1: Valuta
The exiles of 1921 came to Europe seeking one thing and found another. They came to recover the good life and the traditions of art, to free themselves from organized stupidity, to win their deserved place in the hierarchy of the intellect. Having come in search of values, they found valuta.
Exchange! It happened that old Europe, the continent of immemorial standards, had lost them all: it had only prices, which changed from country to country, from village to village, it seemed from hour to hour. Tuesday in Hamburg you might order a banquet for eight cents (or was it five?); Thursday in Paris you might buy twenty cigarettes for the price of a week's lodging in Vienna. You might gamble in Munich for high stakes, win half the fortune of a Czechoslovakian profiteer, then, if you could not spend your winnings for champagne and Picasso, you might give them day after tomorrow to a beggar and not be thanked. Once in Berlin a man was about to pay ten marks for a box of matches when he stopped to look at the banknote in his hand. On it was written, "For these ten marks I sold my virtue." He wrote a long virtuous story about it, was paid ten million marks, and bought his mistress a pair of artificial silk stockings.
Nobody was honest in those days: the seller could not cheat enough to profit, nor the buyer give anything but paper. Those who had gold, or currency redeemable in gold, hastened toward the cheapest markets. There sprang into being a new race of tourists, the Valutaschweine, the parasites of the exchange, who wandered from France to Rumania, from Italy to Poland, in quest of the vilest prices and the most admirable gangrenes of society. Suddenly indifferent to the past of Europe, they were seen in fashionable hotels, in money-changers' booths, in night clubs oftener than in museums; but especially you saw them in the railway station at Innsbruck: Danes, Hindus, Yankees, South Americans, wine-cheeked Englishmen, more Yankees, waiting by the hundreds for the international express that would bear them toward the falling paper-mark or the unstabilized lira. We too were waiting: a few dollars in our pockets, the equivalent of how many thousand crowns or pengos, we went drifting onward with the army of exploitation:
Following the dollar, ah, following the dollar, I learned three fashions of eating with the knife and ordered beer in four languages from a Hungarian waiter while following the dollar eastward along the 48th degree of north latitude---where it buys most, there is the Fatherland---
Following the dollar, we saw a chaotic Europe that was feverishly seeking the future of art, finance and the state. We saw machine guns in the streets of Berlin, Black Shirts in Italy, were stopped by male prostitutes along the Kurfürstendam, sat in a café at Montpellier with an Egyptian revolutionist who said, "Let's imagine this vermouth is the blood of an English baby," drained the glass deep---"Bravo!" we said, and drifted down to Pamplona for the bullfights. Sometimes in a Vienna coffeehouse full of dark little paunchy men and golden whores, in the smoke above these shaven or marceled heads we saw another country, not just painted, revolving, but solid with little hills and the earth brown beneath the plow. "I shall never return, never, to my strange land"---but sometimes beside an unreal Alpine lake they asked us, "Everybody is rich in your country, say?" and steam shovels suddenly bit into the hills, gold washed itself from the rivers, skyscrapers rose, heiresses were kidnapped---we saw the America they wished us to see and admired it through their distant eyes:
Following the dollar by gray Channel seas, by blue seas in Italy, by Alpine lakes as blue as aniline blue, by lakes as green as a bottle of green ink, with ink-stained mountains rising on either hand,
I dipped my finger in the lake and wrote, I shall never return, never, to my strange land.
We had come three thousand miles in search of Europe and had found America, in a vision half-remembered, half-falsified and romanced. Should we ever return to our own far country?
Four angels glory-haunted guard my land:
at the north gate Theodore Roosevelt, at the south gate Jack Johnson, at the west gate Charlie Chaplin and
at the middle gate a back-country fiddler from Clarion County fiddling, with a turkey in the straw and a haw, haw, haw and a turkey in the hay and I shall never hear it fiddled, ah farther than Atlantis is my land,
where I could return tomorrow if I chose,
but I shall return to it never,
never shall wed my pale Alaska virgin,
in thine arms never lie, O Texas Rose.
After the middle of the nineteenth century the younger Russians began to speak of "going to Europe" in the same spirit and even the same words as American writers of the 1920s. They inhabited what seemed to be a new continent raised from the ocean of prehistory; they too stood face to face, not with Germany alone, or France or Great Britain, but with "Europe"---that is, with the whole of West European culture. And they made their long pilgrimage, they settled themselves in Dresden or Geneva, just as American expatriates would cluster in Montparnasse.
In April 1867, long after the beginning of this migration, a couple newly married took the westbound express from St. Petersburg. Each was distinguished, among ten thousand exiles, by a characteristic of interest to posterity. The husband was beginning to be recognized as a man of genius: he was Fëdor Mikhailovich Dostoevski. His second wife, Anna Grigorevna, kept a diary in shorthand and recorded their life together, their first impressions of Europe, with the fullness and directness of a vulgar woman writing for herself. At the end of the 1920s the diary was transcribed and published by the Central Archives of the Soviets; it was translated into English from the German edition.
