Wharton, James, O'Henry, Sinclair Lewis
My Jazz-Generation Characters Discuss Literature of Their Time
In my 2022 novel Renaissance Radio, set in 1927 and 1928 with flashbacks to the 1910s, my six main characters — all born in the 1890s — end up on commenting on the literature of their time. Here are the three occasions:
Edith Wharton and Henry James
It’s January of 1917, the start of the Spring semester, the first day of class, and I’m in one of my English literature courses at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I’m wearing my Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps’ uniform. One of my female classmates has bright fawn-like eyes, glowing cheeks, and black hair that flows down around the back of her neck.
After class I strike up a conversation. “Good afternoon. I’m Riis Evans.”
“Carmen Calderon.”
“What are you studying?”
“Nursing. Graduating the three-year program in June. You?”
“Business and English. Bachelor’s degree in June.” We walk out of the classroom and down the hall. Not sure what we have in common. A literary discussion seems like the best bet. I ask her, “Can it get any worse than Edith Wharton?”
“Ugh. Stilted. Out of touch.”
“So elitist.”
“Looking down her nose at anyone who’s not like the upper-class New Yorkers of her childhood.”
“Unbearable. She’s hostile toward the entire present world. She thinks that almost everyone living now is frivolous, fruitless, and flat.”
We head through the front doors of the building and keep walking together outside. I pick a second author, expecting more agreement. “Henry James. Another elitist.”
“Oh,” Carmen replies, “I find so much value in Henry James.”
I’m surprised. I hesitate to argue with her, given that we’ve just met and I’m trying to connect with her, but I choose to proceed. “Hold on. All his characters lack warmth. He looks down at businesspeople, looks down at the world of commerce. And he has no empathy for common folk.”
“Some people do find James’s values challenging.”
“What values? His characters find the virtues too mysterious, too difficult, for them to think through to clarity. The virtues shouldn’t be so hazy in our minds that we’re left passive and never act on them.”
She’s having none of it. “I think you’re missing the whole point, Riis. These are tragic characters. James’s novels are tragedies of personalities rendered passive because they lack awareness. James is guiding us to see this passivity clearly – and to see how inadequate it is – so we’ll work hard to develop deeper awareness, better thinking, and fuller faculties.”
“Oh.” I feel outmatched.
Carmen continues. “James guides us into people’s inner experience, beyond the surface realities that deceive us all, into people’s hidden motives. James is a wise psychologist of our inner states and the wealth of conscious experience. Do you mean to tell me you don’t have any epiphanies when you read Henry James?”
“Maybe a few little ones,” I admit.
“James also shows us the richness of human relationships,” she concludes. “He reveals in touching ways how individuals actually respond to each other in relationship.”
“All right, Carmen, I’ll give him another read.” In my spare time, I do read several James novels again. I don’t come around to Carmen’s point of view.
O’Henry
During our stay in the Grand Tetons in June 1927, while the other five of us play a game of rummy around a picnic table, my sister Gwen sits in the hammock and reads a book of short stories by O. Henry.
“A decade in Chicago and you’re still a fan?” I ask.
“His characters are so alive,” Gwen responds. “The salesmen and policemen and clerks and maids and chorus girls and candy-store girls and glove girls and shop girls! Isolated people, strangers, baffled and bewildered by city life’s glittering, chilling ruthlessness. And he captures the glory of life in the city. When you get up each day you know that anything can happen, right in front of your eyes. There’s something surprising just around the next corner. The banjo vibrates, the dice get rattled and rolled, and inside each restaurant, hotel, and home, a drama unfolds!”
My friend Troy joins her in her enthusiasm. “Ah, Gwendo, I love his stories almost as much as you do. Such mystery and melancholy and beauty. O. Henry held up the underdog, the waitress saving up her wages for her dream home, the youth striving toward success and his own taste of joy.”
“A resounding appreciation by both of you,” I reply.
Sinclair Lewis
During a Spring 1928 broadcast of our national radio show Renaissance Radio, Gwen initiates a new topic. “Let’s talk about my favorite novel of the decade, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.”
