1920 (37 page)

However, it was not just the pessimism of the postwar years that fueled the artists of 1920; it was a desire to explore more profoundly than ever before the hidden corners of human nature. Such European authors as Zola, Flaubert, and Hardy, among others, were already doing that. It was time for American authors to follow their lead, time for more mature and probing work.

With few exceptions, the art that left the greatest impression in 1920, and is still studied today for both its stylistic innovation and cultural hostility, reflected the views of the lost generation: disenfranchisement, it was, set to page and stage and in many cases canvas. Such painters as Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, among several others, were taking apart the pieces of humanity and putting them back in different sizes and shapes and even places, creating images that startled, captivated, and appalled. Conventional notions of composition and shape, of color, placement, and conveyance of meaning, were ignored, even destroyed, forcing Americans to look differently at what they saw both in the museum and on the street outside. The revolution in painterly vision left more destruction of tradition in its path than a tornado leaves after it rips through a trailer park.

AROUND THE TIME THAT HARDING
defeated Cox, copies of Sinclair Lewis's
Main Street
were being delivered to America's bookstores. It was an appropriate coincidence. The novel could easily have been set in Harding's hometown of Marion, Ohio. Instead, according to historian Nathan Miller,
Main Street

satirized Gopher Prairie, a thinly-disguised portrait of Sauk Center, [Lewis's] hometown in Minnesota, where “dullness is made God.” … the lodge members in their comic regalia, and the women of the uplift societies—were skewered for what Lewis saw as provincialism, emotional poverty, and lack of spiritual values. The publication of
Main Street
ranks with that of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
as one of the few literary events with a profound political or social fallout, for it established a new way of looking at small-town America.

Relating the wistful thoughts of the novel's heroine, Carol Milford, Lewis wrote, “The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot.” Carol was a student at Blodgett College, “a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities.”

What was so blasphemous about
Main Street
was that it had been standard practice at the time, and for generations preceding, to idealize small-town America. It was viewed as a fortress that housed old-fashioned morality, older-fashioned values, and the principles that, at least on paper, had been the foundation of the United States ever since those papers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, had been written.

But the fortress had been penetrated.
Main Street
left no axiom unexamined, no bromide unshattered. To Lewis, places like his hometown taught conformity in their schools more effectively than they did any academic subject. The accumulation of material goods was venerated; the striving after intellectual goals was looked at suspiciously, a goal of socialists, that kind of person. And as for one's so-called friends, the trustworthy, rock-steady, benevolent men and women of Gopher Prairie, the people who made it such a cheerful place to live, Lewis warned against turning one's back to them, warned that they would cheat and lie about their neighbors at the slightest prospect of gain for themselves. Even for the simple joy of gossiping, reveling in the power of possessing information unknown to others. Small towns, small minds, and, when
opportunities for gain presented themselves, small treacheries. If Lewis's masterpiece could be reduced to a single phrase, this would have been a good candidate.

Critics, on the whole, were not fond of
Main Street
. One New Yorker, Deems Taylor, normally a music critic, said the book “owed much of its success to its offering culturally insecure Americans … ‘a set of consistently contemptible and uncultured characters to whom [they] superior must feel.'”

And Walter Lippmann, the dean of global-affairs columnists who virtually never wrote about literature either, accused Lewis of merely “inventing stereotypes … substituting new prejudices for old … marketing useful devices … used by millions … to express their new, disillusioned sense of America.” In addition, critics charged, Lewis's prose tended to ramble; he was less interested in telling a single, unified story than he was in accumulating incidents to make his accusations—piling on, rather than proceeding artfully. And those accusations were more often than not too harsh, his characters more parodies than flesh-and-blood mortals—such was the consensus.

The fact that men who were not normally book reviewers, men of more prestigious rank, raced into print to denounce Lewis is telling, indicative of the threat that
Main Street
posed to the conventional values to which they subscribed. But Taylor was wrong in his specifics. Lippmann was wrong. Their condemnations were publicity for the book, their judgments more suitable to the days of “lassies in sunbonnets” than to the present. For what Lewis was doing was writing a new kind of fiction, helping to create a new literature, one of the purposes of which was to stir emotions, examine motives beneath the surface, and reinforce the newly forming biases that were the basis of the lost generation.

After a slow start,
Main Street
had sold 200,000 copies before 1920 ended. Within a few years, the total was up to three million, and the book has not stopped selling, or being studied in both high school and college, ever since. A spokesperson for the publisher whom I contacted claimed not to know how many copies of
Main Street
are being sold these days, a patently and inexplicably false statement, but the number is surely in the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds.

Former small-town newspaper publisher Warren G. Harding could have lived on
Main Street
. He looked the part, espoused the cautious means of proceeding from day to day. “What is the greatest thing in life?” he once asked; then answered for himself: “Happiness. And there is more happiness in the American small village than in any place on earth.” He could have taken the physician Will Kennicott's place at the side of his contrarian wife, one-time Blodgett student Carol Milford, whom he married later in the story.

