Being Geniuses Together, Robert McAlmon & Kay Boyle

The frank approach of this text, like the Malcolm Cowley, is refreshing after being bogged down in the prose of Fitzgerald. There is nothing to decipher; one doesn’t have to wonder is he talking about Zelda—or really Nichole? Or is it the Murphys? The “characters” named here remain true to who they are throughout. Although their personalities may at different point within the text appear convoluted—they are real and individual. They are multi-layered and complex and yet, James Joyce can be expected to act like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein like Stein. There is no pretense. No one is vilified or valorized; they simply exist as who they were in that particular time and place. It is thought-provoking. For this reader it makes for a more engaging prose—a Paris I would have liked to be a part of.

Yes, there were parties and lots of apparently drunk people—but there was purpose and a focus that has thus far been ambiguous. The American writers in Paris were “determined to be free and yet that freedom did not have a specific name.” (14) Freedom from the constraints of a society to which they didn’t feel a part; money, society. As Boyle suggests, like hippies of the 1960s they seemed to embrace poverty—as an ideal (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose). They were the epitome of the starving artist—as a generation.

Of interest to me in this text is, like the Cummings text, the attention to language. McAlmon discusses at length Joyce’s infatuation with words—as though this was something outside of himself. And yet his own word play is deeply engaging and intimate. Clearly, like Joyce McAlmon and Boyle were carrying on love affairs with the language in which they wrote. When I began reading, I was underlining pithy lines and brilliant turns of phrase—after reading two pages—and having two pages of underlined text (in different colors!) I surrendered (and I may go all Irish-twiligty were I to try to recapture the affects of such eloquence).

Thus far, of what we have read this semester, this text offers a solid explanation to the movement to American writers to Paris. It makes no apologies, and doesn’t try to define this generation as singular. Perhaps they were lost—but the writers here acknowledge that that in and of itself is not what made them stand out. For McAlmon and Boyle it wasn’t an abstract concept of “lost generation,” but rather a generation found. A generation unfettered by Victorian constraint, free to explore the limits of creativity. They were a generation liberated by war and destruction—liberated by the very tragedies that they felt defined them in many ways (much in the same way that poets like The Pearl Poet and Chaucer followed the Plague that destroyed much of Europe in the twelfth century). What I glean from this book is that while there were periods of rowdiness—for many of these writers there were periods of discipline and intense creativity. I wish we had read this earlier on.

McAlmon, Robert, and Kay Boyle. Being Geniuses Together 1920-1930. 5th ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Living Well is the Best Revenge

For the first time all semester we have read a text that approaches individuals with a feeling of sincerity and honesty. Tompkins engaging prose allowed me to see and feel the Murphy’s. As a Cole Porter fan, I knew a little bit about their lives. And I knew from reading the introduction to Tender is the Night that they were the models for the Divers. In contrast to the other memoir/biography texts we have read this felt real—there were real people with real issues doing real, albeit somewhat insane, things. The voices were authentic rather than persona.

Even in these short excerpts one gets a feel for who Ernest Hemingway was, and what ate at Scott Fitzgerald. For the first time I got a picture of what life was like in France in the twenties. I got a feel for the passions of the individuals—how life really was in France—without the complication of ego. While The Sun Also Rises is filled with shallow empty characters and Tender is the Night seems to be taking that tack (I have only read the first hundred pages or so), this text explores real people, with real emotions and issues; people about whom one wants to care. They drink, they party, some are profoundly irresponsible, but they also feel—this is a quality that has been lacking in all that we have read.

Each text has been from the outside looking in, they have bordered, at least for me, on voyeurism. Although there are moments in The Sun Also Rises where one catches glimpses of how Jake feels (and one could certainly expand that to how Hemingway felt) there isn’t enough to build on and make him a solid individual. Here, Fitzgerald is seen clearly through Tompkins lens and although he is obnoxious, one sees another side of him; a frightened insecure side. For me, seeing that others saw, felt, and perceived these writers (Hemingway and Fitzgerald) as sensitive, personable individuals adds depth to the shallowness I have always read into their texts. This will allow me to approach texts by these authors with a greater understanding of who they were, and what they were trying to say. It seems a pity that we are only reading excepts as I feel it has been the most enlightening about Americans in Paris in the 1920s.

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway uses a Gertrude Stein quote as an epigraph for his book The Sun Also Rises, “You are all a lost generation.” If this book is to be the standard of that quote one would certainly have to add the alcoholic, promiscuous, violent, and shallow generation. Lost does not begin to capture the characters of the novel; they are vacant. The characters wander aimlessly about Europe morally corrupted—morally bankrupt (some financially too). They don’t believe in anything. They don’t particularly want anything. They are stripped of any sense of a dream—any reason for existence beyond their tawdry excesses. Life is about sex and drugs and rock and roll—or rather—sex and alcohol and bullfighting.

