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The (Hi)story of Their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and "The Lost Generation" Author(s): Marc Dolan Source: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Apr., 1993), pp. 35-56 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464076 Accessed: 04-08-2019 18:59 UTC

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The (Hi) story of their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and "The Lost Generation"

MARC DOLAN

Of what use is autobiography to history? At first glance, autobiographies would seem invaluable to historians. After all, no attempt to reconstruct or understand the past would seem complete without a sprinkling of quotations from some form of "eyewitness account. " Among the various forms of such accounts available to historians, the formal autobiography

often provides the most comprehensive and comprehensible account extant of the personal experience of historical events.1 Yet even so strong an admirer of the genre as Allan Nevins was forced to admit that very few autobiographies were ideally suited to the traditional historian's purpose. Most, he conceded, were "imperfect" historical documents at best and could prove "far more deeply misleading" than many other historical sources.2

Considered schematically, there are five frequently-raised, formal objections that twentieth-century historians like Nevins have made to the indiscriminate use of formal autobiographies as primary sources of historical evidence. All five objections are variations on some fairly standard historiographical problems; and while none of these objections

Marc Dolan was recently Lecturer in American History and Literature, Harvard University. He wishes to thank Donald Fleming, Warner Berthoff and (especially) Bob Lamb for their comments on versions of this essay.

1 In speaking of "the formal autobiography," I seek to distinguish, à la Marc Bloch, between those autobiographical texts clearly intended for a public and frequently posterior audience, hereafter " formal autobiographies " ; and those eventually published texts that were originally intended for more private purposes. (Postmodernist critics should note that my use of the word "formal" is not to be considered identical to current usage of the word "performative." For what it's worth, I consider all texts performative.)

2 Allan Nevins, "The Autobiography," collected in Allan Nevins on History, compiled and introduced by Ray Allen Billington (New York: Scribners, 1975)» *37-38- For a good example of Nevins' earlier praise of the genre, see Nevins, The Gateway to History (1938; rept. New York: D. Appleton & Century, 1938), 323.

Journal of American Studies, 27 (1993), 1, 35-56 © 1993 Cambridge University Press

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36 Marc Dolati

is damaging enough in its own right to rule out any and all evidentiary use of formal autobiography, taken together these five objections are enough to give us pause. For example, one standard objection - the limited, distorting perspective provided on history by the evidence of a single consciousness - is clearly part of the ongoing historiographical debate over the relative merits of so-called "objective" and "subjective" approaches to history. This debate is also sometimes configured as a conflict between the study of "historical events" and the study of "historical experience," or as the conflict between "scientific," "quan- titative" history and "artistic," "qualitative" history. At base, the problem is fairly simple. Which is more valuable to historical studies: historical knowledge that concerns itself with objectively verifiable political, sociological, and economic "events" (occurrences or trends that can be reasonably demonstrated by recourse to valid documentary and/or statistical evidence) ; or historical knowledge that concerns itself with the ultimately unverifiable, inner "experience" of the past as lived by its individual citizens (the internal, subjective knowledge that G. M. Young once delineated as "not what happened, but what people felt about when it was happening")?3

Even if this first objection to formal autobiography may be surmounted fairly easily (by declaring that "historical events" and "historical experience" are both equally important to historical studies), a second, related objection - to the genre's overall emphasis on a single life, rather than the "collective life" or interconnected lives of a community, a nation, or an age - proves slightly more difficult to elude. Ultimately, this second problem comes down to a question of priority : how do we go about integrating these two separate, very different types of historical knowledge? Do we, as David Hackett Fisher suggests, first use statistical evidence to determine what he calls "modal tendencies" in a given era, and then select individual accounts ofthat experience that provide us with statistically confirmed "modal characters"? Or do we, as David Levin proposes, begin with the subjective account of historical experience, and then work outward from these insights to the collateral evidence that confirms those individual tendencies that are characteristic rather than

3 G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936; rept. London: Oxford University Press, i960), vi. On the idea of " historical experience," also see: Peter Gay, General Introduction to The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud, in Gay, Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 9-16; Bernard Bailyn, "The Challenge of Modern Historiography," American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 1-24, esp. pp. 18-22; and Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 185-92.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Löst Generation" 37

idiosyncratic in a given period ? This may seem like hairsplitting, but if we

seek out a particular life story for closer study, have we not already decided that it is in some way "representative," i.e., that it shores up the historical knowledge that we have already determined to be important?4

Ultimately, neither of these problems of "subjectivity" and "ob- jectivity" can ever be satisfactorily resolved, nor will we find a satisfactory

resolution to the historiographical controversy that lies behind a third objection - the genre's near-axiomatic recourse to linear narrative. Theoreticians like Karl Popper and Carl Hempel have advanced shrewd, cogent arguments regarding the essential falsity of narrative form, while historical philosophers like Michael Oakeshott and J. H. Hexter have made equally compelling cases for the Bergsonian view that history is experienced as continuity rather than segmentation and should conse- quently be represented as such. "Change in history," as Oakeshott observed in 1933, "carries with it its own explanation; the course of events is one, so far integrated, so far filled in and complete, that no external cause or reason is looked for or required in order to account for any particular event. " History, in other words, resides in contingency as much as in more obvious, overdetermined causes. To remove contin- gency - to remove the continuity of narratively rather than analytically organized historiography - is thus to simplify the true causality of historical events.5

Opposing camps in all three of these historiographical debates have been active for some time. (Certainly, no thinking historian of the last century and a half would have taken any of these issues for granted.) But the historiographical problems that lie behind the two remaining objections to formal autobiography - to its obscuring literariness and its frequent distance from the events described - remained dormant until quite recently. Historians of all stripes, from R. G. Collingwood to

4 David Hackett Fisher, "The Braided Narrative: Substance and Form in Social History," in Angus Fletcher, ed., The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), esp. 123-26; and David Levin, In Defense of Historical Literature: Essays on American History, Autobiography, Drama, and Fiction (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), esp. Chs. 2 and 3. On these issues and their relation to the current vogue of cultural history discussed below, cf. Dominick LaCapra, "Is Everyone a Mentalité Case?" in History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 71-94.

