Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [89]
Bored, discontented exiles, running from themselves, had even managed to make Paris dreary. “From the Dome to the Rotonde, thence to the Select they march,” wrote Richmond Barrett of his weary “trail-blazers” doing the rounds of literary Montparnasse nightspots. “The next move is around the corner to the Parnasse; across the street someone beckons from the window of the Dingo. The dogged band leaves the Dingo at last for a round of Russian cocktails at the Viking. So the time passes—day after day, week after week, and still they congratulate themselves upon having escaped the rut!”
The more insightful among them recognized that, paradoxically, living abroad made it possible to look more clearly at the United States, to better judge and comment on what they had left behind. Their time away actually intensified their Americanness, rather than diluting it, and this became a powerful inspiration for many. Then, too, returning Americans found that they liked being back home—that the familiar had charms more potent than they remembered. Harold Stearns, finally back in New York after a decade away, rediscovered his homeland with a sense of wonder: “after all, there is a real world here.”
Wits of the Round Table: Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross.
10
THE NEW YORKER
THE IRONY ABOUT THE LITERARY WORLD OF THE 1920S WAS that although it bemoaned the dearth of culture and inspiration in America, it was in fact experiencing a period of vibrant growth. The generation that delighted in the title “lost”—Hemingway’s epigram to The Sun Also Rises was a quote from Gertrude Stein describing him and his friends as a “Lost Generation”—found itself through creative endeavor.
As Archibald MacLeish later wrote, it was “precisely because the bottom had fallen out of the historical tradition” that his contemporaries wrote so bravely, so innovatively, so freely and tragically. “It was not the Lost Generation which was lost: it was the world out of which that generation came.” This idea of what Edmund Wilson called “the starvation of a whole civilization” allowed MacLeish, Hemingway and their friends—even Harry Crosby—to produce from the rubble something entirely, compellingly new.
From the First World War onwards, artists followed Ford Madox Ford’s maxim: “the business of art is not to elevate but to render.” The very fact that Crosby, whom friends described as an Elizabethan adventurer in spirit, should have desired to be a poet above all other things shows how crucial the role of literature was to 1920s America, as criticism, conscience, mirror and diviner. Ezra Pound, who was commissioned by Caresse to write a posthumous appreciation of Harry’s work, described the role of the 1920s artist:
Ruffle the skirts of prudes
speak of their knees and ankles.
But, above all, go to practical people—
go! Jangle their door-bells!
Say that you do no work
and that you will live forever.
While some Americans with literary or artistic aspirations spent long periods of time away from the United States, many more gravitated to New York. The leafy, brownstone-lined streets of Greenwich Village had for decades been the province of the bohemian, women with short hair and men with long, both sexes in flowing, brightly colored clothes. Their ideals of personal liberty and self-expression were quickly adopted by the post-war generation who added to them their own sense of affected disillusionment and an emancipating dose of Freud.
Some of the more adventurous ventured up to Harlem in search of exotic drum-beats. Hoping to break free from the repressive shackles of society and civilization, they believed they would find in “primitive” black culture a freer, more spontaneous, less inhibited life. Despite these avowedly high ideals, the practice was invariably low-life. Harlem may have been a place of inspiration for its own artists and writers but it did little more than service the darker needs of its white visitors.
For 1920s