1: Connecticut Valley
In the preceding chapters I have been describing a process that first impressed me as being geographical. A whole generation of American writers---and how many others, architects, painters, bond salesmen, professors and their wives, all the more studious and impressionable section of the middle-class youth---had been uprooted, schooled away, almost wrenched away, I said, from their attachment to any locality or local tradition. For years the process continued, through school and college and the war; always they were moving farther from home. At last hundreds and thousands of them became veritable exiles, living in Paris or the South of France and adhering to a theory of art which held that the creative artist is absolutely independent of all localities, nations or classes. But most of them didn't remain exiled forever. One by one they came lingering back to New York, even though they came there as aliens, many of them holding ideas that would cause them a difficult period of readjustment.... And what happened then? Once the process had reversed itself, did it carry them homeward at an accelerating speed, till they had returned in body and spirit to their own townships?
Something of the sort might actually have happened if the repatriated exiles had retained their freedom of movement. But most of them had ceased to be free. They were poor and married; they had livings to earn, professional careers to think about and not much time to pursue ideas toward their logical limits. At this point the clear process I have been describing becomes confused: the lives of the literary exiles lose their individual outline and become merged with the lives of a whole class in American society.
At this point, too, the author begins to disappear from his book. In the preceding chapters, although I was trying to tell the story of a generation of writers, I felt justified in recounting my own adventures because they were in some ways representative of what was happening to others. That partly ceased to be true in the following years. After the suppression of Broom I had no energy for new undertakings and for a time I was simply another advertising copywriter who hated his job. I saved a little money, enough to buy furniture and garden tools, and in the summer of 1926 we moved to the country, near our friends Slater Brown and Hart Crane. There I supported the family by doing translations from the French and writing for magazines, and eventually I bought a back-road farmhouse, making the down payment of seventy-five dollars with part of a prize of a hundred dollars that I had received from Poetry (and keeping out the rest for groceries). My adventures were interesting to me, even absorbing, but many of them had lost the element of freedom of novelty and most of them had ceased to be representative; instead they were merely typical. As I think back on the period it seems to me that I am looking at a class or crowd photograph in which my face is lost in a mass of faces.
New York was beginning to be crowded with people like ourselves. As American business entered the boom era, it needed more and more propagandists to aid in the increasingly difficult task of selling more commodities each year to families that were given no higher wages to buy them with, and therefore had to be tempted with all the devices of art, literature and science into bartering their future earnings for an automobile or a bedroom suite. Business needed public-relations counselors, it needed advertising artists and copywriters, it needed romancers to fill the pages of the magazines in which its products were advertised and illustrators to make the romance visible (and psychologists to explain how the whole process could be intensified); it needed designers, stylists, editors, and all these professions came flocking to Manhattan. Soon it became evident that all the younger members of this class had had about the same experiences, the Midwestern background, the year in the army if they were men, the unhappy love affair that took its place if they were women, the long voyage to France; and it was evident, too, that most of them were lost in their new environment and discontented.
That was the class into which the exiles were being merged. All its members were individualists by theory, yet they lived the life of their social order as strictly as Prussian officers, and had to cultivate meaningless affectations and real vices in order to possess even the appearance of individuality. "All of them have Watkins, Algonquin or Stuyvesant telephone numbers and live in the Village. . . . I know so well what they are doing. There will be greetings and ringings of the telephone, cocktails will be poured and drunk, cigarettes held in nervous fingers. Toward eight o'clock or later, women will be crowding before the mirror in the bathroom, men will be hunting out overcoats from the tangle of clothes on the bed in the alcove and shoving their arms into the sleeves; people will be going trailing laughter down the stairs. We shall all gather on the sidewalk in a little noisy cluster, deep down among the silent unfriendly houses. . . ."
The life they led was molding people into such strict patterns that when my friend Robert M. Coates wrote a novel about them, in 1933, he chose as his hero a man of the crowd. The book was Yesterday's Burdens; the hero's name was Henderson. "When I saw him," Coates said, "I had always the sense that he was several: that like the crowd that has not yet chosen its leader and begun its movement toward an elected goal, he had not yet compacted himself, not taken his ultimate direction." Henderson, in the afternoon, "is to be seen in the apartments of the more recherché commercial artists; of writers who are either just going to, or just returning from, Hollywood; of stockbrokers who collect, with a tempered enthusiasm, lalique glass and finance, every second year or so, an unsuccessful musical comedy. He is poised, alert, insouciant; he goes well with modernique furniture." And Henderson, like most of the other characters in Coates's novel, is profoundly unhappy.
All these people ---with whom the exiles were beginning to mingle as the years passed by, as their incomes rose a little, articles were sold to magazines and publishers' contracts signed---all these people were living a series of contradictions. They prided themselves chiefly on their professional competence, their skill with words or lines or colors, their ability to gauge the public taste, and yet their skill was devoted to aims in which none of them believed. Their function as a class was to be the guardians of intellectual things, and yet they were acting as propagandists for a way of life in which the intellect played a minor part. They were selling their talents, often at a stiff price, and yet they didn't know what to do with the money they received, except spend it for automobiles and gin and the house beautiful, exactly like the gulled public for which they were writing and drawing. They had satisfied a childhood ambition by moving to the metropolis and becoming more or less successful there, yet most of them wanted to be somewhere else: they wanted to leave it all and go back to something, perhaps to their childhoods.
Of course they couldn't go back: their own countrysides or Midwestern towns would offer no scope to their talents, no opportunity for earning the sort of living to which they had grown accustomed. They were inexorably tied to New York ---but perhaps they could make a compromise, could enjoy the advantages of two worlds by purchasing a farm somewhere within a hundred miles of Manhattan and spending their summers in the country without separating themselves from their urban sources of income. About the year 1924 there began a great exodus toward Connecticut, the Catskills, northern New Jersey and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Many of the former expatriates took part in it; and soon the long process of exile-and-return was resumed almost in the form of a mass migration.
The emotional effects of it are suggested in Robert Coates's book. "My present occupation," the narrator begins, "is that of a book reviewer, but I live in the country." He goes on to describe his daily life, his memories of Henderson; then, "There is, of course, the great problem of whether or not I belong here. On all sides one sees writers, painters, fashion designers buying acres of tillable land or pasture and dedicating them to the cultivation of sumac, goldenrod and blackberry brambles. Is it for revenge? The artist's tendencies, it would seem, are always atavistic: he would raze cities, he would remake New England into a wilderness. But what of the land itself?
"I sometimes feel a strange uneasiness: the trees look hostile, the very grass seems to regard me with a venomous air. I have bought these fields and doomed them to sterility. Can you tell me if there is anything in common law concerning the rights of the soil to expect careful husbandry on the part of its owner?" . . . Perhaps such a law exists, though still unwritten; perhaps it levies its quiet penalties against the man that holds even stony acres without plowing them, or lives in a community without taking part in its life.
