1920 (40 page)

BUT T. S. ELIOT WAS
not what he seemed, for he created nothing less than a revolution in verse, an overthrow of conventional themes and rhythms, the end of romance and the beginning of introspection that could lead down alleys so dark that their entrances had not even been visible before. His was the poetry of the disaffected intellectual, the lament of the lost generation set to atonal music. In
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
, Eliot writes:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized on a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

Prufrock felt the inevitability of time, of its passage and power, and of his inability to do anything other than yield to it, to feel it as a weight upon him, pressing down without surcease. Haunting thoughts they were, that Eliot expressed, but an element of his genius was the small, seemingly irrelevant details out of which he so poignantly related cosmic sorrows.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his legs and arms are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decision and revisions which a minute will reverse.

…

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Prufrock has heard mermaids singing, somewhere in the distance, but does not believe they will ever sing to him. They will provide no relief from his suffering, none of the contentment he cannot find on land.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Eliot knew early in his career that he would not write nearly as much poetry as others, although he did not explain why. It may be that he had already decided that writing for the theatre would take too much of his time; ahead of him still, among others, were such plays as
Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party
, and
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
,
which provided the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber's late-century musical delight,
Cats
. Or it may be that he realized his poems demanded too much of him, left him psychically enervated. “My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse,” he conceded once to a friend, “and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.”

Most were. No one had ever made one shudder through his reading of poems like T. S. Eliot. The collection published in 1920 was far from a best seller and, as far as non-existent human beings were concerned, J. Alfred Prufrock could not compare in popularity to Hercule Poirot; but Eliot's anthology was one of the most influential collections that the literary world would ever know—although, for the most part, the influence would not be felt until time had passed and comparisons were more easily made.

THAT POETRY COULD BE TAKEN
down yet another untrodden path the same year was a remarkable coincidence. But that is exactly what happened. Between Eliot and an exceedingly different kind of man named Carl Sandburg, the very definition of verse was expanded in 1920, beyond limits that would have been thought possible earlier in the century.

If Eliot was ethereal, Sandburg was gritty, the poet of the working class, of the robber barons' victims, although there are times when Sandburg seems to be exalting in the raw power of industry more than sympathizing with those who have been oppressed by it.

Eliot was for a year a visiting professor at Harvard, and for a longer period the head of the prestigious English publishing firm of Faber and Faber. Sandburg, before landing a reportorial job with the
Chicago Daily News
, worked as a milk-wagon driver, a farm laborer, a bricklayer, a traveling salesman, a coal-heaver, and both a servant and a porter at different hotels. As a young man he undertook “an exploration of the American frontier as part of the vast procession of hoboes, tramps and bums who sought to find or escape work in the wake of the depression of the 1890s.” He would come to describe himself as an “Eternal Hobo.”

Sandburg attended three colleges, including the United States Military Academy at West Point, but didn't last at any of them for more than a few months, and would never receive a degree.

But he knew life, life as all too many Americans lived it at the time, and he wrote about it in a distinctive manner, his style as extraordinary as his subject matter. In a poem he never published, he wrote “Study the wilderness under your own hat,” and it might have been precisely the aphorism that spurred him on.

In 1920, however, his long face already beginning to settle into its often dour expression and his hair to whiten, he published
Smoke and Steel
. It was a vast sampling of his work that could not have been more different, in either sensibility or topic, from Eliot's. But neither could it have been more similar, in its own way, to the concerns of the year, the reports in the newspapers, the explanation of continuing work stoppages.

Smoke of a brick-red dust

Winds on a spiral

Out of the stacks

For a hidden and glimpsing moon.

This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill,

This is the slang of coal and steel.

The day-gang hands it to the night gang,

The night gang hands it back.

Stammer at the slang of this—

Let us understand half of it.

In the rolling mills and sheet mills,

In the harr and boom of the blast fires,

The smoke changes its shadow

And men change their shadow;

A nigger, a wop, a bohunk changes.

But Sandburg was a remarkably versatile poet, much more so than he is given credit for, and
Smoke and Steel
is a collection of almost impossible diversity. Biographer Penelope Niven tells us that it included “reflections
on the aftermath of war. There were lyrical affirmations of family and home in poems for [his wife] Paula and the children. He wrote of peach blossoms, birds, the landscapes he loved, and of prophecy for his daughters.”

One of the latter was called, simply, “Helga.”

The wishes on this child's mouth

Came like snow on marsh cranberries;

The tamarack kept something for her;

The wind is ready to help her shoes.

The north has loved her; she will be

A grandmother feeding geese on frosty

Mornings; she will understand

Early snow on the cranberries

Better and better then.

The wilderness under Sandburg's hat was terrain that he alone knew. One wonders how he would react if reached at a séance and told that, among the buildings and institutions named after him posthumously, in addition to schools and a library, archives and a commemorative stamp, there is, in his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, the Sandburg Mall on W. Carl Sandburg Drive.

Perhaps he would have smiled. “He was hailed as the poet of the future,” biographer Niven wrote, “the poet of America,” and what could have symbolized so well the American future when Sandburg was at the top of his game than a shopping center?

