Lecture 18

LITERATURE BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS (1916 –1956)

18.1. «Американская мечта» и кризис эпохи первой мировой войны Творчество Френсиса С. Фитцджеральда («Великий Гэтсби»). Творчество Эрнеста Хемингуэя. Война в его рассказах и романах («Прощай, оружие!»). Писатели военного поколения: Уильям Фолкнер, Джон Дос-Пассос, Эдвард Каммингс, Торнтон Уайлдер.

18.1.1. A period of disillusion and cynicism that followed World War I found expression in the writings of a group of Americans living in Paris who became known as the Lost Generation. Although the group never formed a cohesive literary movement, those associated with it shared bitterness about the war, a sense of rootlessness, and dissatisfaction with American society. The most influential American writers of this generation include novelists Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and dramatist Thornton Wilder. The term lost generation was first used by writer Gertrude Stein in her preface to Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises to characterize Hemingway and his circle of expatriate friends in Paris.

18.1.2. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is an American writer, whose novels and short stories chronicled changing social attitudes during the 1920s, a period dubbed The Jazz Age by the author. He is best known for his novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night, both of which depict disillusion with the American dream of self-betterment, wealth, and success through hard work and perseverance.

Fitzgerald left Princeton because of academic difficulties and joined the United States Army, which was then entering World War I. While in basic training near Montgomery, Alabama, he met high-spirited, 18-year-old Zelda Sayre. They married in 1920 and she became the model for many of the female characters in his fiction. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, captured a mood of spiritual desolation in the aftermath of World War I and a growing, devil-may-care pursuit of pleasure among the American upper classes. The book met with both commercial and critical success. Thereafter, Fitzgerald regularly contributed short stories to diverse periodicals. Financial success as well as celebrity enabled the Fitzgeralds to become integral figures in the Jazz Age culture that he portrayed in his writing. Fitzgerald’s partly autobiographical second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, is the story of a wealthy young couple whose lives are destroyed by their extravagant lifestyle.

In 1925 Fitzgerald reached the peak of his powers with what many critics think is his finest work, The Great Gatsby. Written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American ne’er-do-well from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger (seller of illegal liquor) in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsby’s destruction. Although the narrator ultimately denounces Daisy and others who confuse the American dream with the pursuit of wealth and power, he sympathizes with those like Gatsby who pursue the dream for a redeeming end such as love.

The Fitzgeralds made their home on the French Riviera, where they became increasingly enmeshed in a culture of alcohol, drugs, and perpetual parties. Fitzgerald began a battle with alcoholism that went on for the rest of his life, and Zelda experienced a series of mental breakdowns that eventually led to her institutionalization. Tender is the Night is generally regarded as Fitzgerald’s dramatization of Zelda’s slide into insanity. It tells of a young doctor who marries one of his psychiatric patients. The novel met with a cool reception. Poor reviews alienated Fitzgerald from the literary scene and Zelda’s disintegration left him personally distraught. He moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a scriptwriter. While there, he began The Last Tycoon, a novel set amid corruption and vulgarity in the Hollywood motion-picture industry. At the age of 44 Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...

... One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lip parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

18.1.3. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is anAmerican novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. Hemingway's writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature, and some have been made into motion pictures.

After graduating from high school, he became a reporter, but he left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded. After the war he served as a correspondent and then settled in Paris. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa. During the Spanish Civil War, he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II he again was a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. Hemingway drew heavily on his experiences as an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfight enthusiast in his writing. His adventurous life brought him close to death several times: in the Spanish Civil War when shells burst inside his hotel room; in World War II when he was struck by a taxi during a blackout; and after the war when his airplane crashed in Africa.

One of the foremost authors of the era between the two world wars, Hemingway in his early works depicted the lives of two types of people. One type consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed, and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The other type was men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as prizefighters and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances.

