Fitzgerald and Hemingway; Modernism Goes Mainstream

By Jeffrey Hart | Tuesday, November 28, 2006

I have the ghost of a theory, developed when my college students during the late 1950s and the 1960s were drawn to the radical literature of the 1930s—that is, when their parents were young and confronting the Great Depression. And that made me aware that perhaps I myself was drawn to the literature of the 1920s when my mother was on the Broadway stage in the great musicals such as Poppy, the Music Box Review, and Jerome Kern’s Showboat; and my father was an optimistic young architect. My friend Frank Lentricchia encouraged me to develop this theory into a short book, but I will let it remain a ghost haunting the attic.

And yet, there is the 1920s, and for us today, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Let me begin with some social context, and a theory. Clearly, in style and content, both Fitzgerald and Hemingway obeyed Ezra Pound’s command to “make it new.” That is, they were reacting against—in rebellion against—the nineteenth century.

What we see happening in England before the First World War was the proliferation of various movements and magazines representing the impulse to “make it new.” Imagism emerged in 1912 with Hilda Doolittle, Pound and T.E. Hulme. In 1915 Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, at Pound’s insistence published T.S. Laforguean “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” even though she did not at all understand it.

But these “avant garde” stirrings remained outside the mainstream of literature and the arts until the First World War blew the nineteenth century away, literally, with tons of high explosives in such slaughters as the extended butchery on the Somme.

In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine Barkley’s fiancé, a British officer, has been blown to bits in those slaughters. She now carries his swagger stick. As she says to Frederic Henry, “People can’t realize what France is like. If they did it couldn’t all go on. He didn’t have a sabre cut. They blew him all to bits… We’ll crack. We’ll crack in France. They can’t go on doing things like the Somme and not crack.”

I will propose another theory now. And I have considerable confidence in this one. The modernist rebellion that was there before the war, went mainstream, so to speak—that is, rejection of nineteenth century manners and morals—right after the war, and because the war, affecting millions of people, blew the nineteenth century away, and make the 1920s the first modern decade.

The end of the war brought an erotic jolt as youth cohorts led the way to a break with Victorian manners and morals and a break with nineteenth-century styles; this youth cohort turned the tables and transformed much of the adult world as well. In an often cited chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, the 1920’s This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald tells us and a shocked older generation that on the Christmas vacation trip of the Princeton Triangle Club:

None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed … Amory [Fitzgerald’s youthful hero] saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible… But he never realized how widespread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.

That is how Amory saw it from the perspective of a Princeton undergraduate. The fashions of young adults also reflected the change. The leading designer in Paris, Coco Chanel, re-imagined the contours of women’s bodies, interpreting them to express women’s independence. Whale-bone corsets were out, svelte was in, hair was bobbed, and comfortable dresses were designed as the waltz was replaced by the bouncy Charleston, the Tango, the Bunny Hug and the Lindy Hop, that last named for Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight to Paris. Social historians tell us that sleeveless blouses were known as “petting shirts” and that Henry Ford’s new closed sedans, replacing the parlor and porch swing, were called, disapprovingly, “rolling brothels.” In his essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), Fitzgerald tells us that the word “jazz” first meant sex before it meant music, and remembered the re-education of adults by novels during the 1920s:

We begin with the suggestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life (Jurgen, 1919); then we learn that there is a lot of sex around if we only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920); that adolescents lead very amorous lives (This Side of Paradise, 1920); that there’s a lot of neglected Anglo-Saxon words around (Ulysses, 1920); that older people don’t always resist sudden temptation (Cytherea, 1922); that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined (Flaming Youth, 1922); that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922); that glamorous English ladies are often promiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924); that in fact they devote most of their time to it (The Vortex, 1926); that it’s a damned good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928); and finally that there are abnormal variations (The Well of Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah, 1929).

The varied and adventurous voices of the 1920s are insistently new, and let us listen to a few, as through them we hear an individuality that is adventurous and often erotic, very high spirits and even higher achievement.