At any rate, the Connecticut migration failed to produce the great effects that were hoped of it. I can report this from experience, having lived for years in a valley near the one that Coates described. During the long winters it was almost deserted. No more than thirty voters attended the town meeting in November, where formerly there would have been two hundred. In December the snow fell, blocking all but the main-traveled roads until April; the valley hibernated. Then, late in spring when the arbutus buds were half-open, the city people came trooping back. There was the sound of banging shutters, of rugs beaten in the yard, and the first smoke rose from a dozen chimneys, to mingle with the spring haze sleeping over the hill.
In May the housewives laid plans for a rock garden here, a terrace there, a pergola where the outhouse used to stand. It would be nice to remodel the dairy barn into a studio---or perhaps they should tear it down in order to have an unobstructed view into the valley. They walked along the hillside, their faces pink with the spring wind, and lamented because the old tobacco fields were growing up in sumac and sweetfern. A little flock of sheep would keep them clean---but who would care for the sheep in the winter, with so few natives left and most of them unreliable? Then, looking toward the crest of the hill where the rock-oak buds were a smoky green, they said, "Isn't all this beautiful! Aren't you glad we live in this lovely valley?"
During July and August, the summer people traveled incessantly over the valley roads. They drove to the last remaining dairy farms for milk and eggs; they drove to the Moffats for croquet, to the Denisons for a highball, to Green Pond for a swim. They had social functions of their own, gin parties, ping-pong parties, barn parties, musical evenings, which they attended in force. Over the week-end their houses were crowded with guests from the city, who exclaimed between two drinks, "Oh, how I envy you this lovely old farmhouse!"---"Yes, isn't the valley beautiful," the summer people agreed. And, if they wandered outside into the moonlight, they saw that the valley had lost its ravaged daytime look: the roofless barns seemed whole; the goldenrod on the hillside might be a ripe field of wheat.
In autumn, when the neglected orchards are heavy with apples and fields are dotted with gentians almost the color of the autumn haze, the summer people prepare to go. They sprinkle mothballs in the closets, they lock the shutters, they store their bright lawn furniture in the empty barns. Their cars, waiting at the front gate, are piled with suitcases, unfinished manuscripts or paintings, vaseline glass and the two Hitchcock chairs they bought at a real bargain. For a moment they wait before starting the motor. They look at the hilltops, where the oaks are red-brown, and at the steep pastures with their pools of wine-colored sumac; they look down at the blazing maples in the swamp. Somewhere in the fields a hound is baying on a cold scent; the sound of an ax comes drifting down from the hill. "Isn't the valley beautiful in October," the summer people repeat as if they were dutifully admiring a masterpiece. "Aren't you glad we live here," they say as they drive off.
There have always been summer people---and as time went on there were more of them---who stayed through the winter, who voted in town meetings and sent their children to the local school; they were partially absorbed into the life of the countryside.(7) There were others who acquired a real taste for gardening or fishing, and even the most insensitive were somewhat affected by their new residence. It remained true, however, that most of them lived in their country homes as they might live in a summer hotel. The ownership of an old house full of Boston rockers and Hitchcock chairs did not endow them with a past. The land for which they were overassessed was not really theirs; it did not stain their hands or color their thoughts. They had no functional relation to it: they did not clear new fields, plant crops, depend on its seasons or live by its fruits; in a Connecticut valley, as in Manhattan, there remained the problem "of whether or not I belong here."
They might have traveled farther without ceasing to be faced by the same answer. Modern transportation makes everything easy: there are airplanes, buses, railroads and concrete highways leading everywhere, and even to one's birthplace. Driving westward from New York, a writer might suddenly find himself in his own country, the village where he went to school, the woods where he gathered hickory nuts and listened to the red squirrels that sang as they cut down hemlock cones from the trees crowding the slopes of dark ravines. He might pass the house where his grandmother used to live, and stop at the roadside, wondering what would happen if he bought the house from strangers and planted a new garden on the site of the old. He could live and die there like his ancestors---but no, the door was double-locked against him; the house would not take him back.
He was seeking for something that was no longer there. It wasn't so much his childhood, which of course was irrecapturable; it was rather a quality remembered from childhood, a sense of belonging to something, of living in a country whose people spoke his language and shared his interests. Now he had ceased to belong---the country had changed since the new concrete highway was put through; the woods were gone, the thick-growing hemlocks cut down, and there were only stumps, dried tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. The people had changed---he could write about them now, but not write for them, not resume his part in the common life. And he himself had changed, so that wherever he lived he would be a stranger. It was no use regretting the past; he might as well drive on.
For the long process I have been describing was not so simple as it seemed to me at first. The sense of uneasiness and isolation that oppressed American writers was not the result of a purely geographical process and could not be cured by retracing their steps---they could go back to Iowa, but only as alien observers, and back to Wisconsin, but only as Glenway Wescott did, to say good-by. They had been uprooted from something more than a birthplace, a county or a town. Their real exile was from society itself, from any society to which they could honestly contribute and from which they could draw the strength that lies in shared convictions.
All during the 1920s many, and perhaps most, of the serious American writers felt like strangers in their own land. They were deeply attached to it, no matter what pretense they made of being indifferent and cosmopolitan, but they felt obscurely that it had rejected them. The country in those days was being managed by persons for whom they felt a professional hostility. It was the age when directors' meetings were more important than cabinet meetings and when the national destiny was being decided by middle-aged bankers and corporation executives. One saw their pictures week, after week in the slick-paper magazines; they wore high collars and white-piped waistcoats beautifully tailored over little round paunches. Sometimes they assumed a commanding look, sometimes they tried to smile, but their eyes were like stones in their soft, gray, wrinkled cheeks.
These rulers of America, as they were called in magazine articles, showed little interest in books or ideas. The few statements they made to the press were empty and pompous, yet 'the statements announced one doctrine that was almost universally held. Americans should work longer and harder, produce always more, consume always more, save always more and invest in the future of the country, which was in safe hands.
Apparently the doctrine was the secret of American prosperity. Year after year there were more factories employing more workers to produce more goods per man-hour; year after year there were more automobiles on the highways, bigger crowds and brighter lights on the main stem, and in the suburbs more and more houses completely equipped with radios, mechanical refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and pop-up toasters. Year after year the advertising pages were becoming more shameless; they cajoled, tempted, flattered, bullied or frightened people into trading in or throwing away everything they had bought the year before, in order to win the envy of their neighbors by acquiring, on easy monthly terms, the latest super-heterodyne or super-powered, super-attractive model. Installment buying had plunged more and more people into debt; trying hard to earn a higher salary with special bonuses, they had less and less leisure to enjoy their new possessions. Stocks rose from year to year; their prices were based not so much on past earnings as on faith in the future. There seemed to be no reason why the whole process of making, selling, servicing and discarding could not continue indefinitely at an always increasing speed. But writers had begun to complain that the process left very little time for reading or gardening or family evenings together, and very little scope for virtues like independence or integrity.