The text is rife with shallow—or—non-existent relationships; Robert and Jake, Jake and Georgette, Jake and Brett, Brett and Mike, Mike and Jake, Jake and Bill, Bill and Edna, Bill and Mike. It is dizzying to put so many dysfunctional characters in the span of two hundred pages. Jake loves Brett, who loves Jake, but is marrying Mike, who knows Brett is cheating on him and is perfectly ok with that until she has an affair with Robert, who begins to stalk Brett, who cries on Jake’s shoulder, who sort of kind of skirts the issue in conversations with Bill, who is quite sure that sex is the downfall of everything… My reaction to the text as a whole was similar to my reaction to A Moveable Feast—is there a point here, and if there is what the hell is it? And do I care? It reads (to me) like poor-rich-kids with too much time and money and not enough brains, morality—or backbone.

Brett Ashley has a backbone, sort of, I suppose. But Hemingway’s misogynistic presentation, at least for this reader, removes the power/impact of what could have been an otherwise strong and independent character. Brett is charismatic and beautiful (although not rich in her own right—the money comes to her through a man). Her very presence is disruptive to everyone around her—all men. Her liaisons with one or another of them create tension within all of the male-male relationships (excepting Jake and Bill on their fishing trip—which could almost be described as homo-social/erotic). This group of men, Jake, Robert, Mike and Bill, travels together, allegedly friends, at least acquaintances, and they come to blows. Brett disrupts Romero’s reality and her interaction with him threatens to destroy his career and reputation. She seems to rob men of their personal power and feeling of control. She is commitment phobic and profoundly self-centered, spoiled and shallow. The only other women portrayed in the novel are shrews (Frances Clyne), and harlots (Georgette). What sort of a statement is that?

One could, of course, attribute the insecurity of the male characters to their involvement in World War I with its trench warfare and lack of honor and chivalry; a war in which all illusion of individual honor and bravery were stripped away. This theory may work for Jake who in many ways (at least in Hemingway’s mind) did surrender his “manhood” to the war, but it does not work as well for Mike—who simply appears to be a raging alcoholic not complicated by any emotion at all. And what of Robert Cohn (who would surely be in jail today under some stalking law!)? Or Romero? Neither was in the war and yet they too seem to personify this loss of manhood—emasculated by Brett Ashley.

For me, this text has to be looked at as a reflection of the writer himself (although I do hate to do that). The text reveals so many of Hemingway’s insecurities, phobias and biases. How he perceives women, men, the world. One can look at the bullfighting as a microcosm of Hemingway’s vision of the world: We will travel, as men, in packs and kill anyone who strays from the herd—or gets in our path. Perhaps it is lost, in a pathetic rather than ennobling sort of way.

Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

As I read this text I thought, it’s reflection, memoir, it’ll gloss the rough edges of life. I could not have been more wrong. If anything Hemingway magnifies human imperfections (all but his own of course). In my mind I attributed the odd homosexuality conversation with Gertrude Stein as Hemingway putting his words in her mouth—it didn’t strike me as sincere (I am openly a lesbian, but will slam homosexuals; it just doesn’t ring true). It struck me as more Hemingway than Stein—and it was recalling a conversation years and years after the fact. Memory is so selective, so I brushed it off and moved on to Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Walsh.

The more I read the more uncomfortable I got. Ok, he paints a wonderful portrait of Paris, but at what cost? He annihilates each person in turn. Each chapter more painful than the last—I struggled with how I would—could—write about this text. I arrived at the Scott Fitzgerald section tense and anxious. I finished it wondering if Ernest Hemingway ever liked anyone in his life—did he even like himself? I have my doubts. So he was not unkind in his writing about Beach or Pound, but he didn’t exactly paint them as wonderful human beings either. I read them as marginalia to his reality.

I have tried to balance his profound negativity with his sensory—sensuous portrait of Paris. I tried to find a point to it all. And I cannot do it. Did he harbor deep resentments towards all of these people? How then did he enjoy his time in Paris? And if he didn’t have resentment towards these people—he becomes unreliable as a narrator (which, of course, he is; people with trust funds and cooks can hardly call themselves poor). How valid is his description of Paris? For someone who has not been there, I think the city’s allure might be lost in Hemingway’s castigating, condescending attitude towards the people he encountered there. For people who have been to Paris he reawakens our own memories more than he creates the atmosphere of the city.

I considered, most especially in the Fitzgerald section that he had deliberately waited for Fitzgerald to be dead to write such a tract. I was so dismayed by the passage about Zelda being Scott’s only lover that the final pages of the book are a blur. I read that section more than once thinking—he can’t be saying what I think he is—but he was. I was left desperately wanting a shower.

Exile's Return (part one), Malcolm Cowley

You will note in the title, this is part one. I am reading this book in pieces and will likely post continuing comments.

Early in the introduction to Exile’s Return it is pointed out that the Lost Generation lived with a pervading sense of betrayal (x). There is the implication that—even as teens—this generation was somehow different. This was not the impression I took away from the text. Perhaps in the century since it was written that sense of being different has come to be the standard. What I read seemed—felt to me very much like the work of a young (twenty-something) American, not necessarily a man, but American youth of almost any generation that followed the “lost generation.”

