The Columbia History of the American Novel

The Early Twentieth Century

Introduction

The chapters in this section remind us that culture and cultural production in the United States and around the world in the first half of the twentieth century were shaped by momentous political, technological, economic, and social developments. Large numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the world; the unimaginable devastation of two world wars and the Korean War; the economic catastrophe known as the Great Depression; the migration of large numbers of African Americans from the deep South to population centers in the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western states; the enactment of increasingly repressive laws and practices to monitor, control, and segregate members of disenfranchised racial and ethnic groups; changing constructions of gender and sexuality; the rise of new technologies and industries, among them motion pictures and television; the reforms associated with the New Deal; the scourge of McCarthyism — these developments, as well as others, altered inexorably the meanings that attach to the idea of 'the American.'

It is therefore not surprising that fiction produced in such an apparently turbulent period would respond in a variety of ways to these changes. Indeed, even a quick glance at the titles of the chapters in this section indicates that the authors all consider American novels in relation to circumstances under which they are produced, circulated, and read. Readers of this section will, no doubt, be struck by the various challenges that writers of the period offer to the meaning of -309- a national identity and to the practice and work of fiction in the wake of the globalization of the United States economy, the internationalization of American culture, and the evolution of new media.

In this period, writers from groups historically underrepresented in the canon of American letters explored ways of representing the specific cultural practices of their communities that were accessible to a wider readership. Drawn, perhaps inevitably, to received literary forms such as realism, naturalism, regionalism, the romance, the Western, the detective novel, and so on, they challenge the boundaries of these genres by writing from fresh perspectives. In addition, the emergence of expatriate movements helped to situate American writing in an international scene and heightened the relationship between American narrative experimentation and innovations in other art forms.

Readers of this section should notice as well the prescience of American novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. In their search for narrative strategies that speak to the fabric of American experience; in their explorations of the space between fiction and history; in their quest for a language to address the power of visual media upon life in the United States; and in their simultaneous gestures toward universality and particularity, they anticipate movements and developments we have come to associate with postmodern and contemporary culture.

Valerie Smith

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Modernist Eruptions

An earthquake, the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, becomes in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) the massive disruption that loosened Alice B. Toklas from her American moorings and launched her on her journey to Europe and into modern literary history. Like many of Stein's narratives, the anecdote makes only tenuous sense: apparently the earthquake forced Stein's brother and his wife to return abruptly from Europe, and Alice B. Toklas, her placid life already shaken by earthquake and fire, became even more unsettled when she saw what the Steins brought with them. 'Mrs. Stein brought with her three little Matisse paintings, the first modern things to cross the Atlantic.' Thus Stein's narration slyly links the natural earthquake in America to the first tiny rumblings of the European modern art movement that would become a cultural cataclysm in the early twentieth century. This traffic of modern art between Europe and America turned sensational in 1913, when over 1500 international works of highly experimental art were exhibited at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, and a shocked American audience found Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase insane and depraved.

American artists, generally committed to a national literature as free as possible of British influence, responded in a variety of ways to the lure of modern European culture. Some, like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, stayed home and continued to work 'in the American grain,' to borrow William Carlos Williams's phrase. Some were drawn to Chicago, which became a hub of American literary activity -311- and the home of such important modernist publications as Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe, and the early Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. As Hugh Kenner argued in A Homemade World (1974), the Continental influence eventually found its way back to America, where it produced a 'homemade' variety of modernism. Meanwhile, other young artists, equipped with that spirit of experimentation they considered quintessentially American, went off to Europe. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle ('H. D.') first stopped in London, and the rather conservative Eliot, his temperament responding to the tradition, order, and Anglicanism of England, stayed on. Some, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, were swept across the Atlantic with the tides of war or its aftermath, and were caught up in the excited cultural tumult they encountered there. France, especially, offered Americans a place where they suffered none of the anxieties that threatened their postcolonial psyches in England, and Paris became a Mecca for young American 'expatriates,' who revolved around a series of literary salons and centers usually dominated by brilliant and enterprising American women — Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Natalie Barney's pavillon with its leafy garden and Doric temple in the rue Jacob.

Gertrude Stein was the first of the American expatriates to cross the Atlantic and settle in Europe — arriving in Paris in 1903, after having acquired a fine education at Radcliffe that included instruction from the psychologist William James, brother of the novelist. Within a year of her arrival she was studying a painting by Cezanne of his wife, in order to appropriate his techniques for her own experimental verbal portraits, which she eventually published at her own expense in 1909 as Three Lives. In these three portraits of American women, two German-American servants and a young African American woman, Stein dismantled the mythology of the American dream by using her newly discovered Continental techniques to forge a writing capable of illuminating its hypocrisies and ironies. At the same time, her technique, like postimpressionist painting, drew attention to its own procedures. Inspired by Gustave Flaubert, whose story 'Un Coeur Simple' she had translated to improve her French, Stein told the stories of these exploited women in a severely unadorned and stripped prose that would make Flaubert's style the -312- enduring standard of the language of modernist fiction. Ezra Pound would, ten years later, promote James Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on precisely this ground: the verbal economy that Joyce called 'a scrupulous meanness' reflected the clean, clear, disciplined, impersonal expression inaugurated by Flaubert's quest for le mot juste as an antidote to Romanticism both in expressive language and in sentiment.

But in Three Lives Stein was not only looking backward to the French novel tradition, she was also looking toward 'the new' with a canny combination of insights from the American pragmatism that she had learned in college, applied to understanding the European postimpressionism that was confounding art lovers with the exorbitant demands it made on them for an active, fragmented, and creative perception. William James's theories taught Stein to think of cognition as an active, selective, purposive process aimed not at finding transcendent truths but at creative exercise of its own powers. She toyed with automatic