Sodom in the Suburbs

The closest I ever came to an orgy, aside from the occasion in Montparnasse twenty years ago when I smoked a cigarette purported to contain hashish and fainted dead away after two puffs, was at a student dance at Brown around 1922. I did not suspect it was an orgy until three days later; in fact, at the time it seemed to me decorous to the point of torpor and fully consonant with the high principles of the Brown Christian Association, under whose auspices it was held. Attired in a greenish Norfolk jacket and scuffing the massive bluchers with perforated toe caps and brass eyelets considered de rigueur in that period, I spent the evening buffeting about in the stag line, prayerfully beseeching the underclassmen I knew for permission to cut in on their women and tread a few measures of the Camel Walk. At frequent intervals, noisily advertising an overpowering thirst, I retired to a cloakroom with several other blades and choked down a minute quantity of gin, warmed to body heat, from a pocket flask. Altogether, it was a strikingly commonplace experience, and I got to bed without contusions and stayed there peaceably riffling through Jurgen and humming snatches of “Avalon.”

The following Sunday, I learned, to my astonishment, that I had been involved in a momentous debauch; the campus reeked of a scandal so sulphurous that it hung over our beanies like a nimbus for the rest of the academic year. In blazing scareheads, the Hearst Boston American tore the veil from the excesses tolerated at Brown University dances. At these hops, it thundered, were displayed a depravity and libertinism that would have sickened Petronius and made Messalina hang her head in shame. It portrayed girls educated at the best finishing schools, crazed with alcohol and inflamed by ragtime, oscillating cheek to cheek with young ne’er-­do-­wells in raccoon coats and derbies. Keyed up by savage jungle rhythms, the abandonnés would then reel out to roadsters parked on Waterman Street, where frat pins were traded for kisses under cover of darkness. Worst of all, and indicative of the depths to which the Jazz Age had reduced American womanhood, was the unwritten law that each girl must check her corset before the saturnalia. Painting a picture that combined the more succulent aspects of the Quatz’ Arts Ball and a German officers’ revel in occupied Belgium—two types of wassail long cherished by Hearst feature writers—the writer put all his metaphors in one basket and called upon outraged society to apply the brakes, hold its horses, and retrieve errant youth from under the wheels of the juggernaut. It was a daisy, and whoever did the pen drawings that enhanced it had given a lot of thought to the female bust.

I was poignantly reminded of that epoch and its turbulent escapades the other afternoon as I sat puffing a meerschaum and turning the leaves of a novel called Flaming Youth, which attained an immense vogue about that time not only with the general public but with the owner of the meerschaum. The book was hailed by press and pulpit as a blistering, veracious study of the moral chaos prevalent in the upper brackets, and it was popularly believed that its author, ostensibly a physician writing under the pseudonym of Warner Fabian, was, in reality, a top-­drawer novelist. If he was, he successfully managed to conceal it; his style, at once flamboyant, euphuistic, and turgid, suggested nothing quite so much as melted marzipan. Fabian was plainly determined to leave no scintilla of doubt that he was a neophyte, for he wrote a windy foreword affirming it, the final segment of which seems to me to prove his claim incontestably: “To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshiper of tinseled gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless, and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of—what manner of being?: To Her I dedicate this study of herself.” I don’t know why, but I got the feeling from the foregoing that the doctor was a precise and bloodless little creep with a goatee I would dearly love to tweak. I could just see him whipping to his feet at a panel of nose specialists, removing his pince-­nez with maddening deliberation, and beginning, “With the permission of the chair, I should like to amplify Dr. Westerphal’s masterly orientation of the Eustachian tubes.”

The fictional family chosen by the author to typify the decadence of the twenties is named Fentriss, resident in a well-­to-­do Westchester or Long Island suburb called Dorrisdale. Stripped of its gingerbread, the story concerns itself with the amours of the three Fentriss daughters, Constance, Dee, and Pat, whose adolescence has been colored by their mother’s reckless hedonism. She, while delectable, sounds from Fabian’s thumbnail description very much like an early Cubist portrait by Picasso: “She was a golden-­brown, strong, delicately rounded woman, glowing with an effect of triumphant and imperishable youth. Not one of her features but was faulty by strict artistic tenets; even the lustrous eyes were set at slightly different levels.” Mona Fentriss’s life of self-­indulgence has done more than throw her features out of whack; in the opening stanza, we see her being told by her physician and devoted admirer, Dr. Robert Osterhout, that there are fairies at the bottom of her aorta and that her days are numbered. Osterhout is a gruff, lovable character in the best medico-­literary tradition: “Like a bear’s, his exterior was rough, shaggy, and seemed not to fit him well. His face was irregularly square, homely, thoughtful, and humorous.” Ever the heedless pagan, Mona turns a deaf ear to the voice of doom and, over the single shakerful of cocktails the doctor has restricted her to daily, confesses no remorse for her numerous extramarital affairs. Her husband, she confides, is equally unconcerned at her peccadilloes (“They say he’s got a Floozie now, tucked away in a cozy corner somewhere”), and it is a lead-­pipe cinch that, given this profligate environment and dubious heredity, the Fentriss girls are going to cut some pretty spectacular didos once the saxophones start sobbing.