Cowley’s presentation of young men in high school claiming, “We felt that we were different from other boys; we admired and hated these happy ones, these people competent in every situation, who drove their fathers’ car and led the cheers at football games and never wrote poems or questioned themselves.” (16) sounds, at least to this reader, very much like James Dean, or Bob Dylan, or Kurt Cobain. To be misunderstood perhaps was not so eloquently presented as a part of American culture before this lost generation, but I am hard pressed to believe that this sense of being different—of feeling betrayed by—a people apart from those who came before was so completely new. I have witnessed the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties and each generation had its own sense of loss. Each generation has had a sojourn in Greenwich Village (which as far as I can tell hasn’t changed much in temperament since the twenties).

I found the prose engaging and wondering did Cowley perhaps have other texts? His insight, his sharp attention to exactly what is American culture (a topic much on my mind in relationship to my thesis), what makes it unique—why do so many look to other shores to find a sense of connection? I found buried within the text nuggets but one of the most profound, one of the nuggets that does set this lost generation apart; “national consciousness—indeed, some doubted that this country was even a nation; it had no traditions” (94). Writers, throughout history have drawn on traditions—and these writers had none. Writers have drawn on the struggle and these writers had none. In their lack of history, tradition and struggle, if I read Cowley right, these writers found something distinctly American—a non culture—and they felt betrayed. I don’t think they were the first to see this gap in our society, nor were they the last. These writers did perhaps give voice to the discontent that still has no name in our society, nothing clearer than “lost.”

The Enormous Room, E. E. Cummings

I confess that I approached a book of prose by E. E. Cummings with some trepidation. His poetry never impressed me; or rather, it is well crafted, but not my cup of tea, so to speak. I read the brief bio-sketch at the opening of the book, and was less interested in the reading. Having grown up in Boston, I have some preconceived notions about Boston’s Brahmin society – to which the sketch made it sound like Cummings belonged; a Unitarian minister father, a Harvard education, a Brahmin in the making despite his Greenwich Village foray. But I persevered; an assignment is an assignment.

The Introduction offered some comparisons that I found at least interesting, James Joyce, Brendan Behan, and the overt allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress subtext. But I maintained my resistance, although it did weaken slightly with the Whitmanesque reference, “Cummings, the Harvard rough-neck.” (xv) I squirmed with the text’s opening words, a seven line sentence. I prepared to be annoyed by the Brahmin-like arrogance that infused an American text with a French vocabulary. I was fully prepared to be bored.

Mais, au contraire, I found the text fascination et divertissement avec mon Français rouillé. I did struggle with the foreignness, at first, but je me suis adapté rapidement. I considered that perhaps Cummings, with his classical education, was being snobbish, trying to look better than his fellow Americans. But much of his French vocabulary consisted of more colorful words that one learned on the streets, not at school. I found myself looking in the glossary for words such as putain, chiez, fontue. My traditional French classes had taught me none of these words that one learns on the streets of Paris. I decided he wasn’t trying to impress me nor was he looking down on his audience. He had something to say. I began to relax into the text.

I found his prose, albeit it slow reading (I felt as though I were making a pilgrim’s progress), to be peppered with snide witticisms, critical commentary—not only of the world around him (the French Government in particular), mais de sien capacité d'exister dans le monde. From the outset he acknowledges the ridiculousness of his situation—the ridiculousness of the world around him. One can find the humor in drastic situations—or one can go insane. Cumming clearly chose the high road and viewed his world cynically.

I found myself scanning—squeamishly—passages about urine, and spitting—and locked basement rooms, but reading attentively his descriptions of people—les gens and most especially conversations. Rooms are described as “altogether American,” (10) people speak “sanitary English,” (11) and altars hold “the efficient implements for eating God.” (45) His ironic tone forces the reader to focus on the insanity of the entire situation; the war, the death, the absurdity of the political machine that destroyed human spirits and imprisoned what it did not understand. Lives could be destroyed by that which one refused to acknowledge, or so I read in Cummings innuendo and commentary in microcosm of the world at large.

Within the text Cummings works to see the individuality of the “characters” he’s presenting to us. His vivid descriptions paint clear and concise portraits such as, “a fragile, minute, queer figure, remotely suggesting an old man,” (57) or his description of the Turk’s reaction to the suggestion that he sing, “he merely blushed as if he were remembering (or possibly dreaming of) something distant and too pleasant for utterance.” (94) This passage in particular struck me as Joyce-like; Cummings leads the reader to the fountain—but allows each of us to drink for ourselves drawing more personal conclusions. The character is presented, and interpreted through Cummings’ eye, but the reader is left to draw inferences or conclusions. For Cummings, even in la masse de l'humanité at the prison, where individuality is consciously being stripped away—il n'y a rien mais l'individu pour Cummings. A very modernist, very American perspective.

Je dois admettre that, as yet, I have not completed the text yet, but at the halfway point I am feeling engaged intellectually—I am reading something different, something new, I am listening to a man at the dawn of our bravez le nouveau monde. And he is not feeling like Woodrow Wilson, that American democracy will save the world, like Ezra Pound he seems to think it is a botched civilization, and the best we can do is to seek happiness in every adventure laid before us. I find myself curious to see where Cummings goes with his text—will he remain true to this bohemian self, or surrender to the Brahmins of Boston.