4
More than one observer of the literary scene has drawn the obvious parallel between the 1890’s in England and the 1920’s in our own country. Both periods were characterized by a sharp break with tradition. In both periods the younger writers found themselves voluntary exiles from their own country and both groups selected the same European city as the scene of their exile. There are other parallels, ... the flood of “little” magazines, the cultivation of the “continental” attitude, the revival of the art for art’s sake tradition and a general letting down of the bars once again. Mr. Waugh, the 1890 Mr. Waugh, might well have written his Reticence in Literature for the benefit of the new generation of bold, bad, young intellectuals.
Peter Munro Jack, writing in Malcolm Cowley’s symposium After the Genteel Tradition, called this the “James Branch Cabell Period,” and Alfred Kazin, in On Native Ground, refers to the writers of the Twenties as “The Exquisites,” while “All the Lost Generations” seems to him a suitable chapter heading to cover a brief history of the Twenties.
Mr. Jack credits it all to Cabell’s Jurgen and to novels by Carl Van Vechten and Eleanor Wylie. “These books,” says Mr. Jack, “brought to our shores the very spirit of Rabelais and Voltaire, Balzac, Anatole France and Horace Walpole, Pater, Wilde, Machen, Max Beerbohm and Aldous Huxley ... and converted a barbarous literature over-night into an airy dance of verve, irony and Gallic sophistication.” Mr. Kazin also begins with Jurgen, which apparently ushered in “a vogue of elaborate decadence and enthusiasm, very wicked, world-weary and ornate.” Kazin goes on to indicate that “just as the pale, imitative exoticism of the late Nineties had marked not merely the beginnings of revolt against the old parochialism but a leisure-class psychology in an America that had finally attained a leisure class, so that the new literature of sophistication that came in with the James Branch Cabell School was fundamentally the ambitious baroque luxury of a period that had finally obtained a self-conscious splendor of its own.”
Mr. Kazin writes from the vantage point of 1942, and anything can happen to a critic, a book, or a period in a dozen or more years. Hindsight used to be considered superior, in some ways, to foresight—but such is the condition of the world today that this is no longer particularly true. Mr. Kazin, writing in the heyday of the four evangelists of modern American fiction—Don Passos, Hemingway, Farrell and Steinbeck, looks back upon the era of “baroque luxury” and “self-conscious splendor” with anything but nostalgia. Malcolm Cowley, contributing an essay on Dos Passos to his own symposium, an essay which preceded Kazin’s book by five years, and to which Mr. Kazin is somewhat indebted, remarks that Dos Passos had entered college in those olden baroque days, “at the beginning of a period which was later known as that of the Harvard aesthetes.” This is noted with an almost, but not quite, imperceptible touch of pride—or of snobbishness. These young Cantabrians, our boy Dos Passos among them, are reported to have acted in a manner befitting the Elizabethans, or least the men of the Nineties, or any other generation that felt it was living in a Golden Age. They read, Dos Passos still among them, Pater and The Hill of Dreams, and they explored the slums of Boston—which must have seemed to them at least as romantic as Cheapside or Houndsditch.
At any rate Machen was accepted and more or less widely hailed as one of the more important importations by some of the little magazines that began to spring up at this time. “The Reviewer,” one of the most important of the new journals, published Machen along with Ellen Glasgow, Joseph Hergesheimer, Ernest Boyd, Ronald Firbank, Ben Ray Redman, Edwin Muir and others. His public and enthusiastic acceptance by Van Vechten, that inveterate organizer of torchlight parades, was quite enough to launch Machen successfully with the intellectuals who, in those halcyon days, had scarcely an ideology among them.
It has been said that the writers of this period, motivated no doubt by the cynicism they either created or absorbed, or both, tended to escape from this world they never made and produced in the process of escaping some of the most exciting and readable books ever written in America. Of course neither Mr. Cowley nor Mr. Kazin draws exactly these conclusions—they are rather scornful of the Twenties and of the books produced in the Twenties.
They are both, Mr. Kazin more than Mr. Cowley since he came in later, in rather a hurry to get on to the Thirties when the Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal were beginning to gallop madly down the back-country lanes and through the congested streets of cities and the back-yards of milltowns. Nevertheless it must be apparent to even the most ideological reader of these weighty volumes that, for all their efforts at deprecating the self-conscious splendor of the period, both Mr. Cowley and Mr. Kazin manage to make the Twenties sound vastly more entertaining than the dull period to follow, when the leftist interpretation of literature placed black Marx against every novel that showed signs of having been written for the sheer pleasure of writing, or the desire to create a character or to tell a story.
This seems to be the great fault that is found, by such men as these, with the novels of that era. They were not so judged in the Nineteen-Twenties. The sentiments expressed by Arthur Machen in Hieroglyphics, and echoed in Cabell’s Beyond Life, were rather widely accepted at the time, not only by a large portion of the reading public, but also by members of the more critical profession. Dyson, however much he may have fussed with his pipes and his pencils, his notes and his notions, expressed what was the literary credo of the day; “I will give you the task of a literary man in a nutshell—to create a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.” And so Cabell and Wylie and Fitzgerald and Hume and Wilder and many others created wonderful stories. In this time of man and to this manner of writing Machen was admirably suited.
People who found New York in the Twenties as fabulous a city as Machen and Stevenson found London in their day, were delighted with the yellow-bound books that came out under the Borzoi imprint. For many a speakeasy in the mid-Forties, or in the Village, offered possibilities as extraordinary as Stevenson’s Suicide Club or The Lost Club of Machen. Indeed there are undoubtedly those who can recall when their favorite haunt disappeared over-night and then, as if by magic, reappeared in the brownstone house across the street. The city parks, as yet uninhabited by muggers, were magical places after midnight and lonely as the sunken lanes of Avalon. Those who delighted in the doings of Dyson and the adventures of the Young Man in Spectacles were enchanted by the curious byways of London, and they shared the satirical views of the dyspeptic Doctor Stiggins and the Hermit of Barnsbury. It pleased immense numbers of people who tired of Dreiser to find, in Hieroglyphics, this perfect reflection of their own attitude: “Imagine having to spend twenty years with such people.”
The crash in the fall of 1929 was followed by a stunned silence—and presently one began to hear the hoof beats of the four frightening Horsemen and the voices of the economical evangelists crying, and wreaking, havoc.
The realists began to be heard because realism seemed to be what people wanted—politically, at any rate. The polemics disguised as novels began to appear in greater and ever-increasing numbers. It has since become obvious that realism of this sort was a one-way street to despair—and it was the realists, not the now-silent “romanticists,” who were called, in their own time, “The Irresponsibles.” But with the rise of the proletarian novel, the heroic mill-hand and the long, dreary lines of the unemployed, the period came to an end. Machen, along with the others, ceased to be read except by those who re-read him, or discovered him in the dusty bookshops where the yellow binding gleamed from the darkest corner.