorous and filthy. He dreamed of beetles, he said, when he thought of Crich and Birkin, and would awaken in the black of night disgusted with himself. In an earlier draft of the book, Lawrence was more transparent about homosexuality, writing about two would-be male lovers who engaged in a wrestling match not for the sport of it but for the romance of coupling.
Frieda stayed with him through it all. But just before Women in Love was published, their lives took a turn. Frieda did not see it coming; her husband might have surprised himself as well.
Lawrence decided that he could no longer live in a place like England. He pronounced himself an exile, escaping not just the war’s terrible aftermath, but the criticism that his books and essays had already aroused and the controversy that he knew lay ahead from Women in Love. He and Frieda went first to Italy, but Lawrence soon grew restless and Frieda, ever compliant, was willing to uproot herself before they had even settled. The two of them then began to drift aimlessly, their destinations often determined by the smallness of the sums of money that they could afford. They sailed in steerage to the United States, and from there traipsed on foot into Mexico. Also ahead of them lay Australia, Malta, France, Germany, Monte Cassino, and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. It was a “savage enough pilgrimage,” Lawrence wrote to another friend, one that enabled him to find no peace, no geographical basis for contentment.
He kept writing all the while, but his health began to fail now, and the only book of significance that he produced after 1920 was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 1928, four years after the savagery of his travels had ended and he had returned to England. He managed to squeeze two more novels of uneven merit into the next two years, but in 1930 he died in France, an exhausted and tormented man who looked as if he had lived more of life than his years suggested. He was forty-five, only one year older than Fitzgerald.
Lawrence’s was not what people were used to thinking about when they thought of the literary life. It was more the life of an escaped prisoner, one who had managed to extricate himself from his cell but was unable to free himself from the ceaseless punishment meted out by the years in which he lived.
NOT ALL, HOWEVER, WAS BLEAK or lascivious on the world’s bookshelves in 1920. As it happened, that was the year when an author who would go on to become an industry, and remains one almost a century later, published her first book. The author, like Lawrence, was a Britisher but had virtually nothing else in common with him, including gender. But although Agatha Christie was a woman, she published her first novel in the voice of a man, Captain Hastings, one of thousands of small-town English police officers.
He was not, however, the story’s hero. That distinction belongs to Hercule Poirot, a private investigator from Belgium who would go on to achieve a distinction in the real world that only he, of all the fictional characters ever created, would be able to claim.
He was a charming fellow in his way. Undoubtedly he gave off a whiff of snootiness, an air of superiority—but wasn’t he entitled? Nobody could detect the way Poirot detected, and no one was as ingeniously clever in assembling the suspects in a single room of a British mansion in the final chapter of a book and, after a series of false hints about the killer’s identity to raise the level of suspense, actually revealing it.
In narrating the first of Poirot’s adventures in 1920, Captain Hastings, upon his initial meeting with the unlikely-looking crime-solver, was impressed that, despite the fact of his being but five feet, four inches tall, “his extravagance of personality … was sufficiently plausible to stand and survive by himself.” Christie biographer Janet Morgan continues with her description of Poirot by relating that he “was clever, and equipped with a pompous character, a luxuriant moustache, and a curious egg-shaped head.”
But how was Christie to find the peace she needed to concentrate on her first of Poirot’s adventures? She decided, after a time, to write at least part of her novel in a hotel room in a section of England that was “desolate, tranquil, and utterly unique in the nearly spiritual serenity that transcends the vast moorland.” Nonetheless, the creative drive demanded by Poirot’s investigative methods would tax her physically as much as it did artistically. According to biographer Richard Hack, the ambience “was dreary, yes, and outside, the damp cold weather no doubt furthered that impression as Agatha settled into a daily routine of rising early and writing in longhand for several hours in the morning, until her fingers ached and cramped around her pencil, and the lunch bell finally pealed the call for the dining room.”
Christie’s fingers did not completely un-cramp for the rest of the day; she was finished writing until tomorrow.
And when she was finished writing her book in its entirety, she did what all unknown authors did in those days before agents—she submitted it, unsolicited, through the mail to a publishing house, hoping that someone who worked there would pluck her envelope from the stacks and stacks of other unsolicited manuscripts and read it. In this case, that is exactly what happened, and it did so, to Christie’s ineffable joy and immediate success, at one of England’s leading publishers, the Bodley Head.
Stunned when an editor contacted her and told her he had actually read The Mysterious Affair at Styles, even more stunned when he asked for a meeting, and stunned yet further after the meeting when he told her the book would be published and then offered her a contract, Christie virtually took flight from his office and “wanted to hug someone, or scream, or do something so wonderfully silly that everyone on the street would stop and stare in her direction.”