6 Michael Oakeshott, "Historical Continuity and Casual Analysis," collected in William H. Dray, ed., Philosophical Analysis in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 207. On this point, also see the essays by Carl Hempel and Alan Donagan in Dray's anthology, as well as J. H. Hexter, "The Rhetoric of History," in The Rhetoric of History (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1971), 15-76.

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38 Marc Do Ian

E. H. Carr, from Allan Nevins to Marc Bloch, could all agree that a published memoir written decades after the fact needed to be regarded more skeptically than a deed-register, a census-report, or even a contemporaneous account taken from a diary or letter. " [T]here can be no doubt, " Bloch wrote in the posthumously published The Historian's Craft (1953), a historiographical "bible" for several generations of historians, "that, in the course of its development, historical research has gradually been led to place more and more confidence ... in the evidence of witnesses in spite of themselves. " "Even in the present," Bloch observed, writing in 1942, "who among us would not prefer to get hold of a few secret chancellery papers or some confidential military reports, to having all the newspapers of 1938 or 193 9p"6

Such historiographical unanimity has disappeared, however, with the recent rise of the so-called "new cultural history. " Eschewing many of the evidentiary rules honored by professional historians from Leopold von Ranke forward, cultural historians of the 1980s and 1990s have adopted a historiographical practice that frequently falls halfway between anthropology and literary criticism, drawing on the insights and methodologies of both fields. As Lynn Hunt has observed, this new form of historiographical practice is increasingly interested in the oddly textual nature of historical knowledge; in the ways in which the historian's notions of evidence and its value inevitably hinge on acts of interpretation not unlike those of the ethnographer or literary critic. In considering the problem of representativeness alluded to above, for example, cultural historian Robert Darnton freely admits that he " [cannot] see a clear way of distinguishing idiom from individuality," but asserts that "[t]o proceed ... by first establishing an idiom and then explaining the individual expression [i.e., as David Hackett Fisher proposed doing when selecting a "modal character"] does not seem workable." "We never meet pure idiom," Darnton notes, "[w]e interpret texts."7

It would be comforting for our purposes to take Darnton's last statement as gospel - to assert that, since all historical knowledge comes

6 Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, tr. Peter Putnam (New York : Vintage Books, 1953), 61, 62. For further illustrative examples of these objections, see: Nevins, Gateway, 3 1 8-32 ; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946 ; rept. London : Oxford University Press, 1956), 295-96; and E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 16-20.

7 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984; rept. New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 262. For a full account of the complicated origins of these recent movements, see Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," in Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1-22.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The host Generation" 39

to us by way of textual evidence, there can be no valid unique objections to employing formal autobiography any way we want to - but such an easy assertion would be ill-advised. Yet the ideas of contemporary cultural history do suggest a possible means of minimizing our five objections, even if we cannot eliminate them altogether. What if we treated the rhetoric

of a formal autobiography as "historical fact" rather than as its content? Darnton, Dominick LaCapra and the other practitioners of the "new" cultural and intellectual history do have a point: the one thing that we do know exists is the text. Rather than reading a formal autobiography as a documentary account of factual events and judging its dubious veracity accordingly, perhaps we should read it instead as a rhetorically constructed account of the relation of narrated past to narrating present within the life

of a particular individual. In line with the foregoing discussion, we may most reliably posit that such accounts often betray their "true" historical information less through their manifest content than through their rhetorical devices, their dialogic relations with the past, and their discernible traces of subjectivity. They also reveal similarly valuable historical traces both through their narrative form and discourse and through their signs of post facto revision via a particular, self-justifying consciousness.8

Another way of putting this would be to say that, in order to employ formal autobiographies as historical evidence, we must read them as myth, not fact; as simultaneously personal and tribal myths; as myths not just of the self or the age, but myths of the relation between the two. Consequently, just as each autobiographical myth constitutes a separate historical " fact, " any pattern of autobiographical mythology - any shared,

near-contemporaneous re-imagining of the past that travels across and among autobiographical texts -is a "fact" of paramount historical significance. Such "facts" may be found, not in instances of the same, repeatedly retold anecdote, nor even in multiple accounts of the same "event" from different angles, but rather in the inclusion of similar sets of experiences or patterns of experiences. Viewed in this light, formal autobiographies become most important to the study of history as indications oí projection and mood, of what participants might have thought

happened around them and of how they might remember feeling while it was occurring.

8 For LaCapra's ideas on the historical uses of rhetorical analysis, see "Rhetoric and History," in History and Criticism, 15-44; and History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), passim.