“Oh, it’s as if Lewis held a mirror up to us,” Troy’s wife Mary enthuses.
“And like all mirrors,” my brother-in-law and friend Francis Calderon (Carmen’s brother) counters, “he shows only people’s surfaces.”
“If it’s just a surface mirror,” Gwen asks, “why do so many people see their thinking, beliefs, and behavior – and their neighbors’ – reflected back to them in Main Street?”
“A lot of people have a sense of discovery when they read it,” Mary agrees, “and self-recognition.”
“If he goads us into self-reflection, that’s a good thing,” I acknowledge, “but Lewis is maligning millions of Americans unfairly.”
“That’s right,” says Troy. “He makes it seem that all of us are undeveloped but smug, that we’re all hollow and vacant inside, that we’re all stunted and dull and spend our days uttering banalities.”
“And that we’re suspicious of anyone who cultivates his mind and soul,” Carmen adds.
“Lewis,” I assert, “makes Americans look like we’re a bunch of vivacious, gregarious, jocular, snappy, baby-faced babblers – and nothing else.”
Gwen doesn’t back down. “That may be what happens when an entire society is bent toward practical ends. And when so much of our thinking, feeling, aesthetics, and social faculties are left to atrophy. His portrayal of Americans may be unflattering, but it’s true that narrow, petty, insular, self-satisfied, gossiping, and hypocritical people need to be challenged.”
“That all sounds good,” I say. “But the doers of America, the doers of the world, should never let themselves be pestered by whiners!”
“Yes!” exclaims Troy.
“What is it Lewis wants from us?” Mary asks.
“Same things the five of you claim to want,” Gwen asserts. “To develop as individuals. To set meaningful standards for ourselves. To reflect on whether or not our actions are good and wise. To live with integrity. To have purpose and conviction when we make choices in life.”
“Gwendolyn,” says Francis, “when you read Sinclair Lewis and the rest of the Smart Set school of thinkers, do you sense any cynicism? Do you hear any scorn? Do you see any of them sneering?”
“At what?” Gwen asks.
“’At what’ and ’at whom’?” asks Francis. “Whom do you hear them denouncing as yokels, louts, peasants, hicks, and boors? What are they maligning? And whom are they maligning?”
“I think I see where you’re going with this,” says Gwen.
“I’m sure you do,” says Francis, with a bit more bite. “They’re maligning the wisdom of our ancestors and elders. They topple the best of our civilization to the floor. And their slurs are against regular working Americans – the doers, as Riis says – whom they belittle as third-rate ‘cads’ merely because they are ‘provincial’ and ‘unartistic’.”
“Great points!” Troy enthuses.
“Yes!” Carmen and I respond in unison.
“These artsy types think they’re so sophisticated and superior,” Francis continues. “But the ‘moderns’ and the ‘avant-garde’ of our generation are morally and spiritually confused. If we had let them, they would have led our whole generation down into the void with them.”
“Disillusionment is no excuse for nihilism,” I declare.
“Our generation can be fun, even exciting, in our glamor and high spirits and cavorting,” Troy says. “But our artists’ excessive discontent, defeat, and spiritual dismay – how can we have a society based on excellence if our art and culture aren’t based on excellence?”
“Absolutely,” says Carmen.
“Self-indulgent people narrow their horizons,” Francis concludes. “They send the best of themselves, bit by bit, out with the laundry. And in the place where the human soul ought to be, they offer us nothing but debris.”
Wharton, James, O'Henry, Sinclair Lewis
Lewis was a master at describing the small town life of early 20th Century America. Somewhat narrow in their thinking, rigid and conforming however, as today focused on material success and not too intellectual. Great piece again.Thanks for your insights and contributions.
What a great idea and a lovely read, Mike!
P.S. 'Main Street' has been on my bedside table for a while. I am about halfway through (my reading has not been going to plan, as of late..) and truly enjoying it. I need to pick it up again.