It begins, as travel diaries do, with an accumulation of details chiefly concerning the price of things. The bride and groom entered Germany at Eydtkuhnen, where the station had "enormous restaurants with two rows of windows one above the other, and a marvelous painted ceiling and everything wonderfully done." On reaching Berlin they went to the Grand Union Hotel; their room cost one thaler and ten silver groschen. "Fëdor again began grumbling about the Germans, the hotel and the weather." They went on to Dresden, where the droshky that took them from the station cost "the awful price of twenty-two silver groschen." The hotel room was expensive, and the hotel tea really too weak to drink, but they soon found two furnished rooms at the moderate price of seventeen thalers per month, washing included. . . . Every fact recorded is an implied comparison---as if Anna Grigorevna were saying, our tea is stronger, our people are less grasping, these Europeans have no business looking down on us.
Once established in Dresden, they rushed off to the museum. The Sistine Madonna, they thought, was perhaps the greatest picture ever painted. Holbein's Madonna they admired at first, but later they decided that it had a German look, and they didn't like Germany. They spent some time in front of a letter "painted so lifelike that in the distance one would have taken it for a real letter, stuck to the wall." Then finally they "went and looked at the pictures of Watteau, the French court painter of the early part of last century. For the most part he paints scenes of court life, some marquis or other making love to some dazzling beauty." So far the story has been that of any impecunious and disagreeably self-assertive young couple confronted for the first time with the marvels of European civilization---the sort of couple that servants avoid and cabbies like to overcharge. But soon the diary assumes the accents of a Dostoevski novel. They reach Baden-Baden and Fëdor Mikhailovich goes to the Rooms.
Having lost his money at roulette, he raises a few more thalers and, with Christian humility in the face of temptation, returns to the gaming tables.
The process was really longer and more cyclical. One morning, for example, the total fortune of the Dostoevskis consists of sixty gold pieces, locally known as ducats. Fëdor Mikhailovich takes ten of these and sets out for the Rooms. He returns with a despondent face, having lost them all. After a somber luncheon he takes ten more gold pieces and disappears. This time he does not return till after sunset. He begs Anna Grigorevna to forgive him, but he must have twenty ducats more; it is time for his luck to change. He is back in ten minutes, having staked and lost the money on one throw. They have only twenty ducats in the world. Fëdor Mikhailovich falls on his knees; he begs God and Anna Grigorevna to forgive him for having robbed her; he kisses her shoes; he swears that after tonight he will never gamble again. Then, taking five ducats more, he goes back to the Rooms.
The following morning they have only five silver thalers, and their rent due, and no food in the house. Fëdor Mikhailovich takes her wedding ring---having pawned his own already---and goes out to find a Jew. He is gone all day, while Anna Grigorevna walks up and down their sitting room. Late in the evening he returns, holding a great bunch of roses in one hand; little boys follow him with baskets of plums, peaches, grapes, a great cheese, a pound of Russian tea. After these purchases he has forty ducats left from his winnings; it is time to stop gambling forever. Fëdor Mikhailovich decides that he wants to win just enough for a bottle of wine. He disappears. . . .
Two days later they are once more reduced to five silver thalers. Anna. Grigorevna's earrings and Fëdor Mikhailovich's overcoat have followed the two wedding rings. Returning after another bout of play, physically and mentally overwhelmed by his losses, the husband falls into one of his epileptic fits. "He began to fling himself about so violently that it became impossible for me to hold him. . . . I undid his waistcoat and trousers, that he might breathe more freely. For the first time I now noticed that his lips were quite blue and his face much redder than usual.... He called me Anya, and then begged my pardon, and couldn't in the least understand what I said. Finally he begged for some more money to go and, play with. A fine piece of work that would have been!" It seems that everyone who met Dostoevski ended by talking like a character in a Dostoevski novel. "And yet," says Anna Grigorevna, "none the less I had a feeling that he would have won."
He often won; he was not an especially unfortunate gambler; but he rarely had strength of mind to leave the Rooms before his winnings were frittered away. It was only the fortunate arrival of money from Russia that enabled them to continue their journey, after redeeming most of their belongings from the pawnbrokers and settling with the landlady before whom they had trembled for a month. The diary ends with the Dostoevskis in Switzerland, in Basel, staring at the Town Hall. "There is no doubt from the style of it," wrote Anna Grigorevna, "that it dates from very far back."
Among these details concerning Dostoevski's life (and the emotional background of his novels) there is a quantity of material that bears upon the general problem of provincialism and expatriation---not only as it affected his Russian contemporaries, but also as it was met by the American exiles to Montparnasse.
