The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization

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Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gandal, Keith. The gun and the pen : Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the fiction of mobilization / by Keith Gandal. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-533891-1 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. World War, 1914–1918—United States— Literature and the war. 3. War and society—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States— Armed Forces—Mobilization—History. 5. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Great Gatsby. 6. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961. Sun also rises. 7. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962. Sound and the fury. 8. Modernism (Literature)—United States. I. Title. PS374.W65G36 2008 813'.509358—dc22 2007039406

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For J. L. V. In memory of Michel Foucault In memory of my father, Robert Gandal, 1928–2005, one of the three-quarters of a million Jewish Americans who served in the U.S. Armed Forces in the World War I or World War II eras

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Acknowledgments

I

became interested in the subject of the mobilization for World War I and made my first visit to the National Archives back in 1983, with grant support from the University of California, Berkeley. This initial research was meant to be part of a project with Michel Foucault and two other Berkeley graduate students, Stephen Kotkin and David Horn, an international and interdisciplinary study titled “New Arts of Government in the Great War and Post-War Periods,” addressing France, the Soviet Union, Italy, and the United States. But Foucault’s death the next year ended the joint project before it had ever really begun. Kotkin, a historian, and Horn, an anthropologist, went on to write their portions as individual books, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (1997) and Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (1994), respectively, and I turned to another period and subject. But I kept the archival papers I had then collected over the next twenty years because they documented a history unavailable in any published book. In the intervening decades, several studies by literary and historical scholars were published that helped me to conceive of this one: especially works by Walter Benn Michaels and the historians Allan Brandt, Nancy Bristow, Nancy Gentile Ford, and Jennifer Keene. I finally looked at the archival papers again in 2005, with an inkling of this new book in mind. Since then, I have received the best help imaginable from a host of talented, longtime colleagues. Jackson Bryer, Larry Howe, Eric Sundquist, Cindy Weinstein, and Mark Van Wienen each read draft chapters and helped me get an initial manuscript into shape. I also met new colleagues along the way who honored me by helping me with my research, specifically, some of the historians whose books made mine possible: Nancy Ford, Jennifer Keene, and Nancy Bristow. Archivist Mitchell Yocelson helped me track down some hard-to-find papers on my return visit to a reorganized National Archives in 2007. Then there have been the colleagues, old and new, who have supplied essential encouragement: Jackson Bryer, a Fitzgerald expert, and Steven Trout of the Hemingway

Society expressed keen interest in the project, as did Cindy Weinstein and Peter Stoneley, who asked to use a portion in the book they were editing. I had some instrumental conversations with Dan Andries, Hal Janney, and Gavin Jones. I would also like to acknowledge the encouragement of my Northern Illinois colleagues, especially Jeff Einboden, James Giles, Joe Bonomo, William Baker, Philip Eubanks, Deborah Holdstein, Christoph Lindner, Amy Newman, John Schaeffer, Diana Swanson, Mark Van Wienen, and the late Gustaaf Van Cromphout. My students at Northern Illinois made contributions, and, in particular, Karley Adney and Lisa Pennie provided excellent research assistance. In addition, I am very thankful to Shannon McLachlan, humanities editor at Oxford University Press, who saw the merit in this book from the start. Oxford’s reviewers provided excellent suggestions for revision. And Christina Gibson, editorial assistant at Oxford, has provided tremendous help to me all along the way, especially in the selection of photographs. Financial support for this project was generously provided in the forms of a research sabbatical, a summer grant, and special support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Northern Illinois University. A shorter version of chapter 3 of this book originally appeared as “The Great Gatsby as Mobilization Fiction: Rethinking Modernist Prose,” in A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900–1950, ed. Peter Stoneley and Cindy Weinstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 132–157. This book was made possible by the day-to-day support of my wife, Jen Voris; she also helped me in the very practical search for photographs in the archive. As usual, my greatest professional debts are to the friends and mentors who have believed in me throughout my career: John Wilkins, Walter Michaels, and, most of all, Eric Sundquist.

viii

Acknowledgments

Contents

Illustrations Part I

xi

Introduction

1 Rethinking Post–World War I Classics:

Recovering the Historical Context of the Mobilization 45

3

2 Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

Part II

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the 1920s

3 The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army:

Ethnic Egalitarianism, Intelligence Testing, the New Man, and the Charity Girl 77 4 The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds”: Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas 123 5 The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects: The Feebleminded and the Postmobilization Erotic Triangle 151 6 Postmobilization Romance: Transforming Military Rejection into Modernist Tragedy and Symbolism 167 Part III

The 1930s and After

7 Postmobilization Kinkiness:

Barnes, West, Miller, and the Military’s Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease 185 8 The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the World War I Mobilization Novel 199

Afterword Here We Go Again:

World War II Mobilization Blues in William Burroughs’s Junky 213 Notes

221

Index

255

x

Contents

Illustrations

Cover: Psychological Tests at Army Camps. Camp Lee, Virginia, November 1917. Source: National Archives. Open Air Class in English for Foreign Born, Camp Dix, New Jersey. World War I. Source: National Archives. 3 Man Who Sees Double Is Not Destined to Become an Air Pilot. March 19, 1918. Source: National Archives. 45 Sgt. Will A. Dietz, 27th Battery, Tanks Corps, Wounded but Happy. France, September 26, 1918. Source: National Archives. 77 World War I photograph demonstrating the similarity between boxing and bayonet fighting. Source: National Archives. 123 Physical Examination of Men of the 9th Regt. Boston, 1918. A similar photograph was titled, “Taking the Measurements of a Prize Specimen.” Source: National Archives. 151 Intensive Training: “All a soldier’s time is not devoted to training. He is given opportunities to enjoy himself.” World War I, Scarborough on the Hudson, New York. Source: National Archives. 167 Venereal diseases, pictured as a half-naked woman. 1918(?) Poster. Source: Library of Congress. 185 Jewish Welfare Workers, Hostess House, Chicamauga, Georgia. June 1918. Source: National Archives. 199

xi

Pvt. Mere Lipsky, 2nd Bn., 329th Infantry, 82nd Division, Proudly Exhibiting His Helmet Which Was Struck by a Bullet a Few Hours before, Cutting a Hole through the Top. Argonne Forest, France, October 11, 1918. Source: National Archives. 213

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Illustrations

Part I Introduction

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1

Rethinking Post–World War I Classics Recovering the Historical Context of the Mobilization

3

I

n a striking sequence in A Farewell to Arms (1929) that doesn’t get much attention, a minor character questions Frederic Henry’s right to his medals. Ernest Hemingway’s narrator Henry has been decorated for being wounded in circumstances similar to those in which Hemingway was famously wounded, namely, while working with an ambulance service. The first American to be wounded on the Italian front in World War I, Hemingway received notoriety for his wounding and his medals when he returned home from the war.1 But this section of A Farewell to Arms is hardly celebratory or triumphant. Of all the soldiers in the book who have, like Anglo American Frederic Henry, been wounded or decorated, it is one of the two Italian Americans in the novel—and not any of the numerous Italians—who challenges the legitimacy of his decorations because he did not earn them as a soldier. Ettore Moretti, “a wop from Frisco,” as someone calls him, asserts that, in contrast to Henry, he himself had to fight to get his medals, or, as he puts it, to “work for [the] decorations” Henry got simply by being hit by shrapnel without ever picking up a rifle. Moretti further proclaims that he is “no boozer and whorehound”; “I don’t drink and I don’t run around,” he says; he “know[s] what’s good” for him if he wants success with the military. “I’ll be a colonel before the war’s over,” Moretti boasts. But Moretti cannot be dismissed as simply a blowhard or suck-up to his superiors; indeed, the problem for Hemingway narrator Lieutenant Henry is that Lieutenant Moretti, because of “merit of war,” is going to be made a “captain” in the Italian army whereas Henry, who has more years in rank in the ambulance corps, will not be promoted. Moretti may be “conceited” and may have “bored everyone he met,” but, unfortunately for Henry, he is “a legitimate hero.” To make matters worse, A Farewell to Arms makes clear that Moretti would do better than Henry in the American Army as well as the Italian one because, as Moretti and Hemingway know, the American military needs qualified bilingual speakers (of the common immigrant languages) to be officers: “I can command a company in Italian,” says Moretti; “I could learn it in English easy.” Moretti asks a pointed question of Henry that leaves the ambulance driver at a bit of a loss: “Why don’t you go in the American Army?” Hemingway has his narrator answer, “Maybe I will,” though in fact the character does not, and the author, likewise, did not do so. Clearly a bit rattled by the encounter with this ethnic American about to make captain on the basis of merit in combat, nonsoldier Henry later asks his love interest, the English nurse Catherine Barkley, as they discuss Moretti, “Wouldn’t you like me to have a more exalted rank?” (88–92).2 4

Introduction

Though this sequence is not often explored, it should be thought of, not as a singularity, but as the tip of an iceberg. The issues that animate it are by no means aberrant in the larger context of A Farewell to Arms, or, indeed, that of the 1920s “masterpieces” of Hemingway, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. Rather, The Great Gatsby (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and The Sound and the Fury (1929) are steeped in such concerns. In fact, in a departure from the common understanding, this book will show that the “quintessential” male American modernist novelists were motivated, in their celebrated postwar literary works, not so much, as the usual story goes, by their experiences of the horrors of World War I but rather by their inability in fact to have those experiences. The famous sense of woundedness, diminishment, and loss in these works, the sense of mourning for fallen worlds—symbolized for example by Gatsby’s prewar romantic dream that cannot be retrieved, Jake’s impotence received in combat in The Sun Also Rises, Benjy’s idiocy and Caddy’s loss of innocence in The Sound and the Fury—stems, not principally from the disillusionment or the alienation from traditional values brought on by the crisis of the Great War or the failure of civilization it represented (or even, in the case of Faulkner’s novel, the devastation of the earlier, catastrophic but romanticized Civil War), but instead from personal rejection by the U.S. Army. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command, and the result was that they felt themselves “emasculated”: again, not because of their encounters with trench warfare in a mechanized army or their consciousness of mass slaughter, but because either they got nowhere near the trenches or because they got to them in “trivial,” noncombat roles. Furthermore, the frustration of their military ambitions took place in the context of a whole new set of methods employed in the mobilization, which had as their aim the transformation of the army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not racial, or black-white, difference). So, for these writers, the humiliating failure to get into or to be promoted in the army was also a failure to compete successfully in a rising social order and against a new set of people. And it is that social order and those people—these effects of mobilization, and not other effects supposedly produced by mass war and a mechanized army—that their most famous postwar novels both register and reimagine. Finally, celebrated aspects of their renowned high modernist style, in particular its symbolism and tragedy, issued, not primarily, as has long been thought, out of the trauma of the war or a break with a tradition that the catastrophe of the war had proven failed, but rather out of a need to both express Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

5

and submerge their “mobilization wounds,” which were at once inescapable and embarrassing.3 When approaching the famous fiction of this decade, such as The Great Gatsby (Gatsby), The Sun Also Rises (Sun) and A Farewell to Arms, and The Sound and the Fury (Sound), there are compelling reasons to recover the singular history of the Great War years, years when these supposedly exemplary American male writers were coming of age—and all three of them were being frustrated in their desires to serve in the American military’s colossal war effort while they observed, among other startling developments, ethnic or “hyphenated” Americans4 for the first time in U.S. history being granted essentially egalitarian treatment by the army in its selection of officers. For, even though some of the army’s selection procedures, such as intelligence testing, famously had an overall bias against immigrants and ethnic Americans, they nonetheless gave educated ethnic Americans unprecedented opportunities for advancement. Of course, much has been written about the twenties literature of these authors— the beginning of their literary production—as following from the traumatic experience of mechanized “mass warfare,” as well as the dehumanizing and emasculating experience of the disciplinary “machine” of the mass army, with its unending regulations, military police, and punitive courts-martial.5 But very little attention has been paid to the dramatic social experience of meritocratic methods of personnel used in the mobilization, and the trauma experienced by these Anglo writers who were in one way or another kept from the war or its main action and rejected or “passed over” by a military that, at the time, essentially had the power to confer or deny masculinity. As the introduction and subsequent chapters will explore, the mobilization for World War I involved dramatic and large-scale shifts in American life, some of which have been mostly or somewhat forgotten, or are in fact only recently recovered: an unprecedented equality of opportunity for ethnic Americans (but not blacks), including the meritocratic assignment of recruits to positions and ranks in the military based on intelligence testing and other personnel methods as well as the preferential assignment of foreign-speaking officers to command foreign-speaking troops (before the Great War, men qualified for officer commissions based primarily on Anglo social and family background, as well as educational pedigree); an unprecedented and shockingly frank but largely failed military propaganda campaign aimed at fighting venereal disease among recruits, creating a “clean” and celibate fighting force, and redefining masculinity in terms of chastity, chivalry, and athletics; an unprecedented policing of American female sexual behavior in response to an unprecedented “problem” 6

Introduction

of sexual intercourse between training camp soldiers and local women, which led to the incarceration of tens of thousands of prostitutes as well as “promiscuous” women and girls (called at the time charity girls because they didn’t charge for sexual exchanges with soldiers6); and a likewise dramatic but dramatically unsuccessful effort to ban sexual contact between American troops and French prostitutes, a widespread contact that, together with the intercourse at home between soldiers and local women, amounted to a sexual revolution. Much of the fiction of the twenties, as well as the thirties—including the “masterpieces” of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner—is absolutely shot through with these wartime issues of meritocracy and sexuality, but in terms of the understanding of modernist fiction, this essential history of the Great War mobilization has not yet been assessed or understood. This thesis is a radical departure from the usual interpretations of modernist American fiction, and this literary-historical study has the triple task of establishing a largely unfamiliar or forgotten historical context, in part by recourse to World War I archival documents that have not previously been brought to light; reviewing the necessary biographical information of the principal authors in order to place them in that historical context; and then reading the target literature against that fresh historical/biographical context. And that first task, of introducing the historical context, will itself require argument because of course there exist traditional accounts of the mobilization, the treatment of ethnic Americans in the wartime period, the army’s testing program, and the sexual revolution of the era. But in order to establish the stakes of the study right off, I will turn first to laying out the basic reading of these famous texts, and then turn to the relevant social and personal histories.

Literary-Historical Thesis: Modernism’s Backlash against the Army’s Ethnic Egalitarianism The story of the mobilization for the Great War, a major and surprising chapter of American history in its own right—which involved tremendous and sudden social transformation in terms of meritocracy as well as sexual mores (as well as nothing but more of the same in terms of the “humiliation and degradation of black Americans”7)—is today largely unfamiliar, its dramatic impact on the literature of the twenties, some of the supposedly quintessential American literature, almost completely unmeasured. This study attempts merely to broach that huge literary project, mainly by a tight focus on just three seminal novels Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

7

of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, Gatsby, Sun, and Sound, three major American novels of the period by almost all accounts—what I will interchangeably refer to as mobilization novels (to indicate their having been shaped by this experience) or postmobilization novels (to indicate also their period of production, as well as the singular event to which they are reacting, in contrast to and as a fitting replacement for the term “postwar novels”8). This study will also briefly look at some ways in which a few novels of the 1930s, by Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, and Nathanael West, picked up on and played with the mobilization themes these 1920s writers invented. Importantly, these three renowned novels dramatically overlap one another in terms of text and context; they share textual and contextual features of plot and character that are by no means common to all postmobilization works of the era, which also include novels by John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings.9 In short, though they, too, are motivated in part by their sense of being underappreciated by the army, Dos Passos and Cummings, unlike Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, do not scapegoat ethnic Americans; Dos Passos, for example, in Three Soldiers (1921), chronicles the military careers of ethnic Americans and shows them, right alongside Anglos, suffering the unforgiving, mechanized discipline and punishment of the mass army.10 Gatsby, Sun, and Sound in fact form a subcategory of the larger postmobilization genre: what I will call, in contradistinction to the (class-based) seduction plot, the (racist) promiscuity novel. When Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald that, as a way of expressing his thanks for Fitzgerald’s help with his first novel, he would subtitle Sun “A Greater Gatsby” in all editions after the eighth printing, he was of course joking, but there was more truth than he imagined to his quip that he had followed the outline of Fitzgerald’s novel in his own.11 In the 1920s, with Gatsby and Sun, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were in fact unwittingly developing what would turn out to be a short-lived but distinctive novel genre. And they would shortly be joined in their partially unwitting efforts by Faulkner, with his Sound, as well as a few other major modernist authors who came on the scene in the 1930s. What had intervened between the fiction of the Progressive Era and the 1920s modernist novels was of course the Great War, but, again, this particular group of famous novels is not so much shaped by the war as by the extraordinary American mobilization for it. We have tended to think of this group of novels in terms of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Lost Generation, and 1920s New Woman. And if we now think about these novels in terms of race 8

Introduction

as well—and in this era, what we now think of as various European “ethnic” immigrant groups, including Jews, were considered to be “racially” different from Anglos12—we associate these fictions with the Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924 that drastically reduced the number of newcomers entering the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the pseudoscience of the evolutionary struggle of races, which also blossomed in the decade.13 But it is more revealing to consider this group of novels in light of the “new man” of 1917 and 1918 that the American military hoped to create amongst its recruits (attempting to protect them from the prostitutes and promiscuous charity girls who swarmed the army camps in what we might think of, following the concerns and the blunt language of the military authority,14 as the Whoring Teens), a generation of Anglo male writers that felt it had lost out in the brave new meritocracy based on an equality for ethnic Americans and an intelligence testing and personnel management that the military employed in the staffing of the war, and a reactionary age of Jewish quotas developed in the 1920s at universities and medical schools15 as a backlash against this rising meritocratic wave. In the decade after the Great War, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner produced similar “racist promiscuity” stories shaped by the experience of mobilization. They crafted similar postmobilization tales of Anglo female promiscuity and sexual liaisons with soldiers or military men, and male competition between Anglos and Americanized ethnic Americans, the children or grandchildren of immigrants,16 over Anglo women and money and status. At the heart of these novels are “love triangles” involving Anglo male characters bested in love and war and thus compromised in their masculinity, desirable and promiscuous Anglo females whom the Anglo males cannot have, and ethnic or outsider upstart competitors (of the Anglos) who have ties to the military and get the Anglo girls.17 More precisely still, in Gatsby, Sun, and Sound, one finds the following shared textual elements (of character and plot) and corresponding contextual (or historical) underpinnings. 1. A host of characters pursue a central promiscuous Anglo female (Daisy Buchanan, Brett Ashley, and Caddy Compson in Gatsby, Sun, and Sound, respectively) whose sexuality has been shaped or awakened by contact with a soldier—and whose sexual involvement with a military figure sparks the central conflict in the novel. She is thus not only comparable to the famous new woman of the 1920s, as many critics have noticed, but also, and more precisely, though critics have missed it, she is a romanticized image of the Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

9

charity girl who sexually fraternized with recruits at army training camps and worried moral and military authorities for moral and health reasons. 2. The military figure she gets involved with is an ethnic American or social outsider, and this unprecedented literary figure is a reflection of the army’s egalitarian treatment of ethnic Americans and class outsiders during the war. (Daisy’s lover Gatsby—born Gatz—is of course a decorated ethnic American officer; Brett’s Robert Cohn is a Jewish military school graduate, and the outsider to the town with whom Caddy loses her virginity, Dalton Ames, is a returning soldier. Critics have tended to miss Cohn and Ames’s associations with the military.) This socially other military figure is perceived by Anglo males as coming on the scene and shaking up the established order. As such, the promiscuous woman’s involvement with him meanwhile expresses her rebellion against Anglo male authority and women’s traditional moral containment. 3. Indeed, Anglo men badmouth “upstart” ethnic Americans, as they compete with the children or grandchildren of immigrants for women or money and status or both (Tom Buchanan; Jake Barnes, his friend Bill, and Brett’s fiancé Mike; Jason Compson). Jews in particular are seen as suspicious (Meyer Wolfshiem, Cohn, Jason’s “eastern jews” on Wall Street). There is an Anglo-male backlash against ethnic American males that reflects the institution of Jewish and other ethnic quotas, for example, at universities, after the war. A mentally deficient character may make an appearance (Benjy Compson), or a character may be accused of being mentally feeble (Cohn). Both this competition with ethnic Americans and this appearance of the feebleminded are reflections of the very particular American mobilization for World War I, which for the first time employed meritocratic intelligence testing that was initially instituted to eliminate mental defectives. Again missing a crucial connection to the mobilization, critics have failed to understand Benjy as having been shaped by the extraordinary attention given to the problem of the feebleminded during the war. (There is, in addition, a marginal African American presence in these novels that functions to highlight the Anglo competition with ethnic Americans by its contrast to a much more stable and comfortable position of Anglo “superiority” vis-à-vis blacks. This secure domination of African Americans is also a reflection of the Great War mobilization, which did not extend its egalitarian and meritocratic practices to blacks.18) 10

Introduction

4. Reflecting the much-discussed gender wars of the era between the “new woman” and traditional patriarchy, the promiscuous woman escapes or tries to escape a subordinate role to a traditional Anglo male chauvinist (Tom, Lord Ashley, Jason). But, meanwhile, in a trope that has not been properly analyzed historically, she gets involved with and ultimately rejects a chivalrous male romantic (Gatsby, Cohn, Quentin Compson) who has taken on some traditional feminine values, including chastity and a devotion to a single love, which were promoted for the “new man” the American military training camp authorities of World War I tried to shape—a mostly forgotten figure of the era.19 5. The crisis in the plot comes when the chivalrous male romantic, committed to a sentimental fantasy of female rescue, is faced with fairly incontrovertible evidence that he has mistakenly idealized the principal woman: the promiscuous woman does not want to be “saved.”20 This climax is prepared for by an unpleasant encounter between the chivalrous figure and a tested, unsentimental killer, a daunting martial figure by whom the Anglo narrators—and authors—are awed, a reflection obviously of Great War combat soldiers, but also a projection of these Anglo authors whose very limited military experiences and achievements left them feeling that they did not measure up to such soldiers. (Cohn confronts bullfighter Pedro Romero; Quentin confronts Dalton Ames; Gatsby’s much discussed “two sides”—the romantic and the killer—come into view.) 6. Finally, the promiscuous female relies on a special, nonsexual relationship with an Anglo lover or devotee who has been implicitly rejected or underutilized by the American military (Nick Carraway’s service was undistinguished; Jake was posted to a “joke front”; the idea of Benjy serving is mocked) or humiliated by an American soldier (Quentin). And this consequently “emasculated” Anglo figure, for some very particular reason or another (but not a belief in female chastity)—say, he is sexually or mentally handicapped or a blood relation—can never consummate the relationship sexually, get too close, demand too much, and compromise her independence. This Anglo character’s underutilization by the military is thus sometimes coded by a disability, sometimes by a familial relationship to the promiscuous woman that likewise disqualifies him as a partner, but, whether through disability or incest taboo, the practical result is a sexual nullification. (His “emasculation” may also be coded in Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

11

part by his being misperceived at some point as a homosexual, a trope that has roots in the fact that World War I and just after was the moment when the American military for the first time attempted official sanctions against homosexuals.) This Anglo lover stays true to his promiscuous love, no matter what she does with others or how she hurts him.21 By the 1930s, this particular postmobilization tale (the racist promiscuity plot) was already being subverted, while still being utilized. In Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller, Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes, and The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West, there is still a central promiscuous Anglo woman; there are love relationships with ethnic Americans, and often with Jews; there are obsessed romantics; there are sometimes mentally deficient characters; and there are lovers who have special relationships with a promiscuous woman. But now the masculine soldierly ideal comes under attack; the figure of the sexually available female camp follower is parodied, and the military is openly criticized, its concern over venereal disease mocked. The postmobilization novels of the thirties are no longer haunted by sexual liaisons between military figures and women—as were the twenties novels as well as the 1917–1918 military authorities; rather, the figures of the prostitute and the charity girl are now fetishized, not romanticized or problematized. In these thirties novels, ethnic prejudice can be rejected or lampooned; the special relationship that avoids sexual intercourse and preserves the right amount of autonomy for the independent, promiscuous woman can exclude men altogether in the form of lesbianism; the romantic character can even fight against the fixation with the promiscuous beloved with his or her own campaign of promiscuity, and the formerly muted male anger at women can now, without an ethnic scapegoat, border on violence. (Tropic of Cancer and Nightwood, which in particular tend to be seen as outré, perhaps hard to take seriously because of their respective misogyny and bestialism, and certainly as anomalous in the context of American modernism to the point of hardly belonging, or belonging instead to European or international modernism, in fact fit well in the American modernist genre I am calling postmobilization.) Short-lived genres do not tend to warrant our attention, but the case of the interwar postmobilization promiscuity novel seems to be an exception: for it comprises perhaps the most acclaimed and studied novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, and Nathanael West: Gatsby, Sun, Sound, Nightwood, Tropic of Cancer, and The Day of the Locust. (Despite truisms about modernist plotlessness, one might contend—though 12

Introduction

this contention is not the major point here—that American modernism developed a singular and recognizable plot.) What is revealed by the generic grouping together of these novels, especially these 1920s novels—on the basis of their shared textual and contextual or intertextual features—is that the literary fallout from the Great War has been dramatically underestimated or at least misunderstood.

The Historical Context of the Mobilization: The Rise of Meritocracy and a Sexual Revolution That the relevance of the mobilization to this high modernist American fiction has not previously been identified is due to a couple of factors. First, the full story of the mobilization has been largely forgotten and is just now being rediscovered; in fact, this study itself hopes to make a small contribution to that historical project of recovery. Second, the modernist writers themselves, although compulsively writing out of a deep distress engendered by their “mobilization wounds,” their own failure to matter to the army or to become heroic soldiers, had learned by the time of writing their twenties masterpieces to submerge and transfigure this pain so as not to embarrass themselves with the revelation of their sense of inadequacy or emasculation. All three of these writers had produced previous texts that openly address Anglo characters’ humiliations in the military and so come off as bitter and even pathetic if also ironic: Fitzgerald in The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Hemingway in “A Very Short Story” from In Our Time (1925), and Faulkner in Soldiers’ Pay (1926). The high modernism of Gatsby, Sun, A Farewell to Arms, and Sound, with its symbolism and its sense of tragedy (as opposed to bitterness) is, as I will discuss in chapter 6, precisely a result of these authors developing the literary tactics that allow them to disguise their mobilization traumas and thus to continue to attempt to exorcise them, but now obliquely. Indeed, the fact that we do not read these texts in terms of a competition for status in a newly meritocratic U.S. Army is a testimony to the awesome effectiveness of their shared literary gambit, which is today circumscribed as an aspect of modernist innovation and considered a product or reflection of twenties culture.22 To take just the case of Fitzgerald for the moment, Gatsby has been thought of as “a book about the Roaring Twenties”—and when critics as different in their understandings of historical context as Matthew Bruccoli and Walter Benn Michaels have approached it, they have nonetheless both contextualized Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

13

it in terms of 1920s developments, despite the fact that, for one thing, part of the book is set during the war years. (In fact, if we follow Bruccoli, the book provides precious “little in the way of sociological or anthropological data”23 for historically minded literary critics to work with—and yet, though supposedly faced with a dearth of information, he and other critics who depend on particular factual references have nonetheless basically ignored some extremely specific data in the book concerning ethnic American Gatsby’s rise through the ranks.) To characterize the interpretive blind spot slightly differently, the mobilization’s relevance to the modernist fiction of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner has been missed because of two very powerful sets of received ideas— one about the 1920s and its literature that the modernists themselves helped create, and the other about the World War I years. The received wisdom about the twenties is that, because of catastrophe of the war, the literature and, even more broadly, the sensibility and morals of this decade marked a break from that of previous decades. The received idea about the war years is that they were monolithically repressive not only toward blacks but also ethnic Americans: blacks were segregated in the army and often relegated to labor detail, and their numbers in the officer ranks were severely limited; immigrants and the children of immigrants were subjected to compulsory assimilation, political and social suspicion, and “100 percent Americanism,”24 and, for the first time, potential newcomers from Europe faced a literacy requirement. Thus, one major reason the mobilization’s importance to this fiction has been overlooked is the particular branding of the American twenties and its literature—as the beginning of the modern era and the advent of modernism— the idea that some sort of social or epistemological break occurred because of the war and a revolution in thinking or mores came to fruition just after it. So what came just before or even during the war, namely the mobilization, is deemed irrelevant to what came after. Indeed, the term or the notion of modernism has functioned as a smoke screen,25 and one that was initially crafted or subscribed to by these twenties novelists precisely to function as such, to cover up and hide their “mobilization wounds.” The other important reason the World War I mobilization has been seen as irrelevant to modernist fiction is that its radical if partial break with previous military practice, as well as its departure from the current nativism—the meritocratic thrust and egalitarian treatment of ethnic Americans but not blacks—has until recently been a lost knowledge. And even after its rediscovery by historians since 2001, it has remained marginal, a “knowledge-in-waiting,” 14

Introduction

overshadowed and crowded out by the conventional wisdom about the nativist wartime era and the now familiar knowledge of the military’s undeniably horrible discrimination against blacks, together a true but partial portrait that has essentially come to be seen as the whole story. Turning first to the received ideas of the war years, as revisionist “socialmilitary” historian Nancy Gentile Ford puts it, “Historians traditionally portray the immigrant experience in the First World War as one of forced assimilation, ruthless xenophobia, and harsh Americanism. Historians David M. Kennedy’s Over Here and John Higham’s Strangers in the Land depict the superpatriotic atmosphere of suspicion and mass hysteria directed toward the civilian ethnic groups during World War I and illustrate how nativists attempted to strip immigrants of their ethnic culture.”26 Even now, after various historians have begun first to challenge and later to nuance the traditional understanding of this era, and Nancy Ford in particular has summarized the efforts of revision, scholars writing about this period tend to portray the era in the conventional way, with reference to the Espionage Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which legitimated prior censorship and the denial of mailing privileges to repress foreign-language newspapers; in the Alien Act of 1918, which allowed for deportation of aliens; and in the Red Scare just after the war (in 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer added a new “anti-radical” unit to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, and also teamed up with quasi-vigilante groups, such as the American Protective League and the Ku Klux Klan, in arresting and deporting “radical” aliens without a trial).27 Meanwhile, “what we now know” about the mobilization for World War I is that blacks were segregated, they were often put to use in labor battalions, and the number of black officers was arbitrarily restricted. There is no doubt that the army’s treatment of African Americans in World War I was singular for its discrimination. As Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri accurately put it, “the black war story . . . was to add a new chapter in the humiliation and degradation of black Americans.” As for the selection of officers, “opposition to commissioning black officers of any sort was [extremely] powerful.” For example, “At a time when the army was seeking doctors and dentists, black men in these professions were being turned down for commissions; later they were drafted as privates.”28 “Some eleven hundred African-Americans received commissions, 1 percent of the officer corps of an army with 13 percent black enlisted men.” But, in addition, “army policy prevented all but a tiny number of blacks, however qualified, from ever rising above captain.”29 Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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“Fourteen officer-training camps had opened after the declaration of war, but none admitted blacks, and it had begun to appear that the army intended to commission only white officers.” The NAACP, appealing to Secretary of War Baker and bowing to realities, put aside its usual insistence on integration, and pushed for a segregated camp for black officers. This became a reality in July 1917 when an exclusively black camp for black officer training opened in Des Moines, Iowa. “In October, it graduated a single class of 639 officers, all below field rank. Those men were then assigned to the 92nd Division, whose superior officers remained white,” and which was never assembled stateside, out of a fear of collecting too many blacks together in one place. As for regular troops, blacks were belatedly but eventually drafted, starting in September 1917 (the initial draft call had come in June); however, they were “carefully segregated during and after arrival” in the camps, and the ratio of whites to blacks was kept at least two-to-one to assuage white fears. “Only one of every five black men sent to France saw combat, while in the AEF [American Expeditionary Forces] as a whole two out of three soldiers took part in battle. ‘The mass of colored drafted men cannot be used for combatant troops,’ said a General Staff report in 1918, and it consequently recommended that ‘these colored drafted men be organized in reserve labor battalions.’ And so they were, taking up the most menial tasks in the army as in civilian life. They worked as stevedores in the Atlantic ports and common laborers at the camps and in the Services of the Rear in France.”30 The discrimination against black officers and regulars who saw action in France was perhaps even uglier. In an attempt to prevent “the integration of black troops with white French troops,” which “was all too complete, without social or other discrimination,” AEF headquarters issued a document called “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops” and distributed it to French officers and civilian town officials. The document, which disparaged black intelligence and morality, called on the French to segregate the races (among officers as well as troops) in the manner of Americans, lest blacks develop “intolerable pretensions to equality” after the war.31 But the story of the military’s discrimination against African Americans in World War I, as horrible as it is, is only part of the story of the mobilization— and leaves out the very different experience of ethnic Americans. (In fact, it may be suggested that to understand the full horror of the military’s discrimination against blacks, it is helpful or even necessary to know that other minority groups were not discriminated against—that blacks were singled out for official discrimination and humiliation.) Discussions of “The Great War and 16

Introduction

the Equality Issue” tend to focus exclusively on blacks and women,32 and occasionally the subject is extended to include “Blacks and Indians in the American Army.”33 When the subject of “new immigrants” does come up in regard to the military, the discussion tends to be limited to observations that the army’s intelligence testing program was prejudiced against them and that the overall testing results played into the hands of old-stock nativists and immigration restrictionists after the war.34 This is the primary received idea about the World War I mobilization and ethnic Americans, and it, too, though true, is incomplete. Unlike the characterization of the 1920s as involving a kind of epistemological break, which seems dubious, the problem with the received ideas about the wartime era is not that they are wrong: they are simply partial, but not recognized as such. Their very fossilization has functioned to cut off further inquiry: the problem with them is precisely that they are not recognized as partial; they are treated as the “whole story,” and when new scholars want to characterize the wartime period in its entirety, they tend to rely on the portraits in established, well-known scholarship. The result is that other information that doesn’t fit the usual portrait becomes very difficult to see, or it is viewed with suspicion. Thus, a scholar writing in 2007 about Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned and on the lookout for what the novel indicates about “broader historical currents in the United States during the . . . years” covered by the book, namely 1913–1921—but presumably unaware of the military’s unprecedented treatment of ethnic Americans during the war—finds “surprisingly little”35 and fails in particular to note the integration of Anglo and ethnic American men the novel details at training camp and on the train to camp, or the Anglo “culture shock” experienced at this new egalitarian treatment. This is arguably the first moment in American history when the socially and ethnically privileged are meeting the rest of the nation (minus blacks), not as servants, service people, employees, or charity cases, but rather on an equal footing—and the novel documents this encounter. The “people in the station who,” according to the main Anglo female character, are “dirtying up our world” and “haven’t any right to live” (294)36 are the very people her husband, the main Anglo male character, must suddenly share seats with on the train and a tent with at camp. Gloria describes “Millions of people, swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell . . . monkeys! Or lice.” She would gladly “sacrifice a hundred thousand of them, a million of them” (322); meanwhile, her husband must appeal to a particular individual out of this faceless mass, a “short swarthy Italian,” for a place to sit on the train, and his “tent-mates” will include a “a big, scared Pole, and [a] disdainful Celt” Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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(261). Much more striking, in terms of this blind spot about the wartime era created by received ideas, a senior scholar in the humanities, serving on a NEH panel, can comment in 2005, “I am leery of the claim that ‘meritocratic methods’ were in place and were used to evaluate [ethnic Americans] during World War I. I put that up against the history of a segregated armed forces and the refusal to allow blacks in combat during that war.” There is no question that the army’s treatment of African Americans was hideously prejudiced, and it is also true that for decades after the Great War, “The record of African-American soldiers in World War I . . . was lost from national memory, at least from the memory of most Americans” or “the ordinary white inhabitant.”37 Barbeau and Henri appropriately titled their 1974 history of African American soldiers in World War I “The Unknown Soldiers.” But it is also true that the very different record of the army’s treatment of ethnic Americans in the war is, for most, still mostly lost, still largely unknown, and still to some degree blocked by the weight of received wisdom. This record has until recently been unavailable outside of papers buried in the National Archives or in obscure books of the era; it is just now being recovered in Nancy Ford’s Americans All! (2001) and even more recently in Richard Slotkin’s 2005 Lost Battalions; my book also aims to make a contribution to that project of recovery, in its discussion of the wartime testing and personnel programs, based on archival research. And the examination of this record is essential to understanding Gatsby, Sun, and Sound.38 As I will demonstrate in chapter 3, the army’s new meritocratic personnel procedures, including but not limited to intelligence testing, gave leadership opportunities to educated ethnic Americans. And Nancy Ford has shown that, for reasons of practicality and morale, the army specifically selected and trained foreign-speaking immigrants and American-born ethnic Americans as officers to lead immigrant companies.39 The aggregate result of these programs was that ethnic Americans had significant representation in the officers’ ranks. For example, in the case of Jewish Americans, for which aggregate figures exist, they were equally represented in the officer ranks overall; that is, the proportion of Jewish officers to Jewish soldiers in the World War I U.S. Army was similar to the proportion of all officers to all soldiers.40 The received wisdom on the military’s intelligence testing is that it was biased against ethnic Americans, and the results served only to confirm the stereotypes of Anglo racists and immigration restrictionists, who exploited these results after the war to argue for and effect their cause, in the dramatic immigration restriction legislation of 1921 and 1924 that all but cut off immigration 18

Introduction

from southern and eastern Europe.41 There is no question that such an exploitation of the testing results took place. To take but one example, a Congressman arguing for the 1924 immigration restriction legislation in the House asserted the following: “The intelligence test applied to the soldiers during the Great War has demonstrated that nearly one-half of our foreign-born population is to be classified in the two lowest levels of intelligence rating. We have about 14,000,000 foreign born in America, and the army tests indicated that more than 6,000,000 of these are to be classified either as inferior or very inferior.”42 But the story is more involved—and there is simply more to say—especially when the literary story is the issue. Though these tests certainly functioned in this invidious way after World War I (and standardized tests to this day in fact continue to be criticized for their cultural bias), they also undeniably gave unprecedented opportunities for status and advancement in the army to talented and educated ethnic Americans during the Great War (and after—when they were retooled by the peacetime army and adopted by the American educational establishment). It is necessary to distinguish between the army’s use of the tests, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, their postwar collation and interpretation by psychologists who led the testing program, along with the exploitation of the psychologists’ summations and conclusions by immigration restrictionists. The military used the tests, in conjunction with other personnel methods, to eliminate the mentally disabled from the service, to balance companies in terms of intelligence, and to identify potential officers. For all its glaring faults in the treatment of blacks and women, the World War I army was the standout institution in the nation when it came to the treatment of ethnic Americans. The army promised ethnic soldiers, as Slotkin puts it in his monumental Lost Battalions, that they “would not be subject to discrimination or unfair treatment in the assignment of tasks or the making of promotions.”43 Of “all the major institutions that shaped the life of the nation— schools and universities, government, corporations—the wartime army may have been the one most willing to acknowledge and accept ethnic difference as an inescapable element of national identity.” Slotkin points out that even the Chinese “were integrated with White soldiers” in the 77th Battalion, which was “quite remarkable and flies in the face of the passions and legal proscriptions that isolated Asian-Americans.”44 The intelligence tests by no means excluded nor worked against ethnic Americans with university or high school educations, or with a certain sort of mental ability, or knowledge or test-taking ability that the tests selected for; in addition, again, the army went looking for talented, bilingual ethnic Americans to serve as officers in foreign-speaking companies.45 Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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And importantly, the premier group of Anglo American writers at issue here focused not on the aggregate intelligence test results, collated after the war, that seemed to “confirm” Anglo superiority, nor on the fact that, in terms of sheer numbers and at the highest ranks in terms of percentages as well, most World War I officers were still college-educated and Anglo, but naturally on their own personal frustrations with the American Army—an army that they also understood had rapidly changed its methods of selecting officers. For it should also be made clear that, though these authors’ reactions to this frustration were racist, they were not delusional. Indeed, their racist reactions were a frustrated response to unprecedented realities of equal opportunity afforded by the army to ethnic Americans (not to blacks). As Nancy Ford pointedly asks, “The question remains, why did the United States military treat immigrants in a rather enlightened fashion, yet at the same time preserve the ‘second-class’ status of black soldiers?”46 According to Slotkin, the War Department expressly stated that it would not solve the country’s “so-called race problem” between blacks and whites.47 In much more detail, historian Jennifer Keene has very recently shown that the military initially planned for a “fairly equitable” treatment of black soldiers that reflected the War Department’s 1917 commitment to “no racial discrimination in the National army”48—but that the plan and that commitment were undermined by political pressure, from Congress and other powerful civilian men. The initial plan bowed to white fears about blacks in just one particular: blacks would be distributed to training camps so that there was an “overwhelming white majority in each camp.” Keene goes on: Except for this concession to existing racial prejudices, the first mobilization plan accepted by the General Staff and approved by the Secretary of War on 31 July 1917 proposed a fairly equitable approach to absorbing the 75 540 black soldiers anticipated out of the first draft call of 687 000. The Chief of the War College Division acknowledged that his department had considered, then rejected, the possibility of assigning black soldiers solely to noncombatant positions in transportation, engineering, and bakery units or having black draftees serve primarily as cooks throughout the National army preparing meals for white troops. Instead, the War Department embraced an initial plan that would train 45 000 (60%) for combat and assign 30 000 (40%) to communication and labor units. “The proportion of drafted colored men to be thus utilized will be approximately equal to the proportion of drafted white 20

Introduction

men to be used for similar [noncombatant] service,” the planning report concluded to underscore the War Department’s commitment to “no racial discrimination in the National army.” Black regiments would “be an additional regiment to those included in the normal division,” suggesting that the US National army, like the French army, would include integrated battalions and divisions, although remain segregated on a regimental and company level. This early plan [would have given] black soldiers the opportunity to prove their valor and bravery on the field of battle and included at least a partial step toward organizational integration of the American armed forces. It was not, however, to be. Instead, during the war over 89% of black soldiers served in noncombatant roles, with a mere 45 000 out of the 400 000 who eventually served assigned to combat divisions. Black combatants, furthermore, served in either the all-black 92nd Division or in four black regiments assigned individually to French divisions, not as part of integrated battalions or divisions in the US army. What happened? Within a month of announcing this plan, the War Department began revising this partial commitment to racial equality. [Brigadier General Joseph E.] Kuhn [the Chief of the War College Division] admitted that the July plan “would not solve racial problems; the subject was treated on the basis of service requirements.” But the army’s pressing need for infantry troops no longer dominated discussions on mobilizing black troops. Instead, political pressure to maintain the status quo of civilian race relations beyond simply segregating black and white regiments began to affect General Staff views on how to incorporate blacks into the wartime army. The military knew from the “illustrious records” of “black units” in the Civil War and the Spanish American War that blacks made good soldiers; the military’s disparagements of blacks’ abilities as soldiers that came later in the war (beginning in the spring of 1918) were rationalizations for a policy decided on for political reasons.49 In a private letter to General Robert K. Evans written at the very start of U.S. involvement in the war, Assistant Chief of Staff Major General Tasker Bliss complimented blacks as soldiers and referred to the initial commitment to “universal training,” but acknowledged the pressures that were already developing to exclude them from the battlefield. “In talking with the southern members of Congress I find a very natural repugnance to the idea, due to their own local conditions. It is not that they disbelieve in more or less universal Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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training on principle. But they do not like the idea of looking forward five or six years by which time their entire male negro population will have been trained to arms. It is a serious problem. As you know, the negroes seem to take naturally to military service and at this moment at the snap of a finger we could recruit all of our colored regiments to war strength and raise plenty more.”50 In effect and fairly quickly, as Keene concludes, the army “unhesitatingly accepted the limitations which civilian communities placed on the role black soldiers could assume in the military.”51 But the military leadership simply could not afford, on top of this whiteblack conflict, a nativism that would provoke continual tension between Anglos and ethnic Americans, or widespread ethnic disaffection with the military. Whereas blacks made up about 15 percent of the draft,52 a significantly larger percentage still of men drafted for the war were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Eighteen percent of the military draft was made up of the foreign born53—and this fraction doesn’t count recruits who were the children of immigrants born in the United States. Because one third of the total population consisted of immigrants or those who had an immigrant parent, it is safe to assume that about 33 percent of the total draft was made up of immigrants and first-generation ethnic Americans, or what were called “hyphenatedAmericans.”54 Thus, together, African Americans, immigrants, and firstgeneration ethnic Americans made up about 50 percent of the nation’s draft. Keene has shown that “army authorities often lost control of white and black troops in racially charged situations”; the military was ultimately concerned that if completely “unchecked, racial conflict might paralyze the nation’s war campaign.”55 The army was not committed to social justice, but, likewise, it wasn’t committed to social injustice either: it was in the end pragmatic on the issue of egalitarianism. In short, the army was committed to winning the war, and to that end the army was willing to retain and reaffirm traditional discrimination against blacks as well as to undermine traditional ethnic and class privileges. This dramatic, war-driven shift to meritocracy and near equality of opportunity for ethnic Americans is a part of the story of World War I, and indeed of U.S. history, that has been all but lost, but this sudden, and short-lived, egalitarian moment is absolutely central to the twenties “mobilization literature” addressed here. As for the received wisdom on the twenties, we Americans now tend to characterize our decades, and the 1920s is the first American decade that has a distinct and recognizable identity in the popular imagination—the Roaring Twenties, 22

Introduction

the Jazz Age, the Lost Generation. The 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, and so on, all have familiar profiles in the public mind, but the 1910s? The first decade of the twentieth century—the oughts? (Academics regularly categorize these decades as the Progressive Era, but this term is not a popular one.) These decades do not call up ready-made associations for most Americans; though not exactly blanks—of course the World War I years have a popular identity— they are definitely not branded in the way all subsequent decades are. We tend unthinkingly to date our modern world from the decade of the twenties—“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” as Willa Cather poetically put it.56 Since the 1960s, historians have confirmed this assessment: one writes, “the Twenties were really the formative years of modern American history.”57 Another observes, “The Twenties have been alternately praised and blamed for everything and its opposite, but most historians hold, whether to praise or to condemn, that this decade launched the revolution in manners and morals through which we are still moving today.”58 In particular, this is supposed to be the first decade of female sexual freedom: the flapper, the new woman. And thus the term modernism for the literary period between the world wars,59 the era when American fiction is conventionally thought to come into its own. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner: these are the names that still refer to the supposedly quintessential American fiction the world over. But there are questionable things about this dating, and the branding of the 1920s. The labeling was initially done by 1920s fiction writers themselves and only later picked up on by literary and cultural critics and everybody else: like Cather, like Fitzgerald, whom Hemingway credited with coining the expression “the Jazz Age,”60 like Hemingway himself, who popularized the term The Lost Generation.61 Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were all tremendous selfmythologizers, and these 1920s novelists and others were self-conscious about their modernism; they attempted to “sell” the notion of the 1920s. Part of the received understanding of the 1920s is that this decade followed hard on World War I—and is neatly framed on the other end by the Depression.62 The Great War tends, in this capsule view of the 1920s, to function as a sort of contemporary sign or proof of the catastrophic failure of the project of Western civilization, a proof that effectively wiped away or made defunct traditional notions that had underpinned American life. As if individual thinkers and writers, as well as the popular imagination of the twenties, had a clean slate on which to think freshly; as if the tragedy of the war had opened up an epistemological gap in the order of things. In perhaps the most well known book on the subject, World War I and the American Novel (1967), Stanley Cooperman Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

23

writes, “ . . . total violence, machine civilization, futile terror, and mass death. . . . The impact of WWI was unparalleled; it shattered a cultural universe and in the United States shaped the literature of a generation.”63 Even more explicit about this epistemological opening, John W. Aldridge writes, “World War I had the effect of seeming to annihilate past history and the old styles of history. Hence, the generation that had fought in the war felt urgently the need to establish new premises, to redefine the terms of existence.” To take another prime example of this sort of claim, Wendy Martin can speak of “the gap of meaning that opened after World War I,” in which “the female role was undergoing a transformation in the popular consciousness from passive, private creature to avid individualist in pursuit of new experience.”64 But do we believe any longer in such a history of ideas, discourses, or epistemes? 65 Or do we rather believe that sometimes new, divergent, widespread, emergency practices as well as their unintended consequences—called up by national exigencies such as war—can subsequently effect a discursive change and a change in the popular mind? To put into question for a moment the common wisdom about the “new woman” of the 1920s, which has been so exhaustively written about and so successfully branded in images such as that of “the flapper”: Did the notion of a “new woman” of the 1920s emerge from a “gap of meaning” or “the . . . seeming . . . annihila[tion of] past history” created by the catastrophe of the war—and the unprecedented prosperity66 that followed it? Or was the image of the “new woman” of the 1920s related more practically to the woman of 1917 and 1918, the million to one and a half million women who did men’s factory or blue-collar or office work in their wartime absence (a generation and a war before such women were effectively branded as Rosie the Riveter),67 or the thousands who served as nurses in military hospitals or as volunteers for various aid organizations, such as the Red Cross or the YMCA,68 or—in perhaps the most arresting development, which no one planned and many worried about, because of the sheer numbers involved—the hundreds of thousands (and perhaps even millions) who became sexually involved with the millions of young male recruits uprooted from family, cut loose from parental and community supervision, and distributed to military camps?69 Was she sometimes in fact the very same woman, just a few years older in the 1920s? To these questions, the most famous American male novelists of the 1920s seem to answer with a resounding “yes”: their leading women in Gatsby, Sun, and Sound all get involved with soldiers early on in their sexual lives, and some of them also were serving as nurses in military hospitals or as Red Cross aides.70 Moreover, and most relevant to the other issue of the mobilization that was 24

Introduction

central for these writers—namely the issue of status or prerogative—these main female characters all get involved with soldiers, military training camp recruits, or military school graduates who are also ethnic Americans or outsiders. And, again, no doubt part of the reason this sort of connection has been missed or left mostly unexplored is that these three authors have already been branded in certain ways that shape our reading of their novels—a branding they themselves had a hand in. Fitzgerald is the “prophet of the Jazz Age” (to quote Hemingway), an era of prosperity, style, and excess;71 Hemingway is describing a postwar “lost generation” in which recreational sex and drinking have a particular existential or tragic valence; Faulkner’s novel is supposed to be about the decline of the old South and its aristocracy—in terms of wars, only about the Lost Cause and not about World War I as well. Moreover, as I have suggested, in their intense self-mythification, and specifically in their desire to hide their embarrassing mobilization wounds, these modernist writers have obfuscated or written aslant about their actual World War I experiences and observations in these novels set during and after the war. (To take the most blunt example, Faulkner doesn’t even mention the Great War, though Sound spans the years from around 1900 to 1928 and engages with this war in a number of striking ways, most obviously with the characters of feebleminded Benjy and returning soldier Dalton Ames—and other critics have made the connection between Ames and World War I72). But the other reasons these connections between the mobilization and “modernist” fiction have been missed—beyond the control of these authors and beyond the scope of this book—would take us further into the issue of the branding of entire decades, the issue of the ideological or political functioning of the particular “decade brands” we are all familiar with. Suffice it to say here that the popular identity of the Roaring Twenties, lodged between the “noble and unselfish effort” of World War I (“the war to end all wars”) and the “ominous” Crash of 1929, functions, at least in part, as a moral lesson against hedonism and excess. If the twenties “economy of abundance challenged the old Horatio Alger formula of thrift, hard work, and sobriety as the American way to success,” as one historian puts it,73 the Crash, and the Great Depression it triggered—so the lesson would go—punished Americans for their temporary loss of identity and returned them to sober realities and traditional morals. In this implicit narrative, World War II then functions as redemption for the mistakes of excess made after World War I in the twenties and punished in the thirties. (This particular narrative in which the twenties figure cannot, of course, be attributed to our modernist fiction writers.) Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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But more to the point here, we Americans do not tend to associate U.S. military efforts in the world wars with sudden revolutions in sexual mores and declines of traditional morality. In our national myth, then, as now, we keep these issues separate. (Vietnam is supposed to be our sole morally unclean war.) The Great War American military attempted to create and to “market” the doughboy as a clean-living agent of virtuous aggression, and, though the evidence shows the attempt at creating a chaste army was largely a failure, with 70 percent of soldiers violating the officially “prescribed continence while overseas,”74 we still tend, unwittingly, to believe the hype.75 The world broke apart in 18 months in 1917 and 1918, to revise Cather.76 And the few years’ difference here between the twenties and the late teens is not a matter of hairsplitting because it implies a significant challenge to some of our central national myths as well as to our usual ways of imagining how historical changes in attitudes and behaviors happen. The “sexual revolution” of the 1920s, which involved documented changes in mores (including contraceptive practices), as well as changes in the media images of women,77 was not the result of a “gap of meaning that opened after World War I.”78 Rather, it was kick-started during the war by the dramatic increase in pre- and extramarital sexual activity in America, due to the mobilization of around four million soldiers and the excitement and opportunities this collection and redistribution of men generated, as well as by the broadening of American sexual experience and knowledge in France, in liaisons between about one and a half million American soldiers and French prostitutes, and the importation not only of alternative sexual practices but of large numbers of condoms by the same returning American soldiers. In terms of alternative sexual practices, though today we unthinkingly imagine that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s invented oral sex, or made it popular—or that perhaps the Roaring Twenties did—the Great War was actually the moment when probably “hundreds of thousands” of American men were first introduced to the practice of fellatio and brought that sexual knowledge back from overseas. Not Paris or New York in the twenties, but France in 1917 and 1918 was the sexual watershed. Thus, though, when the war ended, many army authorities publicly celebrated the purity of American troops, some worried “that American boys had been corrupted by the French.” For example, Colonel George Walker of the military’s urological department devoted a chapter to “Sex Abnormalities (Perversion) in France” in his report on venereal disease among American troops. As Allan Brandt explained in his social history of venereal disease, “Walker sent investigators to cafes to interview prostitutes 26

Introduction

who reported, almost without exception, the American soldiers’ newly developed preference for the ‘French way,’ a euphemism for oral sex.” Colonel Walker wrote in his report, “When one thinks of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men who have returned to the United States with those new and degenerate ideas sapping their sources of self-respect and thereby lessening their powers of moral resistance, one indeed is justified in becoming alarmed.” Walker went on, in an apocalyptic tone, “Whatever the origin of the twisted impulse, it creates but one effect, a subtle state of demoralization that is far more dangerous to society as it is presently constructed, at least from the AngloSaxon viewpoint, than mere immorality could ever be.”79 No doubt part of Walker’s concern was that returning soldiers would of course share their “new and degenerate ideas” with American men—and women—who didn’t serve in the war: thus, Faulkner himself, who didn’t make it to France, can nonetheless have a soldier in his Soldiers’ Pay declare elliptically, “I learned things from French women” (195).80 Meanwhile, with respect to the issue of prophylactics, historians of birth control agree, as Linda Gordon bluntly puts it, that “condoms were introduced to the [American] public in large part by World War I soldiers.”81 The United States was the only Allied country not to supply its troops with condoms, but American doughboys, as Andrea Tone writes, found themselves “immersed in an international environment that promoted condom use. . . . Those who had no experience with condoms learned about them from their compatriots or from lady friends. Condoms were easily acquired in Europe and . . . were also sold ‘unofficially’ in many government-operated American canteens.” “U.S. soldiers and sailors had special incentive to use them. Chemical prophylaxis”—a treatment provided and indeed required by the army for use immediately after sexual contact—“could be painful and degrading, yet to forsake prophylaxis was to risk acquiring venereal disease, which was punishable by loss of pay and a court-martial. Many rank-and-file troops dealt with the problem by circumventing official policy and using condoms on the sly, a trend widely commented on by contemporaries. One medical officer attributed the dwindling number of visits to the prophylaxis station to men’s acquiring prophylactics ‘in the open market,’ where ‘some men purchase them by the dozen.’ ” Returning American soldiers were responsible for “infusing the civilian population with condom know-how at an unprecedented level,”82 and when they ran out of the condoms that they brought home, they went looking for them on the American market.83 Moreover, the military’s public wartime struggle with venereal disease led to the legalization of condoms in 1918, a legal breakthrough that finally overturned the Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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Comstock prohibition that had outlawed contraceptive devices as obscene since 1873.84 One major result of this importation by American soldiers of “French” sexual alternatives to intercourse, as well as birth-control knowledge and technology, along with this legalization of condoms that also followed from the wartime experience, was a significant decrease in the U.S birthrate in the 1920s—or a meaningful increase in Americans’ abilities to control birth through effective sexual contraception.85 Another important result of the availability and knowledge of condoms was, experts tend to think, an increase in premarital sex.86 In short, then, in rejecting the “official” sexual and military histories of America, it is not going too far to suggest that 1917—a moment Faulkner described in his first novel as “everybody excited and hysterical, like a big circus”87—might profitably be associated with 1967, “the Summer of Love”: in both of these years, separated by a half century, there was a war going on, and very much tied up with the war was a sudden and dramatic sexual outbreak. The magnitude of the sexual activity was such, both at home with “charity girls” and prostitutes and abroad with French women, and the consequential problem with venereal disease was so great that the military responded with radical, unprecedented measures aimed at sexual suppression: the shutting down of red-light districts, the incarceration of some 30,000 American women thought to present a sexual threat, and an official policy of sexual continence for soldiers in the AEF whose violation could result in court-martial. World War I, the war to make “the world . . . safe for democracy,”88 was the dramatic kickoff of the first large-scale American sexual revolution. Or, perhaps more precisely, World War I fantastically accelerated a sexual revolution that had already made a small beginning. Historians now tend to think that the sexual revolution traditionally associated with the 1920s actually began in the two decades before the war.89 As Linda Gordon, perhaps the foremost historian of birth control puts it, “For a long time historians associated this ‘sexual revolution’ with the flappers, jazz, and speakeasies of the 1920s and only more recently discovered that these cultural changes”—most obviously, the greater practice and acceptance of birth control and premarital sex— “began in earnest before World War I. The reason for the original chronological mistake was that greater sexual latitude became a mass commercial phenomenon in the 1920s, and new forms of sexual behavior were both ‘sold’ through the mass media as fashionable and used to sell other products through modern advertising.”90 (This original chronological error, then, like our conventional misunderstanding of the roots of the modernist texts at issue here, is partly a result of the twenties marketing itself as absolutely new or modern.) 28

Introduction

But I don’t quite agree with this historical revision. My sense is that these revisionist historians get it nearly right, but still underestimate the impact of World War I. In my view, the wartime experience was a watershed: without the Great War, no real sexual revolution. The sexual revolution brought to fruition in the twenties wasn’t inevitable; it didn’t grow organically out of the white and black bohemianism of Greenwich Village and Harlem.91 After all, there had been a utopian agitation for free love in the mid-nineteenth century that never blossomed into a popular movement. The “sexual revolution of sorts in the early twentieth century” was “not commercialized,” and it was “confined to small groups of urban sophisticates.”92 It might very well have remained that way for decades. Gordon asserts that “the war merely accelerated long-term tendencies,”93 but this doesn’t seem to me to put it nearly strongly enough. By collecting millions of American men and redistributing them by the thousands across the Eastern half of the country in military camps, and by large-scale American male contact with European sexual mores, the war transformed a small and marginal tendency into a mainstream movement, and the advertising of the twenties—that sold “sex” and used “sex” to sell—is an index of that mainstreaming. Wars with national drafts, including World War I, have been mechanisms for rapid, large-scale social change in American history. First of all, the stakes of winning are so high that the cause of victory will trump almost any tradition— of individual rights as well as class and ethnic prerogatives—that the military sees an obstacle. In addition, such wars subject large numbers of Americans to national and international influences, ideas, and practices that are by their nature nonparochial.

