Tension and Technique: The Years of Greatness

TENSION AND TECHNIQUE: THE YEARS OF GREATNESS Linda W. Wagner Michigan State University Were I a Gail Hightower, my moments of nostalgia would center about those years of literary greatness, the period from 1912 or 1915 to 1940. Exuberance, innovation, temerity, the compulsion to create a new consciousness, in modes and patterns that were equallynew: asJohn Dos Passos recalled, "there was, among many of the young people of my generation, a readiness to attempt great things. ... It was up to us to try to describe in colors that would not fade, ourAmerica that weloved and hated."1 And were I a Malcolm Cowley or Cleanth Brooks, I could present an "I-was-there" kind of survey, the remarkable listing of Cowley's in Exile's Return and A Second Flowering. But as it is, I would like—as concisely as possible—to provide a more nearly retrospective view, from the end of glory backward, assessing some of the major writers of the time through the eyes of readers since World War II. No matter which writers from the period we discuss, there are at least four assumptions that unite even the most dissimilar. (1) Writers after 1900 were struggling toward a new nationalism, and much of the interest in style and language stemmed from the general impatience with the influence (outright dominance) of England. We too often forget that theprevalent view of American literature (evident in its paucity in curricula and anthologies) was that of John Macy, writing in 1913: American literature is a branch of English literature, as truly as are English books written in Scotland or South Africa. . . . In literature nationality is determined by language rather than by blood or geography.2 Yet, set against that view areHemingway's excitement over each victory of natural American language; Dos Passos' and William Carlos Williams' fascination with America as both subject and image; the characterizations of Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and, more obliquely, Gertrude Stein as a means of defining a national persona. Which of America's modernistshas not givenus some picture of character, whether it be in the perverted tragedies of displaced Americans like Joe Christmas or Jay Gatsby, both men victimized by 66Linda W. Wagner insidious social patterns; or the romantic epics of Eugene Gant, Robert Jordan, and the Joads, simple Americans who manage to best those social patterns? And yet, criticism, even today's criticism, sometimes balks at such evident chauvinism and appears to penalize the most obviously American of its authors. At times one must wonder whether we share Yvor Winter's 1943 attitude, when he called interest in America a "romantic error," condemning out of hand "the fallacy" that a writer "achieves salvation bybeing, in some way, intenselyofand expressive of his country."3 (2)The intense interest in America was only one means of breaking convention, upsetting the expectations of the parental or educational authority figures. The tensions of the time were createdlargely from the supposed betrayal of beliefs—Wilson's in political and social matters, middle-class conventions in religious and economic ones—and because betrayals were graphically illustrated in carnage and death on the battlefield of World War I, those of this generation who lived came to rebel actively against the rhetoric of amelioration. "Peace in our time" became one ironic war cry, and Ezra Pound's "make it new" became another. (3)The obsession with innovation and technique was, consequently , much more important philosophically than it might first appear. The reason an entire generation of writers turned to a religion of art, believed so compulsively in their work as both promise and reward, was that nothing else that was left to them seemed valuable. Sherwood Anderson describes modernism as "an attempt on the part of the workman to get back into his own hands some control over the tools and materials of his craft."4 The impetus behind whatJohn Ciardi was to call "The Age of the Manifesto"5 was the same kind of search that the Victorians had pursued; but by 1915 or 1920, art had replaced philosophy and was coming close to replacing religion. Robert Penn Warren, too, defines the modern period as marked by "the self-conscious...