Writers also complained---in dozens of books and hundreds of articles published in the less popular magazines---that except for the mass industries producing honest products almost the whole of American culture was becoming false or flimsy. The stage dealt with problems that had no meaning in terms of daily life; the movies offered dreams of impossible luxury to shopgirls; the popular magazines were merely vehicles for advertising and the popular newspapers effectively disfranchised their readers by failing to give them the information they needed as voters, while doping them with always bigger and brighter scandals. Worst of all, many writers said, was the hypocrisy that had come to pervade the whole system, with businessmen talking about service when they meant profits, with statesmen proclaiming their love for the common man while taking orders from Wall Street (and sometimes money from oil operators, in little black bags) and with prohibition agents raiding one gang of bootleggers so they could sell the seized liquor to another gang.
In those days hardly anyone seemed to believe in what he was doing---not the workman on the production line, or the dealer forced to sell more units each month to more and more unwilling customers, on threat of losing his sales agency, or the salesman with his foot stuck in the door while he repeated an argument learned by rote, or the underpaid newspaperman kidding his stories, hating his managing editor and despising his readers---not even the people at the head of the system, the bankers and stock promoters and politicians in the little green house on K Street; everybody was in it for the money, everybody was hoping to make a killing and get away. The advertising men who served as priests and poets of American prosperity were the biggest cynics of all. Often on Saturday nights one heard them saying drunkenly that they were only misleading the public, that they wanted to chuck it all up---everything, job, wife, children---and escape to some island where they could paint or write a book or just loaf in the sun.
"Why don't you then?" the writers asked them, feeling superior because they had once worked in offices and had managed to break away. Like the advertising men, however, they suffered from a feeling of real discomfort. Something oppressed them, some force was preventing them from doing their best work. They did not understand its nature, but they tried to exorcise it by giving it names---it was the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine, which had been developed to satisfy men's needs, but which was now controlling those needs and forcing its standardized products upon us by means of omnipresent advertising and omnipresent vulgarity---the Voice of the Machine, the Tyranny of the Mob. The same social mechanism that fed and clothed the body was starving the emotions, was closing every path toward creativeness and self-expression.
There was no political theory that seemed to promise a haven to the individual spirit. All the moderate reformers, including the right-wing Socialists, had been discredited by the war and the Treaty of Versailles; all the radicals were impractical and silly. Guild socialists, anarchists and syndicalists belonged to a forgotten age of innocent aspirations. The Communists were shrill futile voices crying out that we should imitate Russia ---and to what purpose? The Russian experiment was interesting to watch, but it would probably fail. If it succeeded, writers liked to say that it would merely combine the mechanical efficiency of the West with a terrifying system of mob control; it would lead toward a utopia of identical human ants, a dullard's paradise, and the liberty of the individual would wither from within. Russia was like America: they were two formidable giants marching against the old European culture to which writers clung, and Europe was weakening before their onslaughts.
It seemed in those days that nobody could hasten or direct the heavy march of history or hope for any political solution of his problems: the individual would have to solve them for himself. He could either adjust himself to society by yielding to its standards, or else, if he was too proud to accept that course, he could escape society by seeking new places, new ideals, new ways of living. He could either surrender or else assert his independence by running away.
Yet there was one political event of the later 1920s that brought a great many writers together for a common purpose. It did more than that, for it aroused and unified a larger group with which writers are more or less closely affiliated. At this point I am not referring to the group composed of editors, commercial artists and advertising men that writers were meeting socially if they lived in Manhattan or Connecticut. I am thinking about another group scattered over the country and united by its manner of thinking more than by its economic interests; the best name for it is "the intellectuals."
Nobody likes the name, but there is nothing else that will take its place, "the intelligentsia" being too foreign, "the elite" too flattering, "the highbrows" and "the longhairs" too unfriendly, while "the liberals" is too contentious and confusing. The intellectuals can be defined as the part of the population that tries to think independently and to value ideas without regard to personal interests or popular prejudice. They are now fairly numerous, to judge by the sales of their favorite books and magazines, yet the history of their class has been surprisingly brief in this country. It began to be conscious of itself in the years after 1900; it played a large part in the cultural renaissance that preceded the war; it was terrified and rendered politically sterile by the postwar reaction. During the early 1920s it appeared to be chiefly interested in moral revolt, progressive education and Freudian psychology. But the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in 1927, was another crisis in its development.
There were several features of the case that stirred the intellectuals profoundly. First of all there was the situation of two men tried unjustly and sentenced to death, the old story of innocence endangered. There was the fact that these men were radicals and had been arrested during the Palmer Raids, when the intellectuals had also been threatened. There was the high smugness of the Massachusetts officials, some of whom turned themselves into caricatures of everything that artists hate in the bourgeoisie. There were the international echoes of the case: the riots in Paris, Berlin and London, the general strikes in Rosario and Montevideo, the bombs exploded in Sofia, Nice, Basel and Buenos Aires. Then, overshadowing all other issues, there were the personalities of two men who had spent seven years between life and death, seven years of being threatened, praised, lied about and continually tortured with hope. Most prisoners would have broken down or developed illusions of grandeur. These two---little, impulsive, confiding Sacco and big, mustachioed Vanzetti---managed in their different fashions to remain skeptical and human, thanking their good friends, contriving presents for their lawyers and, incidentally, writing more eloquently than all the bigwigs who made speeches for and against them---the artists for, the politicians against. It is no wonder that they aroused a blind hatred and a fanatical loyalty.
It was the intellectuals rather than the labor unions who conducted their defense. Some of the unions struck and demonstrated; the radical parties held literally thousands of meetings (although they regarded Sacco and Vanzetti merely as two more victims in the class war); but the intellectuals for once assumed most of the responsibility: they raised funds, issued statements, suggested new appeals to new courts. "Artists and Writers Appeal for Sacco," the newspapers would announce. "Intellectuals Ask New Sacco Respite" --- "Appeal Signed by Hundreds of Professional Men and Women Is Sent to Fuller." At the very end the intellectuals even came out into the streets and got themselves arrested, like workers on the picket line of a strike that is being broken.