Hercule Poirot’s career was about to begin.
Christie could not, or would not, ever satisfactorily explain the origin of either her hero’s name or his Belgian nationality. But his brilliant deductions at Styles made him, virtually overnight, the most famous crime-solver on the planet. Only he, it seems, could have discovered the identity of the murderer of the grande dame of Styles, Emily Cavendish Inglethorp, who was elderly, near death, and had a great deal of money to dispense when her demise finally came.
This first of Christie’s books, in Captain Hastings’s voice, began as follows:
The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somehow subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumours which still persist.
However inadvertently, Christie was being coy. She wanted the rumors to persist, rumors not only about the possible perpetrator of Dame Inglethorp’s slaying, but of the murders by the score she would set to paper in the years ahead, eventually putting aside her pencil and, with fingers straightened, making use of a typewriter.
And, to this very day, the rumors have indeed persisted.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie was born in 1890, her parents wealthy but their daughter uninterested in other little girls of her age and similar circumstances. Although she would later describe her childhood as a happy one, Christie preferred to spend her time alone, with her pets, and often with her imaginary friends. One of them was Sue de Verte, and little Agatha was perhaps describing herself as much as her fantasy playmate when she wrote that Sue was “curiously colourless, not only in appearance … but also in character.”
As she grew older, Agatha turned to books for companionship, and they may have been her truest friends of all in childhood. She began with the works of Maria Louisa Molesworth, who was simply Mrs. Molesworth on her dust jackets and who produced such British childhood classics as Carrots, The Cuckoo Clock, and Tell Me A Story. Eventually Agatha moved up to the sophisticated, sometimes nonsensical verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and in time, too inspired by her reading to resist, she began to write her own works. She began with short stories that were not published, then novels that were not published. But she was becoming a determined young lady and would not be dissuaded by early disappointment.
It is the story of many an author. Years of failure—or, to consider them less depressingly and in some cases more realistically, years of learning her craft—and then finally a breakthrough.
At this point, however, Christie’s real-life story, like her fiction, takes an unforeseen twist. The Mysterious Affair at Styles becomes an immediate best seller. So does every other book she writes, all of them mysteries, more of them than the number of years remaining in her life. It is reported by her estate that the books of the woman who would eventually become Dame Agatha, a total of sixty-six novels and fifteen short-story collections, rank behind only the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare in sales. She is, thus, with four billion of her volumes in print, the most widely read novelist of all time.
And as if that weren’t enough, she also succeeded beyond any playwright’s dreams on the stage, where her work The Mousetrap has for many years been the longest-running play in history. It opened in London’s West End in 1952 and, as of this writing, after more than sixty years, has yet to close. On November 18, 2012, it celebrated its 25,000th performance. It has gone far beyond the status of mere theatrical drama to being one of England’s principal tourist attractions, ranking with Big Ben, the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace.
Even Christie, in her autobiography, admitted her puzzlement at the success of The Mousetrap. “Apart from replying with the obvious answer, ‘Luck!’—because it is luck, ninety per cent. luck at least,” Christie wrote, “I should say … it is well constructed. The thing unfolds so that you want to know what happens next, and you can’t quite see where the next few minutes will lead you.”
At the beginning of the play, with the stage still in darkness, a young woman is murdered. After the killer is finally identified, the person’s identity a surprise to almost all, the curtain falls and the audience is asked not to discuss the play’s ending with family members, friends, or associates at work, who might thus have the experience of The Mousetrap spoiled for them. The assumption is that, eventually, everyone in London, whether resident or tourist, will get around to seeing it. So far, almost everyone has.
Curiously, the world’s longest-running play has never had much success in this country. Hundreds of productions have been mounted, but almost all of them in community and regional theatres, and they have been limited by the theatres’ schedules to a run of a few weeks, a month at the most. No attempts at a major New York production have been made for decades, and none has ever had more than a tiny fraction of the success of the original.
Still, that original, now an institution, is the great marvel of live drama—certainly in modern times. And Christie’s continuing book sales are the great marvel of the publishing world. She is far from being the world’s most honored author, often criticized for an inability to create three-dimensional characters, her works accused of being puzzles more than true literary creations. Nonetheless, whatever her shortcomings, Agatha Christie is without question the queen of engaging quantity.
AH, IF ONLY HE COULD have offered his services to the Bureau of Investigation in the United States after the Wall Street bombing. …
On August 6, 1975, the New York Times ran one of its rare front-page obituaries. It reported the death of Hercule Poirot. But it was a strange kind of passing, and there was far too much to say about it for a single page. The notice of decease continued at greater length on page sixteen.
