4 - Residual Individualism and Hedged Commitments

Summary

The elitism that found expression in T. S. Eliot’s famous description of himself as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” survived in the thirties. Worldly in its wit and reach, as it gathers fragments in different languages from different times and places, and world-weary in its tone, as it laments the loss of artistic tradition and religious faith, Eliot’s style largely defined literature for shapers of the New Criticism. Art should be cosmopolitan yet imperial in its claims (meaning that it should claim everything high-up and good) and aristocratic in its exclusions (meaning that it should condemn everything middle-class, mean, or vulgar). But the thirties witnessed the revival of three overlapping forms of populism that had flourished during the Lyric Years and then languished in the twenties. One of these, more or less Marxist in tendency, descended from writers like Upton Sinclair, Randolph Bourne, Floyd Dell, John Reed, and Jack London. A second came from some of the same writers, especially London, and was primitivistic in logic. And a third, more “realist” than “naturalist,” found expression in the heirs of William Dean Howells – writers like Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, who made fiction out of the manners and foibles, the aspirations and hypocrisies, the symbols and myths of the frequently maligned middle class. During the twenties, when the vocabulary of idealism fell into disrepute, the untested truce between populist and elitist tendencies fell apart. Mencken became almost typical in treating the “Middle Class” with contempt and all politics, including reform politics, as a farce.