That problem, in literary Russia during the 1860s, was omnipresent. Among people of breeding---the land-owning class, that is, and the new bourgeoisie---the language itself was becoming a despised, almost a foreign tongue. Stavrogin, the hero of The Possessed, was an aristocrat of wide education and yet he could not write Russian correctly: the fact is mentioned more than once in the novel. Anna Grigorevna observes of the compatriots she met in Dresden: "They would say the Russian 'God be with you,' then immediately start talking in French; it really doesn't seem the custom to speak Russian." In order to appeal to such an audience---there was no other---writers published their works under French titles, adopted a gallicized style and interlarded their sentences with German, French and English phrases. One might say that they were workmen forced to struggle with half-foreign tools---but the same remark could of course be applied to the American writers of a later day who hesitated whether to use the English expressions they learned in school or the words they heard in the streets.
The Russians had other difficulties, however, arising from the fact that their country was in the full sense a colony of Europe. It exported furs, fish, wheat and rough-sawed lumber; it imported not only machinery, shoes, furniture, Sevres china, but also governesses, portrait painters, wives for the nobility, fine wines, fashions in clothes and books---everything, in a word, that composed its new culture. And the Russian traders and officials, the chief proprietors of this culture, had enriched themselves by acting as mere agents for European capitalism. They were a class limited in function, in number, and they were almost the only class to which writers could look for support.
In spite of all the difficulties there were novelists and poets in Russia whose greatness was generally recognized. But the middle class of letters, the men who had neither failed nor succeeded, led a troubled existence. If they stayed at home, they had the feeling of being provincials doomed to follow last year's Paris styles. If they emigrated, many of their problems were solved: they lived nearer the source of literary fashions, lived in an atmosphere that seemed more favorable to art, lived more cheaply; and finally they acquired a certain distinction at home from the very fact that they had shaken from their feet the mud of Moscow. On the other hand, they lost contact with their own people, were uprooted from the Russian land. . . .
These alternatives were discussed by every Russian writer, just as they were discussed in America during the 1920s. The majority chose at least a temporary expatriation. Time went on and there were several generations of expatriates; Dostoevski belonged to what might be called the second. It was distinguished by the practical nature of its motives. Fëdor Mikhailovich left Russia neither on account of his political convictions nor in the hope of broadening his culture: he went to Europe to play roulette and escape his creditors. In Baden-Baden, between two bouts of gambling, he paid a visit to Ivan Turgenev. Their encounter, described in Anna Grigorevna's diary, was symbolic; it was the younger generation of expatriates confronting the elder; with allowance for the literary stature and opinions of the men involved, it was like a meeting, let us say, between Henry James and Ernest Hemingway.
Turgenev, like James, had definitely cast his fortunes with Europe; he spoke rather coldly of the homeland. Dostoevski suggested that he get himself a telescope so that he could see what was going on in Russia. Turgenev smiled politely. Dostoevski mentioned the new Turgenev novel; he didn't think much of it. Turgenev smiled politely. Dostoevski burst into a sudden torrent of imprecations against the Germans, "that detestable race . . . who exalt themselves at our expense." This time, instead of smiling, Turgenev went white with rage. "Insofar as you talk like that," he shouted, "you mean to insult me personally! Here and how let me tell you that I have settled in Baden-Baden for good and all, and that I no longer regard myself as a Russian, but as a German, and am proud of it."
Dostoevski was still calm enough to apologize. He shook hands, pronounced a definite farewell, then hurried off to risk five ducats in the Rooms.
Not all of his long exile in Europe was wasted in gambling and repenting. It was shortly after leaving Basel for Geneva---in other words, after the end of Anna Grigorevna's published record---that he set to work on The Idiot, a novel more Russian than anything he had written in Petersburg---so Russian, in fact, that many years would pass before it was translated into the Western languages, and still more years before it began to be admired. The effect of living in Europe had been to emphasize the most national---it would be wiser to say the most personal---elements in his character.
A similar effect was produced on many American expatriates of the second generation; and the parallel lines of growth go even farther. After his return to Dresden, in 1870, Dostoevski began a novel which, in its conception, was not unlike Main Street. It is true that The Possessed belongs to a higher category of fiction, but its distinguishing qualities did not appear in the original plan, nor do they appear in the first two hundred pages of the book as published. It opens as a satire on Russian provincial life rather less skillful than Sinclair Lewis's satire. It opens in a town that is evidently smaller than George F. Babbitt's Zenith, and somewhat larger than Gopher Prairie. It opens with a character, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, who is in many ways the Russian elder brother of Carol Kennicott. "Always," Dostoevski says, "he had filled a particular role among us, that of the progressive patriot, so to say, and he was passionately fond of playing the part."
Stepan Trofimovich was surrounded by half a dozen serious Russian thinkers. There was Shatov, "one of those idealistic beings common in Russia who are suddenly struck by some over-mastering idea." There was Virginsky, the henpecked liberal. "His wife and all the ladies of his family professed the very latest convictions, but in a rather crude form. They got it all out of books, and at the first hint coming from any of our little progressive corners in Petersburg they were prepared to throw anything overboard." There was a Jew called Lyamshin who played the piano, and a Captain Kartusov sometimes joined in the discussion. "An old gentleman of inquiring mind used to come at one time, but he died.... It was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy and godlessness, and the rumor gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but indulge in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian lighthearted liberal chatter. The 'higher liberalism' and the 'higher liberal'---that is, a liberal without any definite aim---are possible only in Russia."