Personal Context: Frustrated Military Ambitions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner Again, this postwar genre and specifically these 1920s novels are not so much postcombat as postmobilization: the Anglo American male fictional characters are not so much shell-shocked94 as culture-shocked. And the culture shock I’m referring to is not simply or even principally that of the “new woman,” of female independence and sexual activeness that begins on a large scale in the war years and continues into the twenties. Rather, it is that of the military’s unprecedented meritocracy and of this female sexual activeness in the context of that sudden meritocratic surge. In the World War I era when manhood was Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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profoundly tied to military service, these Anglo male characters have been humiliated or emasculated in their less than glorious assignment by the army, as is Jake in his posting to “a joke front”(31)95 in Sun, or, in the case of the “idiot” Benjy in Sound, in his implicit rejection by the army. Or these Anglo male characters have been humiliated or emasculated in competition over women with formidable and accomplished returning soldiers who are ethnic Americans (Daisy’s husband Tom with Gatsby) or outsiders (Caddy’s brother Quentin with Dalton Ames in Faulkner’s novel) or in competition over women with ethnic Americans who have passed through the military training apparatus (Jake and Brett’s fiancé Mike with Robert Cohn in Hemingway’s book). Their humiliation is not a result of their encounter with trench warfare or grinding military discipline, but as a result of their encounter with the newly meritocratic American Army (or an equally non-race-conscious military education establishment)—and also, importantly, with women who basically follow the military’s lead in its valuing of men. In response to their encounters with a newly (and mostly) meritocratic U.S. military, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald tended to create in their fictions ethnic characters favored by the army or the military school establishment, as well as Anglo characters who want such ethnic Americans put back in their old place, a subordinate place. Meanwhile, the ethnic Americans are portrayed by the authors and seen by the Anglo narrators as handicapped by an overromanticization of Anglo women that may be socioeconomic but is still portrayed as childish—as if they have taken too literally the chivalric and hygienic propaganda of the military training camps. Perhaps it is not surprising to find, more generally, in these texts of these three American writers only one of whom saw combat and not as a soldier, a culture shock based on the encounter with the new American Army—rather than a shell shock and a disillusionment with modern war that leads to a jaundiced skepticism about the old order, for its having sent men into battle with archaic notions of honor and heroism. This latter scenario may very well describe the experiences and texts of the British war writers, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who had no trouble becoming combat soldiers and in fact officers, and saw protracted trench warfare, grotesque mutilation, and widespread death.96 But the case with these three famous American writers is different: written instead by wannabe soldiers, their works retained a certain enthusiasm for war and did not introduce the American reading public to a horrified recoil from modernized combat, which the texts of their British counterparts expressed. 30

Introduction

To be sure, Hemingway shares with the British writers some skepticism about archaic, sentimental notions of martial valor, which, to his dismay, were promoted in the war works of Cather and Edith Wharton97; in his perhaps most renowned pronouncement about World War I, from A Farewell to Arms, he rejects “the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. . . . There were many words that you could not stand to hear, and finally only the names of places had dignity” (133). But Hemingway, along with Fitzgerald and Faulkner—and in contrast to their British counterparts as well to other male American “war writers” of the era, such as Dos Passos and Cummings98— were not disillusioned with or horrified by modern war or sharply critical of World War I. Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick “enjoyed” the war “thoroughly” (7)99; Hemingway’s gravely injured narrator Jake surprisingly has fond memories of his service in the war. Likewise, Hemingway’s narrator of A Farewell to Arms accepts the verdict of the priest who tells him, “you don’t mind [the war]”; in fact, “you are nearer the . . . people who would make war” (55–56). These authors’ problems are not with industrial-age warfare or with “real” heroism and courage, but with a suddenly meritocratic military, which indulges in “empty” heroic rhetoric. Moreover, Hemingway, as well as Fitzgerald, associates this vapid, archaic romanticism not only with the military authority, but also with the ethnic Americans whom they see as favored by the military’s new meritocracy. In short, the American modernist prose of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, unlike the British war writing, is not particularly antiwar. It may be antimilitary, but in certain obvious ways, perhaps most clearly with Hemingway, it idealizes war and courage in battle, what Hemingway famously called “grace under pressure.” Anyone who has read Hemingway feels that, as his biographer Carlos Baker simply put it, Hemingway “gloried in his proximity to the field of battle.”100 It is important to underline that what links all of the most well-known American “war writers,” including Dos Passos and Cummings—and distinguishes them from their British and European counterparts—is that none of them were in fact combat soldiers.101 And the point is not only that these American war writers saw little or no combat action; it is that they were all concerned, to a large extent—and this goes for Dos Passos and Cummings too, notwithstanding their criticism of the war and their lack of ethnic scapegoating—with their trivial status vis-à-vis the military and the war effort. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, as well as Dos Passos and Cummings, were all traumatized by the experience of the army, not that of the battlefield—they were traumatized by not having made it to the battlefield, or not having made it to the right battlefield in Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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the right capacity. Whereas Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Cummings are all to a significant extent preoccupied in their fiction with this issue of their marginal status, and thus are more aptly described as postmobilization than postwar writers, British and European war writers, who as soldiers obviously didn’t have this issue or anxiety, tend to be focused instead on the problems of dying, being maimed, seeing others killed and horribly wounded, and killing. And the difference between British and American “war writing”102 has in turn everything to do with the different experiences of British and American mobilization. The British did not use the American methods of selecting officers; in fact, the American military authorities developed their careful methods of selection partly in response to what they saw as a catastrophic British haphazardness in sending men potentially qualified as officers or technical experts to the front lines. Perhaps the wartime culture shock of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner is especially unsurprising given the singular U.S. mobilization for the war, which was unmatched in its scope and unprecedented in its egalitarian techniques of selecting officers, its propaganda about male chastity, its programs of social hygiene and athletic training for men, and its crackdown on women thought to be involved in sexual vice. It was first of all unprecedented for its “scientific” and meritocratic classifying of nearly three and a half million soldiers, its intelligence testing of nearly two million (beginning with an identification of the mentally deficient that established the feebleminded in the national consciousness), and its transfer of almost a million men largely into technical units that required expertise. Moreover, never before had an American military mobilization involved the aggressive sexual policing of tens of thousands of women in and around the military training camps in the interest of moral rectitude and the prevention of the spread of venereal disease, or included an attempt to educate soldiers in sexual hygiene (with a previously unparalleled recourse to frank language), and to promote male abstinence and chivalry toward women. We are all familiar with the relocation of approximately 112,000 Japanese Americans during World War II; we are less familiar with the detention of some 30,000 women and girls during World War I and just after who were considered a threat to the medical and moral hygiene of male soldiers.103 Hemingway borrowed the notion of a World War I “lost generation” from a Parisian car mechanic by way of Gertrude Stein and apparently didn’t think much of the concept.104 And, indeed, if we interrogate these American novels, we might want to speak instead of a “lust generation”—if we are talking about 32

Introduction

the women and men of 1917–1918, and the new image of women during the war and after. Or, if we are talking about Anglo American writers who came of age during the war, we might instead want to speak of a “generation that lost out,” or felt it was losing out, in terms of the quest for status and women, to Americanborn ethnic Americans. These American novelists, then, were affected more by the mobilization than by the combat, arguably like the nation was in the long run: it certainly makes more sense to speak of lost generations when referring to European combatant nations. France lost more than 1,300,000 men, Russia lost around 1,700,000, approximately the number the U.S. military gave intelligence tests to; 2.1 million American soldiers were sent overseas out of a mobilized army of 4.5 million; 1.1 million were involved in combat, and American fatalities were around 122,000.105 And again, if this American generation of writers was lost in the sense meant by Stein’s car mechanic—alienated from traditional cultural values—it was not because of the horrors of war but because of the shock of mobilization: the “scientific” and partially egalitarian selection of officers was experienced as a drastic and sudden shift away from traditional ethnic, educational, and family elitism. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, male novelists old enough or nearly old enough to serve in World War I—and deeply interested in serving (all three in fact imagined being aviators,106 the elite or stars of the war)—were all frustrated in one way or another in their attempts to join the combat, or what American wartime posters sometimes referred to as the “Big Game,” what was also at the time nicknamed the “Big Show,” and what Fitzgerald called “the big time.”107 Fitzgerald experienced the mobilization but was never shipped over to the front, and in his personal essay, “The Crack-Up” (1936), he discussed this frustration “at not getting overseas during the war” as one of the “juvenile regrets” that troubled him in the twenties; that same year, he wrote a short story called “ ‘I Didn’t Get Over,’ ”108 and, along similar lines, a 1920 short story declares of a man who, like Fitzgerald, never sees action: “It was not so bad—except that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him.”109 Other such symbols that eluded Fitzgerald were rank, command, and respect of his fellows. At Camp Leavenworth, he was remembered as “the world’s worst second lieutenant.”110 Though he did qualify for an infantry commission and was eventually promoted to first lieutenant, he was never given the platoon he was supposed to receive at Camp Zachary Taylor: there, “his superior officers felt he couldn’t be Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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entrusted with a command.” At Camp Sheridan, where he finally made first lieutenant, his fellow officers mocked him and pulled pranks on him.111 Fitzgerald registered his humiliations in the army in works other than Gatsby. As one of Fitzgerald’s biographers put it, “ ‘I Didn’t Get Over’ ” is “the story of Captain Hibbing, who, on being snubbed during a training exercise by an officer from his own college named Abe Danzer, loses his head and asserts his authority by forcing the troops to cross a river in a leaky ferry which sinks and drowns a number of them.”112 And in Fitzgerald’s novel that precedes Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, the Anglo main character’s humiliation in the army is drastic: he never even makes it to officer status; after working his way up from private to corporal to sergeant, he commits an offense, is apprehended by the military police, confined to camp, and court-martialed. Meanwhile, Hemingway and Faulkner were implicitly or explicitly rejected for failing to meet the military’s physical standards. Faulkner, too young to be drafted in the initial draft, “sought a commission in the air corps” but was too small.113 He managed to join the Canadian air force, but never made it to Europe, and, after the war, pretended that he was an officer and his plane had been shot down in France, going so far as to walk with a limp and to sport an officer’s uniform of his own creation.114 Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, features a character that obsessively bemoans the fact that the war ended before he finished his flight training and so never made it to the war. Only Hemingway saw action, but as a Red Cross ambulance driver on what his narrator Jake called “a joke front” and what the narrator of A Farewell to Arms agreed was “a silly front” (19), the Italian one. (He also was too young to be drafted at the start of the war, and a bad eye made it impossible for him to join the air corps.) And in addition to being embarrassed about the combat zone to which he was assigned, Hemingway was also, apparently, uncomfortable with his identification with the Red Cross, which in the public mind came to be associated with women and men afraid of combat service: as one of his biographers put it, the “Red Cross . . . became an embarrassment that he simply eradicated” from the story of his life. Like Faulkner, who fabricated his own uniform, Hemingway, along with some other Red Cross drivers, bought in Milan “fitted uniforms made to order” that resembled those worn by American soldiers. Indeed, the dust jacket of the Scribner’s edition of A Farewell to Arms falsely asserted that Hemingway “served as an ambulance driver and infantry man with the Italian army.”115 And, despite its reputation for delivering up “hard” truths of combat, A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel that records the narrator’s unromantic 34

Introduction

perceptions of death and wounding in war; it is also a novel in many ways focused on injury and even death caused by mobilization. Near the end of the novel, in a well-known climactic passage, the narrator bemoans the fact that his love, Catherine, is going to die and that “You died . . . [without knowing] what it was about.” Significantly, when he goes on to enumerate the ways that “you died”—which are all in and around war though Catherine is dying in childbirth—they do not include being killed by the enemy. “They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo [who dies by friendly fire]. Or gave you syphilis like Rinaldi.” The “they” here seems to be one’s own army, obviously in the first two cases, but perhaps in the third case as well (by its collection of large numbers of men together, mobilization did in fact spread venereal disease). For the narrator here, the “real” enemy is surprisingly not the enemy army, but one’s own. (Catherine’s death, in fact, though seemingly not a mobilization death, may implicitly be chalked up in part to the narrator’s need to flee Italy to avoid being “caught . . . off base” [232].) In addition, A Farewell to Arms devotes some space to expressing the narrator’s mobilization wounds, most obviously his jealousies of the ethnic American war “hero” (91) with which I began. In the same vein, it is a little observed but interesting fact that the narrator famously declares that he “had made a separate peace”—not when he first deserts to avoid execution by the military police, but just after the “scornful” looks of a group of “aviators” (who take him for a “civilian” slacker) fail to make him “feel insulted.” “In the old days,” the narrator comments, “I would have insulted them and picked a fight” (173). The peace the narrator comes to in this climactic scene is not simply about leaving the war; it is also about his—and no doubt the author’s—being able to leave behind the issue of feeling undervalued and thus insulted by the army that excluded him from its elite. Indeed, Hemingway’s fixation on his underutilization by the military may shed light on his much-debated decision to choose as his climax to this war novel the retreat from Caporetto, a portion of World War I that preceded his posting in Italy. (In this part of the novel, the narrator, Frederic Henry, is ultimately captured by the military police, who are summarily executing officers who have deserted or lost the men in their charge. Henry barely avoids death by escaping.) My contention would be that Hemingway finds in writing about the retreat he never saw an opportunity to express and exorcise his anger at the military for undervaluing him, in a way that is not embarrassing. So, Hemingway’s anger at the American Army for delegating him to a minor, lowly role on Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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a “silly front” becomes Henry’s irritation with the Italian Army for failing to appreciate his dedicated service as an officer and instead attempting to execute him. Thus in fiction, Henry, important enough to nearly get executed, gets to reject the Italian military—“I was through. . . . [I]t was not my show anymore” (167)—and such a turning of the tables would be cathartic for Hemingway, who in reality, had an unimportant position and felt rejected perhaps by both armies. Another World War I American writer and Red Cross ambulance driver, John Dos Passos, expressly articulates this feeling of being underutilized by the army in his Three Soldiers, in a discussion between two Anglo characters: one “rejected from the army” because of “a weak heart,” says to the other, a dissatisfied private, “one of the nameless marching throng,” “do you mean that you think you had abilities which would have been worth more to your country in another position? . . . I have many friends who felt that.”116 But this is to put the experience of rejection lightly, at a remove. At a moment when the failure to make it into the army or into combat raised questions about a man’s very masculinity, the misery of that experience becomes almost unspeakable, nearly too humiliating to address directly. Fitzgerald and Faulkner represent the male hysteria and insecurity with women, the near mental breakdown, this experience engenders, in The Beautiful and Damned and Soldiers’ Pay, respectively, as we shall see. But perhaps Katherine Anne Porter, who as a woman is spared the possibility of this dreaded experience but can observe it in men—as well as perceive the sense of humiliation and defensiveness it generates in their attitudes to women—is better situated to describe it succinctly and without agitation in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939). Of one of “the rejected men,” a character with a bad lung, she has her female protagonist Miranda observe, “All the rejected men talked like that. . . . War was the one thing they wanted, now they couldn’t have it. Maybe they had wanted badly to go, some of them. All of them had a sidelong eye for the women they talked with about it, a guarded resentment which said, ‘Don’t pin a white feather on me, you bloodthirsty female. I’ve offered my meat to the crows and they won’t have it’ ” (216).117 The officer protagonist in the novella says quite simply, “in a matter-of-fact voice,” of his impending service overseas, “If I didn’t go . . . , I couldn’t look myself in the face” (224). Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were not literally lost in the war, or figuratively as a result of it; they “lost out” in the meritocratic competition to be significant players in the “Big Game.” And, in short, these authors were doubly humiliated: they felt emasculated as a result of not having had the (full) 36

Introduction

encounter with modern trench warfare and the opportunity for heroism they desired; they also felt inadequate about not having achieved important positions in the military. Even Hemingway, who famously was in fact wounded in a trench by an Austrian projectile, had been on a Red Cross errand, “carrying a supply of cigarettes, chocolate, and postcards for the [Italian] soldiers”; later in life, he described his military position as “a very sort of minor camp follower.”118 He was hit by shrapnel, collapsed on the spot, could not move under his own power, and had to be carried by stretcher bearers. His wounding, then, was not exactly in a heroic mode as a combat soldier. That the nonheroic nature of his business in the trenches and his injury bothered Hemingway can be deduced from the fact that he fabricated a heroic version of his wounding, which he told to friends and wrote home in a letter (whose details found their way into the local Oak Park, Illinois, paper and also fooled some of his later critics and biographers119). In Hemingway’s tale of invented heroics, he was both a leader of men and miraculously strong; he was also modest about the miracle he imagined having pulled off: The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn’t hurt a bit at the time, only my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on (hot water) and my knee cap was acting queer. The machine gun bullet just felt like a sharp smack on the leg with an icy snow ball. However it spilled me. But I got up again and got my wounded into of the dugout. I kind of collapsed at the dugout. . . . They couldn’t figure out how I had walked a hundred and fifty yards with such a load [that is, carrying other wounded men], with both knees shot thru and my right shoe punctured in two big places; also over two hundred flesh wounds. “Oh,” says I, in Italian, “my captain, it is of nothing. In America they all do it. It is thought well not to allow the enemy to perceive that they have captured our goats.”120 The answer to the conundrum of “how” Hemingway did it was that he made up not only the carrying of his men while gravely injured: that he had men under his command was also a fiction. It has long been the critical vogue to see Hemingway’s postwar fiction in particular as elegiac in response to the slaughter of World War I. Certainly this has been the prevailing view since the publication of Cooperman’s World War I and the American Novel in 1967; most recently, Michael Szalay invokes Eric Auerbach’s 1953 pronouncement that much post–World War I Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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literature is “pregnant with disaster” and pervaded by “universal doom,” as he claims that “Hemingway . . . was one of the many to respond, numb and stricken, almost beyond language, to the unprecedented carnage of the First World War.”121 In fact, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, like the army they wanted so much to join, romanticize courage in battle; they, too, in fact have an archaic sense of war and manliness—as this fabricated war story of Hemingway’s demonstrates—their differences with the military on this account are a matter of hairsplitting,122 due to resentment. And they sometimes project this romanticization onto the ethnic Americans in their texts (Faulkner, with greater self-understanding or honesty, reserves it for an alter ego, Quentin). It is precisely because these authors believe so deeply in martial courage—and are not disillusioned in these beliefs by an experience of the slaughter of trench warfare because they basically miss out on the full horror of this experience—that they are so traumatized by their being passed over by the military and so angry with it. If their tone is elegiac, it is not because they are “numb and stricken” on account of the millions dead, but because they are “numb and stricken” on their own accounts, and mourning for a disappearing order, an Anglo elitism that they, along with guardians of privilege in other fields, are attempting in the twenties to bolster up. And because they had a beef, not with war or with soldiering, but with the American military authority and its processes of selection that slighted them, it is not surprising that they in turn also rejected the military’s campaign of moral hygiene, its promotion of the chaste “new man,” and its attack on female promiscuity. (There is no question that all three of these authors knew about the army’s programs and policies about male chastity and female promiscuity. Fitzgerald would have directly received the propaganda in the army training camps; Hemingway would have gotten inculcated because of his service in the Red Cross, and Faulkner, who was the most remote from the American military and its civilian partners, makes reference, in Soldiers’ Pay, to the army’s policy of punishing venereal infection with court martial.123) These authors’ personal frustrations with the army—and their concomitant disdain for its sexual policing—may explain their relatively understanding portraits of promiscuous women in these 1920s novels (relatively sympathetic for these authors, especially Hemingway and Faulkner, given female characterizations in later works that have been reasonably described as misogynist124). This personal frustration with the military also helps explain their fairly sardonic portraits of romantic men, ethnic or not—Gatsby, Robert Cohn, Quentin Compson—for their adoption or reflection of the American Army’s 38

Introduction

World War I redefinitions of manhood, which, though new, were also in some obvious ways a throwback to feudal, chivalric notions of soldiery or knighthood. In these novels, the image of the tough, manly soldier is in no way a casualty of World War I—and should not be confused with a rejection of notions of honor, glory, and sacrifice as antique and hollow (again, famously articulated in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms). All of these novels, rather, distinguish and dramatize a tension between true, tested fighters who are killers, on the one hand, and, on the other, wannabe chivalrous knights who have derived their ideas from military training or literary romance or family legend and nourish fantasies of honor and female rescue. Thus in Sun Romero the bullfighter squares off with Robert Cohn, with his military prep school training; Faulkner’s returning soldier Dalton Ames dominates Quentin, who identifies in his mind with forefather generals; and Gatsby is unable to contain and hide his internal contradiction between cold-blooded soldier-criminal and softhearted romantic lover. And, in much the same way as these 1920s novels are shaped less by combat than by wartime mobilization, they participate less in the wartime and postwar hysteria about keeping out of the country “dangerous” immigrants (who may be socialists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, German sympathizers, or simply members of “lower races” who will drag down the aggregate national intelligence and character) and participate more in the postwar backlash against a rising meritocracy that the wartime mobilization had fantastically accelerated, at least momentarily. They are not, like many nativists and immigration restrictionists with a national agenda, obsessed with racially pure families and alarmed by the prospect of widespread “mixed breeding”; rather, they are more practically and personally concerned with reestablishing what are for them disappearing or lost Anglo prerogatives in regard to the possession of wealth, status, and women.125 Indeed, Fitzgerald can mock the rumor mongering about Gatsby’s being a German spy and make fun of Tom Buchanan’s fevered appeals to racial purity in marriage; through Tom, he can also show his disdain for the apocalyptic and racist evolutionary writings of pseudoscientist Lothrop Stoddard, which Tom is reading and which worried about the disappearance, through uncontrolled breeding, of Anglo or Nordic dominance. Hemingway can likewise mock the glibness of the Freudian revolution in thinking in his novel (116), and, in a mockery of thinkers like Madison Grant, who had the same concerns as Stoddard and titled his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, Hemingway can subtitle his 1926 parody of Sherwood Anderson “The Passing of a Great Race.” Which is not to say that Fitzgerald and Hemingway weren’t racist and sexist; Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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it is merely to say that they were more stylishly and sophisticatedly racist and sexist than the pulp novelists and pseudo social scientists of the era, as well as the congressmen who called for immigrant restriction before the “Great Race” was irreversibly corrupted or swamped. Specifically, these modernist novelists were not afraid of doomsday scenarios in which primitive “foreigners” and devolved, fiendish women teamed up to defeat the Anglo race,126 but rather of the recent wartime and immediate, gritty realities of engaging in a competition with ethnic Americans for women and money and status—a competition they seemed to be losing. Marcus Klein suggested in 1981 in Foreigners—getting it not quite right—that these modernists were afraid of losing privilege based on birth: “The Mongols were at the gates.”127 Actually, it seems to me that Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner had already, in their minds, experienced that loss of privilege, and not in some abstract way; “the Mongols” were already well inside the gates, as far as they were concerned: in officers’ uniforms, in the Ivy League, on Wall Street, in Anglo women’s beds. And, for these writers, it was the Great War mobilization, whose rating and distribution of men had all frustrated them personally, that had changed the order of things. As Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald’s autobiographical hero, puts it in This Side of Paradise (1920), “the war . . . certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation.”128 The main concern in these 1920s novels is not the ultimate fear for the nation or the “race,” the fear that ethnic Americans will soon overwhelm the Anglo population in terms of sheer numbers or penetrate the Anglo family and bloodline through unreliable Anglo new women of the 1920s.129 The driving issue in these novels is the more pressing and personal resentment that ethnic Americans are already laying claim to modern American society’s prizes (as Anglo males imagine them), as a result of an ascendant meritocracy accelerated by the wartime mobilization: access to its most beautiful and pedigreed Anglo women (either for marriage and family or simply for sexual relations), its high-ranking military positions, its best universities, its best professional jobs, and its wealth. In a foreword to Sun that was never published, Hemingway wrote, “This is not a question of what kind of mothers will flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us. This is about something that is already finished. For whatever is going to happen to the generation of which I am a part has already happened.”130 As far as I am concerned, that “something” that “has already happened” is the Great War mobilization—the mostly meritocratic assignment of recruits to positions and ranks in the military, including the exclusion of the mentally and physically unfit and the promotion of many ethnic Americans. 40

Introduction

This resentment about ascendant ethnic Americans explains why one of the Big Three Ivy League university figures in each of the 1920s novels here, why Jewish American Robert Cohn has attended Princeton in Sun and apparently German American Gatsby has attended Oxford, why all three of these 1920s novels are so unusually preoccupied with financial figures and details,131 and why Gatsby, Cohn in Sun, and the “eastern jews” involved in the stock market in Sound are rich but do not work or do not do “honest work” to earn their wealth. These 1920s novels of Hemingway and Faulkner do not echo the overt call for legislation to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe. With the possible exception of Gatsby, they are not part of the effort to stop the “ethnic hordes” at the gates of Ellis Island, which, by the 1925 composition of Sun, had already been achieved (in the restriction acts of 1921 and 1924).132 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton figure in Sound, Gatsby, and Sun, respectively (and Anglo Tom Buchanan is flabbergasted to learn that Gatsby, born Gatz, who for Tom is not of the “Nordic race” [24], has spent time at Oxford), because these novels mimic the largely covert, postwar effort to exclude ethnic Americans from colleges, universities, and medical schools in the form of ethnic and specifically Jewish quotas—which were gaining steam throughout the 1920s. (This anti-Semitic and racist reaction at American universities and medical schools is also reflected in Barnes’s Nightwood, in which Irish American and Catholic Matthew O’Connor is a European medical student.) These postmobilization, racist promiscuity novels enact and participate in the backlash against the ascendancy of already Americanized ethnic Americans that would not be solved simply by restricting future immigration and that was brought into sharp focus during the war. Again, it is not that these male Anglo authors are not writing in shocked reaction to the charity girls of the Great War and the new women of the 1920s as well; it is rather that the gender shock is partly subordinated to the ethnic one, especially because these writers want to distance themselves from the prudery of a military authority they also associate with “reckless” ethnic promotion and Anglo demotion. Because the military that has failed to select these authors for important service is also promoting chastity, they provisionally support or tolerate female promiscuity. Ethnic scapegoating, and particularly anti-Semitism, most dramatically with Hemingway and Faulkner but still to some degree with Fitzgerald, spares women the brunt of the blame that these authors are dishing out for the “fallenness” of their once elitist, aristocratic worlds. But, as World War I recedes with the 1930s, and as non-Anglo male writers take up the genre, the attack more squarely targets women. And when anti-Semitism becomes untenable after the Holocaust Rethinking Post–World War I Classics

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is revealed toward the end of World War II, Faulkner himself revises his novel in an appendix that strikingly demonizes his once beloved promiscuous heroine Caddy; the promiscuous female is once again, as in the vamp story that became popular in the 1910s,133 a fiend. After a second introductory chapter concerned mostly with methodology, the following parts and chapters take up, in turn and basically in chronological order, the twenties and thirties novels at issue, developing the arguments laid out here and expanding on various portions of the history of the mobilization for the Great War as they become relevant in the discussion of the targeted features of the texts. Chapter 3 is devoted to Gatsby, the army’s new personnel methods, the military’s new man, and the charity girl, and includes a major historical revision of the conventional account of the intelligence testing program during World War I; chapter 4 takes up Sun, the military’s programs of athletics and social hygiene, American soldiers’ sexual experiences abroad, and postwar Jewish quotas; and chapter 5 discusses Sound (as it was published in 1929), the military’s problem with the feebleminded, the postwar use of intelligence test results, and the postmobilization novel’s distinctive “erotic triangle.” Chapter 6 addresses the particular motifs of incest, impotence, and mental disability in the twenties novels as devices by which Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner obfuscated and transformed their difficult experiences with the military into stories of impossible and tragic love. Chapter 7 addresses The Day of the Locust, Nightwood, Tropic of Cancer (1930s texts that both make use of and subvert the mobilization themes of the twenties novels), and the military’s attempt to control the spread of venereal disease, along with its consequent strategy of unprecedented frankness about sexuality. Chapter 8 focuses on Faulkner’s revision of Caddy in his Compson Appendix of 1946, the revelation of the Holocaust, and the image of a defeated France. Chapter 9 is a brief Afterword that identifies William Burroughs’s post–World War II novel, Junky (1953), as a new brand of mobilization novel. Because all of these chapters devoted to a particular text or set of texts depend on certain basic aspects of the historical context, which are delineated once, and not rehearsed over and over again, chapters 3 and 4 bear by far the greatest burden of this historical reconstruction and are thus much longer than the subsequent chapters; and, for the same reason, chapter 3 is a good deal longer than chapter 4. (This is not at all to imply that the argument being made in this study applies more fully, in particular, to Fitzgerald than to Hemingway.) The necessity of establishing the unfamiliar or forgotten 42

Introduction

historical context, as well as revising received ideas on this context, also means, then, that this literary-historical study is, in its discussion and procedure, unusually cumulative for a book that essentially treats a text or set of texts in each chapter. Although chapter 2 develops aspects of the argument, especially about the mobilization and modernist style, this continuation of the introductory section is the most scholarly and specialized portion of the book; it mostly takes issue with previous scholarship on modernism and politics, especially in terms of methodological approaches. The first section, called “Historiography: Against the History of Ideas or Discourses,” addresses in particular Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America, an important and relevant recent study that this book builds on and takes issue with; it critiques the historiography of Michaels’s study and indeed of much New Historicism—in essence, a history of master discourses that involves an aversion to biography—while it distinguishes the literary-historical method employed here. The second section of chapter 2, a continuation of the methodological discussion, titled “The Literary Object: Modernist Style and Plot,” challenges conventional assumptions about modernism, discusses the “promiscuity plot” that the modernist fiction at issue shares, criticizes analyses of modernist style that treat style apart from plot and character, and begins to offer an alternative, integrated approach to and understanding of some modernist stylistic qualities.

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Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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Historiography: Against the History of Ideas or Discourses

W

alter Michaels’s Our America (1995) was a major, groundbreaking study on the subject of ethnicity, gender, and American literary modernism. If I single out and address Michaels’s argument in some detail here, it is not because it is the only such study of the last 15 years but rather for the following reasons. First, Michaels specifically addresses this constellation of issues in the works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner that I am focusing on.1 Second, my book is indebted to Michaels’s breakthrough recognition of repeating elements of plot and character in modernist fiction and, more particularly again, in the famous 1920s novels of these three authors—and to my knowledge, no study has adequately challenged Michaels’s explanation for these repeating elements, in the form of a compelling alternative account. It is precisely in accounting for these common narrative elements that I part company with Michaels, and I end up disagreeing with Michaels because my approach is different from his study of “discourses.” And this difference in approach is my third reason for addressing Michaels’s study here: by differentiating my methodology from Michaels’s “history of discourses” approach—which is, in important ways, typical of New Historicist criticism, whether or not that criticism explicitly uses the term discourse as Michaels’s study does—I am able to articulate what I see as the methodological problem with most studies that address the politics of modernism and, even more generally, with much New Historicist study, as well as to articulate my method by contrast.2 In explaining repeating motifs in key modernist texts, such as male impotence, incest, female promiscuity, and the exclusion of an ethnic other, Michaels has rightfully drawn attention away from the experience of the catastrophe of modern war (he has focused instead on postwar social and intellectual developments). But in so doing, he has missed the central role of the wartime mobilization in shaping the landmark modernist texts at issue here. Michaels hardly addresses the shock of the U.S. military’s Great War mobilization, the glimpse it provided of the very real prospect of individual ethnic ascendance, and the problems of sexual mores and masculine identity it attempted to control. As a result of missing this context for the texts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, his analysis falters. And he misses this context because of a long-standing reflex in modernist studies to focus ultimately on style, which strikes me as misguided, as well as a popular New Historical approach whose historiography seems to me deeply flawed, predicated as it is on an aversion to author biography (supposedly 46

Introduction

theorized with the notion of “the death of the author”3), and on the deployment of a notion of a master discourse that is supposed to shape the texts of a given historical period, a notion akin to that of the episteme in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966)—and in fact ultimately derived from it.4 Michaels’s book is provocative and very often persuasive, but there is a serious problem with one of his major arguments, at least as it pertains to the 1920s texts at issue here. In his discussion of the new 1920s nativism and its reflection or expression in modernist fiction, Michaels writes that for modernist nativists, “the comparative sterility of Nordics constituted both a problem—they were committing ‘racial suicide’—and a solution—their low birthrate testified to the irreducibility of their difference from non-Nordics” (12). According to Michaels, this nativist problem and solution shaped modernist texts, including Gatsby, Sun, and Sound, accounting for their repeating elements of Anglo male impotence, female promiscuity, incest, and the exclusion of ethnic Americans. To break down into its separate parts this nativist concern and ideology that Michaels sees reflected in modernist fiction and to elaborate slightly: 1. “War tends to ‘induce sterility,’ ” the nativist Stoddard writes. “The Great War, according to Stoddard, was a breeding disaster for the white race”—because whites died in the war in great numbers and so weren’t able to reproduce, whereas ethnic Americans supposedly 5 stayed home or showed less fighting spirit or took fewer chances on the battlefield in order to survive (29).6 We thus find in modernist texts, according to Michaels, representations that confirm this concern about breeding, in particular with regard to the effect of World War I. 2. But not reproducing proves Anglo singularity. As Michaels puts it, “Incest saves the family from marriage”—or an incest substitute or incest equivalent such as impotence does the same thing—and preventing marriage can prevent children, and, again, nonreproduction is a sign of Anglo difference (42). The “refusal of procreation is the mark of racial purity”; “impotence itself . . . figures as a technology for producing purity” (96). Thus we find in modernist texts themes of incest and impotence—as ways of asserting an ideology of Anglo purity. The practical problem with this important argument of Michaels’s that is supposed to elucidate Gatsby, Sun, and Sound (as well as other texts) is that it doesn’t apply to Gatsby. Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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Granted, the situation in Sun seems to follow nicely from this “white breeding-disaster/mark-of-distinction” idea: the war has left Jake sterile—a breeding disaster and a mark of purity—meanwhile, Cohn didn’t fight in the war and has three children. But what of Gatsby and Sound, other books Michaels addresses and sees under the sway of these same nativist concerns/strategies? Tom Buchanan doesn’t seem to fight in the war, stays home and has a child with Daisy—they are both Anglo. Ethnic Gatsby, who goes to war and takes incredible chances in combat, which are rewarded with medals, has no children. Quentin, Jason, and Benjy don’t have children in Faulkner’s novel— Quentin imagines incest; Benjy is eventually castrated, and Jason’s sexual relationship is with a prostitute he doesn’t intend to marry—but Caddy does produce a child, with Dalton Ames, whose whiteness is never directly questioned, and who is a returning soldier obviously not made sterile by war. Even if the birthrate for the Compsons is quite low in Sound, only one child produced by the four siblings, and somehow one argues that Dalton Ames is really an ethnic American and so his reproductive power is not a problem for the theory, Gatsby seems not to fit this “white breeding-disaster/mark-ofdistinction” scenario at all. In fact, with Tom apparently staying home from the war (or even quietly going to war and returning intact) and reproducing while Gatsby goes to war, misses his chance to be with Daisy, and is otherwise chaste, it is the ethnic American who is losing out in the breeding competition because of the war, and the Anglos do not have the distinction of not reproducing; the ethnic American does. Fitzgerald’s novel presents a situation that is just about the complete reversal of the white-breeding/ethnic-breeding scenario (vis-à-vis the war) described in Michaels’s initial argument and borne out in Sun.7 In the course of recasting this literature in this study, I will offer an alternative explanation for this representation of incest and impotence—and it is obviously represented in Faulkner and Hemingway’s novels. The key issue in these books that leads to such representation, as far as I see it, is not about reproduction among Anglos and ethnic Americans and the relationship of such breeding to the war (that is, the idea that the Great War was an Anglo breeding disaster). Rather, it is about sex and other “goods,” including wealth and status, especially status in the World War I military, among Anglos and ethnic Americans and the relationship of sex to the war (that is, charity intercourse and prostitution around military camps became a problem of national scope while the writers here had a related, but particular, problem of Anglo women sleeping with ethnic Americans or other social outsiders with military status). So, in these novels, you get, on the one hand, representations of socially disruptive extramarital sex 48

Introduction

between Anglo women and ethnic or outsider men who have been to war or have military credentials. And, on the other hand, you tend to get representations of “objective” sexual obstacles, in the form of male impotence or incest prohibition or (I would add) mental deficiency, that stand between Anglo men who have been implicitly rejected by the military and the Anglo women they desire, who (instead) sleep with ethnic Americans or social outsiders the military has favored. These “objective” sexual obstacles stand in for the military rejection that has emasculated these Anglo authors, disguising or transfiguring it, and they thus serve to make these novels tragic rather than resentful.8 Though not totalizing, like some of the famous literary criticism of the 1960s— and Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1966) comes to mind because it covers this period of modernism and these authors, as well as all other periods—this analysis of Michaels, as I see it, is nonetheless still too broad, and, as a result of its breadth, it also cannot adequately consider what today is referred to as the subject positions of the writers it discusses. Theoretically, too, this study, along with many New Historical studies, is averse to “biographical” material, and such studies often act as if biographical material is irrelevant and proceed as if they are ignoring it. The objects of Michaels’s study, what matters in it, are discursive formations.9 And yet some aspects of the subject positions of these modernist authors are obviously assumed in Michaels’s analysis: for example, Hemingway is male and Anglo, so the racist notions of various nativists are congenial to him. These “biographical” facts are so basic that they need not be stated, but this biographical information seeming “self-evident” is not the same thing as biography being irrelevant. And Michaels’s study also knows but does not state that Hemingway wasn’t actually dephallicized in the war: presumably, if he had been, Michaels’s analysis of Jake’s sexual disability would be different. Biographical criticism has a bad name, and for good reasons, some of which are exemplified by the overall treatment of these modernist writers in particular: we know an incredible amount about the lives of these modernist writers, but our historical analysis of their texts has lagged by comparison with our knowledge of their biographies. Moreover, and more generally, biographical criticism so easily slips into unconvincing psychological argumentation. And yet these authors’ experiences in their social worlds, or their subject positions, matter. Perhaps it is a matter of thinking of author experiences as forms of contact or encounter with social practices and discourses, and paying special attention Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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not only to encounters with discourses socially privileged authors find congenial, or in which they find themselves so at home they barely notice them as something outside of their own thoughts—because these discourses defend their privilege against practices that threaten it. This is just the sort of contact Michaels and much New Historicism focus on: for Michaels, the logic of Hemingway’s novel is in line with the contemporaneous logic of Stoddard and Madison Grant’s very popular social science.10 Of course, there are other important forms of contact or encounter with popular discourses and practices besides congenial ones, and this is something critics are very aware of when writing about authors who have been discriminated against or who have been at a social disadvantage historically because of race, gender, or class. And, again, this study of Michaels’s does see these privileged authors as defending their privilege against possible or further erosions (by practices such as unrestricted immigration or the agitation for women’s rights). This is the typical way in which writers of privileged status are seen by critics to operate—in a position of defending prerogatives—and, because it is assumed or understood that privileged authors behave this way, this, too, can go basically without saying in Michaels’s text. It is perhaps reasonable enough to assume that the socially privileged subject will protect his privilege. But it does not follow that it is only necessary to know his race, gender, and class to position him vis-à-vis prevailing discourses, that further biographical information, or subject positioning, becomes unnecessary. This simplification is not only obviously reductive of individuals. It is also likely to be inadequate in an era of sudden transitions, brought on by national emergencies, in the criteria of status (for example, the rapid transition from considerations of family background and social status to those of physical standards and personnel ratings or intelligence test scores, in terms of the awarding of officer commissions). In this sort of historical moment, real possibilities open up for experiences of “demotion”—despite an ethnic and class pedigree and a tradition of ethnic and class privilege. To put this another way, in their encounter with the military’s sudden and unprecedented meritocracy, these authors were experiencing a new, modern form of subjection that identified and classified individuals according to aptitude or ability (and that, in that wartime moment, was given precedence over the traditional subjections of individuals according to ethnic and class background). Especially in such a period, then, we might also give special attention to practices and discourses authors have experienced as personally frustrating, that have presented a personal problem or humiliation for them—even if these 50

Introduction

authors are still in general at the top of the social “food chain” and would thus seem to be in a subject position in which they would simply want to defend their status. The key example in my study are those practices of the army, some of them unprecedented, that end up excluding these authors—despite their social pedigrees—from a military they want to join or impeding them from getting the positions and ranks in the military that they desire. If traces of these authors’ uncongenial encounters with the military have been mostly missed in previous historical studies of these novels, it is no doubt partly because critics do not tend to be on the lookout for the representation or refraction of such hostile encounters by writers whose subject positions are socially exalted and who thus are expected to be merely protecting that social privilege. As I have suggested, Hemingway is not afraid of the loss of privilege to come; he is resentful about how he has already lost out. The other reason for this oversight, as I have suggested, is that until very recently, the record of the treatment of ethnic Americans by the military in the Great War has been a lost knowledge. But the larger point here is that my study, along with some other recent studies of 1920s and 1930s literature, involves a corrective to the distorting practice of reading big swaths of literary history and whole decades according to broad thematic narratives or histories of ideas. It prefers instead a more precise analysis of a focused selection of texts and their contexts, including the immediate circumstances of a particular set of authors—the literary object of this study is not modernism but a subset or type of modernism, say “mobilization modernism”—circumstances and contexts, both discursive and nondiscursive, that are at once historical and biographical.11 That is to say, my problem with Michaels’s analysis is not only its breadth but also its methodology. Though he references historical practices, Michaels’s account is, finally, like a good deal of New Historical study, essentially a history of ideas or discourses. Master ideas or discourses are the driving forces in his account. The influence of Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), despite Foucault’s own later souring on it and his subsequent critical development in later works, is still very powerful in Americanist criticism. It seems to me that Our America is in search of an underlying logic to an era. Thus Michaels begins on page 1 by talking about the “twinned fantasies about language and the family—about language, that the word can be made flesh and about family, that endogamy can supplant exogamy”—in Sound and declares that there is a “discourse of . . . nativist modernism” that has a “commitment to identity” (between words and things, most obviously in modernist aesthetics, and between blood and community, most obviously in nativist Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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politics). His “point . . . in beginning . . . with an exploration of the relation between a certain fantasy about the sign—that it might function, in effect, onomatopoetically, without reliance upon a system of syntactic and semantic conventions—and a certain fantasy about the family—that it might maintain itself incestuously, without reliance upon the legal conventions that turn otherwise unrelated persons into husband and wife—is to suggest the structural intimacy between nativism and modernism.” For Michaels, “both nativism and modernism” are seen “as efforts to work out the meaning of the commitment to identity—linguistic, national, cultural, racial—that . . . is common to both.” That is, there is supposed to be a discourse of “nativist modernism” that is shot through, at various levels (linguistic, racial, etc.), with this repeating logic involving a commitment to “identity as the determining ground of action or significance” or to the idea that “what people and things do or mean is a function of what they are” (1–3). Again, Michaels’s readings in the interest of this project are often ingenious, but such a search for a logically consistent “discursive formation” or “master discourse” of this type seems to me misguided and misleading. As with Wendy Martin’s much more casual recourse to a history of ideas in her comments about the image of women in the 1920s, Michaels’s internally consistent “discourse of nativist modernism” is supposed to account historically for modernist texts (their particular qualities).12 A significant problem is that Michaels’s analysis is in fact fuzzy on the question of historical change, on what provokes this “discourse of nativist modernism” to begin with. His is not really a historical argument, about causes or conditions of possibility of his discourse of nativist modernism, but about concordances between contemporaneous documents, which are seen as all under the sway of nativist modernist discourse. In his account, it is this logic of nativist modernism that is rather the historical force “causing” or “shaping” particular textual features. The notion of Michaels’s kind of master discourse is problematic in its static quality; though his discourse of nativist modernism is given a particular historical dating, he doesn’t account for historical transformation (for example, either its appearance or demise)—this was the criticism that was appropriately leveled at Foucault’s notion of the episteme in The Order of Things. It is not that Michaels ignores practices in his account; it is that practices are for him, like texts, merely reflections or instances of the master discourse. To say that the Immigration Act of 1924 is one of the “typical . . . major American texts of the 1920s . . . that belong to the discourse of . . . nativist modernism” (2) is to miss the way that the passage of that Act, which radically limited immigration from 52

Introduction

southern and eastern Europe, changed the practical and discursive landscape in regard to immigration and also ethnicity. To put it bluntly, the moment it passed into law, it was not merely a text, but a semipermanent and far-reaching practice that ratified a dramatic shift in American immigration policy and had all kinds of practical and discursive results. One of the immediate and obvious discursive effects of the passage of this act was that it no longer needed to be argued for; in a sense, a decades-old discourse about the reasons for immigrant restriction could be put aside, or on the back burner. As a guardian of Anglo privilege, for example, one no longer needed to argue that the percentage of criminals in the immigrant population coming from southern and eastern Europe was higher than that of the Anglo American population. This contention about the propensity for crime among such immigrants was an argument that antiimmigration legislators had been making in Congress since the 1890s, and it was often replayed and invigorated as Congress debated—and passed—the stopgap and “permanent” immigration restriction laws of 1921 and 1924.13 In the early twenties, congressmen in favor of limiting or eliminating immigration from southern and eastern Europe not only cited (often misleading) statistics concerning the disproportionate percentage of these immigrants in prison,14 they also had access to newer, hysterical claims about rampant “slackerism” among disloyal “aliens” and even immigrant acts of criminal sabotage during the war (“They poisoned our horses at the camps”; “They poisoned food intended for our soldiers”), and they could play on fresh, post–Russian Revolution fears about “bolshevism, red anarchy, black-handers, and kidnapers” disembarking on American soil. Again, this particular demonization of immigration as the “influx of the refuse and criminal hordes of foreign countries”15 could be temporarily retired with the passage of the 1924 act. But the work of the guardian of Anglo privilege was by no means over; instead, he could now shift his discursive energies to other domains that were just picking up steam: Jews and Italians were now for the most part stopped at the gates of Ellis Island, but what about such ethnic Americans who were already here—how to stop them from entering elite, traditionally Anglo institutions, such as universities and medical schools? And thus this signal Act of 1924 perhaps explains why Fitzgerald’s principal ethnic Americans in Gatsby are (still) criminals—after all, the main action takes place in 1922, and Fitzgerald had already written a draft in 1923,16 before the 1924 Immigration Act was passed, that is, when congressional debates about the act were still routinely touching on the criminality of immigrants and ethnic Americans. (To be quite specific about Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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Gatsby’s intricate engagement with the debates at the time, if Fitzgerald pointedly doesn’t play into the immediate postwar anxiety about ethnic Americans having worked or fought for foreign governments against the United States17— despite rumors, Gatsby wasn’t a “German spy during the war” [48]—the author does participate in long-standing and continuing fears about ethnic criminality: Gatsby does turn out to be, like his Jewish business associate Wolfshiem, a violent lawbreaker.) And the timing of the passage of the 1924 act perhaps also explains why in Sun, set and first drafted in 1925,18 after the act’s passage, Hemingway’s principal ethnic character is not a criminal—but has other, less obvious “problems,” the kind of personality problems universities and medical schools were citing or working up in the interest of effecting Jewish quotas. Perhaps this portrait of Gatsby as criminal is one of the things that compel Hemingway to see Fitzgerald’s work as false and immediately outdated: though just published the year before his own Sun, Hemingway calls Fitzgerald’s novel “literary speculation” that “occurred in times past.”19 In any case, when Hemingway soon after finishing a revised typescript of Sun wrote a letter to Fitzgerald “jesting” that “his novel followed the outline of Gatsby,” he went on to explain that “its heroine, Sophie Irene Loeb,” with an ethnic Jewish surname (that belonged to the person, Harold Loeb, upon whom Robert Cohn was largely based), “was sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing for killing her mother.”20 Hemingway was here poking fun, not only at Gatsby’s melodramatic qualities (the hero is killed at the end), but at the fact that its hero was an ethnic criminal. The point is, in trying to account for textual features, or to read the details of literary texts, a dynamic notion of discourses—and practices as well—is necessary, much more dynamic than that of Michaels’s “discourse of nativist modernism.” My own method here is derived from the later works of Michel Foucault, such as Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), which take as their object not master discourses or epistemes, with internal coherences, but a variety of related discourses and practices, which are changing, and which are often logically inconsistent or contradictory, but interact in some way, sometimes undercutting and transforming one another, sometimes functioning together though they are indeed logically or ideologically incoherent.21 Fiction of course does partake of or reflect existing social discourses and practices, discourses that identify social problems (or, more exactly, construct social problems or problematize) and practices that are meant to embody solutions to these problems. There are of course intertextual—and extra-textual— connections to be made, but when it comes not to pulp or derivative fiction but 54

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to complex, personal novels, delineating these connections is not simply a matter of finding concordances or resemblances. To make a final point about my method derived from the later Foucault, which considers author experiences of discourses and practices, the fiction at issue here should also be seen as doing something more active than merely reflecting or partaking of social discourses or “aesthetic[ally] duplicat[ing] . . . social practices.”22 It reproblematizes. The history of the American Great War mobilization is to a large extent shaped by the army’s problematizations, first of the British and Canadian experiences of putting together an army (the American military constructed their approaches as haphazard, lacking proper selectivity and differentiation), then of the unintended side effects or undesired consequences of mobilizing American men in camps and in France (American and French women flocked to them, and the army constituted problems of immorality and the spread of venereal disease). Meanwhile, this twenties postmobilization fiction is to a large extent shaped by its active reproblematization or counterproblematization of the army’s proposed problems (and this fiction, having constituted different problems, imagines different solutions). This is indeed one way of defining what it means for this fiction to be called “postmobilization.” These authors are tracing out their argumentative narratives in, and against, the footsteps made by the military (in much the same way that their geographical trajectories, refracted in these novels, follow from the moves and movements of the American military: Fitzgerald and Gatsby go to Camp Taylor; Hemingway and Jake to Paris via Italy; Faulkner, stymied by the army, to New Haven and Canada, and his alter ego Quentin to Harvard, where he has a Canadian roommate). It is not the case, of course, that Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner saw the war itself or the American military involvement as a mistake; thus, Hemingway has his narrator Jake mock the popular and easy postwar position that “discussed the war” as “a calamity for civilization” that “perhaps would have been better avoided” (17), and Fitzgerald has his narrator Nick refer glibly to “the Great War,” in which between 8 and 9 million men died and more than 21 million were wounded, as “that delayed Teutonic migration,” along with “the counter-raid” which he “enjoyed . . . thoroughly” (7). Briefly put, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway saw various problems with the army’s new methods of identifying officers, as well as its ideal of and programs for a New Man. They essentially accused the American military of a different failure of selectivity and differentiation (its inattention to ethnic differences that these authors, in chorus with other nativist Anglo commentators and actors in the late 1910s and ’20s, identified as meaningful). And at the same time (still concerned with ethnic Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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differences), these authors found fault with the military’s focus on chastity, chivalry, and athleticism in its revised ideal of the soldier; they had notions of the true soldier and of authentic masculinity that differed from the military’s. But, of course, these authors’ reproblematizations stemmed from their sense of betrayal or dismissal by an army from which they sought validation. If they were so interested in finding fault with the military’s revised ideal of masculinity, it was not because they didn’t care about the ideal, but because they did—and they cared so deeply because they themselves had been found wanting. Thus, again, their scapegoating of American ethnic males is not simply the consequence of general racism, but the result of a definite and personal sense of injury. At the same time, at least by this more mature point in their artistic careers, pride forbade the injury to be raised too directly, and so the texts rail against a sexual prudery (pushed by the military) and calculate the degree of ethnic denunciation carefully, thus avoiding the appearance of a hysterical scapegoating. (So, in Gatsby, the hysterical racist is Tom Buchanan, not the narrator Nick; Sun’s narrator, Jake, begins by being friendly to Cohn, and never attacks him in public like Brett’s fiancé, Mike, does; and the detestable Compson brother, Jason, is the ugly anti-Semite in Sound; Quentin’s racist wisecracking is, by contrast, “light” rather than bitter.) Meanwhile, these authors have learned, after earlier literary endeavors that smack of bitterness (The Beautiful and Damned, “A Very Short Story,” Soldiers’ Pay), to mask the connection between their decade, the “modern,” sophisticated, and worldly-wise twenties, from the mobilization of the 1910s and the embarrassments of meritocracy.

The Literary Object: Modernist Style and Plot Oddly enough, two apparently separate and even opposing lines of approach led me to this set of texts by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. First, I had the sense that these are the most commonly taught and perhaps most written about and acclaimed 1920s novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner— they are supposed to be the quintessentially modernist, twenties novels by these authors largely because of their stylistic innovativeness (including, in the cases of Hemingway and Faulkner, their rejection of plot). Second, I noticed that these three novels, two of which are, again, supposed to be fairly plotless, seem to share variations on the same plot. (Incidentally, I observed that this plot similarity extended to a couple of supposedly plotless 1930s novels that also had reputations for stylistic innovation, The Day of the Locust and Nightwood.) 56

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It then struck me as strange that these two very different, and in some ways nearly contradictory, sets of criteria should lead to the same set of texts. And this coincidence suggested another way of understanding the standout reputations of these texts. Perhaps critics have granted these texts supercanonical or masterpiece status not simply because of their stylistic breakthroughs, which have been exhaustively championed, but also because of their similarities in plot, which have been unconsciously perceived but not expressly articulated. The shared plot and character elements then led me, naturally enough, to suspect that these novels were in fact sharing similar reactions to the same historical contexts. (But because this plot similarity had been mostly missed, the shared historical context—of the mobilization—had consequently been uninvestigated.) In the 1920s, with Gatsby, Sun, and Sound, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were in fact unwittingly participating in what might be thought of as a subgenre or mini-genre (the racist, promiscuity postmobilization story), a short-lived successor to both the long-lived and very-hard-to-kill seduction plot of the nineteenth century—initiated in the United States by The Power of Sympathy (1789), by William Hill Brown, and the bestseller Charlotte Temple (1794), by Susanna Rowson,23 and painstakingly dismantled by realist writers from James to Crane, Chopin, Dreiser, and even Cather 24—and the shocking, new, popular culture vampire-seductress story of the early twentieth century, popularized by A Fool There Was (play and novelization, 1909; film version with Theda Bara, 1915).25 And these twenties novelists would shortly be joined in their partially unwitting efforts by a few other major modernist authors who came on the scene in the 1930s, including Djuna Barnes and Nathanael West. By the 1930s—as was the case with the seduction plot by the late 1800s—this postmobilization plot was still essentially operative though it was being parodied and deconstructed. The deconstructive aspects will be discussed in chapter 7, and because I have already detailed the shared plot elements of this promiscuity story in chapter 1, I won’t rehearse them here, except to say that, in a reversal of the seduction plot, the principal woman in this modernist plot has desire and is promiscuous—in fact, ethnically indiscriminant in her choice of partners—and her lovers, not she, now suffer the fates of the seduction plot’s fallen woman. But this new promiscuous woman isn’t a fiend, as in the vamp story. If these shared plot elements of these three twenties and two thirties novels have been (mostly) missed, it probably has a lot to do with modernist fiction’s reputation for plotlessness. Expanding on a long-standing truism about the modernist novel in America and in England, Ann Douglas writes Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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in her “massive, impressive”26 1995 book Terrible Honesty, “Nothing is clearer about the most important novelists of the post–Great War decades than that they abandoned plot as the indispensable framework, interest, and credential of the novel form.” In important modernist novels, with the notable exception of Gatsby, Douglas asserts, “plot is no longer the necessary handmaiden of the characters’ lives, nor does it supply the narrative’s beat; it has . . . been dismissed from the narrative . . . ”27 As postmodern author John Barth put it 15 years earlier, modernist fiction overturned the realist novel by such tactics as the introduction of “the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative [and] the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof.”28 While American modernism underwent serious reevaluation in the 1990s in terms of the thematic of race—for example, in Douglas’s own book29 and also in Michaels’s, Bram Dijkstra’s, and Michael North’s, as well as in others’30—this notion about plot’s disappearance, its severance from character, or its extreme marginalization has survived even if it has been occasionally challenged. (The most important challenge has been by Michaels, but even Michaels ultimately undercuts his challenge, as I will discuss, in framing a thesis focused on politics and modernist style). This familiar notion about modernism and plotlessness echoes another, older claim, one with political dimensions: namely, that when it comes to the issue of plot, modernism is basically in the business of disrupting the traditional plots of romanticism and realism and thus challenging conventional ideologies. This long-standing platitude has developed as a counterargument to Lukacs’s famous celebration of nineteenth-century realism as the model for progressive art and his rejection of modernism as an elitist and subjectivist retreat from politics. Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas have all seen progressive aspects in modernist form,31 and, more recently, Edward Said has revisited the theme of modernism’s disruption of realist narrative and the imperialism, bourgeois hegemony, and patriarchy that supposedly underwrites realist narrative.32 Meanwhile, critics who follow Lukacs and see modernism as politically regressive do not challenge the idea that modernist fiction disrupts plot.33 Both sides in this decades-old ongoing debate—which is almost as old as modernism itself and which still shapes a good deal of the current discussion of modernism—are, on this one point at least, in agreement. Indeed, the notion that modernist fictions disrupt plot is not restricted to debates within Marxist circles or about the political valence of modernism.

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Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane also see modernist form as “taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and conventions of form” and providing “the shock, the violation of expected continuities, the element of de-creation and crisis.”34 And though feminist reevaluations of modernism in the 1980s and ’90s35 have in particular taken issue with the claim about modernist plotlessness, some of these still tend to focus on the way (female) modernist fictions disrupt or undermine earlier realist or romantic plots: for example, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), discusses the late nineteenth-and earlier twentieth-century female literary “strategies that sever the narrative from formerly conventional structures of fiction and consciousness about women.”36 The persistence of this view about modernism’s essentially disruptive relationship to plot shows that there is still a tendency to grant to modernism a self-possession and self-consciousness that is not credited to other literary periods (with the possible exception of postmodernism)—and that is antithetical to the theoretical notions of poststructuralism because such self-possession implies a freedom from historical forces. But modernist novelists not only “disrupt” or “sever” previous plots or “de-create” (though they certainly do this), they also—unconsciously—create or fall into the production of new common or standard plots. There is no question that, in the “high art” and hyperrealist or surrealist aesthetic of modernism, plot is submerged, and beginning with modernism the highbrow novel will be distinguishable from the medium-brow novel on the basis of its seeming independence from plot. (In Sun, for example, the climactic conversation between the promiscuous woman and the self-deceived romantic man—that is, the moment in which Brett tells off Cohn and shatters his fantasy of rescuing her—is retold rather than experienced firsthand by the reader. This is a prime instance of the modernist novel’s submerging of plot; by having this climatic confrontation happen offstage, Hemingway avoids any hint of melodrama. Similarly, Faulkner handles the analogous scene between Quentin and Caddy, in which Caddy basically informs Quentin that she isn’t, with Dalton Ames, the sexual victim but the aggressor, by fragmenting it and spreading bits and pieces of it throughout Quentin’s section in Sound.) I would agree with Douglas (and many others) that plot is downplayed in the modernist novel, or that modernist novelists are self-conscious about conventional plot mechanisms and storytelling, but I don’t agree at all that plot is no longer the “indispensable framework” or that “plot is no longer the necessary handmaiden of the characters’ lives.”

