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    The Twenties
    The Twenties
    The Twenties
    Ebook588 pages9 hours

    The Twenties

    By Edmund Wilson and Leon Edel

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    In these pages, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, the preeminent literary critic Edmund Wilson gives us perhaps the largest authentic document of the time, the dazzling observations of one of the principal actors in the American twenties.

    Here is the raw side of the U.S.A., the mad side of Hollywood, the literary infighting in New York, the gossip and anecdotes of an astonishing cast of characters, the jokes, the profundities, the inanities. Here is the slim young man in Greenwich Village sallying forth to parties in matching ties and socks. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Peale Bishop, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos and Eugene O'Neill.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 12, 2019
    ISBN9781466899674
    The Twenties
    Author

    Edmund Wilson

    Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

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    • 3/5
      A trip through the 1920s, from New York through Europe and California and then back to New York, with someone rubbing shoulders with literary luminaries of the age. Tedious at times and lyrically beautiful at others.
    • 1/5
      dreadful. just a list of fucking. some name mentioning . i read to learn something about nyc in the 20s.

    Book preview

    The Twenties - Edmund Wilson

    1919–1925

    AFTER THE WAR

    [My intelligence unit was not mustered out, on account of our being noncombatants and hence low on the list of privilege, till after the Fourth of July, 1919. My father and my mother came to see me separately at the rest camp at Southampton, Long Island. My father had gratified me at the camp when he first complained of the army’s inefficiency in not letting him in to see me sooner, then when the officer in charge warned him that that way of talking was treasonable, telling him that there was nothing in what he had said that violated any law. I had written my mother to bring me Witter Bynner’s poems, Ezra Pound’s Lustra and H. L. Mencken’s American Language, the first edition of which had just appeared. I read them all on the camp’s board benches.

    My mother had an upsetting revelation to make. My favorite cousin Sandy (Reuel Baker) Kimball was a schizophrenic case (schizophrenia was then called dementia praecox). He was only fifteen months older than I was and had in our early years been my closest friend: we wrote stories, made phonograph records, played checkers and got up charades together. We had been sent to different prep schools, had belonged to different clubs at college and had become rather alienated from one another. He was a year ahead of me at school and college, and during those years we saw little of one another. But that he should have gone insane was a shock that I had difficulty absorbing. It was an amputation of a whole relation. His mother had brought pressure on him to become a successful doctor like his father, but his instructors at Physicians and Surgeons had advised against trying to finish, and he flunked his examinations. He had proposed to and been rejected by the spirited redheaded daughter of one of his neighbors in the country. (He had rather disturbed me by telling me with a certain amount of enthusiasm of his homosexual experiences with another boy at his prep school.) And he had worried about not taking part in the war. When I was in France, he had written me letters about this, and I had answered that once you had enlisted in something, you were preoccupied with your work and its hardships and never gave your patriotic duty a thought. His father, after a taxing and assiduous life of work, had now collapsed and become quite helpless, relapsing into a second childhood; and his mother, who had never understood him—it was a mistake for him to continue to live in her house—could not bring herself to relinquish her ambitious plans for his future. His unfortunate sister Esther had to act as a buffer between him and his mother, whose tendencies were irreconcilable. Sandy had first, after giving up medicine, had a job in a chemical department in Washington and afterwards worked as a clerk in Scribner’s bookstore; then, his condition making this impossible, was sent to private sanatoriums, where he at first partly retained his intelligence. He wrote a parody, The Great Hater, of Rupert Brooke’s The Great Lover and a story in which he figured as the inadequate son of a great old king (my now disqualified Uncle Reuel). He made friends at the sanatorium with a young member of the Proctor family of Keith and Proctor, the vaudeville producers, and they used to kid one another, joking about their illnesses. He spoke once of going to Europe, and I pretended to take this seriously, but How can I go when I’m insane? he said. My very boyish-minded Uncle Win attributed Sandy’s deterioration to his having been sent to St. Paul’s instead of, like the rest of the family, to Andover or Exeter. His Knox uncles, products of St. Paul’s, were considered decidedly weak-minded by my more energetic and competent Kimball uncles. Sandy soon passed into eclipse in the state hospital at Middletown, New York. His disappearance from the world made upon me a deeper impression than I might have expected, and it was for long felt as something of a trauma.

