Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [91]
The Round Table’s brittle charms did not have universal appeal. The aristocratic intellectual Edmund Wilson, a classmate of Scott Fitzgerald’s at Princeton and, as literary editor of Vanity Fair, a sometime stable-mate of Parker, Benchley, Sherwood, Broun and Woollcott, found them at bottom provincials masquerading as urban sophisticates. Only people from the same small-town, middle-class backgrounds could despise and mock their roots with such malice and yet be unable to escape them. Dorothy Parker was the one who stood out for Wilson: she alone, he thought, was genuinely witty as well as being able to move in circles other than her own.
Wilson’s circle was higher-brow than the wise-cracking, small-town mob at the Algonquin—a group of aspiring poets rather than hack journalists. He and his friend John Peale Bishop competed for the affections of the untamed Edna St. Vincent Millay. Their literary tastes, shaped by their years at ivy-covered colleges, were self-consciously aesthetic and decadent; their heroes were James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
When Henry Mencken and George Nathan founded the American Mercury magazine in 1924, the first issue carried a parody of the “Aesthete: Model 1924,” a composite portrait of the literary intellectual of the period by Ernest Boyd, drawing on Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings and others. Born with the century, wrote Boyd, the Aesthete had a proprietary attitude towards his times. He had been molded by evening parties at Harvard and Princeton against a background of “red plush curtains and chairs but recently robbed of their prudish antimacassars.” A spell in France during the war had given him a veneration for Proust and Cézanne, a florid rhetorical style and a taste for inaccurate and spurious French phrases. “The Aesthete holds that a cliché, in French for preference, will dispose of any genius.”
Accessibility was not the Aesthete’s aim. Although he adored French literature its allure would have been tarnished if it had been widely popular. “What he wants to do is lead a cult, to communicate a mystic faith in his idols, rather than to make them available for general appreciation.” But the appeal of “the esoteric editorial chair where experiments are made with stories which ‘discard the old binding of plot and narrative’” had to compete with “the sales manager’s desk, where, it appears, the Renaissance artist of today is to be found.” Like the habitués of the Round Table, even the Aesthete was learning to be commercial.
Dorothy Parker and her friends at the Algonquin were riding the tide of a revolution in the writing business. Although they would have hated the comparison, the literary industry, as Malcolm Cowley put it, “was becoming like General Motors . . . 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.” Authors’ advances, which made it possible to live while writing a book rather than just being paid from royalties after it came out, were a new development, pioneered during the 1920s by firms like Knopf, Viking and Random House. The number of new books published doubled between 1919 and 1929. An eager, if credulous, audience awaited: it almost seemed as if anyone who felt the urge could call themselves a writer and make a living from their pen.
The young editor Max Perkins transformed old-fashioned Charles Scribner’s Sons by pursuing (and in large part creating) the stars of the new generation: Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway and Tom Wolfe. Sixty-six-year-old Charles Scribner II, known at the firm as “old CS,” had headed Scribner’s Sons since 1889 with his brother, Arthur. They were cigar-smoking, handsomely