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4O Marc Do/an

A case in point is posedrby the numerous memoirs of Americans in Paris in the 1920s. These volumes have proved extraordinarily influential in shaping popular views of the period, even though professional literary and social historians of the era have spent much of their time demonstrating how nonfactual so many of them are. Taken as a whole, such volumes as Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company (1956), Morley Callaghan's That Summer in Paris (1963), and Kay Boyle's skillful revision (1968) of Robert McAlmon's already classic Being Geniuses Together (1938) - not to mention such lesser known but no less striking memoirs as Harold Stearns' The Street I Know (1935), Matthew Josephson's Life Among the Surrealists (1962), and Gorham Munson's The Awakening Twenties (1985) - present a remarkably coherent myth of American writers in the 1920s, a myth commonly designated in popular discourse by the phrase "The Lost Generation."9

A full account of the myth of "The Lost Generation" and its relation to the nonfictional and fictional writings of those who participated in its construction and dissemination demands a thorough, book-length study. For the purposes of this essay, however, I would like to suggest the outlines that such a full-length treatment might take by focusing more narrowly on the three formally autobiographical volumes that have proven the most influential in forming popular notions of the period : Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return (1934; 195 1); Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964); and The Crack-Up (1945), a posthumous collection of pieces by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald that was edited by Fitzgerald's old college friend Edmund Wilson.10

These three volumes are more responsible than any other nonfictional works for the popular myth of " The Lost Generation. " In tracing where

9 Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York: Coward, McCann, 1963); Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together (1968; rept. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984); Harold Stearns, The Street I Know (New York: Furman, 1935); Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, 1962); and Gorham Munson, The Awakening Twenties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

10 Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return 2nd edn. (1934; rept. New York: Viking Press, 195 1); Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribners, 1964); and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945). These texts will hereafter be cited parenthetically within the text as ER, MF, and CU, respectively.

For more on the problematic state of these three texts, and how it has affected several of my readings, see Marc Dolan, "'True Stories' of 'The Lost Generation': An Exploration of Narrative Truth and Literary Meaning in Three Memoirs of the Lost Generation" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1988), 171-72, 199-206, 282-93.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 41

this myth came from and how these three writers co-opted it and made it their own, I will attempt to demonstrate how their three nonfictional/ nonfactual memoirs provide a valuable, mythic testimony of their own experience of the 1920s. After examining how these three particular tests participate in the construction of this myth, I will end by sketching a theory of the myth's wider cultural implications : implications not only for

the relatively insignificant segment of the society that may be legitimately

grouped under the rubric of "The Lost Generation," but also for the allegedly "unwritten" mass of American society in this period.

In so doing, I will be "working," as Darnton proposes cultural historians should do, "back and forth between texts and contexts,"11 although I intend eventually to place the undeniable "fact" of these memoirs' textuality in the foreground of my analysis. As relatively privileged young men who were born just before the turn of the century, Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald witnessed the birth of modern American politics, culture, and society. In their personal testaments, they tell us about the dawn of a new age in literature, a new age of social and political organization, and the birth of a modern, consumer-oriented mass culture. They speak, however, as writers and mythmakers and not as eyewitnesses for the prosecution or defense. They communicate their true autobiographical selves more through "lies" and "distortions" than "facts," capturing their experience of the early twentieth century more in a borrowed plotline, a string of semes, or a switch in focus or point-of- view than in their manifest eyewitness accounts of Paris, New York, or the Charlestown Prison.

I

The phrase "lost generation" was first employed by the German Expressionist Franz Pfemfert in Die Aktion in 191 2 and was used extensively in Britain and France in the first years after the war to describe

the literal age cohort that had been severely reduced by the fighting of 1914-18.12 After the publication of The Sun Also Rises, however, with its famous paired epigraphs, the term "lost generation" could never again be employed in so broad or international a sense. Today, even if the phrase makes a non-specialist think of Britons or Frenchmen, most likely the

11 Darnton, 262. 12 On this general point, see Robert Wohl, The Generation 0/1914 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1979), passim. The translation of the phrase "lost generation" from Pfemfert's Aktion article of 11 December 191 2 is Word's (p. 45).

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42 Marc D o Ian

images conjured up are of Montparnasse or the Cap d'Antibes rather than of a row of gravestones in Flanders. These are images of presence, not absence. All that is left of the phrase's original connotation is the vague notion that the well-known "disillusionment" of the generation had "something to do with the war." Why? Why did the American version of this symbol become so popular? Why has the 1920s become, in the popular imagination, the decade of the Lost Generation?

First, let us consider the words. "In the slogan," Malcolm Cowley tells us at the beginning oî Exile* s Return, "the noun was more important than the adjective" (ER, p. 4). The realization of a shared narrow identity ("generation") was more important than the implied absence ("lost") of an established, culture-wide identity. When Gertrude Stein greets young Ernest Hemingway with the same harsh slogan in "'Une Génération Perdue,'" the third sketch in the published version of A Moveable Feast, he offers an almost identical reaction, wondering "about the boy in the garage and if he had ever been hauled in one of those vehicles when they were converted to ambulances. " In other words, Ernest13 feels a common

bond with a young man around his own age and in almost the same breath denies the significance of the term "lost generation." What he explicitly denies is the adjective: "I thought that all generations were lost by something, " he writes, " and always had been and always would be " (MF, p. 30). As for F. Scott Fitzgerald, although he never employed the full term in his public writings, he had been speaking and thinking of "generations" in his writing since his first published novel, with its famous final reference to "a new generation ... grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."14 "[M]y point of vantage, " he tells us of this period of his writing in " Early Success, " "was the dividing line between the two generations, and there I sat -somewhat self-consciously" (CU, p. 87).

Notwithstanding Hemingway's assertion that all generations were "lost by something," it is still worth asking why this "generation" was so aware of itself. If we examine the historical record, we see that the sense

of common identity they discovered in age sprang from their demographic uniqueness. As Paula Fass has demonstrated, the years from 1870 to 1930 showed a steady decline in the national birth rate and consequently in the size of the family unit. The early 1920s (the time of Fitzgerald's

13 To avoid confusion, I have adopted the device throughout this essay of referring to protagonists by their given names and authors by their surnames. Thus, in this case, A Moveable Feast is a book by "Hemingway" about "Ernest."