    It was only after coming back from the war that I found that it had come to be possible to talk naturally to my father on something like a plane of equality. He did not express outrage at my then rather radical opinions; but though himself still a mainly loyal Republican, he was horrified by the illegality of the arrest and deportation of radical aliens without either warrant or trial. Our conversations had become more comfortable. He talked frankly about politics—told me that Warren Harding, though a Republican, represented the lowest grade of the machine politician and regaled me with funny stories about local New Jersey figures.]

    Upper New York. One saw the first beginnings of the city in the open boulevard: the façades of apartment houses, laced with fire escapes, the many garages and automobile stores.

    A local doctor named Sam Patterson once sat in the New Jersey Senate. It was the custom at that time, when a bill had been proposed which was likely to restrict any large corporation, for the senators to await offers from the corporation before declaring which way they would vote. Votes were usually bought for a reasonable enough sum—a few hundreds—but on a certain occasion this man Patterson demanded $5,000. The corporation’s lobbyist expostulated with him, but Patterson claimed that his conviction was so strong that he should vote the other way that nothing short of $5,000 could persuade him to change it. The lobbyist finally consented and made an appointment with Patterson to meet him the day that the bill was to be voted on in a certain water closet in the Capitol lavatory. When the roll was being called for the vote on the bill, Patterson went to the W.C., as agreed, but the lobbyist did not appear. Just as they were nearing Patterson’s name in the roll, however, the fellow turned up with a wad of bills big enough to choke a horse. My God! hurry up! he said, or you won’t get a chance to vote at all! Hold on now! Wait a minute! I want to count these bills! Why, man alive! They’ll be past your name, if you stay here another minute! Patterson went up and voted. When he finally counted the bills, there turned out to be a good $100 bill on the outside and nothing but counterfeit money inside. So great was his rage at first that he threatened to have the lobbyist arrested for passing bogus money.

    Charley Walker [a Yale friend of EW’s, later internationally known for his expertise in labor relations and his translations of Greek plays] came down to Red Bank. I had not seen him since before we went into the war. He had been doing the long shift with the blast furnace in a steel town and looked as if he had been baked in the fires of hell. He had decided to devote himself to Labor, because that was the great coming force. I regarded myself as pretty far to the Left, which Charley was still far from being—he saw everything in terms of employment conditions, had nothing of the radical vocabulary. I had been much excited by the big steel strike of 1919. But Charley was a serious person, he had not gone in for selling bonds like so many other college graduates. I did not then become so acutely aware as I afterwards came to be of the difference between the college graduates who were carrying out the tradition of the time when the men who went to college were all, with few exceptions, destined for what were called the learned professions, but I found the visit of Charley had a fortifying effect on my own morale.

    [I decided that I had now been innocent long enough and decided to buy a condom. I went to a drugstore on Greenwich Avenue and watched nervously from outside to be sure that there were no ladies there. I then went in and inquired. The clerk withdrew to the back counter and produced a condom of rubber, which he highly recommended, blowing it up like a balloon in order to show me how reliable it was. But the condom, thus distended, burst, and this turned out to be something of an omen. I soon got over my shyness with women, but I was a victim of many of the hazards of sex—from which I might have been saved by previous experience: abortions, gonorrhea, entanglements, a broken heart.

    I went back after the war to sharing an apartment—this time on West Sixteenth Street—with my old friends David Hamilton, Larry Noyes and Morris Belknap. We had, to cook for us, a mulatto West Indian woman, who would become exasperated with me for bringing unexpected guests home to dinner. We entertained many Yale and Princeton friends as well as other friends: Gilbert Troxall, Phelps Putnam, Charley Walker, Fred Manning, Douglas Moore, John Bishop, Scott Fitzgerald, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Adele Brandeis, Morris Belknap’s stepmother, and others whom I have forgotten. The arrangement, pleasant while it lasted, eventually, however, had to fall apart.

    David Hamilton soon got married to Margaret Bentley, a girl from Chicago to whom he had been engaged from before the war. She was the daughter of a Chicago lawyer who looked after the interests of the McCormicks. I had been to school with her brother Dick, a tough-spoken but likable boy who went to Yale and afterwards himself became a lawyer. But Margaret had or thought she had artistic tastes and on that account, I think, married David, who wanted to be both a writer and a painter. There was a big very affluent wedding in Chicago, to which we all went out and at which we all were ushers. Margaret was a strong-minded dynamic girl, with more character, I think, than David, who was languid and had always been rather coddled by an indulgent mother and sisters. He was to publish two or three novels of an unemphatic ironic humor and do a certain amount of drawing and painting of which I never saw much except enough to be sure that it was very far from first-rate. He and Margaret had two daughters, then Margaret at an early age died.