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(Peter Brooks’s 1984 account of what happened with modernism in regard to plot seems to me more considered and accurate. He suggests that “with the advent of Modernism came an era of suspicion toward plot.” But he makes clear that plot is indispensable, despite a tendency to believe otherwise: “For all the widely publicized nonnarrative or antinarrative forms of thought that are supposed to characterize our times . . . , we remain more determined by narrative than we might wish to believe. . . . Until such a time as we cease to exchange understandings in the form of stories, we will need to remain . . . dependent on plot.”37) Incidentally, that Gatsby appears—exceptional among modernist novels— to be excellently plotted is due in large part to the fact that the book weaves together two plots, one of which is familiar: it cleverly weaves together a classbased seduction plot and an ethnicity-based promiscuity plot. In the seduction plot in the novel, Myrtle, the lower-class fallen woman, is punished with death in a horrible accident (when she runs into the street wrongly believing that her upper-class seducer Tom is driving his own car); but the same accident of course leads to romantic, ethnic Gatsby’s death by murder in the promiscuity plot. Tom, playing libertine in the seduction plot and traditional controlling male in the promiscuity plot, at once avoids the avenging husband of Myrtle and takes revenge on his romantic rival by setting Wilson on Gatsby, who was in fact in the killer automobile (though not driving it). Fitzgerald’s “superb” plotting38 is due to this meshing of these two plotlines, in which Tom plays the hinge between the stories; he is the only figure who belongs to both plots. The reason he can belong to both—and still be a recognizable and coherent though necessarily hypocritical character—is that a traditional controlling male has a role in the seduction plot as well as the promiscuity plot. One instance of the dominating male traditionalist who subjects women is indeed the libertine seducer. Closely allied to the notion of modernist plotlessness is the idea that modernist stylistics in fiction marks a singular literary breakthrough. Again, this book’s argument about a postmobilization novel is purposefully not (primarily) about modernist style. Most critics want to argue that modernist style marks a distinctive break with past literary styles, but there is of course much disagreement about how to describe the change and perhaps even more disagreement about how to account for it. Michaels says of literary modernism that “probably all (of the accounts of it) acknowledge its interest in the ontology of the sign— which is to say, in the materiality of the signifier, in the relation of signifier to signified, in the relation of sign to referent” (2). But such claims about style or 60

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self-consciousness are very slippery: it is hard even to show that 1920s modernism in fiction marks a real break from, say, the “modern” quality of Stephen Crane’s prose (leaving aside the modernity of Henry James or Mark Twain). The poet and critic John Berryman wanted to date modernist fiction from Crane’s Maggie (1893), and, though this is a minority view, it indicates the difficulty of this kind of dating enterprise when it comes to this issue of style or a certain self-consciousness about style.39 Crane’s writing especially seems a candidate for modernist status, as it is studiously nonmoralistic, as well as highly stylized and full of slang, and so concise at times that critics have often seen Crane as anticipating or “foreshadowing” Hemingway 40 —an odd claim epistemologically speaking, but one that follows from designating the 1920s as the decisive, modernist moment in American literature and Hemingway as a major modernist; given the conventional demarcations of literary periods, the “best” Crane can do in terms of modernism is “foreshadow” it; he can’t yet practice it. Moreover, in fact, in terms of Crane’s eligibility for modernist status, it is hard to imagine a novel more singularly dedicated to the exploration of the relationship between sign and referent than The Red Badge of Courage (1895), in which the usual relationship between referent and sign is reversed: an accidental sign of courage (a wound received away from the front lines, while fleeing battle) precedes and indeed precipitates its referent, courage. A surer argument about a distinctive modernist prose style in the 1920s, in my mind—one that could, for example, stand up to scrutiny vis-à-vis the “premature” example of a Crane—would note stylistic differences among these postmobilization promiscuity novels, the seduction novel, and the Progressive Era novels that consciously aim to dismantle the seduction plot. If the novel of seduction was in a moralistic, along with a sentimental or sensational, mode, the promiscuity novel at issue here is in a sensual mode, and the Progressive Era novels are in a transitional state between these modes (I will define these terms below). My contention would be that the new modernist mode is made possible in part by the rejection of the moralism about chastity (including the traditional mystique of female virginity), a moralism that had most recently been adopted by the military authorities in their attempt to police the sexual activity of soldiers and their female partners. Also, the old mystique of female virginity was replaced by a new mystique of female desire, which was made possible by the Freudian revolution.41 (Note that the vamp novel, which reverses the gender polarity of the seduction novel, turning the woman into the predator and the man into the victim did not, of course, do away with moralism or a mystique of chastity.) Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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Finally, if the Progressive Era realist and naturalist novel often enough featured the failure or destruction of a romantic character and an implicit or explicit irony about romance registered in third-person narration (to take just a few examples, Crane’s Maggie, James’s The Turn of the Screw [1897], and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening [1899]), modernism picked up on this destruction and irony but elaborated on this schema, now adding a foil to the doomed romantic character in the form of an ironic narrator who is also a character. In the transition from the early and mid-nineteenth-century moralism and sentimentalism to late nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, moralism and sentimentalism go from being lodged in the third-person narration to being identified with particular characters. In the case of Maggie, the title character articulates a romantic dream, and her mother caricatures moralism, while Crane’s narration ensures the irony about the traditional seduction plot. Modernism enacts an analogous maneuver on the ironic third-person narration of realism and naturalism. So, for example, in Sun, Jake takes the mantle of realism’s ironic omniscient narrator; the same can be said of Nick in Gatsby. But, in addition, the particular characters associated with moralism and romanticism now tend, in modernism, as opposed to realism and naturalism, to be products of military training or idealism (the “new man”): Cohn and Gatsby. This now old-fashioned moralistic and sentimental language is also identified with ethnic Americans, whereas the new ironic aesthetic is the purview of an Anglo narrator. In fact, the stakes of the competition between Anglo Jake and Jewish Cohn (mainly over Brett) are figured as aesthetic and literary as well as sexual: though his book is a success, author Cohn has written, according to Jake, “a very poor novel” (6) presumably because of his literal investment in the “romantic” novels of W. H. Hudson (9); by contrast, the “hard-boiled” (34) narrator Jake, who is a journalist, along with his Anglo writer friend Bill, understand that the cutting-edge literary world of “New York” is “mad” about “Irony and Pity” (114). Similar tensions between Anglo and ethnic storytelling exist in Gatsby: when Gatsby invents his life story, ironic narrator Nick finds that Gatsby’s romantic “phrases were worn so threadbare they evoked no image except that of turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne” (70). This conflict between Anglo and ethnic American art is more explicitly developed in Fitzgerald’s previous novel, The Beautiful and Damned. The book begins by announcing that “irony” had 2 years ago in 1911 become “the Holy Ghost” of the era and had now descended on the Anglo main character (3). Later in the book, this Anglo character, Anthony Patch, develops a rivalry with and jealousy of the 62

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Jewish immigrant and film producer Joseph Bloeckman (who, in anticipation of Gatsby, later changes his name as well, to Joseph Black). Their conflict over the super-desirable Anglo female, Gloria, is inflected by differing aesthetics: Anthony, who has unused literary talent, along with his Anglo friend Dick, who actually produces fiction, are identified with irony and modern novels, and Bloeckman is of course identified with the movies but also with plot. Jewish American Bloeckman wants “plots first” or “a strong story”; “many novels” are not “valuable” to him as a film producer because they “are full of talk and psychology” and weak on plot—hallmarks of modernist prose (78). Indeed, it might be said that this new modernist style of Fitzgerald and Hemingway follows partly from a motivated rejection of conventional moralism (motivated by a disillusionment with the military and its archaic account of honor and chivalry) and also partly from the competition posed by the now Americanized ethnic other. Walter Michaels’s comment, in regard to the (stylistic) competition between Jake and Cohn in Sun, that Cohn’s supposed “racial inferiority is reproduced here as aesthetic failure” (27) strikes me as a more promising notion, for helping explain the reasons for the modernist “interest in the ontology of the sign . . . in the materiality of the signifier” (2), than his master logic of the “discourse of nativist modernism.”42 In depicting sex in American seduction literature, the fact of seduction and dispossession of women didn’t allow for a sustained sensual mode of description: rather, seduction eventually necessitated the sensationalism involved in tricking a woman and degrading her, or the sentimentalism involved in a girl being taken advantage of and ostracized, or the moralism involved in violating a woman’s soul. It’s not that there can’t be sensual moments in, say, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845): Lorraine “slowly flung back the night robe from her shoulders. Her bosom, in all its richness of outline, heaving and throbbing with that long pulsation, which urged it upward like a billow, lay open to his gaze” (132).43 Perhaps awkward, this is nonetheless sensual language. But the text has to revert to moralism and sensationalism or sentimentalism; it has to remind us, meanwhile, that the female here is the male’s “victim”; it has to show her recoiling from “the touch of her seducer’s hand, polluting her stainless bosom,” then begging him to “save” her from himself; it has to show him standing “before the crouching girl, a fearful picture of incarnate LUST” (132–133). Victim, seducer, stainless bosom, pollution, and crouching girl: sex in a seduction novel was an act of sinister trickery, moral degradation, and, often, physical violence—out-and-out rape. Such an act cannot be described in a strictly Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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sensual or material register—without reference to immaterial moral and even legal realities. Lippard’s moralistic, and alternately sensational and sentimental, style might have been verbose and overblown, but he merely articulates at painstakingly length what is essentially behind the act of seduction in every seduction novel. For the narrative description here to remain on the sense or sensual level, for the narrative not to supply the moral or metaphysical correlative of the physical action—given the ideology of virginity—would be to deprive the reader of the meaning of the story and the fate of the characters, or else to write with an indifference to that meaning and that fate that would be incomprehensible or itself cruel and fiendish, essentially taking part in the seducer’s crime. The text has to put the sensuality of the action in the larger moral context, and thus the “sensuality” will be named, the word itself used. “Sudden as the shadow after the light this change had passed over his soul. His form arose towering and erect, his chest throbbed with sensual excitement . . . His bloodshot eyes, flashed with the unholy light of passion . . . ” (133). The ascendancy of sensuality in the seducer involves a transformation of his soul, a surrender to base or unholy passion. Sensuality in the seduction plot is precisely a departure from moral behavior. However, if the woman is not duped or morally degraded or forced, but rather discovers her own sensuality and sexual desires and pursues them, as is very obviously the case with Jordan Baker, Brett, and Caddy, each of whom pointedly initiates sexual activity (but she is meanwhile not a vampire bent on the seminal use and destruction of men), then the female body and sexual experience do not have automatic moral meanings; they need not be rendered moralistically, and sentimentally or sensationally, but can be rendered, in the narration, strictly on a “sensual” level, by which I mean, in physical description, bodily sensation, and emotional impression. It is instructive here to look at the transitional novels that come between the seduction novel of the late 1700s and early 1800s and the postmobilization promiscuity novel. What can happen in the Progressive Era (pre–Great War) promiscuity novel, or “proto-promiscuity novel,” is that sensual description begins to dominate, but remnants of moral and sentimental description remain. Or, more precisely, these transitional novels show the eraser marks, or a palimpsest, as they attempt both to eliminate the seduction plot and to show its erasure. Thus, they don’t simply describe what happens physically and what is sensed and felt, but, oddly, what is not experienced, not there any longer. In Crane’s Maggie, after Maggie has gone off with her lover, Pete, the narrative states that Maggie “perceived only vague reasons to be miserable. . . . She did not feel like a bad 64

Introduction

woman.”44 And in Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), after Edna embarks on her affairs with Robert and Arobin, the narrator reports that “among the conflicting sensations which assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse.”45 The narrative feels obligated to make explicit the new, nonoperational status of the seduction-plot mechanisms and leaves the realm of positivist description to do so. These texts are essentially saying to the reader, “Here, if this were a seduction novel, you would expect guilt; please note there is none.” “Or very little.” Such is in part the formula in Sister Carrie (1900). But Theodore Dreiser, who is more deliberate and extensive in his psychological and sociological analyses than either Chopin or Crane, examines the stalling and eventual breakdown of the seduction-plot motor at greater length, and in a social-scientific naturalist mode that overwhelms the sensual one. He asserts that after Carrie moves in with a man, Drouet, to whom she is not married, she has a conscience and feels remorse, as one would expect in a seduction novel; however, Dreiser’s innovation is to show that the “average . . . conscience” is in reality weak and doesn’t really work very well.46 Frank Norris, like Dreiser, employs a scientistic mode; in McTeague (1899), sensual description gives way to a sociobiological type of analysis. His text revitalizes the old seduction-novel notions of “the awakening of the animal nature,” “the struggle of conscience and the passions,” and the sentimental notions of male aggression and female submission by giving them grounding in a pseudoscientific theory of instincts (that is informed by evolutionary thinkers of the era). Sequences that begin with sensual description—McTeague looking down at an anesthetized Trina in the dental chair and his sensing her beauty and vulnerability, McTeague crushing Trina in his arms by the shore and her feeling excitement—are finished, as in the seduction novel, with metaphysical analysis: “The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins,” or “The Woman within her suddenly awoke.”47 Here, the metaphysical action is not exactly moral action—although moral terms appear again and again to make clear how the seduction novel is being erased or rewritten—the action is rather imagined as biological. But the pseudobiological mode in McTeague is progressively more and more sensational, much like the moral sensationalism involved with the criminal libertine and his innocent victim: the sensationalism augments in the course of the novel, as the relationship between McTeague and Trina goes from aggressive-submissive to sadomasochistic. In addition, traditional sentimental and moral notions of gender difference underwrite Norris’s pseudoscientific theory of sexuality: in sexual behavior, his male is aggressive, predatory, indeed sadistic; the female Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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is submissive, obedient, indeed masochistic. The resulting mode in which the physical action takes place is hardly sensual: it is a weird, even perverse, hybrid of the old moralism-sentimentalism-sensationalism and a new Progressive Era racialism-scientism. This Progressive Era transitional novel might also, like the seduction novel, use the word sensual or sensuous, now not to place the sensuality in the traditional moralistic context, but, again, to alert the reader to its difference from the older seduction novel and to indicate the new moral context in which sensuality operates. So, in Chopin’s novel, “The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”48 This is hardly the soul that is stained by premarital sex or discolored by sensual passion, but the point is that the text is telegraphing, or explaining, the new, harmonious relationship between sensuality and soul operative in the promiscuity novel. By contrast, narration of the postmobilization, racist promiscuity novel is no longer in the business of eliminating the seduction novel or showing its erasure. Insofar as remnants of sentimentalism and the moralistic seduction novel remain, they remain in the attitudes of particular characters, not in the narration. This modernist novel is no longer attempting to argue for the centrality of sensual experience; it is simply taking that centrality for granted. Finally, because this novel is premised upon a mystique of sexual desire and not chastity, the act of extramarital sex has no automatic moral valence. It is now complicated and its meanings multifarious. Some sex can be good for the lovers, such as Brett’s with the bullfighter Romero; other sex can be poisonous, such as Brett’s with Jewish Cohn. It depends on how the lovers react to it—and it depends on the ethnicity of the lover. More generally, the female body is no longer an object of sentimental and moral description in the narration (though of course particular characters may be carriers of this old discourse). The narration is freed up to pursue a diverse, complex, ambiguous, and sometimes racist, sensual description of human beings because bodies and sexual acts are no longer understood according to a binary code of chastity that organized the seduction novel, in which every act was either stainless or polluted, unholy or innocent. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway famously rejects, as Michaels puts it, “abstract words” (27), such as courage and nation, which had lost their meaning for Hemingway with the Great War and (I would add) the Great War mobilization; “There were many words that you could not stand to hear, and finally only the names of places had dignity” (133). More precisely, Hemingway rejects abstract moral words—because Jake’s narration now includes abstract words such 66

Introduction

as “nice” (to describe Brett [38]) and “good” (to describe, say, the bullfights or the fishing; Mike also describes Brett as “good” [203]), words that are traditionally moral. Nice and good here are no longer moral terms; Brett’s being “nice,” as Michaels points out, refers to her social background, her family;49 in saying “Brett was rather good” (203), Mike means effective or amusing. Metaphors and fantastical impressions about body parts or shapes are also fine, as long as they aren’t moralistic. So Brett “was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht” (22): a racing yacht clearly has no moral valence, but it suggests speed, power, athleticism. And Nick “enjoyed looking at” Jordan because “she was a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (15). There is nothing here about that breast being stainless or that erect carriage suggesting a moral uprightness—indeed, the analogy to a young cadet suggests, in this immediate postwar moment, the sex appeal of the soldier as well as the army trainee and the military school student, a central element and source of anxiety in all of these mobilization novels. There could hardly be a more striking index of the postmobilization, promiscuity novel’s rejection of moral abstraction and its embrace of sense impression and sense metaphors than Faulkner’s launching of Sound in the narration of an “idiot”: that is to say, a childlike, almost infantile, mentality in which sense impressions rule and intellectual ideas are basically absent. But Benjy’s repeated observation that “Caddy smelled like trees and like when she says we were asleep” (5)50 is in one way a lot like the Compson father’s contention that “Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. . . . I [Quentin] said That’s just words and he said So is virginity” (143). Both Benjy’s sense perception and Mr. Compson’s deconstructive analysis lead to the same naturalization of Caddy’s body and her promiscuous sexuality. The thrust of Sound is to naturalize and sensualize—rather than moralize— sexuality, and this is true even when particular characters attempt to restore or insist on its traditional moral meaning. For the most powerfully “sensualizing” tactic the novel undertakes is to transform moral acts into sensual ones and moral language into a sensual experience. For example, Quentin’s holding a knife to Caddy’s throat, supposedly playing the moral role of an avenging brother, doesn’t hold the promise of purifying her (in death) of a supposedly sinful sexual pollution, as it would in a sentimental seduction novel. Rather, the knife to Caddy’s throat becomes, in Faulkner’s hands, another sensual act, not so different from her sexual activity itself (it ends with “but I couldn’t stop Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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[crying] she held my head against her damp hard breast I could hear her heart going firm and slow now” [189]). This dynamic, in which the power of sensuality or sexuality overwhelms moral meaning, is reproduced in Quentin’s obsessive memories of the day Caddy as a 7-year-old child “sat down in the water” and got her “drawers . . . muddy” (188–189)—the very thing Quentin brings up as he holds the knife to her throat. The muddy drawers are not simply symbolic for Quentin (or a reader) of Caddy’s destiny as a fallen woman or a dirty “whore” (197)—and here Quentin, Faulkner’s nonsoldier with archaic chivalrous and moralistic aims, uses a word the army had made popular in some of its posters, as we shall see in later chapters. The drawers are also part of a sensual memory that “seduces” Quentin from the moral task he has undertaken into a sensually aroused state. Quentin himself may yearn for the old sensationalism or horror of the seduction tale, but his is, paradoxically, a sensual nostalgia for sensationalism and moralism. And, for this conversion from the moral to the sensual to work, specifically for the moral figure of the avenging brother to be believably converted into the potentially incestuous figure of the sensually fascinated brother, Faulkner has to pull off an alchemy in which not only Caddy but words themselves become first and foremost sensual. That is why when Quentin remembers saying to Caddy’s “what are you going to do,” “none of your business whore whore” (197), he repeats the word. The unnecessary and meaningless repetition of the word whore doesn’t exactly make it “just words”—but it moves in that direction and makes it too a sensual experience and insofar as it does, reduces its moral and intellectual force. Faulkner effects the moral brother’s conversion to a sensual brother in part by transforming moral acts into sensual ones and moral words into sounds—and into visual effects. That is, the same transformation or drift to the sensual is being effected in regard to the written words on the page: Faulkner eliminates much in the way of punctuation, capital letters, and apostrophes, in the interest of calling attention to and aesthetically boosting the visual appearance—and the sense impression—of the written words themselves. Highlighting the materiality of words, a long-recognized feature of the modernist aesthetic, is consonant with highlighting the materiality of bodies; in fact, my argument would be that the latter makes possible the former. It is the promiscuous woman and the mystique of her confident or brave sexuality that makes possible and calls forth a sensualization of the literary act. One critic refers aptly to Zora Neale Hurston’s “sexing of all things”51 in her late modernist fiction; more generally, these early modernist novels have the tendency to sensualize many things. Cohn is right to speak of Brett as a Circe figure, not 68

Introduction

because she turns men into swine, but because she powerfully casts a spell. Not only the characters but also the language of these novels is under the sensual spell of the sexualized woman. (Sherwood Anderson, a devotee of Freudian thinking, and, according to Malcolm Cowley, “the only story teller of his generation who left his mark on the style . . . of the generation that followed,” including Hemingway and Faulkner, whom he knew, has a provocative metaphor for the image of the writer in “The Book of the Grotesque,” the introductory chapter to Winesburg, Ohio [1919], according to some critics the first modernist text. There, the old writer “had something inside of him [that] was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight.” The source of the writer’s creativity, though he might be male—for it is “the young thing within the writer” that is “thinking”—is now interestingly a young woman.52 And incidentally, this inner young woman is given a martial association as well, not unlike Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick giving Jordan Baker, who reminds him of a “young cadet,” a military inflection.) Meanwhile, the quest for linguistic uniqueness or specialness in these novels, by the authors and the characters, is akin to the attempts of the woman’s special Anglo partner to set himself (or herself) apart and appeal to the promiscuous woman on other than sexual grounds. “I have committed incest I said” (97): Quentin’s attempt to possess Caddy by saying he committed incest with her, by words, that is, assumes a kind of incantatory power to language, assumes that the right words, the special irreproducible combination of words will achieve the fantastic liaison. In much the same way, in Nightwood, Nora can’t stop writing to and talking about Robin after she has lost her: not only because she is obsessed with her, but also because she may trip upon the formula that brings Robin back; Matthew understands that Nora’s “pet names [for Robin] are a guard against loss, like primitive music.”53 And, similarly, the aptness of Jake’s language, the authenticity of his narration—compared, say, to the supposed gaucheness and imitative nature of Cohn’s, alloyed as it is with secondhand or derivative romantic ideas, not to mention worn-out moral notions of a woman’s virtue and innocence (if Brett is sleeping around, Cohn thinks, it is because Jake is a “pimp” [197])—is one final thing that makes Jake, and not Cohn, or Romero, or even her fiancé, Mike, the man with whom Brett has her most intimate and sustained relationship. The verbal rapport Jake establishes and enacts with Brett cannot be copied with any other man. The following is an example: Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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“I have to work in the morning,” I said. “I’m too far behind you now to catch up and be any fun.” “Don’t be an ass.” “Can’t do it.” “Right. Send [the count] a tender message?” “Anything. Absolutely.” “Good night, darling.” “Don’t be sentimental.” “You make me ill.” We kissed goodnight and Brett shivered. (33–34) Jake’s sensitivity to the least sentimentality in language (here, Brett’s use of the word “darling”)—his careful if ironic aesthetic policing of her language, as well as his own, equips him as her mate. She clearly shares his verbal sensibility, and that is why they both understand that an antisentimental, “hard-boiled” (34) exchange—“don’t be sentimental”; “you make me ill”—is a prelude to a kiss. Because sexual competition for the desirable woman in these novels is often a social competition between Anglos and ethnic Americans, and because, in this era of American-born ethnic Americans coming of age and of a rising meritocracy, Anglos and ethnic Americans can become fairly indistinguishable, linguistic style—modernist style—can indeed become supremely important as the sole factor that sets the Anglo apart. This is a fascinating point Michaels seems to me to suggest. Hemingway’s representation of a Jew who is a native speaker of American English, from a wealthy family, athletic, Ivy League educated, and not even stereotypically Jewish looking points up Jake’s need to distinguish himself on other grounds, and those grounds turn out to be essentially linguistic. More simply, the disappearance of ethnic dialect or accent (still present in Gatsby with the example of Wolfshiem and still present in Sound with the Italian Americans Quentin encounters in Boston) and its difference from standard American English, as a marker of otherness, may be one of the forces pushing the development of a distinctive American modernist style—at least in the case of Hemingway. The sensibility that Brett and Jake share, and that allows, for example, Brett to assert that the Count is “one of us” (60), is of course delivered up in language, in fact in modernist style: in the case of Hemingway, in a linguistic style that is curt and elliptical, hard-boiled and ironic. Along similar lines, Jake warns Brett not to say too much about her sexual experience with Romero, lest talking too much about it causes her to lose it. What makes Brett assert that the Count is 70

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“one of us” is not finally that he’s been to war and has war wounds (like Jake), but rather that when she asks him how he got his arrow wounds (“Were you in the army?”), he replies, elliptically and sardonically, and much as Jake might, “I was on a business trip, my dear” (60). This irony and terseness is precisely what Jewish Cohn lacks. In addition to liking bad romances and acting as if he’s living in a romance, he talks sentimentally, and occasionally moralistically, which in this novel is equated with talking foolishly (“rot,” as Brett would say [149]), and he doesn’t think to indulge in irony or comedy. Mike criticizes Cohn for offering very little to the group conversation, and specifically for not being humorous: “Oh, say something more. Say something funny. Can’t you see we’re all having a good time here” (141). And Cohn’s problem is not simply that he is too quiet or says too little, for he also says too much at certain points and sounds foolish. This point is made clear when Cohn, in describing Brett, says, “There’s a certain quality about her, a certain fineness. She seems to be absolutely fine and straight,” and Jake responds tersely, as a sort of correction to Cohn’s verboseness, “She’s very nice” (38). In the novel’s terms, Cohn simply doesn’t have the right linguistic measure or tone; it is corrupted by sentimentalism and moralism. The ethnic American can’t hear the cadence that underscores the conversation of the Anglo group— and the modernist style of Jake’s narration. In partial contrast, the ethnic upstart of Fitzgerald’s novel is sensitive to language—and to Anglo linguistic formulas such as Brett’s “what rot!”: “old sport” is the one he constantly employs. Gatsby’s education in being wealthy (by Anglo Dan Cody) and at Oxford has apparently included a linguistic education that Cohn evidently missed out on (though Cohn was accepted into Princeton, he was nonetheless, as we shall see in chapter 4, socially excluded by the Anglo student community while there). And it is telling that when Tom exposes Gatsby’s criminal enterprises (rather than his family) as the real basis of his wealth, he also attempts to strip Gatsby of his verbal pretensions. “ ‘Don’t call me “old sport”!’ cried Tom” (141). But the very idea that Gatsby’s persona is a façade behind which creeps the face of a criminal killer indicates the deeper similarity here between Gatsby and Cohn: that both of them are incurable romantics and not given to irony but rather to violence. To take but one example of their shared romantic ideology, Gatsby insisting that Daisy never loved her husband Tom is a lot like Cohn insisting that Brett never married for money. The larger aesthetic point here is that with both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the ethnic American with ties to the military has antiquated notions that belong to the premodern, romantic tradition. Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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Although for the most part the linguistic distinction of Jake’s prose style in Sun is not explicitly tied to ethnicity and class (and Americanness), at one point in the novel these links are asserted. In one extended internal monologue, Jake thinks the following: What a lot of bilge I could think up at night. What rot, I could hear Brett say it. What rot! When you were with the English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking. The English spoken language—the upper classes, anyway—must have fewer words than the Eskimo. Of course I didn’t know anything about Eskimo. Maybe the Eskimo was a fine a language. Say the Cherokee. I didn’t know anything about the Cherokee, either. The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. I liked them though. I liked the way they talked. (149) Here Jake associates Hemingway’s famous terseness and ironic inflection and the famously limited vocabulary at work in his novels with the spoken English of the English upper classes. And Jake may not know anything about Cherokee, but his free association of upper-class English with Cherokee is also something comprehensible. Hemingway here imagines his linguistic aesthetic to be at once upper class, Anglo, and Native American: which is to say, having a race and class superiority derived from England and yet being somehow essentially American at the same time. This discussion about style is meant to be merely suggestive and limited— and not definitive. Most importantly, it is not, as yet, sufficiently historically grounded. Specifically, my aim here is not to join the debate about the relationship between modernist style and politics, and to make an alternative argument about that relationship. I think that is a very difficult enterprise, which, if not grounded properly in an attention to plot and character, is doomed to fail. Following up on an observation of Michaels’s, I have suggested an argument that could be made about Hemingway’s modernist style as part of an ethnically inflected Anglo exclusivity, an argument that might be applied to Fitzgerald’s narration as well, but I am not claiming it could be extended even to Faulkner (whose romantic is not ethnic, but Anglo); meanwhile, generalizing this claim to American modernist fiction would be reckless. The focus on modernist style—and the tradition of privileging stylistically interesting texts—seems to some degree a function of the pedagogical 72

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traditions in the field of literary studies, New Critical traditions that have to a certain extent eroded. Part of the pedagogical appeal of stylistically challenging or interesting texts was that their meaning could be discussed and argued about without the need to “enrich” the discussion by bringing in material outside of the text, such as “history.” Strangely, or perhaps inevitably, “Cultural” or “New Historical” studies on the political meaning of modernist style have usually built their edifices on top of the temples erected by the New Critics. That is, they have tended to take as given the starting point the New Critics established for any “serious” engagement with modernism: its modern style and modern concern with style. But the notion that there was a distinctive breakthrough in American prose style in the twenties is, again, a major, multigenerational construct, and one engineered first of all by the twenties writers themselves. Hemingway was busy at the time of the publication of Sun branding his own work as modern—and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby as old-fashioned, of “times past.” So, in the recent history of American literary criticism, modernist style has gone from a New Critical mark of literary value to a poststructuralist mark of a certain, usually reactionary, politics. But again, the larger agreement here, like the larger agreement in the debate over the meaning of a modernist plotlessness that is mostly taken for granted, is that there was a stylistic revolution with modernism and that modernism has a recognizable concern about style or ontology of the sign. The familiar agreement about modernism’s relative freedom from plot seems to me a fundamentally mistaken one, and one whose perpetuation continues to blind us to basic historical aspects of the modernist novels at issue here: the obliviousness to plot similarities has occluded the critical ability to perceive the shared context of the mobilization for World War I that stands behind these similarities. The related agreement about and focus on modernism’s distinctive style also strikes me as misguided; one need only look at the seemingly endless debate about the political valence of modernist style—essentially from Lukacs and Benjamin at the onset of modernism to Walter Michaels and Alan Filreis 54 in our own era—to see that the attempt to understand modernist stylistic development in terms of political ideology is doomed to go in circles.55 It isn’t that Lukacs or Michaels is wrong exactly; rather, the abstraction of their arguments is problematic. The problem is that just about anything can be deduced from the emergence or nature of modernist style; the various qualities or characterizations of modernist style can be associated with almost any politics. The reason for this flexibility is that modernist style or the modernist ontology of the signifier are themselves fairly elaborate constructs, fairly removed Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction

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abstractions from prose passages of any given work; giving referents to those terms requires significant acts of interpretation or characterization to begin with. Modernist style is simply too vague and open-ended an object—too remote from any textual element—to be of much use in the kind of historical argumentation I want to make here. Of course, the styles of the writers at issue here are not irrelevant to my study. In general, just as I am arguing that style cannot be assessed apart from character and plot, I have to add that character and even plot cannot be read apart from style. More specifically, chapters 3 and 4 on Fitzgerald and Hemingway will ground my reading of the ironic styles of their Anglo narrators and likewise give the historical context for German American Gatsby’s archaic romanticism and Jewish American Cohn’s similar stylistic “failings.” Chapter 6 will put Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner’s high-modernist literary control, symbolism, and tragedy in the context of their learning to disguise, transmute, and sublimate their “mobilization wounds.” My methodological point here is that arguments about the relationship between modernist style and politics that give attention to stylistics per se, apart from plot and character, have denatured our understanding of 1920s and ’30s novels. Even Michaels’s Our America, despite its implicit rejection of the notion of modernist plotlessness and its acute readings of plot and character similarities among 1920s novels that indicate an obvious affinity between modernist fiction and nativism, reverts to the tradition of argumentation about modernism and politics when it comes to producing a thesis: Our America essentially brackets off style from narrative and character when it develops its central claim about modernist ontology of the sign and postwar nativist ideology. To my mind, Michaels thus lays aside or marginalizes his most fruitful suggestion about the relationship between modernist style and politics, the connection between Hemingway’s modernist style and ethnic stereotyping (“Racial inferiority is reproduced here as aesthetic failure”). By contrast, I want to make an argument about a number of texts of the 1920s and ’30s—principally about the six aforementioned novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Miller, Barnes, and West, but also about other texts as well by the three principal authors and others—that concerns, not their stylistic links in themselves,56 but their similarities of plot and character, including the similarities in the linguistic styles of the characters. And what I have said and will say about the political meaning of the styles of these texts is derived from and inseparable from what I have observed about their politics by placing their similar narratives and character sets in historical and biographical context. 74

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Part II Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the 1920s

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The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army Ethnic Egalitarianism, Intelligence Testing, the New Man, and the Charity Girl

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I

n 1917, when the United States entered the Great War, Jewish gangster Samuel “Nails” Morton enlisted in the army and went overseas. A historian puts it as follows: Nails enlisted in the 131st Illinois Infantry that went overseas with the famed “Rainbow Division” [a division so named because of its geographical diversity]. Nails rose through the ranks to become a first lieutenant. He received the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest decoration for bravery, for capturing a machine gun nest despite being wounded. He returned to Maxwell street [a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago] a hero, became a bootlegger, and put his training in weapons and warfare to practical use. Morton was [after the war] a stylish dresser and high liver who loved horseback riding. . . . After his death, Nails was characterized as a man who led a number of lives. To one set of acquaintances he was a gallant soldier . . . and to the police, a notorious gangster.1 If this thumbnail biographical sketch sounds eerily like the fictional career and double-sidedness of Jay Gatsby (romantic soldier-officer and “rough-neck” [53] bootlegger),2 it is probably not because Fitzgerald modeled Gatsby on “Nails” Morton,3 but rather because the author of Gatsby was describing, with Gatsby’s experience, not a fantastical and romantic aberration, but a believable, if historically unprecedented, trajectory for ethnic Americans, especially during the war. This possible social trajectory of an Americanized ethnic American, and, specifically, Gatsby’s wartime rise “through the ranks” in military training camps and on the front, interested Fitzgerald intensely. (No doubt Fitzgerald’s intense interest stemmed from the fact that in the training camps he himself had been denied promotions and commands he had hoped for). And it is something that, at our historical remove from the Great War era and used to a world of meritocratic placement and promotion, few critics and readers now see as historically remarkable or practically unprecedented. Indeed, when it comes to ethnic American experience in this war and the postwar era, it is Gatsby’s 1920s career as a millionaire gangster that is the unusual part: in fact, it might be said that in creating the portrait of Gatsby, Fitzgerald combined a sensational stereotype of the stylish ethnic bootlegger with a less celebrated but historically more important figure of the ethnic American officer in World War I. A 1918 memorandum from the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Military Intelligence Branch declares the following:

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There is a natural prejudice among American officers against new Americans who have a decided accent and who do not speak English as perfectly as they. Many of these men, however, are most capable and members of the professions and are successful businessmen and prominent in their own colonies. Such men are splendid officer material. . . . The sending of worthy candidates from the racial groups to an Officers’ School and their subsequent commissioning, in addition to filling a large need in the army, will have a most excellent effect on the large foreign-speaking colonies in this country. They compose 30,000,000 of our 100,000,000 population.4 Of course, Gatsby’s own account of his success in the war and afterward is a mix of fact and fiction, and Nick pieces together the truth over the course of the novel. He does so, in fact, sometimes in quite minute detail. For example, Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic family saga history of his military service in which he began the war by “accept[ing] a commission as first lieutenant” and got promoted to major after proving himself in combat in the Argonne Forest (70): Nick informs us that “He was a captain before he went to the front” (158). This correction of a seemingly minor omission on Gatsby’s part seems indeed nitpicking and pointless. What difference does it make whether Gatsby got promoted to captain in camp before he saw action or got bumped up from lieutenant to major at the front, all as a result of his combat performance? (Is Nick correcting Gatsby’s impression that he was promoted through two ranks because his heroism at the front was so dramatic? How did one get promoted to captain in the camps?) It obviously makes some difference to Fitzgerald, and perhaps understandably so: captain was precisely the promotion that, in his training camp experience, Fitzgerald was next in line for, apparently expected and hoped for, but never got.5 In later years, Fitzgerald fantasized in his private “ledger” about being a hero in battle—and being a captain: “—my division is cut to rags and stands on the defensive part of Minnesota where I know every bit of ground. The headquarters staff and the regimental battalion commanders . . . have been killed by one shell. The command devolved upon Captain Fitzgerald. With superb presence. . . .”6 What is at issue here is how Gatsby succeeds, including how Gatsby achieves at training camp what Fitzgerald couldn’t. It is generally but mistakenly understood that instrumental to ethnic American and lower-class-born James Gatz’s

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later social success was a combination of self-mythification and a Ragged Dick instance of good luck: he transformed his presumably German last name to an Anglo-sounding one and invented a family pedigree for himself, and he ran into the rich Dan Cody and his yacht on Lake Superior at an opportune moment (104). (Gatsby is obviously ethnic American, thus Tom Buchanan’s insinuation later in the book that Gatsby is not of the same race as he, Daisy, and Jordan, to which Jordan responds, “We’re all white here” [137]. Gatsby’s original last name—Gatz—and the rumors that he grew up in Germany are pretty strong indications that his ancestry is German.) The irony, or Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age revision of Horatio Alger, is supposed to be that Cody did not teach Gatsby how to be moral, but how to be rich or upper class and thus to pull off his self-fabrication as an Anglo from a good family: and thus Fitzgerald seems to anticipate historian Warren Susman’s insight that what makes for success in the modern, corporate age is personality or likeability, not moral character.7 Clearly, Gatsby’s name change is significant and historically relevant; this is, after all, the era in which ethnic Americans routinely adjusted their names for the purposes of succeeding; among the authors in this study, for example, Jewish Nathanael West changed his name from Nathan Weinstein, and even Faulkner, an Anglo, tampered with the spelling of his name and made up a different family past in attempting to join the Canadian air force.8 But Gatsby’s fakery and his “singularly appropriate education” with Cody (107) is only part of the story of his success; there is another, separate ingredient in his story that is based on Gatsby’s real abilities, is absolutely fundamental to his rise, and has everything to do with his making captain before he went to the front. Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door” (137, 138). Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house, during the Great War, was not his polished manner or his false name, but his officer’s uniform, and that was something he could not grant himself, nor could Cody have given it to him. Again, Cody provided him with a training in manners that he later used to help fake an upper-class upbringing and that perhaps also helped make him appealing as a front man to the immigrant gangster Wolfshiem. Of course, he might have picked up some of the same training in manners during his stint at Oxford University; in fact, his being an “Oggsford man” (76), as Wolfshiem pronounces it, clearly drew the Jewish gangster’s interest. In any case, Gatsby got to Daisy’s house, and to Oxford, because he was an officer in the army, in fact a captain before he left 80

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training camp for Europe. And his being an officer had little to do with his training in manners by Cody, and even less with his self-fabrication. The war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer; he in fact crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” separating different classes and different “races” when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform” (155–156): “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor” (155). But mightn’t Cody have pulled some strings for Gatsby with the army, or mightn’t Gatsby have used some of Cody’s money to “purchase” a commission? After all, Fitzgerald says Cody “turned up as James Gatz’s destiny” (106), and Gatsby tells Nick that he “accepted a commission as first lieutenant” when the war began (70). But Cody is already dead by the time the war rolls around (according to Fitzgerald’s dating, Cody dies in 19129), and Gatsby ends his Cody apprenticeship without any of the inheritance Cody intended for him (107). (Cody, his lifestyle, was indeed to be Gatsby’s destiny, but he wasn’t Gatsby’s opportunity.) Moreover, Nick comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have issued out of a fabricated upper-class background. Indeed, to get a commission, a “white” man (even an Anglo man) would have had to take and pass a qualifying exam, as college students could and Fitzgerald did,10 or, if he had no college education, and Gatsby had only “two weeks” at “the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota” (105), he would have had to score exceptionally high on the army’s intelligence test, or score well on its “Individual Rating Sheet for Selecting [Officer] Candidates in Each Training Unit,” or otherwise prove his effectiveness and usefulness to his superiors. As Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri explained in The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I, most white officer candidates had some college education, but “highly qualified experts, high scorers on tests, and some who rose from the ranks were exceptions.”11 So Gatsby would have had to make it into officers’ training, not on the basis of any personal wealth or connections to the rich and powerful. In short, the particular American mobilization for the Great War, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers—which Fitzgerald knew all about, as an officer in training at Camp Taylor and at other camps—meant that a “nobody” like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training, and specifically promoted to captain, while still at camp, on the basis of his own measurable and observable abilities, in the context of a new meritocratic moment. The novel is not explicit on this point, but it strongly implies that Gatsby met Daisy, not on the basis of luck or chance connections, but on the basis of the unprecedented pressures toward meritocracy generated by the Great War. The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 81

Indeed, the World War I U.S. Army was like no other American Army to that date—for the first time in American history, an army was to a significant extent mobilized on the basis of intelligence and trade testing and other “scientific” personnel methods imported from business and industry and developed by psychologists. It was the nation’s first mobilization according to “modern” personnel procedures. Such unprecedented agencies as the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits and the Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army in the Adjutant General’s Office, as well as the Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection of the Military Morale Section of the Military Intelligence Branch, were developed and to some degree coordinated to help distribute recruits to appropriate ranks and jobs in the military. Meanwhile, this war ushered in the use of now familiar personnel devices, such as interviews and qualification cards for soldiers and officers that recorded “occupational, educational and military” experience. A War Department General Order decreed the use of the cards for soldiers and required in addition that every soldier be interviewed.12 In a June 1918 letter, the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council reported the following about the mobilization of the Great War U.S. Army: In April 1916, President Wilson requested the National Academy of the Sciences to organize the scientific resources of the nation in the interest of national security and welfare. He expressed the desire that this mobilization should include the scientific resources of the entire country. . . . The psychologists of the country, in common with their scientists in other fields, have made notable contributions to the national defense. Their program has included: the psychological examining of recruits in order that the mentally unfit may be eliminated, and the remainder classified according to intelligence; additional psychological measurements which aim to select those individuals who are best adapted for tasks requiring special skill.13 The “psychological tests” were also meant “to assist in selecting men of superior mental ability, who should be considered for promotion,”14 or, more specifically, in “the selection of, as material for officers training course, those men who are best qualified intellectually for command.”15 Meanwhile, in a separate testing program, “To increase the accuracy of selecting skilled workers among the enlisted men, a system of practical trade tests was devised, standardized, and installed in twenty camps.”16 82

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In addition, the Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army was developed because “the Chiefs of the War Department Bureaus [were] not wholly satisfied with present methods of classifying personnel and making recommendations of [officer] commissions.” The director of the new committee wrote the following in an official memorandum to Secretary of War Baker, the day before Baker ratified the committee on August 5, 1917: The first aim of this committee is to bring to the aid of the various bureaus the combined judgment and experience of specialists in methods of employing, examining, rating, and classifying men according to their native abilities and their relative value to different branches of the service. A second aim is to provide a means for bringing to a focus the combined experience of the various branches of the army organization, in selecting, classifying and assigning men, and recommending them for commission. The committee was made up of two parts, “a Scientific Staff of Specialists with civilian status” (many of whom had been members of the Bureau of Salesmanship Research, which was studying methods for identifying effective salesmen) and “army officers.”17 This committee devised a standard “rating scale” for “the rating of officers and candidates for commissions in the Officers Training Camps” that the army officially adopted in a General Order of May 1918.18 Near the war’s end (in November 1918), the Committee on Psychology was able to report that “The rating of soldiers according to mental alertness or degree of intelligence has facilitated the early and prompt elimination of men who are mentally unfit for service and the proper utilization of various grades of intelligence. Approximately one million, seven hundred thousand individuals have been examined to date.”19 In a letter to the secretary of war, an official with the Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded reported, “It is probable that never before, certainly never before in our country, has there been made a scientific study of efficiency based on a measure of intelligence and involving so large a number of citizens from every section of the country as that now in progress.”20 In terms of trade tests, “At the time of the armistice about 130,000 men who claimed occupational skill had been trade tested.”21 Meanwhile, by the war’s end, the Committee on the Classification of Personnel could claim an even greater role in the distribution of men in the war effort. As the executive secretary reported, “Personnel offices have been established in all army divisions, depots and training camps, coast defense stations, The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 83

aviation fields, special training camps for Staff Corps and at other army Posts. In these offices, a special card system furnished accessible information as to the educational, occupational, and military qualifications of every man. . . . This system selected 973,858 men for transfer largely into technical units in the Engineers, Aviation, Ordnance and other Staff Corps. . . . The number of soldiers interviewed by trained examiners and classified according to their best army usefulness was in all, approximately three and a half million men.”22 By early 1918, intelligence tests23 “were commonly used . . . at the various cantonments for the examination of men for promotion and special work,”24 and in fact Camp Taylor, Gatsby’s camp, was definitely one of the first cantonments that used intelligence tests, in part to distinguish potential officers. The “tests [were] tried out . . . in the four cantonments at Camps Devens, Taylor, Dix, and Meade;” “psychological examining began” at these camps “in the fall of 1917.”25 A 1918 document from the Committee on Psychology, entitled “Interpretation of Scores in Intelligence a” (referring to the Alpha test for literate soldiers), contains the handwritten note, “Results at Camp Taylor.” The scores separated officer “types” from privates, as well as indicated superior officer “types”: a score of 100–249 or a “C” indicated a “Private (type)” and accounted for 57% of those tested; a score of 250–299 or a “B” indicated an “Officer (type)” and accounted for 12%; a score of 300–349 or an “A” indicated a “Superior Officer” and accounted for 5%, and a top range of 350–414, a high “A,” reached by only 1%, indicated “Skilled thinker in abstract relations” (at the bottom were another 25% with “D” and “E” grades, encompassing “Unskilled laborers,” “dull laborer,” and “Feebleminded or bordering on fm”). Similar overall test results from Camp Taylor were collated in the chief psychologist’s postwar tome, Psychological Examining in the United States Army (1921).26 Also of particular relevance to Gatsby, the Psychology Committee’s “tests [were] used in the qualification of army Captains.”27 In terms of performing on the intelligence tests, it is important to realize that a recruit with Gatsby’s background would have had a few significant advantages over most other men—because Gatsby grew up in the United States, has apparently graduated from high school (he even begins college education), and received that education in the North (he is raised in Minnesota). As many commentators have rightly pointed out in criticizing the intelligence tests, they did not measure intelligence as their designers claimed, but rather were culturally biased in a variety of ways (and that’s why ethnic Americans, immigrants, and blacks scored more poorly on them in the aggregate). There were strong correlations between performance on the test, on the one hand, and on the 84

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other, years of schooling and years of residence in the United States (and thus acquaintance with American culture); in addition, those educated at Northern schools did better than those educated at Southern schools.28 Though Gatsby only started college, he would have absolutely stood out in terms of years of schooling for having gotten this far in his education: “relatively few recruits had the opportunity to finish or even attend high school.”29 Indeed, Gatsby had much more education than that of the average white recruit born in America, which was 6.9 years; “in one large sample of native white draftees, fewer than 18 percent had attended high school, and most of those men had not graduated.”30 In fact, given the bias of the very strong correlation “between test score and amount of schooling,”31 it would be very probable that a recruit with Gatsby’s educational history would score at the officer level, because at Camp Taylor that was precisely the top 18 percent, more or less the percentage of native white draftees who had any high school at all. That Gatsby in addition graduated from high school, and that his high school was in the North and that he had an American upbringing, indeed made it likely that he would score in the top 6 percent, or at the superior officer level. The separate Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army developed, again, a companion method of a “rating scale” system for identifying potential officers,32 candidates for training camp as well as captains from among junior officers: an “Individual Rating Sheet for Selecting Candidates In Each Training Unit” and later a “Rating Sheet for Selecting Captains.”33 Of course, Gatsby would have had to be selected for officers’ training camp and to make lieutenant before he got promoted to captain. Evaluators of candidates for “Officers’ Training Camps” in 1917 were instructed to base their selections on “the personal history record and the efficiency record, as well as upon your own observation.” Candidates were to be judged on the following: 1. Physical Qualities. Consider how the candidate will impress his men by his physique, bearing, neatness, voice, energy, and endurance. 2. Intelligence. Consider ease of learning and ability to grasp easily and to solve new problems. 3. Military Leadership. Consider self-reliance, initiative, decisiveness; and the ability to command the obedience, loyalty, and co-operation of men. 4. Character. Consider stability, freedom from general bad habits, regard for authority and spirit of service and general helpfulness in the . . . unit. The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 85

5. General Value to the Service. What is your general impression of the candidate’s probable value for a company officer, i.e., as an administrator, as a drill master, as a leader in action? Each of these categories was assigned a specific numeric range, for the purpose of grading; the first four were to range from “maximum of 15” to “minimum of 3,” and the final quality was to be graded on a scale from “40 to 8.” The scores were then to be totaled, with the highest possible being 100. It is easy to make the case that Gatsby has many of the characteristics that the army was identifying in this “Rating Sheet”: as for “Character” (#4), the novel tells us “he formed the habit of letting liquor alone” after seeing what drink did to Cody (107); as for “Physical Qualities” (#1), the book also stresses Gatsby’s bearing, neatness, and energy in various ways. (It is under this category that Gatsby’s polish thanks to Cody could have worked in his favor. In recommending a Syrian American for “Officers Training Camp,” a captain noted, in addition to the man’s more important qualities, that he “is splendidly educated, a young man of fine appearance, a man of the utmost refinement and is thoroughly Americanized.”) Gatsby’s behavior in the war also seems to bear out some of these desirable traits for officers listed under rubric #3, “Military Leadership,” such as initiative and decisiveness: Gatsby “took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance” (70).34 The “Rating Sheet for Selecting Captains” among those officers “eligible for a captaincy” was similar, but even more specific and articulated; it had eight separate criteria of evaluation: “Appearance,” “Military Experience,” “Influence over Men,” “Regard for Authority,” “Vigor,” “Stability,” “Judgment,” and “Total Value to the Regiment.” Each of the first seven categories was to be judged on a range from “10 to 2,” and the final category was given a range of “30 to 6,” so a perfect score would again be 100. Evaluators were asked to rate a candidate in comparison with the ratings given to five existing or “present captains in your regiment”; in fact, they were to make the evaluations of the candidate against the other captains and with the ratings of the other captains in front of them: for each category, the evaluator was “to give him the number of points following the name of the captain whom he equals” in the quality at issue. Finally, the Rating Sheet had spaces for evaluations by three “rating officer[s]” and asked for an “Average” of the three scores.35 Again, it is possible to argue that Gatsby would do well in terms of the criteria on the Rating Sheet for captains. 86

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Reconstructing and synthesizing all of the personnel practices at use at Camp Taylor, it can said fairly definitely that for a soldier like Gatsby (that is, without a college education) to be considered for promotion to captain there, he would have to 1. have scores more or less in the top 18 percent on the intelligence test (scoring in the top 6 percent would have been even more helpful), or high scores on the Rating Sheets for selecting officers, or qualifications along the lines of the Rating Sheets that would have had to have come to the attention of his superior officers in some other way, thus getting selected for officers’ training, 2. succeed at officers’ training school to make lieutenant there, and 3. then acquit himself at a superior level in officers’ training camp or score highly according to the Rating Sheets for selecting captains, or both. And, as we have seen, because of Gatsby’s upbringing and educational background, along with his personal qualities, he was in a very good position to do well on both the intelligence tests and the Rating Sheets. Fitzgerald would have known that captains were being generated in some of the training camps in 1917, and at Camp Taylor in particular, according to the new personnel methods, because he himself was in officer training at Camp Taylor, in Louisville, Kentucky.36 Interestingly, Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, that Fitzgerald met his future wife Zelda—for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy. (He also spent time at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas just before his stint at Camp Taylor and at Camp Gordon in Georgia and Camp Sheridan after.37) Most likely, Fitzgerald chose Camp Taylor for Gatsby and put Daisy in Louisville because Camp Taylor would have had the new personnel methods for officer testing, rating, and selection in 1917 during Gatsby’s tenure there, according to the novel’s dating, whereas Camp Sheridan near Zelda got the tests only later (by early 1918 all of the camps had the tests38). According to Jordan’s account, Gatsby meets Daisy at Camp Taylor in 1917, and it can be deduced that Gatsby leaves camp for France in early 1918 because it is “one winter night” in that year that Daisy packs her things to “go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas” (80).39 An “A” score on the intelligence test was deemed indicative of superior officer potential, but other qualities, such as those considered in the “Rating Sheet for Selecting Captains,” were also taken into consideration in making a The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 87

promotion. As the head of the Psychology Committee Robert Yerkes put it, a grade of A on the intelligence test indicated “a high officer type when backed by other necessary qualities.”40 Obviously, scoring well on tests, whether the exam for college students or the intelligence test, was not sufficient for promotion to captain, even if one had a college education. The insufficiency of high performance on tests was exactly the case with Fitzgerald: while a college student, Fitzgerald “went out to Fort Snelling,” near his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and passed “the necessary examinations for a provisional appointment in the regular army;”41 he probably took the intelligence tests as well because Officers’ Training Camp at Camp Taylor, along with 21 other such camps, were giving candidates the test by the early spring of 1918,42 but he didn’t acquit himself in officers’ training, and, much to his dismay, his army career stalled at the rank of lieutenant. The point of all this is that Gatsby got his real start, as a captain in the military training camps—and thus got near Daisy—as a result of the unprecedented opportunities that the Great War offered to lower-class and ethnic American men of education, bilingual ability, other leadership traits, or simply test-taking ability. For all his self-fabrication, including his lie about having “accepted a commission as first lieutenant” when the war began (70), Gatsby could not have faked his way into the officers’ corps in World War I. In fact, one of the benefits of the intelligence tests used at Camp Taylor and elsewhere was to eliminate, as the wartime Committee on Psychology put it, “the danger of charletans [sic].”43 If Gatsby lies to Nick by concealing the fact that he made captain, not at the front, but in the training camps, it is not because he made captain through some sort of shady means or nepotism, but just the opposite. The false account of himself that Gatsby tries to foist on Nick is of course meant to be romantic, and to paint himself as an American aristocrat who is given preferential treatment on the basis of his exalted family background. Gatsby is hiding a stateside military experience that is anything but dashing, romantic, and aristocratic; his training camp career is mundane, practical, and bureaucratic. In short, Gatsby was the beneficiary of new meritocratic personnel techniques developed to rapidly mobilize a huge and effective American Army to fight in World War I. Given the seriousness of the crisis that confronted the United States and the proportion of ethnic Americans in the nation’s population—about a third of the population was immigrant or first generation American—the “luxury” of ethnic prejudice was to a significant degree put aside in the interest of winning the war (though the traditions of racial prejudice against blacks were, 88

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by contrast, mostly retained and reaffirmed).44 In fact, in response to a perceived problem of ethnic disaffection, the military revised its initial approach to foreign-speaking immigrants. At first, such immigrants were put in “development battalions” and—counter to official policy—indiscriminately mixed in with soldiers who were deemed physically or mentally unfit, or sick with venereal disease. Moreover, the companies were often polyglot, in which soldiers couldn’t understand one another or their officers, and, finally, most of these foreign-speaking recruits were left to themselves or assigned menial tasks or K.P. (“kitchen police”) duty.45 This situation was first of all a serious waste or misuse of manpower (indeed, “many of them [had] seen military service in the counties from which they came”); as Lieutenant Stanislaw Gutowski, a Polish American officer tapped to help solve the problem, put it, “The War Department finally came to the conclusion that having about 100,000 [nonEnglish-speaking] men in the army for six months, clothing them and feeding them, with no benefit, no result in any form is pretty serious.” Another report by the Military Intelligence Branch estimated that each such wasted man had by the end of July 1918 cost the army about $1,000 in “pay, clothing, food and time expended upon them in training”; “therefore the Government is financially bettered $1,000,000 for each 1,000” foreign-speaking soldiers actually used in the war effort. (Involving immigrant soldiers in the war—and finding ethnic American officers to lead them—was not primarily motivated by a concern with social justice: as Gutowski pointed out, in attempting to appeal to an audience of “Intelligence Officers” from a number of camps, “If every one of you will give to Government 1000 [foreign-speaking] men, then Government will get 50,000 men who will fight at the front and more American lives will be saved. If you do not, American boys have to go to the front, fight and die while these men stay over here.”)46 But the situation was worse than extremely wasteful; it was also divisive and dangerous: a confidential War Department bulletin from July 1918 stated that the foreign-born soldier morale “had been utterly broken down.” The Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection (FSS) of the military, recently reassigned to the Military Morale Section, responded with what came to be known as the “Camp Gordon Plan.” Under this plan, developed at Camp Gordon, Georgia, an infantry replacement center that was providing intensive training and shipping soldiers overseas at the rate of 10,000 a month—and so allowed for experimentation with foreign-speaking soldiers on a mass scale—the FSS developed “ethnic-specific companies” that shared a single language, and then selected, promoted, and trained foreign-speaking immigrant and first-or second-generation officers to lead these companies.47 The initial The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 89

selection of officers was made after “the men of the Development Battalions of this camp were classified physically and mentally,” or, more broadly, after “Each man was classified as to his nationality, intellect, loyalty, citizenship and military fitness.” Gutowski emphasized that the officers chosen “must be intelligent.”48 The Camp Gordon initiative met with amazing success. A month before the arrival of FSS personnel, “all of the foreign-speaking soldiers had refused to go overseas. However, after the ‘Camp Gordon Plan’ was implemented, 85 percent expressed their willingness ‘in no uncertain terms’ to fight in Europe. Later, this number increased to 92 percent.” By the war’s end, the military “intended to institute the Camp Gordon Plan in every cantonment in the United States with a sufficient number of foreign-born soldiers,” and such reorganization in fact continued after the Armistice.49 Fitzgerald had passed through Camp Gordon and left just a month before the Plan was developed there.50 Gatsby’s camp, Camp Taylor, was one of fifteen army cantonments that began to experience the Camp Gordon Plan of reorganization during the last few months of the war. Given Gatsby’s apparently ample combat record and, more definitively, an exchange with Nick that reveals that Gatsby was already fighting in France by “June nineteen-eighteen” (52),51 Fitzgerald clearly imagined Gatsby hitting the front before Camp Taylor was reorganized, but Fitzgerald could also have imagined taking poetic license with the dating of this reorganization. It also isn’t clear that Gatsby spoke German (only false rumors about his growing up in Germany and being a German spy [48] imply that he speaks German), but if he did, he would of course have been an ideal candidate to lead a German-speaking company: Germans in fact comprised the largest ethnic group at Camp Taylor at the end of the war, with 1,492.52 Two things are for certain here and of relevance to the broad issue of ethnic American ascension during the war, and thus Fitzgerald’s creation of the figure of Gatsby: first, the army not only developed personnel methods that gave equal opportunity to ethnic Americans, it also gave preferential treatment to ethnic Americans who were bilingual. Second, Fitzgerald spent time in army camps (including Taylor and Gordon) that had substantial immigrant and American-born ethnic populations, and these camps generated numerous ethnic, including specifically German American, officers: he no doubt encountered plenty of potential models for Gatsby. As a French soldier put it in 1917 in regard to U.S. troops in France, “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”53 90

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The Committee on Classification of Personnel in the U.S. Army recognized “the necessity of utilizing to the last degree every available bit of human material.” And that meant selecting, classifying, distributing, and employing men on a “more careful and scientific basis” than was the general practice in business and industry.54 It also meant being concerned at times about the damage done to the “morale” of ethnic and even “colored troops” by the racist language—or “unfortunate phraseology”—used by commissioned and noncommissioned officers, and the need to educate officers to employ “tact.” The need to eliminate racial slurs from the working vocabularies of officers was in fact occasionally seen as an issue of national security. A military Report of the Second Conference on Control of Morale in May of 1918 stated the following: Depression of morale of this group [of Italian Americans] largely due to lack of skill and tact among ignorant non-commissioned officers. Many of latter seem to have no comprehension of the problem. Situation aggravated by freely expressed ridicule of American units who call these men “wops,” “dagoes,” much to latter’s resentment and humiliation. . . . A similar problem but even more serious is presented by the colored troops. . . . They have great possibilities as soldiers. They exhibit admirable docility, are brave, work hard, show fine endurance and are capable of doing splendid things when properly led and inspired. At present colored troops much disturbed and depressed, and the same is true of the civilian colored population. Bulletin No. 34 prepared for the purpose of minimizing friction between white and colored troops. Owing to some unfortunate phraseology the colored population was infuriated. Their resentment was deep, wide-spread and still continues. . . . In the handling of colored troops, education of the officers—both non-com. and commissioned—is of central importance.55 In response to reports such as this one and complaints from Italian recruits about use of the terms wop and dago, the army made an effort to get noncommissioned officers to desist. A 1918 Military Intelligence bulletin instructed, “All officers should exercise great care that no discrimination shall be allowed among non-commissioned officers and soldiers generally, against [foreignspeaking] soldiers in the training companies. Prompt steps shall be taken to prevent the use of such epithets as ‘guinea,’ ‘bohunk,’ or ‘wop.’ ”56 Meanwhile, the War Department “formally prohibited calling Negro soldiers ‘niggers’ and The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 91

‘coons,’ which had some effect on the language used by White officers training blacks at Des Moines,”57 the sole officer training camp for African Americans. Distinctively, the pragmatic and sometimes “scientific” system of the selection of officers—which, though biased toward the educated and against blacks, was otherwise class- and ethnicity-blind—was a far cry from anything the American military had employed in the past. In early 1917, before the United States had instituted the draft, and the new meritocratic personnel initiatives that followed, Theodore Roosevelt, the old Rough Rider of the Spanish-American War, had wanted to raise a volunteer division. The way he imagined staffing it was steeped in elitist traditions of the military and the nation: “Some staff positions [he] intended to offer to scions of the French nobility. . . . But most of the officers—indeed most of the enlisted men—would be Ivy Leaguers. Places of special distinction were reserved for the descendants of prominent Civil War generals. There would be a German American regiment and a black regiment (officered by whites).”58 President Wilson was not about to let his archrival attempt to gain publicity in such a scheme, but more than this, Wilson and his aides wanted a mobilization strategy that was, as he put it when he signed the Selective Service Act into law in May 1917, “undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”59 In the early years of the Great War, American authorities had watched, and learned a lesson, as “England offered an especially compelling example” of how not to mobilize for war. “The British had refused until 1916 to resort to the draft. In the first two years of the war they had seen their best-educated and most talented young men rush willy-nilly to the colors and as quickly and haphazardly die in the mud in Flanders. That non-policy wrought a terrible loss of leadership cadres that seriously crippled the British military effort.”60 Wilson and his aides were determined to do things very differently, and one of the results, particularly relevant in terms of Fitzgerald’s novel, was that ethnic Americans, and specifically German Americans, like Gatsby—despite elitist traditions exemplified by Roosevelt’s idea for a volunteer division—could indeed end up as officers, due to new processes of “scientific” selection.

