Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

29. The Turbulent Twenties, II

The Turbulent Twenties, II to van wyck brooks, there had never been a time in America’s history as favorable to the growth of its writers as the 1920s. In 1925 alone, Sinclair Lewis published Arrowsmith; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby; Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground; Willa Cather, The Professor’s House; EdithWharton,TheMother’sRecompense;Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter; Ernest Hemingway , In Our Time; DuBose Heyward, Porgy; and Alain Locke, The New Negro anthology. A period of spectacular energy in the arts, the 1920s offered myriad forms of entertainment. “The Phantom of the Opera” thrilled moviegoers , while a tuxedoed Basil Sidney played Hamlet to filled houses. On the radio, Frankie and Johnnie were sweethearts, and more conventional lovers dreamed of “Just a Small Cottage by a Waterfall.” Couples danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom. At West Fifty-fifth Street the novelist, music critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten served limitless martinis to George Gershwin, Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, and the Peruvian diva Marguerite D’Alvarez. Artists such as John Sloan and Reginald Marsh painted a grittier world, its heavenly foil suggested by the comforting obituary portraits of James Van Der Zee, Harlem’s foremost photographer . Not only artists but the whole country seemed on the move to Harlem, Greenwich Village , Santa Fe, and Paris. 29 In business, in the merchandising of stable commodities such as coal, iron, grain, wool, and the like, there are fixed and arbitrary standards which can be recognized, duplicated, and graded accurately after preliminary training. Not so in literature, that elusive, intangible, delicately beautiful product. “Fewer and Better Books,” Atlantic, January 1925 The Turbulent Twenties, II [ 261 ] Atlantic contributors assumed that recent events had a direct impact on fiction and poetry. In “The Literature of Disillusion” (August 1923), Helen McFee insisted that the war had given the younger generation “a right to be morbid.” Singling out Edna St. Vincent Millay’s verse for both its rawness and lyricism, she attributed the closing lines of “Here Is a Wound” to “moods left by the war”: That April should be shattered by a gust, That August should be leveled by a rain, I can endure, and that the lifted dust Of man should settle to the earth again; But that a dream can die, will be a thrust Between my ribs forever of hot pain.1 Her clumsy last line notwithstanding, Millay offered an alternative to those readers and critics bewildered by the extremes of modernism. Defining the new poetry for Atlantic readers, Carl Sandburg parsed the word thirty-seven times. Among his effusions, he called poetry “a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smokestacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets” (March 1923).2 Not, in other words, those “ribs forever of hot pain.” Editors of the Atlantic had traditionally assumed art to be “one of the great instruments of popular education.” By art, they meant the “right” kind of art, not, for example, “a holiday book for the center table of the uneducated rich,” which corrupts “art at its source” and degrades popular taste.3 Perhaps for the first time in American or European history, the distinctions between high and low art would be leaving even the critics in a daze. Samuel McChord Crothers, in “Keeping Up with the Smart Set” (1924), poked fun at contemporary poets and critics by asking readers to decipher Ezra Pound’s lines from the fifth section of “Homage to Sextus Propertius”: My muse is eager to instruct me in a new gamut Or gambetto. Up, up, my soul, from your lowly cantillation, put on a timely vigor. Pound’s poem had to be good, Crothers explained, because no one could understand it. Only a critic could find significance in the following lines, which might be “a little too rough” for Atlantic readers: r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 262 ] I grasped the greasy subway strap And I read the lurid advertisements, I chewed my gum voraciously.4 For his part, Pound preferred the “little” magazines that promoted everything from Imagism to anarchism. He condemned mainstream magazines like the Atlantic for putting profits above quality.5 To him, they participated in a capitalistic economy that resulted in the First World War—and, later on, the Second. The so-called “new” magazines, which set themselves apart from the “old” magazines by demanding...