The tone of all this is unmistakable. Change the names to Perkins or Schmaltz, change "Russia" to "America" or "the Middle West," and it might have been written by Sinclair Lewis. Change the style to something more colloquial, objective, and it might almost have been written by a young American in Montparnasse as he leaned his elbows on a café table of imitation marble ringed with coffee stains. But there is a difference, even at the beginning of The Possessed. Instead of ridiculing a Russian Gopher Prairie, Dostoevski is ridiculing the Russian Carol Kennicotts, the denationalized intellectuals who dreamed of escaping to Europe. And there is another difference which, as the story proceeds, becomes enormous.
Sinclair Lewis planned to write a good satirical novel, and, by keeping a firm grip on plot and characters, successfully executed his plan. Dostoevski, after the first few chapters, let his characters take hold of the story, let them transform it page by page, let them carry it toward realms into which lesser novelists cannot venture. But it was only on rewriting the novel (he mentions the fact elsewhere) that he introduced the figure of Nikolai Stavrogin, the most terrible of all his creations. This proud, humble, godless and mystical hero destroyed by his own undirected power seems to have been the pattern after which thousands upon thousands of Russian intellectuals came to model themselves. One might say in a certain sense, and after a hundred reservations, that in creating Stavrogin over his writing desk in Dresden Dostoevski revealed or invented what used to be known as the Russian soul. He himself used another word, though his meaning was almost the same: he spoke of finding the Russian god. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. . . . The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence, is to seek for its God, who must be its own God, and for the faith in Him as its only true faith."
Today it is easy to see that the soul or god invented by Dostoevski was only one aspect of the Russian people. Any great people has many personalities of this order; often they are in conflict, and the nation may reveal different personalities one after the other as new classes become socially dominant. The Stavrogin personality was the myth of the old intelligentsia. After the 1917 revolution it was the idol they would carry with them into a harsher sort exile-- sitting in the Russian Isba or the Caveau Ukrainien, Vera and Olga and the Caucasian Princess would pour out many libations of vodka to this tragic buffoon-god that had ceased to be worshiped by their cousins in Moscow. There in the homeland another myth would be installed: that of the bustling, practical commissar who was equally ruthless to himself and others. What the intellectuals had once accepted as "the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end," was merely the personality adopted for a time by their own caste. That was a lesson learned by some of the intellectuals in their new exile, and it was also a lesson that the commissars might some day learn about themselves as national gods and heroes.
But I am going beyond my story, having merely wished to suggest that Dostoevski's achievement was not exactly what it seemed. He did not reveal the total personality of the Russian people or even put an end to the feeling of inferiority to "Europeans" that weighed upon the intellectuals of his own generation and the one that followed. Nevertheless, with his myth and his great novels, he had changed something. A burden was lifted from the shoulders of Russian literature, a feeling of backwardness and provincialism. Russia after his day was still a colonial nation in the economic sense, but writers in Petersburg and Moscow were no longer condemned to follow European fashions: they could create their own fashions, could write for the world.
There is a point beyond which historical parallels cannot be carried. The United States in 1921, unlike Russia in 1867, had ceased to be a colony of European capitalism. It exported not only raw materials but finished products, and the machinery with which to finish them, and the methods by which to distribute them, and the entire capital required in the process. In addition to wheat and automobiles, it had begun to export cultural goods, hot and sweet jazz bands, financial experts, movies and political ideals. There were even American myths, among others that of the hardheaded, softhearted businessman enslaved by his wife. Yet our literature had not registered the changed status of the nation. American intellectuals as a group continued to labor under a burden of provincialism as heavy and jagged as that which oppressed the compatriots of Dostoevski.
Almost everywhere, after the war, one heard the intellectual life of America unfavorably compared with that of Europe. The critics often called for a great American novel or opera; they were doggedly enthusiastic, like cheer leaders urging Princeton to carry the ball over the line; but at heart they felt that Princeton was beaten, the game was in the bag for Oxford and the Sorbonne; at heart they were not convinced that even the subject matter of a great novel could be supplied by this country. American themes---so the older critics felt---were lacking in dignity. Art and ideas were products manufactured under a European patent; all we could furnish toward them was raw talent destined usually to be wasted. Everywhere, in every department of cultural life, Europe offered the models to imitate---in painting, composing, philosophy, folk music, folk drinking, the drama, sex, politics, national consciousness---indeed, some doubted that this country was even a nation; it had no traditions except the fatal tradition of the pioneer. As for our contemporary literature, thousands were willing to echo Van Wyck Brooks when he said that in comparison with the literature of any European country, "it is indeed one long list of spiritual casualties. For it is not that the talent is wanting, but that somehow this talent fails to fulfill itself."