Carol Milford Kennicott, try though she did, could never make herself comfortable in Gopher Prairie. She had married Will in good faith; but when she could no longer bear the stagnation of her hometown, or her husband's complacency and inability to appreciate art of any kind, she left him for two years of war-related work in Washington, D.C. She returned to her husband and others she knew in Gopher Prairie not so much because she wanted to, but because there was nowhere else to go. As the 46-year-old poet Robert Frost had written five years earlier, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Gopher Prairie welcomed her back, but she was not feeling what she had hoped to feel; there were times, in fact, when she seemed more discouraged than she had been before her out-of-town sabbatical.

Less than a year after leaving Washington, when the Kennicotts' first child, a little girl, was born, Carol led husband Will to the hospital nursery and

pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. “Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you would arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars.”

Her husband might have agreed with her, or perhaps did not. After all these years of marriage, his disputes with Carol had become lifeless. “Yump, probably be changes all right,” he yawned. And that was the end of the conversation.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS JUST BEGINNING
to make a name for himself as a short-story writer, but his first novel,
The Sun Also Rises
, full of the angst and emptiness of the lost generation, was still six years away. It might not have been published at all, however, had it not been for the urging of F. Scott Fitzgerald—impressed by Hemingway, then later dominated and ridiculed by him, the beggar turning vindictively on his benefactor, Fitzgerald pleaded with his editor at Scribner's, the famed Maxwell Perkins, to take his friend as a client. Perkins was dubious at first, but began reading Hemingway's short stories in 1920 and finally, in 1925, published a collection of them, called
In Our Time
.

Then, the next year, Scribner's published
The Sun Also Rises
, a tale of tedious people that is among the most tedious of twentieth-century classics. The book became the first of a shelf-load of successes for Hemingway that included, among others,
A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea
, and
A Moveable Feast
—all with vastly different plots, yet most featuring at least a few characters from the lost generation. “This is a hell of a dull talk,” says a woman in
The Sun Also Rises
, accurately summing up the conversation Hemingway has presented in the book. “How about some of that champagne,” she says, just as accurately summing up the hobby of choice—virtually a vocation—for all the characters. If it weren't for abuse of bulls in the ring in Pamplona, Spain, nothing would have happened in Hemingway's volume at all. It is difficult to write purposeful books about purposeless people.

His entire body of work enabled Hemingway to join Lewis in winning the Nobel Prize. Lewis won it in 1930 but refused to accept; Hemingway accepted his own trophy twenty-four years later. “For a true writer,” he said in his speech in Oslo that, in a way, described the literature that had changed so drastically in the twenties,

each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done, or that others have tried and failed. Then, sometimes, with good luck, he will succeed. … It is because we have had such great writers
in the past, that a writer is driven far out, past where he can go, out where no one can help him.

AS A NOVELIST, FITZGERALD GOT
the jump on his friend, publishing
This Side of Paradise
in 1920, one of only four full-length books, not counting short-story compilations, that he would manage to finish. The book's protagonist, Amory Blaine, is, like the author, a Minnesotan with a high opinion of his own abilities. He attends Princeton to have his opinion confirmed; then, according to plan, he will become a successful author.

In brief,
This Side of Paradise
is the story of two of Blaine's love affairs, one in Minneapolis with Isabelle, which ends with his returning to college at Princeton; and the other, which begins at Princeton and ends with his beloved Rosalind deciding to marry a far wealthier man than he. He develops a crush on another young lady, and then another, but neither lasts nor means nearly as much to him as the first two relationships.

The result of it all is a distraught, and surprised, protagonist.

Women—of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvelously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience—had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.

At the novel's end, Blaine's summary of his life to date is a sad one, despite being uttered to himself under “the crystalline, radiant sky. ‘I know myself,' he cries, ‘but that is all.'”

This Side of Paradise
was the biggest seller of Fitzgerald's lifetime. Unfortunately, he was deluded by the book's success into thinking that all of his work would be so profitable, and that he was, therefore, capable of the same kind of wealthy lifestyle of which he wrote. But it was just that: a delusion. And it was not just literary profits that misled him. A movie
producer optioned
This Side of Paradise
for $3,000. But the movie was not made and the money not paid, the producer forfeiting on the project and the story remaining between the covers of the book version. Still, Fitzgerald continued to believe that financial woes, which would in fact worsen for him, were a thing of the past.

Nineteen-twenty was probably the apogee of Fitzgerald's life, both professionally and personally. In addition to
This Side of Paradise
, Scribner's also published
Flappers and Philosophers
, Fitzgerald's first book of short stories; and then later in the year, seven months to the day after his novel was released, he married Zelda Sayre, the free-wheeling, universally pursued but deadly addled, nonsensically poetic belle of Montgomery, Alabama. Somehow, he believed he could lead a stable life with her. Another delusion.

Actually, the year before they wed, Zelda's biographer Nancy Milford tells us, “she wrote to him that if he felt he had lost his feeling for her, if he'd be happier without their marrying, she would release him from whatever promises had once been made.” It was an offer he should not have refused.

And she added: “Somehow ‘When love has turned to kindness' doesn't horrify me like it used to—It has such a peaceful sound—like something to come back to and rest—and sometimes I'm glad we're not exactly like we used to be—and I can't help feeling that it would all come back again.”