A Revised Account of the Army’s Intelligence Testing Program The army’s intelligence tests have rightly been much maligned for being culturally biased, as opposed to objective measures of intelligence: biased toward 92

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the educated, and biased against immigrants and blacks. They were famously exploited by immigration restrictionists after the war to argue for and achieve their goals. But attention has not been paid to the fact that, given these very biases, the tests actually favored and gave opportunities during the war to Americanized ethnic Americans who (like Gatsby) had significant schooling. In addition, it has become a received idea that the army never thought very highly of the testing program and never itself made much use of the tests during the war. I also take issue with this received idea about the army’s use of the tests, which has stemmed in part from the fact that there was resistance to the tests by company commanders as well as suspicion of the psychologists’ aims even by some of those in the military who supported the tests. So far, historians and other commentators have evaluated the testing program in terms of what the psychologists intended for them and then did with them after the war. What has been missing is an analysis of how the tests functioned, along with other new as well as tried personnel methods, in terms of the army’s mobilization. In essence, their controversial postwar effects—their exploitation by nativists after the war to argue for immigration restriction, together with their launching “the era of mass testing”61—have utterly overshadowed their wartime effects of contributing to a partially egalitarian mobilization and an ethnically diverse officers corps, effects that have been forgotten or underestimated. Though my argument about Gatsby does not depend on this specific corrective about the tests, precisely because the army had, in addition to the testing, another major personnel initiative for identifying potential officers out of the mass of recruits (that is, the “rating” system used by the Committee on the Classification of Personnel), it is nonetheless important to set the record straight and, more to the point here, to make clear that the testing program took place in the context of initiatives intended to be both meritocratic and efficient. My ultimate interest is not in the testing program per se, but in the methods of the mobilization, and specifically in characterizing the World War I mobilization—often associated with the invidious postwar uses of the tests—in a new way, as having a meritocratic and egalitarian thrust that, though partial (because denied to blacks), was nonetheless a radical departure from previous military policy and an important event in American history that happens to be registered in our most famous postwar fiction. Without an awareness of this development and the fact that it was a radical shift—which the three authors in my study painfully possessed—it is impossible, I am arguing, to come to grips with that fiction. With both the testing program and the classification of personnel programs, which overlapped in their purposes and often affirmed each The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 93

other’s evaluations (as well as the observations of regular officers), the army was trying to find the best men to be officers, including ethnic American men, and to develop methods that, in order to cope with the huge influx of draftees, would work effectively, quickly, and ideally with large numbers. Ronald Schaffer claims in America in the Great War (1991), in chorus with many other commentators who both criticize the tests for their bias and downplay or dismiss their effects on the mobilization, that the testing “program produced . . . little of benefit to the army”: The wartime intelligence tests did yield important results, if not the ones [Robert] Yerkes [the director of the testing program] promised. To those who believed in their validity and certain theories about racial differences, they appeared to prove that blacks, who tended to score lower on average than whites, had less intelligence than whites. . . . They were interpreted to demonstrate that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were inherently stupider than people who had come from countries in the north and west of that continent. They contributed to the popular culture notion that millions of Americans had a “mental age” of thirteen or less, barely above the level of “feeblemindedness,” thus increasing alarm about mental deterioration and what was called in those days race suicide.62 In Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), David Kennedy had already begun to set the pattern of critique that has fossilized into a received idea. He discussed the bias of the tests and indicated that the army did not “eagerly” cooperate with the psychologists, that “the army at first responded tepidly to these ‘mental meddlers,’ as one general called them”; he concludes that the “army, to its credit, never lost its suspicion of the psychologists, and ended the testing program at the first opportunity, January 1919.”63 Though his account exaggerated the army’s opposition to the tests by being deeply misleading on two counts—the army continued to use psychologists tests after January 1919, and the army had passed up as well an earlier prime opportunity to end the testing program mid-war when it evaluated the program—Kennedy stopped short of claiming the tests were hardly used by the army or produced little of benefit to it. A year later, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981), probably the most thorough and well-known account of the testing program, basically established the full critique that Schaffer and others have since echoed. Gould, like Schaffer after him, concluded that the army never “made much use” of the 94

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tests and that the “primary impact” of the tests had nothing to do with army’s use of them. “The primary impact of the tests arose not from the army’s lackadaisical use of scores for individuals, but from general propaganda that accompanied Yerkes’s report of the summary statistics.”64 Gould’s book includes a careful and compelling analysis of why the tests were biased: Most of the Alpha [test] parts presented items that have become familiar to generations of test-takers ever since: analogies, filling in the next number in a sequence, unscrambling sentences, and so forth. This similarity is no accident; the army Alpha [the test for literate test takers] was the granddaddy . . . of all written mental tests. . . . These familiar parts are not especially subject to charges of cultural bias, at least no more so than their modern descendants. In a general way, of course, they test literacy, and literacy records education more than inherited intelligence. . . . A few items are amusing in light of Yerkes’s assertion that the tests “measure native intellectual ability.” Consider the Alpha analogy: “Washington is to Adams as first is to . . . ” But one part [out of eight parts] of each test is simply ludicrous in the light of Yerkes’s analysis. How could Yerkes and company attribute the low scores of recent immigrants to innate stupidity when their multiple-choice test consisted entirely of questions like: Crisco is a: patent medicine, disinfectant, toothpaste, food product; The number of a Kaffir’s legs is: 2, 4, 6, 8; Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian[?]65 Gould also suggests that the army’s use of the tests was never more than “lackadaisical” because there was opposition to them among regular officers: “Tensions rose between Yerkes’s testers and regular officers” over the testing program. “As friction and doubt mounted, the secretary of war polled commanding officers of all camps to ask their opinion of Yerkes’s tests. He received one hundred replies, nearly all negative. They were, Yerkes admitted . . . , ‘with a few exceptions, unfavorable to psychological work, and have led to the conclusion on the part of various officers of the General Staff that this work has little, if any, value to the army and should be discontinued.’ ”66 But it is important to point out that, despite the friction and objections, and even Yerkes’s characterization of “various officers of the General Staff,” The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 95

the official General Staff Report on the issue did not finally find the program lacking in value and did not recommend abandoning it but rather fixing its problems; the army did not discontinue the testing (and the army did not, as Kennedy claims, “end . . . the testing program at the first opportunity”), and it is insufficient and even misleading to claim, as Gould does, that “Yerkes fought back and won a standoff ” or that “his work proceeded under a cloud of suspicion.”67 First of all, the regular officer response to the tests was more mixed than Gould’s book would suggest. Though indeed, the General Staff ’s “Report on psychological tests in the army” of June 1918 asserted that “the generally higher ranking officers of long military service generally condemn the test as unnecessary from the standpoint of an organization commander,” it also observed that the “younger officers who are now, and to be company commanders, are inclined to believe that the psychological ratings are of value in confirming organization commanders in their estimates of men.” More specifically, it asserted, “The introduction of the Psychological Division is a distinct step forward in military progress. Its work is full of possibilities in the direction of classifying personnel, equitably distributing personnel and speeding up organization and training.” Furthermore, to describe the situation after the polling more fully and accurately, the military made very particular adjustments in the psychological testing program in response to opposition and complaints. That June 1918 “Report” of the General Staff carefully considered the objections of commanding officers and concluded, as to the fate of the program, “It is recommended that the Psychological Division with its examinations be continued with limitations and curtailments.” Chief among these alterations was first to give commanding officers discretion as to the testing of established officers and second, so the scores could be useful in assignment, to give the tests to men within 2 weeks of muster (when men were quarantined) or not at all, and to report scores immediately to commanders. The report also asserted that the psychologists needed to be assigned or built their own building; “in the overcrowded cantonments, the psychologist has become a ‘pest,’ since a building was to be furnished him and none has been at hand”; if he would be furnished such a building, “little opposition to his Division would have been reported by cantonment commanders.”68 Finally, it must be pointed out that, arguably by June of 1918 when the program was revised, and certainly by August of 1918, the “cloud of suspicion” over the program had lifted: in August, the Psychological Division, now reflecting these changes recommended by the General Staff, was officially ratified by General Order, Number 74, of the War Department.69 96

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The dating is important because it indicates that the testing program was not only in place but also revised in time to affect a large percentage of American troops; that is, the revision did not come too late to be meaningful. The first draft call, in 1917, had been capped at 687,000, and only 175,000 American soldiers were in France by the end of 1917, but inductions and troop shipments accelerated dramatically through the spring, summer, and fall of 1918, as the “military’s manpower needs” became “desperate.”70 Putting together the chronologies of the testing program and that of troop muster and training, it not only becomes conceivable that 1.7 million men (or over 40 percent of those mustered) were in fact tested, it also becomes evident that a large percentage of those men would have been tested after the army’s June 1918 revision of the testing program. Although the figures between June and the end of the war in mid-October are not available, the army’s Personnel Manual published in October 1918 reported that “Between May 1st and October 1st, 1918, approximately one million three hundred thousand men were tested,”71 or about 75 percent of all men given the exams. There is no question about the invidious biases of the tests and the overweening and misguided claims of their designers that the tests measured native intelligence. But the postwar exploitations of the test results by racists, immigrant restrictionists, and ethnic-quota advocates at universities were not the only “important results,” to use Schaffer’s phrase, though it is easy to understand how they have come to dominate our sense of the effect of the tests in the era, especially because, until recently, the war and postwar era has been seen as uninterruptedly xenophobic. There were other important results, during the war, in terms of the mobilization and specifically in terms of the selection of officers— and in the literary context that is of particular relevance here. Schaffer is unfairly dismissive when he writes that the testing “program produced . . . little of benefit to the army.”72 Gould likewise goes too far and is misleading when he depicts the army’s overall “use of scores for individuals” as “lackadaisical” or concludes, “I do not think the army ever made much use of the tests. One can well imagine how professional officers felt about smart-assed young psychologists who arrived without invitation, often assumed an officer’s rank without undergoing basic training, commandeered a building to give the tests . . . , saw each recruit for an hour in a large group, and then proceeded to usurp an officer’s traditional role in judging the worthiness of men for various military tasks.”73 First of all, the psychologists did not exactly “usurp” the officer’s role in judging his men for tasks and promotions: rather, the testers assisted him. The military, no doubt sensitive to just the kind of issue of authority that Gould raises, made The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 97

clear that the examinations were merely meant “to assist” and “to aid” “company commanders” in the classification of men.74 Regular officers could make use of the tests to eliminate “the mentally incompetent” and to weed out from officer training officer-candidates who were likely to fail as well as to identify recruits who might make good officers: but the regular officers still made the final decisions about which men were eliminated and which qualified for officer training and which finally became officers. As the General Staff’s report on revising the psychological program made absolutely explicit, “No officer or enlisted man is discharged solely upon the recommendation or rating of psychologists.”75 Moreover, the work of the testers or the Committee on Psychology was part of a larger system of army personnel work that unquestionably had a huge impact on the war effort. The Psychology Division’s efforts were often coordinated with (and sometimes preempted by) the work of the much larger, umbrella personnel committee, that of the Classification of Personnel in the Army, and again this other committee relied to some degree on regular officers’ reports about recruits in judging them. First of all, as Daniel Kevles—who consulted the military records in the archive—has written, this larger, more influential, and earlier ratified committee “stamped the [intelligence testing] program with its approval,” and the “practical-minded Committee on Classification of Personnel’s weighty support led . . . to . . . army-wide adoption of the tests.”76 Secondly, the director of this committee, pioneering industrial psychologist Walter Dill Scott, instructed his staff to work together with the testers, explaining that the test results gave “a quick and fairly accurate classification of the men according to general intelligence.” As Kevles described it, “Quick assignment was at a premium in the wartime army. Personnel officers, after they had assigned recruits on the basis of occupational experience, would allocate the remainder of a draft batch on the basis of intelligence scores. They distributed men so that each company received what the Committee on the Classification of Personnel called ‘its pro-rata share of superior men, average men, and inferior men.’ Many commanding officers found this method of placement so appealing that they requested draftees of a specific measure of intelligence.”77 As for the impact on the war effort, Raymond Dodge, an original member of Scott’s team, reasonably credited this umbrella committee, on Classification of Personnel, with a key role in winning the war: In an address at the Personnel Officers’ School . . . [the] Director of Organization of the British army, spoke very frankly of the serious mistake of Great Britain in recruiting her skilled labor indiscriminately 98

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into fighting units. They made good soldiers, but the plan seriously interfered with the development of technical units and the “output of many vital things.” If it had not been for the great American reservoir of skilled labor it would have probably cost the war. That the United States did not make a similar, and with the exhaustion of the reservoir, a disastrous mistake in the military distribution of our skilled labor is due primarily to the Committee on the Classification of Personnel in the Army.78 That the committee’s director, Scott, received the Distinguished Service Medal79 from the military is another piece of evidence suggesting the importance of this personnel effort. But more to the point here, the testing program itself, as Gould himself admits, had “a strong impact in some areas, particularly in screening men for officer training. At the start of the war, the army and National Guard maintained nine thousand officers. By the end, two hundred thousand officers presided, and two-thirds of them had started their careers in training camps where the tests were applied. In some camps, no man scoring below C could be considered for officer training.”80 As Schaffer too concedes, “Several camp commanders considered the tests useful and made a certain score a prerequisite for officer training or asked for draftees in the higher categories.”81 Again, Barbeau and Henri are quite clear that most (nonblack) officers were college-educated, but “high scorers on tests” were exceptions.82 Meanwhile, not only did the army make wide use of the tests, but—and this is crucial to my discussion of the effects of the tests during the war—the wellknown, overall bias of the tests do not tell us that the tests prevented significant numbers, and significant percentages, of ethnic Americans from getting scores that were considered “officer type.” In the aggregate, the tests were indeed particularly biased against those with “new immigrant” backgrounds—with “more than half the Russian, Italian, and Polish draftees” falling into the “inferior” category83 and with the averages of all three of these groups, as well as that of Jews, falling below that of Americans with northern and western European backgrounds.84 And this result followed from the fact that most of these ethnic American test takers were immigrants. But it does not follow that a significant percentage of ethnic Americans of all types who scored better than inferior would not in fact have scored well enough to qualify for officer training (say, in the top 18 percent or so judging by the Camp Taylor scores); from the overall results, which are the ones almost invariably referred to in the nativist The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 99

exploitations as well as the scholarly critiques of the postwar studies of the test results, nothing can be concluded about the numbers of ethnic Americans who got officer-level scores. Indeed, ethnic Americans from older immigrant groups had significant percentages scoring either A or B on the tests. Gatsby’s German American group had 10.1 percent scoring at the top two grades, for example (whereas Anglos had 19.0 percent in that A and B range); Dutch Americans were slightly higher than German Americans in this category at 12.4 percent.85 In the case of Jews, who scored poorly on the tests overall,86 but who were nonetheless proportionally represented in the officers’ corps, significant numbers of the approximately half who did average or well might have done very well, whereas the ones who did poorly did extremely poorly. Another way of putting this is that Anglos may have scored much higher than Jews in the aggregate, whereas a roughly similar percentage of Anglo and Jews scored at the A level. (This would be made possible by the bottom half of Jewish scorers, who were immigrants, scoring much lower than the bottom half of the Anglo sample.) And there is good reason to expect this was the case. Again, one of the strong biases of the tests was that they favored the educated, whether the educated were Anglo or ethnic American—and, indeed, test takers across the board tended to fall into two distinct groups in terms of performance: those who could follow the instructions (presumably the educated) and those who couldn’t (presumably those will little or no formal schooling). And, indeed, as Gould has shown, on six out of eight sections of the Alpha tests (meant for literates, but sometimes mistakenly given to illiterates), there was not a normal distribution (of the test scores), as one might expect, but a bimodal shape (that is, with two peaks); moreover, the most common score, or the mode, was zero—indicating in most cases that “men didn’t understand the instructions.” On many sections of the Beta tests (for illiterates), though the primary mode wasn’t zero, the secondary one was. As Gould rightly concludes about both tests, “the commonsense interpretation of this bimodality holds that recruits had two different responses to the tests. Some understood what they were supposed to do, and performed in various ways. Others, for whatever reasons, could not fathom the instructions and scored zero.”87 By categorizing groups according to ancestral background, the psychologists who collated the scores put together in the same category immigrants who did not speak English, and first-, second-, or third-generation Americans who attended American high schools and universities. For example, Jews, because they were “primarily recent immigrants,” did poorly on the tests overall,88 but, meanwhile, they were also in this period notoriously successful in American 100

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high schools and colleges—and specifically in taking college admissions examinations: there were, by 1918, American-born Jewish Americans attending elite American colleges and universities in large enough numbers to create a “Jewish problem” for the deans of these institutions (as we shall see in chapter 4). Presumably, this highly successful educated sector of the Jewish American population scored very well on the army’s tests. As Carl Brigham (a colleague of Yerkes) himself conceded in his nativist A Study of American Intelligence (1923) that concluded that Jews “have a low average intelligence,” a 1920 intelligence test study comparing “American children” and “Jewish children” in New York City found that the two groups “tested about the same.” Brigham also acknowledged a statistically “high . . . variability” in the sample from the countries or regions from which Jews came (Russia and also from that group he called Alpine, which included Germany),89 but these results he chalked up to a “high variability” native to Jews, rather than to differences in education or between foreign and American childhoods (for immigrant and U.S.-born Jews). In short, in terms of the army intelligence examination program, the very tests that were prejudiced against immigrants selected for American-born ethnic Americans with high school and college educations. And again, indeed, one net result in terms of the officer corps was that Jews ended up as officers in the army at an egalitarian percentage. Frankly, it is hard to square Gould’s sweeping statement, “I do not think the army ever made much use of the tests” with his acknowledgment that the tests had “a strong impact in some areas, particularly in screening men for officer training,” an impact he reasonably estimates extended, in some way, to twothirds of the two hundred thousand officers selected by the army by war’s end. (Which isn’t to say that the tests were decisive in all or even most of these cases, simply that they played some role—in some cases a major role, in some cases a minor role, in some cases little or almost no role at all—in helping to generate this huge officer contingent.) The tests, as internal army communications stated again and again, had three—and only three—purposes for the military. As the surgeon general of the U.S. Army wrote to the adjutant general of the U.S. Army, advocating the “continuance of psychological work” in December 1917: The purpose of these tests . . . is as follows: a. To aid in segregating and eliminating the mentally incompetent; b. To classify men according to their mental capacity; c. To assist in selecting competent men for responsible positions.90 The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 101

It is important to state explicitly that the army, unlike the psychologists, was not concerned with the performance of ethnic or racial groups, did not collect such data, and did not refer to racial and ethnic categories or group performances in its internal communications. The army was interested in the performances of individuals, and when it compared group performances, the groups were based on military ranks: those of officers, noncommissioned officers, and privates. The point here is that when Gould states, “I do not think the army ever made much use of the tests,” he obviously has in mind purposes for the tests that might have been important to the psychologists, and to their leader Yerkes in particular, but were irrelevant, even distracting, to military leaders. Indeed, just after Gould claims that the army never made much use of the tests and just before he concedes that the tests had “a strong impact . . . in screening men for officer training,” he notes that “some army officials became suspicious of Yerkes’s intent and launched three independent investigations of the testing program,” one of which “concluded that it should be controlled so that ‘no theorist may . . . ride it as a hobby for the purpose of obtaining data for research work and the future benefit of the human race.’ ”91 But, just as the wartime and postwar uses of the tests need to be differentiated, it is absolutely crucial here to distinguish between the army command’s purposes for the tests and the psychologists’ intentions for them: the army never intended to use them except to screen men for officer training, and for special assignments and for mental competence. The army did not want to control the testing program simply to keep the psychologists from pursuing their own agenda; ultimately, it wanted to keep the psychologists from pursuing their own agenda because any other agenda interfered with the military’s. Indeed, the sentence Gould quotes (relying on a secondary source) that warns about a theorist potentially riding the program “as a hobby for the purpose of obtaining data for research work and the future benefit of the human race,” which comes from the June 1918 General Staff Report, importantly continues and concludes, “and this at the expense of present military training.”92 The illogic of Gould’s notion that the “army never made much use of the tests” is that the army indeed used the tests widely and exactly as they intended to, and that this wide and directed use had an impact on, according to his own calculation, the selection of around 130,000 officers. The problem with Gould’s analysis is that it measures the army’s use of the tests against the intentions of psychologists and their postwar use by these psychologists (and exploitation by immigration restrictionists) to provide statistics on and make intelligence assessments of ethnic or racial groups as a whole, not 102

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against the army’s intended purpose of the mobilization of a competent officer corps and a competent army—and, more specifically, not in terms of its effect on ethnic American participation in that officer corps. No doubt Gould unwittingly falls into this problem because he follows the story from the chief psychologist Yerkes’s point of view, not from that of the military command; his primary source is Yerkes’s study, not the military’s papers. This perspective is perhaps to be expected as Gould’s is a history of psychology, not of the military. But the result is that he, along with critics such as Schaffer, who are writing histories of the war but who have followed his lead, are sensitive to Yerkes’s ambitions, intentions, promises, and campaigns for the testing program, and less aware of and focused on the military’s purposes, and the assessments and revisions the army undertook to make sure the program was working as it intended. Much the same can be said of Kennedy’s earlier book, though it is by contrast with Gould’s a history of the war and the military. He misleadingly begins his discussion of the subject by stating, “The army cooperated less eagerly with another social experiment in 1917–1918”93—thus giving the false impression that the military for some reason accommodated the psychologists and their agenda, and wasn’t attempting to use the psychologists for its purposes. Along with Gould, Kennedy relies on two sources, Yerkes’s 1921 Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army and a journal article by Daniel J. Kevles from 1968, based in part on archival research of the military’s papers, and mostly, though not entirely, from the point of view of the psychologists. But apparently neither Gould nor Kennedy consulted the archives themselves—and, in terms of the military’s internal communications, had only what Kevles happened to quote in this single article subtitled “Psychologists in World War I.” Finally, both ignored Kevles’s balanced conclusions about the psychologists’ significant contributions to the war effort and effect on military culture, despite the military’s ambivalence about their testing program. Previous historians and critics of the testing program, at least since Kevles, haven’t looked at the situation from the military’s point of view, and haven’t posed in particular the question, if so many company commanders complained about the tests, why did the military keep using them? These historians have credited the psychologists with imposing themselves on the army and managing to keep themselves in the military bureaucracy, despite the fact that the army was suspicious of them and didn’t do much with the tests. This seems a ludicrous misunderstanding of how the wartime military behaved in general with regard to its initiatives and in particular with the testing program. The military brass could indeed be pressured by congressman and other powerful leaders to The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 103

adjust their policies when it came to a hot-button issue like black-white relations, but they would hardly be pushed around by a bunch of psychologists advocating a new, exotic program that Congress and the voters could not care less about. And thus the military would not have kept the psychologists around unless they perceived value in the program, despite its flaws and irritations. Even if the army command had realized that the tests were not really a measure of intelligence, but rather such things as years of schooling, quality of schooling, and years in the United States—and, again, plenty of officers were dubious about the tests’ ability to predict who would be the best soldiers—they might have kept on using them. Even as a quick way of measuring a soldier’s education, they had value to the military. A soldier could easily pretend a high school or college education in filling out the “Soldier’s Qualification Card,”94 and many may have done so if education, and not the test score, was a prerequisite for officers’ training. Soldiers did not come to camp carrying official papers such as a high school certificate or college diploma; in any case, these might be faked, too. The army didn’t have time to examine and verify documents of the millions of soldiers drafted. The tests were a fast way to measure something about a soldier, something that seemed to the army to roughly correspond to other, more seasoned judgments, and, as the army was well aware, the results couldn’t be faked. The point here, missed by critics focused on showing that the tests did not measure intelligence, is that the test’s usefulness to the army was not predicated on its being an accurate measure of intelligence. Moreover, as an “objective” measure (even if not an objective measure of intelligence), test results prevented soldiers from perceiving favoritism in and thus feeling resentment about the processes of selection, and the army was cognizant of this virtue of the tests as well. Indeed, in a report on the “Psychological service” after the Armistice, one “Commanding General” concluded that the “Examinations have proven of great value” because, among other things, “while an officer can undoubtedly classify his men after some acquaintance, the rating considerably expedites the process of organization and classification”; in addition, they give “Assistance to the Morale Officer in the stimulation of morale.”95 Finally, Gould has accurately described that the tests were often given in chaotic, overcrowded conditions, where the barked-out instructions might not be heard well or at all and acted-out instructions for foreign speakers might have been incomprehensible, without an explanation of what the test results would be used for (expulsion? the front lines?), to men who had just been drafted, and so “most of the men must have ended up either utterly confused 104

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or scared shitless.”96 But the ability to focus and do well in such an examination environment that alone obviously invalidated the tests’ claim to measure intelligence might also have in fact selected for qualities that would be useful in the middle of a battlefield. And it should be pointed out that even if Kennedy might be technically correct in saying that the army ended the wartime version of the psychologists’ testing program a few months after the Armistice, the military did not completely do away with what it continued to call “psychological examination.” Rather, without, as Kevles put it, the “compelling need for mental testing once the emergency ended,” and without a large wartime budget,97 the military greatly reduced the psychological testing program as well as reorganized the bureaucracy—what had been the Psychology Division during the war became the much more modest Psychology Section in 1919.98 But limited testing continued: in October 1919, for example, the Surgeon General’s Office edited a version of the “Recruit Psychological Examination for Illiterates and NonEnglish-Speaking Citizens and Aliens,” “To Be Used by Recruiting Officers at General Recruiting Stations.”99 Nor did the army end the use, more generally, of “mental testing” in the selection of potential officers. For example, in AEF General Order Number 12, of January 1919, when the army wanted to extend to “200 well qualified enlisted men” the opportunity to attend West Point, it dictated that the selection would be based on “physical examination” and a “competitive” “mental examination,” and that the mental examination would “be the same as the regular entrance examination.” Indeed, performance on such mental examinations would trump a college education; the order explained that “Enlisted men may submit educational certificates”—from “schools and colleges”—with a view to admission without mental examination if all vacancies are not filled by the competitive examination.”100 Moreover, in AEF General Order Number 13, concerned with “Application for Appointment in the Regular army,” the army stressed that appointments should be made on the basis of “personal character and qualifications” and not favoritism or quid pro quo of any kind: “while full consideration will be given service in war, the board will not make recommendations as a reward for services rendered, but will assure itself that the applicant is physically, mentally and morally qualified.”101 The larger point here is that the army was in general in its mobilization attempting an “equitable distribution” of men, in the interests of effectiveness as well as morale, and the army tests should be seen in the context of that larger military initiative (not simply in terms of the psychologists’ agenda). As Kevles The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 105

himself noted in part of his conclusion—a portion both Gould and Kennedy seem to overlook—because of the frustrations of Yerkes’s own large personal ambitions with the military, “Yerkes underrated the effect of his profession on the army. The psychologists did not leave the military unchanged. . . . Scott (of the Committee on the Classification of Personnel) and Yerkes had laid the foundations for a scientific personnel system.” Kevles even made a passing reference to meritocracy (though one that doesn’t do the subject justice): “by emphasizing merit, the tests were working to equalize opportunities in the vast war machine.”102 Simply put, in previous analyses of the impact of the testing program, especially in those since Kevles, the temporary wartime effects of a testing program biased against immigrants but toward educated ethnic Americans have so paled in comparison to their monumental and long-lasting postwar effects both in immigration restriction and in educational testing that the testing program’s place in a new military bureaucracy aimed at a mostly meritocratic mobilization, as well as its relation to the largely ethnically egalitarian makeup of the officers’ corps, have been basically missed. I am obviously considering the effects of the tests in just the wartime context. And in this mobilization context, it is evident that the testing program, alongside and in conjunction with the personnel classification program, gave unprecedented opportunities to individual ethnic Americans who were educated or talented or good test takers. Meanwhile, the Camp Gordon plan for “non-English speaking companies” specifically sought out officer candidates from among ethnic Americans who could speak the common foreign languages as well as English.103 College-educated ethnic Americans who could pass an entrance exam, as well as ethnic recruits with high school educations or even less schooling (men like Gatsby, that is) who scored well on the tests or the personnel evaluations (or were bilingual), could have been selected for officer training and regularly were. Records show that in the case, for example, of Jewish Americans—who, again, did badly on the tests overall and against whom there was by all accounts a robust Anglo prejudice in this wartime and postwar period—the World War I American Army was very evenhanded in terms of officer commissions, except perhaps at the very highest ranks (above colonel). There were perhaps as “many as 200,000” “American Jews in service during the war,” and the “Army, Navy and Marine Corps altogether had nearly 10,000 Jews as commissioned officers,” including “more than a hundred colonels and lieutenant colonels” (as well as “a really tremendous number of non-commissioned officers”).104 That proportion of all Jewish commissioned officers to all Jewish 106

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soldiers—namely 1 to 20—is very similar to, and if anything slightly greater than, the proportion of all American officers to all American soldiers (around 200,000 to around 4.5 million). One can find striking anecdotes—besides the one concerning the Jewish gangster Morton, who was not college educated—that reflect the special opportunities afforded by the Great War meritocracy to ethnic Americans such as Gatsby, along with the wartime practice of setting aside prejudice. For example: “in 1916 a Jewish intern [at King’s County Hospital in Brooklyn] was overpowered in his room [by Gentile students], bound, gagged, and taken by force to a train station and told not to return. That same intern became an army medical officer in the first World War and died in the line of duty.”105 And what happened after the war to men like Gatsby, whom the army appreciated and promoted? “In 1927, at the same hospital [King’s County in Brooklyn], an estimated twenty Gentile interns kidnapped, physically intimidated, and warned three Jewish interns to leave the ‘Christian institution.’ ” The perpetrators were all let off.106 Indeed, after the war, at the same time that intelligence testing began to be integrated into the American school system, as well as applied in industry and civil service,107 there also ensued a backlash by the traditionally, ethnically privileged against a rising, ethnically blind meritocracy. On the level of the law, an intensified nativist concern about alien immigrant masses was of course registered in the dramatic restriction of immigration in a nation that had become markedly immigrant (the acts of 1921 and 1924). But more to the point, given that the publicly debated immigrant restriction acts of Congress were a fait accompli before the publication of the three twenties novels at issue here,108 was the subtle, often covert, nonjudicial, nonlegislative backlash against meritocratic forces that was taking place with the invention of ethnic and specifically Jewish quotas at universities and medical schools—as well as with the exclusion of Jews from certain banks, insurance companies, and corporations.109 Tom Buchanan represents or speaks for the forces of Anglo backlash in Fitzgerald’s novel, including that of ethnic quotas. Thus, he is not only a reader of pseudoscientific, racist literature that claims that the “Nordic race” is being overrun by the “lower races”110; Tom, who went to Yale (135), expresses disbelief and dismay that a man of Gatsby’s “lower” ethnic and lower-class origins could go to Oxford (136). Again, Gatsby’s attendance at Oxford “was an opportunity they gave some of the officers after the Armistice” (136)—another example of Great War meritocracy.111 It is a new experience for Tom, whose matriculation at Yale was no doubt predicated on a family legacy or family money or both, to find The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 107

his impeccable university credentials potentially equaled by an ethnic American such as Gatsby, who made it to Oxford, not because of family tradition or wealth, but on the basis of merit—in his case, meritorious military service. Just as Tom resorts to assertions of traditional privilege in response to ethnic “upstart” Gatsby’s attendance at Oxford, alarmed university and medical school administrators of the Anglo old guard were resorting throughout the 1920s to ethnic quotas.112 As historian Charlotte Borst has put it, “Higher education was emerging as a substantial institutional force in American cultural and political life by the early twentieth century,” and, in the same period, “middleclass, native-born white men” were attempting to “maintain their political and cultural hegemony” in the face of a rising challenge from ethnic Americans.113 Viewing this confrontation between Daisy’s lovers in terms of its effect on Gatsby, one might say that Anglo-elite Tom’s confrontation with Gatsby over educational pedigree—and his ultimate defeat by Tom in regard to Daisy— makes Gatsby’s experience after the war, as well as during it, emblematic of the ethnic experience of the entire wartime and postwar era. Gatsby’s wartime rise in the armed forces and postwar fall at the hands of a representative of Anglo prerogative reflects the rapidly shifting status of meritocracy in the period— although of course Gatsby’s ups and downs are still a tabloid or melodramatic version of very real trends. The novel can be thought of as a sort of historical fable about the meritocratic mobilization and the ensuing postwar backlash against meritocracy. Gatsby’s training camp promotion to captain and postwar dressing down and defeat by a self-proclaimed guardian of Anglo or Nordic privilege makes Gatsby a historically recognizable figure, and one with a remarkable specificity. And, as an examination of Daisy’s relationship to Gatsby will make clear, this historical correlation is more specific still. Another common misreading of Gatsby, again predicated on a lack of attention to and familiarity with the era of mobilization for the Great War, is to perceive Daisy as a traditional woman and a foil to Jordan Baker’s new woman. Critics and readers tend to read the novel with an eye to the historical phenomenon of the new woman of the 1920s, and, as a result, to contrast unmarried, sexually promiscuous Jordan to Daisy, mother and wife to a domineering philanderer. Concentrating on the postwar moment and dating a new female sexual activeness to the 1920s and the “gap of meaning that opened after World War I,”114 they see Jordan as a newfangled flapper and Daisy as a conventional—and traditionally submissive—woman.115 What is missed or forgotten in this opposition is not that Daisy is sexually active insofar as she cheats on her husband (with 108

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Gatsby), but that, before her marriage and the end of World War I, she was involved with a number of men and her behavior would have been considered promiscuous at the time, even if Gatsby was the only man with whom she actually had premarital sex. In fact, as a flirtatious and sexually active teenager during the war, Daisy was initially Jordan’s sexual role model. In an extraordinary narrative interlude in Gatsby in which Nick momentarily cedes the narration to Jordan, she recalls the day during the war when Daisy called her over to her roadster, and, at 16, on her way “to the Red Cross to make bandages,” she was “flattered that [Daisy] wanted to speak to me because of all the older girls I admired her most.” Jordan was impressed by Daisy’s example as she flirted with Gatsby: “The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. . . . That was nineteen-seventeen.” And Jordan quickly followed in Daisy’s footsteps. Indeed, “By the next year [1918] I had a few beaux myself ” (79–80). Which is to say, Jordan, like Daisy, became sexually active during the war: if Jordan has all the traits of a flapper, it is a role she adopted during the war before the vogue word had become a cultural phenomenon. In terms of her wartime experience, Daisy, like Gatsby, has her own quite specific historical correlative: rather than the (twenties) flapper, she resembles one of the “charity girls” or “silly girls” that the moralistic U.S. wartime Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) fretted were compromising servicemen, morally and hygienically, because of a sudden or surprising promiscuity apparently occasioned, not by an epistemological gap produced by the trauma of the war, but by the excitement of the mobilization for war and specifically its collections of thousands of uniformed men in American training camps all over the country. As one CTCA pamphlet put it, “The ‘lure of the uniform’ is more than a phrase; it is an actuality. Girls often lose their heads in a whirl of emotion brought about by these unusual conditions.”116 These women and girls were often called “charity girls” because—unlike prostitutes, who also swarmed the camps and presented a similar kind of problem for moral and health reformers117—these females had sex with the soldiers for free. A CTCA report on “charity girls” near Camp Dix, New Jersey, explained: In all towns, both large and small, in the vicinity of the camp or accessible to the soldiers by jitney, trolley or train, there still is considerable volume of “charity” intercourse. There seems to be a psychological feature to The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 109

this particular evil in that young girls between the ages of 14 and 20 are inordinately susceptible to any man in uniform whether he be an officer or one of lesser rank.118 These internal CTCA reports about “charity girls” were not the result of hysterical exaggeration by a largely moralistic agency; they were echoed at the time by other reformers, psychological researchers, journalists, individual citizens—and novelists. As an article in The Survey magazine put it, “The social hygiene problem created by this war is not a problem of commercialized prostitution. It is a problem of the individual soldier and the individual girl—the man cut away from his ordinary amusements and social life, the girl responding to the unusual and romantic glamour of the uniform.”119 A reform organization noted in 1917 that under the “lure of the uniform, [girls were] picking up soldiers on the street, going to shows and ice cream parlors with them, and gradually becoming demoralized.” A psychological study of female adolescents just after the war asserted, dramatically, that the Great War “wrought its greatest influence . . . in the field of sexual relationships.” It created “a vast emotional tension which tends to break conventionalities and outer restraints.”120 Faulkner more fully articulated a similar insight about the same phenomenon in his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. A charity girl turned soldier’s wife remarks, “You remember how it was then—everybody excited and hysterical, like a big circus. . . . [A]ll soldiers talking of dying gloriously in battle without really believing it or knowing very much about it, and how women kind of got the same idea, like the flu—that what you did to-day would not matter to-morrow, that there really wasn’t a to-morrow at all.”121 And, as a worried citizen, not writing for publication, wrote somewhat more colloquially—and incoherently—to an officer in the army, “The girls of Scranton [Pennsylvania] it seems . . . have lost all the sentiment of decency that is proper of the sexes, giving another exhibition of immorality hunting for men like a bunch of sea dogs in the season of love. Maybe they were sacrificing themselves on the altar of the fatherland, which I believe is not asking so much of the patriotism of their women. Never before [have] . . . I witnessed such a debauche [sic].”122 As a soldier and officer in training camp, Fitzgerald was of course himself acquainted with the phenomenon of the charity girl, and he gives a short sketch of one such lower-middle class girl, the daughter of a shop owner, who at age 19 has an affair with Anglo recruit Anthony, the main character in The Beautiful and Damned. In the case of Dorothy (Dot) Raycroft’s career as a charity girl around Camp Upton, which began with another soldier, Fitzgerald comments, 110

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in much the same terms as CTCA and other observers, it was “the naval officer’s uniform . . . [that] had made the magic” and brought on her “first hysteria of passion” (266). Daisy at 18 might not have been typical of the “hundreds of young girls” who became “hysterical at the sight of buttons and uniforms”123—admittedly, most of them, including Dot of The Beautiful and Damned, were not economically privileged like Daisy—but she nonetheless “playe[d] around with” a number of soldiers (80), and “many men had already loved Daisy” (156) by the time she slept with Lieutenant Gatsby from Camp Taylor. She is a romanticized version of the charity girl. She may very well have been based, as Fitzgerald’s biographers have asserted, on Zelda, whom Fitzgerald met while at training camp, but this inspiration for Daisy doesn’t nullify the point. Zelda herself, because of an adventurous and willful sexual fraternization with camp officers, was, from the military’s point of view, a charity girl, albeit an unusually uppercrust one. (Whether Daisy actually had sex with the men who “loved” her and she “playe[d] around with” is left ambiguous, but this ambiguity may be due principally to Fitzgerald and Scribners’s desire to avoid outraged reviews or even censorship. Unlike Jordan, Daisy is, after all, a mother in the course of the novel, and a mother with a history of blatant sexual promiscuity would have been a highly controversial character.) The behavior Daisy engages in, which supposedly undermined the morals of the soldiers and, in the case of Gatsby at the very least, potentially spread venereal disease, was one of the major issues addressed by the Commission on Training Camp Activities, and this wartime organization pursued an unprecedented crackdown on sexual vice—precisely because, on account of the national emergency of the war and the necessity of having healthy troops, it was given an unprecedented power to do so.124 Under the Selective Service Act and what was called the American Plan, “the military could arrest any woman within five miles of a military cantonment.” And under “the new health laws, when women were arrested, their civil rights were suspended.”125 Detained women were to be subjected, involuntarily, to a medical exam. The Department of Justice gave the CTCA this power, under the doctrine of the police power of the state and “the constitutional right of the community” with regard to “infections and communicable diseases.”126 “If found infected, a woman could be sentenced to a hospital or a ‘farm colony’ until cured.”127 Probably because of her social status, and perhaps also because Daisy knew to stay—or to appear to stay—on the right side of such regulations, Daisy was spared the direct intervention of the social work–based Committee on Protective Work for Girls of the CTCA, created in September 1917, which tried The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 111

to befriend sexually active girls who were not prostitutes, warn them of their danger, subsequently visit them, and perhaps refer them to other protective agencies.128 She was also spared the intervention of the repressive Section on Women and Girls, which, as the wartime mobilization dragged on and “soldiers and civilians continued to resist the new behavioral strictures passed by the federal legislature and implemented by the CTCA,”129 came essentially to replace the Committee on Protective Work for Girls and addressed itself to the policing and internment of prostitutes and promiscuous girls alike.130 Perhaps Daisy’s wealth shielded her from the sort of “complaint” by neighbors that could be directed against any girl between “the ages of 10 and 21,” who was perceived as sexually active, “the so-called charity girl and professional prostitute, whether diseased or not, also [including] women having venereal disease.”131 But perhaps her family’s crackdown on her sexual dalliances with soldiers also kept her from being one of the approximately 30,000 women and girls detained in detention houses, reformatories, or local jails by the CTCA’s progressively more misogynistic law enforcement program and the Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board; after all, only a third of the females detained during the war were charged with prostitution; most were found merely to have violated a sexual code that could extend to speech, clothing, and styles of dancing.132 Though Daisy doesn’t experience any of this governmental sexual policing, the novel and specifically Jordan (who narrates this section of the book) subtly registers its looming threat. Jordan recalls of the day in 1917 when she first saw Daisy with Gatsby: “I had a new plaid skirt that blew a little in the wind and whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut in a disapproving way” (79). The American flags are disapproving because Jordan is violating the “dress code” with her skirt. Interestingly, Daisy’s family puts a stop to her sexual fraternization with military recruits, but not her promiscuity per se. When Daisy’s “mother had found her packing her bag . . . to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas,” she “was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn’t get into the army at all” (80). Which is to say, Daisy’s family’s response, or the compromise she and her family come to, is not moralistic, but practical. Though Fitzgerald doesn’t explain, two issues seem to be in play. First, perhaps Daisy’s family understands that she is indeed just the sort of “silly girl” the government is worried about, the girl who loses all 112

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(moral and social) sense when she sees a uniform. That is, they are concerned about Daisy’s falling in love and wanting to marry a soldier who is not of her class or ethnicity (after all, she wants to travel to New York for just such a soldier, namely, Gatsby)—while at the same time her family understands she isn’t in danger of falling in love with a socially inappropriate young man who is rejected by the army. Second, perhaps Daisy’s family is indeed concerned that, even if she gives up Gatsby and the idea of marrying a soldier who is socially “beneath her” but continues a recreational sexual intercourse with soldiers, she may wreck her reputation and her future by attracting the ire of neighbors and government watchdogs. Meanwhile, a sexual fraternization with nonsoldiers will at least not get her into legal trouble. Although the War Department seems to have little effect on the sexual practices and attitudes of Daisy and Jordan, it seems to have everything to do with Gatsby’s. Critics have long noticed that Gatsby’s sexual outlook is unconventional for a male, but its historical significance has not received much attention. Gatsby’s “romantic readiness” (6), a theme singled out by Nick and numerous critics, is manifested in his extraordinary commitment to Daisy, his undying belief in true love, and his misguidedly chivalrous attempt to protect her from her husband, Tom, who only really gets rough with his lower-class mistress—and with whom Daisy seems ultimately suited. What critics haven’t noticed is that Gatsby’s “feminine” romanticism is precisely consonant with the lessons of the wartime training camp authorities committed to generating a “new man,” who for one thing could resist the temptations of sex with a potentially infected woman. It is of course Gatsby who feels inextricably bound to Daisy when they have premarital sex, not the other way around (as in a seduction or romance novel); “He felt married to her, that was all” (157); she meanwhile continues her promiscuity with nonrecruits, then gets engaged to a man from New Orleans, and then marries Tom (80). As a believer in the myth of true love, it makes sense that Gatsby asks Daisy to tell Tom “that you never loved him” (139); in the romantic myth Gatsby has signed onto, a woman loves only one man, just as the man, Gatsby, loves only one woman, Daisy. Set against the tradition of sentimental literature, it is perhaps merely the reversal of emotional roles that is strange; for romantic Gatsby it is shocking that Daisy can claim to have loved two men at the same time: “I did love [Tom] once—but I loved you too” (140). Critics since Leslie Fiedler have noticed the transposition of “the mythic roles and values of male and female” in Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s “remaking Clarissa in Lovelace’s image, Lovelace in Clarissa’s.” As Fiedler puts it, “In a real sense, The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 113

not Daisy but Jay Gatz, the Great Gatsby, is the true descendant of [Henry James’s] Daisy Miller: the naïf out of the West destined to shock the upholders of decorum and to die of a love for which there is no object.” “Thematically, archetypally even such [a] chief male protagonist . . . as Gatsby” is “female . . . ; at least” he occupies in his story “the position of Henry James’s Nice American Girls.” It is he who embodies “innocence and the American dream, taking up the role the flapper had contemptuously abandoned for what was called in the ’20’s ‘freedom.’ ”133 But what Fiedler and other critics do not explain is where, historically speaking, this feminized man comes from (or what, historically speaking, prompts males to take up this more conventionally feminine role), and, more specifically, why Fitzgerald identifies this feminized man with Gatsby, the ethnic American promoted to lieutenant then captain then major and decorated as a war hero, and not, say, with Nick, an Anglo who also serves in the war, but whose rank and wartime achievements are never mentioned. Focused like most critics of Gatsby on the 1920s and not the wartime experience, Fiedler misconstrues the order of events involved in this transposition of roles, a transposition that was taking place, not simply in creative literature, but in public discourse and propaganda. If “Public attitudes toward the ‘fallen woman’ . . . changed,” in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and “woman as victim of environment or economics was replaced by woman as threat and pariah,” as Dorothy M. Brown puts it in her study of the 1920s, it wasn’t because of the flapper, but because, again, “During World War I, the federal Commission on Training Camp Activities had rounded up prostitutes” and—we can add—promiscuous and even adventurous women “to safeguard soldiers from the ‘greatest destroyer of manpower,’ ” venereal disease.134 Meanwhile, faced with the threat posed to soldiers by venereal disease and the moral contamination of prostitutes and “charity girls,” the American Army looked not only to the detention of women but to the reeducation of soldiers. That is, in the face of women apparently abandoning sentimentality for promiscuity, the army tried to prompt regular recruits to step into the role of defender of chastity, a role traditionally belonging to women or to highly cultured males. It seems strange at our historical remove, but a promoter of the CTCA program for soldiers could write at the time, “Home is coming to have a new significance to these men in the camps. They are learning how much they like pink.”135 After all, army encampments were traditionally places where “alcohol abuse, prostitution, and venereal disease were rampant”; this had been true in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and very recently for the American 114

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public, in the conflict along the Mexican border in 1916.136 But President Wilson and his progressive-reformer officers in the war department, notably Secretary of War Newton Baker and Raymond Fosdick, head of the CTCA, attempted to sanitize military camp culture. The military cost of venereal disease was a very real problem among Europe’s armies during World War I. There were rumors during the war that Austria alone had lost the service one and a half million men to the disease,137 and that as much as one-quarter of some English and French regiments were sidelined. Indeed, the “French had recorded over a million cases of gonorrhea and syphilis since the beginning of the war, and British forces had continually suffered an average loss of 23,000 men for seven-week hospital stints due to sexually transmitted diseases.”138 Meanwhile, by the end of the war, the American Army at home and abroad would chalk up 383,706 cases of venereal disease, with a loss of “almost seven million days of active duty” that “cost the government almost fifty million dollars.”139 American masculinity came to be tied (by the army) to sexual purity not only to combat the spread of venereal disease but also because of the ideology concerning U.S. involvement in the war. Wilson himself publicly articulated the notion of the morally pure new man embodied in the programs of the CTCA. Partly because Wilson saw U.S. involvement in the war as a moral crusade, “a war to end all wars,” he instructed the troops, in a published communication, “Let it be your pride, therefore, to show all men everywhere not only what good soldiers you are, but also what good men you are, keeping yourselves fit and straight in everything and pure and clean through and through.”140 A CTCA propaganda pamphlet made explicit the connection between the American military’s moral crusade and the chastity of its troops: “You are going to fight for the spirit of young girlhood raped and ravished in Belgium by a brutal soldiery. You are going to fight for it in this country, too, where you yourselves are its protectors, so that it may never need to submit to the same insults and injuries. But in order to fight for so sacred a cause you must be worthy champions. You must keep your bodies clean and your hearts pure. It would never do for the avengers of women’s wrongs to profit by the degradation and debasement of womanhood.”141 Wartime government propaganda posters reflected the various rationales for male chastity: future health, morality, immediate fitness for service. One, which pictured a little girl messily eating, read, “Remember—Your Future Children—Give ’em a chance/Don’t start ’em out with a mortgage on body or mind.” A second showed “The Folks at Home” and reminded soldiers, “Go back to them morally clean and physically fit/Don’t allow a whore to smirch The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 115

your record.” A third pictured a sailor walking with a girl outside a movie house above and, below, three soldiers loading an artillery gun, and was titled “Taking Chances”; the finer print read, “A real sailor is not afraid to take chances BUT—If he takes a foolish chance—he may lose his chance to get into the BIG GAME.”142 The language of these posters could get extreme: one read, “A German Bullet Is Cleaner Than A Whore.”143 This particular caption, though, was by no means an anomaly in terms of the authorized discourse about venereal disease; rather, it was simply a harsh and pithy expression of an oft-rehearsed official truism: sexually transmitted disease was regularly seen as an invisible enemy, worse than the visible German one. As the former president of Harvard University, Charles Eliot, wrote at the time, “vices have proved more destructive to the French people since August 1914, than all the German artillery rifles, hand grenades, poisonous gases and fire blasts. The killed transmit no poison to their families and descendants—the victims of . . . prostitution do.” President Wilson himself had—decorously and euphemistically—echoed the same theme. “The federal government has pledged its word that as far as care and vigilance can accomplish the result, the men committed to its charge will be returned to the homes and communities that so generously gave them with no scars except those won in honorable conflict.” “Better dead than diseased” was the message of the military propaganda, as social historian of venereal disease Allan Brandt has observed: “In a war fought on moral grounds there would be moral and immoral injuries, moral and immoral deaths.”144 The military backed up its educational and propaganda campaign about social hygiene with regulations and sanctions, especially when it came to soldiers overseas.145 Less than a week after the first American troops arrived in France, where they were greeted “hospitably” and offered “the run of local amenities, which included, of course, the use of local bars, cafes, and houses of prostitution,” General Pershing issued General Order (G.O.) No. 6, which “called for semi-monthly inspections . . . , and in addition required that soldiers report to special stations for administration of chemical prophylaxis within three hours of any sexual contact. Finally, the most radical provision of the order made the contraction of venereal disease an offense punishable by court-martial.” Infection rates among American troops in France stayed reasonably low for a few months, but when they shot up in early November 1917, Pershing (who, unlike the military social hygienists on the home front, initially was not interested in repressing soldiers’ sexual activity) issued G.O. No. 77, which not only made commanding officers responsible for infections among its men, but officially barred American 116

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troops from houses of prostitution, including regulated ones, and thereby “committed the AEF to an official continence.” This order, one of its drafters proudly proclaimed, was “the most far-reaching health order ever issued to an army.”146 In addition to sexual abstinence, the new man of the training camps was to pursue physical fitness and athletic prowess: as a publicist for the CTCA put it, “Never before in the history of this country have so large a number of men engaged in athletics; never before has its physical welfare received such a stimulus. . . . Men are learning to get bumped and not to mind it.”147 Finally, this new man would exert a “chivalry towards women” that would extend to personal relationships and to marriage. “America is the land where women are partners, not chattels,” asserted a CTCA spokesperson.148 Gatsby, of course, embodies all of these virtues that the new man of the training camps and the AEF was supposed to. His remarkable chastity—after his slipup with Daisy—is comparable to that of a heroine of a seduction plot, the traditional fictional protector of chastity: having fallen, he remains sexually faithful (over years) to the woman with whom he had sex, practicing abstinence and pursuing single-mindedly the dream of a marriage based on love that will redeem his misstep.149 Though he throws wild parties at which most others flirt and many act badly, Gatsby stays aloof from the women and remains proper. In fact, “he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. . . . [G]irls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups knowing that someone would arrest their falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder and no singing quarters were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link” (54–55). Because of his devotion to Daisy, Gatsby apparently doesn’t have sex as a soldier overseas, and, despite the tremendous efforts of the military to promote chastity for its recruits (including ordering it for members of the AEF and barring them from brothels), this continence certainly put him in the small minority. Only about 30 percent of American soldiers who went to Europe in the Great War refrained from sex.150 Gatsby’s temperance (with alcohol) and his chivalry would also have placed him in the minority.151 The literary figure of the chaste and chivalrous American officer from the Midwest who resists sexual temptation while American soldiers all around him overseas carry on with foreign women would have been familiar to the reading public by the time Gatsby appeared—and most likely to Fitzgerald as he was writing it. A few years earlier, in 1922, Willa Cather had published the very popular Pulitzer Prize–winning war novel, One of Ours, in which Lieutenant The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 117

Claude Wheeler from Nebraska practiced a standout celibacy in France. A British officer in the air service, who proposes Wheeler go “nutting” (picking up girls) with him (331),152 explains the realities of the soldier’s life and gives him advice on how to break the American military rules and get women in France. “He began to explain to a novice what life at the front was really like. Nobody who had seen service talked about the war, or thought about it. . . . Men talked about . . . [their] next leave, how to get champagne without paying for it, dodging the guard, getting into scrapes with French women and out again.” He advises Wheeler, “You’d better brush up on [your French] if you want to do anything with French girls. I hear your M.P.’s are very strict. You must be able to toss the word the minute you see a skirt, and make your date before the guard gets onto you.” Wheeler also learns that “French girls haven’t any scruples” (289). But although “every doughboy [American soldier] has a girl already,” Wheeler stays chaste (435). As for Wheeler’s chivalry, “He believed he was going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry. Most of his friends at camp shared his Quixotic ideals.”153 Gatsby is not only chaste; in addition—again like Cather’s Wheeler—he stays true to the role of protector of women advocated by the army for soldiers: he from time to time imagines himself rescuing Daisy from a loveless and unequal marriage in which she has been demeaned, dominated, and misused. He sees Tom as nothing more than the man who treats his wife without proper respect, as chattel. When Daisy starts rehearsing Tom’s infidelities to his face, “Gatsby walked over and stood beside her. ‘Daisy, that’s all over now,’ he said earnestly. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore. Just tell him the truth—and it’s all wiped out forever’ ” (139). And later on that evening, when things have come to a crisis, Gatsby stands in the yard, ready to watch over Daisy “all night if necessary.” “I’m just going to wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this afternoon. She’s locked herself into her room and if he tries any brutality she’s going to turn the light out and on again” (151–152). And though Gatsby’s physical fitness and athletic prowess is understated, it is nodded to, and its “Americanness” is clearly registered, in a striking paragraph: “He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is particularly American—that comes, I suppose . . . with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always the tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening or closing of a hand” (68). 118

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But why should Gatsby reflect the “new man” the training camp authorities aimed at creating? Why Gatsby and not, for example, Nick, who obviously is not an example of this “new man”—who by contrast has in the course of the novel affairs with two women he doesn’t love, Jordan and “a girl from New Jersey who worked in the accounting department” (61)? After all, Nick was a soldier in the war as well. Why might the army camp propaganda fail with him? Or, to ask the question conversely, because the CTCA’s propaganda and the army command’s General Orders aimed at creating the “new man” failed for most soldiers (and thus the increasingly repressive nature of the CTCA’s programs for women and the General Orders regarding sexual contact for soldiers as the war went on), why might it succeed with Gatsby? Why, that is, is Gatsby the army camps’ ideal product—both a war hero and a chivalrous, chaste new man? Perhaps precisely because Gatsby is the beneficiary of the army camp’s new meritocracy, he is disposed to pay attention to its moral and social training program as well. Especially if he comes from a poor, ethnic background and thus is predisposed to idealize rich, Anglo women. In fact, Gatsby’s famous doublesidedness, over which critics have long puzzled—as chivalrous lover and coldblooded killer (from time to time in the novel, Nick remarks, “He looked . . . as if he had ‘killed a man’ ” [142])—may not be as mysterious, eccentric, or peculiar as has been imagined. Of course, Gatsby has learned to kill men in the war, and if he has killed in civilian life as well, he has been prepared for criminal violence by his wartime experience (as was the case with the real-life gangster Nails Morton). That is, Gatsby’s doubleness may not be a bizarre invention of Fitzgerald’s. Rather, his doubleness may have a mainstream enough historical correlative: it may be a straightforward, if an ideal or even extreme product of the peculiar American military camp training of World War I. If anything, Gatsby is one with whom the military has succeeded all too well: he is both too much the killer and too much the chivalrous and chaste “new man.” Trained to kill, he becomes homicidal, and, in his chivalry, he eventually becomes suicidal. It is in fact possible and plausible to read Gatsby as an extended, agonized missive addressed to the U.S. military by Fitzgerald on the subject of The Great War (the novel’s title is of course an echo of the contemporary term for World War I): “yes, you have helped win the conflict by creating officers and ‘new men’ like Gatsby, but look too at what you have thereby let loose in our postwar world.” In any case, it makes sense that someone promoted to captain in the camps, like Gatsby, would be more disposed to the army’s propaganda than an officer, say, who is stymied in his promotions at camp and underused or undecorated in the field. Nick may have been such an officer; we don’t hear about his rank, The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army 119

his promotions, or his combat exploits, except that he was in the “Third Division,” “Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion” (51). The omission is suggestive because Fitzgerald was unquestionably such an officer; again, though he was eventually promoted from second to first lieutenant in the camps, he did not make captain there like Gatsby; he was deprived of the platoon he was promised at Camp Taylor because “his superior officers felt he couldn’t be entrusted with a command,” and, at Camp Sheridan, “his brother officers refused to take him seriously and made him the victim of pranks.”154 The war ended before Fitzgerald was due to be shipped overseas; likewise, Nick in some sense didn’t get his fill of war: “he enjoyed [it] so thoroughly” that he “came back restless” (7). Gatsby, by contrast, “After the Armistice . . . tried frantically to get home.” Of course, he wanted to get back to Daisy, but it is also made clear that he had significant combat adventure and responsibility: he had his Argonne Forest thrills and heroics and after that “command of the divisional machine guns” (158). The point of this comparison is not only that Gatsby is a prime candidate to be a true believer in the military’s “new man” ideology, but, also that an Anglo officer with a fairly nondescript or simply frustrated military experience, like Nick and Fitzgerald, respectively, might naturally look at a figure with Gatsby’s army career with some resentment, a resentment that would easily translate into a light ridicule of his embrace of the military’s propaganda concerning chivalry and chastity. Particularly, again, if this Gatsby was a poor ethnic American who would, because of such a background, already have a “naïve” tendency to romanticize a rich, Anglo girl like Daisy whose very voice rings of money. An officer such as Nick or Fitzgerald would not of course belittle combat prowess or Gatsby’s account of his very real combat exploits, except to make clear that his Argonne Forest bravery and initiative got him promoted to major only from captain, and not from lieutenant, that he was already a captain before he got to the front. The soldierly aspect of his masculinity would be unassailable, unless of course he failed to put away his talent for killing once he returned to civilian life—as Gatsby the gangster apparently does. Nick, that is, in contrast to Gatsby, suffering from no outsider illusions about Anglo women and smarting a little bit from his relative rejection or underemployment by a military that would make a Gatsby its darling, might be mildly critical of the military’s production of killer soldiers who don’t stop killing when the war is over and would certainly be a natural to reject the same military’s prissy propaganda about protecting females and pursuing personal chastity, and to be at least gently critical of a Gatsby’s romantic illusions. Thus Nick is poised to play the role of clear-eyed realist when Gatsby, sentimentally 120

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and also somewhat pathetically, goes on about repeating the past or tries to rationalize the fact that Daisy couldn’t deny that she loved Tom, too (“Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?” [159]). For, after all, what refuge is there for a sophisticated Anglo who has bumped up uncomfortably against the new meritocratic realities of the mobilization that don’t exactly favor him, while they offer unprecedented chances to ethnic Americans? One doesn’t want to come off as a hateful, vulgar racist like Tom Buchanan; that reveals too much insecurity. (In fact, Tom is a foil to Nick whose presence in the novel demonstrates Nick’s relative lack of racism and sexism.) So one naturally turns one’s relative social failure into spiritual success: the upstart successful are blinded by illusions; they tend to believe too uncritically in the system that has promoted them, along with the system’s romantic illusions. This is their vulnerability. Gatsby believes in his chivalry and fidelity. Meanwhile, the relatively failed have the freedom to reject such self-delusion and to know truth: so Nick says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (64), and “I’m . . . too old to lie to myself and call it honor” (186). Such realism and honesty is imagined as a protection against the vulnerability of the successful and deluded, who justify their own criminality and await a fall. Add to this strategy of face-saving Nick’s familial relationship to Daisy (his cousin), and his detached, antiromantic, slightly sardonic superiority is complete. “Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs,” Nick reports, and “so I drew up the girl beside me” and kissed Jordan (85), whom he will later peremptorily dump. But for all his talk of finding Gatsby “worth the whole damn bunch of them put together” (162), he will never clear Gatsby’s name and betray Daisy to the police for her responsibility in Tom’s mistress’s death. And there we have the distinctive profile of the narrator of this particular postmobilization brand of modernist novel: Anglo, underappreciated by the army, ironic, immune somehow to the ultimate losses involved in love, and in a special, nonsexual relationship with the promiscuous Anglo princess who began her sexual career with a man in uniform.