    Morris Belknap came from Louisville, Kentucky, where his family were evidently quite well-to-do. He had lost both mother and father early, and his father had married again a handsome and very able woman, who was extremely kind to Morris. His only brother was not all there, a case of arrested development. Morris’s invariable companion was a cultivated Jewish girl, from a well-known and well-to-do family, who had pretty and distinguished sisters but was herself rather dumpy and unattractive. She came to New York to be near Morris, and I imagined always hoped he would marry her. They had their love of the arts in common. Morris was both a painter and a musician, but a kind of spiritual impotence, quietly resigned and morose, nullified his artistic aspirations. He went to the Art Students League, where he sat under Kenneth Hayes Miller and was very much influenced by him in the direction of psychoanalysis. He painted nudes of both sexes; they seemed always to turn a turbid green, as if they were already dead.

    Morris Belknap contributed in a small way to my musical education: he played on the piano Gluck’s Euridice and Mussorgsky’s songs of death, read the memoirs of Berlioz and talked about them, and he led me to explore Berlioz’s A Travers Chants, with its literary descriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies—I read it with the same kind of avidity that I was beginning to read Paul Rosenfeld’s musical articles, and Morris played so many times the oboe’s part in the Meistersinger overture that I was finally able to whistle it. He was an extremely friendly good-tempered fellow, but in the long run rather dampening. He exemplified the sour side which I noticed as characteristic of one of the two classes of graduates of Yale. There were those who had proudly belonged to the best senior societies and fraternities, for whom Yale was a kind of religion, and those—of whom Sinclair Lewis was one of the most embittered examples—who had never belonged to anything and could never forgive Yale. (I remember that Paul Rosenfeld told me that it was only his summers in Europe that made it possible for him to stand four years of New Haven.)

    Larry Noyes was a homosexual, but though I had roomed with him two years at school and in spite of his occasional pederastic jokes and a rather ambivalent pal that he brought back from his period in the navy, I never suspected this and knew nothing about it till after we had parted. He was evidently somewhat embarrassed about this side of his life. I was told later that it was his great regret that his being homosexual had prevented him from belonging to the Racquet Club. He came from St. Paul and had known Scott Fitzgerald but, due to the Fitzgeralds’ straitened means, there was a social barrier between them. Scott did not like Larry and, referring to him in My Lost City says of him, in his description of what he regarded as my enviable New York household, that only the crisp tearing open of invitations by one man was a discordant note. Larry, when Scott became famous and had died, said of him, like a patronizing elderly lady, that it was a pity he had not lived to do more because he was "such a clever boy." I thus learned that although in Louisville it was a social disadvantage to have too much money, it was, on the contrary, in a Middle Western city a handicap not to have a good deal. Yet Larry was the kind of Middle Westerner who, regardless of Middle Western fortunes, depends much on the prestige of his Eastern connections. His sister was married to a De Forest; his mother was related to the Gilmans; Katherine Ludington, a kind of liberal patroness, was also a relation of his. He was the most complete case I have ever known of Eastern-oriented Western snobbery.

    Larry had a job in New York with a very smart firm of architects, but having been given the commission for a millionaire’s house in the West Indies or some other exotic place, he got into trouble for attacking a native and was apparently in his office relegated to a minor role. I got him, at some time in the forties, to remodel an old Cape Cod house I had bought, and found that since his driver was a boyfriend who occasionally presumed to treat him with a rather undue familiarity, he did not like either to leave him alone or to ask us to have him to dinner. It was equally impossible for me to tell him that I really didn’t care. We finally invited them both.]

    One of the young Rockefellers and his wife rode up on horseback to the Duryeas’ house. Mrs. Duryea went out and began to talk to them. Mr. Rockefeller’s horse caught her little finger in his mouth and began to grind and munch it as if it were an apple, while poor Mrs. Duryea jumped up and down with pain. When she had finally got her finger out of the teeth of the horse, Mrs. Rockefeller remarked: Oh, I hope he hasn’t bitten your finger off. Mrs. Duryea excused herself, saying that she felt faint and sick, and withdrew to the house. The colored servant came to her in great agitation. I tell you, he was no gentleman, Mrs. Duryea, or he would have gotten off his horse! … You leave him to me! I’ll go out and fix him! The Rockefellers simply left word that they had come to invite her to dinner and would she telephone whether she could come? Mrs. Duryea called in the doctor and had her finger bandaged up. She waited purposely for some time to see if the Rockefellers would call up and inquire after her, but nothing happened, and she was finally obliged to call up herself and tell them she could not come; they never mentioned her finger. The only kind of situations they knew how to deal with were dinner invitations and, confronted with anything else, they were helpless, did not know what to say.