An article about the death of a man of Poirot’s eminence is always accompanied by a picture. However, since no photograph of the decedent could ever be taken, the Times article was accompanied by a painting done some fifty years earlier, when Poirot was at the peak of his powers, not to mention the peak of his dandified, even haughty, presence. It looked just like him.
Since his was a death that saddened hundreds of millions of readers the world over, the obituary of this man deserves to be quoted at some length.
Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.
Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.
At the end of his life, he was arthritic, and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false mustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.
Mr. Poirot, who was just 5 feet 4 inches tall, went to England from Belgium during World War I as a refugee. He settled in a little town not far from Styles, then an elaborate country estate, where he took on his first private case. …
The news of his death was confirmed by Dodd, Mead, Dame Agatha’s [American] publishers, who will put out “Curtain,” the novel that chronicles his final days, on Oct. 15.
The Poirot of the final volume is only a shadow of the well-turned out, agile investigator who, with a charming but immense ego and fractured English, solved uncounted mysteries in the 37 full-length novels and collections of short stories in which he appeared.
Dame Agatha reports in “Curtain” that he managed, in one final gesture, to perform one more act of cerebration that saved an innocent bystander from disaster. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.
It was the first and only obituary of a fictional character that the New York Times has ever published.
CHRISTIE WAS THE MAGNIFICENT EXCEPTION of 1920, a traditionalist who succeeded in a radical age of literature, which consisted of verse as well as prose. T. S. Eliot, who had shaken the world of poetry a few years earlier with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and would startle it again in two years with the modernist classic The Waste Land, published his first volume of collected works in 1920, including Prufrock. It was the poem’s first great showcase. Described as “a drama of literary anguish,” Prufrock’s language was dense and some of its references oddly chosen, but one did not have to understand every word in the epic to feel the aching depression of the title character’s life, a life in which there was no love, no music, no hope. Going further, Eliot biographer Craig Raine offers a withering description of Mr. Prufrock, calling him “a thin-skinned sensitive, a dithering compass of cowardice and crippling lack of self-esteem. Prufrock fails to live, fails to declare himself—and is therefore culpable by romantic lights. He does not seize the day.” It is, rather, the days that seize him, and do with him what they will.
Eliot, an Englishman who moved to St. Louis as a young man, was another of the year’s prominent figures who looked as if he belonged on Main Street, although in a position superior to that of Harding—perhaps bank president, perhaps president of the Gopher Prairie Chamber of Commerce, despite appearing a bit reserved for a hale-fellow-well-met crowd. Eliot wore three-piece suits, parted his hair in a wide, straight line and flattened it to his scalp, both of which actions appeared to have been taken ruthlessly. He was a private man. His smile was slight and benign, his mind always appearing to be on something other than the photograph. The frames of his glasses, which he wore in only a few of his pictures, were perfectly round.
Eventually, moving back across the ocean and settling as far as comfort would allow from Gopher Prairie, Eliot became a citizen of Great Britain, as staid in his choice of homeland as he was in his appearance. But devoted to it. When the United States announced it was entering the Great War with little more than a year remaining, Eliot wrote from London to his mother in St. Louis with undisguised bitterness. “You [Americans] will be having all the excitement and bustle of war with none of the horrors and despairs.”
For Agatha Christie, the Great War was seldom more than a fact turned up in the background of a suspect by Poirot or her other great detective, the village busybody Miss Jane Marple. It usually meant nothing more than that the individual in question knew how to shoot a gun, or that he might still have walked with a slight limp.
BUT T. S. ELIOT WAS not what he seemed, for he created nothing less than a revolution in verse, an overthrow of conventional themes and rhythms, the end of romance and the beginning of introspection that could lead down alleys so dark that their entrances had not even been visible before. His was the poetry of the disaffected intellectual, the lament of the lost generation set to atonal music. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot writes:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized on a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
Prufrock felt the inevitability of time, of its passage and power, and of his inability to do anything other than yield to it, to feel it as a weight upon him, pressing down without surcease. Haunting thoughts they were, that Eliot expressed, but an element of his genius was the small, seemingly irrelevant details out of which he so poignantly related cosmic sorrows.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his legs and arms are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decision and revisions which a minute will reverse.
…
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Prufrock has heard mermaids singing, somewhere in the distance, but does not believe they will ever sing to him. They will provide no relief from his suffering, none of the contentment he cannot find on land.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Eliot knew early in his career that he would not write nearly as much poetry as others, although he did not explain why. It may be that he had already decided that writing for the theatre would take too much of his time; ahead of him still, among others, were such plays as Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party, and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which provided the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s late-century musical delight, Cats. Or it may be that he realized his poems demanded too much of him, left him psychically enervated. “My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse,” he conceded once to a friend, “and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.”