We get our first peep at the dissipation extant in the household at a party thrown by Mona shortly afterward and characterized as follows: “The party was a Bingo. . . . Lovely, flushed, youthful, regnant in her own special queendom, Mona Fentriss sat in the midst of a circle of the older men, bandying stories with them in voices which were discreetly lowered when any of the youngsters drew near. It was the top of the time.” Pat, the youngest daughter, has been considered too young to attend, but she abstracts a dinner dress from one of her sisters and eavesdrops in the shrubbery. A furious crap game rages in the breakfast nook, furtive giggles emanate from parked cars, and, in the conservatory, Pat overhears her mother holding an equivocal duologue with Sidney Rathbone, an elderly but distinguished Baltimorean of nearly forty. A moment later, a glass of home brew is rudely forced to Pat’s lips; as she recoils from the searing liquid, she is kissed violently and an insinuating voice pleads in her ear, “Come on, sweetie! We’ll take a fifty-­mile-­an-­hour dip into the landscape. The little boat [automobile, in the argot of ’22] can go some.” Much to Pat’s discomfiture, however, her mother intercedes, routs the befuddled Princetonian besieging her daughter, and packs her off to bed. But the damage has been done, and, as Fabian darkly observes, tucking back his sleeves and preparing to fold a spoonful of cantharides into his already piquant meringue, that first smacker is the one a girl never forgets.

The narrative jogs along uneventfully for a spell, enlivened by a couple of minor scandals: Mrs. Fentriss shacks up briefly at a hotel called the Marcus Groot, in Trenton, with the aforesaid Sidney Rathbone, and Constance, the eldest daughter, underestimates her resistance to Bacardi, passes out in her cavalier’s room, and is forced to still gossiping tongues by marrying him. A quick time lapse now enables the author to dispose of the exuberant Mrs. Fentriss and dress the stage for the entrance of the hero, Cary Scott, a former flame of hers encountered on a trip abroad. The description of Scott, clad in a sealskin coat and astrakhan cap, sufficiently explains why he sets the Fentriss girls by the ears: “No woman would have called him handsome. His features were too irregular, and the finely modeled forehead was scarred vertically with a savagely deep V which mercifully lost itself in the clustering hair, a testimony to active war service. There was confident distinction in his bearing, and an atmosphere of quiet and somewhat ironic worldliness in voice and manner. He looked to be a man who had experimented much with life in its larger meaning and found it amusing but perhaps not fulfilling.” Nor does he become less glamorous when he admits, in the cultivated accents of one more at home in French than in his native tongue, that he has lived much out of the world: “The East; wild parts of Hindustan and northern China; and then the South Seas. I have a boy’s passion for travel.” This suave customer, understandably, makes the youths at the Dorrisdale country club seem pretty loutish to radiant, eighteen-­year-­old Pat, and she falls headlong. He reciprocates in flippant, half-­serious fashion, regarding her as merely another spoiled flapper; besides, like all distinguished men of the world with deep Vs, he is chained to an impossible wife in Europe, and even the most beef-­witted reader must appreciate what plot convulsions are required to reconcile such opposites.