    Gordon Bodenwein used to treat Trixie [Gilbert] Troxall abominably when they roomed together at Yale. He would prod him with a fork or chase him around the room with a knife. You little hussy! he would say. You horrible little monster! You’re the kind of thing that the kings used to pick up, when they were riding through the country, to be their court fools! He would, in fact, do everything possible to hurt and insult Trixie. He seemed to be possessed by a perverse demon. After he got out of college, Gordon quarreled with his father and went into a monastery; he broke out later, became a Catholic and is now teaching and flogging little boys in a Catholic school at Hackensack. He had excellent taste and loved the arts, which went strangely with his fanaticism. [Gilbert was a friend of ours whom, in spite of some peculiarities, we liked.]

    Trixie and Gordon, after a year together, separated for a year, then resumed the combination.

    Larry (Noyes) on the Gardenia. When Larry was on the tugboat Gardenia, whose business was to meet incoming ships, he used to get shore leave every five days. When he came back, he would sleep for three or four days on end, sustaining himself with chocolate till he gave himself indigestion and became incapable of getting up, but lay there in a stupor. One day, the captain came down into the hold where they slept and asked: Are there any rats down here? Hell, no! answered somebody, who didn’t see who it was. No rats could live down here!

    The Palisades in October. In the autumn haze, they looked very remote, and the green and gold of the trees, which clothed the cliffs like metal scales of armor, was infinitely faded till it blent with the brownish gray of the many-fissured side of the naked rock. And against that ancient background, so somber and wild, the white gulls rose and fell on languid wings. And downstream the river and sky were melted to silver together.

    New York to Newark on the way to Red Bank or Princeton. Coming out of the Hudson tunnel, one finds oneself emerging from a hill on whose barren sides are seen the straggling frame houses of suburbs, the last city streets of some New Jersey town which is itself a suburb of New York; one stark church stands up in the sordid landscape, where one is surprised to see even the outer semblance of a religion; if it is actually the house of a religion and not merely a building designed mechanically, in an obsolete form and by architects who had more taste for designing factories, as an inexpensive recognition of a respectable convention; it is a religion hardened and begrimed and divested of beauty, which has assumed protective coloring in order to live at all. It is a country forever tarnished by a dingy haze of dampness and smoke. At the foot of the hill lies a vast marsh of swamp grass, bleached by the fall, with patches still persisting in a feeble verdancy and with stagnant pools corrupted by a vivider green; the whole of this dead meadow is laced with telephone wires and occasionally traversed by muddy roads that seemed to be foundering. The one touch of color and life was the series of large board signs that advertised New York hotels and theaters, underclothes, candy and shaving soaps. Then one saw the factories with tapering smokestacks; one of them had four chimneys and lay like a ship in the marsh. The landscape bristled with chimneys and with cranes along the railroad tracks. And there were human habitations: feeble-looking houses, unpainted and gray, which, but for an occasional line of clothes drying in the tainted air, would have seemed bleached to as complete a death as the sea they were islanded in. At last, after ten minutes’ ride in a world of factories, one reaches a body of water, perfectly black and still, where the hulk of an old steamboat, as black as the river, has been rotting and sinking slowly for several years and shows only its warped upper deck and its blackened wheel. This is Newark Bay, and the city is Newark: more factories here, but jammed together; small factories and machine shops, pattern-makers and electroplaters, press close beside the train—manufacturers of castings, blowpipes, paints, chemicals, mattresses, fountain pens, ketchup, refrigerators, phonographs, bacon, chewing gum, safety razors, cigarettes, carpet sweepers, licorice drops, flours, letter openers, typewriters, umbrellas. The city and the bay produce a curious impression of mingled life and death: there is business, one can see that; there is lots of work being done; there is prosperity in the cheap stores and solid buildings; but in the dirtiness of the streets, the dull colors of the city, the lack of any sign of a love for cleanness or brightness, the impression of life grown heavy and sordid in those thousands of brick-walled rooms behind those dirty windows, one felt that death was rotting and blackening the city, as it had that old steamboat hulk which no one had thought to destroy or

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