14 Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner's, 1920), 282.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 43

"younger" generation and Cowley's "youngest" generation) witnessed an unprecedented interest in youth and their "moral situation" precisely because the young segment of the population was steadily declining. "Whereas," Fass observes, "in 1870 there were two persons 24 to 64 years of age to every one 15 to 24 years, there were three older persons to every one youth in 1930. "15

In other words, the members of the "Lost Generation" felt the full

weight of the noun in that slogan precisely because they stood at the beginning of an obviously growing demographic trend. They werevthe first generation to represent a declining proportion of youth, and that decline would continue throughout the 1920s, the first years of which they certainly dominated. Because of these developments, not only did they become the focus for a great deal of public commentary, they also became the pundits of the era. This is the shrewd truth behind Fitzgerald's comment about his "peculiar vantage point," not to mention the vignettes that dominate the second chapter ("War in Bohemia") of Cowley's narrative. Among the popular arts of the period, from "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and from Flaming Youth (both

novel and film) to The Sun Also Rises, the works that focused on "youth" or "generation" were inevitably engaged in the dramatization of a popular type.

To be sure, "youth" had started being a prominent topic of American writing before the war, just as "the American girl" had been a popular topic for American writing throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. But what distinguished these postwar writings from prewar texts by Booth Tarkington and others was the sense, initiated by the publication of This Side of Paradise (and books like it) and driven home by the publication of The Sun Also Rises (and its many literary imitators) that "youth" was now speaking for itself. In their memoirs of the 1920s, both Cowley and Fitzgerald directly address the issue of what it meant to be "young" then, while Hemingway rather noticeably ignores it, save for the instance quoted above. But all three authors carry their youth like a badge of honor. Only Cowley is not wholly wistful about it. By 195 1 he could characterize the 1920s as "easy, quick, adventurous... [and] good to be young in, " all the while insisting that " on coming out of [them] one felt a sense of relief" (JER, p. 309).

So, according to their autobiographical testimony, the word "genera- tion" had powerful significance for these three writers and their

15 Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58.

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44 Marc Dolan

contemporaries almost from the moment they came of age. "Lost," however, came later. Because of the low rate of mortality among American soldiers in the war (relative to European casualties), it is difficult to find any usage of the term "lost generation" in America before 1926, the year of Hemingway's celebrated first novel. After that point, as Cowley notes, the phrase became a fetish, even "a craze -young men tried to get as imperturbably drunk as the hero, young women of good families took a succession of lovers in the same heartbroken fashion" (ER, p. 3). The phrase had stuck and finally made the moral baggage of the term "younger generation" explicit. Such young men and women were "lost" - they had lost their moral bearings.

In essence, what Hemingway had done was to give an Anglo-European name ("lost generation") to an American phenomenon (the rise of a noticeable and noticeably anti-traditionalist youth cohort), but that was not the end of the story. The phrase "lost generation," like any mythic signifier, contains many meanings. If Cowley's report about the reception of Hemingway's novel and its paired epigraphs may be believed, then a second shift in dominant meaning occurred between 1926 (when the term was first applied in its moral/ American sense) and 193 1 (when both Fitzgerald and Cowley began their cultural and ideological inquiries into the recent past). In the late 1920s, the term "lost generation," captured for Americans by Hemingway, shifted from a moral to a cultural connotation. In the process of moving from "a lost generation" at the opening of Hemingway's novel to "the lost generation" on the first page of Cowley's narrative of ideas, the phenomenon of loss came to mean less "moral looseness" and more " deracination. " The suggestion of deracination was there in The Sun Also Rises, to be sure, but it was overpowered by the issue of problematic morality among the exiles.

By the time Cowley sat down to write the first installments of the serialized text of Exile's Return in the spring of 193 1, and Fitzgerald "Echoes of the Jazz Age" later that summer, there was no longer any question of blaming the members of this generation for their loss, as there had been in the earlier moral formulation. Now there was the alternative

notion that these men and women were victims of history. The term had undergone a subtle change in the years surrounding the apocalyptically perceived Wall Street Crash, and in so doing it had also acquired an implicit mythic narrative as well. Writing to Max Perkins in May of 193 1, Fitzgerald declared that the Jazz Age was now "over." It had "extended," Fitzgerald wrote, "from the suppression of the riots on May Day 19 1 9 to the crash of the stock market in 1929 -almost exactly one

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 45

decade. "16 As the essay that grew out of these comments subsequently demonstrated, Fitzgerald saw the historical narrative ofthat decade chiefly as the transit of his own generation from ebullience to dissipation. This even influenced him to the extent of placing the zenith of the decade's characteristic behavior as early as 1922. "That was the peak of the younger generation," he wrote, "for though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth . . . like a children's party taken over

by the elders" (O7, p. 15). Even in his prior, off-the-cuff assertion to Perkins, the mythic narrative

that Fitzgerald perceived in the decade and presented in his auto- biographical writings had a clear protagonist (his own generation), a clear beginning (the heady days after the War), and a very clear end (the despondent time just after the Crash) - but the middle stretches of that mythic narrative remained oddly murky. In general, this may be said of Cowley's and Hemingway's historical/autobiographical narratives as well. The so-called "Lost Generation" is absent from our three texts

during the middle years of the decade. What we find in the autobiographical writings of Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald are thick descriptions of the generation in the early 1920s (visions of heady youth) and then in the late 1920s (images of doom and self-destruction). We very seldom see the transformation between these two stages, the necessary intermediary stage between honest enjoyment and self- indulgence. The reasons for Ernest's infidelity in A Moveable Feast, for example, are implied, not stated; we see Kenneth Burke at the beginning of Exile's Return and Harry Crosby at the end but are only given a suggestion as to how Malcolm Cowley is a link between these two icons; F. Scott Fitzgerald describes both his early success and his crack-up a number of times in Edmund Wilson's posthumous collection, but he never shows us the connections between these two phases of his life.

