Culture

Lecture Three: Art, Literature and Music

As we have witnessed in the previous lectures, much of American culture in the Twenties can be characterized as homogenized and manufactured. In spite of this--or indeed, because of it--a number of intellectuals, artists, and writers took a critical view of American culture in the Twenties. They felt the emphasis on conformity was stultifying, as well as hypocritical. Disenchanted with the hypocrisy of mainstream culture, they sought to break free of the cultural constraints of the era through their art, literature, and music.

European Influences

Martha Graham, 1948

It is difficult to divide art up into convenient chronological or national boundaries. Suffice it to say that Europeans heavily influenced American art and literature with their experiments in deconstructing the human form as well as the English language. In literature, writers such as James Joyce and Virginia wollf transformed the traditional forms of fiction as well as the meaning of words in themselves.

In art, the Cubists and Futurists (influenced by the work of Albert Einstein) challenged prevailing notions of time and space. The radicalism of their vision was often tied directly to an equally radical political vision. (For a brief summary of these artistic and political relationships, read the lecture on the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced "modern art" to America. If you want to learn more, visit the University of Virginia web site on the Armory Show.)

In dance, Russian emigré Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russe highlighted a more popular and artisitcally free version of classical ballet that employed modern music (like that of Diagilev's Russian contemporary, Igor Stravinsky) and modern art (colors, shapes and perspectives influenced by Picasso and Kandinsky).

In America, young artists like Isadore Duncan and Martha Graham carried their work even further with their contributions to the foundation of Modern Dance. Rejecting the forms of classical ballet, these performers adopted forms and styles of more "primitive" cultures to dance, simplified styles and settings, and used modern music--or no music at all--as the backdrop for their peformance.

Literature

H. L. Mencken

Sinclair Lewis

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway in his Red Cross uniform

Millay's best-known phrase of poetry encapsulated the attitude of the hedonistic Twenties:

My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night'
But, oh my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

T. S. Eliot

Perhaps the greatest critique of American culture emerged from the literary front. Writers like Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others searched for new ways to both describe American culture and deconstruct it.

One of the greatest social critics of the era (mentioned in the previous lecture) was journalist H. L. Mencken. Mencken edited a literary magazine, the American Mercury, which showcased the talents of unknown writers such as Sinclair Lewis. Mencken also provided a hefty amount of his own material, much of it aimed at the hypocrisy of middle-class, small-town American. Mencken derisively referred to the bourgeoisie (middle class) as the "booboisie," and derided their shallow taste in art and music. Web biographer Gibbons Burke described Mencken as a "libertarian before the word came into usage. His prose is as clear as an azure sky, and his rhetoric as deadly as a rifle shot." Burke continues: "Frequent targets of his lance were Franklin Roosevelt and New Deal politics, Comstocks, hygenists, `uplifters', social reformers of any stripe, boobs & quacks, and the insatiable American appetite for nonsense and gaudy sham." (1)

Another writer who endeavored to expose the hypocrisies of American middle-class, small-town life was Sinclair Lewis. In the introduction to his book Main Street (1920), Lewis subtly sets the stage for his view of small-town values:

This is America--a town of a few thousand, in a region of
wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.

The town is, in our tale, called "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota."
But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets
everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in
Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would
it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford
car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal
invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What
Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the
new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the
sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing
is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.

Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture.
Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four
counties which constitute God's Country. In the sensitive art
of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor
strictly moral.

Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he
not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray
Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether
there may not be other faiths? (2)

Lewis expanded his critique further with the 1922 publication of Babbitt, in which the title character, George Babbitt, personifies the materialism, narrow-mindedness, and complacency of the middle class, speaking in clichés and buying every gadget on the market.