THE MOST RADICAL OF THE
new literature might have been written for the stage, and no one wrote it, either in volume, verbosity, or passion, like Eugene O'Neill. Providing the American theatre with some of its most memorable evenings, he was also responsible for some of its longest. In the latter case, the results affected millions of people, not necessarily theatergoers, and are still affecting them more than eighty years later.

In 1928, O'Neill won one of his four Pulitzer Prizes for
Strange Interlude
, a nine-act epic about abortion and adultery and various other matters that ran for more than four hours. A mere intermission would not
do for a play of this duration and emotional intensity; instead, O'Neill provided a dinner break.

Early in the thirties, a troupe of actors performed the play in a space they had recently leased in Quincy, Massachusetts. Across the street was the only place close enough to the new theatre for audience members to dine and still return to their seats in time for the play's later innings. It was “a curious restaurant,” William Manchester wrote, “with a bright orange roof and pseudo Colonial architecture,” and, with the owner more than $40,000 in debt, was on the verge of bankruptcy when
Strange Interlude
opened. It was the only restaurant the man owned, the only business about which he cared or knew anything. He was panicked when he considered what lay ahead.

The play, however, was an enormous hit, perhaps more than it had been in any previous production, and because of that, so too was the restaurant. It served hundreds of theatergoers for six nights and one matinee a week, and many of them, pleased with the fare and the prices, told their friends. As a result, the restaurant continued to thrive even after the play closed, and with the evenings not so busy, it began to attract a lunch crowd as well. The owner, a man named Howard Johnson, had Eugene O'Neill to thank not only for saving his business in Quincy, but for enabling it to become one of the first successful eatery franchises in the United States. In 1965, HoJo's, as it was called, sold more food than McDonald's, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined. By the late 1970s, the HoJo name was attached to a thousand restaurants and five hundred motor lodges.
Strange Interlude
's long interlude had created an empire.

BORN IN
1888,
HOWARD JOHNSON'S
inadvertent benefactor was the son of a drug-addicted mother and her husband, James, known primarily for his starring role in second-rate road show productions of
The Count of Monte Cristo
. In fact, for the first seven years of his life, O'Neill was often dragged along with his father, who sometimes played a theatre for a week, sometimes was booked for only a one-night stand. The child and his father and nanny endured “the ceaseless succession of railroad trips and poor hotels. … They never stayed anywhere long enough for a little
boy to find a playmate.” Unlike Christie, he did not develop imaginary friends; rather, he began to store up real grievances.

The playwright's father was an alcoholic, and as O'Neill grew older he began to follow the same path, showing the same instability of character, the same kind of self-destructive thirst. Writes historian Page Smith, O'Neill “was a heavy drinker; he was nicknamed Ego by his Princeton classmates because of his preoccupation with his own states of mind. A few months [after his marriage] he set out on a gold-mining expedition to Honduras. … A son was born in his absence. His wife obtained a divorce, and O'Neill never saw his son until the boy was eleven years old.”

For no particular reason, O'Neill later took passage on a Norwegian vessel bound for Buenos Aires, where “he worked briefly for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, acquiring, in the process, a lifelong distaste for machines.”

Back in the United States, O'Neill continued drinking, reaching new excesses, and at the same time began to absorb the dark new writings of novelists like Jack London and Joseph Conrad. These were the influences for his early plays, which he probably started writing in 1914, at the age of twenty-six. Two years later, supposedly with a trunk full of his work, none of which had ever been performed, he arrived at the Cape Cod theatre of the Provincetown Players. His first play to be produced was also the first one he pulled randomly out of the trunk to be read aloud. The one-act
Bound East for Cardiff
was presented in Provincetown when O'Neill was twenty-eight.

In 1920, two of his plays were staged in New York, to enviable results.
The Emperor Jones
, with an all-black cast, “was based on a story that O'Neill had heard in a bar about a Haitian … who, convinced that he could be killed only by a silver bullet, had seized and held power in Haiti for six months.” In O'Neill's more mystical version, set in the jungle of an unidentified equatorial nation, the playwright's description of the setting tells all that one needs to know about the mood of the performance. “Only when the eye becomes accustomed to the gloom,” O'Neill wrote, “can the outlines of separate trunks of the nearest trees be made out, enormous pillars of deeper blackness. A somber monotone of wind lost in the leaves moans in the air. Yet this sound serves but to intensify the impression
of the forest's relentless immobility, to form a background throwing into relief its brooding, implacable silence.”

The play is oddly constructed. There are eight scenes, and in all but the first and the last, Emperor Brutus Jones, previously a Pullman porter trying to outrun a murder charge, is the only character who speaks. In the background is the pounding of drums, an ominous sound that Jones interprets as the signal of his impending death.

In the first and last scenes, a white trader named Smithers, a man of dubious probity, is featured. As the play nears an end, Smithers is seen talking to rebels who have set out to kill the emperor. The assassination is accomplished by means of a silver bullet, although it might also be said that Emperor Jones was, in reality, “overthrown by his own fear and madness.” O'Neill's play, raved the
New York Times
critic Alexander Woollcott, was a “striking and dramatic study of panic fear.” He might also have added racism. Although decidedly not a racist himself, O'Neill portrayed the trait so effectively in some of his characters that actor Charles Gilpin, one of the few black stage stars of his time, was dropped from the London cast for objecting to the play's bigotry of language.