Floyd Dell.Qxd

ple growing up in the thirties. With Felix Fay they discovered Concerning Floyd Dell new and exciting writers: Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, and Leo An Essay Tolstoy. Like Felix, they prowled the public libraries searching By Si Wakesberg for these writers’ books, devouring their contents—every Ibsen play, every Shaw preface—and Dell’s novel also plunged them t is 35 years since Floyd Dell, once known as “the Scott into the populous world of the great Russian writers. IFitzgerald of Illinois,” died. Who today remembers this utopian Later on when they discovered Portrait of the Artist as a Young socialist (perhaps the last of the breed), critic, fiction writer, gad- Man, they began to part company with Moon Calf, but in the fly to the existing bureaucracy, and editor of a series of rebel mag- early years, Dell achieved his own personal portrait of the artist azines? His books, though still available, are not among the top as a young man, in a book that was very American not only in 10 with today’s readers. His name can evoke blank stares. But tone and texture but in political thought as well. back in the days of the Great Depression and Floyd Dell was an authentic midwest- later, he stood for artistic integrity and intellec- References: erner. Born in 1887 in Pike County, tual rebellion. His was the voice on college Homecoming: An Autobiography Missouri, he moved with his family as a campuses, in little radical magazines, and by Floyd Dell youngster to Illinois. Even before 1920 he besides, it was whispered, hadn’t there been an Floyd Dell: Life and Times of an had already achieved a modicum of fame as affair with that Greenwich Village poet, Edna American Rebel by Douglas Clayton editor and writer. He had left the small St. Vincent Millay? Floyd Dell by John Edward Hart Illinois towns of his early youth to make his Later, Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus and Moon Calf by Floyd Dell home in Carl Sandburg’s big city of Chicago. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield would succeed in Janet March by Floyd Dell There, at the age of 21, he became editor of capturing the spirit of their generations. But for the Friday Literary Review, a supplement to many of the young people sweating through the Great the Chicago Evening Post. He had previously written articles for Depression, Felix Fay, the protagonist of Dell’s famous Moon the Tri-City Workers Magazine and worked as a reporter on the Calf, was the artist-hero they got to know. Felix was a genera- Davenport Times (Iowa). For five years he lived in Chicago, tion’s young man, encountering the world of work, art, sex, and making friends with writers, journalists, editors; marrying politics. They went with him on his journey of discovery, sighing Margery Currey (only later to divorce her); and securing a firm with relief at every hurdle crossed, trembling with him at every foothold in the literary world. barrier, hoping there was a future for him as well as for them. But the big move came when Floyd Dell settled in New York Dell’s mixture of skepticism, utopian socialism, and rebellious and eventually made his home in Greenwich Village, which was radicalism was just the tonic that the country needed as it strug- becoming the intellectual center of the city. According to his gled against the greatest economic depression in American his- biographers, he adopted a bohemian pose and affected an exag- tory in the 1930s. gerated dress, style, and manner. But despite this personal arti- Moon Calf was actually published in 1920, but to the ness, he continued to define himself as a socialist and allied teenagers of the 1930s it seemed as if the author had written that himself with workers’ movements and feminist causes. book specifically for their generation. It became their “growing In 1914, he joined Max Eastman, then a crusading radical, to up” novel. It was not a “great” or “grand” novel in the tradition establish and edit The Masses, which achieved within the next of Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, or Tolstoy. It was not as “advanced” as few years its share of notoriety and fame. Dell proposed and the work of Joyce or Virginia Woolf. It was not even as experi- helped establish the first “Masses Ball,” reserving Webster Hall mental as the books of John Dos Passos. It had, however, a on 11th Street near 3rd Avenue for an occasion meant to be a generic feeling, a midwestern accent that gave it its American onetime fundraiser. But it was so successful that it became an tone. What attracted young readers was that very youthful artis- annual affair. He later remembered with pleasure those early tic aspiration overlarded with a kind of intellectual radicalism. It Village years and particularly his