When any of these three authors speaks of the events of the mid- 1920s, he widens the story so that he need not dwell on its more personal elements.

In the central passage of these tales, the individual and group centers of generational consciousness to which we have grown accustomed vanish for the middle stretches of the decade, leaving us to investigate a more widely conceived version of the postwar period than any we have seen in the narrative so far. Thus the middle third of A Moveable Feast depicts the

world of literary memoir and the celebrated cafés; this world provides the

16 Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, [ca. 1 5 May 193 1], in John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., Dear Scott/Dear Max (New York: Scribners, 1971), 171.

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46 Marc Do/an

implied causal link between Ernest the devoted husband and Ernest the adulterer. Likewise, the years between Broom and the Crash pass in Exile's Return in a blurred summary of "Mass Production, Babbittry, [and] Our Business Civilization" (ER, p. 217), which is, one supposes, intended to explain why poets like Hart Crane and Harry Crosby killed themselves. And it is in the middle of "Echoes of the Jazz Age" that Fitzgerald provides his frequently cited analysis of popular films and novels, leaving aside for the moment his crucial group protagonist of rich young people. That, Fitzgerald's text almost suggests, is how they got from the productive atmosphere of postwar New York to the seductive sur- roundings of the Cap d'Antibes.

What we have in each of these three formal autobiographies, then, is a journey from the initial realization of "generation" to the eventual realization of "lost." What is significant about this symbolic pattern is that in all three cases we must pass through an area of wider focus (Modernist writers, business civilization, popular culture) in order to get from the noun to the adjective that is supposed to modify or describe it. The journey out in all three narratives begins with the realization of unique identity ("generation"). In the separate texts, this is signified by the act of writing the first good story ("A Good Café on the Place St.- Michel" in A Moveable F east) ' the eye-opening experience of the war and Greenwich Village ("Mansions in the Air" and "War in Bohemia" in Exile's Return) ; and the liberating Zeitgeist of prewar college and postwar New York (described in three different forms in Fitzgerald's " Echoes of the Jazz Age," "My Lost City," and "Early Success"). This feeling of uniqueness lasts a while and then fades, as it becomes apparent that what is unique about the generation is what they lack rather than what they possess. This is the final realization of "lost," the realization of the late 1920s, whose two separate stages we have already examined. To admit one was "lost" was to wish to be "found," and so the early 1930s were a sort of homecoming, as Cowley contends in Exile's Return^ just as the early part of the decade was a sort of departure.

Cowley articulates this perception of a real-life arrival/departure motif even better in the Epilogue to the second edition of his memoirs when he notes, on rereading them seventeen years after their initial composition, that their story "seems to follow the old pattern of alienation and reintegration, or departure and return, that is repeated in scores of European myths ..." (ER, p. 289). What it follows - what all three texts follow, in fact - is Joseph Campbell's famous outline of the " protomyth, " the general narrative line of mythic adventure that cuts across most of the

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Mythic Autobiography and " The host Generation" 47

world's cultures, especially post-agricultural ones.17 But what these three historical autobiographers were trying to do was slightly more soph- isticated than a run-of-the-mill, Eliotesque variation on the "blighted land "/"Holy Grail" theme. By merging their own personal histories with those of the perceived "generation," they were telling two mythic narratives (a personal story and a generational story) by blending them into a third mythic narrative (a "representative" story of "the lost generation").

This implied heroic narrative explains a number of stylistic and tropical peculiarities that traverse the three texts. For one thing, there is the matter

of shifting personification, particularly in the writings of Cowley and Fitzgerald. In the first chapter of Exile's Return, for example, the antecedent of the first person plural shifts from each subsection to the next : from the contemporary grouping of Cowley and his dialogically inscribed reader(s) in "Blue Juniata"; to the historical grouping of Malcolm and his teenage friends in "Big-Town High School"; to just Malcolm and young Kenneth Burke in "Apprentice of the Arts"; to anyone who attended college in the prewar period in "American College, 1916"; to all young Americans who served in noncombatant roles in the war in "Ambulance Service." Each shift in antecedent is accomplished through a transitional excursion into either the cool, historical third person plural or the direct, anecdotal first person singular. The ambiguous, generational, active "we" is constantly mediating between these two passive antecedent poles ; the potential polysemy of the first person plural thus makes it the perfect pronoun for the protagonist of a text that attempts to merge public history and personal memoir. In reality, almost no single individual had the precise set of historical experiences attributed to this protean first person plural protagonist - not even Malcolm Cowley.

Beyond this implicit, generational narrative, there are also the symbolic activities ("dissipation," "exile," "self-destruction," and "youth") that we normally associate with that grouping. It should not surprise us that these symbolic activities help reinforce the larger narrative pattern that we have already uncovered. An activity like alcoholic consumption, as it is used in these stories, can convey the shift in mood from honest enjoyment

17 The classic summary of the "protomyth" is in Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 245-46. For the extent to which temporal and regional variations can affect its narrative contours, see also Campbell, The Masks of God, 4 vols. (New York: Viking Press, 1959-69); and Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, 5 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988-89).