Other writers depicted the hedonism of the pleasure-seeking Twenties. Among the most prominent of these was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was from a wealthy background, having attended prep school and Princeton University. He joined the Army in 1917 and fought in Europe. In 1918, while stationed at Camp Sheridan, Alabama, met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre. She refused his proposal of marriage, however, so he returned home to Minnesota to begin writing his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which was published in 1920. This book was a somewhat autobiographical novel about the new life of former soldiers who had fought in the war against

Germany

. It was an instant hit, and with his wealth and success, he convinced Zelda to marry him and move with him to New York. There, he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, published in 1922, about the "flaming youth" (Fitzgerald coined the phrase) of the Twenties. The distractions of life in New York City proved too much, however, and Fitzgerald joined a growing number of writers escaping to France. There, he wrote his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1924), which depicted the people who attained the dreams of wealth in the high society of the East coast though the eyes of Nick, a midwesterner. Through Nick's eyes, he showed the the reader this the hollow core of pretense and emptiness of this affluent society. (3)

Fitzgerald's odyssey in France followed that of many disaffected American intellectuals, artists, and writers who were fed up with the hypocrisy, materialism, and conformity of middle-class society. Malcolm Cowley, one of these intellectuals, wrote of his experience and those of other Americans in France in his book, Exile's Return (1934). Speaking for himself, Cowley explained that by moving to Paris, Capri, or the South of France, "the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, and live freely, and be wholly creative." He added that Paris in the 1920s "was a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses."

One of the most famous of the American expatriates living in France after the war was Ernest Hemingway. A midwesterner like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had joined the Red Cross and served in Europe as an ambulance driver during the war. There, the brutality of war shocked Hemingway, who had grown up reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott and other romantic writers who idealized the virtues of combat. This experience made Hemingway question the war, and, after his brief return to America, everything about American society. Like Fitzgerald and Lewis, he saw through the hollow pretensions of modern life and wanted to escape it. He moved to Paris where he began writing. He published his first major work, In Our Time, in 1924, and then his novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. The latter work, which depicted the disillusionment and frustration of the expatriates, made Hemingway famous. Then, in 1929, he published A Farewell to Arms, the story of Lieutenant Henry, who was forced to choose between love and duty. The novel was very much semi-autobiographical: Henry was an ambulance driver who became involved in a serious relationship with a nurse (as Hemingway did). Unlike Hemingway, however, who lost the nurse, the fictional Lieutenant Henry successfully escaped with the nurse to

Switzerland

where both left behind the horrors of war. Here, Hemingway rejected the romantic notion of duty to one's country as the sine qua non of manhood. (4) (An English poet who died in the war, Wilfred Owen, likewise castigated the mindset that drove millions of young men to die for their country in the name of patriotism in a searing poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, in which described an attack by poison gas, after which he proclaims: "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori." The Latin ending translates as "It is a beautiful thing to die for one's country.")

American poets also reflected the hedonism and hopelessness of the era. Edna St. Vincent Millay celebrated the hedonism of her era. She published her first collection of poems, Renascence and Other Poems, in 1917. In 1923 Millay was honored as the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In that same year she published The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. She was honored for her work later in her life by election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1929) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1940). Millay was as famous for her lifestyle as her poetry. She lived in Greenwich Village in New York City where she lived the hedonistic lifestyle of the bohemian set. She had many lovers, and wrote erotic poetry. She also wrote anti-war poems, as well as a poem condemning the verdict in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts," which was published in The New York Times in August of 1927. Millay had been arrested and jailed for participating in a protest outside the prison where the two men awaited execution. Her involvement in the protest was evidence of her long-standing sympathy for the socialistic aspects of communism. (5)

Thomas Stearnes (T. S.) Eliot was another American who left for Europe. He lived an outwardly conventional life as a banker, but spent his free time writing poetry. His most famous work of this era was The Waste Land (1922). Perhaps Eliot’s most famous work, this controversial poem details the journey of the human soul searching for redemption. The Waste Land is known not only for its probing subject matter but also its radical departure from traditional poetic style and structure incorporating historical and literary allusions as well as unconventional use of language. (6)

The Harlem Renaissance

James Weldon Johnson

Langston Hughes

For the most part, feelings of despair and disillusionment troubled white writers and intellectuals. Such sentiments were rarely apparent in the striking outpouring of literature, music, and art by African Americans in the 1920s.