Boston on the night of the execution was a city beleaguered by its own fears of violent revolt. The public buildings were guarded; the streets were heavily patrolled. In the vicinity of Charlestown Prison, people were warned not to leave their houses. The prison itself was armed and garrisoned as if to beat off an attacking army. Five hundred special patrolmen, detectives and state constables had been summoned to reinforce the prison guards. Riot guns and tear-gas bombs were stacked inside the gate. The top of the prison wall was lined with machine guns and searchlights in clusters of three. An advance guard of mounted police was posted at some distance from the prison to hold back the crowd. On the other side, facing the river, the prison was guarded by marine patrol boats, bright with searchlights and flares. And all this armament by land and water, all this infantry, cavalry and artillery, was posted there to defend the prison---against just whom, just what? It is a question that the Massachusetts authorities could hardly answer. The only movement they could possibly interpret as aggressive was a protest parade of three hundred intellectuals, led by Ruth Hale, that started toward Charlestown late in the evening. They were unarmed and pacific and they scattered -at the first charge by the mounted police.
Afterward I talked with some of the people who joined in that strange nocturnal march. They knew that it was absolutely futile, that everything had been done that could be done, yet as long as Sacco and Vanzetti were alive they could not sit in a hall and talk and wait; they had to make a last united protest. Then came the execution, the catastrophe that nobody had really believed could happen. Suddenly they wept or fell silent, they separated, and many of them walked the streets alone, all night. Just as the fight for a common cause had brought the intellectuals together, so the defeat drove them apart, each back into his personal isolation.
For a time it seemed that Sacco and Vanzetti would be forgotten, in the midst of the stock-market boom and the exhilaration of easy money. Yet the effects of the case continued to operate, in a subterranean way, and after a few years they would once more appear on the surface.
Writing about the late 1920s and remembering how disastrously they ended, one is tempted to dwell on everything in those years that now seems ominous or frantic or merely ill directed. One says too little about other qualities of the period: its high spirits, its industriousness, its candor and its reckless freedom. One talks about the big parties---especially the later ones that broke up in hysterical quarrels---and forgets to mention the long mornings at one's desk, the afternoons in the garden, the after-supper hours of reading by a kerosene lamp while embers glowed through the cracks in the kitchen stove.
We stayed in the country till very late in the autumn---I am speaking now of my immediate friends---but most of our winters were spent in New York, in furnished rooms or cold-water flats. I remember the good winter when we used to meet two or three times a week at Squarcialupi's Restaurant on Perry Street. We were all writing poems then, and, sitting after dinner around the long table in the back room, we used to read them without self-consciousness, knowing that nobody there would either be bored by them or gush over them ignorantly. Kenneth Burke would wipe his spectacles with a napkin and give an affirmative "Mhmmm." --- "That's good enough to read again," Allen Tate might say; "I'd like to catch the rhyme scheme." John Squarcialupi would stand in the kitchen doorway listening, with a bottle of red wine in each hand. He was an operatic baritone who had missed his career, and he used to sing for us late at night after the other guests had gone home; if we applauded wildly enough the wine was free. We were all about twenty-six, a good age, and looked no older; we were interested only in writing and in keeping alive while we wrote, and we had the feeling of being invulnerable---we didn't see how anything in the world could ever touch us, certainly not the crazy desire to earn and spend more money and be pointed out as prominent people. There was only Hart Crane who complained of being "caught like a rat in a trap" and displayed angers and enthusiasms out of proportion to the objects that aroused them, a first foreshadowing of hysteria and suicide.(8)
A few of the early meetings to plan and organize the New Masses were held in the same restaurant, with different people attending them: Mike Gold, John Dos Passos, Joe Freeman. One evening Dos Passos called over to our table self-derisively,, "Intellectual workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains." The others glanced up at us without much interest, feeling that we weren't serious about politics. Usually the radical writers met at another Italian restaurant, on East Tenth Street, with an upstairs room. that was big enough to accommodate a fund-raising party of fifty or a hundred. In those prohibition days every group had its favorite Italian restaurants and Irish or German saloons; everyone's wallet was stuffed with cards that were supposed to be shown at the locked doors. . . . I remember being taken to an unfamiliar saloon---it was in the winter of 1925-26-and finding that the back room was full of young writers and their wives just home from Paris. They were all telling stories about Hemingway, whose first book had just appeared, and they were talking in what I afterward came to recognize as the Hemingway dialect---tough, matter-of-fact and confidential. In the middle of the evening one of them rose, took off his jacket and used it to show how he would dominate a bull.
About that time it became possible for young men of promise to support themselves by writing novels and biographies. The book trade was prospering, new publishers were competing for new authors, and suddenly it seemed that everybody you knew was living on publishers' advances---sometimes a hundred dollars a month for an extended period, sometimes three hundred or five hundred in a flat sum---toward the writing of a book that might or might not be finished. Most of the books financed by publishers were not worth writing at all, but some of them were good and a few were enormously successful---the man you had seen night after night eating spaghetti at the next table in a cheap Italian restaurant and counting his money before he ordered dessert or a glass of red wine would suddenly disappear, would be snatched away into a floodlighted world of press interviews, trips by airplane to Hollywood, sunbasking on the Riviera, well-advertised books that regularly appeared on the best-seller lists. In those days writing could be a profitable business, but it was a perilous business, too, and the ordeal by success was fatal to almost as many talents as was the ordeal by failure.
I remember the time---it must have been the winter of 1927-28---when it seemed that New York had been suddenly inundated with pretty girls from Smith and Vassar and wherever, all of them determined to lead their own lives and have a lot of interesting love affairs-t--hey wore leather jackets like commissars and had bright natural-pink cheeks and were so full of vitality that the young men they allowed to escort them seemed colorless and dry. They had been very young flappers during the war; now they were learning to talk about "our own" generation, which they contrasted with "your lost" generation, and it was hard for us to get used to the idea that there were rebels younger than ourselves, who regarded us as relics of an age that was passing. But the relics managed to enjoy themselves almost as much as did the Smith College girls. When we put together an issue of a little magazine we did the work gaily and in common, as if we were taking part in a husking bee.
Since the disappearance of Broom and Secession my friends hadn't had any magazine of their own, although once as a lark we got out the first number of something called Aesthete 1925, which was intended as a bundle of squibs to be tossed in the direction of Ernest Boyd and his friends; the squibs went off without making much noise. We never scraped together money enough to print a second number of Aesthete, but later we were
asked to furnish material for special issues of the Little Review and transition. The procedure was the same in all these undertakings: we hired a suite of rooms in an old-fashioned hotel and appeared there at nine in the morning, each with his portable typewriter and a manuscript or two. By working together all day---rewriting, arguing, jotting down new ideas and exploding into laughter---we would have the issue finished at four or five in the afternoon, and then we set out together for new adventures. After one of the magazine-writing bees we took our wives to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem; after another we all attended a publisher's tea to which only one of us had been invited. It was being held to celebrate the publication of a book by a bewildered English nobleman. There were hundreds of guests and gallons of punch, and the nobleman's book, after being mentioned briefly, was forgotten for the afternoon and forever.
