American Experiment (207 page)

A few of the critics, apprehensive about the disjunction between art and life, were suspicious of photography’s “machine-made” objects; in this they reflected, perhaps not always knowingly, John Ruskin and William Morris, who detested machines and machinery because they served commercial greed and threatened the handicrafts of the “people.”

But Stieglitz refused to equate machines with artistic or human degradation. Stieglitz, Lewis Mumford wrote, subordinated the machine to his human direction through understanding its potentialities and capacities. “When used thus, as part of man’s organic equipment rather than as a substitute for a deficient organ, the machine becomes as integral as the original eyes or legs. Assimilating the machine in this fashion, Stieglitz was armed to reconquer the lost human provinces that had been forfeited by the one-sided triumph of the machine.” Living in New York City and summering at Lake George in the Adirondacks, Stieglitz was closely attuned to both the industrial and the natural environments around him, and this, together with his understanding of the European artistic heritage, enabled him to avoid the ephemeral and disjunctive tendencies that afflicted so many of his fellow artists.

Though he worked in a quite different medium, Frank Lloyd Wright was no less aware than Stieglitz of the need to put mechanical and industrial power to the service of human aspirations. The young architect had long
objected to the industrial uglification of America. “The buildings standing around there on the Chicago prairies were all tall and all tight,” he complained. Chimneys were lean and taller still—“sooty fingers threatening the sky.” Dormers were “cunning little buildings complete in themselves,” stuck onto the main roofslopes “to let the help poke their heads out of the attic for air.” Everything was overdecorated—walls “be-corniced or fancy-bracketed,” roofs “ridged and tipped, swanked and gabled,” the exterior “mixed to puzzle-pieces with cornerboards, panel-boards, window-frames, cornerblocks, plinth-blocks, rosettes, fantails, and jiggerwork in general.” If the home was to be a machine for living, Wright contended, this machine could and should help people live according to their “organic life” as well as in a democratic fashion. In a democracy especially, man must master the machine, not the reverse—and man
could
do so. The machine, Wright said, is “the tool which frees human labor, lengthens and broadens the life of the simplest man,” and in doing so becomes the basis of the “Democracy upon which we insist.”

Fascinated by the big city—by its railroad yards, elevated trains, ferries, tenements, chimneys, skyscrapers—painters like John Sloan and George Bellows used more than their canvases to register their views. Often they turned to the radical or avant-garde magazines that were sprouting across urban America. In 1912 Sloan became art editor of
The Masses,
a struggling left-wing journal. Drawing with pen, charcoal, and crayon on thin paper laid over a pebbly surface, Sloan revolutionized the style and format of magazine illustration. He insisted that he was serving on the journal as an artist, not as a polemicist. Art Young, the leading
Masses
cartoonist, had no such inhibitions, even though he had been a fellow art student with Henri in Paris. Borrowing from the work of Hogarth and Daumier, he savagely caricatured plutocrats, imperialists, censors, and police as agents of a vicious and bloated capitalism.

The Masses
had begun in 1911 as such a dull and doctrinaire sheet that it almost folded within a year. Then, in August 1912, Art Young read to the editorial board an article by an unknown young writer named Max Eastman. Impressed—and desperate—the group authorized a note to Eastman: “You are elected editor of the Masses, no pay.” The new editor, who freely admitted he knew nothing about art, brought to the journal a beguiling mixture of “scientific socialism,” applied logic, pragmatic experimentation, and Christian doctrines inherited from his parents, both of whom were Congregational ministers in upstate New York. But Eastman
was no dogmatist. The pages of
The Masses
were soon open to a variety of radical philosophies and to a new and biting satirical tone.

The journal’s editorial board boiled with squabbles, but Eastman was good-natured about it all. “We live on scraps,” he said. “Twenty fellows can’t get together to paste up a magazine without scrapping about it.” Nevertheless, several illustrators quit the staff in 1916 after Art Young accused Sloan and other artists of wanting to “run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street—regardless of idea—and without title.”
The Masses
never recovered from this secession.