Ten years later this feeling had gone and even its memory was fading. American intellectuals still complained, but their enemy was no longer "civilization in the United States"; it was "our business civilization," it was efficiency, standardization, mass production, the machine---it was something that dominated our nation more than others, but affected the others also. Germany had yielded to it, Britain was yielding, even France was being poisoned---it was no use fleeing to London or Paris, though perhaps there was a secure village in the South of France, perhaps there was safety in Majorca. . . . People still said in 1930 that it was impossible to live in the United States, but not that it was impossible to write or paint there. Comparisons with European literature continued to be drawn, but not so often or so unfavorably. Ten years after the first migration to Montparnasse, I met a talented, rather naive young woman just returned from London, where she had published her first novel. Yes, it had been fairly successful---it was good enough for the English, she said, but she didn't want to publish it over here until she had time to rewrite it completely; it wasn't good enough for New York. I knew that she did not intend to be smart; she was a simple person trying to state her impressions and those of the circle in which she moved.
Something had changed, and the exiles of the 1920s had played their part in changing it. They had produced no Dostoevski, but for this simpler task no genius was required; they had merely to travel, compare, evaluate and honestly record what they saw. In the midst of this process the burden of inferiority somehow disappeared---it was not so much dropped as it leaked away like sand from a bag carried on the shoulder---suddenly it was gone and nobody noticed the difference. Nobody even felt the need for inventing an American god, a myth to replace that of the businessman; instead the exiles invented the international myth of the Lost Generation.
These young Americans had begun by discovering a crazy Europe in which the intellectuals of their own middle class were more defeated and demoralized than those at home. Later, after discounting the effects of the war, they decided that all nations were fairly equal, some excelling in one quality, some in another---the Germans in mechanical efficiency, the French in self-assurance, the English in political acumen; the Americans excelled in wealth, but in most qualities they ranked midway in the scale: they were simply a nation among the other capitalist West European nations. Having registered this impression, the exiles were ready to find that their own nation had every attribute they had been taught to admire in those of Europe. It had developed its national types---who could fail to recognize an American in a crowd?---it possessed a folklore, and traditions, and the songs that embodied them; it had even produced new forms of art which the Europeans were glad to borrow. Some of the exiles had reached a turning point in their adventure and were preparing to embark on a voyage of rediscovery. Standing as it were on the Tour Eiffel, they looked southwestward across the wheatfields of Beauce and the rain-drenched little hills of Brittany, until somewhere in the mist they saw the country of their childhood, which should henceforth be the country of their art. American themes, like other themes, had exactly the dignity that talent could lend them.
. . . That was the general conclusion, but it was reached after a process that extended over a period of years and had many variations. Indeed, there were several waves or successive groups of exiles, and their different points of view were reflected in a whole series of little exiled magazines. The myth of the Lost Generation was adopted by the second wave, by the friends of Ernest Hemingway who contributed in 1924 to the Transatlantic Review; this was also the magazine that showed the greatest interest in colloquial writing about American themes. Transition, which came later, was more international. It included among its contributors many of the dyed-in-the-wool expatriates, those who had deliberately cut every tie binding them to the homeland except one tie: their incomes still came from the United States. They were like colts who had jumped the fence without breaking their tethers: one day the tethers would be tightened and they would have to jump back again. Our own earlier wave of exiles wrote for magazines like Broom, Gargoyle and Secession. The years we spent in Europe were adventurous and busy, and our return to America proceeded by stages as clearly marked as those of a well-prepared debate.
For me the process began under a grape arbor in Dijon, when I tried to define the ideas with which I had come to Europe.
Early on a hot August morning in 1921 I started to write an essay on "This Youngest Generation." Six weeks had passed since leaving New York: it was still too early to be affected by a new intellectual climate. But the essay expressed clearly enough the ideas which the exiles of that year had packed in their baggage and carried duty-free across the Atlantic.
"As an organized body of opinion," I said, "the youngest generation in American letters does not exist. There is no group, but there are individuals. There is no solidarity, but there are prevailing habits of thought. Certain characteristics held in common unify the work of the youngest writers, the generation that has just turned twenty."
Most of these traits, I found, were negative. "One can safely assert that these new writers are not gathered in a solid phalanx behind H. L. Mencken to assault our American puritanism. Certainly they are not puritans themselves, but they are willing to leave the battle to their elder cousins and occupy themselves elsewhere. In the same way the controversy about Queen Victoria does not excite them. She died when they were still in bloomers, and the majority of the Browning Clubs died with her. Time has allowed enough perspective for them to praise Tennyson a little and Browning a great deal."
I am setting all this down as I wrote it that morning under the grape arbor, when everything was simpler and it was possible to annihilate in a phrase the life work of an internationally famous man of letters, without fear of being in turn annihilated. "It follows as a corollary," I said, "that they have little sympathy with the belated revolt of the Georgians. Little with the huge, uninspired documents of the Georgian novelists, as informative and formless as a cookbook. Little with the divine journalism of Mr. Wells. None with the fausse-naïveté of Georgian poets. It does not follow that they dislike the 'movements' popular among Georgians on both sides the water, and yet one meets few that are either feminist, Freudian or Communist.
