Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [86]
D. H. Lawrence, depressed by the news of Harry’s death, wrote to his friend and publisher, Dino Oriolo, that Harry “had always been too rich and spoilt: nothing to do but commit suicide.” This was only partly fair. Harry Crosby’s ability to insulate himself from the real world may have been exceptional, but in life the things he was running from were far from unique and a fascination with death was common among his contemporaries.
Born around the turn of the century, the young men who would become the voices of their generation came to maturity during the First World War, when many of them served as soldiers or ambulance drivers. Not just Harry but friends and acquaintances including Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, Louis Bromfield and John Dos Passos had watched their companions die in the bloody mud of northern Europe and glimpsed adulthood and freedom in the bars and brothels of Paris.
Stimulated by a rich new culture but disillusioned by the carnage and senselessness of war, in France these men felt the first stirrings of their distinctive identity: a “spectatorial attitude” to life, a sense of emptiness and detachment from reality; a feeling, because ultimately they survived the war, of being both chosen and undeserving; finally, a restless rootlessness that would color much of their subsequent work with a faint but unmistakable wash of nostalgia. “What shall we do tomorrow?” asked T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. “What shall we ever do?”
Writers of the period didn’t want, as Malcolm Cowley put it, to “write stories in which salesmen were the romantic heroes.” They had to fight to find their own material. Even the one novel that did achieve Cowley’s improbable transformation, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, expressed the same unformed yearnings, the unfocused nostalgia, that characterized their generation and sent so many into exile.
One way of turning their backs on the past was to celebrate modernity and the future. Hart Crane’s poetry, like Langston Hughes’s and Carl Sandberg’s, used experimental language to convey with a new immediacy the effect produced upon him by jazz, machinery, laughter, debauchery, alcohol, sex, slang. His most famous work—the one written at the Moulin de Soleil—was an ode to the Brooklyn Bridge. Crosby was fascinated by cars, airplanes and speed; Gerald Murphy’s paintings presented machines and engineering as works of art.
Believing their world had been wrecked by the generation that had preceded them, these writers set about wholeheartedly rejecting their parents’ values. “They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the ’80s,” wrote John Carter furiously in Atlantic Monthly in 1920, expressing the views of so many of his contemporaries. “We have been forced to live in an atmosphere of ‘tomorrow we die,’ and so, naturally, we drank and were merry.”
“They’re all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins,” said one of the maturer characters in Warner Fabian’s best-selling novel, Flaming Youth. The disenchanted younger generation strove to maintain their inner purity while living as dissolutely as they could, turning their backs on the complacency and conformity that sucked the vitality from life. “Depravity was their prayer, their ritual, their rhythmic exercises: they denied sin by making it hackneyed in their own bodies, shucking it away to come out not dirtied but pure,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams of the English debauchees Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard, whom he met in Paris at this time. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald also saw their fast living almost as a dare, as if they were