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The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas

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he first pages of The Sun Also Rises about Robert Cohn and his educational history at military school, where he played football, and at Princeton, where he boxed, are a seemingly tangential and curious start to a novel that has usually been interpreted as telling a story about the soldiers and nurses that served in the catastrophic first World War and thus became the Lost Generation. Cohn didn’t serve in the war; moreover, he is not one of the two “obviously” main characters: Jake, a wounded pilot, and Brett, a hospital aide during the war. But there is good reason to believe that Hemingway meant the Gertrude Stein epigraph about the Lost Generation ironically, which also casts doubt on the conventional interpretation of the novel. Moreover, the thumbnail sketch of Cohn’s progress from “military school,” “where . . . no one ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else,” through Princeton, which “made him race-conscious” (4), is a neat little allegory about the contemporary social conflict over the meaning of “race” or (as we would say today) ethnicity, a cultural battle between “racial” or ethnic equality and discrimination in the period of the Great War and just after, and one that identifies the front lines and opposing sides of that battle: namely, the unprecedented shift to an ethnically egalitarian military establishment during the war and the sudden shift away from policies of equal opportunity to those of discrimination at elite universities afterward.1 And by making Cohn a military school graduate but not a soldier, Hemingway tidily separates out social issues within the military from the related, but different, issues of war and combat. In the spring of 1918, with World War I still in full swing, the Association of New England Deans met at Princeton to discuss the “Jewish problem”—the rising number of Jews on campus. In that year, Jews made up 4 percent of the freshman class at Princeton; the year before, Yale had a freshman class that was 9 percent Jewish; also in that last year of the war, 20 percent of Harvard freshmen were Jews. As Jerome Karabel puts it in his 2005 study, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, “From the perspective of the Anglo-Saxon men who ran Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and like institutions, something had to be done soon or their schools would be overrun by culturally alien students.” The dean of Yale said at the meeting, “A few years ago every scholarship of any value was won by a Jew. I took it up with the Committee and said that we could not allow that to go on. We must put a ban on the Jews.”2 A few years later, in the early 1920s, Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, a vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, declared, “The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews. 124

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If their number should become 40% of the student body, the race feeling would become intense.”3 Lowell worried that Harvard might suffer the fate that Columbia University, around 40 percent Jewish already by 1914, had experienced: namely, the WASP elite would abandon it.4 The “problem” of a rising Jewish population on elite campuses stemmed from the simple fact that Jews were excelling in terms of the scholarly criteria these colleges and universities had traditionally relied upon in selecting students. As Ernest Hopkins, president of Dartmouth College from 1916 to 1945 framed the problem, “Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.”5 On the first page of Sun, Jake discusses the “feeling of inferiority” Cohn “had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.” Given the novel’s dating and Cohn’s age, he would probably have attended college from 1909 to 1913, and though Princeton’s administration had yet to introduce Jewish quotas, Cohn’s experience of anti-Semitism there is not merely an allusion to official postwar bigotry: the student body at Princeton was already active in discriminating against Jews (and indeed discouraging them from matriculating). In Cohn’s time at Princeton, Jews were excluded from the “eating clubs,” and, in a 1907 letter to then president of Princeton Woodrow Wilson, who attempted but failed in that year to abolish the clubs, a Jewish alumnus who left Princeton in 1903 after two years attributed his departure to the “abominable system of club life,” with its attendant “social humiliation,” “racial contempt,” and “class prejudice.” In fact, according to the author of the 1910 book Great American Universities, the “anti-Semitic feeling” at Princeton seemed “more dominant than at any of the other universities I visited.” He observed that “The Christian tradition of Princeton, the exclusiveness of the upper-class clubs, and the prejudices of the students keep away many Jews, although not all—there were eleven in the Freshman class.”6 On the second page of Hemingway’s novel, it is made clear that no one had “made [Cohn] race-conscious” at “the military school where he prepped”—a reminder of the military’s shift to an egalitarian policy for ethnic Americans during the war (after all, military schools, though not officially connected to the U.S. military, tended to follow its lead in terms of values and policies7). Whereas the military establishment had become blind to certain “race” (meaning ethnic) differences, prestigious universities were taking up the “cultural work” of differentiating between “races.” As Hemingway’s book proceeds, it becomes quite clear where its sympathies lie in terms of this question of whether to abandon or preserve “race consciousness”: the military establishment had The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 125

failed to make “important distinctions” during the war, and now in the twenties elite universities were stepping into the breach, noticing and responding to these “real and significant differences” between Anglos and ethnic Americans. For, in parallel fashion, recognizing the importance of such ethnic differences, as the universities were doing, is the lesson learned by Jake and Brett’s circle in the course of the novel, which starts off the story with a “naïve” attitude of ethnic inclusiveness that mimics the army’s: Jake and Brett make the “mistake” of including Jewish Cohn as a friend and a lover, respectively, as if “race” didn’t matter, only to find out that “race” does matter and that he really doesn’t belong with Anglos—socially or intimately. Harvard President Lowell’s answer to the “Jewish problem” and the growing problem of anti-Semitism on campus was the introduction of Jewish quotas at Harvard and elsewhere; he argued, in fact, that a Jewish quota would be good for Jews. Indeed, Cohn’s presence at Princeton is imagined by Hemingway’s novel to kick up just the sort of “race feelings among students,” which, according to President Lowell in a speech to Harvard’s graduates in 1922, a quota “should go a long way toward eliminating.” (Jake narrates: “No one had ever made [Cohn] feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton” [3–4].) Lowell’s recommendation that “every college in the country [should] take a limited proportion of Jews” was justified as a method of reducing anti-Semitism on campuses and in the larger community.8 In much the same spirit, Hemingway’s novel treats Cohn’s presence in Jake’s expatriate group as a growing “Jewish problem,” which, once more, as it did at Princeton, kicks up anti-Semitism (“That kike!” Bill finally exclaims [164]) and which is best solved by Cohn’s going away. Harvard’s freshman class had grown from 7 percent Jewish in 1900 to 21 percent Jewish in 1922 and 27.6 percent Jewish in 1925—due to the children of Jewish immigrants entering college “in large numbers”9 and “Harvard College[’s] . . . traditional policy of freedom from discrimination on grounds of race or religion.”10 Lowell wanted the Jewish percentage capped at 15, and, though a faculty committee and the board voted down a formal quota, by 1931 his aim was achieved through indirect devices. Other Ivy League universities acted similarly; in fact, Harvard’s “unofficial program of education access restriction . . . spread to many colleges, universities, and professional schools.”11 Yale, where the percentage of Jewish students had risen to 13.3 percent by 1923, afterward “moved toward an explicit quota” of 10 percent,12 and “Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia reduced the proportion of Jews at his school from 40 to 20 percent in two years.”13 126

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Much the same thing was happening at American medical schools in the 1920s and ’30s; between 1930 and 1950, as the New York Times reported at the end of this period, “Anti-Jewish ‘quota’ systems . . . resulted in a 50 per cent decline . . . in the number of Jews enrolled in United States medical schools.” The American Jewish Congress reported that “with the number of applicants increasing approximately fourteen times between 1920 and 1950, while the number of available places remained constant, ‘rough quotas’ became the rule of most of the admissions committees. As a result, the number of Jews admitted to medical schools was arbitrarily limited with little regard for the qualifications of the excluded applicants.”14 Statistics indicate that, by 1933–1934, after the introduction of quota systems in the 1920s, 26 percent of Jewish applicants versus 46 percent of Gentile applicants were being admitted to U.S. medical schools; by 1945, the disparity was even greater: about 25 percent of Jewish applications were successful versus 75 percent of Gentile applications.15 As with Ivy League colleges, there was a resulting change in the ethnic makeup of medical schools, with a sometimes drastic reduction in Jewish presence: “from 1920 to 1940 the percentage of Jews in Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons fell from 47 percent to 6 percent.”16 But how were such Jewish quotas to be justified? And, likewise, how to justify getting rid of Cohn? (After all, Cohn is not a criminal involved in violence like Gatsby; Tom’s attack on the bootlegger in Fitzgerald’s novel needs no finesse.) In some cases, the discrimination at universities was blatant; there was an employment of official quotas, and no rationalizations were provided. At Yale Medical School, for instance, applications were marked with an “H” for Hebrew and a “C” for Catholic, and the dean instructed his admissions committee, “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics and take no blacks at all.” Indeed, some medical schools openly admitted to using Jewish quotas and cited them in rejection letters. One such letter from Loyola University in Chicago to a rejected Jewish applicant read, “I am sorry to inform you that your application for admission to the School of Medicine cannot be acted upon favorably because the quota for Jewish students has been filled.”17 Sometimes these ethnic quotas at universities were not official but were rather achieved and justified by taking into account nonscholastic factors such as geographic diversity (this was one of the methods at Harvard) or personality traits. In the 1920s, some medical schools instituted a personal interview “to exclude Jews on the basis of their having an unacceptable personality,”18 and elite undergraduate colleges also “found the personal interview a useful device to limit the number of Jewish and other ethnic students.” (Face-to-face interviews The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 127

were also used at medical schools to “out” Jews who were hiding their ethnic identities on paper by changing their surnames.)19 A Princeton trustee could explain to Harvard President Lowell in 1926 that there is “no Jew question at Princeton” because of the use of recommendation letters, “preferably from Princeton graduates—something like letters required for admission to a club,” which allowed the director of admissions to grade students, A through D, on “a more or less social basis”; “none of Grade D are admitted, no matter how high their examination marks.”20 In essence, in response to the “Jewish problem,” the selection or admissions process at American universities was changed forever: what was once decided almost entirely on the basis of scholarship would now be determined by a host of factors, importantly including letters from teachers and in-person interviews that were supposed to reveal “aptitude and character.”21 As Karabel puts it in The Chosen: The development of a procedure for identifying Jews was . . . the first step. For the first time, candidates were asked to fill out lengthy applications that included demographic information, a personal essay, and a detailed description of extracurricular activities that might demonstrate “leadership” and reveal something about their “character.” The centerpiece of the new system was the personal letter of recommendation, especially those from trusted sources such as alumni and headmasters or teachers from the leading feeder schools. Finally, to ensure that “undesirables” were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment, and physical appearance, a personal interview was required, a final screening device usually conducted by the Director of Admissions or a trusted alumnus. The new policy permitted the rejection of scholastically brilliant boys considered “undesirable,” and it granted the director of admissions broad latitude to admit boys of good background and weak academic records. The key code word was “character”—a quality thought to be frequently lacking among Jews but present almost congenitally among high-status Protestants.22 Again, in a similar vein, Cohn is railed against by Jake and the others in his clique for just the kinds of social failings that university and medical school administrators were leveling against Jews; the portrait of Cohn in the novel 128

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is a strong echo of the portrait of Jews that issues from observations made by college and medical school officials who were in favor of Jewish quotas. To put it another way, Hemingway and the Ivy League and medical school administrators were partaking of a new or revised anti-Semitic stereotype that was being reinvented and revitalized in the context of an increased socioeconomic competition between Jews and Anglos—specifically in the context of increased competition for places at universities and medical schools. This was not the older stereotype of the Jew as dirty, sneaky, greedy, and criminal (that Fitzgerald to some degree partakes of in his portrayal of Gatsby’s associate, Wolfshiem23); rather, it was a newer stereotype of the Jew as socially inept and personally neurotic. In short, Robert Cohn echoes a historically identifiable figure of the era: namely, the Jewish student who has in the past been accepted to elite colleges and medical schools—or in the meritocratic mobilization for the Great War has found a place in the military—but starting in the 1920s is being discriminated against, or, to put it even more specifically, the Jewish student who is suddenly being rejected by college and medical admissions committees on social, rather than scholastic, grounds. It would probably be going too far to claim that Hemingway’s subplot in relation to Cohn is an allegory in which Jake Barnes’s in-group resembles an undergraduate or medical admissions committee that considers and interviews Cohn but finally rejects him. (However, it is tantalizing to wonder exactly what Hemingway intended: he obviously has personal interviews on his mind as soon as Jake’s group reaches Spain: there, Jake undergoes “a sort of oral spiritual examination” by a bunch of Spanish bullfighting aficionados who determine that he has “aficion”; even more interestingly, the examination, like the new college or medical school interview, is not direct but depends on subtle indicators of the special status at issue. As Jake explains, “there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination, with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent” [132].) But, whether or not Hemingway was thinking of university interviews, the novel all the same enacts a ritual of excluding the Jewish outsider and does so on the very grounds that universities and medical schools were developing. Cohn, like a growing number of Jewish students who were rejected by universities and medical schools in the 1920s, has academic and intellectual credentials: he is a Princeton graduate with a book publication. (Cohn even has financial resources.) What he lacks—what makes him not “one of us” (60), to use Brett’s insider terminology—is the proper personality and social graces: according The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 129

to various members of the in-group who criticize him, he doesn’t get drunk (142), doesn’t say funny things (141), lacks manners (142), acts superior (99), is unusually nervous and eager (98), has a weak stomach (166), and is immaturely romantic, dependent on books for his ideas about life (12). As one medical dean, who saw the effectiveness of the interview for rejecting Jewish applicants who were scholastically qualified, put it, “It is a fairly tenable fact that . . . personal acceptability and magnetism . . . is less prevalent among the Jewish class.”24 In like manner, the dean of Columbia College worried in 1910 about “uncultured Jews” being admitted to the university, and the chairman of admissions at Yale in the early 1920s referred to Jewish students as “alien in morals and manners” and “naked of all the attributes of refinement and honor.”25 Indeed, the specific personality defects that, according to medical school and university officials, were supposed to afflict Jewish students mirror many of those that Jake and his friends detect in Cohn. Jake comments on Cohn’s “spell of superiority” (99), and Bill makes clear that that superiority is related to Cohn’s Jewishness: “well, let him not get superior and Jewish” (96). Meanwhile, the acting dean of Chicago Medical School in 1934 commented, “It has been my experience that Jewish students, on the average, compare favorably with the Nordic type. The only criticism I have is their tendency to develop a superiority complex which at times make them appear to be disrespectful to their superiors.”26 Jake finds that Cohn derives his notions about life “out of a book” (12), and that they are thoroughly unpractical notions. “Cohn, I believe, took every word of ‘The Purple Land’ [a romance novel] as literally as though it had been an R.G. Dun report.” And “for a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books” (9). Along similar lines, an official from the State University of Iowa College of Medicine observed that Jewish students “have difficulty in handling the practical angle of the medical course, but they do very well on the didactic or so-called book work.”27 Likewise, administrators at elite undergraduate schools tended to characterize Jews as “bookish” and “unmanly” and thus to emphasize in their selection processes physical or athletic criteria in line with the Rhodes scholarship: President Hibben of Princeton wrote in 1921 about the new, socially restrictive admissions policies, that “the Rhodes Scholarship requirements present an excellent precedent.”28 Although Cohn is of course versed in various sports, his reaction to the bullfights is the litmus test of manliness in Sun—after all, Jake has “aficion,” and passes the “oral spiritual examination” given to him by 130

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the Spanish “aficionados” (132). Meanwhile, Cohn unmistakably fails the test: he lacks “a good, healthy stomach” and gets “positively green” at the spectacle; Brett’s fiancé Mike says of Cohn, “I thought he was going to be sick” (166). Jake notes, “I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn—nor as eager” (98), and, by the end of the novel, it is also suggested that Cohn is overly emotional and aggressive as well as behaviorally erratic—one moment he is throwing punches, the next he is crying and asking for forgiveness (193–195, 202). Similarly, the superintendent of the Newport Hospital in Rhode Island rationalized his hospital’s discrimination against Jews in the matter of selecting interns on the basis of Jewish zealousness and aggressiveness: selection committees “have found by past experience that the average Jewish interne [sic] is so zealous in his desire to learn, and so aggressive in his demands for hospital opportunities to learn, that they have been prejudiced with the preference to engage a Gentile interne whenever possible.”29 And the dean of the University of Georgia School of medicine remarked, more generally, “My general impression is that the Jewish students, who are admitted to this and other schools . . . , stand high on scholarship. I believe that relatively a high percentage of Jewish students are of a neurotic temperament.”30 Jewish American Cohn, like German American Gatsby then, is put down and rejected by one or more bigoted, self-styled Anglo guardians of culture, and in this sense the novels of Hemingway and Fitzgerald play out very similarly. Of course, in both novels the problem of the ethnic upstart is focused on his access to a very desirable Anglo woman—and issues of access to wealth and status are present but secondary (Gatsby and Cohn both are rich and successful). In these two 1920s modernist novels, the promiscuous woman cannot successfully be blamed for promiscuity per se; when a character attempts to hold her to the old standards of chastity or fidelity, which Gatsby and Cohn each believe in and articulate, that character is generally seen as naïve or pathetic. Promiscuity as such has become acceptable, and its tolerance by men is seen in these books as sophistication or cool, specifically an Anglo sophistication the ethnic American lacks. However, the promiscuous woman is sometimes effectively attacked for her “racial” or (as we would say today) ethnic indiscrimination, her ethnic promiscuity, for her not sticking to her own “kind.” Similarly, a character that wishes to be effectively critical of female infidelity or promiscuity will invoke considerations of race or ethnicity (and sometimes class, as well). Thus, even Tom Buchanan’s sudden “transition from libertine to prig” (137) in Gatsby is—strategically—inflected by a racism and classism. He might The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 131

have said, in his outrage about Daisy’s affair with Gatsby, “I suppose the latest thing is to let your wife have a lover. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out.” What he does say is, “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” Jordan retorts, taking a dig at Tom, “We’re all white here” (137), but Tom is purposely using a scare tactic—“if today we allow ourselves to be infiltrated by ethnic Americans (what Tom would have called ‘other races’ from Europe), eventually we will be mixing with blacks”— and Jordan’s response indicates that even if Tom’s maneuver here is ineffective, he can count on a shared racist understanding about African Americans, insofar as all the assembled Anglos, including Jordan, seem implicitly to agree that black-white intermarriage is a social nightmare to be avoided. In any case, even if Tom seems to admit by his silence on this point that Gatsby is white, he sees Gatsby as racially other. Not only is he ethnic—his name was originally Gatz—but he is tied to suspicious Jews (he is in business with the immigrant Jewish gambler and gangster Meyer Wolfshiem), and Tom might very well share the prevalent (pre-Holocaust) Anglo viewpoint that Jews were not “truly” white (even if they weren’t exactly black either).31 And though Tom manages to turn Daisy off to Gatsby most of all by talking about his criminal connections, Tom is himself clearly irked by Gatsby’s “racial” and class background. When Jake’s friend Bill in Sun finds out that Brett slept with Robert Cohn, he says, “What bloody-fool things people do. Why didn’t she go off with some of her own people?” (102). Brett’s fiancé Mike is tolerant of her sexual affairs, but her sleeping with Cohn crosses a line for him. He says to Jake, “Brett’s had affairs with men before. . . . Brett’s gone off with men. But they weren’t ever Jews” (143). He even takes Brett herself to task for her choice of men: “I gave her a fearful hiding about Jews and bull-fighters, and all those sort of people” (203). “Those sort of people” is clearly the opposite of “her own people”: what links Jews and bullfighters—hardly similar categories—as “those sort of people” is their ethnic or “racial” otherness (the bullfighters in this novel are, of course, Spanish). Both novels thus end up dramatizing—or revealing—the new and uncomfortable Anglo male sense of sexual and social rivalry with ethnic Americans. Meanwhile, because, again, Tom can justifiably attack the German American’s criminality, and Jake and Mike must trump up a case against the Jewish American’s subtle social and personal failings, in the manner of university and 132

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medical school officials, Tom can hide his jealousy of the ethnic upstart better than Mike or Jake. As Jake admits, to himself, of Cohn’s sexual liaison with Brett, “I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. . . . I certainly did hate him” (99). Part of the point here is that Jake is not jealous of Mike, or Romero (for Jake, Jews and bullfighters aren’t classed together, as they are for Mike), Brett’s other lovers in the course of the book. And what pushes Jake’s jealousy into hate is apparently Cohn’s “spell of superiority at lunch” (99)—the direct challenge to Jake’s status vis-à-vis Cohn. This Anglo sense of competition with ethnic Americans is underlined in both books by its contrast to a much more secure position of Anglo domination vis-à-vis blacks—a continuing discrimination against and segregation of African Americans that the Great War mobilization, despite its egalitarian and meritocratic practices with regard to ethnic Americans, merely confirmed. Driving into New York City one day with Gatsby, Nick notes, “As we crossed Blackwells Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in a haughty rivalry” (73). Nick’s untroubled laughter, his condescendingly referring to male African Americans as “bucks,” his identification of their “rivalry” as “haughty,” and even his oblique recourse to the minstrel image of “eyeballs roll[ing]”: all of these express the comfortable sense of white superiority Anglo Nick takes for granted. Jake and his friend Bill likewise indulge in a casual, “friendly,” and repeated use of the term “nigger” (13 times in two pages at one point) to refer to the blacks whose skills they accept because they consider the blacks, the drummer and the boxer (62, 71–72), to be there for white entertainment. Also similarly, Jake has a handy recourse to minstrel stereotypes—the drummer “was all teeth and lips” (62). Jake and Bill’s confident condescension to blacks makes quite a contrast to their agitated discussions of Jewish Cohn’s acting “superior,” Jake’s doubts about the truth of Cohn’s boxing achievements (they turn out to be real), and their heated use of the “kike” slur. The next step in both books is for the Anglo princesses whom the ethnic upstarts love to follow the lead of their male “compatriots” and reject the outsider males as well. This climactic scene of rejection is shocking for the naïvely romantic ethnic American, who has all along misjudged his essentially promiscuous woman. “You loved me too?” Gatsby blankly murmurs to Daisy in front of Tom, unable to comprehend that the girl who used to play around with officers at Camp Taylor, including himself, could grow up to love two men at the same time (140). Likewise, when “Cohn wanted to take Brett away . . . to make an The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 133

honest woman of her,” “Brett gave him what for. She told him off . . . Then Cohn broke down and cried” (201). Indeed, though the ethnic stereotyping in the two books is quite different—violent criminal versus socially awkward neurotic— Gatsby and Cohn completely overlap in their starry-eyed romanticism. What’s more, in terms of their misguided chivalry and loyalty, Cohn, like Gatsby, can and should be associated with the military training camp’s “new man.” Though, as critics have noticed, Cohn apparently did not serve in the war (presumably because as a father and husband he was exempt 32), they have generally missed the fact that Hemingway nonetheless associates him with military training. He gives Cohn a “military school” pedigree, and, again, crucially, this military school—like the U.S. military training camps of World War I—was egalitarian and meritocratic. Hemingway is meticulously explicit on this point: “at the military school where he prepped . . . no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew and hence any different from anybody else” (4). Moreover, though the narrator Jake says Cohn was formed externally at Princeton, he associates Cohn’s chivalry and sense of honor with his military prep school: “Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff,” Jake says to Cohn when Cohn feels Jake has insulted a lady’s honor, simply by being frank about Brett’s having married two men she didn’t love (39). Finally, Cohn is athletic, and athleticism was another aspect of masculinity promoted by the military training camps, which, in fact, specifically promoted Cohn’s favored sports. The training camp authorities seized upon athletics because sports had the double function of providing healthful and “manly” activities while providing a leisure-time alternative to bars, saloons, and brothels where trainees might find opportunities for illicit sex.33 Indeed, though he now plays a good game of tennis and had success boxing at Princeton, we hear of his first pursuing sports at military school where “he played a very good end on the football team” (4). The military did not merely recommend athletics in its literature and movies; the Commission on Training Camp Activities assigned an athletic director to every training camp and “made athletic instruction and competition a part of every soldier’s camp life.” The athletic program involved training in all the “major American sports—football, baseball, basketball, soccer, boxing, and track and field events.”34 But above all other sports, boxing, the sport with which Cohn is most closely identified—because his boxing career opens the novel and he punches out several men at the end—had a special meaning for and appeal to the military camp authorities. The CTCA produced a wartime pamphlet that claimed that the “science of boxing” was “intimately related to the business of bayonet-fighting,” and 134

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maintained that “nearly every blow and position [in boxing] has its counterpart in bayoneting.”35 Edward F. Allen, who published a book about the CTCA during the war explained further: “The big contribution of boxing to military training is to develop in men the willingness and ability to fight at close range. Its purpose is to teach soldiers to give and take punishment.”36 Hemingway was himself a boxer and a football player in high school,37 but, in the novel, he gives boxing and football exclusively to Cohn and has Jake play only tennis, because football was a major CTCA sport, and boxing was the training camp sport par excellence. In this context of Cohn’s boxing, it is worth noting that masculine icon Teddy Roosevelt had approvingly observed of Jews in the military, not only that they had a good fighting record, but also that they had “taken to boxing, wrestling and the like.”38 Hemingway’s association of Cohn with the wartime military training camps, but not combat, is also implied by Cohn’s partial resemblance to Hemingway’s friend and literary rival Fitzgerald. Though Cohn is more closely modeled on Jewish Harold Loeb, who was part of the company that traveled with Hemingway to the Spanish bullfights in the summer of 1925, Robert Cohn not only attends Princeton, like Fitzgerald, but also in earlier drafts of Sun, is called Gerald Loeb and Gerald Cohn,39 perhaps in Hemingway’s imagination a mix of Fitzgerald and Loeb. (Interestingly, in the published draft, Hemingway seems to feel the need to hide the name “Gerald,” as well as “Loeb”—suggesting that the name Gerald might refer to an actual person; of course, it was perhaps simply too close to Harold, with which it rhymes.) In addition, Cohn, as we have seen, continues to think about football long after high school (44), and so apparently did Fitzgerald: in his confessional essay “The Crack-Up,” he speaks of “two juvenile regrets” that bothered him in the 1920s, “not getting overseas during the war” and “not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college.”40 Fitzgerald is also someone, like Cohn, who has recently had a novel “accepted by a fairly good publisher” (8) but whose novel is actually “a very poor” one (6) (remember that Hemingway in like manner criticized Gatsby). Finally, of course, Fitzgerald was a literary rival Hemingway knew at the time who had been mobilized and trained in the military camps but never saw action. If Hemingway felt himself in such profound competition with ethnic Americans for status in the military, as I am claiming, one would expect this sense of rivalry to arise in some manner in his other major post–World War I fictions, especially his novel of the Great War. And, indeed, as we saw at the very start of this study, Sun is not the only Hemingway novel of the era in which an The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 135

Anglo narrator experiences an antagonistic sense of competition with an ethnic American. In A Farewell to Arms, published 3 years later, the reprised theme is a minor one, but, interestingly, in this novel it is absolutely blatant rather than slightly subtle (as it is in Sun). In the war novel, this theme of competition with ethnic Americans for military status and women is treated directly; in addition, the issue of the ethnic American being promoted on the basis of “merit” is explicitly raised. We are now in a better position to appreciate the details of that sequence. Again, Anglo narrator Frederic Henry finds himself locking horns with an Italian American, Lieutenant Ettore Moretti, who challenges Henry’s right to his decorations. Importantly, Moretti, like Cohn, is ill-mannered and arrogant; he is “conceited” and “bored everyone he met”; again like Cohn, who has the American military training stamp on him and so doesn’t drink much and maintains a chivalrous propriety with women, Moretti, though he is in the Italian Army, is “no boozer and whorehound.” “I don’t drink and I don’t run around,” he asserts; he “know[s] what’s good” for him in the eyes of the military (88–91), and, though the concern with temperance and chastity is much more of a concern of the moralistic American Army than the Italian Army, Moretti also has his eye on an American military career. In any case, Moretti’s resemblance to the U.S. Army’s “new man” makes sense: Hemingway’s major quarrel is with the American Army, not the Italian one. It seems hardly coincidental that this challenge to Henry comes, not from one of the many Italian soldiers in the book, but one of the two Italian Americans who make an appearance. My claim is that Hemingway felt in competition with ethnic Americans, not with foreigners (and thus, likewise, Jake is jealous that Brett sleeps with Cohn, but actually helps her bed Romero, even though that latter liaison destroys Jake’s relationships with the other bullfighting aficionados). Because they pose no threat to Henry’s sense of his status, the Italians are much more appealing to Henry than this Italian American; to take one small example, just a few pages after the uncomfortable sequence with conceited and boring Moretti, Henry encounters, by contrast, two “Italians [who] were full of manners” (96). And part of my contention is that Hemingway specifically felt in competition with ethnic Americans over status in the U.S. Army. Thus it is also significant that A Farewell to Arms makes clear that Moretti would achieve higher rank than Henry in the American Army as well as the Italian one because he is not only a seasoned soldier and “legitimate hero” (91) but in addition a bilingual speaker. Thus Moretti’s question to Henry—“Why don’t you go in 136

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the American Army?” (90)—is hardly casual for Henry, or Hemingway, even though Henry has already been wounded and the U.S. Army might simply consider him unfit to fight. We can speculate that if Hemingway were to have answered this question during his own Red Cross service in Italy (once the draft age had been dropped and he became eligible for service), his reluctance to join the American Army might have had to do with the fact that in the U.S. military, he would have had to compete with soldiers like Moretti all the time, not just on this odd occasion, and given Moretti’s proven competence in combat, plus his language abilities, Hemingway would have found himself at a disadvantage with such ethnic Americans. Though the ambulance service in Italy is humiliating for Hemingway because Italy is a minor theater of the war and Red Cross ambulance work is hardly soldiering, as an alternative to the American Army, it nonetheless offers the advantage of exempting Hemingway from daily direct competition with ethnic Americans. Anglo Americans, not ethnic Americans, tended to join the Red Cross ambulance corps; moreover, although there were Italian Americans like Moretti who returned to Italy to fight in the Italian Army, they were few and far between. It is also no coincidence that soon after his encounter with Moretti, the subject of American military training camps comes up, and Henry comments, without explaining his reasons, “I was glad I wasn’t in a training camp” (100). In fact, in this context, I would suggest an alternative to the typical interpretation of Hemingway’s expatriation after World War I, usually understood in terms of issues raised in a short story such as “Soldier’s Home” from In Our Time: the trauma of combat and the alienation it produces from those back home unacquainted with war. Hemingway’s expatriation in Europe has generally been seen to offer a moral freedom and spiritual camaraderie less available in America. So, in that short story, for example, Krebs feels unable to relate to American women back home after the war. “That was the thing about French girls and German girls. There was not all this talking. You couldn’t talk much and you did not need to talk. It was simple and you were friends.”41 But Hemingway’s European expatriation can also be understood as a continuation of his wartime situation in Italy that allowed him to avoid the American “training camps.” Expatriation allowed him to continue to avoid the American soldiers, especially the ethnic American soldiers, whom the army sent into battle or promoted and with whom Hemingway felt agonizingly in competition. If Henry’s “separate peace,” tied up with his ability to no longer “feel insulted” by an elite combat group of “aviators” who take him for a slacker (173), is achieved in A Farewell to Arms by heading out of the war zone for Switzerland, The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 137

Hemingway’s postwar “separate peace,” involving a similar freedom from humiliation, can analogously be achieved by going back to Europe and leaving behind the domain of American—and ethnic American—soldiers and officers. The encounter with the ethnic American has an easy, happy resolution in A Farewell to Arms, unlike that in Sun, perhaps because Hemingway is more confident at the time of its writing, as a result of his literary success, perhaps also because the uncomfortable experience of competition for status during the war is 3 years more remote. He has also had more experience with women, and his uncomfortable experience in 1925 with Lady Duff Twysden (the principal model for Brett), who wouldn’t sleep with him but slept with Harold Loeb (the main model for Cohn),42 has also receded some. In any case, in A Farewell to Arms, the British nurse love interest, unlike her counterpart Brett Ashley in the earlier novel, has been made immune to the “charms” of the ethnic American; Catherine Barkley finds Moretti “conceited” and a bore. “We have heroes too,” she asserts; “But usually, darling, they’re much quieter.” (Apparently, the difference between the boring Jewish American Cohn and the boring Italian American Moretti is that Cohn usually says too little and Moretti talks too much.) She is also less captivated by rank and title than Brett: when Henry asks her, in discussing Moretti, “Wouldn’t you like me to have a more exalted rank?” she reassures him his rank is sufficient (91–92). It is of course precisely because in this novel the desirable Anglo woman isn’t impressed by or attracted to the ethnic American military figure that the issue of competition between the Anglo narrator and the ethnic American can be a minor, momentary irritation and anxiety that never comes to a crisis. Is it accidental for Hemingway, in his first postwar novel, to create a character that is a product of “military school” (and the military’s egalitarianism and chivalric propaganda) but never served in the war? On the contrary, there seems to be a deliberate point being made here by the author, especially when that author served in the war but, as a volunteer in the ambulance corps, skipped entirely the training camps that might have relegated him to a labor battalion, or simply rejected him, on account of his defective vision.43 That is, Sun seems invested in the notion that American military training with its idealized ethics of athleticism, fair play, chivalry, and honor is immature and should not be confused with the experiential ethics of soldiering and combat. And the novel quite deliberately stages a showdown between representatives of these different spheres of military-style training and life-and-death encounters, namely Cohn, the military school graduate, and Pedro Romero, the bullfighter. 138

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(Hemingway would have known about the military’s propaganda or ideology for a few reasons at least, even if he never came into contact with American soldiers while in the ambulance corps in Italy: first, military posters hung in public places; second, the American Red Cross, the organization through which Hemingway volunteered and from which he received his service orders and his transportation and boarding en route to Italy,44 was a partner with the U.S. military in its social hygiene campaigns and treated venereally infected, as well as wounded, soldiers,45 and third, while living in Kansas City and before volunteering, he briefly served in the Seventh Missouri Infantry of the National Guard.46 His knowledge of the military’s outlook is more clearly demonstrated in A Farewell to Arms than in Sun, in the oft-quoted passage in which he explicitly rejects it: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.” Interestingly, in a portion of this passage that is rarely quoted, the book’s narrator talks about being subjected to this ideology by posters: about having “read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations” [133].) The confrontation between Cohn and Romero, between newfangled sport and ancient blood ritual, between new egalitarianism and aristocratic tradition, between military school and combat, is at the heart of the novel. “Nobody lives their lives all the way up except bull-fighters,” Jake tells Cohn early in the novel (except maybe soldiers, one can imagine Jake adding, but you can’t always count on there being a war on); Cohn responds that he’s “not interested in bull-fighters”; “That’s an abnormal life” (10). And at the end of book, in a sort of muted climax, Cohn and Romero square off over Brett. Of course, Romero prevails. Though Cohn the boxer “nearly killed the poor, bloody bull-fighter” and “knocked [him] down about fifteen times,” he can’t knock Romero out or keep him down. Cohn is finally ashamed to hit Romero any longer, and Romero then strikes Cohn in the face and tells him to leave town by morning or he’ll kill him. Cohn, then remorseful and sentimental, tries to shake hands with Romero, and Romero, now unable to get up from the floor, hits him again. (And Cohn does leave the next day.) “That’s quite a kid,” Jake’s friend Bill comments (201–202), and the reader is to understand not only that Romero has bested Cohn with sheer grit, but also that, whereas Cohn the eternal schoolboy is unable to stand living with bad blood (thus the need to shake hands after a fight), the true warrior has learned to tolerate a real world of enemies and unresolved conflict. Jake, the war veteran, presides over this object lesson that proves the puerility of U.S. military camp or The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 139

military school ethics in the face of real-world struggle—whether that conflict be in love or war. Of course, Romero’s domineering style with Brett is also in direct contrast to Cohn’s pathetic passivity on the romantic front. Cohn is compared by Mike to a steer following around a bull (141), and if Brett is the bull in this metaphor, the metaphor can be extended to the scenario in which Brett, still the bull, is taken in hand by Romero, literally and figuratively the bullfighter. Brett may not consent to growing out her hair, as Romero demands (242), but Romero is clearly not daunted by Brett like all the other men in the novel, including Jake; the 19-year-old bullfighter is unafraid to order her around. But another metaphor about Brett and Cohn returns us to the insistent contrast between military school or camp and combat: Brett tells Jake that she slept with Cohn because she “rather thought it would be good for him,” and Jake somewhat nastily suggests she might take up “social service” (83–84). This reference might very well remind readers who lived through the Great War of the “charity girls” who serviced servicemen in the training camps at no charge (the term social service supplanted that of charity work precisely in this World War I era47): briefly, but importantly, Brett occupies this role, which in Hemingway’s book becomes undignified—but not because of the promiscuity involved. These girls were of course perceived as “silly” or immature by the U.S. training camp authorities for their moral flimsiness, but Hemingway’s take, although seeming to overlap with the military’s for a moment, is actually very different: according to Jake, female promiscuity is fine if it is confined to true men, but silly if it extends to effeminate men, mere trainees. And Robert Cohn, because he is a mere military school graduate, not a combat veteran, and Jewish to boot, is not for Jake truly masculine. Jake has no problem, by contrast, with Brett’s affair with Romero, a true fighter; he in fact helps orchestrate it. And in her liaison with Romero, which Jake vets, Brett is, significantly, motivated by her own desires (not “social service”) and acts maturely (she leaves him when she realizes he’s too young to be living with a woman). As with Cohn and Romero themselves, who are not only contrasted but come into conflict, these two affairs of Brett’s are not only distinguished from each other but impact one another. Brett’s fling with Romero turns out to be the antidote for her unpleasant experience with Cohn. Just as Romero bests Cohn in their fight, her relationship with Romero “wipe[s] out that damn Cohn” (243), as she puts it. Here in this conflict between Cohn and Romero is one place where the Cohn-Gatsby analogy breaks down, or to put it another way, where Heming140

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way’s postmobilization plot and character set veers off significantly from Fitzgerald’s. It can be argued that Hemingway really was aiming for “A Greater Gatsby”—or a “better Gatsby”—in Sun, and, indeed, an effective way to grasp Sun is to superimpose it upon Fitzgerald’s book. Hemingway had read Fitzgerald’s Gatsby “just a few months before” beginning his Sun,48 and Fitzgerald himself helped edit Hemingway’s novel: importantly, he convinced Hemingway not to begin with Brett but instead with Cohn—much as he himself begins his novel with Gatsby.49 More than this, as Hemingway’s biographer Michael Reynolds shows, “Fitzgerald’s Gatsby had been there when Hemingway most needed a rough model for Sun,”50 and he was “consciously competing with Fitzgerald” in its writing.51 One significant alteration Hemingway made to Fitzgerald’s model was to split the Gatsby archetype—romantic military trainee and disciplined, coldblooded killer who knows real risk—into two ethnic characters, Robert Cohn and Pedro Romero, respectively, who would compete and thus dramatize what in Gatsby was only a vaguely glimpsed internal tension within Gatsby himself. In Fitzgerald’s novel, the look of someone who “killed a man” (142) is occasionally popping through Gatsby’s cool and romantic exterior, in moments of crisis (for example, when Tom outs Gatsby as a bootlegger in front of Daisy), and so this internal contradiction has simply a limited role in the plot. In fact, the occasional glimpse is pretty much all Fitzgerald presents of a conflict that comes to occupy a central place in Sun’s thematic as well as its storyline. (It may very well be that Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Gatsby as the ethnic American who is both cold-blooded soldier hero and romantic training camp favorite— apparently in 1926 an impossible contradiction for Hemingway—is one of the main things that irk him about Gatsby, and another of the reasons Hemingway sees Fitzgerald’s work as artificial or false.52) But why, one might ask, if Hemingway wants to contrast military camp ethics and experiences to those of combat, does he need a character like Romero to pit against Cohn—when he already has Jake, another competitor with Cohn, and an actual war veteran injured at the front? For one thing, Hemingway realizes his readers need to see his warrior in action, and there is no war going on in 1925, in which a Jake could show his stuff the way Romero demonstrates in the bullring his competence and cool or, to use Hemingway’s phrase, his “grace under pressure” (and in fact does so the very day after being beaten up by Cohn). More important, though, Jake does not exactly correspond to the triumphant-killer side of Gatsby (the way Romero does). Jake has a different representational burden to carry. Jake is something of a loser in the war, not The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 141

chiefly because he has been seriously wounded, but because he was assigned to a “joke front” (31), a front distant from where the “real” action of the war was taking place, the decisive and most bloody action. Also, though Hemingway the volunteer ambulance driver did not experience American military training camp, Jake, as an aviator, would have had to—whereas Romero of course has nothing to do with American military training and comes out of a completely different training tradition, but a tradition that nonetheless certainly involves killing and military-style uniforms. Thus, Jake, like Nick with his nondescript rank and service record but even more obviously, has been underutilized by the military—and, in the masculine hysteria of the wartime years, devalued somewhat as a man. Being in the war, being in the action, had felt absolutely necessary to Hemingway in 1917. He wrote to his sister before he hit upon volunteering for the Red Cross as an ambulance driver: “We all have that bad eye like Mother’s. But I’ll make it to Europe in some way in spite of this optic. I can’t let a show like this go on without getting into it.”53 Sun may not be entirely gung ho about war, and it is not as flip about it as Gatsby: Fitzgerald, who never saw combat, has Nick say breezily of his war service, “I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War . . . [and] enjoyed the counter-raid . . . thoroughly” (7). However, Hemingway’s book is by no means an antiwar novel. We don’t hear about any American or Allied troops dying in combat in either of these novels, and only one war-related death seems to be alluded to. (Brett’s true love died of dysentery during the war, and while it isn’t clear that he died in the service, dysentery was of course a major killer on the battlefields of World War I, and a previous draft of the novel in fact puts his death in “Mesopotamia” where Brett thought he had the best chance to “last out the war”54—presumably this is a reference to a minor front of the conflict.) And though Jake is wounded in combat and Brett’s husband Lord Ashley seems to have come home with shell shock, the experience of war is also praised. Harris, Jake and Bill’s accidental fishing buddy on the way to Pamplona, whom both approve of, reexperiences, on the fishing trip, the male bonding and sense of adventure the war provided. “Really you don’t know how much it means. I’ve not had much fun since the war” (129). Jake compares his war memories to his time at the fiesta in Pamplona with his gang, including Cohn, and his memories of impending battle and group cohesion, though not as glowing as Harris’s, are not exactly unpleasant either. “It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming 142

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that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people” (146). Jake’s wound has been read as a symbol of a diminished sense of manhood or potency in the contexts of mechanized warfare and of rising female power; but it is also possible to read this wound as a symbol of diminished manhood in the face of an implicit rejection or underappreciation by the armed forces—the tyrannical arbiter of masculinity in the era. (Like Gatsby for Fitzgerald, Sun can be read as an indignant and proud rejoinder to the military apparatus that implicitly rejected Hemingway: as if Hemingway is saying, “I in turn reject your ridiculous notions of honor and chivalry; I know the truth about combat, about life-and-death risk, and it has nothing to do with such empty rhetoric.” Hemingway’s novel might be described as antimilitary but pro-war.) In Kansas City, where Hemingway was living after the United States entered the war in 1917, “Any able-bodied young man . . . not in uniform . . . risked being called a ‘slacker,’ and such men risked being rounded up in mass ‘slacker raids,’ initiated by the Justice Department.”55 The war hero Moretti, Anglo Henry’s ethnic American rival in A Farewell to Arms, raises the specter of “slacker” “round up[s]” as he intimidates Henry and a couple of Americans not in the service (91). Before the draft age was lowered to 18, Hemingway, because his defective eye made an air force commission impossible, because he joined the frontline Red Cross ambulance corps when he was too young to enlist, and because he was wounded in July 1918, could in no way be called as a slacker. But the issue of Hemingway’s status got more complicated after Congress lowered the draft age the next month. Some able-bodied men sought refuge in Red Cross service as a way to serve on the home front or avoid the front lines, and Red Cross service got associated in the public mind with slackers. As Michael Reynolds points out, “One could not tell from the [Red Cross] uniform who had been a front-line ambulance driver and who had been a slacker.” Moreover, Theodore Roosevelt had unambiguously criticized Red Cross ambulance work for able-bodied men of draft age: “Let . . . a man of fighting age . . . do his utmost to get into the fighting line—Red Cross work, Y.M.C.A. work, driving ambulances, and the like, excellent though it all is, should be left to men not of military age or unfit for military service, and to women.” Given such a prevailing attitude, “it is little wonder that Hemingway, along with other Red Cross men, began to invent a different war life for himself,” as Reynolds puts it, and that Hemingway would lead people to believe he had been in the Italian Army.56 It may be true The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 143

that the question of Hemingway’s possibly enlisting in the American Army when the lowered draft age made him eligible was moot because the American Army wouldn’t have taken him after his injury left him with a “bum leg and foot.”57 But personal doubts about his “manhood,” about whether he could have handled being a soldier and whether his decorations for being wounded were legitimate, seemed to haunt him: thus he has Moretti challenge his already wounded and convalescing narrator of A Farewell to Arms with the question, “Why don’t you go in the American Army?” And he has Frederic Henry answer, “Maybe I will” though neither the character nor the author would of course do so. Likewise, in the short story “In Another Country” (1927), published the year after Sun, the Hemingway narrator anxiously contrasts himself with soldiers who have been wounded while fighting, admitting he wasn’t cut out to be a heroic soldier: The boys at first were very polite about my medals. . . . I showed them the papers, . . . which really said . . . that I had been given the medals because I was an American. . . . [T]hey had done very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes . . . I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but . . . I knew that I would never had done such things, and I was very much afraid to die.58 Of course, in struggling with doubts about his service in the Red Cross and ultimately his manhood, Hemingway might have consoled himself with the fact that his defective eye would probably have meant rejection by the American military from all branches of the service. However, to be rejected by the army during World War I—to be one of the “flat-footed, short-sighted young men . . . who couldn’t get into the army at all,” as Jordan puts it, in Gatsby, of men like Hemingway himself (80)—was to be, maybe not a “yellow-streaked”59 coward, but another sort of masculine reject or pariah. Perhaps that is why Daisy’s family lets her “play around” (80) with such men: her parents may understand that these men present no sexual threat to Daisy because Daisy will not want to have sex with them. It is almost as if such men, through a reclassification by the army as undesirable, had been stripped of masculine power and made into a species of eunuch. Jake, by a similar alchemy, has been transformed into one 144

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of these neutered men. (Jake is not rejected by the army like Hemingway but undervalued by it, assigned to the same “minor theater” of the war to which Hemingway was, as an ambulance driver. Jake’s humiliation is clearly less intense than Hemingway’s, but it is also clearly derived from Hemingway’s—both end up in Italy, and both are aware of the Italian front’s reputation.60 And just as Hemingway wants to underplay Jake’s anti-Semitism in the interest of masking his resentment of ethnic Americans, he wants also to underplay Jake’s humiliation by the army, in order to mask his anger at the military.61) It is in this context that Jake’s irresistibly symbolic war wound—that leaves him without functioning genitals—not only occurs on a “joke front” but is a result of his being assigned to a joke front. Jake’s homophobic encounter, early in the novel, with the gay men who hang around Brett can be understood in the light of this anxiety about an emasculation due to military rejection or undervaluation. “Somehow they always made me angry,” Jake puts it. “I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure” (20). To be sure, Jake’s problem with the homosexuals who accompany Brett in her initial appearance in the novel is that, in terms of what he can offer her, he is a lot like them. They, too, give Brett male company and attention and protection, as she drinks heavily and dances, while sparing her the issue of physical intimacy. Brett herself observes, “when one’s with the crowd I’m with, one can drink in such safety” (22).62 The homosexuals’ similarity to Jake, and thus his implicit competition with them for Brett’s attention, explains why Jake describes them with pique and also obsessively repeats that Brett is with them. “They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them.” And Jake will repeat once more, a few lines later, “And with them was Brett” (21). But it must be observed in this context that homosexuals were, for many heterosexual men of the time of course, another species of masculine pariah: using the derogatory term for homosexual, Jake’s friend Bill tells Jake that he wouldn’t want to be mistaken for “a faggot” (116). And the period of the war and the immediate postwar era was the moment when the American military, in an unprecedented move, put its official stamp on the stigma of homosexuals: it was in 1916 that American military law first codified the punishment of homosexuality. Revising the Articles of War for the first time in more than a century, assault with the “intent to commit” sodomy was named as an offense The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 145

in 1916 (effective 1917), which could result in court-martial, and usually imprisonment and dishonorable discharge as well, and in 1920, Congress went further and made sodomy itself, even when consensual, a dischargeable offense according to military law. In 1919–1920, the navy, under the direction of then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, attempted to purge its ranks of homosexual sailors in the infamous “gay dragnet” at the naval base in Newport, Rhode Island (specific sailors were charged by the navy to trap gay sailors by engaging in homosexual acts with them).63 In addition, the military imprisoned large numbers of homosexual soldiers and sailors according to the new laws during the 1920s and ’30s.64 Very much to the point here, as Randy Shilts attests, “The idea of excluding people for having a homosexual orientation, as opposed to punishing only those who committed homosexual acts, was born during World War I, and advanced by practitioners in the fledgling field of psychiatry.” During the war, psychiatrists put forward the notion that homosexuals were unfit for military service; as one wrote in September 1918: while “recruiting the elements which make up our invincible army, we cannot ignore what is obvious and which will militate against the combative prowess of our forces in this war. . . . From a military viewpoint, the homosexualist is not only dangerous, but an ineffective fighter. . . . It is imperative that homosexualists be recognized by the military authorities.”65 Thus, given Jake and Hemingway’s problems with their treatment by the military, Jake’s homophobic encounter with Brett’s gay friends takes on an added resonance. Jake’s anxious resemblance to homosexuals during this immediate postwar period, as the military attempted to punish and purge itself of homosexuals, is another way of coding his undervaluation by the military and the concomitant emasculation. If Jake is worried about being seen as gay, it is not only because he will disappear for Brett into the mass of homosexuals whom she cannot take seriously as sexual partners, but also because, like his posting to a “joke front,” it is another marker of his military rejection. Readers and critics have also noticed Jake’s resemblance to Cohn: they both play tennis, both write, and both follow Brett around like steers do bulls and cater to her. In fact, as a candidate for steer, Jake seems to edge out Cohn: given his genital wound. But this similarity between the two may be a blind spot for an author absolutely committed to the distinction between the military trainee and the soldier who has seen combat: to Hemingway, perhaps, that difference alone dwarfs all similarities. In any case, the novel also goes out of its way to differentiate Jake and Cohn in other ways. That is why Jake goes out and has 146

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dinner with a prostitute in the initial pages of the book—indeed, a prostitute who may very well have venereal disease66 (the “new man” of the training camps was taught to avoid prostitutes especially); why Jake speaks hard truth about Brett to Cohn’s ignorant romanticism; why Cohn, once more the chivalrous military school boy, speaks in moral abstractions about Brett’s being “fine and straight” (38) whereas Jake observes, in a sensual register more typical of real soldiers, that “she was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht” (22); why Cohn is given Hemingway’s eyesight problem (he is “a little nearsighted” [89]) and Jake has perfect vision (a requirement for being an aviator, the most prestigious and romantic position in the war and the one desired by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway); why Cohn gets green at the bullfights and Jake is unfazed at the sight of blood; why Cohn is stereotypically Jewish and Jake, along with the rest of his gang, is Anglo. In an interview with George Plimpton years after the publication of the novel, Hemingway even “insisted that Jake was not emasculated in the manner of a steer.”67 Just after its publication, in the letter to Fitzgerald in which he promised to subtitle the novel “A Greater Gatsby,” he called his book “THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE).”68 The implication seems to be that Hemingway did not imagine Jake to be seen, like Cohn, as a steer, castrated. A steer has no testicles—to compare Robert Cohn to a steer is to imply, symbolically, that he has no guts, no courage. And this implication of gutlessness or cowardice is in keeping with the portrait of Cohn as the Jewish neurotic who gets green at the bullfights (developed by Jake’s in-group in the course of the novel). What Jake is missing, then, is not “balls,” not guts: the spiritual stuff that matters in war. What Jake is missing is the stuff that matters to a woman, especially a promiscuous woman like Brett. And what Jake has lost, symbolically, is the phallus as status. The final image of the novel is of “a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton.” This image is wedged between Brett’s wishful comment, “Oh, Jake . . . we could have had such a damned good time together” (if only Jake were not impotent), and Jake’s famous reply that closes the book, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (247). And it is yet another image of an officer maintaining a chivalric tradition in a military-style uniform—but, importantly, not a real soldier—and flashing a phallus. The effect of the policeman raising his baton is to slow the taxi “suddenly pressing Brett against” Jake (247); that is, to tease Jake with Brett’s proximity but inaccessibility. This policeman, a figuration of men like Cohn, looming up in front of Jake at the end helps underscore that Brett, the Anglo new woman, will likely continue in the same The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 147

way, unable to distinguish between the Cohns and Romeros of the world. This is Jake’s cross to bear: Anglo women in the novel, Brett included, are slow to discriminate “properly.” Throw the right clothes on a Jew, the novel suggests, give him some military school and Ivy League training in manners and ideals, give him some money, some athletic ability and lessons and “a good body” (45), and maybe “flatten” his ethnic nose in a sporting event (3), and the Anglo new woman will be attracted to him. At the end of the novel, Cohn has been banished, Brett is back with Jake, and Jake has succeeded at least temporarily in his backlash against the forces of meritocracy and ethnic egalitarianism that the U.S. military had suddenly imported into the heart of mainstream masculine culture during the war. But a final irony of the book seems to indicate that the military will win out, in putting its stamp on masculine culture in America, and Jake’s nostalgia for an aristocratic male-dominated world of love and war will ultimately be frustrated. And that irony is that Jake, in his involuntary abstinence—which, one way or another, comes out of his uninspiring assignment by the military to a “joke front”—is doomed to live out, forever, just the sort of chastity that the military pushed in the training camps and tried to demand of its forces overseas. An Italian colonel passionately proclaims, of Jake’s injury, “you . . . have given more than your life,” and Jake says, somewhat darkly, “that was funny” (31). But one can imagine a different, if equally melodramatic and blackly humorous response from an American colonel belonging to a military that produced the sort of posters we have examined: he might have borrowed the text of one of them and proclaimed, “A German Bullet Is Cleaner Than A Whore.” Jake’s particular wounding is a sort of literalizing of that extremist slogan—or the common propaganda motif that produced it—in a sick joke worthy of the macabre and bawdy humor generated in the trenches and combat of the war 69 (similar perhaps to the humor of Hemingway’s own play on his title, THE SUN ALSO RISES [LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE]): for here the German guns have attacked and destroyed just what an infected “whore” might have. For this particular army poster, in the hands of a high-ranking fanatic or an irreverent doughboy at the front lines, Jake is the poster boy.70 This notion of the literalizing of the slogan is, incidentally, suggested as well by the particular development, in Hemingway’s work in the mid-twenties, of the repeating trope of the liaison between nurse and injured soldier. In “A Very Short Story,” from In Our Time, published the year before Sun, the injured soldier, on the Italian front here as well, has a love affair with the nurse who 148

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“prepared him for the operating table.” Shortly after the nurse, named Luz, throws him over for an Italian officer, the American soldier, by this time returned to the states, “contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”71 That is, in the “symbolism” that Hemingway develops over the course of these two related fictions—whose similarity extends to the fact that both end with a significant cab ride—the genital wound goes from gonorrhea to dephallicization; the perpetrator becomes “a German bullet” instead of meaningless, nonmarital sex.72 Jake may take out a prostitute in the opening chapters of Sun, and, for reasons of moral freedom, he may have preferred after the war to stay in France, a country that provided prostitutes for its own troops and offered them to American troops, rather than return to moralistic America, which turned down the French offer and where prostitutes had been demonized during the war.73 Hemingway may thus attempt to distinguish sophisticated and ironic Anglo Jake from the sentimental moralism of the World War I American military and of ethnic military schoolboys such as Cohn. But such a strategy of moral distinction has a limited effectiveness: Jake can’t engage in sexual intercourse with the prostitute Georgette, and in fact has no sex with her at all. He doesn’t engage in sexual alternatives to intercourse with Brett either, nor does he suggest them. It is hardly believable that Hemingway was ignorant of sexual alternatives to intercourse—not after serving in the war and talking to soldiers and living in Paris after the war; as we have seen, French prostitutes introduced probably hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to the practice of fellatio during the war. And, more to the point here, given Jake’s sexual disability, less than a decade after the publication of Sun, Henry Miller, for example, also setting his scene in Paris (and not concerned about censorship, as Hemingway was), has a woman talk about being “suck[ed] off . . . by a Lesbian” (214).74 But Jake’s silence on the subject of sexual alternatives cannot simply be explained by Hemingway’s desire to avoid censorship. After all, Hemingway finds a way to describe Jake’s genital injury so that his book can be published. Jake’s active avoidance of the issue of sexual alternatives is in fact suggested by the last pages of the book, where arguably Brett attempts to raise the subject and he keeps deflecting her. Brett asks Jake, “What do you like to do?” He answers, “I like to do a lot of things,” then repeats a question to her about dessert. “You asked me that once,” she says. Then, “Brett put her hand on [Jake’s] arm. ‘Don’t get drunk, Jake . . . You don’t have to.’ ” She repeats, “Don’t . . . You’ll be all right. . . . Don’t get drunk . . . Jake, don’t get drunk.” He finally evades her by suggesting they take a ride (246). The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds” 149

Moreover, in his decent, nonsexualizing treatment of the Parisian prostitute Georgette, and, more importantly, in his treatment of Brett, he is essentially fulfilling the military’s ideal of male-female relationships as relationships of equal “partners.”75 He might admire and envy Romero’s commanding style with women, but he ends up closer to Cohn in this interpersonal domain. Jake’s wound has made him not only chaste, but also, perhaps because he would be embarrassed to make himself vulnerable to another woman, faithful to Brett even though she can’t be loyal to him. Though Jake has not learned the military’s new lesson of an egalitarian tolerance for ethnic Americans, he has been branded once and for all with its new chaste and egalitarian attitude toward women. The final irony of this novel may be at the expense of Hemingway’s narrator, who is usually the source, not the object, of irony: when it comes to his treatment of women, the mobilization wound inflicted on Jake by the military—symbolized by his loss of a phallus—has succeeded where its propaganda has failed.