That was the great era of publishers' teas, so called, at which the usual beverage was Fish House punch. Year after year there seemed to be more teas, more guests at each of them and stronger punch for the guests to drink. The biggest tea was for Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who had written or let her name be signed to a book about her four successive million-dollar marriages. It was held in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton and an adjoining suite of rooms. There were three punch bowls, with a mob around each of them, and music was furnished by two orchestras. I wandered into one of the smaller rooms and managed to keep two strangers from coming to blows about Ernest Hemingway. By that time Hemingway's influence had spread far beyond the circle of those who had known him in Paris. The Smith College girls in New York were modeling themselves after Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises. Hundreds of bright young men from the Middle West were trying to be Hemingway heroes, talking in tough understatements from the sides of their mouths---"but just cut them open," I said, "and you'll find that their souls are little white flowers."
It doesn't seem to me now that we had any right to be scornful. We had our own affectations, which we failed to recognize, and our innocent notions about leading the good life. In those days I shared with some of my friends---not all of them---the notion that we could retain our personal independence by reducing our needs to a minimum, that is, to the plainest sort of food, shelter, clothing and transportation; everything else was free. If we tried to earn more we should spend more, and thereby raise our standard of living to a level which we could maintain only by writing best-sellers or by finding best-paying jobs, which one is always afraid of losing; we should be caught in the squirrel cage. On the other hand, if we spent most of the year in the country; if we lived in old farmhouses without conveniences (9) ---they were easy to find in those days and rented for ten dollars a month; if we grew our own vegetables, made our own cider, dressed in denim or khaki and traveled the back roads on foot or in the oldest Model T that would hold together; if we associated with others who lived in the same fashion, then we could pick our jobs, take our time over them, do our best work and live as it were on a private island, while profiting from the surplus wealth of a culture enslaved by commodities:
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat,
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind;
In those days hardly anyone read Emerson, but we all admired Thoreau in a distant fashion; the trouble was that we didn't carry his doctrine to the same extreme of self-dependence. Some of us accepted too much from publishers and Wall Street plungers-too many invitations to parties and week-ends, too many commissions for work we didn't really want to do but it paid well; we took our little portion of the easy money that seemed to be everywhere, and we thereby engaged or committed ourselves without meaning to do so. We became part of the system we were trying to evade, and it defeated us from within, not from without; our hearts beat to its tempo. We laughed too much, sang too much, changed the record and danced too hard, drank more than we intended (for wasn't the liquor free?)---we fell in love unwisely, quarreled without knowing why, and after a few years we were, in Zelda Fitzgerald's phrase, "lost and driven now like the rest."
From earlier days I remember how Hart Crane used to write his poems. There would be a Sunday-afternoon party on Tory Hill, near Patterson, New York, just across the state line from Sherman, Connecticut. Besides Hart there might be eight or ten of us present: the Tates, the Josephsons, the Cowleys, the Browns---or perhaps Bob Coates and Peter Blume, both curly redheads, the novelist Nathan Asch(10) and Jack Wheelwright, with his white week-end shoes and kempt and ruly hair; at one time or another all of them lived in the neighborhood. The party would be held, like others, in the repaired but unpainted and unremodeled farmhouse that Bill Brown had bought shortly after his marriage. When Bill was making the repairs, with Hart as his carpenter's helper, they had received a visit from Uncle Charlie Jennings, the former owner, an old-fashioned, cider-drinking New Englander who lived across the line in Sherman. Uncle Charlie had the plans explained to him and said, "I'm glad to see you an't putting in one of those bathrooms. I always said they was a passing fad." That was one of the stories told on a Sunday afternoon. I can't remember the other stories or why we laughed at them so hard; I can remember only the general atmosphere of youth and poverty and good humor.
We would play croquet, wrangling, laughing, shouting over every wicket, with a pitcher of cider half hidden in the tall grass beside the court; or else we would sit beside the fireplace in the big, low-ceilinged kitchen, while a spring rain soaped the windowpanes. Hart---we sometimes called him the Roaring Boy---would laugh twice as hard as the rest of us and drink at least twice as much hard cider, while contributing more than his share of the crazy metaphors ---and overblown epithets. Gradually he would fall silent, and a little later he disappeared. In lulls that began to interrupt the laughter, now Hart was gone, we would hear a new hubbub through the walls of his room -the phonograph playing a Cuban rumba, the typewriter clacking simultaneously; then the phonograph would run down and the typewriter stop while Hart changed the record, perhaps to a torch song, perhaps to Ravel's Bolero. Sometimes he stamped across the room, declaiming to the four walls and the slow spring rain.
An hour later, after the rain had stopped, he would appear in the kitchen or on the croquet court, his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair bristling straight up from his skull. He would be chewing a five-cent cigar which he had forgotten to light. In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript, with words crossed out and new lines scrawled in. "R-read that," he would say. "Isn't that the grreatest poem ever written?"
We would read it dutifully, Allen Tate perhaps making a profound comment. The rest of us would get practically nothing out of it except the rhythm like that of a tom-tom and a few startling images. But we would all agree that it was absolutely superb. In Hart's state of exultation there was nothing else we could say without driving him to rage or tears.
But that is neither the beginning nor the real end of the story. Hart, as I later discovered, would have been meditating over that particular poem for months or even years, scribbling lines on pieces of paper that he carried in his pockets and meanwhile waiting for the moment of genuine inspiration when he could put it all together. In that respect he reminded me of another friend, Jim Butler, a painter and a famous killer of woodchucks, who instead of shooting at them from a distance with a high-powered rifle and probably missing them, used to frighten them into their holes and wait until they came out again. Sometimes, he said, when they were slow about it he used to charm them out by playing a mouth organ. In the same way Hart tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place with a Cuban rumba and a pitcher of hard cider.
As for the end of the story, it might be delayed for a week or a month. Painfully, persistently---and dead sober---Hart would revise his new poem, clarifying the images, correcting the meter and searching for the right word hour after hour. "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," in the second of his "Voyages," was the result of a search that lasted for several days. At first he had written, "The seal's findrinny gaze toward paradise," but someone had objected that he was using a non existent word. Hart and I worked in the same office that year, and I remember his frantic searches through Webster's Unabridged and the big Standard, his trips to the library---on office time---and his reports of consultations with old sailors in South Street speakeasies. "Findrinny" he could never find,(11) but after paging through the dictionary again he decided that "spindrift" was almost as good and he declaimed the new line exultantly.' Even after one of his manuscripts had been sent to Poetry or the Dial and perhaps had been accepted, he would still have changes to make. There were many poets of the 1920s who worked hard to be obscure, veiling a simple idea in phrases that grew more labored and opaque with each revision of a poem. With Crane it was the original meaning that was complicated and difficult; his revisions brought it out more clearly. He said, making fun of himself, "I practice invention to the brink of intelligibility." The truth was that he had something to say and wanted to be understood, but not at the cost of weakening or simplifying his original vision.
