Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [92]
Against their better judgment, Perkins persuaded the Scribner brothers to publish Fitzgerald’s first novel, overseeing three rewrites over a period of two years before his elders agreed to take the manuscript. His faith was amply rewarded. Encapsulating the dreams of the generation that grew up in the wake of the Great War, This Side of Paradise was the seminal novel of the early 1920s and a runaway bestseller. “I am the man, as they say in the ads, who made America Younger-Generation conscious,” Edmund Wilson imagined his friend Fitzgerald boasting after its publication.
Fitzgerald respected Perkins enormously and liked being able to bring him into contact with friends whose work he thought Perkins might want to publish. He introduced Perkins to Ring Lardner, his neighbor on Long Island in 1923, and Perkins helped Lardner make the transition from sportswriter to one of the most celebrated short-story writers of the era.
When Fitzgerald moved to Paris in 1924 and met Ernest Hemingway he lost no time in letting Perkins know about his discovery. “This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway [Fitzgerald never learned to spell Hemingway’s name], who lives in Paris, (an American) writes for the transatlantic Review + has a brilliant future . . . I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.”
Through this introduction Perkins went on to publish the second seminal novel of the 1920s, The Sun Also Rises, which inspired a generation of imitators. It was Perkins who persuaded Hemingway to call his novel by this title rather than Fiesta, and both Perkins and Fitzgerald edited Hemingway’s “careless” and “unpublishable” manuscript heavily to produce the pared-down power of the final version. “Nowadays when almost everyone is a genius, at least for a while, the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax,” Fitzgerald wrote in his ten-page critique. “This should frighten all of us into a lust for anything honest that people have to say about our work.”
Hemingway’s story of a group of expatriates drifting around Europe drinking, arguing and making love encapsulated the glamorous disaffectedness that characterized the Lost Generation. Malcolm Cowley described people fresh from visits to Paris swapping stories about their hero and talking in what Cowley called the “Hemingway dialect—tough, matter-of-fact and confidential.” Smith College girls in New York were wearing leather commissars’ jackets and modeling themselves on Brett Ashley, although their cheeks were too healthily pink for authenticity.
The one future bestseller Perkins failed to persuade Charles and Arthur Scribner to publish was the advertising executive Bruce Barton’s spiritual self-help book, The Man Nobody Knows. Sex and profanity they could learn to live with; making Jesus into a business adviser was a step too far.
Scholarships and fellowships like the Guggenheim Foundation, set up in 1925, supported male writers (as well as scientists and composers) including Wilson, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Conrad Aiken and Langston Hughes. Its declared aim was to seek out “men who were willful, uncompromising, quarrelsome, arrogant and creative”—qualities not previously valued by American society.
Readers as well as writers felt part of a vibrant new literary movement characterized by the proliferation of experimental journals like the Transatlantic Review, Broom and transition and by mass-market magazines like the Saturday Evening Post which paid so much for witty, contemporary short stories that Fitzgerald could keep Zelda in diamonds and furs almost throughout the decade. In 1890 the Middletown public library had offered its readers nineteen periodicals; by 1925 its shelves groaned with 225.
Condé Nast’s glittering Vanity Fair was edited by Frank Crowninshield, uncle of Harry Crosby’s mistress Constance