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.