Just what were these "meanings" and these "visions"? They were different, of course, in each new poem, but it seems to me that most of them expressed a purpose that was also revealed in his method of composition. Essentially Crane was a poet of ecstasy or frenzy or intoxication; you can choose your word depending on how much you like his work. Essentially he was using rhyme and meter and fantastic images to convey the emotional states that were induced in him by alcohol, jazz, machinery, laughter, intellectual stimulation, the shape and sound of words and the madness of New York in the late Coolidge era. At their worst his poems are ineffective unless read in something approximating the same atmosphere, with a drink at your elbow, the phonograph blaring and somebody shouting into your ear, "Isn't that grreat!" At their best, however, the poems do their work unaided except by their proper glitter and violence. At their very best, as in "The River," they have an emotional force that has not been equaled by any other American poet of our century.
Hart drank to write: he drank to invoke the visions that his poems are intended to convey. But the recipe could be followed for a few years at the most, and it was completely effective only for two periods of about a month each, in 1926 and 1927, when working at top speed he finished most of the poems included in The Bridge. After that more and more alcohol was needed, so much of it that when the visions came he was incapable of putting them on paper. He drank in Village speakeasies and Brooklyn waterfront dives; he insulted everyone within hearing or shouted that he was Christopher Marlowe; then waking after a night spent with a drunken sailor, he drank again to forget his sense of guilt. He really forgot it, for the moment. By the following afternoon all the outrageous things he had done at night became merely funny, became an epic misadventure to be embroidered---"And then I began throwing furniture out the window," he would say with an enormous chuckle. Everybody would laugh and Hart would pound the table, calling for another bottle of wine. At a certain stage in drunkenness he gave himself and others the illusion of completely painless brilliance; words poured out of him, puns, metaphors, epigrams, visions; but soon the high spirits would be mingled with obsessions---"See that man staring at us, I think he's a detective" -and then the violence would start all over again, to be followed next day by the repentance that became a form of boasting. In this repeated process there was no longer a free hour for writing down his poems, or a week or a month in which to revise them.
Even before his disastrous trips to Southern California---which he called "this Pollyanna greasepaint pinkpoodle paradise"---to France and to Mexico, Hart's adventures had become a many-chaptered saga. There was, for example, his quarrel with Bill and Sue Brown, when he swept out of their house at midnight, vowing never to come back. But the Browns lived alone on a hillside, and the path to Mrs. Addie Turner's gaunt barn of a house, where Hart was living, twisted through a second-growth woodland in which even a sober man might have lost his way. About three o'clock the Browns were wakened by the noise of Hart crashing through the bushes and then stamping on their front porch. Soon they heard him mutter, "Brrowns, Brrowns, you can't get away from them," as if he were penned and circumscribed by Browns. On another, evening that started in much the same fashion, he had been talking excitedly about Mexico. He got home safely this time, and he began furiously typing a letter to the Mexican President in Spanish, of which he knew only a few words. He blamed his typewriter for not being a linguist and threw it out the window without bothering to open the sash. When we passed the house next morning we saw it lying in a tangle of black ribbon. In it was a sheet of paper on which we could read the words, "Mi caro Presidente Calles" --–in Spanish that was all the typewriter could say.
I suppose that no other American poet, not even Poe, heaped so many troubles on his friends or had his transgressions so long endured. Scenes, shouts, obscenities, broken furniture were the commonplaces of an evening with Hart, and for a long time nobody did anything about it, except to complain in a humorous way. The 1920s had their moral principles, one of which was not to pass moral judgments on other people, especially if they were creative artists. We should have been violating the principle if we had condemned Hart for his dissipations on the waterfront or had even scolded him for his behavior in company. But the real reason he was forgiven was that he had an abounding warmth of affection for the people around him. To hear him roar with laughter, to receive his clumsy, kind attentions when ill, to hear his honest and discerning evaluations of other people's work, offered without a trace of malice, and to realize that he always praised his friends except to their faces was enough to cancel out his misdeeds, even though they were renewed weekly and at the end almost daily. It was Hart himself who took to avoiding his friends, largely, I think, through a sense of guilt. During the last three years of his life he was always seeking new companions, being spoiled by them for a time and then avoiding them in turn.
One of my last serious talks with him must have taken place in November 1929. Hart had come back from Paris early that summer after getting into a fight with the police and spending a week in prison; his rich friend Harry Crosby had hired a lawyer for him, paid his fine and given him money for the passage home. The Crosbys' little publishing house, the Black Sun Press, had undertaken to issue a limited edition of The Bridge, and Hart had spent the summer and fall trying to finish the group of poems he had started five years before. He had worked desperately in his sober weeks, although they had been interspersed with drinking bouts. One afternoon I arrived at the Turner house to find Peter Blume sitting on Hart's chest and Bill Brown sitting on his feet; he had been smashing the furniture and throwing his books out the window and there was no other way to stop him. Hart was gasping between his clenched teeth, "You can kill me---but you can't---destroy---The Bridge. It's finished---it's on the Bremen--on its way-to Paris."
For the rest of the week he was sober and busy cleaning up the wreckage of his room. I called one day to take him for a walk. Hart began telling me about the Crosbys: Caresse was beautiful and gay; Harry was mad in a genial fashion; he would do anything and everything that entered his mind. They were coming to New York in December and Hart was eager for me to meet them.... We stumbled in the frozen ruts of the road that led up Hardscrabble Hill. I had always refrained from interfering with Hart's life, but at last I was making the effort to give him good advice. I said, bringing the words out haltingly, that he had been devoting himself to the literature of ecstasy and that it involved more of a psychological strain than most writers could stand. Now, having finished The Bridge, perhaps he might shift over to the literature of experience, as Goethe had done (I was trying to persuade him by using great examples). It might be years before he was ready to undertake another group of poems as ambitious as those he had just completed. In the meantime he might cultivate his talent for writing quiet and thoughtful prose.
Hart cut me short. "Oh, you mean that I shouldn't drink so much."
Yes, I said after an uncomfortable pause, I had meant that partly and I had also meant that his drinking was, among other things, the result of a special attitude toward living and writing. If he changed the attitude and tried to write something different he would feel less need of intoxication. Hart looked at me sullenly and did not answer; he had gone so far on the path toward self-destruction that none of his friends could touch him any longer. He was more lost and driven than the others, and although he kept fleeing toward distant havens of refuge he felt in his heart that he could not escape himself. That night I dreamed of him and woke in the darkness feeling that he was already doomed, already dead.
The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else--and this was a frequent solution---they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.