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The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects The Feebleminded and the Postmobilization Erotic Triangle

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I

n a discussion of credentials and social opportunities, Sound obliquely touches on idiot Benjy’s lack of fitness for the military; Jason entertains the ludicrous possibility of Benjy serving in the armed forces. Jason cruelly jokes, “I never had university advantages [like Quentin] because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing how to swim. . . . [Y]ou might send me to the State University; maybe I’ll learn how to stop my clock with a nose spray and then you can send Ben to the Navy I says or to the cavalry anyway, they use geldings in the cavalry” (243; italics added). Like Gatsby and Sun, Faulkner’s novel also participates in the backlash against the meritocratic forces let loose by the Great War. The character of Benjy, whose mental age is 3 (19), is, to a significant degree, prompted by the unprecedented attention given to the “feeble-minded” by the U.S. Army during the Great War and by the nation afterward.1 The whole testing program that men like Gatsby benefited from grew out of the initial efforts of the military’s Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded to “weed . . . out those of low mentality.”2 The figure of the feebleminded crops up in Faulkner’s postmobilization novel because it is another surprising artifact of one of the new meritocratic methods, intelligence testing, that can just as easily demote or disqualify an Anglo as promote an ethnic American. Whereas Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s novels focus on ethnic Americans who have experienced nondiscriminatory opportunity or promotion (as well as subsequent backlash), Sound switches the focus to Anglos who don’t qualify or are losing the competition in the context of a rising meritocracy. Idiot Anglo Benjy is the mirror opposite of talented ethnic Gatsby. The use of intelligence tests got a tremendous boost in July 1918 when the commander-in-chief of the U.S. expeditionary force, General Pershing, registered his dissatisfaction that too many mentally incompetent men were being sent over to Europe using traditional methods of selection.3 In turn, the widespread testing made military leaders and, later, state officials aware that the percentage of “feeble-minded” in the general population was apparently higher than anyone had anticipated: “When the psychologists began to tabulate their results they found between one and two percent to be feeble-minded. Remember, these men had all passed the local examining boards as to physical fitness and those obviously feeble-minded had been weeded out,” as a member of the Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded put it. In addition, approximately another 4.5% were determined to be “Class E. . . . Of these perhaps onehalf were either foreigners or illiterates but not necessarily feeble-minded. . . . But at least half (about 2¼% of the ten thousand) are high grade mental 152

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defectives—morons—with a mental age of eight to twelve years. They are quite like the high grade mentally defective men found in every institution for the feeble-minded.” Failure to weed out “feeble-minded” recruits was deemed an issue of national security by officials of the Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded: it meant more than “a drag on the normal men” in the camp. “The experience in other countries, notably in Canada, shows the folly, danger and expense of sending these fellows across.”4 Faulkner himself had had firsthand experience in confronting and failing to meet American military standards. In the spring of 1918, he tried to get a commission in the air corps, but he was too small: his height and weight put him below the standard for pilots, and, though he tried to gain weight and even to lengthen himself, he was rejected.5 He was too young (by a matter of months) to be drafted,6 and he eventually managed to join the Canadian Royal Air Force, which was desperate for recruits 7—it was precisely the Canadian military’s careless deployment of the “feeble-minded” that the U.S. Army wanted to avoid. Faulkner’s warmth for the nonbureaucratized, standardless Canadians, who accepted him, is registered in the novel in Quentin’s friendship at Harvard with the Canadian Shreve. (Incidentally, to get into the Canadian military, Faulkner used just the sort of fakery that the U.S. Army wanted to catch and discourage: not unlike Gatsby after the war, Faulkner during the war posed as an Englishman, fabricating a family history and an accent; he even changed the spelling of his family name to the one we are familiar with—adding a “u” to Falkner.8) Canada was the country where the physically unfit—such as Faulkner—and the mentally unfit—men not so different from Benjy—were slipping through. Interesting in this context is the fact that Faulkner makes Benjy (and not Quentin) his own age, 30 (276) in April 1928, born in 1897.9 Benjy’s association with those excluded from military service is also suggested by a close look at Faulkner’s earliest novel, Soldiers’ Pay. In that novel, Cadet Julian Lowe, who spends the entire 50-page first chapter lamenting the fact that he has missed a chance for military service in the war, is, in an obvious way, a precursor of Benjy. Soldiers’ Pay, as Faulkner’s first novel, is reasonably considered “of enormous interest in establishing Faulkner’s fictional origins,” and critics tend, also sensibly, to connect Benjy to the dying returning soldier Donald Mahon, the officer with “the limp and head wound, even the silence, all suggesting something extraordinary or sacred,” a “ ‘dying god’ figure.”10 But Lowe, who looks at Mahon, with his “wings,” “boots,” “ribbon” (26), and “his scar” (41), “jealously” (21) and with “adolescent envy” (28), in one unmistakable way also prefigures Benjy. Benjy is not the first Faulkner The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 153

character that is described, rather distinctively, one might imagine, as “slobbering and moaning” (19, Sound); Cadet Lowe is. Lowe is so upset about the fact that “he had forty-seven hours flying time and would have got wings in two weeks” and so never got his “chance” (46, 48), that when he gets drunk, his “passionate disappointment” overcomes him and he ends up “Slobbering and moaning” (42). Benjy, with his mental age of 3, might never have passed examination at the local board, which disqualified Faulkner on size; even if he managed to slip through and make it to camp, the new intelligence testing in the army was aimed to eliminate men like Benjy immediately. (It is impossible to know how informed Faulkner was about the new testing program, but Jason’s seemingly offhand reference to the navy, rather than another branch of the service, is either purposefully or accidentally informed: if Benjy wanted to slip through, he would have had a slightly better chance with the navy than the army because “the Navy has not utilized the methods of mental testing employed by the Army”—though it was still involved in “rating, classifying and assigning men according to their mental capacity.”11) Again, the figures of Gatsby, promoted to captain before leaving camp, and that of the “idiot” (422) Benjy, unfit for any kind of military service, are precisely polar opposites on the intelligence or mental aptitude continuum being developed in the Great War American military. The wartime Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded also concerned itself with what would happen to the “feeble-minded” once they were weeded out and discharged: We should arrange to have all of the records of these men . . . turned over to the United States Public Health Service. . . . We want copies of the records to be sent to the State Board of Charities, the State Board of Health or some other official body in every State so that the condition of these men may be on record in their own commonwealths. . . . Then of course comes our bigger job—to persuade the various legislatures to provide institutions for their proper segregation, because everyone who knows anything about the subject agrees that this 1.1% should never be at large. We might well go a step farther—although the idea may at this time seem Utopian. These men have been brought under the control of the Government. Instead of returning them to their homes the United States might send 154

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them to their own State institutions or to a National institution and thus relieve normal society of a group of men who are obviously unfit for undirected life in the community. We have usually considered the care of the feeble-minded as a State problem—it might as easily be considered a national one, for it has to do with citizenship in its large sense.12 The concern about the feebleminded—brought to national prominence by the war—climaxed in 1927, when the Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilization for eugenic reasons in Buck v. Bell, a case concerning the sterilization of an “imbecile.”13 When Jason has Benjy “gelded” in 1913, he is, historically speaking, following the lead of states such as Indiana (the first to pass a compulsory sterilization law for the feebleminded, in 190714), and anticipating the 1927 Supreme Court ruling—which, for Faulkner, who published the book in 1929, has just occurred. Likewise, when Jason, after many threats to do so, finally commits Benjy to the State Asylum in Jackson in the appendix (423–424), he is doing just what the Great War military psychologists would have recommended. And, again, Jason has already made the observation that Benjy is unfit for military service. Of course, this growing bureaucracy of standards and testing was just what had frustrated Faulkner in his bid to fly for the U.S. military in World War I (and he subsequently romanticized and greatly embellished his very minor service in Canada); it is not surprising then that the consistently repulsive Jason is associated here with the U.S. military’s standards, which would reject Benjy, and also that Jason acts in accordance with the wishes of an ascendant bureaucratic and meritocratic movement that Faulkner has suffered from and apparently doesn’t like.15 As in the novels by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the appearance of an outsider connected with the military who finds a willing “charity girl” in the principal female is the formula that disrupts the status quo and launches the conflict in the novel. And, as in Hemingway’s novel, this liaison brings suffering to the Anglo narrator figure who has been implicitly rejected or undervalued by the army, there Jake, here Benjy. With Faulkner’s novel, the Great War era historical relevance of Caddy’s encounter with Dalton Ames has often been missed. Critics have frequently ignored the fact that Ames, Caddy’s lover and the father of her out-of-wedlock daughter Quentin, is a returning soldier who wears “army issue khaki” (113), had “crossed all the oceans all around the world” (187), “had been in the army had killed men” (184), and is a crack shot with a pistol (199). The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 155

(Charity girls were also sometimes called “khaki-mad girls,”16 a reference of course to the “army issue khaki” that Ames sports.) It may be 1909–1910 in the novel when Ames and Caddy have the relationship that brings Benjy misery because it removes his protector and true love Caddy from the Compson house (first temporarily, when she sneaks out to make love and Benjy cries [195], then permanently, when she has an illegitimate daughter and is banished from the house, and Benjy becomes subject to the petty cruelty of Luster and eventually to the commitment to the mental asylum by Jason, exactly what Caddy fears). But as James G. Watson has successfully argued, it is simultaneously 1917–1918 in Faulkner’s mind. Ames is “drawn from . . . the experience of soldiers of the Great War . . . who inspired the young Faulkner’s envy and despair in 1918”—because he himself never got to the war and in fact would later take great pains to pretend he had. (Again, he contrived an officer’s uniform and a limp, as well as a fiction about being a pilot who was shot down in combat.) “Looking back from the moment of composition in 1928–1929 to the fictional moment of 1910, Faulkner borrowed from and, where necessary to the fiction, recast his intense experience at Yale [on his way to Canada] and in the R.A.F. when the Great War had been a constant point of reference and gauge of his morale.”17 In making this argument about Faulkner’s collapsing of time in the novel, his overlapping of 1910 and 1918, it might also be added that Quentin, another Compson brother alter ego for Faulkner (most obviously, Quentin spends time at Harvard while Faulkner spent time at Yale), is 20 in 1910, and Faulkner is 20 in 1917 and 1918. The liaison of Ames and Caddy is somewhat different in Faulkner’s novel from those of Gatsby-Daisy and Cohn-Brett because Ames, although a “stranger” to the town (217), is not explicitly ethnic (though his skin is “so brown,” “almost bronze,” [113] and his name is apparently French). And unlike Cohn, who doesn’t serve in the war, and Gatsby, who hasn’t yet served when he first sleeps with Daisy, Ames is a returning veteran who has already seen combat when he meets Caddy. Ames is comparable to the killer side of Gatsby or to Romero, and he does not represent the chivalrous “new man” of the military training camps and military school, as Gatsby and Cohn do. Ames says of women, with an attitude antithetical to the Great War military propaganda, but not exactly unusual for a World War I combat soldier,18 “theyre all bitches” (199). In Faulkner’s novel, in another transposition from the works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the chivalric foil to the real fighter is an Anglo, Caddy’s brother Quentin, who seems to derive his chivalry from his father and his military officer forebears: “Father and I protect women from . . . themselves our women,” 156

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he thinks (119). When his roommate at Harvard, Shreve, at one point says to Quentin, “God, I’m glad I’m not a gentleman,” Quentin says to himself, “do you think so because one our forefathers was a governor and three were generals and Mother’s weren’t” (125). But unlike his ancestors, presumably, and, definitely unlike most World War I soldiers and contemporary Southern men in general, he is also like the “new man” of the training camps, chaste: in fact, he is “a virgin” (143): “In the south [where] you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it” (96). (Why should Faulkner identify Quentin, an alter ego, with the U.S. military camps he never made it to? Maybe because he did make it only as far as the equivalent military training camps in Canada—and, like Fitzgerald, and despite Faulkner’s later self-mythification about his wartime experience, never to the front. Perhaps we should see Faulkner here as able to be more honest about himself in his fictional alter egos than he felt comfortable being in talking about himself, or representing himself to family, friends, and acquaintances. It perhaps makes sense that Faulkner has two alter egos in the novel, Benjy and Quentin: Benjy represents his absolutely traumatic experience of rejection by the U.S. military; Quentin represents his partially redemptive training camp experience in Canada, which does not get him to war but allows him to imagine for himself a romantic experience as a combat-ready pilot in the training corps—and allows him meanwhile, again with an ability to honestly assess himself under the cover of fiction, to imagine Quentin as something of a romantic, wannabe character, who shares characteristics with Cadet Lowe in Soldiers’ Pay, an explicitly wannabe soldier.19) And like the other novels at issue here, Sound figures prominently a conflict or confrontation between the chivalrous “new man” character and the killer fighter, here between Quentin and Ames. As in Sun, the true fighter emerges victorious and the “new man” figure, who has misguidedly provoked the climactic showdown, is left humiliated. (No doubt in this embarrassing encounter, as at least one critic has observed, we see a representation of the sense of inadequacy Faulkner could feel in front of a real soldier, due to his own rejection by the U.S. military and especially his failure to get combat experience.20) In Faulkner’s novel, just as in Hemingway’s, the chivalric character desires to “save” a woman from a man she truly desires, and Quentin comes off even worse than Cohn. He faints in the daunting presence of the soldier Ames, “passed out like a girl” (201), without being hit. And later, much like Cohn, who decks Jake and Mike because he’s angry about Romero, but without Cohn’s prowess at boxing, Quentin attempts to punch out a man he merely associates in his mind with The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 157

Ames, and the man, a sexist blowhard named Gerald who has been “learn[ing] to box” (206) “boxed the hell out of ” Quentin (204). Because Quentin does “double duty” in Faulkner’s novel—when compared to Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s novels—as both the emasculated Anglo (a duty he shares with Benjy) and the chivalric “new man” (a duty Benjy doesn’t share), his relationship with Dalton Ames is especially loaded. Cohn and Romero fight over Brett, but both of them have had sex with Brett—whereas only Ames has had sex with Caddy. The Quentin-Ames showdown is analogous to the CohnRomero face-off, but the Quentin-Caddy-Ames love triangle is likewise comparable to the Jake-Brett-Cohn (or Jake-Brett-Romero) and Nick-Daisy-Gatsby erotic triangles. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has made us aware of the “homosocial desire” intrinsic to such triangles,21 and, in fact, the erotic triangles at the center of these racist promiscuity novels are of course neat and concise representations of the homosocial and heterosexual crises—and the attendant mess of feelings—that these Anglo authors find themselves experiencing in the meritocratic moment of World War I. On the one hand, the Anglo characters Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes have been sexually demoted or emasculated to serve as mere panders or “pimps” for the Anglo women and the women’s martial, awe-inspiring, “ethnic” lovers (Gatsby and Romero). On the other hand, although Anglos Quentin and Jake try to stand between their Anglo women and the women’s outsider, military lovers, Ames and Cohn, they are more or less ineffective at the job. The supplanted Anglo man is at best left with a secondary Anglo female (Daisy instructs Jordan, “you kiss Nick” [123]) and more often with no sexual partner at all (Jake and Quentin), but in any case having to endure vague accusations—and even experiences—of homosexuality. In Gatsby, Mr. McKee, who can’t seem to “keep [his] hands off the lever” in the elevator with Nick, seems to proposition him, and drunken Nick ends up “beside [McKee’s] bed” as McKee sits “up between the sheets, clad in his underwear” (42). Jake’s homophobic internal rant in Sun seems to issue out of his concern about being easily mistaken for one of the many homosexuals who likewise hang around Brett, provide her protection from male predators while she drinks heavily, but don’t sleep with her. And, in Sound, Quentin’s college roommate Shreve is called Quentin’s “husband” by a senior from South Carolina because Quentin is celibate, or, as Shreve puts it, Quentin’s “got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts” (96). Meanwhile, the primary homosocial relationship between the demoted Anglo man and the ascendant outsider is fraught and confused, the Anglo 158

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feeling a mix of love and hate, envy and contempt, for his successful rival in love and war. This explains Nick’s unresolved feelings for Gatsby, “who represented everything for which [he has] an unaffected scorn,” but “then there was something gorgeous about him” (6). This also explains Jake’s awe for Romero’s technique, bravery, and even looks, as well as his appreciation of Cohn’s athletic abilities and physical conditioning and his explicit jealousy of Cohn’s sexual experience with Brett, on the one hand, and his growing hatred of Cohn on the other. And finally, and perhaps most extremely, this explains how Quentin’s attempt to confront Ames with a threat of murder (if he doesn’t leave Caddy alone) turns into a sexualized, emasculating swoon—Quentin “passed out like a girl.” In keeping with Quentin’s gender transformation in the presence of Ames, Ames himself has already looked at Quentin with a certain mediated sexual pleasure; he has seen not a threat but a version of Caddy, due to a family likeness: “all of a sudden I knew he wasn’t thinking of me at all as a potential source of harm, but was thinking of her when he looked at me was looking at me through her like through a piece of coloured glass” (217). Quentin’s barely contained fascination for Ames, the most sexual of any of the feelings attributed to the Anglo man for the outsider soldier, are revealed in a tableau that neatly compresses the tensions in the erotic triangle: Quentin repeats the name “Dalton Ames” according to Caddy’s instructions while he holds Caddy by the throat, not so much in a threat of violence (she puts his hand there) as in the vicarious titillation of feeling the blood course through her jugular vein, as her heart accelerates in response to the sound of her lover’s name (202–203). The theme of Anglo competition with ethnic Americans is by no means absent in Faulkner’s novel—though it again plays out differently here. In Sound, the promiscuous woman’s “special nonsexual partners” who have been implicitly rejected by the military or explicitly bested by an American military figure and whom she truly cares for are two of her brothers, Benjy and Quentin (compare Jake); her misguided romantic lover is once again her oldest brother, Quentin (compare Cohn or Gatsby), and the chauvinist man who attempts to dominate her is a third brother, Jason (compare Lord Ashley or Tom Buchanan), so it obviously isn’t possible for any of these male figures to be ethnically different from her, but the novel nonetheless pursues seemingly divergent but in fact related subplots about ethnic Americans. Part of the backdrop for this unusual Faulkner novel that is not set entirely in the South (where there was relatively little immigrant presence in 1929) is, as Quentin puts it, “Land of the kike home of the wop” (155). More than this, Sound—driven by The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 159

the dynamics of the postmobilization, racist promiscuity novel—strangely enough identifies Quentin with Italians and Jason with Jews as it puts them both in competition with ethnic Americans. This claim of identification seems at first outrageous, given that Jason hates Jews. Jason has “nothing against Jews as an individual”; he comments, “I’ve known some Jews that were fine citizens”; Jason hates “the race” with an oldfashioned anti-Semitism; for him, Jews overall or most Jews are greedy and conniving. In particular, what Jason hates about the “damn jews” (292) or “damn eastern jews” is that they “trim the sucker gamblers” (237–238), like him, who play the market; for Jason, they essentially swindle other people out of their money. But Jason himself is greedy: the book insists on this greed from his childhood, with an iconic force, because he is again and again pictured with his hands in his pockets; “ ‘Jason going to be a rich man.’ Versh said [of the boy]. ‘He holding his money all the time’ ” (43). Jason is also a swindler: he is involved in robbing his niece Quentin of the money her mother tries to give her; in the one particular transaction we witness, he “trims” Quentin out the majority of the check Caddy has written her (which is to say, even more than the “eastern jews” trim from “the sucker[s]”). The 1929 reader of Sound may not like Jason, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that he or she would repudiate Jason’s anti-Semitism. After all, a reader who has no trouble with anti-Semitism may in fact dislike Jason for the very fact that he hypocritically resembles the “unscrupulous Jews” he “rightly” dislikes. Meanwhile, Quentin is identified with Italian immigrants. Quentin tries to help a little Italian “kid”—who is “just a girl” (171) and for some reason can’t or won’t talk—find her way home, after it becomes clear that she is going to follow him. Quentin is kind to her and stands up for her when she is accused of stealing. But when they finally find her brother Julio, the boy attacks him; “his hands were jabbing at my face, and he was saying something and trying to bite me.” Julio says, “I killa heem” and adds to Quentin, “You steala my seester” (173). Of course, as brother avenger and protector of girls who goes attacking the wrong person and threatening death to men whom he misconstrues as “stealing his sister,” Julio is a comic, ethnic, accented version of Quentin. And Quentin and Julio are the only two characters in the book who behave in this over-the-top, romantic, sister-protecting manner—an old-fashioned, old-world chivalry that finally perhaps seems ludicrous for a moment to Quentin himself when he views it at a distance in his Italian-immigrant counterpart. In any case, Quentin at least gets the irony of Julio’s attacking him and can’t stop laughing (174). The identification of Quentin with Italian immigrants—who may have 160

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“gotta da pape” and be “American” (178), as Julio claims, but are still “durn furriners” (178) to the nativists in and around Boston and “Wops” to Quentin (121, 155)—is further underlined by Quentin’s having consistently called the little Italian girl “sister” (155, 158, 171). Why does Faulkner have these two major male characters interact with and resemble ethnic others? First, patriarchal Jason and emasculated Quentin are put in competition with ethnic others, much the way patriarchal Tom Buchanan and emasculated Jake Barnes are, only here not for women: Jason for money and Quentin for the leading role of protector of women (specifically, of brother-avenger). This competition—for money, more obviously—is not unlike the social competition in the other novels over women, and Jason cares more about losing money, especially to Jews, than about losing a woman (in fact, when his niece Quentin takes off with a social outsider, he loses both, but misses only the money). Second, Jason, resembling the Jews he competes with economically, loses out to, and dislikes, is a lot like Jake resembling Jewish Cohn, whom he competes with and comes to dislike, or, for that matter, Tom Buchanan resembling ethnic Gatsby, whom he competes with and has contempt for (both are fabulously rich and unscrupulous and have been to the best universities). That is to say, though it varies the formula of the ethnicother subplot (eliminating the ethnic-Anglo romance), Faulkner’s book picks up on the same themes of Anglo competition with and resemblance to ethnic Americans on the rise. And Sound represents such competition—again like the novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but much more obviously—against the backdrop of a secure Anglo superiority over blacks. Jason is clearly aggravated by and exasperated with “eastern jews” on Wall Street, and even Quentin’s joke, in which he refers to America as “Land of the kike home of the wop” (155), has a slight edge. But Jason and Quentin use the word nigger casually, reflexively, and without affect. Moreover, Jason isn’t bothered by the notion of “niggers getting ahead” (288) because it’s an absurd impossibility to him. Quentin, similarly, finds the African American man at Harvard he calls Deacon, who is trying to get ahead (“I’ve got string out . . . Wait till next year. Then see where I’m marching”), somewhat ridiculous (with his “pompous . . . municipal and military dream”) and hardly threatening; he lightly suggests that Deacon ought to be made “a general.” Quentin can indeed be complacent because Faulkner has seen exactly what happened in the course of World War I to the “military dream” of African Americans in general in this era (whether it is 1909–1910 or 1917–1918 in Faulkner’s mind), who hoped the army would “draw no petty social lines” (to use Deacon’s words). Not unlike The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 161

World War I military leaders who, starting in the spring of 1918, began to express doubt about the ability of the “backwoods negro” to be made into a soldier,22 Quentin comfortably and condescendingly imagines he can see, “behind all [Deacon’s] whitefolks’ claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner,” the Compson black servant “Roskus” (121–123). In this context of Anglo-ethnic competition, Benjy’s idiocy is continuous with Jason’s economic losses to the “eastern jews” who have found a niche in the stock market: the presence of an idiot Anglo character furthers the same theme of Anglo demotion or disqualification in the context of a rising meritocracy. And though it isn’t immediately obvious why, I would argue that the presence of an “idiot” character in Sound is not only due to Faulkner’s backlash against the rising bureaucratized meritocratic order that during the war served ethnic Americans and immigrants and got in his way (on account of his size), it is tied up with concerns about ethnicity in another way as well. The theme of mental deficiency here—obviously initiated with Benjy but echoed by Quentin’s Italian girl who seems at first to be mute or retarded—is itself relevant in the context of ethnic scapegoating. The point here would be that the concern over the unexpectedly large numbers of “feeble-minded” discovered during the war by the intelligence testing program fed the backlash against immigrants afterward. After the war, worries about the “feeble-minded” dovetailed and interacted with concerns about immigration and “racial” purity in different ways, not all of them logical. The problematizing of the “feeble-minded,” just like the newly intensified problematizing of the immigrant, hinged on the issue of potential for “citizenship” (as the above letter from the wartime officer puts it with regard to the mentally unfit). The “feeble-minded” could definitely not be responsible citizens, and nativists argued in a similar manner that many aliens could not be assimilated to the American citizenry. But, more than this, because many nativists believed that “racial” or ethnic others were generally—hereditarily—of lower intelligence than Anglo Americans and key army psychologists after the war interpreted the testing date to “prove” this belief, the concern over the “feebleminded” was sometimes conflated with a concern over immigrants. Some nativists could keep the two issues separate, although they might begin with racist assumptions about hereditary intelligence; thus even the white supremacist Frank Hankins could argue that a “sound immigration policy” would admit “all of those of whatever race who can prove themselves free from the hereditary taint and pass intelligence tests which show them to be above the 162

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average of the present population.”23 Other nativists simply conflated “race” and mental limitations; thus immigration restrictionists could argue in Congress that “The percentage of illiterates here is too large and the percentage of unassimilable aliens is also excessive.”24 Of course, preventing illiteracy by cutting off immigration is confused or prejudicial: illiteracy could in most cases be solved by training in reading or English or both. During the war, officials of the Committee for Provision of the Feeble-Minded—who, with the serious and pressing task of the war at hand, wanted to employ useful men of foreign origin and exclude the mentally unfit—had been careful to distinguish among different groups of “Class E” recruits: “Of these perhaps one-half were either foreigners or illiterates but not necessarily feeble-minded. Many of them only need adjustment to their new environment or knowledge of the English language.”25 Such distinctions were often purposely—or hysterically—elided after the war. The specter of uncontrolled immigration was sometimes presented as a specter of increased “feeble-mindedness.” And, ironically enough, the very intelligence tests that, during the war, had provided meritocratic opportunities to some (usually educated or bilingual) men of lower classes and “suspect” ethnic groups—men like Gatsby—were used after the war by immigration restrictionists who wanted to keep out foreigners of certain ethnic backgrounds, as well as by undergraduate and medical school administrators who wanted to exclude Jews and other ethnic Americans. Some proponents of the Immigration Act of 1924 were able to cite dubious postwar studies of the army’s extensive intelligence testing data in order to support their arguments for restriction of immigration from southern and eastern Europe—thus began the reactionary exploitation of the army test results that has given the intelligence testing in the period its reputation for bias. Carl Brigham’s A Study of American Intelligence—which helped get that immigration restriction legislation of 1924 passed—asserted that the higher test scores, on average, of American whites and immigrants from northern Europe was due to their superior “Nordic” racial heritage, in comparison with the heritages of “Slavs,” “Alpines,” and “Mediterraneans,” who scored lower as groups.26 Brigham, and others pointing to his study and the army’s data, argued for the immigration restriction of southern and eastern Europeans, before these supposedly less intelligent races overwhelmed the American population, flooded the nation with feebleminded individuals, and significantly lowered the “national intelligence.”27 Brigham’s “hereditarian” and nativist interpretation of the testing data was, as Robert M. Thorndike and David F. Lohman put it, “a study in finding what The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 163

you are looking for.”28 Nonetheless, Anglos in favor of ethnic quotas thought they had discovered not only an argument for immigration restriction but another tool for keeping down the number of Jews and other “undesirables” at institutions of higher education. Aware that Americans of “older stock” had performed better overall than more recent immigrants on the army Alpha tests, administrators from some elite colleges and a number of medical schools seized on intelligence testing as yet another method, more scientific and thus more justifiable than interviewing, for limiting Jewish and other ethnic admissions.29 Sound seems to engage in the kind of conflation of the immigrant and the feebleminded that followed the war and involved a nativist reading of the army Alpha test results—or at least Quentin does—when Quentin encounters the seemingly mute or “dumb” Italian girl around Boston. The little girl doesn’t seem to be able to speak; she apparently can’t understand English (“no spika” [163], another Italian immigrant explains), and she doesn’t respond to a woman who speaks to her in Italian (163–164). It could be argued that Quentin also starts calling her “sister” because she’s strangely familiar to him, a lot like his “idiot” brother Benjy, whom he has significant experience taking care of. Presumably because of Quentin’s experience with Benjy, “Children and dogs are always taking up with him like that” (179); he knows how to respond to the little girl and win her confidence. This particular conflation of the ethnic American and the feebleminded may also explain the curious passage in Sun in which Hemingway has a minor character, a drunk named Harvey Stone, refer to Ivy League graduate Robert Cohn as a “moron” and then call him a “moron” to his face and tell him he’s “not intelligent” (43–44). The term moron had been given a technical meaning in 1910, when Dr. Henry H. Goddard presented the classification of three levels of feeblemindedness: idiot, imbecile, and moron.30 The U.S. Army picked up on the term moron, in particular, as we have seen: moron was used to mean someone with a mental age of 8 to 12 years. The term, along with its technical meaning, was also popularized by the debate over the feebleminded after the war. This conflation of the ethnic or immigrant issue and that of feeblemindedness may even have a subtle and now obscure echo in Gatsby. There, Tom calls the author of a book titled The Rise of the Colored Empires “Goddard” (17), whereas, as Walter Michaels points out, “The book Tom is speaking of was actually called the Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, and its real author was Lothrop Stoddard.”31 But Goddard was another familiar name in the 1920s associated with supposedly “scientific stuff ” (17): only Goddard was associated with the “science” concerning the feebleminded, not primarily that 164

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concerning “race,” and “white” or “Nordic” supremacy (17–18).32 It seems safe to say that the confusion is Tom’s and not Fitzgerald’s because Fitzgerald seems to go out of his way to let the reader know that he is familiar with the name “Stoddard” as well as “Goddard”: Fitzgerald actually refers later in the novel to “Volume One of the ‘Stoddard Lectures’ ” (another Stoddard, but spelled the same way as Lothrop Stoddard33); it’s the one “absolutely real” book on Gatsby’s bookshelves that is named (50). And, indeed, it would make sense that a racist like Tom might confuse the man Stoddard with the man Goddard, insofar as racists like Tom tended to believe that ethnic Americans were mentally inferior to Anglos and even mentally defective. By the late twenties and early thirties, the nativist interpretation of the army testing data that allowed the identification of feeblemindedness with ethnic Americans was unraveling some. Though the major damage of Brigham’s manipulation of the test data was arguably done, in that the “permanent” immigrant bill of 1924 had become law, nearly cutting off immigration from southern and eastern Europe, his findings were being challenged intellectually and disproved practically. Even at the time of the publication of Brigham’s book, several professional reviewers in psychological journals faulted Brigham’s “neglect or dismissal of environmental explanations, and several statistical peculiarities in test-score distributions which tended to undermine his nativist interpretations.” And by 1930, Brigham himself admitted that his study had seriously overstated the role of hereditary or “racial” factors in intelligence test scores and downplayed environmental or cultural issues.34 In practice, too, standardized tests developed from the intelligence tests were disappointing guardians of Anglo privilege who were trying to use them to exclude ethnic Americans from universities. By the 1930s, it was evident that Jews were doing quite well on medical aptitude tests. In response to this unexpected reality, “increasing numbers of [medical school] deans” had a change of heart about such aptitude tests and became “very hostile to using the test for choosing medical students. Their reasons are evident from a close reading of the [Association of American Medical Colleges] reports—the Medical Aptitude Test was not working like the army Alpha tests or other IQ tests had” worked in the aggregate, “in sorting out the ‘right’ sort of men for medical training.” And indeed, some medical schools, George Washington University, for example, dropped the test in this decade.35 Thus, the attempt to use the intelligence or aptitude tests themselves to exclude ethnic Americans—a different enterprise from interpreting, or misinterpreting, overall test results to argue for their exclusion—was not, in the 1930s, very successful. (The tests tended to The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects 165

select Jews. These aptitude tests, like the military intelligence tests used during the war out of which they grew, may have been culturally biased, but, as we have seen, they were biased toward the educated. Just as the wartime intelligence tests had not excluded educated ethnic Americans from officer training, the scholastic aptitude tests were not in the thirties effective instruments for achieving Jewish quotas. To put it another way, the medical deans who hoped they could use the tests to exclude Jews made the same analytic mistake that historians following the common wisdom about the bias of the intelligence tests continue to make, namely failing to distinguish between the overall results for nationalities and the results for the educated of each nationality.) Meanwhile—and in a somewhat analogous manner—the apparent confusion in Sound of the immigrant and the idiot or moron turns out to be only a temporary impression. In the end, it is revealed that the little Italian girl is definitely not mute and probably not feebleminded, rather most likely just scared. She does speak and even has some English: “ ‘There’s Julio,’ the girl said” (172), upon seeing her brother. The joke seems to be on Quentin, perhaps the reader, and maybe even Faulkner himself; accidentally or purposefully, Faulkner’s novel plays with this invidious conflation but, for all the novel’s casual and bitter ethnic prejudice, seems to reject it. Perhaps this revelation about the Italian girl (in the seeming interest of demystifying an ethnic stereotype) is in keeping with Faulkner’s apparent ability to mock, in the safety of fiction at least, his own propensity for extreme romanticism and chivalry (in the portrait of Quentin), and even his tendency to pity himself for missing his chance in the war (in the portrait of Cadet Lowe from Soldiers’ Pay). Faulkner evinces a greater honesty about himself than that of Fitzgerald and Hemingway—in the mid-twenties anyway—about, say, his own motives as a young man and specifically his feelings about his mobilization experience. (Fitzgerald seems able to express a slightly greater self-consciousness or self-reflection on these themes as time passes, for example in his 1936 “The Crack-Up”; even Hemingway seems somewhat more able to reflect on his mobilization experience in 1929, with A Farewell to Arms. But they never seem to poke fun at themselves, even under the cover of fiction, the way Faulkner does.) Perhaps indeed Faulkner has more anxiety about his ethnic and specifically anti-Semitic prejudice than either Fitzgerald or Hemingway; in any case, he is the only one of the three to add a sort of corrective appendix to his postmobilization racist, promiscuity novel in later years—an appendix that in a certain way revises the anti-Semitism of his 1929 text.

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ut why the themes of incest and impotence in these 1920s postmobilization novels? Why is Brett in love with impotent Jake? Why does Quentin imagine incest with his sister Caddy? Why even is the theme of incest touched on in Gatsby, in regard to Nick and Daisy? Why this theme of a love that cannot be consummated—an unrealizable love that in Faulkner and Hemingway’s novels becomes tragic? Like Quentin and Caddy, Nick and Daisy are related; they are cousins. This immediately puts a prohibition on their sexual involvement and creates a certain kind of sexual tension that will be toyed with. When Nick mysteriously invites Daisy over on Gatsby’s behalf, Daisy flirts. “ ‘Are you in love with me?’ she said low in my ear. ‘Or why did I have to come alone?’ ” (90). This sexual tension is generally refracted or mediated, though, through Daisy’s protégé, Jordan—who is in a position to become sexually involved with Nick because, like Daisy, she is promiscuous, but unlike her, she is unmarried and not related to him. On the one hand, then, Daisy sets them up and pushes them together. On Nick and Jordan’s first meeting, Daisy expresses to both of them her intention to “fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—” (23). Her ministrations are in fact effective. At another point, after kissing Gatsby, she instructs Jordan, “You kiss Nick too” (123). On the other hand, Nick’s sexual attraction to Jordan is oddly mediated by the thought of Daisy: when he first kisses Jordan, he thinks, “Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms.” (85). If the love-that-cannot-be is a minor theme in Gatsby, impossibleromance plots are at the heart of Sun and Sound. Apparently deprived of the ability to consummate their love—and here it is important that they never explore sexual alternatives to intercourse—Jake and Brett get to share in a relationship that is marked by a tragedy that is not maudlin; they enjoy the special status of an existentially doomed couple. (Though the nature of Jake and Brett’s doomed love is of course very particular, the theme of a love doomed by the mobilization and the war was itself, of course, an artifact of the war years—with men going off to camp or war perhaps never to return to their sweethearts. Katherine Anne Porter represents such a couple in Pale Horse, Pale Rider: “they looked into the hell they shared, no matter what kind of hell, it was theirs, they were together” [227].) Jake and Brett suffer for a

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love that they can neither have nor give up. And so they can have exchanges like this: “And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.” “Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again. “I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.” “No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.” “It’s good to see each other.” “No. I don’t think it is.” “Don’t you want to?” “I have to.” (27) We usually imagine that taboos about sexual explicitness hamper a writer, but here, the taboo about describing or alluding to oral sex and other alternative sexual practices serves Hemingway; written today, this novel would have to explain why the couple declines other forms of sexual release, and their inability to make love would not simply be a matter of tragic fate. Thus, Jake’s impotence in Sun brings them close—and makes their relationship monumental—by making them partners in a tragic situation. Their heavy drinking together; Brett’s promiscuity; their emotional dependence on one another; their shared, “hard-boiled” (34) attitude; their rejection of sentimentality; their restlessness: these are all transformed from potential psychological problems, with potential solutions, to aspects of their tragedy that unite them and strengthen their relationship, and give it the mystique of hopelessness. If Brett has difficulty maintaining a relationship with a man, Jake—with his impotence—is her solution. Put another way, Jake’s impotence weirdly reintroduces a purity or complete chastity—with all the specialness and the integrity that such chastity implies—into the modern love story, but now with existential, and not sentimental, dimensions (as in, say, the seduction plot). Their inability to consummate is something like a couple always looking forward to the wedding night, a shared virginity that can never be lost. In short, in this postmobilization, racist promiscuity novel, male impotence is a strategy of specialness that replaces the seduction-plot strategy of female virginity and its loss: to be hopelessly in love with the impotent male (in the promiscuity novel) replaces being dedicated to the man you lose your virginity to (in the romance or seduction novel).

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The impotent man and the promiscuous woman: this love relationship might seem at first glance to be a unique formula, ingeniously masochistic and completely eccentric and particular to Hemingway’s novel. But the relationship between the incest-minded (and in fact celibate) brother and the promiscuous woman, in Sound, actually functions in much the same way. The incest taboo functions socially like the physical fact of impotence—that is, if the brother imagines sex with his sister, as Quentin does with Caddy, it makes sex out of bounds, and so makes for a highly charged intimacy, in which the woman’s sexual experience will be talked about in the context of a sexual tension that cannot be relieved. Moreover, the brother-sister relationship can offer a safe, continuous male-female relationship to the restless, promiscuous woman; because she talks about sex with her brother, but doesn’t have sex with him, the woman can achieve a comfortable degree of closeness. Again, there is a relationship with a man who loves and desires the promiscuous woman but can make no sexual claims on her. In other words, it is no coincidence that Quentin, like Jake with Brett, questions Caddy almost compulsively about her sexual experiences, talks about having sex with her, touches her but does not have sex with her, and in fact has sex with no one. Jake is impotent and involuntarily chaste; Quentin is celibate by choice. In fact, but not at all coincidentally, Quentin is led to think about sexual self-mutilation—led to imagine making himself like Jake—though he decides that being born without genitals would be even better (purer, more innocent): “a man mutilated himself. He went into the woods and did it with a razor . . . But that’s not it. It’s not not having them. It’s never to have had them” (143). Insofar as Quentin raises the possibility of incest and insofar as he expresses fascination with Caddy’s sexual desire and experience and not simply disapproval, he obviously stops playing the familiar romantic role from the seduction plot of the brother-protector or brother-avenger and starts playing a very different part. “What does it look like Caddy[?]” Quentin asks, about lust. “That that grins at you that thing through them” (139). “Did you love them Caddy did you love them[?]”(185) These are not the sort of questions—questions about the intimate experiences of lust and love—that the avenging brother asks his seduced sister in the seduction novel tradition. And the avenging brother doesn’t put his hand on his sister’s neck or her chest, as Quentin does, to feel her heartbeat as she says the name of her lover. And in so doing, he plays a special role for Caddy, as Jake does for Brett. This is what it means for Caddy to be fixated on Quentin to some degree, and not simply as a brother—though obviously not to the degree that he is obsessed with her. But as Caddy’s fiancé, Herbert, tells Quentin, “Candace talked about 170

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you all the time up there at the Licks I got pretty jealous I says to myself who is this Quentin anyway I must see what this animal looks like because I was hit pretty hard. . . . I dont mind telling you it never occurred to me it was her brother she kept talking about she couldnt have talked about you any more if you’d been the only man in the world husband” (133). Jake’s impotence functions in one final, important way in Sun: it allows both Brett and him the ability to fantasize. They can always imagine—and both of them do—what it might have been like if Jake were not injured. Jake has to be indulging in fantasy when he says to Brett, “Couldn’t we just live together?” (55)—as Brett quickly reminds him that it won’t work. He also asks her, of their predicament, “Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” (26). And he cries over her (31). Likewise, as we’ve seen, Brett wants to imagine at the very end of the novel that “we could have had such a damned good time together.” “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Jake famously responds (247), and however one reads this line—as bitter, ironic, indicative of a new maturity and resolve—it also makes sense to take it literally. It is pretty to think so, and both of them have indulged in this prettiness in the course of the book (even if Jake is now finished doing so). As Jake comments, Brett “only wanted what she couldn’t have” (31): this is the formula for a fantasy that can never be realized and thus can never be tainted by reality. This fantasy is—or has been—a crucial part of their relationship. In a highly antiromantic novel—and the postmobilization promiscuity novel is consistently antiromantic, in its destruction of the traditional romantic— among characters who are together famously “hard-boiled,” there is also a cherished romantic fantasy. Romance still has a functionality in the promiscuity novel, but only in the realm of fantasy or the imaginary. Here, too, Jake’s impotence, and the corresponding fantasy of his potency, functions like the incest taboo in Sound and Quentin’s fantasy of incest with Caddy. This fantasy again takes us away from a reality in which the unusual love relationship is in some ways functional and exciting, in other ways limited and painful, and into the realm of imagination in which the impossible becomes possible and the lovers can be all alone together, untroubled by the threat of promiscuity and the specter of other men. Of course it is Quentin’s incest fantasy, in the context of his fascination with Caddy’s sexuality, that makes him a special lover of Caddy’s and not just a brother bent on living out a seduction plot. Quentin’s commitment to the idea of incest is tied up with restoring “horror” to a plot in which sex outside of marriage is now only “human folly,” to use his father’s words (220), so Quentin is ready to accuse his sister of a sex crime that, unlike extramarital Postmobilization Romance

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sex, is still taboo. But it is important to acknowledge that Quentin could make up any number of sex crimes for Caddy that need not involve him. His choice of a charge of incest achieves a second aim as well: it implicates them in sexual criminality together; the idea is to have her to himself. The charge of incest is thus also a strategy—alien to the solitary ostracism of the female in the seduction plot—to be ostracized together with his love, Caddy: “if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up” (219). And this is why Quentin can’t in fact fulfill the role of avenging brother and shoot Dalton Ames—though Ames, the soldier, in fact hands him a gun. When Dalton Ames “put the pistol in my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would” (98). The “there” Quentin is talking about is a special bunker in hell, and he wants only Caddy and himself to occupy it: “Nobody else there but her and me” (97). His role as brother-lover in the end trumps his role as brother-avenger. In a fairly clear transition between an older plot and role and newer ones, Quentin finally imagines, not killing Dalton Ames, but taking his place. “I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames” (97–98). In the relative happy ending of the popular, sensational, mid-nineteenthcentury seduction novel The Quaker City, Mary Arlington, the fallen woman, is living in a remote cabin in the far West with her brother-avenger and the fallen woman he has redeemed (after seducing her) and made his wife. But such an arrangement would not be appealing to Quentin; Quentin is dedicated to Caddy alone, and this means he has had sex with no one. His fantasy is finally not to have sex with Caddy, but to be isolated with Caddy in a postsexual world. By confessing to an incest that didn’t take place, he supposedly could wipe out Caddy’s other lovers and make the two of them at once innocent and perverse beyond measure: “you thought it was them but it was me listen I fooled you all the time it was me” (185). Jake’s “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (or Brett’s “we could have had such a damned good time together”) is like Quentin’s “I have committed incest I said” at least in this way: they both propose an imaginary in which impossible union becomes possible, in which promiscuity is overcome by an imaginary sexuality that does away with the need or the possibility of other lovers intruding. Both of these novels have a commitment to another world of romance or horror (or both), constructed in words, though this commitment is much more evident in Faulkner’s book than in Hemingway’s. These postmobilization novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner are, to transform a phrase from French psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva, sub172

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limations of rejection:1 transmuting failure into grandiosity. These three novels are all based on turning the authors’ twin rejections by the U.S. military and desired women, from personal failures, into grand tales of tragic love— and existential tragedies in the case of Hemingway and Faulkner. And, again, impotence and the incest taboo are strategies for creating love that cannot be acted upon physically. Fitzgerald’s strategy of transposition is different, and, consequently, the grand love tragedy of Gatsby and Daisy is, by contrast, a social, rather than an existential, tragedy. These authors had all been implicitly rejected or downgraded by the military, and those losses (as we have seen) were registered in the novels; they had all likewise experienced the loss of females they desired to other men, and these losses too were refracted in these particular books. Faulkner had his Estelle, who had been his “childhood friend”—indeed, like Quentin and Caddy, they had been something like “brother and sister”—next his fiancée, and then “ ‘betrayer’ of his belief in her.” Her family objected to Faulkner, so she gave him up and married an older man, and her sister married a military officer, just after Faulkner tried to get into the air corps and failed. (By the time he was writing The Sound of the Fury, Estelle’s first marriage had failed, and she and Faulkner were moving toward marriage again; it would come off in 1929, after he finished writing the novel.2) Lady Duff Twysden—who was the main model for Brett—slept around with acquaintances of Hemingway’s, including his Jewish friend Harold Loeb (who was the chief basis for the character Cohn), but wouldn’t sleep with Hemingway. He had also been refused sexually by Agnes von Kurowsky, who was a minor model for Brett, in that she was a nurse who helped take care of Hemingway after he was wounded, like Brett who was “a V.A.D.” in Jake’s “hospital” (38), and she, again like Brett with Jake, would kiss Hemingway but go no further.3 Fitzgerald had finally gained Zelda’s hand in marriage, after initial rebuffs, “humiliations and failures,”4 but here she was, as he worked on Gatsby, having an affair with a French naval aviator named Edouard Jozan (an accomplished military figure).5 Two of these novels transformed the military rejections into disabilities with symbolic and tragic resonance: so, by acts of cruel fate, Jake is sexually disabled, and Benjy is mentally disabled. These two fictions also did the work of taking those personal romantic rejections and turning them into tragic stories of love that can never be consummated: so Brett doesn’t reject Jake (as von Kurowsky and Twysden rebuff Hemingway), but rather, tragically, they can never be together because of Jake’s impotence. Caddy doesn’t reject Quentin for Dalton Ames and then Herbert Head (as Estelle does Faulkner for Cornell Franklin) because as sister and brother, they can never marry and face the incest Postmobilization Romance

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taboo when it comes to sex. To a much lesser extent, but still in the same vein, Nick can never have a golden girl like Gatsby and Tom do—“Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs”—and this golden girl can never cheat on him (as Zelda does on Fitzgerald) because he and Daisy are also related, as cousins. These rejections by the military and by desirable women are twin, and conflated or collapsed together in these novels, because the military had the power at this wartime moment to confer or deny masculinity and sex appeal. This power was dramatically confirmed by the national “problem” of the charity girl who would willingly lose her head, and her clothes, at the sight of a uniform— a problem that these authors reacted to differently from the military but took seriously in their own way, as they struck out to some degree at “promiscuous” women and to a greater degree at ethnic scapegoats. To put this conversely: as the most desirable women in these novels, Daisy, Brett, and Caddy have the power to confer manhood status on men, or to recognize such manhood, and their judgments concur with the military’s assessments. Indeed, they trust the military’s judgments, and behave like the uniform-struck “charity girls” of the Great War. So Caddy becomes pregnant by Dalton Ames, a returning uniformed soldier who has killed men; Daisy has sex with and falls in love with Gatsby, a uniformed officer at Camp Taylor who later proves himself in battle; and Brett initially marries Lord Ashley, a “sailor” of the “Ninth baronet” whose postwar shell shock—he “slept with a loaded service revolver” (203)—testifies to the fact that he has seen intense action; she also sleeps with Cohn, who has a military school pedigree. (Jake may be right that Brett marries men she doesn’t love, but Cohn is partly right, too, in that she doesn’t marry men simply for money [39]: Ashley is not only titled and rich, he is a soldier who served on a serious front, not a joke front.) And if, when it comes to the selection of sexual partners, these Anglo female characters are ethnically indiscriminant, it is because the American military is as well, in its meritocratic selection of officers. In these novels, the U.S. military establishment and beautiful Anglo women concur on their choice of men; thus, finding Brett, Caddy, or Daisy inaccessible, as narrators Jake, Quentin/Benjy, and Nick do, is both a repeat of and a metaphor for rejection by the military. To turn this inaccessibility of the desirable female into an inevitability is, then, to refigure and recoup not only female rejection but also military rejection, and the two rejections are experienced as related or continuous, for, again, at this historical moment and in these novels, the women and the military make the same selections among men. 174

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But of course the tragic force of Fitzgerald’s novel comes from a different sort of frustrated love (the socially frustrated love between Daisy and Gatsby), and out of the author’s different transposition of a similar pair of humiliations by the military and by a woman. One might first of all speculate that Nick’s longing for Daisy is relatively weak because Fitzgerald eventually won Zelda and was already married to her when he wrote Gatsby—by contrast, Hemingway of course never consummated the relationships with von Kurowsky and Twysden, and Faulkner had to wait a decade for Estelle and was still anticipating the marriage as he wrote Sound. In any case, Fitzgerald’s literary sublimation of his military and romantic wounds differs from that of Hemingway and Faulkner. Fitzgerald clearly identifies not only with Nick but to some degree with Gatsby as well: as his biographer Bruccoli puts it, “Like Fitzgerald, during the war Jay Gatsby falls in love with a girl who is incapable of matching his commitment.”6 And this authorial identification with the ethnic American or social outsider is something that makes Fitzgerald’s book and its tragedy different from Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s: in contrast to Gatsby, Cohn and Ames are not sympathetic if flawed characters and tragic figures. Hemingway and Faulkner both wanted to become military pilots, but neither managed to; they both also desired particular women who turned them down and got together with other men. So Hemingway’s defective eye and his consequent, implicit rejection by the military,7 along with his rejection by a couple of desirable women, become Jake’s impotence (received as an aviator) and the unfortunate inaccessibility of Brett that follows. The transmutation becomes even easier to see when one notices—again—that the love affair in “A Very Short Story” in Hemingway’s earlier In Our Time has the same basic elements as the Brett-Jake romance in Sun, but not yet arranged into tragedy. More precisely, “A Very Short Story” might be imagined as an intermediate phase in the process of transmutation that turns military and female rejection into a loss of genitals. In the short story, there is the desirable woman who finds the injured recruit less maturely male and rejects him for a more accomplished soldier type, and there is also the genital wound, but these come in the opposite order (from that of Sun), and so the story comes off as a bitter comedy. The injured American soldier has an affair with the nurse Luz, who “prepared him for the operating table,” but later she dumps him for an Italian major, calling her relationship with the American “only a boy and girl affair.” Meanwhile, a “short time after [getting Luz’s letter about the major throwing her over and not answering it] he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”8 The short story Postmobilization Romance

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has obviously not yet hidden the rejection by the desirable woman, which the novel will effect; and because this woman rejects the soldier for an officer who outranks him9 and whom she finds more manly, the military’s comparative undervaluing of the soldier is still pretty blatant; this issue is not yet obscured, as it will be in the novel.10 Likewise, Faulkner’s too-small size and consequent explicit rejection by the military becomes Benjy’s feeblemindedness and Quentin’s humiliation by soldier Dalton Ames, as well as Caddy’s unfortunate inaccessibility due to her sibling status. This transmutation in Faulkner’s Sound is also fairly transparent because his earlier novel Soldiers’ Pay contains the same elements of the inaccessible woman, who chooses the combat soldier, and the rejected military wannabe, whom neither the woman nor the military favors—and it presents these elements directly, without transfiguration. So, Cadet Lowe, who never sees military service and experiences “disappointment and despair” as a result, appeals pathetically to Margaret Powers, the charity girl turned military wife whose husband has died in battle and who cares for and eventually marries the injured combat officer Mahon, “Margaret, are you in love with [Mahon]?”—“ ‘Oh, Margaret,’ he said with better sincerity, ‘I would have been killed there if I could, or wounded like [Mahon], don’t you know it?’ ” (48). The desirable Margaret Powers is kind to Cadet Lowe, but, much like Luz with her American soldier in Hemingway’s short story, thinks of him as a “child” (99) and sends him away. Indeed, Faulkner wrote a subsequent novel, before he tackled Sound, titled Flags in the Dust (drastically cut down and published as Sartoris in 1929), in which the love triangle of military wannabe, combat soldier, and desirable woman has already moved closer to the opaque or symbolic formula he would hit on in Sound; it is just partly transfigured. In Flags in the Dust, the desirable woman, Narcissa, who marries the heroic World War I pilot Bayard Sartoris, is already the sister of military wannabe Horace Benbow, the nonsoldier who serves out the war far from the front, in a YMCA unit. But in this novel, too, as in Soldiers’ Pay, and despite the transposition of one leg of the love triangle into a brother-sister relationship, Faulkner’s mobilization wounds are still very much on display—and this is because Horace explicitly has a marginal, noncombat role in the war. So his biographer Karl can comment, “Horace seems to have in him . . . amounts of Faulkner himself—especially in his weak war role, as contrasted with Bayard’s heroics. We can see Faulkner replaying the war in his ridicule of Horace’s safe activities, his inability to get to the front. Since both Bayard and Horace are competitors for Narcissa, we can also see in this a replay of Faulkner’s own 176