Readers might not have understood the opening of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 “The Waste Land,” but they sensed that it was important:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And the first sentences of Hemingway’s 1929 A Farwell to Arms which I still cannot read without the old excitement coming forward once again, with his great heroine Catherine Barkley and perhaps his best prose:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

Or those final sentences of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922, Paris, of course), a novel that made experience part of one’s nervous system:

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I will yes.

From This Side of Paradise in 1920 until The Great Gatsby in 1925, Fitzgerald stuck with traditional models though evolving a distinctive personal voice. Before Gatsby he was the historian of the modern decade but not a modernist. With Gatsby, he took Joseph Conrad for his model as well as the Eliot of “The Waste Land.” Fitzgerald achieved early fame with This Side of Paradise in 1920.

During the early 1920s Hemingway lived with Hadley, the first of his four wives, over a sawmill at 113 Notre Dame des Champs off the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and there in legendary obscurity began publishing what are books but almost pamphlets. Discerning readers understood that Hemingway was doing something new:

Considered with attention, Hemingway’s apparently simple sentences can be analyzed like a well-wrought poem, and when inserted between the stories of the 1925 Liveright volume they make a variety of subterranean connections. For example, the hero of the many of the 1925 stories is Nick Adams. But he also figures in a chapter or vignette that begins:

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of the machine gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine…

We sense a number of connections, for example between the hospital in the first paragraph and the church in the second. The hospital cannot do those cabinet ministers any good, nor can the church help Nick. The nails are like bullets. The pools of water will be pools of blood. Death surrounds the simple sentences of the vignettes.

Hemingway had worked hard on his new style, at first an effort to write “one true sentence,” then building on that toward paragraphs concentrated with implied meanings. He later described this in his famous “iceberg principle:”

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Hemingway used another comparison to describe his prose at its best when in The Sun Also Rises (1926) he said that the matador Pedro Romero when working a bull held “his line under the maximum of exposure.” Holding its line under the pressure of extreme emotion is what Hemingway’s prose does at its best, during the 1920s.

He had also cut back, making each word count, to the Anglo-Saxon core strengths of the English language. As Pound put it in Patria Mia (1913, published later), and doubtless urged in conversation during those early days in Paris:

Something in the temper of the race which has strengthened [the language] and given it fibre, and this is hardly more than a conviction that words scarcely become a man…it is just here, that one undertakes to keep quiet until there is something worth saying… [that is] the Anglo-Saxon objection to speaking at all.

Words matter. There are times, under pressure, when silence is almost a necessity. At the end of A Farewell to Arms, when Catherine Barkley is dying, she knows this while her lover Frederic Henry does not. This powerful exchange occurs:

“Poor darling,” Catherine said very softly. She looked gray.
“You’re alright, Cat,” I said. “You’re going to be alright.”
“I’m going to die,” she said; then waited; and said.” I hate it.”

In Hemingway, less is more in a very big way, and in that prose there is a morality of restraint, of emotion controlled under extreme pressure. Words do not become a man. Catherine has carried the swagger stick of her British officer who was killed on the Somme, and his disciplined realism has become hers by the first time Frederic meets her near the beginning of the novel.

In A Farewell to Arms, in my judgment his best novel, Catherine his finest female creation, Hemingway added a new lyricism to his prose as well as a structural element. Frederic Henry looking out of a window at motion and potential danger outside. That is the first scene in the first chapter; and finally at the end after Catherine dies, Frederic is outside, walking in the rain, that is, walking like the Italian soldiers of the opening chapter, implicitly aware that he is walking toward his own early or eventual death.

In Fitzgerald’s prose, death is dealt with in a different way: we see the celebration of beauty under the aspect of time and death as Fitzgerald’s characteristic quality in his prose. Yes, Beatrice Blaine, there was a woman, having had “the sort of [aristocratic] education that will be quite impossible ever again… In those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.” There it is: “impossible ever again,” stressed-unstressed, dactyl-iamb.