Many blacks moved to northern cities in the 1920s, continuing patterns begun earlier. Harlem emerged as the largest black neighborhood in New York City and quickly came to symbolize the new urban life of African Americans. The term Harlem Renaissance refers to the literary and artistic movement in which black artists and writers insisted on the value of black culture and drew upon African and African-American traditions in their writing, painting, and sculpture. Alain Locke, a leading black author, likened it to "a spiritual emancipation." Black actors, notably Paul Robeson, began to appear in serious theaters and earn acclaim for their abilities. Earlier black writers, especially Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay, encouraged and guided the novelists and poets of the Renaissance.

Among the movement's poets, Langston Hughes became the best known. His poetry rang with the voice of the people, for he sometimes used folk language to convey powerful images. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, Hughes began to write poetry in high school, briefly attended college, then worked and traveled in Africa and Europe. By 1925, he was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance, sometimes reading his poetry to the musical accompaniment of jazz. Some of his works present images of black history, such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), and others, such as "Song for a Dark Girl" (1927), vividly depict racism. Some of his poems look to the future with an expectation for change and for new choices, as in "I, Too, Sing America" (1925):

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.(7)

Other important writers included Zora Neale Hurston, who came from a poor southern family, won a scholarship to Barnard College, and began her long writing career with several short stories in the 1920s. Jean Toomer's novel Cane (1925), dealing with African Americans in rural Georgia and Washington, D. C., has been praised as "the most impressive product" of the Harlem Renaissance.

Jazz

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong

Duke Ellington

The 1920s has sometimes been called the Jazz Age. Jazz developed in the early twentieth century from several strains of African-American music, particularly the blues and ragtime. Created and nurtured by African-American musicians in southern cities, especially New Orleans, jazz traveled north with the African-American migration out of the South. Black musicians such as Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong traveled to Chicago with Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. There, he played in the speakeasies with "King" Oliver. He married Lil Hardin, the band's pianist. Then, in 1924 he moved to New York to play with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, the most popular African-American band of the 1920s. His thirteen months with the band caused quite a stir among New York musicians, who had never heard anything like him. During this time he also did a number of recording sessions with, among others, blues great Bessie Smith, as well as Clarence Williams and the Red Onion Jazz Babies. In 1925 he formed his own small bands and recorded his first records under his own name. The works created by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven are considered classics. He continued to play with other bands throughout the 1920s. (8 & 9)

Jazz influenced white musicians and composers, most notably George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue (1924) brought jazz into the symphony halls. Some attacked jazz, claiming it encouraged people to abandon self-restraint, especially with regard to sex. But despite--or perhaps because of--such condemnation, the wail of the saxophone became as much a part of the Twenties as the road of the roadster and the flicker of the movie projector.

The great black jazz musicians of the 1920s--Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, and others--drew white audiences into black neighborhoods to hear them. Harlem came to be associated with exotic nightlife and glittering jazz clubs, with the Cotton Club the most well known. It was there that perhaps the greatest jazz composer and arranger of all time, Edward "Duke" Ellington first began to reach New York audiences. Ellington led the Cotton Club Band starting in 1927. From there, his music was broadcast nationwide over the radio on "Live From the Cotton Club." An astute businessman, Ellington made deals the following year that would allow him to publish his own music and record his own band. Soon, Ellington's band became the single-most sought after band in the U. S. and the world.

Some of Ellington's greatest works include "Rockin' in Rhythm," "Satin Doll," "New Orleans," "A Drum is A Woman," "Take the `A' Train," "The Moochie," and "Crescendo in Blue." Ellington played all over the world, from New York to New Delhi, from Chicago to Cairo. Before he died in 1974, he had recorded and written hundreds of compositions, all of which would have a lasting effect on music the world over. (10)

Sources

(1) http://www.io.com/~gibbonsb/mencken.html
(2) http://www.readbookonline.net/read/174/5350/
(3) http://www.angelfire.com/co/pscst/fitzgerald.html
(4) http://www.angelfire.com/co/pscst/hemingway.html
(5) http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/millay/millay_life.htm
(6) http://www.bartleby.com/201/
(7) http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Langston_Hughes/2383
(8) http://www.redhotjazz.com/louie.html
(9) http://www.redhotjazz.com/fho.html
(10) http://www.dukeellington.com/bio.html

Parts of this lecture were derived from Chapter 23, "The Prosperity Decade, 1920-1929," in Berkin, et al., Making America: A History of the United States, Volume II.