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personal history, in which Estelle finally goes not to the artist but to the man of action.”11 Faulkner’s strategy of transposition and symbolic disguise of this World War I love triangle and especially of the rejected military wannabe is fairly clear when these three of his 1920s novels are laid side by side in the order of their composition. Cadet Lowe becomes YMCA worker and brother Benbow, who is split into the Compson brothers, one chivalrous and humiliated by a real soldier, the other implicitly rejected by the military because of mental disability. In short, in the famous novels by Hemingway and Faulkner, the tragedy of physical limitation or defect that the military can’t look past becomes the tragedy of impotence or the incest taboo, which the desired woman can’t look past. And yet in these existentially tragic mobilization novels of Hemingway and Faulkner, in which the Anglo heroines can’t look past impotence and the incest taboo, Brett still loves Jake, and Caddy still loves Quentin, and the women have sexual fantasies about these men they can’t have: as if to say, Hemingway and Faulkner are real men, and it is only an accident of birth that has led to the slight physical defect that has “misled” the military about them; in a “better” world, the military would recognize their true manhood. (Or, again, as Cadet Lowe puts it in Soldiers’ Pay, “I would have been killed there if I could, or wounded like him, don’t you know it? . . . I would have been if I’d had a chance.”) Brett and Caddy would want Jake and Quentin above all other men if not for the cruel accidents of fate or birth: thus the “potency” fantasies of Brett and Jake that are “pretty to think” about and the incest fantasy of Quentin that he believes Caddy shares12 (and after all, even Herbert notices the way Caddy goes on in an unusual way about a mere brother). Again, though Fitzgerald’s novel depends to a degree on an incest taboo and can also be described as tragic, its tragedy does not inhere in that incest taboo or a physical limitation, as Faulkner and Hemingway’s books do. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald’s movement from The Beautiful and Damned to Gatsby depends on just the sort of transition that takes place between “A Very Short Story” and Sun or between Soldiers’ Pay, Flags in the Dust, and Sound: the disguise or transfiguration of military and female rejection. In Gatsby, the reader learns little about Nick Carraway’s army service beyond the fact that he fought in Europe. But in Fitzgerald’s earlier novel, the Anglo main character Anthony Patch not only doesn’t make it to Europe, just as Fitzgerald didn’t, he is—even worse than Fitzgerald—excluded from “officers’ training camp” because of “low blood pressure” that nonetheless doesn’t prevent him from being drafted (250–251). His lowly status as a regular recruit is drilled into him, and often Postmobilization Romance

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enough Anthony’s “eyes were turned precipitously inward upon the indignity of his position. . . . [L]ife was unendurable” (262). Though Anthony works his way up to corporal—“He was to be one of the quarter million selected for that consummate trust” (273)—and sergeant, and is on the verge of making it to officers’ training camp after all, a lie gets him apprehended by the military police: he is “reduced to ranks without trial, and confined for a month to the limits of the company street.” Anthony takes this demotion very hard, and, though his humiliation in the army is more severe than Fitzgerald’s (who, though he was denied the promotions he expected and disrespected by his fellow officers, did become an officer, and though he was at one point, like Anthony, confined to camp for getting into trouble with a charity girl,13 was not court-martialed), one cannot help but feel that in the strikingly intense and detailed passages that describe Anthony’s state of mind during this period Fitzgerald is tapping into his own emotional experience: With this blow a spell of utter depression overtook him, and within a week he was again caught down-town, wandering around in a drunken daze. . . . Early in his confinement the conviction took root in him that he was going mad. It was as though there were a quantity of dark yet vivid personalities in his mind, some of them familiar, some of them strange and terrible, held in check by a little monitor, who sat aloft somewhere and looked on. The thing that worried him was that the monitor was sick, and holding out with difficulty. Should he give up, should he falter for a moment, out would rush these intolerable things—only Anthony could know what a state of blackness there would be if the worst of him could roam his consciousness unchecked. (285) Meanwhile, and in further contrast to Nick who is neither obviously humiliated by the army nor explicitly resentful of it, Anthony’s hatred for the military and for officers in particular is directly stated: “He hated . . . every officer” (262). When the war ends and he is released from camp, the narration concludes: he had a “deep loathing for the military profession and all it connoted. . . . He rejoiced to see general and field-officers riding desolately about the barren camp deprived of their commands” (305). And whereas in Gatsby, Anglo Nick is not in competition with Major Gatsby for Daisy, in The Beautiful and Damned, Anglo Anthony is humiliated by various aviators—the cream of the military—as well as other soldiers, who flirt with his wife in his absence at army camp. At more or less the same moment 178

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that Anthony sweats it out in punitive work detail, Gloria flirts with “an ancient flame, a young man whom at one time she had fully intended to marry” who is now in “the Aviation Corps.” Through him, she meets “several aviators,” and “two other ancient beaux turned up, stationed at Camp Dix” (301–302). In his first mobilization novel, then, Fitzgerald, like Faulkner, develops a character that is absolutely scarred by his military-romantic humiliations. Indeed, perhaps Anthony’s objective failures in training camp exaggerate Fitzgerald’s own because Fitzgerald has an inkling that the feelings he desires to express and exorcise seem out of proportion to his relatively mild setbacks in the army. In any case, aesthetically speaking, the three writers at issue here have the same literary trajectory: Fitzgerald also, like Hemingway and Faulkner, moves from a bitter, ironic tone and from a somewhat pathetic, dejected main character to the “high modernist” combination of irony, symbolism, and tragedy.14 Along with Hemingway and Faulkner, Fitzgerald in his “masterpiece” finds a way to bury or transmute his self-pity over military and female rejection—directly expressed in “A Very Short Story,” Soldiers’ Pay, and The Beautiful and Damned, which precisely because of this direct expression are not masterpieces—and thus he achieves the high-modernist “compactness” and “control” for which Gatsby,15 and the fiction of Hemingway, is famous. Hemingway and Faulkner dignified the suffering of their Anglo alter egos by making their true loves tragically, existentially impossible; Fitzgerald’s alternative strategy for transposing and thus dignifying his sense of rejection is to split himself between two alter egos— one Anglo American and one ethnic American—and to give the experience of social rejection to a tragic character based only minimally on himself, namely, Gatsby. Indeed, one might speculate that this strategy is available to Fitzgerald precisely because he is half Anglo American and half Irish American (his maternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant, and his maternal grandmother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant16). Like the Irish, the Germans in America were an older, more established immigrant group, predating the “New Immigration” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fitzgerald’s choice of a German American identity for Gatsby seems quite calculated and involves another transposition of material from the earlier The Beautiful and Damned, from a crude anti-Semitism to a nuanced, stylish one. The ethnic American romantic rival in The Beautiful and Damned is a Jewish American movie mogul named Bloeckman who Anglicizes his name to Black; the main Anglo character entertains an “obscene jealousy” (96) of Bloeckman, which culminates in Anthony, without provocation, calling him a “Goddamn Jew” and getting punched in Postmobilization Romance

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the face (357). Bloeckman’s company, “Films Par Excellence” (323), reappears in Gatsby, but now it is owned by “Newton Orchid,” who simply attends Gatsby’s parties, amongst a group of Jews “From West Egg” and “connected with the movies in one way or another” (66). In Gatsby, that is, the principal ethnic American is no longer Jewish but merely has more or less sinister Jewish connections, most obviously Wolfshiem, and possesses an ethnicity that, outside of the wartime paranoia, was more generally accepted in America—and was evidently less threatening to Fitzgerald.17 The larger point here is that in all three cases, of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, the style of their high modernism— their control and their use of tragedy and symbolism—was a direct result of their learning to hide and transpose their mobilization wounds. Meanwhile, if these 1920s novels obscure military and female rejection, and tend to transform it into tragedy, or, to put it another way, hide or refract anger at the army and at women, they also create ethnic scapegoats who, instead, take most or a good deal of the blame for these “wrongs.” And this is true even, as in the case of Gatsby, when the main ethnic American is a largely sympathetic character. Thus in Hemingway’s novel we get a rich, Jewish military school graduate who avoids wartime service and is alternately effeminate and violent, and in Faulkner’s Sound there are Wall Street “eastern jews” who supposedly do no real work but trick the farmers out of hard-earned money. And even in Fitzgerald’s book, the sympathetic German American who is given elite educational opportunities by the military still settles on a lucrative life of crime and chooses to collude with a much more unsavory ethnic American figure, a Jewish gangster mastermind. Ethnic Americans most obviously take the blame: but women and even the military receive some share of criticism. The desirable women in these novels are portrayed as compulsively promiscuous and unreliable (Caddy and Daisy are both figured as poor mothers, as well as duplicitous wives; Jordan is portrayed as a cheater and liar in her public as well as her private life, and Brett is depicted not only as an obviously disloyal fiancée but as a bad friend in her inability to keep away from Romero, despite bullfighting aficionado Jake’s earnest pleas). And, though the military isn’t directly critiqued, it comes off as partly absurd in the depiction of foolishly chivalrous military men. Following Nina Baym and her notion of a “melodrama of beset manhood,”18 one would say that compulsive female restlessness and self-involvement in these novels, like Jake’s wound and Benjy’s disability, are projections of the male authors who experience themselves as rejects. (Remember Katherine Anne Porter’s man 180

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“rejected” by the army who can’t help his “guarded resentment” against women, his vulnerable and agonized sense that every woman must be a “bloodthirsty female” out to torture him for his military inadequacy [216].) Ironically, but following from the same unshakable sense of rejection, these authors end up seeing women much as the Great War U.S. military did. For all their problems with the military’s insistence on chastity—and their attempts to make their books by contrast open-minded about female sexual freedom—these authors are compelled out of their mobilization wounds to accept the military’s basic notion that women lack sexual self-control.

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Part III The 1930s and After

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7

Postmobilization Kinkiness Barnes, West, Miller, and the Military’s Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease

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he 1930s postmobilization novels of Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, and Nathanael West still depict “unpossessable” promiscuous women and bold, sexually successful ethnic Americans, but they dispense with the sleight of hand or strategy by which rejection is metamorphosed into the trope of doomed love, of a love doomed because it is physically impossible, taboo, or socially untenable. Rather, they tend to spoof on the notion of impossible love, and ethnic Americans are no longer scapegoated. They can thus be said to demystify the grand-tragedy-making operation or strategy of these 1920s novels. If Tod can’t have Faye in The Day of the Locust, it is because she has no sexual interest in him, plain and simple, and he lacks the will to rape her—though not the angry rape fantasy of the rejected. Though a Mexican eventually beds her, Tod doesn’t blame the ethnic American. If Nora can’t keep Robin in Nightwood, it isn’t, say, because Robin is interested only in men or because society won’t tolerate sexual love between women or, alternatively, because a non-Anglo comes between them; that is, it isn’t because lesbian love is “impossible” or because an ethnic other breaks them apart: Robin leaves Nora for another lesbian relationship with another Anglo woman. Meanwhile, Robin’s heterosexual relationship with Jewish Felix precedes her love affair with Nora and so can’t be blamed for breaking it up. Their relationship fails, not because of cosmic fate or unbreakable taboos or social inevitability but for interpersonal reasons; given their conflicting personal needs, they simply can’t get along. The Henry Miller character-narrator in Tropic of Cancer has no compunction about expressing his vitriol directly at Mona for rejecting him (and arguably at women in general); there is no suggestion that she pairs up with an ethnic American; Miller indifferently enjoys the company of Jewish and Anglo men and goes on to have an affair with a Jewish woman. He is meanwhile painstakingly explicit about the rejections and humiliations he has suffered in relationships with women as well as in the social struggle for money and status. Moreover, whereas these 1920s novels depict “charity intercourse” that leads to serious social upset and dramatic consequences, these 1930 novels, again with a demystifying effect, indulge in a lighthearted sexual kinkiness around the female figures that the U.S. military warned against morally and hygienically and that the twenties novels also took seriously for reasons of their own: charity girls and prostitutes. These liaisons between females and military figures have the power to shake up the social worlds depicted in the 1920s novels; in these 1930s novels, these liaisons have become sexual fetishes. At a greater remove now from the events of 1917 and 1918, and in the hands of writers who were either not Anglo or not male and who either could not or did not seek 186

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service in the Great War,1 the postmobilization novel of the 1930s took another turn as well, toward a more direct mockery of the “mania” of the military and its civilian affiliates in their pursuit of social hygiene. West’s novel is a fairly thorough send-up of Sun and Gatsby—and the ethnic promiscuity plot (it also manages to caricature Faulkner the man).2 Faye, the knockoff of Brett and Daisy, who has none of their charm, money, or experience, is not mysterious and chic; she is beautiful and vacuous, and, technically, she is a minor throughout the novel (age 17). She not only uses men and exploits her sexual power to gain male financial support (say, like Brett); she also works temporarily as a prostitute. Faye Greener shares a name with Gatsby’s Daisy Fay, as Leslie Fiedler points out; Fiedler also notes that her name suggests the old saying, the grass is greener on the other side.3 But green is also the color (of the light at end of the dock) that Gatsby associates with Daisy, and so “Faye Greener” might be said to mean something along the lines of the following: characters like Daisy Fay only appear desirable because they’re at a distance or on the other side. In her very name, Faye Greener calls up and deconstructs the notion of Daisy Fay. Another way of saying this is that whereas the promiscuity plots of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald want to disillusion their chivalrous and archaic characters—and their readers—about the old mystiques of romance and of sentimental notions of gender, West wants to disillusion his readers about the new mystique of the promiscuous woman or the new woman or the flapper that the 1920s authors have helped create. In a similarly demystifying gesture in West’s novel, one of the members of the group that visits Mrs. Jenning’s sporting house, Mrs. Joan Schwartzen, “a female tennis champ,” is a pretty clear parody of female golfer Jordan Baker. (Even West’s character’s name seems somehow derived, and reduced, from that of Jordan Baker: Joan is a streamlining of Jordan, and Schwartzen is German for “blacken”—mere blackening is a kind of failed baking.) Whereas Jordan is sensual and single, Mrs. Schwartzen is married and debauched: the first comment she directs to Tod, “flutter[ing] her eyelids,” is, “Well, I wish we were going to a brothel this minute . . . I love them.” And a moment later, “ ‘Are you talking smut . . . ? I adore smut” (14).4 With such explicit discussion of sexual excitement, by taking his reader to a sporting house, and in detailing a French porn film (Le Predicament de Marie ou Le Bonne Distraite [21]), West not only attempts to demystify the “mysterious charm” of characters such as Jordan and Daisy and the sex-for-money basis of several of Brett’s relationships; he also makes his novel in part sexual entertainment in its own right. Postmobilization Kinkiness

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But the more specific point here is that in its particular depiction of Faye, as a sometime prostitute who risks contracting “venereal disease” (101) and an extra in a movie who plays the role of a “Napoleonic vivandière” (94), West’s novel engages in what might be called a “postmobilization” eroticism or sexual fetishism. Vivandières—and the term was used in the American Civil War as well as the Napoleonic Wars—were women who accompanied soldiers as nurses or mascots or peddlers, and occasionally fought alongside the men; they provided creature comforts to the soldiers (the term literally means “hospitality giver”). Interestingly, though Faye obsessively schemes to break into the movies, this role as a vivandière is the only one we are told about in the novel, and this “costume” (94) is the only one she is pictured in. It was of course the Great War that had most recently made venereal disease, prostitution, and female fraternization with soldiers a national issue. The eroticization of female camp followers and prostitutes would of course fly in the face of the military’s attempt to promote chastity during the war. But such eroticism was at the same time made possible by the military: first, by the military’s use of female sex appeal to encourage men to comply with the draft or enlist (for example, in posters such as the famous one that pictured a windblown, pretty young woman in a sailor’s uniform, with the caption: “Gee!! I Wish I Were a Man. I’d Join the Navy. Be a Man and Do It!”5), and second, by the military’s unprecedented frankness about sex in its attempt to combat venereal disease and promote the “new man”—a frankness that unceremoniously tossed aside the programmatic “modesty” and “reticence” that the American Social Hygiene Association had maintained as recently as 19146 and was at the time “shocking to many Americans unused to the open discussion of sexual matters.”7 As historian David M. Kennedy put it, “Surely very few had ever been exposed to such frank and open scientific discussion of matters about which the society had been notoriously mute. In its own blunt way, the army contributed to the demythologizing of erotic life by bringing sexual matters into the arena of public discourse, which was to become a characteristic feature of twentiethcentury American culture.”8 If postwar modernism is more explicit about sex than prewar literature—and such an argument could be made in reference to Hemingway’s presentation of Jake’s wound, Brett’s sexual attraction to Romero with his tight pants, and Faulkner’s eroticism in regard to Caddy—the U.S. Army had a major role in this shift. “This is man-to-man talk, straight from the shoulder without gloves. It calls a spade a spade without camouflage,” began the CTCA’s pamphlet on sexual hygiene, Keeping Fit to Fight,9 which was distributed to all enlisted men.10 In 188

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addition to such pamphlets, soldiers were introduced to frank and scientific lectures by civilian physicians, sometimes accompanied by slides; also, posters in the camps addressed, as the CTCA put it, “sex hygiene and venereal disease in plain outspoken language, illustrated with effective drawings, anatomical diagrams and photographs;”11 those pamphlets and posters did not mince words, but openly discussed masturbation (essentially encouraging it as an alternative, a form of what we would call today “safe sex”) and employed terms like “balls” and “whore.”12 (Hemingway wanted to use the word balls in his novel; he wanted Mike Campbell to say, in the discussion of steers, “The bulls have no balls.” But Scribner’s publishers feared censorship, for after the war there were “a plethora” of new local ordinances enforcing clean language; “they were sure that word alone would doom the book.”13 The army had gone further during the war, in terms of blunt language, than Hemingway was allowed to in 1926.) West’s novel, published a dozen years later, is much more linguistically raw than Hemingway’s and employs terms like “slut,” “quiff ” (7), and “whore”: “She’s a whore,” Tod says of Faye (137). And The Day of the Locust has a perverse fun with the issue of venereal disease, whereas Sun treats it not as gravely as the military (which perceived a serious health crisis) but still rather gravely, as a kind of symbol of postwar malaise. (“Everybody’s sick. I’m sick too,” says Georgette, the prostitute Jake picks up. When the issue of sickness leads her to ask him what he’s sick with and he reveals that he “got hurt in the war,” she replies, “Oh, that dirty war.” Jake then says to himself, “We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps would have been better avoided. I was bored enough” [16–17]. Venereal disease, sexual dysfunction, empty tragic rhetoric, and boredom are all related symptoms, for Hemingway, of a solemn enough postwar hangover.)14 In West’s novel, the tone is farcical and the sexual issue perverted. When Tod calls Faye a “whore,” he is cautioning simple-minded Homer against her, and at another point, when he is warning Faye herself about the dangers of “venereal disease” (101), he describes himself as having “shouted at her like a Y.M.C.A. lecturer on sex hygiene” (90) or, one might add, like a military CTCA lecturer on the subject—for during World War I, the CTCA in fact had officially and publicly teamed up with the YMCA in its program of sexual hygiene15 (as well as in its program of recreation, both stateside and in France16). Indeed, the YMCA was so intimately involved with the army that soldiers apparently did not distinguish between CTCA and YMCA personnel and programs, and, again, it was the military’s involvement in the issue during the war that brought Postmobilization Kinkiness

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hygienic efforts like the YMCA’s to national prominence and made them effective. (The YMCA was so closely identified with the military that to criticize it, at the height of the war hysteria, was to risk trouble.17) Of course, the fact that The Day of the Locust caricatures the typical YMCA lecturer as shouting out his lecture on venereal disease indicates West’s light mockery of the “intensity” manifested by the agents of the social hygiene movement. But Tod, because he hoped at one point that he would find out that Faye “worked for Mrs. Jenning” and that he could have sex with her for “thirty dollars” (23), and also because of his own increasingly violent sexual fantasies concerning her, can hardly be said to occupy seriously that role of social hygiene expert. He can only pruriently parody such a lecturer. Just before he berates her, he muses that “her beauty was structural like a tree’s” and thus “perhaps even whoring couldn’t damage it” (90). The narration, close at this moment to Tod’s thoughts, repeats the word “whoring,” and remarks that “she had earned the money for her outfit on her back,” clearly taken with its sexual frankness. All during this scene and through the hygiene lecture Tod is holding on to Faye, out of sexual desire; she asks him why, and “He searched his head for [an answer]. It wasn’t his head he should have searched, however” (89). Though Tod imagines giving Faye moral and aesthetic arguments against prostituting herself, it isn’t even clear why Tod is worried about Faye’s prostitution, beyond the fact that venereal disease is a real possibility and a threat to her beauty (90); what is clear is that Tod (along with the book) gets a certain sexual charge out of imagining “charity” sex with a girl who has been working as a prostitute and nonetheless looks great. After all, Tod is continuously trying to bed Faye; thus, ironically, he imagines that his saving Faye from the dangers of prostitution might convince her finally to sleep with him. In short, and in the same perverse vein as the novel’s eroticization of female figures that the army targeted as sex offenders endangering national security, this scene makes a camp-style lecture on venereal disease into a seduction tactic. Whereas Faye’s dressing up as a female camp follower as an extra in the movies allows the charity girl to be fetishized in The Day of the Locust, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood gives perverse voice to the charity girl’s erotic desire, by putting it in the mouth of a soldier who would rather be a charity girl. In the process, Barnes burlesques the soldierly ideal of the Great War era. The only major character in the novel that is a soldier (in the Great War), Irish American Matthew O’Connor, is also a homosexual transvestite—a far cry from the images of martial masculinity in the 1920s novels, as well as from the U.S. military’s 190

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“new man,” and an ironic reminder of the military’s World War I–era initiatives aimed at excluding homosexuals from its ranks. At one point in the novel he is described as having “full gun-metal cheeks and chin . . . framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendent curls . . . heavily rouged and his lashes painted” (79).18 Matthew’s father, apparently a species of traditional male, has not been particularly understanding of his son’s predilections, but “When I joined the army he relented a little,” and, in a scene at once touching and comic, the old man comes to Matthew, not with understanding, which he has never been able to achieve, but with love, an apology, and a “hope . . . I could conduct myself like a soldier. For a moment he seemed to realize my terrible predicament: to be shot for man’s meat, but to go down like a girl, crying in the night for her mother” (74). In the heat of combat, Matthew does indeed seem to manage to conduct himself like a soldier—and to give the lie to the stereotyping by some World War I military psychiatrists who reported their doubts about homosexuals’ performance in battle. He doesn’t panic under bombardment—“where the bombs began tearing the heart out of you”—even as he experiences terror. But he doesn’t seem to cope with fear in the typically “heroic” manner of a soldier either, say through anger or icy self-control. He seems instead to keep panic under wraps by noticing the more intense suffering of a nearby cow, “the poor beast trembling on her four legs,” and to conclude “that the tragedy of the beast can be two legs more awful than a man’s”—and presumably two legs more awful than a girl’s within a man’s body (remembering Matthew’s encounter with his father). The cow “was softly dropping her dung at the far end,” that is, shitting herself, and, though frozen in place, clearly wants to run like mad with four legs, not just two (22–23). In fact, it might be said that soldier-transvestite Matthew’s “feminine” empathy for the experience of a “dumb” farm animal— and not some sort of “masculine” suppression or sublimation of fear—helps him maintain cool under fire or, to use Hemingway’s famous phrase, “grace under pressure.” In any case, despite his real combat experience, Matthew never identifies with the role of soldier, as it was typically portrayed, for example in the war writing of Hemingway. Though Matthew has seen frontline action on a serious front (“France in the war”)—something, for example, that Hemingway’s Jake would have envied—his fantasy of war is, ironically enough, of being a girl who makes love to a soldier: “If I had to do it again, grand country though [France] is—I’d be the girl found lurking behind the army. . . . ” He imagines in the same vein that in a previous life, “I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock Postmobilization Kinkiness

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with a sailor” (90–91). In a neat collapse of categories, made possible by his homosexual, transvestite status, Matthew represents soldier and charity girl in one. And, in a witty testament to the power of the sex appeal that makes some girls silly at the sight of a uniform, even the experience of war as a soldier doesn’t defeat or diminish the fantasy of sex with a man in uniform—if one has Matthew’s charity girl sexual desires. In Barnes’s hands, soldier Matthew’s charity girl fantasy becomes the impossible love of her novel, a minor love (as Matthew is a minor character) both tragic and comic. What can a man do who wishes only to be a charity girl or for whom “no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting”? As Matthew puts it, “God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months. . . . Is it my fault that my only fireside is the outhouse?” (91), he says, referring to the fact that he has to haunt public bathrooms for a sexual and romantic release that never of course begins to live up to his real desires. At one point, exasperated with his predicament, he pulls out his penis in church and talks to it—and God. “Kneeling in a dark corner, bending my head over and down, I spoke to Tiny O’Toole . . . ; I had tried everything else. There was nothing for it this time but to make him face the mystery so it could see him clear as it saw me. So then I whispered, ‘What is this thing, Lord?’ And I began to cry. . . . And there I was holding Tiny, bending over and crying, asking the question until I forgot and went on crying, and I put Tiny away then, like a ruined bird” (132) (something else Jake would be jealous of). A sort of inverse of Jake Barnes, Matthew is the soldier who is cursed with a penis. What can such a man do, the man who wants to be a woman, the soldier who wants to be a charity girl? Apparently, he can become a gynecologist, for at least that way he can perhaps take a vicarious pleasure in the female sex organs and reproduction he is deprived of. (He doesn’t give birth to the main character, Nora, but he does deliver her, acting as a doctor; he also performs abortions.) That is how Matthew ends up a “middle-aged ‘medical student’ . . . whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world” (14). Or, rather, that is part of the story that explains his postwar presence in Europe with his “pile of medical books” (78), for the other part seems to be that as an “Irishman from the Barbary Coast19 (Pacific Street, San Francisco)” (14), it hasn’t been easy getting his medical education or degree. Presumably, if his “interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world,” it isn’t because America lacks for medical schools; it is perhaps rather that American medical schools have ethnic quotas. Interestingly, O’Connor, 192

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who is Catholic as well as Irish American, at one point observes similarities between “the Jew and the Irish” as he discusses what makes a “great doctor” (31). American medical school deans tended to see Catholics and Jews in the same category, too, but a different one: social outsiders whose numbers needed to be kept down. And indeed, Matthew’s strategy for getting a medical education is the tack taken by many ethnic Americans locked out of medical school in this postwar era: a significant number of ethnic Americans, especially American Jews, went to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s in order to attend European medical schools—when they found themselves shut out of American schools by the new ethnic quotas.20 Apparently “one of the strangest characters in all fiction,”21 Matthew becomes somewhat less strange when considered as a tragicomic combination of or cross between two postmobilization figures that run through these 1920s and ’30s novels: the ethnic American with some U.S. military affiliation who experiences a postwar backlash and the charity girl. If The Day of the Locust begins to eroticize prostitution—or perhaps more precisely, begins to eroticize sex with ex-prostitutes—and to sport with the subject of venereal disease and the obsessiveness of social hygiene reformers, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer seems devoted to this project. Meanwhile, if Barnes spoofs perversely on the image of the ideal soldier in Nightwood, Miller directly mocks the military and the enthusiasm for war. Sex with prostitutes is hardly a marginal note or side interest in Tropic of Cancer; if Jake Barnes has supposedly chosen to stay in Paris for a moral freedom revealed by its wartime tolerance of prostitution, the Miller character is in Paris in large part for the prostitution itself. Whereas West’s Tod “didn’t want Faye that way [that is, as a prostitute], not at least while he still had a chance some other way” (23) and thus convinces her to quit prostitution, Miller can eroticize working prostitutes—as such. In fact, what he likes about the prostitute named Germaine is that she doesn’t hide the fact that “She’s doing her job!”—that she “was a hustler.” The prostitute Claude, by contrast, who has a “certain delicacy,” acts like “a lady,” and so allows her customers to fantasize that they aren’t with a prostitute when they are with her, Miller finds inappropriate and even “offen[sive].” “When [Germaine] lay there with her legs apart and moaning, even if she did moan that way for any and everybody, it was good, it was a proper show of feeling.” Miller doesn’t need to imagine, say as Tod does, that he could have Germaine some other way: “She was a whore all the way through—and that was her virtue” (42–43).22 Miller’s ascribing “virtue” to the prostitute as such is of course a direct counter to the familiar moral tradition, picked up on by the U.S. Great War army, in Postmobilization Kinkiness

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which prostitution is a singular vice and sexual congress with a prostitute is also a sinful and shameful act—as army posters regularly made clear. But Miller’s challenge to the military’s moral point of view is only the beginning of his assault on its wartime crusade that was hygienic as well as ethical: even more strikingly, he makes a farce of the issue of venereal disease that the army made a national problem. When a character named Collins finds out that another character, Fillmore, has venereal disease, he is exhilarated. “ ‘Then you’ve got it!’ said Collins triumphantly, and with that he flourished his bottle of ‘Venetienne’ ”—“the sailors’ remedy for clap” (183, 180). He concludes, “And nothing’s worse than worry, do you understand?” (183). Miller’s trivializing of the dreaded venereal disease that could supposedly ravage entire armies—rubbing elbows with “drunken sailors on shore leave,” “we spent Sunday drinking and carousing, clap or no clap” (184)—then turns to comedy, as he makes fun of himself for his worries about contracting it. Fillmore soon “installs” in their living quarters “a genuine princess”—driven out of Russia by the revolution—with “the clap.” Miller has “quite a fright” one morning when he washes his face with “her towel by mistake.” “And when I bawled her out for it she answered smoothly, ‘My dear, if one can become blind from that I would have been blind years ago.’ And then there’s the toilet, which we all have to use. I try to speak in a fatherly way about the toilet seat. ‘Oh zut!’ she says. ‘If you are so afraid I’ll go to a café.’ But it’s not necessary to do that, I explain. Just use ordinary precautions. ‘Tut, tut!’ she says, ‘I won’t sit down then . . . I’ll stand up” (208–209). Finally, venereal disease becomes, in Miller’s text, the centerpiece of a sexual farce in which Miller also parodies the theme of an impossible love found in the 1920s mobilization novels. Like impotence and the incest taboo in the 1920s novels, venereal disease becomes the barrier to consummation, in one episode in Miller’s novel. Macha, the Russian “princess” won’t have sex with Fillmore and comes up with one excuse after another: first her “menstrual flow,” and then she “[p]rentended that she only liked women” (209). But eventually she “ceased to put up a fight. . . . She lay back with her legs apart and she let him fool around . . . and then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going to slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a dose of clap. He rolled off her like a log.” Fillmore, who has had venereal disease previously in the novel, was “pretty well scared about it,” but he rallies, and “the next night he decided to risk it—with a condom.” However, it turns out “that didn’t work either. She was too tight.” Fillmore is momentarily stumped. “How do you make that out? Somebody got inside of her all right to give her that dose. He must have 194

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been abnormally small.” But he rejects that preliminary explanation in favor of another one: he settles on the “strange idea” that “if he cures her of the clap she may loosen up.” But in the meantime, “he just gave it up altogether. They lie there now like brother and sister, with incestuous dreams” (211–212). In other words, Fillmore decides that venereal disease has made his potential lover impenetrable. Venereal disease, in a final comic twist here, becomes a prophylactic against its own spread: a prophylactic that protects against the act of sex with an infected woman. Fillmore and his ethnic princess cannot consummate their relationship, like Jake and Brett insofar as sex organ mechanics fail, and like Quentin and Caddy insofar as they end up like brother and sister. But the point here is not so much that Miller is spoofing on the impossible loves of the twenties mobilization novels, but rather that his particular take on the impossible-love theme spoofs on the dangers of venereal disease, which is to say, it is openly and satirically focused on an issue of the mobilization. In this postmobilization sequence in Miller’s novel, there isn’t a sublimated drama of military and female rejection coded as a tragedy of war injury and the intrusion of a military school pretender or, alternatively, a tragedy of the incest taboo and the intrusion of a returning soldier (as there is in Hemingway and Faulkner’s novels, respectively). Rather, there is an explicit drama of the humiliations, “insults and injuries” Miller has suffered in America, hardly from being rejected by a military he wanted to join—he claims that “nothing touches me, neither . . . wars, nor revolutions” (132)—but rather by being corralled into “harness” and “lock step” by the economic juggernaut (240). And though Miller isn’t here talking literally about being drafted, his figurative language obviously refers to the military equipping and disciplining of the recruit (the “lock step” of the march, the “harness” of the parachute or backpack). There is also a straightforward comedy of the pitfalls and pratfalls of venereal disease, the invisible enemy that the army battled on the home front and in the war zone. In the end, hoping to cure his princess of “gonorrhea” (214) so she can once again perform the act of sexual intercourse, Fillmore consults a “little quack of an abortionist” that his boss has come across after getting “a chancre” from a “girl” he had “knocked up.” Miller concludes, “That’s how one gets acquainted in Paris—genito-urinary friendships.” It turns out that, in contrast to the United States, where they put you on a “treadmill” (63), France is not just the country of loose morals, plentiful sex, and less hysteria about sexual disease, but also, again in contrast to an America Miller finds socially “cold,” “malign,” and forbidding (61), the place where whole social networks grow up in the wake of the American-dreaded gonorrhea. Postmobilization Kinkiness

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Miller’s friend Collins concludes, on the subject of venereal disease and the concern about it that the military helped create, “And nothing’s worse than worry, do you understand?” (183). For Miller, the army had blown the issue way out of proportion, and just the sort of overblown “worry” that the military stirred up is worse than the disease, which can easily be treated.23 The larger theme here is that the army’s—and America’s—hysteria about health, progress, “bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc.” is, for Miller, the real sickness that is not so easily cured, the “virus which is poisoning the whole world.”24 And as with West, the figure of ridicule for Miller is the primary wartime partner of the CTCA in the campaign for social hygiene, the ubiquitous “YMCA man,” who articulates this “modern” religion of “cheap optimism” and whose slogan is “Forward” (86). That Miller associates the YMCA man and his “modern” outlook with the U.S. military is not left in doubt. When the italicized call of “Forward” returns later in the novel, Miller writes critically not only about sanitation and efficiency, but also about the spread of venereal disease and of world war (and Tropic of Cancer, unlike those mobilization novels of the twenties, is antiwar, as well as antimilitary): more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches. . . . Forward! Time presses . . . Forward! Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of it—until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it! (241) “More gonococci!”: a final accusation of the army here is that, in effect, it not only combated but also, ironically, did a great deal to spread venereal disease in the first place, by uprooting millions of men and putting them into camps where they could catch the disease or spread it or both, as they encountered prostitutes and charity girls. Indeed, despite all the efforts of the U.S. military—from propaganda, to closing red-light districts, to detaining suspect women, to General Orders forbidding sexual encounters, to chemical prophylaxis stations—“A total of 383,706 American soldiers were diagnosed with either syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid between April 1917 and December 1917,” and “soldiers serving in the United States accounted for 76.6 percent of the venereal infections in the entire army during the war.” “The Medical 196

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Department of the army insisted that the high rates of infection resulted from the fact that five of every six cases were brought into the army from civilian life by the draft.”25 But if the Medical Department was right about the origin of these cases, it would seem to underline Miller’s point that the army indeed overall helped spread the disease—to women and uninfected men. (“More streptococci!” is probably Miller’s attempt to reference the influenza epidemic of 1918 that was spread by the Great War and killed 50 million to 100 million people worldwide and 300,000 to 500,000 Americans26—at least two and half times the 122,000 U.S. soldiers that died in the war, and around half of those combat deaths are also attributable to influenza.27 Streptococcus is one of the main bacteria responsible for secondary infections in influenza cases,28 and, from the start of the 1918 epidemic, as medical experts puzzled out the disease in order to combat it, “they had isolated from cases . . . hemolytic streptococcus.”29 A minor first wave of the flu in the spring of 1918 appeared in Kansas and in military camps across the nation; returning soldiers and war transport through the East Coast is blamed for the more devastating second wave in late 1918.30) Tropic of Cancer, in its eroticism as well as its social critique, is openly and mockingly hostile in the extreme to the Great War U.S. military, even as it embraces and extends the military’s frankness and misogyny when it comes to sexual matters—routinely referring to prostitutes as “whores” (“a whore, it seemed to me, had no right to be sitting there like a lady,” writes Miller, or she had a “whore’s heart, which is not really a good heart but a lazy one, an indifferent, flaccid heart” [42]) and often enough also calling women “cunt[s]” (48). At the heart of Miller’s book, of course, is the attempt to flee the powerful hold that the charismatic and apparently promiscuous Mona exercised over him—through a reduction of women and a promiscuity of his own.31 Again, like West’s book, Miller’s refuses to scapegoat ethnic Americans for the female rejections of its lead character and instead engages in a straightforward and reactive degradation of women that is much more misogynistic than any of the narration in the 1920s mobilization novels, with the exception of that in Sound by the purposefully unsympathetic Jason—until Faulkner revises his depiction of Caddy in the appendix after World War II. These thirties novels—offbeat, alien to the mainstream of American fiction, relatively untaught—become less strange, more relevant to the canon, and more accessible when seen in the context of Great War mobilization and the postmobilization twenties plots they parody or play off of. Gone from these thirties Postmobilization Kinkiness

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novels is the twenties novels’ sublimation of mobilization wounds in tragic love stories and the send-up of the military’s chivalric new man. These mechanisms are replaced, on the one hand, by an openly perverse eroticization of the charity girl, the prostitute, and even venereal disease and, on the other hand, by a disassociation of masculinity and bravery as well as a mockery of the army’s social hygiene campaign and its YMCA idealists.

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F

aulkner’s compson “appendix (1699–1945)” to Sound, which was written, apparently, in the fall of 1945 for Malcolm Cowley’s Viking Portable Faulkner (1946),1 undermines his own novel in fundamental ways and signals the absolute demise of the postmobilization, racist promiscuity genre that he and Fitzgerald and Hemingway had staked out—and that Miller, Barnes, and West played with. Faulkner added a good deal of information about the main characters of Sound in this appendix, and in so doing, revised some of them quite significantly. Faulkner’s biographer Frederick Karl calls it “problematic . . . that the Jason of the Appendix, while not sympathetic, is a more favorable creature than the repellent man of the novel; . . . he seems to have acquired a different self.”2 But much more striking than Jason’s slight rehabilitation is Faulkner’s drastic demonization of Caddy, the beloved heroine of the 1929 novel, who may be troubled in that text, but is never uncaring, cruel, or fiendish. In the appendix, after Caddy’s failed marriage to Herbert and another failed marriage to and divorce from a “minor movingpicture magnate,” Faulkner has her, “Vanished in Paris with the German occupation, 1940.” She “was not heard of again,” except by the Jefferson County librarian who recognized her “picture” in “a photograph in color . . . from a slick magazine—a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight—a Cannebière backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car, the woman’s face hatless between a rich scarf and a seal coat, ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned; beside her a handsome lean man of middle-age in ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral” (415). It is one thing to declare, as Faulkner does at the start of Caddy’s biographical entry in the appendix, “Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it” (412). Though this already seems a particular, strong reading of Caddy, it is quite another thing to associate her, in the fall of 1945 (the publication date of the Portable Faulkner was the spring of 1946), with the German Army that the United States had just fought and defeated. For by 1945 and 1946, the German military was something even worse than just the enemy army. It was in the summer of 1944 that the story broke on the front pages of major American newspapers about the Nazi concentration camps. Prominent and front-page stories about the camps ran through the end of 1944, all through 1945, and into 1946, as camps were liberated and as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials got organized and underway. In May of 1945, just months before Faulkner finished work on his appendix, “newsreels showing conditions in the notorious Nazi ‘death’ camps . . . were released . . . in first-run and neighborhood motion-picture theaters.” The films, “probably the most frightful pictures 200

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of death and woe ever exhibited in American newsreels,” were widely shown, and viewed; though they contained “warnings to the audience not to look ‘if you are susceptible to gruesome sights,’ ” “the response apparent in theaters indicated that the patrons were determined to see. One experienced theater man attributed this unprecedented reaction to the fact that the reels also indicated there were pictures that ‘General Eisenhower and the army want you to see.’ ”3 At the remove of some sixty years—which has produced an intense familiarity with most aspects of the Nazi “final solution”—it is necessary to remember how shocking and horrific the progressive revelations about the “death camps” were in 1944 and 1945 (when they were still operating), and in 1946, with the Nuremberg Trials, and to remark that the association of German Army officers, indeed of all Germans, with the atrocities was immediate, consistent, and almost inescapable for Americans during that time period—the period in which Faulkner revised Caddy by putting her in the romantic company of a German officer, and in that form reintroduced her to his readership. To recreate that historical moment, consider a few of the articles that appeared in the New York Times: On July 3, 1944, the paper published the headline on page 3, “Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps”; the article detailed the numbers of Jews killed through April 15th of the year and went on to describe the executions and cremations of the bodies. Other articles explicitly stated that the mass killing was still going on in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.4 On August 30, 1944, a front-page story declared, “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp: Victims Put at 1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematoria.” “Nazi Death Factory Shocks Germans on a Forced Tour” was the front-page headline on April 18, 1945; it detailed that “scores” of these visitors, “including German nurses, just fainted away,” at the sight of “more than 20,000 nondescript prisoners, many of them barely living, who were all that remained of the normal complement of 80,000. The Germans were able to evacuate the others before we overran the place.”5 On April 25, 1945, a page-3 headline read, “War Crimes Groups to Inspect Camps”; on May 2, “Camp Horror Films Are Exhibited Here” ran on page 3. The articles continued in 1946 as the International Military Tribunal met in Nuremberg. “Films Back Charges of German Crimes” was the page-6 headline on February 20, 1946. The article began, “A motion picture that piled horror on horror to such an extent that war-hardened army guards gasped and swore under their breath and the defendants fidgeted or averted their eyes.”6 Meanwhile, opinion pieces printed in the Times—letters to the editor as well as Op Ed pieces—consistently laid the blame for the atrocities on the entire The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the Mobilization Novel 201

German Army and indeed the entire German populace. Fine distinctions were certainly not being made at the time between German Army staff generals, of the sort Faulkner put Caddy with, and Nazi S.S. officers, between regular German commanders and architects of the “final solution.” A July 7, 1944, “letter to the Times,” by the Consul General of Czechoslovakia, just a few days after the initial story of the concentration camps broke, set the pattern and was titled “All Germans Are Indicted: Murders in ‘Death Camps’ Are Held to Involve Whole People.” “These Nazi death camps will remain forever an indelible dark spot on the pages of history of the German people. To be fully understood, I do not mean the pages of Nazi gangsterdom but the pages of history of the whole German people. World public opinion should ask all the German people if they too do spontaneously protest against these gruesome crimes which surpass any beastly acts ever committed in the dark barbarian ages.”7 The next day, an Op Ed piece, titled “No Peace with Butchers,” concurred: “Presently the murderers are likely to wash their hands and suggest that we get together on a compromise peace. It is time to make clear that there will never be any kind of peace whatsoever for them alive and at large, and that it will be a hard and stern peace for all those in any Axis country who could have rebelled against their crimes and did not.”8 A July 17, 1944, letter from an American professor in Indiana was headlined “German Rights Forfeited: Indiscriminate Killing of Civilians Held to Put People beyond Pale.” As concentration camps were being liberated, American Army officers reiterated the same position to the Germans themselves: “This is a prime example of your vaunted German culture,” a colonel from Kentucky “caustically” told 600 German citizens whom he brought from a surrounding village to see the “death camps.” An article titled “U.S. Officer Blames Germans for Crimes” quoted him as telling the Germans, “You may say you are not responsible but you supported the regime that committed such crimes.”9 In the Times’s breezy feature column titled “About,” the paper noted, on May 27, 1945, under the headline “Death Camps,” “A thoughtful reader asks us to remind the Germans that they have killed all their chances for consideration—‘killed them one by one, ten by ten, at Buchenwald and Maidenek.’ ” There was also an ironic editor’s note titled “Those Generals” and addressed to “The German General Staff, Somewhere in the Wreckage”: “Gens, Your offer to take charge of what’s left of Germany is hereby acknowledged. In reply would state: When we deem it advisable to entrust the government of 65,000,000 truculent political illiterates to a bunch of human game cocks, will let you know. Yours, The Allies.”10 For Faulkner, then, to put Caddy in the Paris of the 1940 German occupation in the company of a “German staffgeneral,” and to do so in 1945 or 1946, is 202

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not only to brand her a traitor; in those years, it is also inevitably to associate her with one of the greatest and most shocking atrocities in human history. His promiscuous, “charity girl” heroine has gone from being a troubled but compassionate figure in the 1929 novel to a horribly uncaring and evil one in the 1946 Viking Portable—seeking romance and sexual fulfillment among the demonized German elite. Indeed, in this context, to describe her as “ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned,” is to make her an almost inhuman fiend,11 reminiscent of the vampire figure of the pre-Great War film A Fool There Was with Theda Bara, but much worse of course because of the reality of the Nazi horrors. Faulkner’s decision to conjure a printed image, in fact, the “slick magazine” photo of beautiful, ageless Caddy and the “handsome lean” German officer, a photo smacking of “luxury and money and sunlight,” might indeed suggest to readers a startling visual contrast to the newsreel pictures that Americans were actually seeing come out of Germany in that period, “scenes of piles of the dead, pitiful specimens of the ‘living dead,’ the crematoriums in which victims were disposed of and other bodies exhumed from graves,” scenes “received by audiences in silence or with muttered expressions of outrage.”12 That Faulkner is engaging in an assault against his own promiscuous female heroine—whom he once referred to as his “heart’s darling”13—seems beyond question. It also seems clear that he is part of the backlash against the new female sexuality and power that he at least tolerated in the late 1920s—and his appendix belongs in the company of all the 1940s noir films that continued or revitalized the “vamp” literature and films of the teens and twenties and transformed the “promiscuous” woman into a calculating seductress and betrayer.14 If Faulkner wanted to damn Caddy and her liberated desire, he could hardly have given her promiscuous trajectory a more ignominious endpoint in 1946. Once again getting involved with a soldier, she has become a nightmare version of the Great War charity girl; give her a man in a uniform, in khakis, and with ribbons and tabs, and she has become indifferent to whether he is an enemy combatant or even a war criminal. As if to say, in shrill tones that rival even those of the American Great War military authorities, indiscriminate sexuality, a dangerous evil in itself (immoral and unhygienic), can lead to an association with diabolical evil, profound horror. In fact, Faulkner has done in his appendix, then, what Quentin was trying to but never managed to achieve in the 1929 novel: to make Caddy’s promiscuity seem horrible enough to be deserving of universal ostracism and a special shelf in hell (his strategy of course was to claim to their father that she committed incest with him). Quentin seemed hopelessly and archaically romantic, The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the Mobilization Novel 203

a pitiable or gently ironic take on the Great War military’s “new man,” in the 1929 text; now it turns out in the 1946 version that he—and maybe the meritocratic military that Faulkner then resented—was right all along. In the appendix, Faulkner has indeed made Caddy a candidate for special punishment. The revision goes even further, as the Victorian sexual outlook of the military training camp authority is resurrected. The woman who finds Caddy’s picture—and sets out, like Quentin had, to save her, but this time from real and not fantastical “danger” (418)—is “a mouse-sized and mouse-colored” librarian named “Melissa Meek” (417) “who had never married” (413): in other words, a meek, mousy, virginal schoolmarm. And as she makes her way back from visiting Jason and then Dilsey with the noble, but naïve intention of mounting a rescue for Caddy from the German enemy (“We must save her!” [416]), she crosses paths with the prostitutes who have served the American soldiers and sailors on leave from World War II: “the homeless young women . . . who for two years now had lived from day to day in pullmans and hotels when they were lucky and in daycoaches and busses and stations when they were not, pausing only long enough to drop their foals in charity wards of policestations and then move on again” (419). What is happening is that Faulkner’s 1946 appendix essentially concurs with the Great War military authority’s categories for sorting women, in which there are sainted female virgins (such as the librarian Melissa Meek—whose name of course reminds the reader of the biblical promise that “the meek shall inherit the earth”) and careless prostitutes or immoral “charity girls” who abandon their children. And the appendix also agrees with the World War II military authority’s view. For the World War II army basically revived the World War I propaganda about and policy toward prostitution and promiscuous women: again, red-light districts were shut down, thousands of prostitutes were interned, and “promiscuous girls” were targeted in a propaganda campaign.15 The reference to “foals” dropped off of course reminds the reader of Caddy with her daughter Quentin: we understand into which category Caddy falls. And, indeed, even the innocent librarian comes to understand that “Caddy doesn’t want to be saved” (420); she is one of those who is willfully lost and cannot be redeemed. In keeping with Faulkner’s depiction of these “homeless young women” who sexually served the troops, and given the propaganda and repressive practices aimed at charity girls and prostitutes during the Great War, and once again at prostitutes and “victory girls,” “khaki-wackies,” or “good-time Charlottes” in the Second World War, there is another way to consider Caddy’s treachery. Again, during the First World War, President Wilson, the military authorities, 204

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the CTCA, and their reform affiliates (such as the YMCA) all made use of a trope that compared the German enemy to venereal disease and the “whores” who carried it. “Dangerous as the German Army is to our soldiers, it is not as dangerous as this enemy left unconquered,” World War I–era reformers declared in the Literary Digest.16 As we have seen, an army poster claimed that “A German Bullet Is Cleaner Than A Whore.” After the war was won, Wilson juxtaposed the “victory forced from the Central Powers” to the “victory over” the “unseen enemy” of sexually transmitted disease.17 Similar sorts of comparisons were revived during World War II: specifically, venereal disease, and the women who transmitted it, were seen as allies of the Axis Powers. The American Journal of Public Health stated, “prostitution is an Axis partner.”18 One army poster from World War II read, “Axis Agents” and pictured a woman’s face, in front of which she held up a glass of bubbly. The glass was labeled “venereal diseases,” and the woman was labeled “prostitute,” “street walker,” “pick-up.” The bottom of the poster read: “A Toast to Hitler and Hirohito.” Another poster showed a female personification of “V.D.”—with long hair, a low-cut dress, and a skull for a face—striding arm in arm with Hitler and Hirohito. The caption at the bottom read, “Worst of the Three.”19 When Faulkner delivers Caddy, his World War I–era charity girl, over to the German staff general in the appendix, it is as if he has literalized these World War II metaphors: the “promiscuous girl” actually becomes an ally of the German Army. But, even if Faulkner wanted now to return to the CTCA’s Great War sexual morality or, more topically, to demonstrate his agreement with the World War II army’s similar attitude to promiscuous women, there were certainly plenty of ways that he could have damned and doomed Caddy. Why might Faulkner have wanted to bring the Third Reich into his novel? Perhaps because he had a double agenda here. Considering the possibility of another such agenda, it might be said that Faulkner’s particular association of Caddy with the German war effort and, inevitably at this point in time, with its “barbarous” and horrifying extermination of the Jews, can’t help but put anti-Semitic aspects of his 1929 text in a new light. In the 1929 novel, both Jason and Quentin engage in anti-Semitic rhetoric; Quentin’s comments are ironic and “witty”; Jason’s are bitter and resentful. But their anti-Semitism obviously pales in the face of that of the Germans during World War II. What the appendix tells the reader is that their anti-Semitism was of course relatively harmless, and that Caddy should be associated with the truly horrible version of anti-Semitism. If Frederick Karl is right and Jason is to some degree rehabilitated in the appendix, it is perhaps in part because his petty, racist The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the Mobilization Novel 205

nastiness and name calling is nothing compared to the cold-bloodedness, the astounding indifference to others’ suffering, involved in Caddy’s liaison with a German officer. More to the point would be that the reference to the German Army (and Caddy as “cold serene and damned” [415]) serves to distance Faulkner from Jason’s bitter and developed anti-Semitism and Quentin’s comic and offhand anti-Semitic and anti-Italian remarks as well (and Quentin is obviously closer to Faulkner’s affections). Here it helps to know that between 1929 and 1945, Faulkner apparently had himself moved from a “mild anti-Semitism to even philo-Semitism” at certain moments, according to his biographer.20 “Never virulent, never dominantly anti-Semitic like Hemingway . . . ,” Karl asserts, “Faulkner had used Jews in stereotypical ways, making them responsible for the kind of civilization he found unacceptable.”21 After all, to return to a previous point, the Jason of the 1929 text is repulsive in part because he resembles the stereotyped Jews he hates—and Faulkner in 1929 seems to like neither Jason nor the Jews. But World War II had apparently been a “turning point” for Faulkner, in terms of his “attitude toward Jews”: according to his biographer, he noticed Jews serving and dying for America.22 (Perhaps Faulkner “missed”—or in fact resented—the same reality in World War I because he had been competing with Jews for a position in the military and had lost out in that competition; in his forties in the 1940s, Faulkner wasn’t trying to serve in World War II.) In a letter written during the war that presented “the Faulkner that everyone wants to believe in,”23 at least in regard to Jews, Faulkner wrote the following: Mr. Robert Haas is vice president of Random House. . . . During the time when I would be broke, year after year sometimes, I had only to write to him and he would send me money—no hope of getting it back, unless I wrote another book. He’s a Jew. He had an only son, and a daughter. In ’40, the son withdrew from Yale and became a Navy pilot. In ’41, the girl about 20, joined the Women’s Ferry Squadron, is now flying aeroplanes from factories to bases. The boy was flying torpedo planes off carriers . . . in Pacific. He was killed last week. The girl is still flying. All Jews. I just hope I dont run into some hundred percent American Legionnaire until I feel better.24 Jason is the sort who would have been a hundred percent American Legionnaire, and Faulkner is now clearly, in this letter, distinguishing himself from Jason’s brand of anti-Semitism in the 1929 text. The Compson appendix, then, in 206

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light of the historical moment and of Faulkner’s recent rethinking of his attitude to Jews, can plausibly be imagined to involve his nod, via Caddy, to the reality of the anti-Semitic horror in Germany. The reference to the German staffgeneral, then, kills two birds with one stone for Faulkner: it obviously demonizes Caddy while subtly allowing Faulkner to register his rejection of his own previous, more or less casual anti-Semitism. The appendix serves as a kind of retraction: of his anti-Semitism and his implicit criticism of the Great War military authority. This letter of Faulkner’s about World War II Jewish pilots also underlines the way women in general get the short end of the stick in the appendix. Although Faulkner is clearly aware of female military service in the letter, the appendix notes only male soldiers and sailors in the streets; all the women there are prostitutes or promiscuous “victory girls.” The Caddy entry in the appendix indeed marks a stark return to traditional stereotypes of gender and, specifically, a double standard about promiscuity 25—again, the stereotypes of the repressive World War I CTCA, picked up again by the World War II Social Protection Division—stereotypes at odd with World War II realities and with Faulkner’s own sense of things in 1929. Faulkner’s dovetailing of Caddy and the German officer in France and in Paris may have a broader significance as well—the logic of the association of the “promiscuous woman” with evil may not be exclusively Faulkner’s and the army’s: it may signal something more general about the backlash against female sexuality and power in the 1940s. It may signal, indeed, the rationality of a post– World War II return to the status quo that is more intense than the post–Great War “return to normalcy” that President Harding had called for. The 1920s “return to normalcy”—though it clearly involved the promotion of a revised nativism hostile to immigrants and ethnic Americans and a call for women to leave their wartime industry jobs and give them “back” to returning soldiers26—arguably did not involve a return to traditional female roles.27 The post–World War II return to an earlier status quo most obviously resembled the 1920s post–Great War recoil in its Red Scare paranoia about foreign-influenced internal dissidents (the Cold War moment was an intensification of that earlier, 1919 to early twenties Scare) and in its women leaving their wartime factory jobs, but the intensity of the push to return women to a traditional domesticity arguably set the post–World War II paranoia apart from the post–World War I anxiety. Post–World War I Europe, especially France and Paris, had obviously held a glamour for Americans and American authors. American writers, including The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the Mobilization Novel 207

Hemingway and Fitzgerald, had flocked to Europe and to France in particular. Brett is based in Paris; Daisy visits France for a year; even Caddy gets there eventually. Paris and New York were arguably the twin capitals of the 1920s cultural revolution in music, mores, dress, female sexuality, and literature. There was much exchange between the cities: a style exchange and an exchange of people. Indeed, in these novels, Daisy is mostly in New York, of course; Jake is living in Paris, but his best buddy Bill is based in New York. But by the time Caddy “vanished in Paris” in 1940, it is “with the German occupation” (413); Paris is no longer the same place it was in the 1920s; France no longer represents the same thing at all to Americans. The previous sensuality, glamour, and excitement of Paris and France—recapitulated now disturbingly in the photo of Caddy on the Riviera because it includes the German officer—gave way to an image of a fallen France, a France of “defeat, bitterness, bewilderment and humiliation,”28 a France that was weak, even cowardly in its quick capitulation to the Germans, and its subsequent cooperation with the Nazis. It became common for Americans, “including many ‘military experts’ ” to “suggest that France gave up without a fight—either because of division among themselves, cowardice and softness, or widespread treason.” People in America were apt to “sneer at France and shake our . . . heads about the sad effects of France’s decadence and cowardice and corruption.”29 There was a tremendous amount of discussion in American newspapers about France’s ignominious fall and collaboration with the Nazis. Words like cowardice, treason, weakness, and decadence were routinely applied not only to the French leadership that cooperated with the Nazis, but also to entire sectors of French society. The New York Times could assert in 1945 that the Vichy leader Marshal Petain, who had embraced the Nazis, “personifies certain weaknesses of France,” including “a blight of decadence in certain sections of French society.”30 When, before Pearl Harbor, American military leaders wanted to warn Americans about the need to enter the war, they sometimes called up the example of France, its supposed cowardice and corruption, and its defeat: “The Maginot Line of the 3,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean will prove as useless a defense of the United States as did the Maginot Line of France prove useless in their defense, if we permit cowardice . . . , greed, and corruption to rule behind the lines.”31 And, indeed, the French sensuality, glamour, and bold decadence of the 1920s could easily be reinterpreted, in the cold light of the 1940s, as symptoms of a decadent weakness, greed, and softness. White American writers did not flock to Paris after World War II, as they had after World War I; there was a lingering revulsion felt against the French nation. From the immediate end of 208

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the war, it was evident that things were very different. When peace envoys from twenty-one nations gathered in Paris after World War II, the mood was nothing like it had been for the same event in 1919 after the Great War. “Anyone who witnessed Paris in 1919 and those masses of singing, cheering French with whom were mingling exalted, jubilating visitors from every land, who wept with joy as they saw President Woodrow Wilson riding and bowing stiffly as he drove down Champs Élysées on his first arrival, can scarcely recognize this Paris of today,” a writer declared in the New York Times in 1946. Then there had been “French gaiety such as perhaps had never been equaled before and certainly has never been seen anywhere since”; post–World War II, “the mood and the entire atmosphere . . . has changed”: it was “somber.” This was not a moment when “strangers embraced.”32 One reason the post–World War II peace conference was held in Paris was that it was still a “beautiful city—left standing unscathed almost alone among the capitals of Europe.”33 But Paris’s unscathed beauty itself cut two ways: it was another reminder that Paris had ceded its territory and its beautiful cities to the Germans, rather than fight to the finish. London had been bombed, of course, and another accusation targeted at the French was that, with a supreme decadence, they had given up their freedom in order to protect their cities and monuments and architectural treasures: their beautiful things. In much the same way, those wartime articles in the American press that had reported, with a weird upbeat tone, that life and the fashion industry in Paris were going on pretty much the same under German rule were hardly entirely comforting.34 The photo of Caddy with the German staff general in front of the untouched “Cannebière backdrop” on the Riviera and wrapped in an “expensive” sports car and “rich” clothes was another disturbing reminder of France’s dubious surrender (and the “slick magazine” the photo appears in is a particularly troubling example, perhaps, of the health of the French fashion and advertising industries): part of the problem of avoiding a fight to the end was that the Germans could enjoy the luxury, the lifestyle, and the unspoiled natural and historical treasures of a France that was given to them. The point is that the revulsion against or recoil from France was also a revulsion against the exciting sensuality and decadence that it had stood for. Though Caddy had never been to Paris before 1940, there is an association to be made between Caddy and Paris: it is part of the same association that links Brett and Paris. Again, Paris in the 1920s, along with and maybe even more than New York in the 1920s, was a center of the new woman—for Americans. For example, “the ‘quickie’ divorce was all the rage, and Paris was its center. . . . In 1925, scarcely The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the Mobilization Novel 209

a week went by without a front-page [International Herald] Tribune story of American women granted a Paris divorce. . . . Hundreds of other American women divorced that year in Paris.”35 (Indeed, Jake of Sun is a Paris journalist in the business of reporting on American divorces in 1925; Jake asks Cohn if he “know[s] any dirt” and follows up, “None of your exalted connections getting divorces?” [9–10].) Caddy’s association with Paris makes sense, just as her association with “Hollywood California,” where she is married in “1920 to a minor movingpicture magnate” (413), also makes sense, of a somewhat different kind; Hollywood was not only a center of glamour and the new woman, like Paris and New York, it was also the major purveyor of a darker vision of women that predated the 1920s: and in the 1910s and ’20s, it was churning out films that “turned women” not only into “sexual objects” but into “vamps”: movies like A Fool There Was, “The Hell Cat, The She Devil, The Scarlet Woman, The Sin Woman, The Mortal Sin, and Sins of Mothers.”36 For Caddy (associated with Hollywood) and Paris both to go over to the Germans thus has a certain kind of cultural logic: the sensuous, promiscuous woman and her sensuous, promiscuous city show their true, corrupt, or at least misguided, colors. In 1945 and 1946, many in the American nation might have reverberated to Nick Carraway’s comment, at the start of Gatsby, as he reflects on the whole story he is about to tell: “When I came from the East”—here, read Europe— “I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (6). This passage might have meant more to Americans in 1945 than in 1925, when Fitzgerald’s novel was first published—and many more Americans actually had the opportunity to experience Gatsby in the mid-forties, as an Armed Services Edition of the novel had been published in 1945, and “155,000 copies (nearly eight times the 1925 printing)” had been distributed free of charge “to military personnel.”37 The carnage and “the holocaust” (170) that Nick experiences in New York is nothing, of course, to the carnage and the Jewish Holocaust that Americans would discover in Europe toward the end of World War II. (Paris, by the way, had lost something like 90 percent of its Jewish population to deportations to the concentration camps.38) Many Americans indeed “wanted the world to be . . . at a sort of moral attention forever” after that, and part of that moral attention meant a rejection of the sensuality and decadence that was associated now with a corrupt and defunct Europe. Another part of that moral attention meant that for the serious-minded, casual anti-Semitism was now untenable. The Nazis’ genocidal anti-Semitism had changed the meaning of anti-Semitism. (And, to a much lesser extent, the 210

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Nazis grouping together of Jews and Anglos as their enemy, their tendency, for example, to construct acts of the French resistance as a “Jewish . . . and AngloSaxon” plot,39 also helped change the relationship between Jews and Anglo Americans.) In the decade or so following the end of World War II, Jewish quotas disappeared entirely from universities, perhaps in part in direct response to the Holocaust.40 The ethnically paranoid, new woman–tolerant, antimilitary but pro-war postmobilization novel of the 1920s was now impossible. Two of its major ingredients—the sympathetic “charity girl” or promiscuous woman who engages in extramarital sex with ethnic or outsider military men, and the suspicious ethnic American, often Jewish or Jewish-connected, who is the beneficiary of a brave new meritocratic world favored by the army—had disappeared, disappeared with Caddy into the Nazi occupation of Paris. With the ethnic scapegoat unavailable, Faulkner at least turned the blame on women for a fallen world.

