In retrospect, the year 1930 seems a watershed, separating the brimming extravagance of the 20’s from the grim realism of the 30’s. Malcolm Cowley here attempts to capture the mood of that year and to describe how the boisterous echoes of a dying decade merged into the cacophony of the new-born era—an era of political ferment whose effects are still written large on present-day American society and culture.
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In the literary world as in the country at large, 1930 was the strangest year of the century. It was the beginning of an age and the end of an age and the country was living as if by two calendars: one was turned to March and the other to December. The jazz age was ending but it wasn’t tapering off; having survived the Wall Street crash it was rising to new heights of self-destructive hilarity. When we think of a song, a story, or an escapade that “expressed the spirit of the 1920’s,” the chances are that it was written or happened in the year 1930. Meanwhile the new world of the depression, whose first citizens were displaced farmers and factory workers, was creeping in from the industrial suburbs and was taking over the business section. The year went forward as if on two levels, an upper level of crazy ostentation and a lower level of hunger and protest. At the end of the year the levels met, like two slopes in a mine.
Strange as it was in the end, the year began like any other. During the spring Wall Street recovered from its autumn panic and many stocks climbed above their 1928 levels, although they slumped again in May and June. Stock dividends were higher than ever before. Unemployment was increasing rapidly, but that was still a matter of argument and statistics, not of direct experience for the middle classes; even if they lost their jobs they were confident of finding others, as always in the past. The big newspaper story was prohibition and the lawlessness growing out of it. After that came other issues like the tariff debate that lasted all spring, the naval conference in London during the summer, the visit of Ramsay MacDonald to Mr. Hoover’s Rapidan camp, and the great drought in the upper South, extending from Maryland into Oklahoma. Newspapers were trying to stop the business decline by banishing it to their inside pages, but even in private conversations it was not yet the principal topic. “After a 3,500-mile journey through the Middle West,” Bruce Bliven reported in the New Republic, “I feel able to report with some confidence for the benefit of other parts of this gr-r-reat country what that important section is thinking about. It is thinking about Midget, alias Tom Thumb, alias Peewee, alias Tiny, golf.”
While midget golf courses flourished in every vacant lot and in many showrooms vacated by jewelry stores and stock-selling outfits, life for the writers of the country went on as usual. In May and June there was the same exodus from the big cities toward all the countrysides where writers and painters gathered—Woodstock, the Cape, the Vineyard, Bucks County, and upper Connecticut. All summer there were the same shipboard parties for rich friends making another trip to Europe; in fact there would be more American tourists in France that year than at any time during the roaring 20’s. In the fall there were the same reunions in New York and the same round of drinking and dancing parties and publishers’ teas. Liquor was cheaper than at any time since 1919: in the “cordial shops” to be found all over Manhattan four bottles of gin with Gordon labels sold for five dollars, and grain alcohol, 190 proof, was six or eight dollars a gallon. The punch was stronger at publishers’ teas, but otherwise they were a little less sumptuous and they were also less frequent; books weren’t selling well and advances were harder to get. Nothing else seemed to have changed.
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Yet even in the literary world, which was separate from the business world but not so completely divorced from it as in later years, there were signs that an age was ending. The 1920’s had been an era of pretty good feeling among writers. Now suddenly they began to quarrel, not merely about personal questions but about the meaning of literature and its relation to life. A battle that lasted all year was about the New Humanism expounded by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. It was different from the guerrilla warfare and banditry of the 1920’s, being on a larger scale, with writers of many groups and two or three literary generations involved on both sides. The issues were confused, as might have been expected, but it was clear that they involved not only personal and aesthetic but also moral questions, such as the fashion in which writers should live and their relationship to society. There were overtones of politics, rising from the fact that most of the Humanists were conservative while all the radicals were anti-Humanist. There was the suggestion that the 1920’s were a definite period in literature and life and that their principal efforts might have been mistaken. Finally there was an unfamiliar note of acerbity in the discussion. Allen Tate had written an essay against Humanism for the Hound and Horn. In the January 1930 issue of the Bookman one of the Humanists answered him, partly with logic and partly with invective. “Not hastily or willingly,” he accused Tate of “deliberate misrepresentation,” of “puerile inconsequence,” of impudence that “could no further go”; and he ended unsmilingly by calling him “a mere talking mole! . . . A fellow so utterly nothing as he knows not what he would be.” Such language had seldom been used in the late 1920’s, but within two or three years it would seem restrained.
There were other signs of change in the literary world, although it would be hard to suggest them by quotations or reduce them to statistics. As I look back on the year 1930 it seems to me that there were never so many shifts in the personal relations of people one knew well or faintly or by reputation. Marriages that had endured all through the 1920’s, though both partners had been indifferent to each other and in some cases notoriously unfaithful, now ended in sudden quarrels and separations. Old love affairs ended that had seemed as respectable as marriages. Friendships were broken off. People could no longer endure the little hypocrisies that had kept their relations stable; they had to set everything straight, like men preparing for death.