Fitzgerald was aware very early, he was only twenty-four when this novel appeared, of the conjunction between beauty and loss, and so we have that frequent dying-fall rhythm in his prose. “The sentimental person,” he wrote, “thinks that things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” This sensibility drew him to Rupert Brooke and especially to Keats for his richness of language and his powerful conjunction of love and death. As early as his college years, Fitzgerald imagined that he too had tuberculosis and also would die young. It was Jay Gatsby’s “capacity for wonder” that for Fitzgerald constituted his greatness. We remember that in his Notebooks Fitzgerald wrote that “America is a willingness of the heart.” Fitzgerald turned some of his early poetry into passages of prose in This Side of Paradise.

Let us think about the following passage from This Side of Paradise. During his first dusk on the Princeton campus, Amory is enthralled by a marching and singing parade of undergraduates, led by Allenby, the football captain:

The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edges of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful … Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place, a white-clad phalanx broke the gloom, white-shirted, white-trousered … [Amory] sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred and sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines.

Prominent here is the conjunction of beauty and death: hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful … These white-clad undergraduates appear out of a sinister darkness. They are already heading back into it, the echo of their song dying away. The football captain’s name Allenby is also that of Field Marshall Edmund Allenby, famous for his World War deeds in the Middle East, and the war is now a presence off-stage in this novel, the United States neutral for the time being during Amory’s freshman year, but soon, we read, the war “washed up the beach where Princeton played.” Military terms describe the students here, “phalanx” and “platoon.” Their white shirts recall a famous photograph of the poet and beau ideal Rupert Brooke: “If I should die think only this of me,/ That there is some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.” Dying on the way to Gallipoli, Brooke is buried on the island of Skyros.

Fitzgerald’s development as an artist closely follows his models. He moved from Compton Mackenzie and the H.G. Wells of Tono Bungay to The Beautiful and Damned (1922) with such pessimistic naturalists as Frank Norris. For The Great Gatsby, with a sure sense of where he should go, he found direction in the great modernists Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot. Yet he preserved the connection between Amory Blaine at the end of This Side of Paradise stretching out his arms toward the ideal Princeton, and Jay Gatsby when Nick first sees him stretching out his arms toward the green light of Daisy, his ideal woman. This Side of Paradise ends with that hyphen rather than a period. Amory’s road leads to Gatsby and Daisy.

From Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus and Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald learned the uses of the partially involved first-person narrator, a narrative method that permits the selectivity and concentration lacking in Fitzgerald’s first two novels. As Conrad’s Marlow is to the extraordinary Mr. Kurtz, Nick Carraway is to Jay Gatsby: each a reliable observer that gradually moves us closer to the man of extremes. Both Kurtz and Gatsby, to use Conrad’s phrase, have “kicked free from the earth.” Gatsby’s romantic intensity makes him believe that he can abolish time.

As he says to Nick, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can.” Marlow’s emotions are tepid, compared with those of Kurtz, as Marlow indeed recognizes. Kurtz is a kind of Rimbaud, a modernist artist. Nick offers that banality from his father as wisdom at the opening of the novel, and his own thoughts are ordinary until, inspired by Gatsby, he understands America and achieves an eloquence new for him in the famous Dutch sailors passage at the end.

Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared in 1922, and soon became the most influential poem written in English during the twentieth century. In October 1922, Fitzgerald and Zelda moved to Great Neck, Long Island, and in June 1923 he began working toward what would become Gatsby. At the same time he wrote stories that dealt with the emotions that would be central to it, notably “Winter Dreams” (September 1923), a superb story worth reading especially in its relation to Gatsby.

Fitzgerald understood what possibilities the great poem had for him. He went so far as to call the landfill in Flushing Meadows, Long Island the “waste land.” The eyes of the occulist Doctor T.J. Eckleberg, like Eliot’s blind Tiresisas, have seen it all, seen it all. The action moves from spring to the autumn of 1922, with a constant beat of time working against Gatsby’s dream.