Most were. No one had ever made one shudder through his reading of poems like T. S. Eliot. The collection published in 1920 was far from a best seller and, as far as non-existent human beings were concerned, J. Alfred Prufrock could not compare in popularity to Hercule Poirot; but Eliot’s anthology was one of the most influential collections that the literary world would ever know—although, for the most part, the influence would not be felt until time had passed and comparisons were more easily made.
THAT POETRY COULD BE TAKEN down yet another untrodden path the same year was a remarkable coincidence. But that is exactly what happened. Between Eliot and an exceedingly different kind of man named Carl Sandburg, the very definition of verse was expanded in 1920, beyond limits that would have been thought possible earlier in the century.
If Eliot was ethereal, Sandburg was gritty, the poet of the working class, of the robber barons’ victims, although there are times when Sandburg seems to be exalting in the raw power of industry more than sympathizing with those who have been oppressed by it.
Eliot was for a year a visiting professor at Harvard, and for a longer period the head of the prestigious English publishing firm of Faber and Faber. Sandburg, before landing a reportorial job with the Chicago Daily News, worked as a milk-wagon driver, a farm laborer, a bricklayer, a traveling salesman, a coal-heaver, and both a servant and a porter at different hotels. As a young man he undertook “an exploration of the American frontier as part of the vast procession of hoboes, tramps and bums who sought to find or escape work in the wake of the depression of the 1890s.” He would come to describe himself as an “Eternal Hobo.”
Sandburg attended three colleges, including the United States Military Academy at West Point, but didn’t last at any of them for more than a few months, and would never receive a degree.
But he knew life, life as all too many Americans lived it at the time, and he wrote about it in a distinctive manner, his style as extraordinary as his subject matter. In a poem he never published, he wrote “Study the wilderness under your own hat,” and it might have been precisely the aphorism that spurred him on.
In 1920, however, his long face already beginning to settle into its often dour expression and his hair to whiten, he published Smoke and Steel. It was a vast sampling of his work that could not have been more different, in either sensibility or topic, from Eliot’s. But neither could it have been more similar, in its own way, to the concerns of the year, the reports in the newspapers, the explanation of continuing work stoppages.
Smoke of a brick-red dust
Winds on a spiral
Out of the stacks
For a hidden and glimpsing moon.
This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill,
This is the slang of coal and steel.
The day-gang hands it to the night gang,
The night gang hands it back.
Stammer at the slang of this—
Let us understand half of it.
In the rolling mills and sheet mills,
In the harr and boom of the blast fires,
The smoke changes its shadow
And men change their shadow;
A nigger, a wop, a bohunk changes.
But Sandburg was a remarkably versatile poet, much more so than he is given credit for, and Smoke and Steel is a collection of almost impossible diversity. Biographer Penelope Niven tells us that it included “reflections on the aftermath of war. There were lyrical affirmations of family and home in poems for [his wife] Paula and the children. He wrote of peach blossoms, birds, the landscapes he loved, and of prophecy for his daughters.”
One of the latter was called, simply, “Helga.”
The wishes on this child’s mouth
Came like snow on marsh cranberries;
The tamarack kept something for her;
The wind is ready to help her shoes.
The north has loved her; she will be
A grandmother feeding geese on frosty
Mornings; she will understand
Early snow on the cranberries
Better and better then.
The wilderness under Sandburg’s hat was terrain that he alone knew. One wonders how he would react if reached at a séance and told that, among the buildings and institutions named after him posthumously, in addition to schools and a library, archives and a commemorative stamp, there is, in his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, the Sandburg Mall on W. Carl Sandburg Drive.
Perhaps he would have smiled. “He was hailed as the poet of the future,” biographer Niven wrote, “the poet of America,” and what could have symbolized so well the American future when Sandburg was at the top of his game than a shopping center?
THE MOST RADICAL OF THE new literature might have been written for the stage, and no one wrote it, either in volume, verbosity, or passion, like Eugene O’Neill. Providing the American theatre with some of its most memorable evenings, he was also responsible for some of its longest. In the latter case, the results affected millions of people, not necessarily theatergoers, and are still affecting them more than eighty years later.
In 1928, O’Neill won one of his four Pulitzer Prizes for Strange Interlude, a nine-act epic about abortion and adultery and various other matters that ran for more than four hours. A mere intermission would not do for a play of this duration and emotional intensity; instead, O’Neill provided a dinner break.