His earliest works include the collections of short stories Three Stories and Ten Poems, his first work; In Our Time, tales reflecting his experiences as a youth in the northern Michigan woods; Men Without Women, a volume that included “ The Killers,” remarkable for its description of impending doom; and Winner Take Nothing, stories characterizing people in unfortunate circumstances in Europe. The novel that established Hemingway's reputation, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is the story of a group of morally irresponsible Americans and Britons living in France and Spain, members of the so-called lost generation of the post-World War I period. Hemingway's second important novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), is the story of a deeply moving love affair in wartime Italy between an American officer in the Italian ambulance service and a British nurse.

Hemingway's economical writing style often seems simple and almost childlike, but his method is calculated and used to complex effect. In his writing Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely. By doing so he avoided describing his characters' emotions and thoughts directly. Instead, in providing the reader with the raw material of an experience and eliminating the authorial viewpoint, Hemingway made the reading of a text approximate the actual experience as closely as possible. Hemingway was also deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. He believed that a writer could treat a subject honestly only if the writer had participated in or observed the subject closely. Without such knowledge the writer's work would be flawed because the reader would sense the author's lack of expertise. In addition, Hemingway believed that an author writing about a familiar subject is able to write sparingly and eliminate a great deal of superfluous detail from the piece without sacrificing the voice of authority. Hemingway's stylistic influence on American writers has been enormous.

In his original work, Hemingway used themes of helplessness and defeat, but in the late 1930s he began to express concern about social problems. His novel To Have and Have Not and his play The Fifth Column strongly condemned economic and political injustices. Two of his best short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “ The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” were part of the latter work. In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which deals with the Spanish Civil War, he showed that the loss of liberty anywhere in the world is a warning that liberty is endangered everywhere.

Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea, a powerful novelette about an aged Cuban fisherman. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. Hemingway's posthumously published books include A Moveable Feast (1964), an account of his early years in Paris; Islands in the Stream, a sea novel; and the unfinished The Garden of Eden. Some 3000 of his manuscript pages remain unpublished.

When I got back to the villa it was five o'clock and I went out where we washed the cars, to take a shower. Then I made out my report in my room, sitting in my trousers and an undershirt in front of the open window. In two days the offensive was to start and I would go with the cars to Plava. It was a long time since I had written to the States and I knew I should write but I had let it go so long that it was almost impossible to write now. There was nothing to write about. (…) We were in the second army. There were some British batteries up with the third army. I had met two gunners from that lot, in Milan. They were very nice and we had a big evening. They were big and shy and embarrassed and very appreciative together of anything that happened. I wish that I was with the British. It would have been much simpler. Still I would probably have been killed. Not in this ambulance business. Yes, even in the ambulance business. British ambulance drivers were killed sometimes. Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did-not have anything to do with me. It seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies. I wished to God it was over though. Maybe it would finish; this summer. Maybe the Austrians would crack. They had always cracked in other wars. What was the matter with this war? Everybody said the French were through. Rinaldi said that the French had mutinied and troops marched on Paris. I asked him what happened and he said, "Oh, they stopped them." I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the Black Forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz Mountains. Where were the Hartz Mountains anyway? They were fighting in the Carpathians. I did not want to go there anyway. It might be good though. I could go to Spain if there was no war. The sun was going down and the day was cooling off. After supper I would go and see Catherine Barkley. I wished she were here now. I wished I were in Milan with her. I would like to eat at the Cova and then walk down the Via Manzoni in the hot evening and cross over and turn off along the canal and go to the hotel with Catherine Barkley. Maybe she would. Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge's desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please. Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be. I would eat quickly and go and see Catherine Barkley.

18.1.4. William Faulkner (1897-1962) is anAmerican novelist, known for his epic portrayal, in some 20 novels, of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Faulkner's complex plots and narrative style alienated many readers of his early works, but he was recognized later as one of the greatest American writers.

Faulkner was raised in an old-line southern family. He dropped out of high school, which he detested, to work in his grandfather's bank. In World War I he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but never saw battle action. Back home in Oxford, he was admitted to the University of Mississippi as a veteran, but he soon quit school to write, supporting himself with odd jobs. After a brief tour of Europe, Faulkner returned home and began his series of baroque, brooding novels set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County (based on Lafayette County, Mississippi), peopling it with his own ancestors, Native Americans, blacks, shadowy backwoods hermits, and loutish poor whites. In the first of these novels, Sartoris (1929), he patterned the character Colonel Sartoris after his own great-grandfather.