"Let us picture the American writer at the age of twenty-five." In reality I was just about to celebrate my twenty-third birthday, and was in no way precocious. "He has already adopted , " I said, "the enthusiasms of the generation that preceded him, and has abandoned them one by one---at least they no longer exist in his mind as enthusiasms. He cannot be described as Wildean, Wellsian, Shavian, Georgian or Menckenian, as aesthetic, ecstatic or naturalistic. The great literary controversies of the last generation he has solved by the simplest of all logical processes; he ignores them. Thus, he is neither puritan nor antipuritan, romantic nor realistic. He has a great many literary prejudices and could easily write little essays beginning with 'I hate people who . . .'or smart poems whose refrain is 'I am tired of. . . .'Unfortunately, he equally hates and is tired of this form of literary inanity. He has no movement of his own to support and he has no audience. . . . It is the picture of a very negative young man; but it is only one side of the picture."
I began to sketch in some positive traits. "The writers of this newest generation show more respect, if not reverence, for the work of the past. Before the war the belief was rapidly gaining ground that literature and the drama began together on that night when Nora first slammed the door of the doll's house. To be a rebel from convention, one had only to say that one liked Shakespeare better than Ibsen or Shaw. . . . The youngest writers not only prefer to read Shakespeare: they may even prefer Jonson, Webster and Marlowe, Racine and Molière. They are more interested in Swift and Defoe than in Samuel Butler. Their enthusiasm for the New Russians is temperate, even lukewarm. In other words, the past that they respect ended about forty years ago---not long after Nora slammed the door,
"If strange modern gods must be imported and worshiped, they are more likely to be French than Slavic, Scandinavian or English. In this respect, however, the youngest writers are developing the tendency of their elders rather than revolting from it. The last half-century of American literature might be diagramed as a progression away from London. This new interest in French prose and poetry almost completes the progression, for no city is intellectually so far from London as is Paris.
"They read Flaubert. They read Remy de Gourmont. These writers usually serve as their introduction to modern French literature; these are the two fixed points from which their reading diverges. Gourmont's Book of Masks may set them to following French poetry from Baudelaire and Laforgue down through the most recent and most involved Parisian schools. Or they may read the New Catholics, beginning with Huysmans. . . . Certainly the French influence is acting on us today; there remains to be seen just what effect it will bring forth."
It was very still under the arbor; flies were buzzing outside among the late Glory of Dijon roses; New York was centuries away. I tried to remember Manhattan conversations and translate them into terms of prophecy. "One of these effects," I said, "is almost sure to be a new interest in form. Flaubert and Gourmont spent too much time thinking of the balance and movement of their work for this subject to be neglected by their pupils. Already the tendency is manifesting itself strongly among the younger writers: they seem to have little desire to record inchoate episodes out of their own lives. I have heard one of them speak learnedly of line and mass, of planes, circles and tangents. Without going to the geometrical extremes of Kenneth Burke, one can forecast safely that our younger literature will be at least as well composed as a good landscape; it may even attain to the logical organization of music.
"Another characteristic of the younger writers is their desire for simplification; this also is partly a result of the French influence. 'What is needed of art,' said T. S. Eliot in the Dial, 'is a simplification of current life into something rich and strange.' One hears the same idea expressed elsewhere; it is coupled usually with a desire for greater abstractness.
"Form, simplification, strangeness, respect for literature as an art with traditions, abstractness ... these are the catchwords repeated most often among the younger writers. They represent ideas that have characterized French literature hitherto, rather than English or American. They are the nearest approach to articulate doctrine of a generation without a school and without a manifesto."
There was more of the essay, but that was the heart of it. Rereading it now, after many years, I am struck by two questions, both of which concern a larger question absent from our calculations: I mean the position of the artist in society. Why did our theories, slogans and catchwords all center about the unfruitful distinction between form and matter? Why did we abandon them, not without a struggle, but swiftly none the less, in the course of a few months?
The questions are not impossible to answer. . . . I have said that ours was a humble generation, but the truth is that all writers are ambitious: if they were really humble they would choose a craft that involved less risk of failure and milder penalties for the crime of being average. All writers thirst to excel. In many, even the greatest, this passion takes a vulgar form: they want to get rich quick, be invited to meet the Duchess---' thus, Voltaire was a war profiteer; Shakespeare disgracefully wangled himself a coat of arms. But always, mingled with cheaper ambitions, is the desire to exert an influence on the world outside, to alter the course of history. And always, when this path seems definitely closed, ambition turns elsewhere, eating its way like a torrent into other channels---till it finally bursts forth, if not in life, at least in the imagination. "Art for art's sake," "pure art," "form triumphant over matter"---all these slogans bear some relation to an old process of thought. "Matter" is equivalent to the outside world in which the writer is powerless; but in his rich interior world he can satisfy his ambition by subjugating "matter," by making it the slave of "form," of himself.
