Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [88]
Self-imposed exile of some other kind was an easier route for most. Rather than risk conforming to society or being rejected by it, intellectuals had no choice but to become, as the writer Glenway Westcott put it, “spiritual expatriates . . . a band of revolutionaries or a cult of immoralists.” Feeling like strangers at home, attached to the United States but in an obscure way rejected by it, they sought escape and refuge. Millions of Americans pursued the exotic in films like The Sheik or in mah-jongg tiles; the heiress and art collector Mabel Dodge Luhan fled to Mexico and the Southwest; Carl Van Vechten hailed a taxi to take him to Harlem.
Civilization in the United States came out in the same year that Harry and Caresse emigrated to France. The thirty contributors collected together by its editor Harold Stearns were unanimous in their view “that American civilization itself is responsible for the tragedy of American talent.” In a later article, Stearns asked himself, “What should a young man do?” and replied, “A young man had no future in this country of hypocrisy and repression. He should take ship for Europe, where people know how to live.” Stearns, who had left New York in 1921, had already followed his own advice—although with little success. Six years later Hemingway immortalized him in The Sun Also Rises as the failure, Harvey Stone, counting his pennies in a Montparnasse café.
At first, being in Paris made it easier to believe in “a patrie of the imagination.” It was, wrote Malcolm Cowley, another voluntary exile, “a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses. Paintings and music, street noises, shops, flower markets, modes, fabrics, poems, ideas, everything seemed to lead toward a half-sensual, half-intellectual swoon.” e. e. cummings said Paris continually expressed the “humanness of humanity,” as opposed to American cities prostrate before the machine. It was also wonderfully cheap: a dollar bought eight francs in 1919 and twenty-five in 1926.
“They were not in Paris because they were Americans,” wrote Archibald MacLeish of Gerald and Sara Murphy, another expatriate couple in the Crosbys’ circle. “They were in Paris because it was Paris. And not only the Paris of the damp, sweet-smelling mornings with their flooded gutters and their high-wheeled carts but the Paris of the difficult work—the work of art.” No one in America ever did things with the “vast, magnificent, cynical disillusion with which Gerald and Sara make things like their parties,” wrote Fitzgerald.
Harry Crosby was by no means the most talented writer of his generation, nor the most representative, but he encapsulates so many of the things that inspired his peers: the feeling of alienation, the desire for self-expression and freedom, the conflation of pleasure and happiness, the philosophy of living for the moment, the pagan worship of the body, the belief that by continuing to move one would find meaning. Even his suicide was part of a broader pattern. In a strange sort of way he achieved the “grace under pressure” that Hemingway said was all a man could hope for from himself. Harry found meaning in death; others would find it by returning home.
By late 1929, when Harry and the Fire Princess died, most Americans-in-Paris were already making their way back. The French had complained for years that they only heard American-accented English spoken in the boulevard Saint Germain and that high prices were driving them out of their favorite restaurants, but for the first time Europe-based Americans were beginning to get a sense that they were transplanting their own materialistic, progress-obsessed culture to Europe as much as absorbing that of Europe themselves. Writing in Harper’s magazine in March 1929, the historian Charles Beard spoke out against the Americanization of Europe: “prose against poetry; dollars against sacrifice; calculation against artistic abandon.” What was the point of having a patrie