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48 Marc Do/an

in the former part of the decade to pure self-indulgence in the latter phase,

merely by its impenetrable symbolism; the versatility of drunkenness as a seme for the era is that it may be employed as either a seme of Joy or a seme of Dissipation depending on the context in which it is placed. Like Chanel's famous little black dress, it goes with everything: immaturity, exhilaration, fanciful visions, obsessive behavior, sudden violence, and the depths of despondency. Like the shifting antecedent of the personal pronoun, the pure signifier of alcoholic consumption allows these three authors to tell a personal, metaphorical "story" about public, metony- mical "history." In other words, the point of the prominence of alcohol in "A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel" or "Echoes of the Jazz Age" or Cowley's "Significant Gesture" is not to convey the specious "fact" that everyone drank their way through the 1920s, but rather to make readers understand that the closest group of analogous experiences to the feeling of living through the period are the variety of ways that one can react to alcohol.

Like the symbolic field of alcoholic consumption, the words, types, experiences, and settings (Paris, the Riviera, and New York City) that we commonly associate with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Cowley belong to the domain of "narrative truth" that Donald Spence describes, rather than to the parallel domain that he delineates as "historical fact." Taken as a whole, all these common mythic tropes constitute the symbolic field of "the Lost Generation" and add up to a common historical "mood" evoked through constant incantation and repetition of tropes. This "mood" is the chief historical "meaning" conveyed by all these stories - in the sense that Spence speaks of "meaning" intertwined with "interpretation"- whether they emphasize youth (like Hemingway), cooptation (like Cowley), or middle-aged generativity (like Fitzgerald). In all the stories, the mood is the message; and the message is true, whether or not "the facts" are verifiable.18

18 It should be noted that all three authors provide their readers with explicit warnings that their texts should not be taken at face value. The most blatant of these is

Hemingway's posthumously edited remark, in the Preface to the published edition of A Moveable Feast, that "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction" (MF, p. ix). The author is even blunter in most of the surviving manuscript drafts of this passage, simply writing " This book is fiction " and leaving it at that. Less overt but no less significant are Fitzgerald's admission that "it all seems rosy and romantic" in his account of the period (CU, p. 22), as well as Cowley's climactic invocation in the revised text of Exile9 s Return of "the children in Grimm's fairy tales" (ER, p. 288) as analogues to his protagonists.

On "narrative truth" vs. "historical truth," see in particular Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 292 and passim.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 49

In many ways, the transit of the phrase " the Lost Generation, " like that of the mythic symbol and mythic narrative it embodies, reflects this gradual shift in mood. So does the possibly erroneous etymology that Fitzgerald traces early in "Echoes of the Jazz Age":

The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines in a war (CU, p. 16).

As parochial as this passage might seem as a factual description of 1920s popular culture (especially popular music),19 it is a shrewd encapsulation of the mythic narrative of the Lost Generation: from sex to dancing to music and on; from youthful exuberance to group activity to public performance and stylization. Writing in the spring and summer of 193 1, this was how both Fitzgerald and Cowley saw their mythic journeys of the previous decade -as a jerky "progress toward respectability." Looking back on the same period from the vantage point of the late 1950s, even willful Ernest Hemingway probably would not have disagreed.

II

We could carry our mythic reading of these three texts farther still, but the

general outlines of such a reading have been sufficiently established. In reading Exile's Return, A Moveable Feast, and the Fitzgerald essays in The Crack-Up as literary and mythic rather than documentary texts, we have discovered a number of things about their authors' perception of how and why America changed during the 1920s ; as well as about their perceptions of their own relation, both to that perceived change and to contemporary Americans of similar ages, backgrounds, and interests. Most important, we have discovered that all three authors shared a common notion of the

narrative transit of the 1920s, the tripartite structure that I have outlined above.

Now all this is very interesting, but is it historically valuable? After all, we can dismiss objections as to literariness by scrutinizing a text's rhetoric rather than its disputable and possibly even irrecoverable referent; we can read a narrative's linear shape as a form of hypothesis and not as fact; we can be fully alert to textual traces of self- justifying consciousness and the relation of narrated past to narrating present (two topics I have not had

19 See, for example, LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York : William Morrow &c Co., 1963), Chs. 6-10; and Günther Schuller, Early Ja^: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press,. 1968), passim.

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5 o Marc Dolati

sufficient time to treat in their necessary depth here) - but, after all that, we are still left with the most nagging objection of all: putative representativeness. Why these three lives? Even if we had the time to perform the same sort of analysis for the three dozen or so other formal autobiographies of "The Lost Generation," what would that tell us in the end? Simply what three dozen people who had more education, time, and money than they knew what to do with thought was going on in the 1920s ? Where's the historical value in that?

We may find a suggestion of an answer to this question in the extratextual resonances of several topics raised and dropped earlier in our analysis. For example, we theorized that what the myth of the Lost Generation most clearly stood for was a sharply demarcated narrative transit of mood: from joy to dissipation; from "generation" to "lost." It is in this purely affective sense - in the idea that the decade began with exhilaration and ended in deflation - that our three autobiographical texts may be able to lay their most convincing claims to representativeness.

