A HUMBLE PROTEST A LITERARY GENERATION’S QUEST FOR THE HEROIC SELF, 1917 – 1930 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jason A. Powell, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Steven Conn, Adviser Professor Paula Baker Professor David Steigerwald _____________________ Adviser Professor George Cotkin History Graduate Program Copyright by Jason Powell 2008 ABSTRACT Through the life and works of novelist John Dos Passos this project reexamines the inter-war cultural phenomenon that we call the Lost Generation. The Great War had destroyed traditional models of heroism for twenties intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, compelling them to create a new understanding of what I call the “heroic self.” Through a modernist, experience based, epistemology these writers deemed that the relationship between the heroic individual and the world consisted of a dialectical tension between irony and romance. The ironic interpretation, the view that the world is an antagonistic force out to suppress individual vitality, drove these intellectuals to adopt the Freudian conception of heroism as a revolt against social oppression. The Lost Generation rebelled against these pernicious forces which they believed existed in the forms of militarism, patriotism, progressivism, and absolutism. The Lost Generation also viewed the world romantically, as an opportunity for the individual to immerse herself into immediate, self-creating experience. By interpreting William James’s radical empiricism as ii a mandate to experience the world, these writers completed their understanding of the heroic self as the individual, who, according to Dos Passos, is free to thrive upon a “threshold of a new world of experience, of reckless abandoned adventure.” As a result, the Lost Generation’s quest for the heroic self culminated in the celebration of the individual as both a hero of revolt and the exemplar of the flourishing life. iii VITA September 27, 1967…………………………...Born – Seattle, Washington 2002…………………………………………...B.A. History, Calvin College 2005…………………………………………..M.A. History, The Ohio State University 2005 – Present………………………………..Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Vita………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Chapters: 1. Introduction…………………….………………………….…………………………. 1 2. American Phenomenon…………………………………………………….….……..20 3. The Death and Birth of the Hero…………………………………………………… 65 4. The Celebration of Discontent……………………………………………….……..118 5. A Romantic Nihilism…….…………………………………………………………168 6. A Vital Encounter………………….…….…………………………………………204 7. Conclusion……………………………………….…………………………………278 8. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..286 v CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION On January 6 th , 1918, nineteen-year-old volunteer ambulance driver Malcolm Cowley published his first writing concerning the effects that the war had upon soldiers like himself. Cowley’s introduction to combatant life consisted of rummaging through the trenches that had been evacuated by Hindenburg after the German retreat in the spring of 1917. Cowley and friends not only found wine bottles and cooking utensils, but “shells still piled in the storehouses, rusty bayonets scattered along the path, clips of shells, signboards and a cemetery growing with flowers.” When Cowley was about to enter another German trench further on, a French corporal commanded him to halt. The trenches were still possibly booby-trapped, a lesson the French had learned the hard way until they “began to use prisoners for the work of trench cleaning.” In explaining this scenario, Cowley granted his American audience the requisite anti-German propaganda it wanted to hear. Missing the irony of his own martial inclinations, Cowley declared, pejoratively, that it was the Germans who regarded the war as “a normal state of affairs.” As proof, Cowley pointed out the empty German trenches that contained “solid, permanent, comfortable” structures, which expressed the “permanency of the German 1 occupation.” There was nothing makeshift, and it appeared to the young ambulance drive that “the invaders had set about the Prussianization of the country because they were determined for “the annihilation of everything French.” Cowley stumbled upon a makeshift grave, which, in his mind, reinforced the German concept of war. The marker read references to “Kaiser, God and Fatherland,” but even more remarkable was its construction entirely out of materials from a French cemetery, making it “in other words, typically German.” 1 When the volunteer ambulance drivers exhausted their curiosity of the trenches they wandered around a French village, which “Like all French villages in that region,” consisted of mere “outlines of walls and heaps of crumbling stone.” In contrast to the war-mad Germans, Cowley remarked, the French endured the oppressive hardships of the war “without great effort to lighten them.” Cowley believed that such resignation would eventually overcome all enemies, even if the French lost this particular war. “And it seemed to me suddenly,” he exclaimed, “that even if the invader did succeed in destroying every vestige of past civilization in the country and killed every human being they would hardly succeed in their work of Germanization.” No matter how transformational the war was upon the French landscape, in the end “the land itself would conquer them, just as it had conquered Celts and Romans, Franks and Northmen in past centuries, making them over into its own spirit.” Cowley posited that the French commitment to the strength and vitality of its own history and culture fortified its 1 Malcolm Cowley, “U.S. Volunteer Tells of French Battle Front Visit – No Union Hours,” The Gazette Times , January 6, 1918, Section 5, pg. 3. 2 resignation into a dynamic resilience. There were no appeals to heroism, Cowley declared. The French fought to “end war for good.” There are “no militarists over here.” 2 Novelist John Dos Passos also noticed the striking attitude of the French toward the war. He wrote in his journal that the “marvelous part of the French is how unheroic they are.” The French, he believed had resigned themselves to a despair that was “absolutely Greek in its calm beauty.” Paying particular attention to the French priests who wandered about during “shell fire,” he lauded their conduct that was “never a bit preachy, always quiet and absent minded and mildly amused – They make things go marvelously smoothly & well.” Instead the French soldier does not “talk hypocritical bosh about the beauty & manliness of war: they feel in their souls that if they weren’t cowards they would have ended the thing long ago – by going home, where they want to be.” 3 Dos Passos regarded the Americans differently. Americans were motivated by personal heroics. Highlighting the calm resignation of the French priests’ attitude toward the war Dos Passos finished a diary entry with a facetious imperative to himself to “imagine a troop of heroic American clergymen in their place.” 4 Neither did Cowley apply his praise of the French resigned resilience to his homeland. Along with Dos Passos he believed that Americans did not fight as the Germans did, from an aggressive 2 Cowley, “U.S. Volunteer,” 3. 3 Dos Passos, Fourteenth Chronicle , 95, 98. 4 Dos Passos, Fourteenth Chronicle , 95. 3 nature, nor as the French for national survival. Americans were much more interested in individual heroics, and as a result claimed to fight “for personal liberty.” 5 The Lost Generation intellectuals initially shared American society’s objective of liberty, but actual experience of the war quickly disabused them of such a romantic interpretation. The war created a common experience and a common narrative, and we cannot overemphasize the importance of the war for providing historical unity among the Lost Generation writers as they sought to interpret during the nineteen twenties. This project uses the war as its starting point the Lost Generation’s belief that, according to Hemingway, the war created a historical context in which “all the heroes are dead.” 6 This belief engendered a new way of looking at the world and the notion of the heroic individual. As a result, this dissertation is an intellectual history of the nineteen-twenties’ writers whose art reflected a worldview that attempted to address and counter the effects of the war upon postwar American society, and how they sought to find new models to uphold the integrity of the heroic individual. With this understanding of postwar society, this dissertation will argue that the impetus behind the Lost Generation’s literary production from 1917 to 1930 was the search for what I call the heroic self. These writers conceived the heroic self as an individual who has become a personage, someone who has set his or herself apart from the rest of society by demonstrating the supreme value of his or her individuality. Working with this understanding of the individual, I will show that these writers understood the characteristics of the heroic self to be that person who rebelled against the conventional model of heroism defined by the war hero, who rejected 5 Cowley, “U. S. Volunteer,” 3. 4 the social convention of postwar patriotism, who dismissed the historical