Golden Era Books and Lit: An Interrogation

[jake_fink]

I'm an English prof. and a writer and did a lot of work in my university years on fiction between the wars. I happen to love that period for the literature as much as - maybe even more than - for the clothes. I also read a lot of stuff set in that period.

Does anybody here have any interest in this aspect of the GE?

Has anybody read William Kennedy's Albany Cycle (Ironweed being the best known and Legs being about Jack Diamond)?

I'm reading Dark Hazard (1933) right now, a bit of proto-noir by W. R. Burnett who wrote Little Ceasar and Asphalt Jungle and who was a Hollywood screenwriter for a pretty big chunk of the mid-20th century. Anybody else read it? Any interest in it or the author?

I'm just feeling the board out for other like-mided souls.

Cheers.

 

[Billingsgate]

The Lost Generation - I can't get enough of it.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I'm a *big* fan of Sinclair Lewis. I've read virtually all of his novels, and both major biographies, and have seen most of the many film adaptations of his books.

His novels portray the mainstream America of the early 20th century (primarily the 20s and 30s) with bracing cynicism and fascinating insights. Aside from the movie adaptations of his work (the best are William Wyler's 1936 Dodsworth and Richard Brooks' 1960 Elmer Gantry), he is nearly forgotten these days, aside from hardcore fans like myself. Yet he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature! He was an enormously popular and influential writer in his time, and his contemporaries - Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Cather, etc. - are still widely read, but Lewis is just a footnote... It's incredible to me how far his star has fallen.

Though I did just read an article somewhere saying that his 1935 novel about a fascist takover of America masterminded by a folksy populist politician, It Can't Happen Here, actually prefigures the current administration's actions scarifyingly closely...

 

[Hemingway Jones]

I collect first edition books by and about Ernest Hemingway; ergo my screen name.

I have always admired the mavericks of that age who carved out a life for themselves by bending industries or genres to their wills. Howard Hughes and his pioneering advancements in aviation. Pablo Picasso and his reevalutation of the function and aesthetics in art. Hemingway for making a simple declarative sentence sing.

Back to literature, I am a fan of Fitzgerald, though he was active a bit earlier. F. Somerset Maugham is amazing, reevaluating the quest for meaning that many of the Lost Generation instigated at the end of the previous war. Maugham presupposed and surpassed the pop-psychology of the post-1960's age with a certain expressed nobility in the sense of hopelessness that seemed to be out of reach of the Beats and their offspring. Kerouac was mired in sentimentality, though still fun to read, and, it seems the 1960's answer to hopelessness was anarchy. This idea is prevalent to this day.

I haven't read noir, though I should. I love the movies those books inspired. "The Killers" was a great noir film inspired by Hemingway's short story; though they bear little ressemblance.

I have a great collection of Hemingway's first paperbacks with these amazing Pulp Fiction covers. Very interesting, in fact, and no one is collecting them it seems, which surprises me since paperbacks are so ephemeral.

 

[Billingsgate]

One correspondence between Restoration lit and the Lost Generation is that the LG represents, in mores, a throwback to the Restoration as opposed to Victorian prudery.

The font of obscenity law is the case, The King v. Sir Charles Sedley, in which the Restoration rake, Sedley, was prosecuted for his raucous behavior. From this prosecution of a raucous poet derived the tradition that raucous poetry likewise could be prosecuted. The Comstock Laws, Bowlder's Family Shakespeare, the fig leaf on Michelangelo's David, and such followed.

In the Golden Era, Lady Chatterly's Lover , Ulysses , and similar works challenged this Victorianism.

In somewhat similar fashion, New Orleans jazz has been compared to Baroque music.

 

[jake_fink]

Hi folks,

I'm really pleased with the response to this thread so far.

Sinclair Lewis has indeed fallen out of favour. His work tends to be content heavy as opposed to the work of Faulkner and (early) Hemingway and (to a lesser degree) F. Scott Fitzgerald who can be read as primarily stylists. Content, the thinking tends to be, stales, while style lives on and on. Somewhat true, I guess. Also, Lewis is seen very much as a social critic and less so as a literary figure. His work tends to fall under the rubric of "the radical novel" as it tends to reflect and critique society and even to advocate radical social change in some instances. Other works in that category would be the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos (a fantastic piece of work), The Jungle by the other Sinclair (Upton Sinclair) and Tuckers People by Ira Levin, the basis for the great film Body and Soul with John Garfeild. The radical novel died out over time, victim, one might argue, to the Cold War and to a tendency toward form over content. Bernard Malamud wrote them, including The Natural, and Philip Roth is still writing them now, his last one, The Plot Against America, is a virtual response to Lewis' It Can't Happen... There are not many leterary writers as concerned in their work with society and the body politic today, and many who are arite bad books -- earnest and well meaning, but a trial to read, Russo's Empire Falls and Price's Freedomland are, I think, cases in point.

