What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960

One: The 1920s

{ O N E }£e 1Ω20ß In this chapter, I examine the history of the 1920s as it unfolded rather than the anxious study of its self-consciously modernist literature. I begin with the momentous occasion of William Dean Howells’s death to suggest how much the realist tradition survived him. That leads me to survey the middleclass realism that was praised throughout the decade for its e√orts to confront modernity. That examination, in turn, helps to reread the critical tenets of the era as well as scholars’ sense of important contemporary fiction, an analysis that then takes me into a deeper consideration of the reception of American fiction, with special attention to the year 1925. A review of the plots of this bourgeois literature suggests an emphasis on middle-class culture that the rest of the decade confirms. I further relate that broad view to the larger discussion of bourgeois culture in U.S. fiction. That discussion culminates in a reading of assimilation novels—charting the process whereby foreigners are made into Americans—the meaning of the American dream, and a dire forecast of what is to come. This survey of Americanization novels discloses how truly dedicated is that species of fiction to the middle-class ethos and how deeply involved that ethos was in this salient form of ’20s literary expression. M O U R N I N G H O W E L L S When William Dean Howells died in 1920, his passing symbolized the transition between the end of one era, American Victorianism, and the beginning of another, American modernism. While the moment of his demise coincides with that of the emergence of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair { 38 } THE 1920s Lewis as forerunners to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, the neatness of this parallel is not as easy as literary historians may have presumed. Howells had already lost sway among the first generation of twentiethcentury novelists; even if no writer had yet taken his place as a presiding literary critical intelligence, novelists as widely di√erent from each other as Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser had eclipsed his prominence well before the Age of Innocence (1920) or An American Tragedy (1925). In truth, his doctrines, which once seemed bristling, were now taken as intellectual pieties, compared to, say, the pronouncements of Frank Norris, who had maligned the realism of Henry James and Howells (who had once heralded the younger writer) as the ‘‘drama of the broken tea-cup’’ and the ‘‘tragedy of the walk down the lane.’’∞ In addition, his standing as the nation’s literary critic-at-large, humane and even-handed, was also usurped by an intellectual antithesis, journalist H. L. Mencken. Generations of students have come to know Howells for a remark he made, some forty years before his death, concerning the importance of the American writer’s faithfulness to the ‘‘more smiling aspects of life,’’ which Howells held to be the ‘‘more American.’’ There must always be ‘‘sin and su√ering and shame’’ in the United States, he wrote, but these troubles beset individuals, in contrast to the way Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky represented such woe—as the function of an intransigent class structure—in their great tragedies . Modern readers are likely to know Howells through college syllabus novels like the Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), two di√erent sorts of realism representing his various tendencies. The first follows the moral rise and economic decline of a powerful paint magnate (who scarcely resembles any actual Gilded Age robber baron in his final punctiliousness) by focusing on the development of a central protagonist ; the later novel o√ers a more general critique of the psychic, social, and political consequences of the transformation of America’s natural resources into capital, including urbanization, the plight of labor, the disparities of class, the insu≈ciency of altruism and ine≈ciency of collective politics. That novel occupies a broader canvas than Lapham and is darker in its implications. Not surprisingly, it was written after Howells had witnessed the Haymarket Riot, which raised his understanding of the systemic basis of evil in America. (In fact, so angered was Howells by the wrongs done to the immigrants accused of anarchist terrorism that he spoke out as forcefully as any public person on their behalf.) THE 1920s { 39 } Nevertheless, readers forget that Howells turned more resolutely than any other novelist...