There seemed to be more drinking than before, in literary and business circles; at least it was noisier and more public. It was a different sort of drinking, with more desperation in the mood behind it. People no longer drank to have a good time or as an excuse for doing silly and amusing things that they could talk about afterward; they drank from habit, or to get away from boredom, or because they had a physiological need for alcohol. There was as much horseplay and laughter as before, but it was strained and at last hysterical; one began to notice shaking hands and white faces. The epidemic of nervous breakdowns was not confined to one’s friends: it seems to me now that every time I study the life of a recent literary figure—Anderson, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, it doesn’t matter who—I learn that the figure or his wife or both` of them had breakdowns in 1930. If they recovered they wanted to lead completely new lives. Psychoanalysts were busy when every other profession except that of social service was losing its clients. One friend who was being analyzed told me that the doctor’s office was crowded with people he knew. “Why,” he said, “it was like a publisher’s tea.”
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To understand what was happening in the literary world and elsewhere one has to go back to the last years of the Coolidge era. By 1927 the big boom was under way and a great many prosperous Americans had started a frantic search for enjoyment that would afterwards be pictured as a sort of national orgy. It wasn’t that at all, having been confined to groups and classes in the nation. Working-class families simply hadn’t money enough to be affected by it, except insofar as they went into debt for the same conveniences that all their neighbors were buying, or were scandalized by the stories that their children brought home from high school. Most of the business-class families lived very much as before, while yielding in minor ways to the new fashions: for example many of them now played golf instead of going to church on Sunday morning and more of them had begun serving cocktails to their dinner guests. But every city down to the smallest had its “fast set” that was gossiped about and a little envied and finally imitated by most of the other sets. When Robert and Helen Lynd made their second survey of Middletown, in the 1930’s, a local businessman told them what had happened in that city of fifty thousand average people:
“Drinking increased here markedly in ‘27 and ’28,” he said. “. . . In the winter of ‘29-’30 and ‘30-’31 things were roaring here. There was much drunkenness—people holding those bathtub gin parties. There was a great increase in women’s drinking and drunkenness. And there was a lot of sleeping around by married people and a number of divorces resulted.” The same report could have been made from other cities all over the country. It was actually made in scores of the novels written during the early 1930’s and it helps to explain the mood of revulsion and repentance that many of them express. The novels make one feel that the depression, besides being economic, was a sort of liturgical response to what had gone before. It was part of a sacramental drama that answered the human need for punishment after pleasure.
Many of the younger American writers had tried to stand apart from the beginning of the drama. Act I. Scene I. A penthouse in the East 70’s. Well-dressed people are talking confusedly in front of a large window that gives a view of the East River. Enter a butler bearing a tray of cocktails—that wasn’t their scene or their life. In the Coolidge era the country was rich but they were poor, and they were proud of living in tenements or along back roads in farmhouses renting for ten dollars a month. They were glad to eat plain food, dress in khaki or gingham, and drive the oldest Fords that would almost hold together, so long as not spending money helped them to keep their independence. Their excuse for going to Europe was that living was cheaper there. “My work’s the important thing,” they all said a little solemnly. But the boom continued and one by one they were drawn into the general frenzy. Sometimes it was because a novel of theirs had been chosen by a book club, ballyhooed into the bestseller lists and bought by the movies, suddenly giving its author more money than he knew what to do with. Sometimes it was because, in the course of their travels, they met wealthier and idler Americans in Brittany or on the Riviera and imperceptibly adopted their standards. More frequently it was because of rich dilettantes who hoped to find some vigor or vision or purpose among writers and painters that they had missed among moneyed people, and now tried to buy themselves into the world of art by giving big parties. Most often it was the simple contagion of bad examples.
Considering that writers of what was then the younger generation had trained themselves to question all previously accepted standards of conduct, there seemed to be no reason why they should now refuse to have a good time. Soon, by accepting too many well-meant invitations, they found themselves involved in the worst features of the society they had affected to despise. Their rather Puritan attitude toward art itself, and toward the need for working every morning on their new books, kept them somewhat more levelheaded than the others; but it sometimes happened that their work failed them, their books stopped in the middle, and then they were in danger of going to pieces. By the autumn of 1930 that had become a general complaint.
In a little-known short story by Edmund Wilson, “What to Do Till the Doctor Comes,” the mood of the time is expressed in terms of the grotesque and hysterical. The story deals with a group of characters in the semi-literary, hard-drinking set, busy telling funny stories and making love in taxicabs, but unspeakably bored in the midst of their animation and each feeling an utter contempt for himself and all the others. After an evening spent in half a dozen strange apartments the narrator leaves in a taxi with someone else’s wife. “There was a sudden shattering crash, and great glass splinters fell out of the window. We saw a group of men milling around and somebody stopped the cab. It was the taxi strike. They made us get out. Lou gave them a piece of her mind.” And then, the narrator continues:
We were running down and rather glum, so we went into a little downtown bar that had funny blue lights in the windows. Lou told me that Will had a mistress and that he hadn’t lived at home for four years, and that the mistress had been a friend of the children’s nurse, and that she didn’t think he even liked the mistress, and that every time he decided to commit suicide she had to go and quiet him down, and that the children had gotten to loathe him, and that she was getting cross with the children, and that she had never taken a lover because the only man she liked was in Seattle. She wept in the most horrible way.