The writers of our generation were humble in the sense that they did not hope to alter the course of events or even to build themselves an honored place in society. Their class, the urban middle class, was lacking in political power, it was indeed so empty of political ideas as not to realize that such power was being exercised by others. Society was either regarded as a sort of self-operating, self-repairing, self-perpetuating machine, or else it was not regarded. Perhaps in their apprentice years, during Mr. Wilson's crusade or the Russian Revolution, the younger writers had the brief vision of a world adventurously controlled by men, guided by men in conflict, but the vision died. Once more society became an engine whose course they could not direct, whether to glory or destruction---nor did they much care, since the splendors and defeats of history were equally the material for art, the stone for the chisel. And, though their lives might be dingy and cluttered, they had one privilege: to write a poem in which all was but order and beauty, a poem rising like a clean tower above the tin cans and broken dishes of their days. In the world of "form," their failures, our failures, would be avenged.
This, I think, was the emotional attitude lying behind the ideas I was trying to express that morning in the grape arbor at Dijon, while flies buzzed among the August roses. The arbor itself, and the garden with its graveled walks, its fruit trees geometrically trained against the north wall, were triumphs of art over nature, were matter subjugated to form. Indeed, to young writers like ourselves, a long sojourn in France was almost a pilgrimage to Holy Land.
France was the birthplace of our creed. It was in France that poets had labored for days over a single stanza, while bailiffs hammered at the door; in France that novelists like Gourmont had lived as anchorites, while imagining seductions more golden and mistresses more harmoniously yielding than life could ever reproduce; in France that Flaubert had described "the quaint mania of passing one's life wearing oneself out over words," and had transformed the mania into a religion. Everything admirable in literature began in France, was developed in France; and though we knew that the great French writers quarreled among themselves, Parnassians giving way to Decadents, who gave way to Symbolists, who in turn were giving way to the new school, whatever it was, that would soon reign in Paris---though none achieved perfection, we were eager to admire them all. And this, precisely, was the privilege we should not be granted.
In the year 1921 Flaubert had ceased to be admired by the younger writers and Gourmont was almost despised. The religion of art is an unstable religion which yearly makes over its calendar of saints. Changes come rapidly, convolutions are piled on convolutions; schools, leaders, manifestoes, follow and cancel one another---and into this mad steeplechase we arrived with our innocent belief that Flaubert was great and that form ought to be cultivated at the expense of matter. In a few months we were exposed to the feverish intellectual development of half a century.
That suggests, I think, the answer to my second question, why we abandoned our theories after so brief a struggle. As school superseded school, the religion of art had extended its domain. Aesthetic standards of judgment, after being applied to works of art, had been applied to the careers of their authors and finally to the world at large. Cities, nations, were admired for the qualities that were then being accepted as ---making books admirable---for being picturesque, surprising, dramatic, swift, exuberant, vigorous, "original." What nation more than America possessed these qualities? It happened that the American writers who admired French literature were confronted by young French writers who admired American civilization. "Gourmont," we said, "is a great stylist."---"Nonsense, my dear friend. New York has houses of fifty-six stories."
It was a contest of politeness, an Alphonse-Gaston argument in which, at the end, we were glad to yield. America was after all our country, and we were beginning to feel a little homesick for it. But our friends in New York were unaware of the change.
"I must apologize for my failure to write you sooner"---all letters from your friends begin that way; strangers apologize for writing you at all---"but I have been frantically busy. Boobery is soaring to its seventh heaven and I am making frantic efforts to maintain my hold on its tail feathers so that I may be in at the killing of the gentle bird."
It was Ray Johnson, J. Raymond Johnson, one of the professionals who wrote and directed the writing of daily propaganda stories for the newspapers without ever signing his name. The barons and dowager baronesses of industry had turned, after the war, to the new task of molding the public mind. Needing advice, they had hired the services of anonymous freebooters. These for the most part were intelligent, poetic, were men of soul. They despised the barons, hated the work of wheedling money from the public for patriotic causes---but they performed it efficiently and solaced themselves by making fun of it in their cups.
"My latest venture," Ray Johnson continued, "is a projected Good Will Mission under the auspices of the American Committee for Devastated France. Our own beloved Ambassador is president of this kindly enterprise, which looks forward to raising $500,000---good God! how many francs is that?---to be spent by Anne Morgan and others in the Department of the Aisne. Drives are no longer popular and so we are staging 300 newspapers contests in 300 cities to select a delegate (at ten cents a vote) to represent each city in the Good Will Mission. Not so bad, what? The delegate will get a free trip to the battlefields and all we ask are the shekels she wrings from her friends.