Early in the thirties, a troupe of actors performed the play in a space they had recently leased in Quincy, Massachusetts. Across the street was the only place close enough to the new theatre for audience members to dine and still return to their seats in time for the play’s later innings. It was “a curious restaurant,” William Manchester wrote, “with a bright orange roof and pseudo Colonial architecture,” and, with the owner more than $40,000 in debt, was on the verge of bankruptcy when Strange Interlude opened. It was the only restaurant the man owned, the only business about which he cared or knew anything. He was panicked when he considered what lay ahead.
The play, however, was an enormous hit, perhaps more than it had been in any previous production, and because of that, so too was the restaurant. It served hundreds of theatergoers for six nights and one matinee a week, and many of them, pleased with the fare and the prices, told their friends. As a result, the restaurant continued to thrive even after the play closed, and with the evenings not so busy, it began to attract a lunch crowd as well. The owner, a man named Howard Johnson, had Eugene O’Neill to thank not only for saving his business in Quincy, but for enabling it to become one of the first successful eatery franchises in the United States. In 1965, HoJo’s, as it was called, sold more food than McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined. By the late 1970s, the HoJo name was attached to a thousand restaurants and five hundred motor lodges. Strange Interlude’s long interlude had created an empire.
BORN IN 1888, HOWARD JOHNSON’S inadvertent benefactor was the son of a drug-addicted mother and her husband, James, known primarily for his starring role in second-rate road show productions of The Count of Monte Cristo. In fact, for the first seven years of his life, O’Neill was often dragged along with his father, who sometimes played a theatre for a week, sometimes was booked for only a one-night stand. The child and his father and nanny endured “the ceaseless succession of railroad trips and poor hotels. … They never stayed anywhere long enough for a little boy to find a playmate.” Unlike Christie, he did not develop imaginary friends; rather, he began to store up real grievances.
The playwright’s father was an alcoholic, and as O’Neill grew older he began to follow the same path, showing the same instability of character, the same kind of self-destructive thirst. Writes historian Page Smith, O’Neill “was a heavy drinker; he was nicknamed Ego by his Princeton classmates because of his preoccupation with his own states of mind. A few months [after his marriage] he set out on a gold-mining expedition to Honduras. … A son was born in his absence. His wife obtained a divorce, and O’Neill never saw his son until the boy was eleven years old.”
For no particular reason, O’Neill later took passage on a Norwegian vessel bound for Buenos Aires, where “he worked briefly for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, acquiring, in the process, a lifelong distaste for machines.”
Back in the United States, O’Neill continued drinking, reaching new excesses, and at the same time began to absorb the dark new writings of novelists like Jack London and Joseph Conrad. These were the influences for his early plays, which he probably started writing in 1914, at the age of twenty-six. Two years later, supposedly with a trunk full of his work, none of which had ever been performed, he arrived at the Cape Cod theatre of the Provincetown Players. His first play to be produced was also the first one he pulled randomly out of the trunk to be read aloud. The one-act Bound East for Cardiff was presented in Provincetown when O’Neill was twenty-eight.
In 1920, two of his plays were staged in New York, to enviable results. The Emperor Jones, with an all-black cast, “was based on a story that O’Neill had heard in a bar about a Haitian … who, convinced that he could be killed only by a silver bullet, had seized and held power in Haiti for six months.” In O’Neill’s more mystical version, set in the jungle of an unidentified equatorial nation, the playwright’s description of the setting tells all that one needs to know about the mood of the performance. “Only when the eye becomes accustomed to the gloom,” O’Neill wrote, “can the outlines of separate trunks of the nearest trees be made out, enormous pillars of deeper blackness. A somber monotone of wind lost in the leaves moans in the air. Yet this sound serves but to intensify the impression of the forest’s relentless immobility, to form a background throwing into relief its brooding, implacable silence.”
The play is oddly constructed. There are eight scenes, and in all but the first and the last, Emperor Brutus Jones, previously a Pullman porter trying to outrun a murder charge, is the only character who speaks. In the background is the pounding of drums, an ominous sound that Jones interprets as the signal of his impending death.
In the first and last scenes, a white trader named Smithers, a man of dubious probity, is featured. As the play nears an end, Smithers is seen talking to rebels who have set out to kill the emperor. The assassination is accomplished by means of a silver bullet, although it might also be said that Emperor Jones was, in reality, “overthrown by his own fear and madness.” O’Neill’s play, raved the New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott, was a “striking and dramatic study of panic fear.” He might also have added racism. Although decidedly not a racist himself, O’Neill portrayed the trait so effectively in some of his characters that actor Charles Gilpin, one of the few black stage stars of his time, was dropped from the London cast for objecting to the play’s bigotry of language.