The late 1920s were an age of coteries. They were a time when many of the larger social groups, especially those based on residence in a good suburb or membership in a country club, were losing their cohesiveness. Always at dances there were smaller groups that gathered with a confidential air---"Let's get together after the crowd goes home," one heard them say. Prosperous Americans, especially the younger married people, but some of the older ones too, had begun to form cliques or sets that disregarded the conventions. Each of the little sets had its gin parties and private jokes, each had its illusion of being free, sophisticated and set apart from the mass that believed in Rotarian ideals---till slowly each group discovered that it had dozens of counterparts in every big American city. In those days almost everyone seemed to be looking for an island, and escape from the mass was becoming a mass movement.
There is a danger in using the word "escape." It carries with it an overtone of moral disapproval; it suggests evasion and cowardice and flight from something that ought to be faced. Yet there is no real shame in retreating from an impossible situation or in fleeing from an enemy that seems too powerful to attack. Many writers of the 1920s regarded our commercial society as an enemy of that sort and believed that their only hope lay in finding a refuge from it. Escape was the central theme of poems, essays, novels by the hundred; it was the motive underlying many types of action that seemed impulsive and contradictory. Most of its manifestations, however, could be grouped under three general headings.
There was first the escape into art, a tendency discussed at some length in the chapter on the Dadaists, and second there was the escape toward the primitive. People felt vaguely that the most oppressive feature of modern civilization was its binding and falsifying of the natural instincts. To achieve happiness they should seek a life in which their instincts would have full play ---perhaps they could plow the rich earth and plant and harvest; perhaps they could sail off on a three-masted schooner into the South Seas; or perhaps they could revolt against the falsity of urban standards without leaving the city streets. Indeed, it was in New York and other large cities that this escape into primitivism was carried farthest and assumed a dozen different forms. It was expressed, for example, in the enthusiasm of tired intellectuals for Negro dances and music, the spirituals, the blues, Black Bottom and Emperor Jones; time and again one was told that the Negroes had retained a direct virility that the whites had lost through being overeducated. It was similarly expressed in the omnipresent cult of youth, which seemed to depend on the notion that very young people are more simple, physical and instinctive. It was expressed in the sort of body worship that would be codified into Nudism, and again it was expressed in an intense preoccupation with sex and with the overcoming of sexual inhibitions---wives deceived their husbands joylessly, out of a sense of duty, and husbands tried so hard to be natural that they developed into monsters. The search for the primitive was becoming confused with the hysteria of civilized frustration. Meanwhile, by those with money enough to get away, the same tendency was being expressed in a search for adventure, for natural dangers met face to face, lions shot with bow and arrows, sharks harpooned, mountains conquered on skis, the five oceans braved in an open boat.
Some of the methods of escape falling under the first two categories of Art and the Primitive were described by Nathanael West in a tender and recklessly imaginative novel that had few readers.(12) Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) has for its hero a young newspaperman who is hired to write a column of advice to the lovelorn. "The job," he says, explaining his own predicament, "is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke.... He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator."
Miss Lonelyhearts---that is how he signs his column---has a nervous breakdown and takes to his bed. Into his room bursts Shrike, the managing editor. Shrike is an obviously unhappy man who has adjusted himself to his world by becoming completely cynical; his one joy is to shatter the illusions of those about him, and particularly of Miss Lonelyhearts, who is his favorite target. Overhearing a snatch of conversation, he bursts out:
"My friend, I agree with Betty, you're an escapist. But I do not agree that the soil is the proper method for you to use. There are other methods, and for your edification I shall describe them. But first let us do the escape to the soil, as recommended by Betty:
"You are fed up with the city and its teeming millions.... So what do you do? So you buy a farm and walk behind your horse's moist behind, no collar, or tie, plowing your broad swift acres. As you turn up the rich black soil, the wind carries the smell of pine and dung across the fields and the rhythm of an old, old work enters your soul. To this rhythm you sow and weep and chivy your kine, not kin or kind, between the pregnant rows of corn and taters. Your step becomes the heavy sexual step of a dance-drunk Indian and you tread the seed down into the female earth. . . "
Miss Lonelyhearts turns his face to the wall and pulls the covers over his head. But Shrike raises his voice and talks on while the sick man tries not to hear him.
"Let us now consider the South Seas:
"You live in a thatch hut with the daughter of a king, a slim young maiden in whose eyes is an ancient wisdom. Her breasts are golden speckled pears, her belly a melon, and her odor is like nothing so much as a jungle fern. In the evening, on the blue lagoon, under the silvery moon, to your love you croon in the soft sylabelew and vocabelew of her languorous tongorour. Your body is golden brown like hers, and tourists have need of the indignant finger of the missionary to point you out. They envy you your breech clout and carefree laugh and little brown bride and fingers instead of forks. But you don't return their envy.... And so you dream away the days, fishing, hunting, dancing, swimming, kissing and picking flowers to twine in your hair....
"Well, my friend, what do you think of the South Seas?"
Miss Lonelyhearts pretends to be asleep. But Shrike is not fooled; he talks on inescapably:
"Art! Be an artist or a writer. When you are cold, warm yourself before the flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry nourish yourself with great spiritual foods by listening to the noble periods of Bach, the harmonies of Brahms and the thunder of Beethoven. ... Tell them to keep their society whores and pressed duck with oranges. For you l'art vivant, the living art, as you call it. Tell them that you know that your shoes are broken and that there are pimples on your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but that you don't care, for tomorrow they are playing Beethoven's last quartets in Carnegie Hall and at home you have Shakespeare's plays in one volume."
And Shrike continues. He describes the escape by hedonism, not neglecting the pleasures of the mind---"You fornicate under pictures by Matisse and Picasso, you drink from Renaissance glassware, and often you spend an evening beside the fireplace with Proust and an apple"---he describes the escape by drugs, the escape by suicide, while Miss Lonelyhearts trembles beneath the covers; finally he describes the escape by religion, the escape to Christ, which Miss Lonelyhearts wants to choose. . . . But curiously enough he does not describe the commonest of the forms of escape adopted during that period, the escape by sea, by simply packing one's bags and announcing that one was going to the South of France to write---"and don't expect me home for Christmas, not this year or next, because I'm leaving this hellhole forever."
Ever since 1920 there had been no break in the movement toward France. Artists and writers, art photographers, art salesmen, dancers, movie actors, Guggenheim fellows, divorcees dabbling in sculpture, unhappy ex-débutantes wondering whether a literary career wouldn't take the place of marriage ---a whole world of people with and without talent but sharing the same ideals happily deserted the homeland. Each year some of them returned while others crowded into their places: the migration continued at a swifter rate. But after the middle of the decade the motives behind it underwent an imperceptible but real change in emphasis. The earlier exiles had been driven abroad by a hatred of American dullness and puritanism, yet primarily they had traveled in search of something---leisure, freedom, knowledge, some quality that was offered by an older culture. Their successors felt the same desires, but felt them a little less strongly. Instead of being drawn ahead, they were propelled from behind, pushed eastward by the need for getting away from something. They were not so much exiles as refugees.