"We've been having merry times since you left the Village. The Fatty Arbuckle rape case has crowded the deliberations of the Disarmament Conference from the first page, so the delegates are sneaking back to Europe with a fine collection of photographs and a taste for grapefruit, bathtubs and Jersey lightning. Harold Stearns's book, 'America and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL' (the caps are the publisher's), has appeared,(3) but there is still space in literary columns for little pieces about Van Loon's 'Story of Mankind,' Howard Pyle's 'Book of Pirates' and Al Jennings's (the train robber's) book about O. Henry."
Months had passed since we left New York and nothing there had really changed. The dance continued, perhaps to a faster beat, but the dancers were the same, and when the orchestra momentarily stopped they talked about the same topics: Prohibition, Village gossip, American stupidity and they do things better in Europe. "The wk. poet Harry Kemp is occupying a chimney recess at 31 Jones Street. Frances is getting fat, has a new tea set, paint on the floor, a new cupboard in the bedroom, trouble with the gas in cold weather and all that sort of thing. There were only twenty deaths from wood alcohol during the Christmas holidays, but there's a hundred in the hospitals and you never can tell. New Year's Eve was a bright and festive event. The prohibition agents promised a dry evening, but there were so many old-fashioned drunks that the cops had no place to put 'em after midnight. Nobody seems to know where the stuff comes from, but most of our leading citizens have been indicted for bootlegging in the last few days. Everybody is shouting prosperity, but the bank presidents are all Swiss hotelkeepers and the best you can do on a loan is 50 per cent. The Elevated still runs down Sixth Avenue and turns into Third Street at a point not far from the chateau of one J. Smith, who, by the way, has learned to make synthetic gin and has regained much of his old-time gaiety. Broadway ticket speculators at last have been put out of business and now you only have to pay $6.60 for a $2 seat. The newspapers announced that the government had abolished the amusement tax to take effect January 1, but when you try to buy a ticket the box-office overlord tells you that the ruling applies only to seats costing less than ten cents. After a lapse of eighteen years our benevolent government is once more coining silver dollars. About a million of them arrived in the New York banks. There's a rumor that the new coin will take the place of the once popular nickel."
Nothing in New York had changed very much. In Europe we were learning to regard the dragon of American industry as a picturesque and even noble monster; but our friends at home had not the advantage of perspective; for them the dragon blotted out the sky; they looked up and all they could see was the scales of its belly, freshly alemited and enameled with Duco. They dreamed of escaping into older lands which the dragon hadn't yet invaded---while we, in older lands, were already dreaming of a voyage home. Soon we began to argue back and forth across the water.
The debate burst forth in the early months of 1923. My share in it was provoked by two sentences in an article that Kenneth Burke contributed to Vanity Fair. "There is in America," he wrote, "not a trace of that really dignified richness which makes for peasants, household gods, traditions. America has become the wonder of the world simply because America is the purest concentration point for the vices and vulgarities of the world." He was expressing, from New York, ideas in which both of us had concurred two years before. And I answered, from Europe, with a letter of almost incoherent dissent.
"Since when, Kenneth, have you become a furniture salesman? That really dignified richness! You seem to have the disease of the American lady I met in Giverny.---'You know, in America the wall papuh hardly seems to last a minute, it fades or peels off so quickly, but heah the good European papuh dyed with European dyes and put on with that good European glue, why, it just seems to last forevuh.' Let me assure you that the chiefest benefit of my two years in Europe was that it freed me from the prejudices of the lady whose European flour paste was so much better than the made-in-the-U.S.A. product, and of the thirty American intellectuals under the general editorship of Harold Stearns.
"America is just as god-damned good as Europe---worse in some ways, better in others, just as appreciative, fresher material, inclined to stay at peace instead of marching into the Ruhr. As for its being the concentration point for all the vices and vulgarities---nuts. New York is refinement itself beside Berlin. French taste in most details is unbearable. London is a huge Gopher Prairie. I'm not ashamed to take off my coat anywhere and tell these degenerate Europeans that I'm an American citizen. Wave Old Glory! Peace! Normalcy!
"America shares an inferiority complex with Germany. Not about machinery or living standards, but about Art. Secession, being edited by Americans, is less important than any little magazine edited by Frenchmen. John Marin, being American, is a minor figure beside even such a minor French water colorist as Dunoyer de Segonzac. The only excuse for living two years in France is to remove this feeling of inferiority and to find, for example, that Tristan Tzara, who resembles you in features like two drops of water, talks a shade less intelligently. To discover that the Dada crowd has more fun than the Secession crowd because the former, strangely, has more American pep. . . . The only salvation for American literature is to BORROW A LITTLE PUNCH AND CONFIDENCE FROM AMERICAN BUSINESS. American literature---I mean Anderson, Dreiser, Frank, et al.---is morally weak, and before it learns the niceties of form its moral has to be doctored., or all the niceties in the world will do it no good at all."
The old argument about form and matter was already being pushed into the background. For two years, in the midst of a Europe where values shifted from day to day, we had been looking for guidance, for examples to imitate, for a stable intellectual currency. And the guidance, when it came, was not what we had expected it to be.