O’Neill’s other 1920 opus, produced earlier in the year, was his first full-length work and, in his opinion, “a simon pure uncompromising American tragedy.” According to historian Geoffrey Perrett, Beyond the Horizon had “little plot, no melodrama, no surprises. It was naturalistic, and starkly tragic.” What the play did have, however, was a classical denseness of language new to the contemporary stage, its haunting overtones harkening back to the ancient Greeks.
The Mayo brothers are both in love with the same woman, Ruth Atkins. But Robert, the younger brother, is also in love with faraway places and the shipboard journeys necessary to reach them. “Supposing I was to tell you,” he says at one point, “that it’s just Beauty that’s calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I’ve read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on—in quest of the secret which is hidden over there beyond the horizon.”
But it was not the beauty of the far-off and unknown that eventually attracted Robert so much as it was Ruth Atkins. In winning her heart, though, he gives up his dream, deciding he will not go to sea after all but, rather, will stay with Ruth on the family farm, which has been driving both brothers to poverty and madness. Under these circumstances, Andrew, the older sibling, decides he can no longer stay with Robert, and it is he, the loser in love, who adopts his brother’s dream and becomes the sailor. Later, however, we learn that Ruth has loved Andrew all along, causing Robert to rage at her, calling her, among other things, a “slut,” almost surely the first time that word had been heard by a New York theatrical audience.
“In its time,” declare Arthur and Barbara Gelb in a biography of O’Neill and his father, “Beyond the Horizon was perceived as a play of such tragic sweep and grandeur that it dwarfed the efforts of American playwrights who had come before.” Or, as the Times’s Woollcott put it, the play was “so full of meat that it makes most of the remaining fare seem like the merest of meringue.”
O’Neill was surprised that the reviews were so favorable. He had been dubious. On opening night, he “hid nervously behind a pillar to avoid recognition. The audience was unsure what to make of the play.” Yet the play ran for 111 performances, a surprisingly strong showing for so different a theatrical experience.
O’Neill was asked once to explain why he wrote such dramas as The Emperor Jones and Beyond the Horizon with characters embittered and angry, failing and grasping for rescue from the merest of threads; after all, he was to write more than thirty plays in his career, and only one, Ah, Wilderness!, was a comedy. O’Neill’s reply was brief, and many thought it perverse; inevitably, it told as much about the man as it did about his art.
I have an innate feeling of exultance of tragedy. The tragedy of Man is perhaps the only significant thing about him. … What I am after is to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on the stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering, but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.
Beyond the Horizon was the first of O’Neill’s dramas to win the Pulitzer, and later he and Eliot would also win Nobel prizes. O’Neill was the first American playwright to be so honored, and at the present time he is still the only one.
Anarchy, as it turned out, had more than one form, and it was in 1920 that the written arts gave the term a new definition.
THE MOST SUPERFICIAL LITERATURE OF the decade, and some of the most popular among those who could not bear the ever-spreading gloom of the lost generation in their reading and viewing, was not really literature at all. Yes, the playwright Marc Connelly would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1930; and yes, George S. Kaufman, the Neil Simon of his era, would also win Pulitzers for the stage in 1932 and 1937; and yes, Harold Ross would create the undeniably sophisticated New Yorker in 1925. But the ayes do not have it; the more substantive achievements of these men and others of their informal association were too far in the future. For now, they were primarily self-promoters, and had found an ideal forum for the greater renown that awaited.
Starting in late 1919, Connelly, Kaufman, and Ross would lunch daily at the Algonquin Hotel with newspaper and magazine writers Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Alice Duer Miller, Heywood Broun; newspaper editor Herbert Bayard Swope; actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Margalo Gillmore; and Harpo Marx, who, with his movie career ahead of him at this point, actually spoke as he ate. And there were more; all together, believes Benchley biographer Billy Altman, charter members of the so-called Round Table, or, as they preferred to be known, the Vicious Circle, numbered about two dozen. Their goal was the witticism, the memorable one-liner, the crisply lethal putdown, which another of their group, Franklin Pierce Adams, more commonly known as FPA, would include in Saturday’s “Conning Tower,” his popular column in the New York Tribune. He was thereby “illuminating,” wrote Kaufman’s frequent collaborator, the playwright Moss Hart, at a later date, “not only the world of the theatre, but the world of wit and laughter as well.”
The quips in Adams’s column would be discussed as avidly as later generations would discuss Johnny Carson’s monologue of the previous night. And, like the Tonight Show bon mots, FPA’s collection of Algonquinite quotes bestowed a certain cachet not only on those who uttered them, but on those who knew and could discuss them. Also known as the “Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys,” the column was must-see reading.