Hemingway was one of my favourite writers when I was young, and one of the first "serious" writers I really got into. I idolized him for years and it was he who made me want to travel and to write. I am less in thrall now, but, boy oh boy, his short fiction is still the measure to go by as far as I'm concerned. He worked in Toronto for a while and was the PAris correspondent for the Toronto Star. A Toronto homeboy, Morley Callaghan whupped in the boxing ring and Hemingway never forgave him, or F. Scott for, Hemingway contends, not ringing the bell at the right time. I have collected the paperbacks with pulpy covers, and sold most of them again -- there is only so much room on my shelf for each writer. They were published well after Hemingway established his reputation and were printed in the billions (or maybe the high millions ), so I think if it seems that no-one collects them, that has more to do with the fact that there are so many copies around that they are easy to get and are not sought after (like Stratoliners, for example).

Finally, if the period between the wars is in some way similar to the Restoration (I have my reservations), they were, in the literature at least, much less blood-soaked.

Thanks for making my dull, sick day more interesting! Maybe we should start a Fedora Lounge Book Club.

Cheers!

 

[Marc Chevalier]

I'm a *big* fan of Sinclair Lewis.

So am I! I'm rereading Babbitt in awe. The linguistic precision, the attention to detail ... if anyone really wants to experience life in a big midwestern city around 1920, Babbit will take you there. Absolute immersion!

Though I did just read an article somewhere saying that his 1935 novel about a fascist takover of America masterminded by a folksy populist politician, It Can't Happen Here, actually prefigures the current administration's actions scarifyingly closely...

Back in the '30s, It Can't Happen Here was made into a play by the Federal Theatre Project. Sinclair Lewis co-wrote the adaptation and was very involved: at the very last minute, he decided that the sets were wrong, and they had to be torn down and rebuilt in every city where the play was set to open. (That's right: the play opened simultaneously in 20 cities. An amazing feat of coordination!)

MGM planned to film the novel, but bowed to political pressure and aborted the filming.

Lewis has been dropped from the Modernism Canon -- he's not represented in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. I do think that his writing has loads of style; it's just that it harkens back to the Victorian era. (Willa Cather, in my view, is equally "transitional.") I'm delighted by Lewis's novels and consider him a master at his craft. A Modernist? Perhaps not. Who cares?

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Speaking of the Restoration: I'm more of a stuffy Augustan (Swift-Pope-Johnson) fan myself. The Earl of Rochester was fun, though.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Marc, I'll well aware of Lewis's participation in the Federal Theater Project play of It Can't Happen Here. I've read those big Lewis biographies, you know. (I have a great image file of the striking poster from the play on my home machine.)

I think of Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather as two sides of the same coin: he tears down the smallmindedness of the middle American world, where she celebrates the pioneer spirit that created it. To Lewis, the prairie was stifling and populated with hypocrites, whereas to Cather, it was a shining golden expanse populated with heroes. (I suspect they're probably both right, but I've never actually been to that part of the world.)

Re Lewis's reputation, I just wish it were made clearer to today's students that the generation of writers that followed him - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, etc. - owed him a tremendous amount, in terms of themes and boldness (if not so much in style). In his way, Lewis was definitely a modernist. His earlier (and better) books - Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth - were all considered very shocking and heretical when published. And even late in his career, he was handling explosive material that was considered dicey (e.g., his late-40s book on race relations, Kingsblood Royal).

Anyway, it's a real shame that he's not more widely read nowadays - I'll take him over the insanely overrated Fitzgerald anytime...

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Doctor Strange, I was very sure that you knew about the play Still, I thought that others here might not have been, and that's why I mentioned it.

I agree with you about Lewis and Cather. It's interesting, though, that Cather never returned to Middle America to live.