Those were the sort of confidences that were being made late at night in downtown speakeasies. The recklessness of the 1920’s, which had once seemed youthful and appealing, was dying away into nervous tears and drunken exasperation. There was the atmosphere of a party that had gone on too long, that had started with cocktails and spirited gossip, had continued through a big disorganized dinner in an Italian backyard restaurant, then adjourned to somebody’s apartment, where everything went well enough for a time—but nobody seemed to go home, everybody was getting tired and pasty-faced, and the young woman who used to be so funny after the third drink was sobbing and threatening to throw herself out of the window. The party would have ended anyhow; it couldn’t go on forever; but the depression was like a crash of breaking glass that let in the cold night air.
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By autumn the breadlines in more than one American city had spread from the local skidrow into the district of chromium-fronted shops. The Communists were demanding relief for the unemployed and the police were smashing their demonstrations; everywhere one heard stories of bystanders, perfectly nice people, who were kicked or clubbed because they weren’t wearing hats and hence were mistaken for radicals. The National Apple Sellers’ Association had thought of a new way to get rid of its surplus, by selling it to the unemployed on credit at wholesale prices. When the weather turned colder there were men without overcoats shivering on every street corner, not only selling apples but also, in effect, crying out to passers-by that they were penniless, willing to work, and could find no jobs. The rich merchants had become disturbed; they were organizing charity drives and in a few cases were permitting the homeless to take shelter in their great empty warehouses.
Stocks were falling again, after having risen during the summer. This time their decline was “orderly,” but that made the situation no less dangerous for the corporations that had borrowed money against them and the banks that held them as security. Caldwell and Company, of Nashville, went bankrupt on November 14, 1930. It was one of the largest investment houses in the South, with dozens of affiliates, and its failure caused the closing of banks in half a dozen states. Soon afterward Bankers Trust, of Philadelphia, closed its doors and those of its twenty-one branches. When the Bank of the United States went under, on December 11, it was described by the New York Times as “the largest bank in the United States ever to suspend payments”; it had fifty-nine branches and more than four hundred thousand depositors. People began to say that the whole structure of American finance might crash to the ground. They looked for explanations and found them in books; even F. Scott Fitzgerald was reading Marx. Magazines were suspending publication and business houses were planning to reduce their payrolls by 50 per cent after the first of the year. A new age would begin then, and writers were contemplating the possibility that they might be called upon to play a new part in it.
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Meanwhile the round of parties continued, and those given to celebrate the New Year’s Eve of 1930-31 were the biggest and noisiest of all. There were so many parties that people got invitations to six or eight of them and accepted all the invitations and went instead to parties to which they hadn’t been asked. They traveled about the city in caravans of taxicabs, then suddenly irrupted into a house that was strange to most of them, in a mass attack of rainbow silks and uniform white shirt fronts. Glasses ran out and the hostess brought paper cups that dripped on the rugs. Everybody was laughing and screeching together: the friends and strangers and enemies, the cuckolds and the cuckolders, the wives and mistresses and the wives’ girl friends. Somebody was locked in the bathroom and somebody else was pounding at the bathroom door. In the hall bedroom a girl with an excessively innocent look was explaining to her lover why she had left him. “I love Harry,” she said, “and it doesn’t matter if he loves his wife more than me, I’ll live with him until he sends for her.”—“Maybe I’d better make time with his wife,” the deserted lover said. Back in the living room the punch bowl was empty except for the cigarette stubs that floated in a quart of pinkish liquor. The women had disappeared into a bedroom and were shrieking as they tried to pull their coats from under the girl who had passed out on the bed. “Does anybody know who she is?” a woman asked. Suddenly the crowd was gone, rushing off to another house in a great undisciplined body, while the host and hostess were left behind to take care of the drunken girl—or perhaps they forgot about her and, with the few remaining guests, piled into other taxicabs and joined the caravan. Curious things happened that night, quarrels of principle and declarations of eternal faith that people overheard in the confusion and didn’t remember until long afterward. But I was most impressed by the story of a friend, who told me that after attending four successive parties he found himself in a sub-cellar joint in Harlem. The room was smoky and sweaty; all the lights were tinted red or green and, as the smoke drifted across them, nothing had its own shape or color; the cellar was like somebody’s crazy vision of Hell; it was as if he were caught there and condemned to live in a nightmare. At last he broke the spell and, climbing to the street, found that it was bathed in harsh winter sunlight, ugly and clear and somehow reassuring. An ash-colored woman was hunting for scraps in a garbage can.
“This is the new year,” he told me that he said. “This is my world now.”
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