According to many contemporary observers, technological innovation and the expansion of the consumer-oriented aspects of the economy combined to make the earlier part of the 1920s particularly memorable for most Americans. In such influential works as Middletown (1929) and Only Yesterday (193 1), authors like Robert and Helen Lynd and Frederick Lewis Allen observed that the pace of life in these years strongly reflected the sort of "nervous energy" that Fitzgerald implicitly ascribed to the era in his fiction and would subsequently describe explicitly in the essays collected in The Crack-Up, In Middle town, the Lynds characterized the 1920s in passing as "[a] period of rapidly changing standards of living, irregular employment ... [and] increasing isolation and mobility of the individual family...." Inevitably, Allen subscribed to a similar but less restrained version of this view of the early 1920s as a nexus of volatile "modernizing" forces. The legendary first chapter of Only Yester- day - published, like " Echoes of the Jazz Age " and the first fragments of Cowley's autobiographical narrative, in the fall of 1 931 -details a veritable explosion of brand-new consumer goods and faddish concerns (e.g., short skirts, bobbed hair, rouge, beauty parlors, vitamins, tabloids, radio, sound movies, and crossword puzzles), all of which owe their first significant period of popularity to the years between 19 19 and 1929.20

We are, of course, familiar with these aspects of the decade. They are the ones featured by Cowley and, more notably, Fitzgerald, in those

20 Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1929), 125 ; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper's, 193 1), Ch. 1.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 5 1

"crowded" middle sections of their narrative lines. Symbolically, then, the Lynds' "rapid changes" and Allen's " faddishness " supply us with the missing narrative link between Broom and Harry Crosby in Exile's Return, and between New York City and the Cap d'Antibes in "Echoes of the Jazz Age. " The implications of the covert plotline of A Moveable Feast are even more significant in this regard: by the same token, this covert plotline would seem to suggest that the commercialization and commodification of literary modernism (via the café set and the state apparatus of publishing) is the true implicit cause of Ernest's seemingly unseen transformation. Narrative logic dictates that this blurring of aesthetic and commercial cultures implicitly transforms Ernest the sincere young man into Ernest the two-timing weasel.

One could object that contemporaneous sociological and journalistic accounts like those offered in Middletown and Only Yesterday are no more immune to charges of privilege and exclusivity than are the auto- biographical narratives of Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald. Indeed, a highly convincing case might be made for the position that the Lynds and Allen, as well as such other postwar journalists and intellectuals as Charles and Mary Beard, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Charles Merz, played as large a role in "creating" the mythic 1920s as did the three authors featured here. Intellectual historian John Thomas has recently taken this argument even farther, holding that the "apocalypse" of the 1929 Crash had been heralded throughout by preceding decade by intellectuals like Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks. To a great extent, the post-Crash myth of the 1920s was thus "built into" the historical experience of the 1920s through precisely the sort of prior narrative projection and expectation that David Carr has theorized inheres to all historical events. If this is true, though, then the myth sketched above may be only a myth of the intelligentsia, not of the American people

at large.21 However, we need not rely solely on contemporaneous accounts for

validation. The attention of such subsequent historians of the period as William E. Leuchtenberg, Roland Marchand, George Marsden, Lary May, George Mowry, Robert Sklar, and Warren Susman has been equally

21 Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilisation (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 2 vols; Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1929); Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929); and Charles Merz, The Dry Decade (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 193 1).

For Thomas' argument, see "The Uses of Catastrophism : Lewis Mumford, Vernon L. Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, and the End of American Regionalism, " American Quarterly, 42 (1990), 223-51.

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5 2 Marc Dolan

drawn to precisely these sorts of "mass-cultural" developments. For such historians, those "middle years," in which "nothing happened" to Ernest, Malcolm, and Scott, often loom as the most important years of the decade, containing as they do such crucial events as the passage of the immigration restriction act and a notable surge of religious funda- mentalism that came to its well-publicized climax in the Scopes trial. If we widen the scope by just one year at either end, we encounter the emergence of Babe Ruth at the beginning of the decade and the production of the last Model T at the end. If we add the Lindbergh flight and the popular novels, films, and leisure crazes that Fitzgerald mentions, we are talking about perhaps the first decade in American history in which groups and not individuals dominated public discourse.22

Everywhere you turned in the mid-i92os, you encountered another group: movie audiences, target audiences for advertising, immigrants, motorists, sports fanatics, and religious zealots. In earlier ages one could speak of particular groups that focused the public's attention (farmers, speculators, workers, abolitionists, etc.) but in the 1920s it sometimes seemed that there had never before been so many distinct, overlapping groups, never so many all at once. One could argue that the 1920s was less an age of group identity than of hero worship - after all, it was this decade that essentially created the parallel phenomena of the modern movie star and the modern sports hero - but as both May and Susman show in their parallel analyses of these phenomena, these were less cults of exemplary, ideal heroism (in which the celebrity was held up as a distant object of love and adoration) than cults of personality and identification (in which the celebrity's public identity was seen as an extension of the fan's sense of self). In both cases, as in most mass cultural phenomena and epiphenomena of the 1920s, it was the cult that drove its object, and not the other way around.23

22 On these points, see: Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), Chs. 4-9; John Higham, Strangers in the hand, 2nd edn. (1955; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1963), Chs. 10 & 11; William E. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Ch. XI; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), passim; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), passim; Lary May, Screening Out the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Chs. 6-8; George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965), Ch. 1; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York: Random House, 1975), Part II; and Warren Susman, Culture As History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), passim.

23 For these specific issues, see Susman, "Culture Heroes: Ford, Barton, Ruth," in Culture, 122-49; an<* May, Ch. 5.

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Mythic Autobiography and " The host Generation" 5 3

The ultimate cultural significance of the myth of the Lost Generation may lie in this phenomenon of pervasive attention to group activity that is so characteristic of the factual 1920s. In their journey from joy to dissipation, from the new realization of uniqueness ("generation") to the later realization of diminished commonality ("lost"), the Lost Generation turned its attention to the culture at large, just as the attention of American popular culture turned away from this "youngest generation" after the first years of the decade. In noting other people's fads and quirks in those impersonal middle sections of their narratives, Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald (as well as Ernest, Malcolm, and Scott) all come to realize by implication their own status as "types," and thus discard the bad, immature part of their youthful pride and retain the good part, the mature sense of mollified identity. In this way, Ernest moves from the uncertain journalist of "Miss Stein Instructs" to the self-important author of "Birth of a New School" to the humbled, "tamed" novelist of "There Is Never Any End to Paris." So too does Malcolm's generational "we" move from deracinated young men to individualistic purveyors of significant gestures to the resigned Americans that wake up ready for work on "New Year's Day." Both protagonists are, in their turn, following the historical pattern posed by F. Scott Fitzgerald - from success to celebrity to the comeuppance of crack-up.