 

[jake_fink]

I like to think there's room for both on the book shelves. They each represent aspects of the zeitgeist. And Babbitt and Babbitry are still used frequently to describe callow adherence to the status quo and popped up often in the pages of the excellent Chicago based magazine, The Baffler.

What else do you read? What else have you liked?

 

[Doctor Strange]

I'm running out the door, but I wanted to answer quickly.

Re Cather and Lewis, I love both of their books (well, many of them, I can't claim to have read all of them). I came to Lewis earlier, and - to use his own sort of lingo - he's zingier. But Cather was a wonderful writer too, if a bit more subtle and introverted. I think I had to mature a little myself to properly appreciate her books...

Talking about other writers will have to wait, though. I'm off to to gift-shop in the belly of the beast!

 

[Pilgrim]

Perhaps not Golden Era by this group's definition, but Kipling. Wonderful stuff, Kipling.

Or more recently, R.A. Heinlein.

 

[jake_fink]

Doc,

If you were responding to my room for both on the book shelf remark, I was referring to Fitzgerald and Lewis. I guess we can make room for Cather as well, though I'm less enthusiastic.

 

[Senator Jack]

I've been a long time fan of mid-century British literature, Graham Greene being one of my favorites. Though critics claim The Power and the Glory to be his magnum opus, I think he hit his stride later on with titles like 'Our Man in Havana' and 'Travels with My Aunt'. The earlier novels like 'Brighton Rock', and 'This Gun for Hire' (while great) are written filmically, and that quality stays on with The Power...

Also at the top of my list are the acidic Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess. I believe the comic novel to be the hardest sort to write and both were the best at it. Amis' 'Girl 20' is a riot, and while Burgess is best known for 'A Clockwork Orange' there are works like 'The Doctor is Sick' which I find to be more compelling.

Finally, there's my American hero, Ring Lardner. To hell with Fitzgerald, if anyone captured the spirit of jazz age America it was Ring. His stories of flappers, ball players, theatrical producers, songwriters, boxers, and vacationing malcontents, changed American fiction writing. He might be a footnote now, but his use of street vernacular - the first to do so in American Lit - set the ground work for Hammett, Thompson, Runyon, and everyone else. If you've never read him, I encourage you to buy Penguin's Selected Short Stories.

Regards,

Senator Jack

 

[magneto]

Great thread! Seconded on the Siinclair Lewis and Ring Lardner. When reading for enjoyment (i.e. not a textbook or a technical book) I read pre-1960s fiction, mostly American, exclusively. Anyone else like John O'Hara, Edna Ferber, John Marquand and/or Mary Roberts Rinehart?
It is so refreshing to read novels free of deeply unfunny second-hand sarcasm and useless artifice.

 

[Senator Jack]

I've a book of O'Hara short stories I'm reading now. Can't believe I"ve never been on to him before. What a brilliant tawdry writer. A rare trait indeed.

Senator Jack

 

[jake_fink]

John Marquand wrote the Mr. Moto series, about a Japanese secret agent, all written before Pearl Harbour, so Moto is the hero of the stories. He's sort of a proto James Bond, all sophisticated cocktail sipping and pleasure cruising until he has to get down and dirty. The books were made into a series of B films starring Peter Lorre and they're pretty darn good, retaining Moto's nasty edge, keeping him not entirely trustworthy and a little on the blood thirsty side. George Apely is a classic as is O'Hara's Appointment in Samara. I also like O'Hara's Pal Joey collection, upon which the musical was based, but otherwise I find his work a little on the soapy side; fun, but soapy.

Have you read any Grace Paley?

Anyone read any John Fante?

 

[magneto]

I find his work a little on the soapy side; fun, but soapy.
Have you read any Grace Paley?

"Fun but soapy" exactly; sometimes ya just want a refreshing lightweight lather--entertained w/out being too intellectually insulted . I haven't read Grace Paley--somehow I have her mentally bracketed with John Cheever and Louis Auchincloss (both of whom I like) don't know if that's accurate but mean to investigate further; thanks for the reminder.

Anyone familiar w/Dawn Powell? (brilliant lampoonings of golden-era New Yorkers--"Angels on Toast", etc--most her novels have been reprinted lately after decades of neglect...)

 

[lenj]

Speaking of Fun

PG Wodehouse - anything to do with Jeeves.

Set mostly in the between-the-wars period, filled with complex plots and word plays that make me laugh from cover to cover.

lenj