An episode of mixed nude bathing next ensues to blueprint the élan of the younger set, in the course of which the guests, emboldened by draughts of a potation called a “submarine cocktail,” cavort about a pool in a thunderstorm pinching each other. In consequence, Dee, the second Fentriss girl, weds a rotter; Cary Scott goes back to Paris; and Pat is sent away to school. When Cary sees her on his return, she has burgeoned into what he terms a “petite gamine,” a phrase she does not understand; evidently she has been attending some technical school, like the Delehanty Institute. “You know what a gamin is?” he inquires. “Gamine is the feminine. But there’s a suggestion in it of something more delicate and fetching; of verve, of—of diablerie.” Leave it to those expatriates to explain one French word with another; he might at least have gone on to tell her that diablerie was derived from the game of diavolo, just making its appearance in the smarter salons of the Faubourg St. Honoré. Anyhow, he takes her to a concert, where Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony makes them kin-­spirits, and, swept away by the bassoons, kisses her. Almost instantly, though, he feels the lash of conscience and excoriates himself in a noteworthy soliloquy: “It was incredible; it was shameful; it was damnable; but this child, this petite gamine, this reckless, careless, ignorant, swift-­witted, unprincipled, selfish, vain, lovable, impetuous, bewildering, seductive, half-­formed girl had taken his heart in her two strong, shapely woman-­hands, and claimed it away from him—for what? A toy? A keepsake? A treasure? What future was there for this abrupt and blind encounter of his manhood and her womanhood?” Follows a thirty-­one-­page renunciation jam-­packed with rough tenderness, eyes shadowed with pain, and germane claptrap, and Cary vamooses to California. There was one thing you could be reasonably sure of in any novel published between 1915 and 1925: the minute the protagonists got within biting distance of each other, one of them was fated to board a boat or choo-­choo within seventy-­two hours.

As might be anticipated, Pat thereupon reacts in accordance with the protocol governing the broken-­hearted and plunges into a mad round of pleasure, careering around the countryside at 40 m.p.h. in sleek Marmon runabouts, ingesting oceans of hooch, and inhaling straw-­tipped Melachrinos. When Cary, despite himself, is drawn back to her, he finds her more provocative than ever, a disturbing amalgam of elf, kitten, and bacchante: “She shook the gleamy mist of her hair about her face, gave a gnomish twist to body and neck, and peered sidelong at him from out the tangle.” His punctilio holds fast until someone next door idly starts plucking a fiddle, and then hell breaks loose again: “The long, thrilling, haunted wind-­borne prayer of the violin penetrated the innermost fiber of her, mingling there with the passionate sense of his nearness, swaying her to undefined and flashing languors, to unthinkable urgencies. . . . With a cry he leapt to her, clasped her, felt her young strength and lissome grace yield to his enfoldment. . . . Outside the great wind possessed the world, full of the turbulence, the fever, the unassuaged desire of Spring, the allegro furioso of the elements, and through it pierced the unbearable sweetness of the stringed melody.”

Well, sir, that would seem to be it. By all the ordinary rules of physiology and pulp fiction, Pat and Cary should have been allowed at this juncture to retire tranquilly to the Fruit of the Loom without let or hindrance and frisk as they pleased. But Fabian, in inverse ratio to the reader, is just getting interested in his characters and figuring out new ways to frustrate them. They keep everlastingly melting into scorching embraces and springing apart the moment a rapprochement impends between them. She wants, he don’t want; he wants, she don’t want—your exasperation eventually reaches such a pitch that you would like to knock their heads together and lock them up in a motel with a copy of van der Velde’s Ideal Marriage. The subplot bumbles in at intervals, adding to the general obfuscation a thwarted intrigue involving Dee Fentriss and a British electrician stylishly named Stanley Wollaston. At last, with the rueful conclusion: “We’re terrible boobs, Cary. . . . Let’s stop it”—a suggestion hardly calculated to provoke a quarrel with me—Pat sends her lover away to think things out and pins her affections on Leo Stenak, a brilliant violinist. This peters out when she discovers that he washes infrequently (“She forgot the genius, the inner fire; beheld only the outer shell, uncouth, pulpy, nauseous to her senses”), and she becomes affianced to Monty Standish, a Princeton football idol whose personal daintiness is beyond reproach. And then, in a smashing climax, so suspenseful that the least snore is liable to disrupt the delicate balance of his yarn, Fabian deftly turns the tables. Cary appears with the providential news that his wife has freed him, lips settle down to an uninterrupted feast, and, oblivious of the dead and dying syntax about them, the lovers go forth in search of Ben Lindsey and a companionate marriage.

It may be only a coincidence, but for a whole day after rereading Flaming Youth, my pupils were so dilated that you would have sworn I had been using belladonna. My complexion, though somewhat ruddier, recalled Bartholomew Sholto’s in The Sign of the Four as he lay transfixed by an aboriginal dart that fateful night at Pondicherry Lodge. Luckily, I managed to work out a simple, effective treatment I can pass on to anyone afflicted with star-­dust poisoning. All you need is an eyedropper, enough kerosene to saturate an average three-­hundred-­and-­thirty-­six-­page romance, and a match. A darkened room, for lying down in afterward, is nice but not absolutely essential. Just keep your eyes peeled, your nose clean, and avoid doctors and novels written by doctors. When you’re over forty, one extra bumper of overripe beauty can do you in.