The year 1929 was crucial to Faulkner. That year Sartoris was followed by The Sound and the Fury, an account of the tragic downfall of the Compson family. The novel uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view. The structure of The Sound and the Fury presaged the narrative innovations Faulkner would explore throughout his career. Most of the books he wrote over the rest of his life received favorable reviews, but only one sold well.

Faulkner's works demanded much of his readers. To create a mood, he might let one of his complex sentences run on for more than a page. He juggled time, spliced narratives, experimented with multiple narrators, and interrupted simple stories with rambling, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. His accomplishment was recognized in 1949, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Faulkner especially was interested in multigenerational family chronicles, and many characters appear in more than one book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County saga a sense of continuity that makes the area and its inhabitants seem real.

18.1.5. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) is an American poet, who was one of the most radically experimental and inventive writers of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of Cummings's poetry is the abandonment of uppercase letters. During World War I he was an ambulance driver in France, ultimately spending three months in a French military detention camp on a false charge. The experience served as the basis for the autobiographical prose work The Enormous Room. His first volume of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, appeared in 1923. He lived alternately in France and in the United States, finally settling in New York City.

Cummings's poetic style is characterized by typographical nonconformity; distortions of syntax; unusual punctuation; new words; and a liberal use of jazz rhythms, elements of popular culture, and slang. Because of his style, Cummings's poetry appears complex to the eye, but the ideas expressed through the words and punctuation are often simple. Although the emotional content of his poetry appears at first glance to be cynical, it is basically lyrical and almost romantic, often speaking of the value of love. Cummings followed in the Emersonian tradition of individuality and rejection of conformity.

If I should sleep with a lady called death

get another man with firmer lips

to take your new mouth in his teeth

(hips pumping pleasure into hips).

Seeing how the limp huddling string

Of your smile over his body squirms

Kissingly, I will bring your every spring

Handfuls of normal little worms.

Dress deftly your flesh in stupid stuffs,

Phrase the immense weapon of your hair.

Understanding why his eye laughs,

I will bring you every year

Something which is worth the whole,

An inch of nothing for your soul.

18.1.6. John Dos Passos (1896-1970) is an American writer, whose bitter, highly impressionistic novels attacked the hypocrisy and materialism of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. His writings influenced several generations of American and European novelists. His wartime experience as an ambulance driver in France provided background material for his first novel.

Dos Passos received critical and popular recognition for his next novel, the antiwar Three Soldiers (1921). In the immensely successful novel Manhattan Transfer, a panoramic view of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925, Dos Passos first experimented with the techniques for which he is best known: the “newsreel” technique, whereby he inserted fragments of popular songs and news headlines into his text; and the “camera eye” technique, whereby he provided short, poetic responses to give the author's point of view. Dos Passos continued to develop these techniques in several of his later novels.

18.1.7. Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is an American author, whose plays and novels, usually based on allegories and myths, have reached a worldwide audience through various versions.

In his earlier novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder united the lives of a disparate group of travelers in colonial Peru through a single event, the disaster in which they die. His other novels include The Ides of March, an epistolary work about the Roman statesman Julius Caesar. Wilder's direct, accessible style also works well in drama. An enduring work of American drama is Our Town (1938), a touching look at small-town American life that brought Wilder the Pulitzer Prize in drama. It was theatrically experimental for its time, performed on a stage without scenery or props, using stepladders to represent the upstairs of a house and folding chairs to indicate a graveyard. One of Wilder's most successful works, The Matchmaker, derived ultimately from a 19th-century Austrian comedy, was made into a motion picture and adapted as the musical comedy Hello, Dolly!

18.2. Эстетика Шервуда Андерсона, критическое осмысление национальной традиции, обращение к европейскому опыту. Модернизм в американской литературе: Томас Элиот, Эзра Паунд, Уильям Карлос Уильямс.