They began to scatter over the earth like fragments of an eruption. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that Americans
... were wandering ever more widely-friends seemed eternally bound for Russia, Persia, Abyssinia and Central Africa. And by 1928, Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until toward the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads. They were no longer the simple pa and ma and son and daughter, infinitely superior in their qualities of kindness and curiosity to the corresponding class in Europe, but fantastic neanderthals who believed something, something vague, that you remembered from a very cheap novel.... There were citizens traveling in luxury in 1928 and 1929 who, in the distortion of their new condition, had the human value of Pekinese, bivalves, cretins, goats.
But those weren't the people that made Paris seem suffocating to the refugees of art. Creatures like them were easy to avoid: one had merely to keep away from the big hotels, the banks and the night clubs in Montmartre. The refugees were also trying to escape something more subtle, some quality of American civilization that they carried within themselves. Wherever half a dozen of them gathered together, the quality reappeared and the same experience was re-enacted. There was a first glow of enthusiasm; friends were told about this marvelous untouched place and came hastening to enjoy it---as Fitzgerald said of life near the Cap d'Antibes in 1926, "whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art." Then, as the colony grew, there were jealousies, boredom, gossip, intrigues; some Americans became landlords and quarreled with their American tenants---but by this time there were Germans, too, and a broken-down English viscount and a handful of Russian émigrés, while the natives were grasping the opportunity of exploiting all these visitors by raising prices and installing a jazz band in the principal café. Artists complained that it was impossible to work here any longer with all these interruptions; writers again felt that something was constraining them, interfering with their thoughts---and the colony began to dissolve, a good half of it moving onward in search of a place that was still unspoiled by themselves.
All over the Mediterranean lands, but especially on the Riviera and in the Balearic Islands, colonies of the sort sprang up and flourished and eventually sent forth out-wanderers in search of a deeper solitude. It was only natural that the more energetic pilgrims should eventually reach the goal they had been pursuing. Some morning, inevitably, they woke and found themselves in a town that was virgin of tourists. It might be in the western isles of Greece; it might be at Lebda on the Tripolitanian coast, or in Dalmatia, or perhaps on the northern edge of the great desert, at Biskra in an off-season---at any rate they had finally escaped from all the things they hated. They sat in the one café looking out across the sun-hallucinated square and saw walls and crazy houses that must have been standing in the Middle Ages, with nowhere a sign of new construction, nowhere a Woolworth Building or a Chrysler Tower. There were no machines, not even a coffee mill or a Ford roadster; there was no false shame about the functions of the body. In, the middle of the square a little Negro girl had lifted her skirts and was squatting oblivious of the village sheik who passed her in his black and white burnoose. No belfry marked the hours: tomorrow and yesterday had intermingled.
Here at last one was free to live and write in one's own fashion. Here one could lie abed all day and work through the night---or, if one chose, get roaring drunk, smoke hashish, sleep with the native girls, indulge in any sort of orgy without fearing the police or even public censure. Here again one could write without thought of editorial deadlines or critics asking what it meant; one could write exactly as one pleased. .. . . But the days passed by and the great novel or poem was not even started. The refugees were undergoing a peculiar experience. In Paris or the South of France they had written stories about their childhood, about Michigan or Nebraska, stories the hero of which was a sensitive boy oppressed by his surroundings. Later, when this feeling of oppression faded in their minds, they had begun to write about their new friends in Europe, but without the same enthusiasm; they were easily interrupted. Here in this ultimate refuge there were no distractions whatever, nothing to keep them from working except the terrifying discovery that they had nothing now to say. Boredom and loneliness set in. They began to find that the food was bad, that there were fleas in the hotel, a dozen minor discomforts---and suddenly one morning they packed their bags and started north toward Paris, where for all the tourists like fantastic neanderthals, still there were people who spoke your own language.
Perhaps they even felt homesick for America, but unless they had run out of money there seemed to be no special reason for returning. New York, in the effort to overcome its native vices, had adopted those of Paris. Everywhere in the world of the arts, which had now allied itself with the world of cosmopolitan wealth, there existed the same atmosphere of frustration and purposeless tension; the laughter was keyed too high on both sides of the Atlantic. "By 1927 a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signaled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of crossword puzzles." Again the quotation is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novels and stories are in some ways the best record of this whole period. He was living near the Cap d'Antibes, where "pretty much of anything went," but he kept in touch with his friends at home and was amused or disturbed at what he heard from them. "I remember," he says, "a fellow expatriate opening a letter from a mutual friend of ours, urging him to come home and be revitalized by the hardy, bracing qualities of the native soil. It was a strong letter and it affected us both deeply, until we noticed that it was headed from a nerve sanitarium in Pennsylvania."
There was no escape. Whatever the path they followed and the principle they chose to guide them---whether they drank gin cocktails in Manhattan, or retired into Connecticut to be close to the soil, or wandered from island to island in the Pacific, or tried to disregard their surroundings and live only in the bitter air of masterpieces---it did not matter; the refugees of art ended by reaching the same goal: they ended in an atmosphere of hysteria and bewilderment that was not unlike the atmosphere of the bourgeois society they were trying to evade. Fitzgerald said that by this time---it was in 1927
. . . contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled "accidentally" from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speakeasy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for---these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom.
When he wrote that passage Fitzgerald may have been thinking about his own tragic decline, which was the result of events that took place "not during the depression but during the boom." All the emotional and intellectual foundations for what would follow were laid in the boom years. Thus, even under Harding and Coolidge the doctrine of individualism had already defeated itself. In spite of the universal praise it received from essayists, politicians and business apologists, it had ceased to flourish at the heart of the social system---the very millionaires were colorless indoor persons who tried to live up to the conception of themselves created by their press agents and who, in their private lives, were ruled by the public that enriched them. Individualism had deserted the forum, the marketplace, and was taking refuge in marginal doctrines, in the past, in exile or in dreams. And it found no safety there: on the contrary, it was being forced to acknowledge its failure. The individualistic way of life was even failing to produce individuals. In their flight from social uniformity, artists were likely to choose uniform paths of escape and obey the conventions of their own small groups; even their abnormalities of conduct belonged to fixed types; even in the neuroses from which more and more of them suffered they followed established patterns.
Every age has its representative failures of personality and acts of violence, and the late 1920s had more than their share of both. Let us examine the background of one such act, a double suicide that took place in the early winter of 1929, six weeks after the Wall Street crash. Perhaps we shall find that it casts a retrospective light on the literary history of the whole decade.