Popular music sounds in both the poem and the poetic novel. Nick visits a version of the epic underworld where he finds Meyer Wolfsheim, the magician who has fixed the 1919 World Series, changing the white sox to the black sox, and who is a false Anchises, the guide for Aeneas in Virgil’s underworld. The first time Nick visits the Buchanan house and grounds, the prose suggests that the place is alive with spirits. In Eliot’s “Waste Land,” behind any door, a corn god may lurk.

And at the end Gatsby himself, the god of this world of magic, and who has driven with Nick in that Rolls-Royce magical chariot across the Queensboro Bridge, lies dead and surrounded by dead leaves in his swimming pool, death by water, like the fertility gods of the myths. This novel is full of false fertility, Myrtle and Daisy, and the green Eden at the end lives in memory and aspiration, not in fact.

James Gatz has re-invented himself as Jay Gatsby and his quest almost succeeds, though it amounts to a crazy illusion that could never have survived their marriage.

Still, at the end, and though Gatsby has been buried in the mud, his moon of romantic possibility rises over Long Island. Coming out of this novel, that moon rising over the waste land Valley of Ashes possesses a prophetic quality. We know what readers in 1925 could not, that the great New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 will rise out of that same landfill. With The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald both salutes Eliot and answers him. To Eliot’s concluding Sanskrit prayer, Fitzgerald opposes the Gatsbian moon of imagination and creativity. One catches one’s breath at the beginning of Chapter V when reading:

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints of light upon the roadside. Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit toward mine across the lawn. “Your place looks like the World’s Fair,” I said.

Hemingway knew he had topped This Side of Paradise (1920) with his 1925 In Our Time. But Gatsby beat In Our Time the same year. In 1926, writing fast but very well, Hemingway fought back with The Sun Also Rises—the sun of realism rising against Fitzgerald’s moon of romance. Here Hemingway attacked Fitzgerald as having romantic illusions like those of Robert Cohn, also a Princeton man. And as against Fitzgerald’s golden girls he put another kind of heroine, the promiscuous and liberated Lady Brett Ashley. And against Fitzgerald he put his morality of stoic discipline.

“The Waste Land” is powerfully present here as well, with the sexually maimed Jake Barnes as the wounded Fisher King, his wound, we understand, is the comprehensive wound of the West. Jake and his friends fish at Burguete to recover their balance, somewhere near, but only near the Monastery at Roncevalles – a “Waste Land” touch.

Jake and Brett’s problem is insoluble because of his wound. Here is Brett holding Jake together when he is on the edge. He has just ordered two more bottles of wine:
We touched glasses.

“Bung-o!” Brett said. I drank my glass and poured out another. Brett put her hand on my arm.
“Don’t get drunk, Jake,” she said. “You don’t have to.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t,” she said. “you’ll be all right.”

And at the end of the novel Brett for a moment slides into sentimental illusion as they ride in a Madrid cab. Now it is Jake who sustains her:

The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. [The reader is anything but comfortable here.] It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply bright. We turned onto the Gran Via.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

Jake’s word “pretty” pulls her back from illusion. Nothing can be done.

The fight for number one between Hemingway and Fitzgerald goes on, both of them not only read, analyzed and discussed but also best-sellers ever since the 1920s. Hemingway might have tied Gatsby with A Farewell to Arms. Both were at their best there. Available now is a facsimile edition of the manuscript of The Great Gatsby with cross-outs and corrections in Fitzgerald’s hand (Microcard Editions Books, 1973) and the Cambridge University Press has just published Gatsby with full scholarly apparatus at sixty dollars a copy. Fitzgerald’s hero Keats, before dying young, said “I will be among the English poets.” I do not think Fitzgerald would have been surprised that he—and Hemingway—are among the great American novelists.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway; Modernism Goes Mainstream

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