18.2.1. Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) is an American author. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at various jobs until 1898. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war he went to Chicago, Illinois, where he began to write novels and poetry. Anderson's talent was not widely recognized until the publication of the collection of his short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which deals with the instinctive struggle of ordinary people to assert their individuality in the face of standardization imposed by the machine age. Noted for his poetic realism, psychological insight, and sense of the tragic, Anderson helped also to establish a simple, consciously naive short-story style. He brought the techniques of “modernism” to American fiction.

18.2.2. Thomas S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born writer, regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His best-known poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a devastating analysis of the society of his time. Eliot also wrote drama and literary criticism. In his plays, which use unrhymed verse, he attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. His most influential criticism looked at the way the poet should approach the act of writing. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

18.2.3. Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet, critic, editor, and translator, considered one of the foremost American literary figures of the 20th century. Pound was a chief architect of English and American literary modernism, a movement characterized by experimentation in literary form and content, exploration of the literary traditions of non-Western and ancient cultures, and rejection of the traditions of the immediate past. As a poet, Pound experimented with various verse forms, from short poems focusing on concrete images to his epic masterpiece, the Cantos, a wide-ranging series of poems combining ancient and modern history with Pound’s personal reflections and experiences.

18.2.4. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American writer, whose use of simple, direct language marked a new course in 20th-century poetry. Unlike some other writers of his time, such as T. S. Eliot, Williams avoided complexity and obscure symbolism. Williams grew up in a household that spoke French, Spanish, and British English. He entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. By late 1912, Williams had set up a private practice. Although he developed a busy practice as a doctor, Williams also was a prolific writer, and for much of his life he published a book at least every two years.

Poetry was, for Williams, a crucial and necessary—yet sometimes ignored—means of communicating. Williams's ideas were basically humanistic: respect yourself and others, love those you can, and try to make the world a better place. He tried to live up to these ideals through both his writing and his medical practice. One quality that Williams admired greatly was persistence; he loved old people who kept their vigorous response to life, just as he admired artists who kept improving and perfecting their work.

It is difficult

To get the news from poems

Yet men die miserably every day

For lack

Of what is found there.

Toward the end of his life Williams was recognized as an important influence on younger poets. He was a man who meshed two careers into one highly productive life.

18.3. Смена поколений в литературе США. Отражение социальных проблем в творчестве Джона Стейнбека («Гроздья гнева»), Эрскина Колдуэлла, Ричарда Райта, Лэнгстона Хьюза.

18.3.1. John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968) is an American writer, who described in his work the unremitting struggle of people who depend on the soil for their livelihood. As a youth, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker. His first novel, Cup of Gold, romanticizes the life and exploits of the famous 17th-century Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. In The Pastures of Heaven, a group of short stories depicting a community of California farmers, Steinbeck first dealt with the hardworking people and social themes associated with most of his works. His other early books include Of Mice and Men, a tragic story of two itinerant farm laborers yearning for a small farm of their own.

Steinbeck's most widely known work is The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the stark account of the Joad family from the impoverished Oklahoma Dust Bowl and their migration to California during the economic depression of the 1930s. The controversial novel, received not only as realistic fiction but as a moving document of social protest, is an American classic. Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature. A major literary figure since the 1930s, Steinbeck took as his central theme the quiet dignity he saw in the poor and the oppressed. Although his characters are often trapped in an unfair world, they remain sympathetic and heroic, if defeated, human beings.

18.3.2. Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987) is an American novelist, best known for his novels and short stories that concern the poverty-stricken lives of black and white sharecroppers in rural Georgia. With vivid humor, an earthy indignation, and considerable profanity, Caldwell described the unforgettable family of Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road (1932), his most famous novel. Dramatized in 1933, the play had a seven-year run on Broadway; it was also made into a successful film. Caldwell's other works include novels and the autobiographical books. Caldwell also worked as a journalist in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during World War II and later wrote screenplays in Hollywood, California. His books were read worldwide and were particularly admired in Europe.

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