In other words, the signified journey of all these narratives is from the false perception of cultural homogeneity through an illusive sense of cultural uniqueness to a renewed commitment to cultural pluralism. This is the journey that so many cohorts of Americans made in the crowded years between the two World Wars, the same transformation that Susman alludes to when he speaks of a shift from an overwhelming interest in "civilization" in the 1920s to an almost mystical belief in "community" in the 1930s. It is also the transition, which Walter Beim Michaels has recently noted in this period, away from the polarities of political identity and biological identity toward the radical ambiguity of cultural identity, a "model" that, as Michaels notes, "has turned out to be - for better or worse -the greatest cultural contribution of the classic American literature of the '20s. "24

Throughout the decade following World War I, this pattern was repeated over and over in American cultural life: first, a number of

24 Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American," American Literary History, 2 (1990), 238. For Susman's interpretation of the interwar years, see the essays in Part III of Culture, especially "Culture and Civilization: The Nineteen Twenties," "The Culture of the Thirties," and "Culture and Commitment," pp. 105-21 and 150-210.

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54 Marc Do Ian

individuals discovered they had something in common (an interest in mah johng, a type of product they all liked to buy, or an aesthetic philosophy that seemed tempting at the moment). Then, the group was suddenly "discovered" by the culture at large and analyzed at length (by feature journalists, by advertising agency employees, or by pundits in the literary reviews). Finally, the group seemed to burn itself out, but its residue was added to the larger picture (of game players, consumers, or American writers). This cycle of discovery, analysis, and dissipation played itself out hundreds of times over the course of the decade. The Lost Generation was

just one example of this phenomenon; miniature golf was another.

Ill

Even after augmenting our analysis with more conventionally derived historical information, however, the issues examined in the beginning of this essay still nag. Never wholly dissolved, our five objections persist; suggesting that, no matter how architectonic a picture we may construct of the period, we are still begging the larger historiographical question. Even considering this newly uncovered resonance between wider American cultural developments of the 1920s and the narrower myth of the Lost Generation, we must still ask whether our reconstituted knowledge of these three (textualized) lives contributes anything new and valuable to our knowledge of America in the 1920s. Have we simply discovered three mythically modal characters, whose lives recapitulate a symbolic pattern already discovered elsewhere in the period? Or have we instead reversed this process, seeking out the requisite previously established historical knowledge that validates our initial interest but does so only after the fact?

As I suggested above, there are no easy answers to these sorts of questions. The key issues - subjectivity vs. objectivity, priority of data vs. priority of methodology, narrativity vs. analysis, historical events vs. historical experience - will never be sufficiently established for anyone's purposes, certainly not for ours.

Yet, despite all these doubts, the perception of resonance persists. "The Younger/ Youngest/Lost Generation" did experience that three-part cycle, just like so many of the other publicly identified "groups" of the 1920s. The entire decade may have been, as literary critic Walter Benn Michaels and historian George Marsden have both suggested, an "immigrant experience" for all Americans, even those whose families had

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Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 5 5

arrived on the Mayflower and the Arbella : in the 1 920s, they " arrived, " like

young Malcolm Cowley, in an America they did not recognize. Like Michaels' Native Americans and Marsden's fundamentalists, the Lost Generation enjoyed a highly public moment of simultaneous elevation and dissipation in the 1920s, with both processes firmly anchored in their sense of cultural uniqueness. Culturally constructed as admirable Other, they rose to prominence, only to discover in the end that they were just another mass media fad.

If "historical experience" exists, and if it is possible for subsequent scholars to recover it, then it exists in resonances such as these ; in the sorts

of shared patterns of textually inscribed subjective experience, as well as objectively demonstrable events and demography, that New Historicist literary critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose have dubbed " the poetics of culture. " As Raymond Williams suggested nearly a quarter of a century ago, it is not at all uncommon for "a unique life, in a place and a time, [to speak] from its own uniqueness and yet [to speak] a common experience. " In other words, the elements of this sort of cultural discourse - what we have analyzed here as the metaphors and mythic narratives of historical experience - often transcend the economic and sociological categories used to classify the writers who produced them. Such categories are occasionally more suited to the study of "historical events" than to the parallel study of "historical experience." After all, if it is by no means certain that canonical writers possessed greater access to "representative" historical experience of their own time, then it is similarly unproven that they possessed less access to it. As not only Williams but most New Historicists would contend, it may very well be that these common metaphors and narrative patterns point to larger historical shifts, which transcend such material categories and point to "structural" changes that traverse the superstructures of modern society.26

In the end, there is no such thing as a " representative, " " typical, " or "modal" man or woman in a given historical period. There are only millions of individuals, many of them undocumented, most of them irrecoverable. Given those odds, "historical experience" may prove, in practice, to be as much of a myth as "the Lost Generation." But if it is not a myth, and if we seek to know what a given historical period like the

25 Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture" and Louis A. Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," both in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1-36; Williams, Novel, 192.

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56 Marc Dolan

1920s "felt like while it was happening," then we must recover each of the mythic life-stories of that period, one by one, from low to high, from unfortunately forgotten to seemingly well-known. Once we have gathered these myths, we must measure them against each other, in the hopes of discovering palpable, resonant, historically significant patterns.

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