Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [87]
Harry, too, was obsessed with purity. For all his womanizing, he was never attracted to the tawdry or the easily available. At Harvard he had declared that “he’d rather kiss a nice girl than screw a chippie” and his amours were defined by his being able to find something to venerate about the women with whom he became involved. On his thirtieth birthday he pledged (among other things) “to continue rites but to abolish superstitions…to be ascetic not hedonistic . . . to be bright and delicate and gentle and chaste to worship the Sun with a chaste heart and a chaste soul and a chaste body.”
And yet hedonism was what Harry’s generation would be remembered for. Fearlessly they embraced the sins Middle America blamed on immigrants and hoped the Ku Klux Klan would eradicate: adultery, profanity, homosexuality, divorce, alcohol, extravagance, perversity, drugs, individuality, liberty and libertinism. For to them there were worse sins, outlined by the critic Edmund Wilson in an essay on The Waste Land: “people grinding at barren office routine in the cells of giant cities, drying up their souls in eternal toil whose products never bring them profit, where their pleasures are so vulgar and feeble that they are almost sadder than their pains.”
Any catastrophe was preferable to living incarceration in a town like Sinclair Lewis’s fictional Zenith or the Lynds’ very real Middletown. Richmond Barrett wrote an essay in 1928, “Babes in the Bois,” satirizing a group of pretentious young lotus-eaters he met sailing from New York to Paris. “‘I may make a mess of my life,’ said one. It was obvious that he rather hoped he would—a glorious, passionate kind of mess. ‘But at least I won’t be a ready-made, the sort that’s turned out by hundreds. ’”
Security was stultifying. Only by challenging himself with danger and movement could the thrusting young intellectual of the 1920s find inspiration. The cost mattered naught; in fact the cost was part of the prize. As Harry wrote of two of his literary heroes, Byron and Edgar Allan Poe, “in these semi-madmen, these geniuses, lies the true aristocracy of mankind.” Talent was hardly talent if it didn’t burn you up entirely.
Youth, too, was exalted. Like moderation, experience and wisdom were apologies for those who could not keep up. Scott Fitzgerald saw youth as its own justification—the only one. He longed for life but hated the marks it left on him. Above all he feared losing the idealistic sheen that youth had bestowed upon him. “You remember I used to say I wanted to die at thirty,” he wrote to his editor as he was finishing The Great Gatsby. “Well I’m twenty-nine and the prospect is still welcome.” Part of this was bravado; part of it was what he thought an artist should feel; but part of it was genuine. “Youth is the only thing worth having,” said Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, poster-boy for the “Lost Generation.” “When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”
“They long to be doomed,” wrote Richmond Barrett of his immature shipmates. “If destruction threatens to be tardy, they’ll rush to meet it half-way by committing suicide.” Suicide was popularly thought to be a twenties malaise. Barrett referred to the “dozens of sensational scare-heads on the subject of suicide among American students” and admitted that the fact that people were brooding on self-destruction was a worrying social development.
Harry Crosby was not the only one. Hart Crane threw himself off a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932. Harry had recognized their kinship: “He is of the Sea as I am of the Sun.” Members of a suicide club in Paris drew lots once a year to see which of their number was to take his life; for them, committing suicide was the purest, bravest expression of contempt for life and its futility. The heroine of Carl Van Vechten’s The Tattooed Countess traveled with a loaded gold-and-black Toledo-work revolver and a vial of bichloride of mercury tablets, just in case her acute sensitivity to life (and her desire for death) overcame her.