By 1920, the jesters of the Algonquin were all the rage in New York. Their verbal riffs seemed especially in tune with the rapid-fire exertions of jazz, as opposed to the complexity in language of such as O’Neill and Eliot, language that was virtually symphonic in presentation if usually desolate in meaning.
According to Kaufman biographer Scott Meredith, the Algonquin lunchers were “nearly all famous members of New York’s smart set, even though some of them had not yet written or appeared in anything of prominence—and a few never did.” Yet, claims the website Quotes Galore, the Algonquinites were cited more than any other assemblage of Americans in history, with the possible exception of deceased presidents. It sounds dubious to me but may, at least for a brief period in the early twenties, have been true.
To Ben Yagoda, on the other hand, it all makes perfect sense. In his history of The New Yorker, published in 2000, he writes that “[New Yorker art critic Murdock] Pemberton and [free-lance publicist John Peter] Toohey, would feed the members’ quips to columnists for whom there wasn’t room at the table, either because the utterers paid them (not likely), or [Algonquin manager] Frank Case paid them (probable), or they just enjoyed placing an item (almost certain). The remarkable result was that this group of several dozen friends and colleagues, none of them at this point outstandingly accomplished, became intimately known to the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of readers of the public prints.”
It was so much in keeping with the nascent values of the celebrity culture. Many of the Round Tablers would, in fact, end up where KDKA’s Leo H. Rosenberg had started, on the radio, as panelists on talk shows or humor-based quiz programs. Robert Benchley would even make it to Hollywood, starring in short subjects in which he provided erudite and preposterous discourse on such topics as the sex life of the polyp.
But it was at the large round table in the Algonquin Hotel, the clock having reached the lunch hour, that the jokes first and most prominently began to fly; that people like Connelly, Kaufman, and Ross sometimes became better known than they would for their more significant achievements.
For instance …
Kaufman, when asked by a press agent how to get the name of his client, an actress, into the newspapers more often: “Shoot her.”
Benchley: “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m not in any hurry.”
Woollcott: “Every girl should be married to [writer] Charlie MacArthur at some period of her life.”
Parker: “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”
Parker: “I like to have a martini,/Two at the very most./After three I’m under the table,/After four I’m under my host.”
Parker, after aging to the point of becoming bespectacled: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
It was Dorothy Parker, a married woman who preferred to be called Mrs. Parker, who emerged as the maven of these carefully scripted, carefully rehearsed ad-libs and spoke what is probably the most famous and clever Round Table bon mot of them all. It seems that when the Vicious Circle was playing a game of their own devising called “I Can Give You a Sentence,” someone tossed out the question, “Can anyone use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence?” Parker’s reply: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”
Other “I Can Give You a Sentence” classics included Kaufman’s “I know a man who has two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punctilious.” And then there was the modest FPA’s own rare contribution, “We wish you a meretricious and a happy new year.”
In her 2013 novel Farewell, Dorothy Parker, author Ellen Meister turns the title character into a modern-day ghost. But Violet Epps, the woman Mrs. Parker haunts, often finds herself thinking back to the golden days when the ghost was a creature of flesh and blood and devilish humor. “For an entire decade,” Violet recalls, “the Algonquin Round Table was a pop-culture phenomenon that came to symbolize the wit and sophistication of the nation’s most cosmopolitan city. And at the center of it was the tiny woman Tallulah Bankhead had called ‘the mistress of the verbal hand grenade,’ Dorothy Parker.”
The Round Table would not be possible today, would not attract either members or public notice. Perhaps not even a table. But yesterday … ah, yesterday, Meister declares, “was a time when Americans were in love with words and enamored of writers.”
She is right. In today’s post-literate society, though, the word “wit” has lost its cachet. Even in formal settings—between hard covers in bookstores, as feature stories in magazines, on the OpEd pages of prestigious newspapers—wit is often used incorrectly, and true wit is as rare as true perception. Some of the writers in whom at least a number of Americans seem most interested have achieved their status because of the speed with which they can text, tweet, and twitter, two thirds of which I cannot define, much less accomplish.
In 1920, though, the word was not only art in many cases, but was being transformed into a different kind of art from what the world had ever known before—more sarcastic, irreverent, haunting, analytical, mystical, emotionally wrenching, deeply personal. But those who succeeded in their use of the word, those masters of the new art, were changing the definition of the term forever.
THE ALGONQUIN HOTEL REMAINS, AS it has always been, in the center of midtown Manhattan. It has lost its prestige over the decades, but not its business. I passed it on my way to work every Friday morning for ten years, always taking a look inside at what seemed to be cavernous darkness; but seldom was there not someone checking in or out, or at least a bellman or two bustling from reception desk to sidewalk or vice versa, obviously busy at something.
