1920 (41 page)

O'Neill's other 1920 opus, produced earlier in the year, was his first full-length work and, in his opinion, “a simon pure uncompromising American tragedy.” According to historian Geoffrey Perrett,
Beyond the Horizon
had “little plot, no melodrama, no surprises. It was naturalistic, and starkly tragic.” What the play
did
have, however, was a classical denseness of language new to the contemporary stage, its haunting overtones harkening back to the ancient Greeks.

The Mayo brothers are both in love with the same woman, Ruth Atkins. But Robert, the younger brother, is also in love with faraway places and the shipboard journeys necessary to reach them. “Supposing I was to tell you,” he says at one point, “that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on—in quest of the secret which is hidden over there beyond the horizon.”

But it was not the beauty of the far-off and unknown that eventually attracted Robert so much as it was Ruth Atkins. In winning her heart,
though, he gives up his dream, deciding he will not go to sea after all but, rather, will stay with Ruth on the family farm, which has been driving both brothers to poverty and madness. Under these circumstances, Andrew, the older sibling, decides he can no longer stay with Robert, and it is he, the loser in love, who adopts his brother's dream and becomes the sailor. Later, however, we learn that Ruth has loved Andrew all along, causing Robert to rage at her, calling her, among other things, a “slut,” almost surely the first time that word had been heard by a New York theatrical audience.

“In its time,” declare Arthur and Barbara Gelb in a biography of O'Neill and his father, “
Beyond the Horizon
was perceived as a play of such tragic sweep and grandeur that it dwarfed the efforts of American playwrights who had come before.” Or, as the
Times
's Woollcott put it, the play was “so full of meat that it makes most of the remaining fare seem like the merest of meringue.”

O'Neill was surprised that the reviews were so favorable. He had been dubious. On opening night, he “hid nervously behind a pillar to avoid recognition. The audience was unsure what to make of the play.” Yet the play ran for 111 performances, a surprisingly strong showing for so different a theatrical experience.

O'Neill was asked once to explain why he wrote such dramas as
The Emperor Jones
and
Beyond the Horizon
with characters embittered and angry, failing and grasping for rescue from the merest of threads; after all, he was to write more than thirty plays in his career, and only one,
Ah, Wilderness!
, was a comedy. O'Neill's reply was brief, and many thought it perverse; inevitably, it told as much about the man as it did about his art.

I have an innate feeling of exultance of tragedy. The tragedy of Man is perhaps the only significant thing about him. … What I am after is to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on the stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering, but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.

Beyond the Horizon
was the first of O'Neill's dramas to win the Pulitzer, and later he and Eliot would also win Nobel prizes. O'Neill was the first American playwright to be so honored, and at the present time he is still the only one.

Anarchy, as it turned out, had more than one form, and it was in 1920 that the written arts gave the term a new definition.

THE MOST SUPERFICIAL LITERATURE OF
the decade, and some of the most popular among those who could not bear the ever-spreading gloom of the lost generation in their reading and viewing, was not really literature at all. Yes, the playwright Marc Connelly would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1930; and yes, George S. Kaufman, the Neil Simon of his era, would also win Pulitzers for the stage in 1932 and 1937; and yes, Harold Ross would create the undeniably sophisticated
New Yorker
in 1925. But the ayes do not have it; the more substantive achievements of these men and others of their informal association were too far in the future. For now, they were primarily self-promoters, and had found an ideal forum for the greater renown that awaited.

Starting in late 1919, Connelly, Kaufman, and Ross would lunch daily at the Algonquin Hotel with newspaper and magazine writers Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Alice Duer Miller, Heywood Broun; newspaper editor Herbert Bayard Swope; actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Margalo Gillmore; and Harpo Marx, who, with his movie career ahead of him at this point, actually spoke as he ate. And there were more; all together, believes Benchley biographer Billy Altman, charter members of the so-called Round Table, or, as they preferred to be known, the Vicious Circle, numbered about two dozen. Their goal was the witticism, the memorable one-liner, the crisply lethal putdown, which another of their group, Franklin Pierce Adams, more commonly known as FPA, would include in Saturday's “Conning Tower,” his popular column in the
New York Tribune
. He was thereby “illuminating,” wrote Kaufman's frequent collaborator, the playwright Moss Hart, at a later date, “not only the world of the theatre, but the world of wit and laughter as well.”

The quips in Adams's column would be discussed as avidly as later generations would discuss Johnny Carson's monologue of the previous night.
And, like the
Tonight Show
bon mots, FPA's collection of Algonquinite quotes bestowed a certain cachet not only on those who uttered them, but on those who knew and could discuss them. Also known as the “Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys,” the column was must-see reading.

By 1920, the jesters of the Algonquin were all the rage in New York. Their verbal riffs seemed especially in tune with the rapid-fire exertions of jazz, as opposed to the complexity in language of such as O'Neill and Eliot, language that was virtually symphonic in presentation if usually desolate in meaning.

According to Kaufman biographer Scott Meredith, the Algonquin lunchers were “nearly all famous members of New York's smart set, even though some of them had not yet written or appeared in anything of prominence—and a few never did.” Yet, claims the website Quotes Galore, the Algonquinites were cited more than any other assemblage of Americans in history, with the possible exception of deceased presidents. It sounds dubious to me but may, at least for a brief period in the early twenties, have been true.

To Ben Yagoda, on the other hand, it all makes perfect sense. In his history of
The New Yorker
, published in 2000, he writes that “[
New Yorker
art critic Murdock] Pemberton and [free-lance publicist John Peter] Toohey, would feed the members' quips to columnists for whom there wasn't room at the table, either because the utterers paid them (not likely), or [Algonquin manager] Frank Case paid them (probable), or they just enjoyed placing an item (almost certain). The remarkable result was that this group of several dozen friends and colleagues, none of them at this point outstandingly accomplished, became intimately known to the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of readers of the public prints.”