In that same year of 1916, it happened that a wealthy New York socialite, Mrs. A. K. Rankine, and a young utopian socialist, James Oppenheim, were being treated by the same Jungian analyst. As a means of therapy, Rankine was urged to sponsor a magazine project of Oppenheim’s. With her funding, Oppenheim began to realize his dream
of “the
magazine which should evoke and mobilize all our native talent, both creative and critical....” For the new journal,
The Seven Arts,
Oppenheim gathered around him other writers in their twenties and thirties: Waldo Frank, whose association in Paris with the circle around
La Nouvelle Revue Française
had fired an interest in cultural nationalism; Van Wyck Brooks, who, under the influence of Santayana and other Harvard scholars, had written
The Wine of the Puritans,
a seminal critique of American fiction and poetry as sentimental, escapist, and imitative of English literature; and Randolph Bourne, who had fled to Greenwich Village via Columbia from his intellectually stifling middle-class home in New Jersey.

The most arresting of this quartet was Bourne. “I shall never forget,” Oppenheim wrote, “how I had first to overcome my repugnance when I saw that child’s body, the humped back, the longish, almost medieval face, with a sewed-up mouth, and an ear gone awry. But he wore a cape, carried himself with an air, and then you listened to marvelous speech, often brilliant, holding you spellbound, and looked into blue eyes as young as a Spring dawn.” Bourne was even more arresting intellectually. Through those blue eyes he perceived Americans’ “belittling” attitudes toward women, the need for equal economic chances for women and their right to divorce and birth control, the antiquated curriculum of American education, the need to develop an American “transnationality” that respected immigrants’ old cultures instead of the “melting-pot” concept that was leaving Americans in “detached fragments.”

A cosmopolitan and iconoclastic magazine of quite different cut was
The Smart Set,
founded in 1900. Far more amusing than
The Masses,
more irreverent than
The Seven Arts,
the monthly had a flair for presenting serious fiction by such authors as O. Henry, Zona Gale, Edith Wharton, and
Damon Runyon. But even with H. L. Mencken as literary critic and George Jean Nathan as drama critic,
The Smart Set
almost foundered in 1910, only to be rescued by fresh editorial talent daring enough to gather the work of D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, August Strindberg, and William Butler Yeats. After Mencken and Nathan took over the top editorship at
The Smart Set
in 1914, the monthly realized Mencken’s aspirations for a magazine that was “lively without being nasty.... A magazine for civilized adults in their lighter moods. A sort of frivolous sister to the
Atlantic.”

It was Mencken who gave
The Smart Set
its distinctive style. Married to his beloved native Baltimore and to the Baltimore
Sun,
he kept his distance from the Greenwich Village dilettantes and bohemians, as he viewed them, by mailing material to Nathan and making only a tri-weekly trip to Manhattan, where he stayed at the Hotel Algonquin. But Mencken was as unorthodox as any Villager, working during long lunches at Luchow’s or at the Beaux Arts, offering a “Poet’s Free Lunch” of pretzels and smoked herring to visitors in his office, where his desk sported two large brass spittoons and the walls shrieked with posters of Follies girls. To Village radicals, however, he appeared a political and social Tory, and even though Mencken looked for fresh and unorthodox talent, he was cool toward some of the new poets, especially the Imagists and the experimenters in free verse.

The new poets found a warmer welcome at such New York journals as
Trend
and
Rogue,
but these havens were short-lived.
Others,
a more enduring monthly, provided young poets with a forum for the widest experimentation, occasionally devoting an entire issue to a movement or a theme. It was his connection with the
Others
crowd that brought Wallace Stevens to prominence in the New York literary world.
Others
published eighteen of his poems, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

But it was another journal, eight hundred miles to the west, that acted as midwife to the new era in poetry. In August 1912, after a season of fund-raising and hunts across library shelves for prospective poets, Harriet Monroe sent from Chicago a manifesto circular announcing
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
It would offer poets the chance, she wrote, “to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine,” and its readers would be those interested in poetry as “the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty.” Among the recipients of the circular was Ezra Pound, Idaho-born, living then in London. Monroe particularly wanted Pound’s aid because of his place at the center of “the keenest young literary group in England,” despite both his hostility toward most things American and doubts whether he would reply to the urgings
of a Chicago spinster-poetess. To her surprise he did respond with a heartening letter enclosing poems for the first issue, pledges of further help, and the wish that
Poetry
would speed the advent of an American renaissance that would “make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot!”
Poetry
was launched.