Occasionally I would step into the cavern, the gloominess remaining. I have no idea what the lobby looked like in 1920, but it always felt to me when I stood there as if that could have been the year. The furniture is old-fashioned, the wallpaper and fixtures equally are suggestive of another era, an undercurrent of faint mustiness is noticeable. Or is it just imaginable? But the place is well kept up, and the rooms, like those of other noted New York hotels, rent for hundreds of dollars a night.
The Round Table, however, once placed front and center in the Rose Room by Frank Case, has not been there for a long time. There is a painting, though, that brings back all the memories. The Rose Room is brighter than the lobby, and a large oil painting of the Vicious Circle hangs on the wall with all the prominent people gathered around and enough light to see them with their eyes a-twinkle, eager for their turns to feed the “Conning Tower.” First-floor bookcases contain countless volumes by and about Parker, Benchley, Kaufman, and their merry lunchmates. They are covered with glass panes, under lock and key.
Other floors are equally reverential to the past. There are 181 rooms in the hotel, and a one-liner from a long-ago wit has been placed on the door of every one; a guest could as easily say he is in the “horticulture” room as in 322. And each of the hotel’s twenty-four suites is named after one of the most famous figures in the Vicious Circle.
Perhaps those who preached a lost generation were right, but the men and women who had been honored with a seat at the Round Table in the twenties chose to ignore such pessimism, believing it served no purpose other than self-indulgence. Let Hemingway write his deliberately stiff and repetitive novels about it. Let Fitzgerald act it out while under the influence. Let O’Neill put it on the stage and send his audiences home draped in morbidity. Those seated at the Round Table didn’t care. They would wisecrack their way through the apocalypse. Wit above all.
“The Algonquin Round Table,” said Margaret Case Harriman, Frank Case’s daughter, “came to the Algonquin Hotel the way lightning strikes a tree, by accident and mutual attraction.” But lightning is the briefest of phenomena, and the tree may not long withstand its bolt.
INEVITABLY, THE VICIOUS CIRCLE, BASED on so ephemeral a premise as attaining a few lines in the next day’s newspaper, fell apart. Author Edna Ferber, a frequent member and the group’s most commercially successful novelist, said that she knew it was over the day she strolled into the hotel after an absence of several months. She expected to sit and chat with her fellow jesters—and instead found a family of tourists at the hallowed table. She asked where they were from. They said “Kansas.” Ferber was horrified. Kansas! she repeated silently and slunk out of the hotel, hoping not to be recognized. Said Frank Case sadly, “These things don’t last forever.”
Nor did the friendships formed at the Round Table. With the bond of shared publicity having departed, the jokesters found that they had little to say to one another. They would pass on the street, or in the corridors of The New Yorker or some other publication, and nod, say hello, maybe utter a few banalities at each other. Seldom did they rise to the level of repartee. But with few exceptions, the old friends did not snipe at those with whom they used to lunch, did not hold grudges against those whom they believed to be FPA’s favorites; they had simply lost their context and, thus, their reason for a deep cordiality. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t so deep after all. FPA quickly found other people, other events, to write about, and wrote about them well, in a long and distinguished journalistic career.
YEARS LATER, LONG AFTER DOROTHY Parker had read Main Street, seen Beyond the Horizon, and heard Aaron Copland, the homosexual Lithuanian Jew, begin to define American classical music with such promising early works as Keyboard Sonatas 1-3, the queen of the verbal hand grenade looked back on the Round Table. She could not hide her remorse.
These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn’t have to be any truth.
But it was also the day, not terrible at all, of the United States, well on its way to becoming a colossus beyond either conjure or compare. In 1900 it had laid 193,000 miles of railroad tracks; by 1920, almost 254,000. In 1900 it had produced 13,200,000 metric tons of pig iron; the 1920 total was 33,500,000. Between 1920 and the Great Depression, which began gradually in 1929, the Gross National Product per capita grew a remarkable 4.2 percent a year, a rate it has never approached since in peacetime. And according to a Voice of America broadcast, “Americans had more steel, food, cloth, and coal than even the richest foreign nations. By 1920, the United States national income was greater than the combined incomes of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and seventeen smaller countries. Quite simply, the United States had become the world’s greatest economic power.”
It had made some of its greatest strides toward that power in 1920, a year when it seemed as if Americans might be returning to the battlefield and that the battlefield might be their own back yards. It had been a year that whimpered as much as it roared, hinting, especially in some of its commodities markets, at the lean era of economic hardship soon to come. It was a year whose most scandalous, violent, and unsettling event, a bomb placed in a wagon hitched to a horse on Wall Street, remained unsolved as the new year approached, its meaning as mysterious as its perpetrators.
Or was it?