It was so much in keeping with the nascent values of the celebrity culture. Many of the Round Tablers would, in fact, end up where KDKA's Leo H. Rosenberg had started, on the radio, as panelists on talk shows or humor-based quiz programs. Robert Benchley would even make it to Hollywood, starring in short subjects in which he provided erudite and preposterous discourse on such topics as the sex life of the polyp.

But it was at the large round table in the Algonquin Hotel, the clock having reached the lunch hour, that the jokes first and most prominently
began to fly; that people like Connelly, Kaufman, and Ross sometimes became better known than they would for their more significant achievements.

For instance …

Kaufman, when asked by a press agent how to get the name of his client, an actress, into the newspapers more often: “Shoot her.”

Benchley: “I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm not in any hurry.”

Woollcott: “Every girl should be married to [writer] Charlie MacArthur at some period of her life.”

Parker: “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can't say ‘no' in any of them.”

Parker: “I like to have a martini,/Two at the very most./After three I'm under the table,/After four I'm under my host.”

Parker, after aging to the point of becoming bespectacled: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

It was Dorothy Parker, a married woman who preferred to be called Mrs. Parker, who emerged as the maven of these carefully scripted, carefully rehearsed ad-libs and spoke what is probably the most famous and clever Round Table bon mot of them all. It seems that when the Vicious Circle was playing a game of their own devising called “I Can Give You a Sentence,” someone tossed out the question, “Can anyone use the word ‘horticulture' in a sentence?” Parker's reply: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”

Other “I Can Give You a Sentence” classics included Kaufman's “I know a man who has two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punctilious.” And then there was the modest FPA's own rare contribution, “We wish you a meretricious and a happy new year.”

In her 2013 novel
Farewell, Dorothy Parker
, author Ellen Meister turns the title character into a modern-day ghost. But Violet Epps, the woman Mrs. Parker haunts, often finds herself thinking back to the golden days when the ghost was a creature of flesh and blood and devilish humor. “For an entire decade,” Violet recalls, “the Algonquin Round Table was a pop-culture phenomenon that came to symbolize the wit and sophistication of the nation's most cosmopolitan city. And at the center of it was the tiny
woman Tallulah Bankhead had called ‘the mistress of the verbal hand grenade,' Dorothy Parker.”

The Round Table would not be possible today, would not attract either members or public notice. Perhaps not even a table. But yesterday … ah, yesterday, Meister declares, “was a time when Americans were in love with words and enamored of writers.”

She is right. In today's post-literate society, though, the word “wit” has lost its cachet. Even in formal settings—between hard covers in bookstores, as feature stories in magazines, on the OpEd pages of prestigious newspapers—wit is often used incorrectly, and true wit is as rare as true perception. Some of the writers in whom at least a number of Americans seem most interested have achieved their status because of the speed with which they can text, tweet, and twitter, two thirds of which I cannot define, much less accomplish.

In 1920, though, the word was not only art in many cases, but was being transformed into a different kind of art from what the world had ever known before—more sarcastic, irreverent, haunting, analytical, mystical, emotionally wrenching, deeply personal. But those who succeeded in their use of the word, those masters of the new art, were changing the definition of the term forever.

THE ALGONQUIN HOTEL REMAINS, AS
it has always been, in the center of midtown Manhattan. It has lost its prestige over the decades, but not its business. I passed it on my way to work every Friday morning for ten years, always taking a look inside at what seemed to be cavernous darkness; but seldom was there not someone checking in or out, or at least a bellman or two bustling from reception desk to sidewalk or vice versa, obviously busy at something.

Occasionally I would step into the cavern, the gloominess remaining. I have no idea what the lobby looked like in 1920, but it always felt to me when I stood there as if that could have been the year. The furniture is old-fashioned, the wallpaper and fixtures equally are suggestive of another era, an undercurrent of faint mustiness is noticeable. Or is it just imaginable? But the place is well kept up, and the rooms, like those of other noted New York hotels, rent for hundreds of dollars a night.

The Round Table, however, once placed front and center in the Rose Room by Frank Case, has not been there for a long time. There is a painting, though, that brings back all the memories. The Rose Room is brighter than the lobby, and a large oil painting of the Vicious Circle hangs on the wall with all the prominent people gathered around and enough light to see them with their eyes a-twinkle, eager for their turns to feed the “Conning Tower.” First-floor bookcases contain countless volumes by and about Parker, Benchley, Kaufman, and their merry lunchmates. They are covered with glass panes, under lock and key.

Other floors are equally reverential to the past. There are 181 rooms in the hotel, and a one-liner from a long-ago wit has been placed on the door of every one; a guest could as easily say he is in the “horticulture” room as in 322. And each of the hotel's twenty-four suites is named after one of the most famous figures in the Vicious Circle.

Perhaps those who preached a lost generation were right, but the men and women who had been honored with a seat at the Round Table in the twenties chose to ignore such pessimism, believing it served no purpose other than self-indulgence. Let Hemingway write his deliberately stiff and repetitive novels about it. Let Fitzgerald act it out while under the influence. Let O'Neill put it on the stage and send his audiences home draped in morbidity. Those seated at the Round Table didn't care. They would wisecrack their way through the apocalypse. Wit above all.

“The Algonquin Round Table,” said Margaret Case Harriman, Frank Case's daughter, “came to the Algonquin Hotel the way lightning strikes a tree, by accident and mutual attraction.” But lightning is the briefest of phenomena, and the tree may not long withstand its bolt.