With Pound, a tireless promoter of others as well as of himself, installed as “foreign correspondent,” early numbers of
Poetry
included verses from across the Atlantic by the great Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Padraic Colum, and Richard Aldington. Pound extracted contributions from his fellow expatriates, including his Imagist protégée “H.D.” (Hilda Doolittle), and Robert Frost, who was establishing himself in England. The
Poetry
of June 1915 featured T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” From Boston came the verses of Brahmin Imagist Amy Lowell, from New Jersey those of William Carlos Williams. Closer to home,
Poetry
published two of the Chicago Movement’s seminal poems, Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” Pound himself was well represented, notably by his stunning “In a Station of the Metro.” In the March 1913 number, Pound set out the principles of Imagism: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” His “Image” he defined as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

Many of
Poetry
’s offerings were mediocre, some bad, a few next to unreadable. But at a time when poetry was in an unstable state of transition, Monroe’s publication was supreme among literary journals. It maintained an unswerving seriousness of purpose; it was willing to take chances with untested poets and embryonic movements; above all, it resolutely “internationalized” American poetry, placing the work of domestic Americans in a context with the work of contemporary English and Irish poets and of American poets abroad, thus offering models and challenges to young poets groping for a voice.

In 1907 the editor of the
Delineator,
a woman’s magazine, commissioned Mencken to ghostwrite a series of articles on the care and feeding of babies. The exchanges between the two men, both of whom were childless and fully intended to remain so, approached high comedy as the editor, Theodore Dreiser, instructed the cigar-chewing Baltimorean that babies informed their mothers of their various needs through subtly differing cries, and Mencken manfully responded with a piece on babies’ diverse
cries of habit, pain, hunger, and temper. When, a year later, Mencken visited Dreiser in New York, the latter’s first impression was of a “spoiled and petted and possibly over-financed brewer’s or wholesale grower’s son who was out on a lark.”

Doubtless Dreiser reflected on the difference between his own earlier life and that of the son of a rich Baltimore brewer. While Mencken’s background had made him provokingly cocky, Dreiser’s world could hardly have delivered more blows to his self-esteem. He was the son of German immigrants growing up in the nativist, provincial city of Terre Haute, Indiana. His parents were profoundly otherworldly, but in different ways—his father an obsessively puritanical Catholic, his mother a pagan who believed in fairies and sorcery. Misfortune racked the family. The father, once a self-confident businessman, had lost his woolen mill in a fire and was badly hurt by a falling beam while rebuilding it, after which he settled into despair and joblessness. Of thirteen children the three oldest boys died. His mother kept the conflict-ridden and poverty-stricken family together, but finally she took Theodore, then aged seven, and two of the other small children on what turned out to be a long search for a better life elsewhere. At sixteen Theodore headed off on his own for Chicago.

Catapulted into the seething Chicago cauldron of the mid-1880s, Theodore searched desperately for a job that might give him a modicum of self-esteem. He was sacked again and again for incompetence and inattention. As both his status and his sex needs rose to fever heat, as he saw men fighting for jobs in the raw industrial and commercial worlds of Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other cities, he lied, cheated, and stole in vain attempts to advance himself. It was only with the help of others—a prosperous brother who gave him money and jobs, a high school teacher who financed a year for him at Indiana University, the odd editor who was impressed by him, the large number of women, including his wife, who loved and cared for him—and by dint of his own prodigious production of hack writing—that Dreiser survived.