association with artists like mirrored the artistic and political feelings and the temper of the John Sloan, who illustrated his stories for the magazine. times. The Masses led a checkered life. In 1917 it was suppressed The characters that emerged from Dell’s Moon Calf were under the War Espionage Act, mainly because it sanctioned war Americans living in a rural Illinois environment, of mixed resisters’ efforts. Its staff was indicted and brought to trial. They Pennsylvania Dutch and Protestant Irish background; a father had two brilliant attorneys, Morris Hillquit and Dudley Field who had actually fought for the Union in the Civil War; a small- Malone, and the judge was Augustus N. Hand. The trial resulted town, typically midwestern family. Yet he infused his characters in a hung jury. The Postmaster General instead found a techni- with such vivid sensibilities that readers—whether big-city kids, cality to keep the magazine from being mailed, and it finally immigrants, or outsiders—looked on them as if they had known expired. Quickly, Eastman and Dell launched The Liberator, them all their lives. which kept up publication until 1924. Dell himself was quite astonished by the reaction to his book. Dell helped bring attention to a growing list of American writ- In Homecoming, an autobiography he wrote in 1933, he said: “I ers, including Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Upton was surprised to hear from so many people who wrote me saying, Sinclair, and Frank Norris. He particularly liked authors who had ‘you have told the story of my life.’ ” a social view and traced his own interest in what he called Reading Moon Calf was a literary awakening for young peo- “socialism” to reading William Morris’ News From Nowhere and Reprinted from The Bloomsbury Review®, Vol. 25, #1. © 2005, Si Wakesberg. All rights reserved. May not be copied, reproduced, transmitted in any fashion without the written consent of Si Wakesberg; [email protected]. Frank Norris’ The Octopus. Working on The Masses, Dell was American values he cherished in his boyhood. He finds refuge in thrown into the company of people like John Reed and artists books. He meets “real” people such as a socialist mail carrier who like Art Young, who both had a decidedly radical bent. questions even his faith in books. He becomes a reporter and For a short period Dell was also associated with The New after listening to cynical fellow journalists discovers that much of Masses, but his antagonism to its editor, Mike Gold, the author his profession, too, is a sham. He falls in love and his romantic of Jews Without Money, was too deep for him to stay on. Actually, illusions are shattered. Dell did not care to commit to a specific radical cause. In the end, like Stephen Daedalus, Felix Fay fixes his eyes on Throughout his career, though calling himself a socialist, he the road ahead, the road that will lead him out of his stagnant espoused a kind of “non-doctrinaire radicalism” for which he was small-town existence and plunge him into the midst of throbbing accused by more orthodox left-wingers of practicing an out- city life and the artistic community to which he believes he moded socialism, or worse, of being a traitor to workers’ causes. belongs. When he resigned from The New Masses, he received a stinging The years have rubbed some of the gloss from Moon Calf and public blow from Gold in the pages of the magazine, in which he one finds in it a tone of didacticism that, overlooked in youthful was described as “a Greenwich Village playboy.” Dell lived a long exuberance, now simply seems naive. Its prose sounds tame; life, into the turbulent 1960s. By then his name had vanished instead of soaring, it often remains earthbound. But then how from the literary scene, and he died at the end of that decade in does one put oneself back into the time frame of the 1930s? 1969. But in the 1950s when he no longer had ties with radical These days when 15-year-olds grapple with the technology of magazines, he broke with his old buddy Max Eastman, who had the Internet, straightforward books cannot have the same taken a sharply divergent path to the right over the significant impact they once had in those days before TV, VCRs, and com- issue of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He accused Eastman of “hav- puters. Felix Fay, Stephen Daedalus, and Holden Caulfield were ing fallen for a nasty crook like McCarthy who was pretending all young men of a specific time and place. Would any of them to ‘protect us from communism à la Hitler’ ” and hoped Eastman be comfortable in the electronic age of Robo-Cops or Die-Hard “would recover from this aberration.” Suffice it to say, the former movies? friendship quickly cooled.

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