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Afterword

Here We Go Again World War II Mobilization Blues in William Burroughs’s Junky

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A

generation after the modernist novelists of the 1920s sang their postmobilization blues, William Burroughs published the postmodern Junky, a “short, autobiographical account of [his] addiction”1 that seems at first glance a world away from the sublimations, projections, obfuscations, and tragic romanticisms of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.2 There is no existential longing for an impossible love in Junky, to say the least. No Daisy, Brett, or Caddy onto whom Burroughs could have projected his own restlessness: only the barest presence of an unnamed wife and a series of fleeting homosexual encounters that merely punctuate the rhythms of a life devoted to heroin. There is no scapegoating of ethnic Americans. In a familiar and memorable passage from the prologue, added at the urging of the publisher, “explaining that he was from distinguished family background . . . and giving some hint how some supposedly normal citizen could arrive at being a dope fiend,”3 Burroughs wrote (under the pen name William Lee “to keep his parents from finding out he was the author”4): “The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default” (xv).5 But on closer inspection, this explanation turns out to be a little misleading: there is the issue of Burroughs’s exceptional and apparently anomalous interest in becoming an officer in the World War II military. Burroughs does generally paint the picture of himself—or the pseudonymous William Lee—as someone without “strong motivations in any other direction,” and presents the fascinating and perverse idea that because desire is necessary to health and life, junk in essence saves him from the sort of horrible, repulsive physical demise he describes later in the novel, in the case of Gary West, a sort of foil for Lee. Junk is good for Lee because junk addiction can manufacture a desire where none otherwise exists. Thinking he should be a businessman, West tries to get himself excited about this or that project, but he is fooling himself. After trying out a number of ventures he has no real interest in, “He tried out various illnesses. A throat infection settled in his heart. He lay in the McAllen Hospital and tried to see himself as a man of business impatient to get up and back to work. His projects became more and more preposterous.” Lee’s friend Roy comments of Gary West, “That man is crazy. . . . He doesn’t know what he wants.” In fact, he is just like Lee at the start of the novel: he not only doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t seem to want anything. He needs a desire. Shortly thereafter, he dies of “uremic poisoning” (107–108). 214

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In his own case, Burroughs describes in the prologue trying out various activities and professions, but without expending very much effort, and nothing seems to take. “I went to one of the Big Three Universities, where I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. . . . By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the international queer set. . . . I saw a way of life. . . . But . . . after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off on the setup. . . . When I graduated . . . I couldn’t think of any job I wanted. . . . I drifted around Europe, for a year or so. . . . I took a variety of jobs. . . . I worked as a private detective, an exterminator, a bartender. I worked in factories and offices. I played around the edges of crime.” Part of the problem seems to be that Burroughs, or Lee, has a trust fund that gives him a “hundred and fifty dollars per month.” He “did not have to have money” (xiii–xiv). But the whole thrust of this failed sampling of lifestyles and jobs, leading to his conclusion that he becomes an addict because he has no “strong motivations in any other direction” besides heroin and so “junk wins by default,” is belied by a single clause in the prologue, which is easy enough to miss: “after being rejected on physical grounds from five officer-training programs.” It is easy to miss because Lee goes on to say, seeming to integrate this experience, too, into the long list of jobs and opportunities that he halfheartedly attempts but that fail finally to interest him, “I was drafted into the army and certified fit for unlimited service. I decided I was not going to like the army and copped out on my nuthouse record” (xiv). But being drafted as a private in the World War II U.S. Army is very different from enlisting and training to become an officer, and deciding one is not going to like the army as a draftee is not the same as deciding one doesn’t want to be an officer. Despite Lee’s seeming nonchalance about and characteristic “cool[ing] off on the setup” of the army, it seems that something different and in fact singular has occurred in this case. After all, and quite uncharacteristically, Lee tries very hard indeed to become an officer: he is rejected from no less than five officertraining programs; despite the self-portrait of someone drifting, of “a chronic malingerer” (xii), applying five times shows real determination and direction. It should be underlined here for the sake of clarity that though Junky was sold as “lurid paperback” fiction and Burroughs used a pen name, he was describing his actual experience with the military in the prologue. If anything, the prologue, due to its conciseness and brevity, and perhaps a desire on Burroughs’s part to disguise the embarrassment involved, downplays the huge effort he put forth in his attempt to become an officer (for example, he even learns how to fly a plane).6 Here We Go Again

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There is no doubt that despite the thrust of the prologue and its conclusion about a lack of motivation, Burroughs really wanted to become an officer, but he was simply stymied in his substantial efforts to do so. Much like Hemingway and Faulkner, who wanted to be officers and pilots—and something like Fitzgerald who could never rise above lieutenant—Burroughs wanted a place of distinction in the army and tried to become a pilot but was rejected by the military, and, again like Hemingway and Faulkner, rejected “on physical grounds.” Burroughs’s decision to refuse being drafted after being rejected by the army on physical grounds, by the way, makes perfect sense: in his mind, there is a contradiction here between the judgment of the draft board and that of the officer-training programs; either the army is rejecting him from the officertraining programs on false grounds or he really isn’t fit for unlimited service as a draftee. Naturally, Burroughs would feel messed about and mistreated by the army—just as Fitzgerald’s Anthony Patch does in The Beautiful and Damned, who is likewise rejected from officers’ training camp on physical grounds then drafted as a private. And again, being an officer in the army is something quite different from being an ordinary draftee. As his biographer summed up Burroughs’s state of mind after he was drafted, In Jefferson Barracks in the spring of 1942 there was one unhappy William Burroughs. He had volunteered his services in a number of quarters that he felt were commensurate with his intellect and abilities and had been rejected by them all. And now all of a sudden he was classified 1-A in the infantry. Brimming over with resentment, Burroughs thought, if I’m going into this thing, I’m going in as an officer, not as a fuckin’ private. He liked the idea of danger and combat, but he wanted to be giving orders not taking them. He wanted to be wearing stripes and getting a lot of respect.7 In short, junk doesn’t simply win by default; Burroughs has his mobilization wound. His use of junk might in fact be seen as self-medication for that wound. He also has his obfuscation or mask for that wound: a pose of lack of motivation. And so Junky proper—which thus starts, strategically, to resemble the twenties novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner—begins, “My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945.” And if Burroughs’s use of junk is indeed a way to treat his own wartime wound, inflicted by the United States military, it seems altogether fitting that, the first time he uses 216

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it, it comes in the form of “syrettes of morphine tartrate” from “a flat yellow box” (2), which is to say, (stolen) right out of an army medic’s pouch8—it is morphine meant for the treatment of war wounds. Moreover, the first acquaintance we hear of, the man who stole it, is an immigrant and ex-recruit, “a man named Norton . . . whose real name was Morelli or something like that, [who] had been discharged from the peacetime army for forging a pay check, and was classified 4-F for reasons of bad character. . . . Norton was trying to improve his English and achieve a smooth, affable manner. . . . Norton was a hard-working thief. . . . One day he called me up and said he had stolen a Tommy gun” (1). A Gatsby figure, writ small. My point here is not that Burroughs’s long-term junk addiction and counterculture rebellion should simply be read as a sour grapes reaction to his rejection and seemingly dishonest treatment by the military. It is rather that, in our post–Vietnam era, we tend to forget how powerful the call of the military was to American young men—specifically, young male writers—in previous generations, in eras when the military was something like the supreme arbitrator of manhood: even a candidate as unlikely as the lifelong and unrepentant heroin addict, William Burroughs, wanted and tried hard to be a leader in the army. And then he wrote a thinly fictionalized, autobiographical novel in which his ambition and rejection was transmuted and absorbed into a grand indifference. These 1920s modernist novels of “impossible love,” like this 1950s postmodern novel of “absent desire,” are all, on another level, tales of a love or desire unrequited by the military. Given the U.S. involvement in war in the twentieth century—and the tremendous social upset, or accelerated modernizing, that mobilizing for world wars involves—it is not surprising that there is a rich vein in American literature of what could be called mobilization fiction, including, even more specifically, what might be termed the fiction of military rejection, but it is a vein that has so far been mostly untapped. The American modernists prose writers Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner have successfully put one over on us. I am not referring primarily or simply to the singular but usually ignored fact that none of the lasting American literature about the Great War was written by soldiers in that conflict: neither Hemingway, nor Faulkner, nor Fitzgerald (nor Dos Passos, nor Cummings, for that matter) were soldiers in World War I. Rather, the larger ruse is that decades and decades later, these modernists’ supposed invention of a brand new, modern literary style in the postwar 1920s, free in some significant way from the past—but actually Here We Go Again

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involving a careful camouflage of their embarrassing wartime mobilization histories that underlie their most famous novels—still holds sway. Their unwitting allies, the New Critics, ratified their myth of themselves and of a “modernist” literature in which literary style is the supreme issue, the primary issue. Gatsby went on to be for many “The Great American Novel,” and Hemingway and Faulkner went on to win Nobel Prizes. But even the rejection of the New Criticism and the rise of the New Historicism haven’t deprived the prose modernists of the protection they continue to receive because of their identification with literary style—with plotlessness, with the materiality of the signifier: their personal and social histories in the “premodernist” 1910s, although in evidence in their biographies, have remained to a significant extent critically cordoned off from their 1920s novels. Though often deeply critical of the modernists’ politics, New Historical and Cultural Studies critics, suspicious of biographical study like the New Critics, have mostly taken the modernists’ bait and followed their cues: praised or criticized, the modernists continue to be assessed in terms of the meaning of their stylistic innovation. Given the American prose modernists masterful self-invention and the literary critical movements that have dominated the last half century—along, of course, with the interesting-enough achievements in style of the modernists—it becomes easy to begin to see how their refigurations of and reactions to the partly meritocratic World War I mobilization have been missed even in these most read and most taught American novels. Perhaps what bothered Hemingway so much about Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, beyond jealousy over his friend’s book publication, that is, bothered him to such an extent that he apparently wanted to mock half-ethnic Irish Fitzgerald to some degree in his portrait of the ethnic Jewish novelist Cohn, is Fitzgerald’s failure to comport himself as a modernist whose trademark will be the new style, and whose new style will in turn be a proof of his detachment from any mobilization history. For Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel would be “literary speculation” that “occurred in times past” 9—definitely not modern because of Fitzgerald’s double failure to submerge plot and adequately to obscure or mask his mobilization wounds and jealousies. For whereas Faulkner never even mentions World War I in Sound, and whereas Hemingway grants his Anglo alter ego Jake the dignity of being a pilot injured on a combat mission (sparing Jake his own relatively undignified experience of being a Red Cross aid injured on a delivery run of cigarettes, chocolates, and postcards, an experience indeed that he felt the need to embellish and make more heroic10), Fitzgerald’s title character is an ethnic American war hero, and part of the “conventional enough” suspense of the novel is derived 218

The 1930s and After

from his creating mystery about Gatsby’s road to success and then revealing that the lower-class, ethnic American actually was launched on his way in army training camp. And Fitzgerald has his Anglo narrator express sympathy for “the great ethnic,” even at the end! (One can imagine Hemingway thinking, “Does Fitzgerald, half-Irish himself, half-identify with the ethnic?”) But the fact that these reflections and refractions of an unprecedented egalitarian mobilization have been missed in Fitzgerald’s novel where there is, in the case of Gatsby’s career anyway, relatively little displacement or transposition indicates that there has been much accident involved in the successful obfuscation, over the long term, desired especially by the likes of Hemingway and Faulkner. These modernists could not have counted on the fact that the U.S. Army’s extension of meritocracy to ethnic (but not black) Americans would long be forgotten—and is only slowly being relearned now, in the early years of the twenty-first century. Nor could these modernists have counted on the rise of another received idea that would play into their hands: namely, the fact that the army’s World War I intelligence testing program, which, backed by other personnel methods, played a role in this wartime meritocracy, would be remembered today exclusively for its postwar interpretation in the discriminatory service of immigration restriction. The modernists were geniuses of self-styling and self-promotion, and they also got unusually lucky in their project of selfdefinition. We are now poised to reassess them.

Here We Go Again

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Notes

a b b r e v i at i o n s AGO

Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Central Decimal Files, 1917–1925, Record Group 407

CCP

Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army in the Adjutant General’s Office

CP

Committee on Psychology

CPFM

Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded

MID-WDGS

Records of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department General Staff, 1917–1941, General Correspondence, Record Group 165

MRSD-NRC

Medicine and Related Sciences Division of the National Research Council

RG

Record Group

n o t e o n a r c h i va l c i t at i o n s All archival citations using the above abbreviations refer to records of the World War I United States military at the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. Some citations of these National Archives World War I papers lack specifying record group and document numbers (namely, those referring to the CPFM and the CP of the MRSD-NRC and some of those referring to the CCP); in all cases, I have provided as complete a citation as I could. The archival research here is based on two visits to the National Archives: the first in 1983, the second in 2007. In the intervening quarter century, I managed to preserve the documents I collected, but the full citations were lost; in addition, the National Archives moved from Washington, D.C., to College Park, Maryland, and they were reorganized. The second trip to the archives was taken in part to relocate the documents I had collected in 1983 and to provide specifying numbers for them. Because of the reorganization of the archives, this proved in some cases impossible for the National Archives staff, even though references to the agencies’ 221

papers at issue existed in older National Archives handbooks. (For these references, see Solon J. Buck, Handbook of Federal World War Agencies and Their Records, 1917–1921, The National Archives, Publication Number 24 [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943], 451–452.) In terms of recovering documents pertaining to the military’s intelligence testing program, the archive staff had the most success by referencing the military’s own World War I code of “702” or “AG 702” (Adjutant General 702) which referred to “psychological” or “mental.”

chapter 1 1. Michael S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986), 18–19. 2. Page numbers in parentheses for A Farewell to Arms refer to Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (London: Granada, 1980). 3. Nor is it so much, as has more recently been argued, that these writers’ modernist “fetishism” of the signifier or of language itself issued out of an analogous postwar nativist fetishism of “racial” identity, but instead that Fitzgerald and Hemingway, at least, experiencing competition with American-born ethnic Americans, felt the need to distinguish themselves from these perceived outsiders on “alternative” linguistic grounds, now that being a native speaker of English was no longer a mark of distinction. See chapter 2. 4. By ethnic Americans, I mean individuals from ethnic minority communities (excluding African Americans), including immigrants and descendents of immigrants. (I will use the term “Anglo” to mean Anglo American.) 5. The prime example is Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), vii, 78–79, 238–239. Of the three writers at issue here, Cooperman writes about Faulkner and Hemingway. 6. “The term charity girls originally referred to young women, generally of the working class, who used sexual relations as barter in the heterosocial world of commercial amusements in the late nineteenth century.” Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 117. Occasionally—and this can be confusing here—historians have used the term charity girl, referring to the original nineteenth-century meaning, to describe the flapper. Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 1, 14. 7. Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 20. 8. Just to be clear: what I am calling mobilization or postmobilization fiction is not a subset of war literature. 9. John Dos Passos’s One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), Dos Passos, Novels 1920–1925 (New York: Library of America, 2003); E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922). I will refer to other “mobilization” works, by the principal authors and others, but not analyze them in separate chapters or sections.

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Notes to Pages 4–8

10. John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 112. The main character in Cummings’s novel gets into trouble with authorities and ends up in French jail largely because of such a feeling of mistreatment and underappreciation. E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room (New York: Penguin, 1999), 5, 13–14. 11. Michael S. Reynolds, “False Dawn: The Sun Also Rises Manuscript,” ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 120. 12. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). Jacobson observes that the Holocaust was a turning point in regard to the American conception of Jews—and in regard to the rise of the conception of “ethnicity” (187–188). See also Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 110–111. 13. This newer view of these novels, in terms of race issues, is in large part due to a study that I will address, and distinguish my argument from, in chapter 2, Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). In 1921, a stopgap measure, the Immigration Restriction Act, also known as the Emergency Immigration Act, was enacted, and the 1924 act extended the 1921 act indefinitely and made its restrictions yet more severe. Brewing for decades, but in immediate reaction to the post–Great War Red Scare and the fact that more than 800,000 foreigners had entered the United States in 1921, this legislation put a cap on immigration for the first time and involved limiting immigration from specific countries. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 56. 14. On the army’s use of the term whore in literature and posters for soldiers, see subsequent chapters. 15. Such quotas or restrictions on Jews have been extensively documented. On such quotas at undergraduate schools, see, for example, Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). On such quotas at undergraduate and medical schools, see Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920–1955,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56:2 (2001), 140–167. On such quotas at medical schools, see Charlotte G. Borst, “Choosing the Student Body: Masculinity, Culture, and the Crisis of Medical School Admissions, 1920–1950,” History of Education Quarterly 42:2 (2002), 181–214. 16. A major change occurred between the 1890s and the 1920s in the ethnic American population, and, consequently, in these modernist novels. Modernist writers were no longer dealing only with immigrants who arrived in America during the Great

Notes to Pages 8–9

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Immigration and lived in slums, but also with ethnic Americans who were American born, did not speak with foreign accents or in dialect, and were not lower class. Walter Michaels is right to point out that “the major writers of the Progressive period— London, Dreiser, Wharton—were comparatively indifferent to questions of both racial and national identity” (Michaels, Our America, 8), but I would add that this might be because they weren’t particularly threatened by the competition from the children of immigrants that would come a generation later. 17. Sometimes more than one such “love triangle” per novel. 18. Though the place of the African American is obviously a major theme in Faulkner’s novel, it gets minor treatment in both Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s novels. 19. Cather actually uses the phrase new men to describe American soldiers in One of Ours (1922). Her hero, Claude Wheeler, exemplifies the traits the army wanted to instill in its soldiers: he is chivalrous and chaste. Hermione Lee, and Willa Cather’s One of Ours, quoted in Lee, “Introduction” to Cather, One of Ours (London: Virago, 1986), xiii, xxii, xiv, xxi. 20. This awful moment when the self-deceiving character realizes he has fooled himself is comparable to the moment in the seduction novel when the woman realizes the man is out to seduce her and has deceived her, generally with false promises of marriage. 21. It might be pointed out that certain European modernist texts that seem to share a few of the textual elements of the American postmobilization, racist promiscuity novel do not belong to its genre. Given similarities in characters between James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the American novels at issue, the plot contrast between Joyce’s novel and the American ones is revealing about the American genre. Most important, the major ethnic (Jewish) character in Ulysses is not a sexual interloper; rather, his promiscuous, native Irish wife is cheating on him with a Gentile, and ethnic Bloom and Irish Dedalus are not in competition (say, over women) as they are of different generations. There isn’t racial tension between them. Of course, there wasn’t a large ethnic population from southern or eastern Europe in Ireland vying for positions and ranks among the volunteers in the army, and Joyce wasn’t interested in getting into the war but rather avoiding it; he was 32 in 1914 and living in Italy. 22. I am not, of course, claiming that writers before modernism did not transfigure pain they compulsively wrote about but did not address directly, only that the transfiguration in the modernist fiction at issue here is based on “mobilization wounds.” 23. Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Introduction,” ed. Bruccoli, New Essays on The Great Gatsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6, 7. 24. The phrase “100 percent Americanism,” newly fashioned in the era, is quoted in David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 67. 25. For this reason, in my view, the “naked” term modernism, at least when it comes to prose, should be used with suspicion, and types of modernism—one being mobilization fiction—should be specified. The lack of specificity of the term has, of course, been

224

Notes to Pages 9–14

noted by others. See, for example, Tony Pinkney, “Editor’s Introduction: Modernism and Cultural Theory,” Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 3. 26. Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 11. 27. Kennedy, Over Here, chapter 5. For an example of a recent study that, though excellent, relies on the traditional characterization of the wartime period, see Karabel, The Chosen, 77–79. 28. Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 20, 38, 37. 29. Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82–83. 30. Kennedy, Over Here, 160–162. 31. Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 114–115. 32. This is the title of chapter 6 in Schaffer’s America in the Great War that is limited to the issues of blacks and women. On exceptions, including Ford’s Americans All!, see below. 33. This is the title of a chapter of Byron Farwell, Over There: The United States in the Great War 1917–1918 (New York: Norton, 1999), but there is no equivalent sustained discussion of immigrants and ethnic Americans. 34. This is the case with Kennedy’s Over Here, Schaffer’s America in the Great War, as well as a number of other texts. See chapter 3. 35. Ruth Prigozy, “Afterword,” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Signet, 2007), 367. Prigozy notes the racism of the novel, but not the egalitarian moment it depicts. 36. Page numbers in parentheses here refer to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Signet, 2007). 37. Schaffer, America in the Great War, 89. 38. The best source on statistics about ethnic officers in the military I found was Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (New York: Macmillan, 1921). 39. Ford, Americans All!, 76–78, 81. 40. See chapter 3. 41. See, for example, Kennedy, Over Here, 188–189, or, most recently, Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 226–231, in a section called “Racism Ratified: The Army IQ Tests.” For an extended discussion, see chapter 3. For an example in a literary study see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 125–126. 42. Congressman Vestal is extrapolating from the test results. Congressional Record—House (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1924), Vol. 65, Part 6, 68th Congress, April 2, 1924, 5440. 43. The army also provided special religious and cultural facilities for minorities. Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 7. See also Ford, Americans All!, 14, who speaks of the “fair and

Notes to Pages 15–19

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just treatment” of immigrant troops. Dos Passos represents this sort of even-handedness in promotions of ethnic Americans. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 146–147. The army collected (and translated) some testimonials from immigrant soldiers, which attested to their equal treatment. For example, a Russian immigrant who was an “acting corporal” asserted, “In the Russian company we are thought of as much as any American soldier & are on the same bases.” “Translated by Walter S. Przybyszewski, 1st Lt. Inf. U.S.A.,” Office Chief of Staff, Executive Division, Military Intelligence Branch, November 15, 1918, 10565–512/24, MID-WDGS, RG 165. 44. Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 93, 110. 45. See chapter 3. 46. Ford, Americans All!, 14. 47. Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 7. 48. Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, 31 July 1917, quoted in Jennifer Keene, “Raising the American Expeditionary Forces: Early Decision Making in 1917,” manuscript p. 15. Published in ed. Peter Dennis and Jeffery Gray, Battles Near and Far: A Century of Overseas Deployment (Canberra, Australia: Army History Unit, Department of Defence, 2005), 48–70. 49. Jennifer Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 99. For example, in May 1918, Colonel E. O. Anderson wrote, in a memorandum on the black draft, “The poorer class of backwoods negro has not the mental stamina and moral sturdiness to put him in the line against opposing German troops” (99). Also telephone conversation with Keene, May 31, 2007. 50. Keene and quoted in Keene, “Raising the American Expeditionary Forces: Early Decision Making in 1917,” manuscript pp. 14–16, 13. 51. Keene, quoted in Ford, Americans All!, 15. 52. An internal military memo attests that blacks made up as much as “16% of the entire drafted force.” “Report of Second Conference on Control of Morale,” May 15, 1918, MRSD-NRC, CP. 53. Kennedy, Over Here, 157. The drafted included “nearly half a million immigrants of forty-six different nationalities.” Ford, Americans All!, 3. 54. Farwell, Over There, 60. 55. Ford paraphrasing Keene, Americans All!, 14–15. 56. Willa Cather quoted in Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 2. As if to underline the point I am making, this book Setting a Course is part of a series that devotes a book to each decade starting with the twenties; the previous book in the series covers 1900–1920. 57. George E. Mowry, The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, and Fanatics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 1. 58. James R. McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre–World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” Journal of American History 55:2 (1968), 315.

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Notes to Pages 19–23

59. I am really referring to American fiction here in terms of modernism being dated from the twenties. Modernism in American poetry is often given a somewhat different chronology that begins with the Great War or just a few years before. 60. Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 120. Critics credit Fitzgerald, too. See Bruccoli, “Introduction,” 6. 61. In a famous epigraph to Sun. 62. For example, “Tantalyzingly benchmarked by the devastation and brutality of World War I and the cataclysm of the crash and the Great Depression” begins a book on the subject of the twenties. Brown, Setting a Course, 2. 63. Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, vii, my italics. 64. John W. Aldridge, “Afterthoughts on the Twenties and The Sun Also Rises,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays on The Sun Also Rises (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 115. Wendy Martin, “Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises,” Wagner-Martin, New Essays, 67. 65. Michel Foucault used this notion of an episteme in The Order of Things (1966), but he rejected it in his later work, as far as I’m concerned, because of the critique of The Order of Things that it did not adequately account for historical change, for discontinuities in epistemes or discursive formations. (Foucault came to think of The Order of Things as his worst book, even asking his publisher to stop printing it. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], 185.) 66. See Brown, Setting a Course, 2; Mowry, The Twenties, 3. 67. Kennedy, Over Here, 285. Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 153. Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Heart: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 243. 68. Kennedy, Over Here, 284. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman, 154. Rothman, Hands and Heart, 243. 69. See chapter 3. 70. This is also the case with the leading female characters in Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and with at least one female character in Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). Dos Passos refers to and represents American charity girls in his Three Soldiers, 92, 118. 71. Bruccoli, “Introduction,” 6. 72. For example, James G. Watson, “Faulkner and the Theater of War,” ed. Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie, Faulkner and War: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2001 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 30. See chapter 5. 73. Brown, Setting a Course, 2. 74. Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 115. 75. On the hype, see Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 118, 224n81.

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76. That is, from the American entrance to the war in April 1917 to the armistice in November 1918. 77. On the “media phenomenon,” see Martin, “Brett Ashley,” 67. On changes in sexual mores (affairs, abortions, birth control) in the 1920s, see Brown, Setting a Course, 19, 114, 117. See also Carolyn Johnston, Sexual Power: Feminism and the Family in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 57–58. 78. My italics. 79. Brandt and Walker quoted in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 119. 80. Page numbers in parentheses refer to William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Liveright, 1997). This theme is picked up by Faulkner again in As I Lay Dying (1930). See John Liman, “Addie in No-Man’s Land,” ed. Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie, Faulkner and War: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2001 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 36. One also finds the theme of French sexual corruption in Dos Passos’s 1920 One Man’s Initiation, 9, and Three Soldiers, 310, 345. 81. Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 63. 82. Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 105. 83. Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 137–138. 84. Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, 65, 63. Tone, Devices and Desires, 106– 107. Condoms had existed for centuries, and rubber condoms were available from the mid-nineteenth century. Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, 137. 85. Tone, Devices and Desires, 105. 86. Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, 138. 87. Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay, 158. For more on this “circus” of 1917, see chapter 3. 88. President Wilson, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 6. 89. See, for example, White, The First Sexual Revolution. See also McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre–World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” 315–333, and Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” ed. Michael Gordon, The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 426–438. “The timing of the ‘sexual revolution’ is the subject of an extensive historical debate.” Rothman, Hands and Heart, 350n90. 90. Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, 137–138. 91. Rothman, for example, makes use of the metaphor of organic growth. Rothman, Hands and Heart, 243. 92. Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, 128. 93. Ibid., 138, my italics. 94. For British shell-shocked characters in modernist fiction, think of Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), but also think of Sun and Brett’s British ex-husband, Lord Ashley, who, after his stint as a “sailor” in the “Ninth baronet,” slept on the floor with “a loaded service revolver” and sometimes “used to tell [Brett] he’d kill her.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1986), 203. 228

Notes to Pages 26–29

95. Page numbers in parentheses for Sun refer to Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1986). 96. Paul Fussell tracks this discrediting of such notions in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), and Kennedy discusses the same phenomenon in regard to American authors in Over Here, chapter 4. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber, 1928); Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1930). 97. Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, [1923] 1995). There were also numerous popular culture writers who likewise promoted antique and romantic notions of martial heroism. Hemingway criticized Cather’s very popular One of Ours. See Kennedy, Over Here, 205–230. 98. The cases of Cummings and Dos Passos, who were also ambulance drivers and not soldiers, are somewhat different. They begin to question the war in a way that the three chief authors here do not. Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, 5–6. Cummings, The Enormous Room, 15–16. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 221, 231, 264, 269, 270. In fact, they both got in trouble with wartime authorities for such questioning. Samuel Hynes, “Introduction,” Cummings, The Enormous Room, viii. Townsend Ludington, “Chronology,” Dos Passos, Novels 1920–1925 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 844. 99. Page numbers in parentheses for Gatsby refer to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1992). 100. Wendy Martin discusses Hemingway’s “grace under pressure” in “Brett Ashley,” 66–67. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 44. Likewise, Kennedy says of Hemingway that he “maintained a lifelong fascination with things military.” Kennedy, Over Here, 223. 101. Cummings was in the ambulance service, and Dos Passos was first a volunteer ambulance driver and, when that service ended, an enlistee in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, in which capacity he experienced training camp. However, like Fitzgerald, he was too late to experience the front. He did postwar service in Europe. Ludington, “Chronology,” 844–845. 102. Kennedy also distinguishes between British and American war writing, differences he chalks up to different battlefield experiences. Kennedy, Over Here, 214. 103. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 129, 270n145. Different authors give different totals. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 35. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 89. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 126. 104. Hemingway “said he had not taken the Stein epigraph seriously. He had meant to contrast her splendid bombast against the simply statement of Ecclesiastes.” Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 120. 105. “Another 237,000 returned wounded.” Richard B. Stolley, ed., Life: Our Century in Pictures (Boston: Little Brown, 1999), 68. John Whiteclay Chambers, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 752. Around 24 million men were registered by draft boards. Schaffer, America in the Great Notes to Pages 30–33

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War, 177. To get an idea of proportions, according to U.S. Census figures, the United States had a population of around 92.2 million in 1910 and 106 million in 1920. Thus, something like one in four Americans total (regardless of age or gender) was registered by draft boards, and around 4 percent of the population served. 106. “The aviation service attracted [Fitzgerald] as the romantic equivalent of the Civil War cavalry.” Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 74. Hemingway said he wanted to “get into aviation when I am 19 and get a commission.” Quoted in Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 51. Faulkner “sought a commission in the air corps.” Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 110. 107. Poster with the phrase “Big Game” displayed in Bristow, Making Men Moral, following 112. The “Big Show” appears in Kennedy, Over Here, 210, 223. Fitzgerald in “ ‘I Didn’t Get Over’ ” (1936), quoted in Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 68. Hemingway referred to the war as a great show. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969), 36. 108. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” ed. Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 522. In “ ‘I Didn’t Get Over,’ ” an autobiographical character named Captain Hibbing comments about his dramatic experiences in training camp that it was not “the big time.” Mizener comments, “Training camp was a hopelessly inadequate setting for the heroism Fitzgerald had imagined.” Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, 68. 109. The story was called “The Offshore Pirate.” Quoted in Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 93. 110. Quoted in Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, 71. 111. “Fitzgerald also fell off his horse at a parade and was ordered to take riding lessons.” Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 86, 94. 112. Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, 68. 113. Karl, William Faulkner, 110. 114. Karl, “Introduction,” William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Liveright, 1997), viii. 115. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 23, 22. 116. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 306. 117. Page numbers in parentheses refer to Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964). 118. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 44. 119. See, for example, Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 170. Reynolds has realized the tale is a fabrication by the publication of The Young Hemingway in 1986. 120. Reynolds and Hemingway quoted in Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 18–20.

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121. Michael Szalay and Eric Auerbach, from Mimesis, quoted in Szalay, “Modernism’s History of the Dead,” ed. Peter Stoneley and Cindy Weinstein, A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900–1950 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 161. Perhaps the fullest treatment of this theme in regard to American post–World War I novelists can be found in Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel. 122. Wendy Martin, for example, comes to the aid of Hemingway in this hairsplitting project in her essay “Brett Ashley,” 66–67. 123. Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay, 171. 124. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 318–319. Fiedler notes that Brett Ashley is a standout female for Hemingway, a mere “demi-bitch” among complete “bitches.” 125. This is a correction to the analysis in Michaels, Our America, 50. See chapter 2. 126. This is a reference to Bram Dijkstra’s analysis in Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Knopf, 1996), which takes up popular and high modernist texts from the early twentieth century, including Sun. See, for example, Dijkstra, Evil Sisters, 217. 127. Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 16. 128. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner, 1920), 213. 129. Again, this is one of the key arguments about this literature in Michaels’s Our America. 130. Michael S. Reynolds, “The Sun in Its Time: Recovering the Historical Context,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays, 45–46. 131. These preoccupations are obvious in Gatsby and Sound. On the concern with financial details in Sun, see Scott Donaldson, “Hemingway’s Morality of Compensation,” in Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations, 73. 132. Thus it is not quite right, as one critic puts it, to understand “Hemingway’s treatment of Robert Cohn” as issuing from his feeling “threatened by the hordes of immigrants entering his country through Ellis Island.” Gay Wilentz, “(Re)Teaching Hemingway: Anti-Semitism as a Thematic Device in The Sun Also Rises,” College English 52:2 (Feb. 1990), 191. Moreover, Cohn represents a more immediate social threat. 133. On the vamp story, see Dijkstra’s Evil Sisters, chapter 1.

chapter 2 1. Another important recent study on race and modernism is Michael North’s The Dialectic of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). But he doesn’t address Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. 2. Other, newer studies have indeed used a more effective approach (I give some examples below).

Notes to Pages 38–46

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3. See Keith Gandal, Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 22. 4. My purpose here is obviously not to critique Michaels’s conclusions about cultural identity and racial identity or even his argument about reproduction and Anglos/ ethnic Americans in regard to the other modernist texts he addresses. 5. This common accusation that ethnic Americans did not serve in the same numbers or avoided dangerous missions in the military is not borne out by statistics or contemporary accounts. See, for example, Congressional Record—Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), Vol. 61, Pt. 1, 67th Cong., May 2, 1921, 916–917. Jews, for example, served at higher proportions than their share in the American population. They also got their fair share of commendations. Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 121, 117, 219. Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 233–234. 6. Page numbers in parentheses here refer to Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 7. Michaels gets around this problem in Gatsby by claiming that Tom and Daisy are incestuous in a sense (41). But even if one buys his logic, something has been forgotten: Tom and Daisy have a child. The whole point of the incest strategy, for Michaels, like the impotence strategy, is that it prevents children (a mark of purity). Here Michaels’s logic gets loose and slips. 8. See chapter 6. 9. In the case of Bram Dijkstra’s Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Knopf, 1996), what matters, similarly (but with somewhat less sophistication), are sets of ideas with pseudoscientific underpinnings. 10. Michaels, Our America, 28–29. 11. Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) and Sean McCann’s Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) strike me as examples of the sort of focus and delimitation I have in mind. 12. Michael Szalay makes a similar objection to this sort of methodology, but, without, to my mind, fully explaining why such methodology is problematic. Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 6. 13. See, for example, Senator Lodge, “Must Guard Our Gates: The Necessity of Restricting Immigration to Our Shores,” New York Times, March 17, 1896, 3. And, after the Great War, with the Red Scare, there was in addition the concern about Bolsheviks, radical aliens, and anarchists. David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 149. 14. For examples, in the 1924 congressional debate, of statistics cited on the disproportionate numbers of criminals in the immigration population, see Congressional

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Notes to Pages 47–53

Record—Senate (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1924), Vol. 65, Pt. 6, 68th Congress, April 8, 1924, 5824; Congressional Record—Senate, April 1924, 5941; Congressional Record—House, April 2, 1924, 5440. 15. Senator Heflin from Alabama, Congressional Record—Senate, May 2, 1921, 916–917. 16. Nick says, “I came east . . . in the spring of twenty-two” (7). Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 185. 17. For an example of this charge, see Senator Heflin, Congressional Record—Senate, May 2, 1921, 916–917. 18. See Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 309. 19. Quoted in Michael S. Reynolds, “False Dawn: The Sun Also Rises Manuscript,” ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 120. 20. Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 120. 21. This chapter’s discussion of literary-critical method is focused on studies of modernism. For a more general critique of New Historicism and Cultural Studies and a broader discussion of attending to practices (as well as discourses) and to new forms of subjection (beyond those of race, ethnicity, gender, and class), see my forthcoming article, “Extra-textuality and Modern Forms of Subjection: Suggestions for Poststructural Historicism.” 22. Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 131. He makes this claim about nineteenth-century fiction. 23. In the seduction plot, a girl is seduced, often by a man of a higher class, and she falls morally by having premarital sex. She subsequently experiences guilt and also is socially ostracized. The fallen woman generally dies as a result of her sin; she can, in a variation of the plot, be rescued if the man who seduces her reforms his libertine ways and goes on to marry her. Charlotte Temple and another example of the seduction genre, the 1845 novel by George Lippard, The Quaker City, were the most popular; both have been described as “the most popular American novel” before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Back cover of Rowson, Charlotte Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). David S. Reynolds, “Introduction,” Lippard, The Quaker City: Or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), vii. 24. Hawthorne was already challenging this tale in the 1850s with The Scarlet Letter (1852): the “fallen woman” can overcome ostracism and needn’t die. Henry James took aim with Daisy Miller (1879): the girl might be ostracized and might die, but maybe she never had sex. Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin attacked it with Maggie (1893) and The Awakening (1899): the woman doesn’t need to be seduced, and she might not feel guilt for extramarital sex, even if she is ostracized and dies. Theodore Dreiser upended it with Sister Carrie in 1900: in the big city, the “fallen woman” might feel some guilt, but it

Notes to Pages 53–57

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won’t be crippling, and she needn’t experience ostracism or death. Willa Cather was still subverting but relying on the generic tale in 1918 with My Antonia: the “fallen woman” can overcome ostracism and live on, even marry and have a big family. 25. This new vampire story, which A Fool There Was epitomizes, was a dramatic and fairly straightforward (if also pseudoscientific) reversal or inversion of the seduction plot, in which a debased, primitive, finally inhuman woman stalked and fed on her male prey. For a discussion of this story and the example of A Fool There Was, see Dijkstra’s Evil Sisters, chapter 1. 26. Carla Kaplan, “On Modernism and Race,” Review Essay, Modernism/Modernity 4:1 (1997), 165. 27. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 203. 28. John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction,” The Atlantic 233.1 (January 1980), 68. Barth is here adapting and expanding ideas from Gerald Graff ’s “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough” and “Babbitt at the Abyss,” TriQuarterly 26 (1973); 33 (1975). 29. Douglas’s is an excellent book, and quite innovative, apart from its rehearsal or extrapolation of these platitudes about modernist plot. 30. Other studies in the 1990s have worked toward expanding the “scope” of modernism to include black writers. See for example, Bonnie Kime Scott, “Introduction,” ed. Scott, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 4–7. 31. See Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82, 87, 248–251, 272. Lunn’s book presents a comprehensive account of this debate. 32. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). For a quick summary of this debate within Marxist theory and the Frankfurt School and the extension of this debate into feminism, see Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, Modernism, History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 7–11. 33. This goes for critics as well who see modernism as politically mixed. Michael Tratner has argued that although modernist style is an attempt to access mass politics, some modernist writers are progressive in this effort (like Joyce and Woolf), others conservative (like Yeats and Eliot). Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 31–32. 34. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 24–25. 35. See Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation between Power and Denial,” trans. Marilyn A. August, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 165. See also DeKoven, Rich and Strange, 8. 36. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), x. 234

Notes to Pages 57–59

37. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), 238, 7. 38. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 203. 39. John Berryman, Stephen Crane (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1950), 285, 52. 40. Thomas Gullason notes of sections of Maggie that they “reveal Crane’s understated staccato style, foreshadowing the Hemingway style of the 1920s.” Stephen Crane, ed. Thomas Gullason, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: Norton, 1979), 13n7. 41. A discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book and has been covered amply elsewhere; see, for example, Douglas’s Terrible Honesty, chapter 3. 42. I am not trying to argue that these two reasons alone account for a stylistic shift to modernism, merely that they are two factors among others. 43. Page numbers in parentheses here refer to George Lippard, The Quaker City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). 44. Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 40, my italics. 45. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 80, my italics. 46. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Signet, 2000), 92–93. 47. Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (New York: Signet, 1981), 27–29, 72–73. 48. Chopin, The Awakening, 14, my italics. 49. Michaels, Our America, 27. 50. Page numbers in parentheses for Sound refer to William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1956). 51. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American contrarian,” The New Yorker, Feb. 17, 1997, 88. 52. Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction,” Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 1. Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 22. 53. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961), 127. 54. Alan Filreis discusses the many “convergences between modernism and radicalism.” Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. 55. Michael Szalay makes a similar observation. Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 4–5. My book does not engage the classic debates about the political valence of modernism, as well as newer discussions about modernism, in which modernist style is linked to particular social ambitions, such as those of status or professionalization (as Louis Menand argues in Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and his Context [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987]), or a particular style of politics, for example, mass politics (as Michael Tratner argues in Modernism and Mass Politics). 56. Here is where the primary literary object of my study differs from that of Szalay. The primary objects of his study are still form and ideology. He inventively gets around the conventional pitfalls in approaching modernist form precisely by considering contemporary “accounts of form,” which are “ideological.” Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 6–7. Notes to Pages 60–74

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chapter 3 1. Robert A. Rockaway, “Hoodlum Hero: The Jewish Gangster: Defender of His People, 1919–1949,” American Jewish History, 82:1–4 (1994–95), 217. 2. This doubleness is and continues to be a standard theme in Great Gatsby criticism. See, for example, Roger Lewis, “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, New Essays on The Great Gatsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 43. 3. Fitzgerald’s biographers have other candidates for the model for Gatsby, gentleman bootlegger. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 183. Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 171. 4. “Memorandum for Capt. Hale,” from Lt. H. A. Horgan, Office Chief of Staff, Executive Division, Military Intelligence Branch, August 14, 1918, 10565–559, MID-WDGS, RG 165. 5. Elizabeth Sudduth, of the rare books division at the University of South Carolina, which houses the Fitzgerald papers, checked the fact that Fitzgerald never made captain with two Fitzgerald experts, including his major biographer, Matthew J. Bruccoli. “Both Judy Baughman and Dr. Bruccoli confirmed that Fitzgerald was not promoted above 1st Lieut.” Email from Elizabeth Sudduth, May 25, 2007. 6. Quoted in Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 93. 7. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), xxii. 8. Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 111–112. 9. In 1902 Cody takes “to sea in a yacht,” and he’s been floating around for “five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny.” Then, “the arrangement” with Cody “lasted five years” (106). 10. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 75. 11. Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 60, 218n15. 12. General Order No. 46, U.S. Army Personnel Manual, Chapter V, November 1, 1918, 1, CCP. 13. June 8, 1918, letter from Robert M. Yerkes, MRSD-NRC, CP. 14. Robert M. Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 15 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 424. 15. “Memorandum for Dr. George E. Hale Relative to Psychological Work, Medical Department,” 1917, MRSD-NRC, CP. Handwritten note at the bottom reads: “Prepared for Dr. Hale to be used in letter to President Wilson.” 16. Personnel Manual, Chapter V, 4.

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Notes to Pages 78–82

17. Director Walter Dill Scott to the Secretary of War, “A Plan for the Proposed CCP,” August 4, 1917, CCP. 18. Personnel Manual, Chapter I, “Work of the CCP,” 6. 19. “Committee on Psychology” report, dated “1918,” 8, MRSD-NRC, CP. See also Raymond E. Fancher, The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985), 119. 20. Letter from Joseph P. Byers, Executive Secretary of the CPFM, to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, Jan. 2, 1918, 2, CPFM. 21. Personnel Manual, Chapter V, 4. 22. Lieutenant Colonel W. V. Bingham, “Army Personnel Work: With Some Implications for Education and Industry,” 3, CCP. 23. There were two versions of the U.S. Army intelligence test: “Army Alpha for literate subjects and the Beta for illiterates.” Fancher, The Intelligence Men, 119. More precisely, the Army Beta test was supposed to be “for those recruits who did not speak English, could not read, or got low scores on Form Alpha.” Robert M. Thorndike and David F. Lohman, A Century of Ability Testing (Chicago: Riverside, 1990), 45. 24. Letter from E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, Military Sales Department, February 23, 1918, MRSD-NRC, CP. 25. Letter titled “The Training School at Vineland New Jersey,” from E. R. Johnstone of the CPFM to Mr. R. Bayard Cutting of the same committee, 1918, CPFM. Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, 469. 26. “Interpretation of Scores in Intelligence a,” 1918, MRSD-NRC, CP. These were most likely results from Camp Taylor at some point before the end of the war; the overall percentages, recorded by Yerkes in his study after the war, are slightly different: 4.9 percent were in the A group and 9.5 percent were in the B group. Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, 489. 27. Letter from Du Pont de Nemours. 28. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 218–221. 29. Gould, Mismeasure, 198. 30. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 188. 31. Gould, Mismeasure, 218. 32. On the use of these two different methods of identifying potential officers, see Thorndike and Lohman, A Century of Ability Testing, 43. 33. “Rating Sheet for Selecting Captains,” “Form No. 1051,” 1917–1918, CCP. 34. “Officers’ Training Camps, 1917. Individual Rating Sheet for Selecting Candidates In Each Training Unit,” CCP. Capt. E. R. Padget, “Memorandum for Captain Perkins: Recommendation of Mishel George Daavid . . . for Officers Training Camp,” September 9, 1918, 10565–581/6, MID-WDGS. 35. “Rating Sheet for Selecting Captains,” 1–2.

Notes to Pages 83–86

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36. Dos Passos represented an army clerk typing up a report on a “private” who is found to be feebleminded and will be discharged. “Scores ten years . . . in test B . . . m-e-n-t-a-l-i-t-y that of a child of eight.” John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, Dos Passos, Novels 1920–1925 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 100–101. 37. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 86. 38. Kennedy, Over Here, 187, says all the camps had testing; Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 136, says “about three quarters of the army camps in the United States.” 39. Fitzgerald’s stint at Camp Taylor, which began on March 15, 1918, according to Bruccoli (Epic Grandeur, 86), comes after the period he puts Gatsby there. Of course, it is necessary for Gatsby to be in some camp earlier on than Fitzgerald, because Gatsby makes it overseas and Fitzgerald doesn’t. 40. Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the United States Army, 424. 41. Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, 66. 42. The Surgeon General to the Adjutant General, “Report on Psychological Examination of Students in Officer Training Camps, 3rd Series,” April 5, 1918, AGO, RG 407, This report contains test results from 22 camps. 43. “A Suggested List of Topics That May Be Treated under the Six General Problems of the Course of Study in Human Action for the S.A.T.C.,” Psychological Course for Student Army Training Corps (SATC), 1918, MRSD-NRC, CP. 44. For a discussion of this issue, see chapter 1. 45. Nancy Gentile Ford and quoted in Ford, Americans All!: Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 74–75. 46. Quotation on previous military experience comes from “Extract From Military Intelligence Bulletin No. 17, July 15, 1918, ‘Foreign Legion’ Companies,” Part A, 1, 10565– 414/1, MID-WDGS. “Report of Lieut. Stanislaw Gutowski’s Talk on Foreign Speaking Soldiers in Different Camps,” September 7, 1918, 3, 10565–110/27, MID-WDGS. M. Churchill, Chief, Military Intelligence Branch, “Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, Subject: Foreign Speaking Soldiers in Development Battalions,” July 31, 1918, 10565– 515/22, MID-WDGS. “Report of Lieut. Stanislaw Gutowski’s Talk,” 1, 4. On Gutowski’s role, see Ford, Americans All!, 69–72, 76, 81–83. 47. Ford and quoted in Ford, Americans All!, 74–75, 73. 48. Letter from Intelligence Officer, Camp Gordon, Lt. E. G. Moyer, “ ‘Camp Gordon Plan’ Training Battalions for non-English Speaking Soldiers,” January 23, 1919, 2, 10565–515/23, MID-WDGS. “Extract From Military Intelligence Bulletin No. 17,” Part A, 1, 10565–414/1, MID-WDGS. “Report of Lieut. Stanislaw Gutowski’s Talk,” 4. 49. Ford and quoted in Ford, Americans All!, 77, 84. 50. Fitzgerald was sent to Camp Gordon in April, 1918. In June he moved on to Camp Sheridan. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 86. 51. Gatsby recognizes Nick and asks, “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?” When Nick answers that he was, Gatsby volunteers that he “was in the Seventh

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Notes to Pages 87–90

Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen” (51–52). Fitzgerald’s dating here is reasonable, and there was indeed a Seventh Infantry of the Third Division. “On 30 May [1918, American] General Pershing dispatched his 1st and 3rd divisions to the French,” as “the Germans had reached the Marne [River] near Chateau-Thierry, less than fifty miles from Paris.” Byron Farwell, Over There: The United States in the Great War 1917–1918 (New York: Norton, 1999), 166. 52. Ford, Americans All!, 80, 82. 53. Quoted in Ford, Americans All!, 3. 54. The Personnel System of the U.S. Army, Vol. I, Washington, D.C., 1919, 178, 47, CCP. W. Johnston, Adjutant General, endorsed Walter Dill Scott’s “more careful and scientific system” of selecting and classifying men. Letter of July 11, 1917, quoted on 47. 55. “Report of Second Conference on Control of Morale,” May 15, 1918, MRSDNRC, CP. 56. “Extract from Military Intelligence Bulletin No. 17,” Part C, 2, 10565–414/1, MIDWDGS. 57. Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 92. Slotkin points out that those efforts to stop soldiers from insulting Italian Americans and African Americans with slurs failed among the “rank and file.” 58. Kennedy, Over Here, 148–149. 59. President Wilson, quoted in Kennedy, Over Here, 149. 60. Kennedy, Over Here, 147. 61. Gould, Mismeasure, 195. 62. Schaffer, America in the Great War, 139, 138. 63. Kennedy, Over Here, 188, 187, 189. 64. Gould, Mismeasure, 195. 65. Ibid., 199–200. 66. Ibid., 201–202. 67. Ibid., 202. 68. Colonel R. J. Burt, General Staff to The Chief of Staff, “Report on Psychological Tests in the Army,” June 1918, 11, 2–3, 3–4, 10195–25, AGO. 69. General Orders, No. 74, War Department, Washington, D.C., August 14, 1918, Part VII, AGO. 70. Kennedy, Over Here, 187, 169, 167. 71. Personnel Manual, Chapter X, “Intelligence Ratings,” 1. 72. Schaffer, America in the Great War, 139. 73. Gould, Mismeasure, 194. 74. The Surgeon General, U.S. Army, “Continuance of psychological work,” December 7, 1917, 1, Records of the CCP, 1917–1919, Correspondence, 1917–1919, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1917, RG 407. 75. Burt, “Report,” 1.

Notes to Pages 90–98

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76. Daniel J. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence: Psychologists in World War I,” Journal of American History 55 (1968), 571. 77. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence,” 573. 78. Raymond Dodge quoted in Thorndike and Lohman, A Century of Ability Testing, 46. 79. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence,” 579. 80. Gould, Mismeasure, 195. 81. Schaffer gives other results as well: “On the basis of the results, the examiners recommended that more than 7,800 be discharged, [and] that over 10,000 be assigned to labor battalions because of low intelligence.” Schaffer, America in the Great War, 136–137. 82. Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 60, 218n15. 83. Kennedy, Over Here, 188. 84. Gould, Mismeasure, 197. 85. Carl Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), 144. 86. Though we have no aggregate data on Jews because soldiers were identified by national ancestry, psychologists analyzing the statistics, by looking at the various aggregate results of men from “nations” with significant Jewish populations, were able to conclude that overall Jewish performance was poor. See discussion of Brigham below. 87. Gould, Mismeasure, 212–216, quotes on 214, 212–213. 88. Ibid., 225. 89. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence, 190, 187. 90. Surgeon General, “Continuance of psychological work,” 1. 91. Gould, Mismeasure, 194–195. 92. Burt, “Report,” 3. 93. Kennedy, Over Here, 187. 94. The card asked the soldier for “No. of Yrs.” of “Schooling” at various levels; it also asked the soldier to indicate whether he “Graduated” each school by marking box “Yes” or “No.” The levels were: “Common School,” “High School,” “College or University,” “Technical School,” “Trade, Night, or Business School.” “The Soldier’s Qualification Card,” Personnel Manual, chapter 5, 6. 95. Commanding General J. D. Leitch to the Adjutant General of the Army, “Psychological Service,” December 3, 1918, 1–2, 10195–25, AGO. 96. Gould, Mismeasure, 204–205. 97. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence,” 579, 578. 98. Bingham, “Army Personnel Work,” 9. 99. Typeset draft of “Recruit Psychological Examination for Illiterates and NonEnglish-Speaking Citizens and Aliens,” October 1919, cover page and p. 3, 10195–25, AGO. 100. General Orders of the AEF, No. 12, “Examination for Appointment to the Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.” January 16, 1919. United States Army in the World War,

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Notes to Pages 98–105

1917–1919, Volume 16, General Orders, GHQ, AEF (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History of the United States Army, 1992), 609. 101. General Orders of the AEF, No. 13, “Application for Appointment in the Regular Army.” General Orders, GHQ, AEF, 611. 102. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence,” 580, 573. 103. “Extract from Military Intelligence Bulletin No. 17,” Part A, 1–2. 104. Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 121, 123. 105. Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920– 1955,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56:2 (2001), 153. 106. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 153. 107. Thorndike and Lohman, A Century of Ability Testing, 85. 108. See chapter 2. 109. David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), 155. 110. By the nativist Carl Brigham’s estimates, incidentally, some Germans were “Nordic” (40 percent) though most (60 percent) he considered “Alpine.” Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence, 159. 111. This army program is also represented in Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, 314. 112. The use of quotas affected not only Jews, but also Catholics and blacks. But the most “pressure,” in terms of qualified ethnic applicants, was coming from Jewish students. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 143. 113. Charlotte G. Borst, “Choosing the Student Body: Masculinity, Culture, and the Crisis of Medical School Admissions, 1920–1950,” History of Education Quarterly 42:2 (2002), 186, 185. 114. Wendy Martin, “Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays on The Sun Also Rises (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67. 115. See for example Laura Mulvey, “The Original ‘It’ Girl,” ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski, Novels for Students, Vol. 4 (Detroit: Gale, 1998), 77. 116. CTCA pamphlet quoted in Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 113–114. 117. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 122. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 126. 118. Report quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 117. For another CTCA report, see Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 122. 119. Quoted in Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 122. 120. Reform and psychological studies quoted in Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Heart: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 243.

Notes to Pages 105–110

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121. William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Liveright, 1997), 158–159. 122. E. Deantonio, M.D., to G. B. Perkins, Capt., 10565–501G/24, MID-WDGS. 123. Raymond Fosdick, Chairman of the CTCA, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 113. 124. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 135–136. This particular concern about charity girls with venereal disease is represented in Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, 92. 125. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 35. 126. Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85. 127. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 35. 128. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 114–115. 129. Ibid., 116. 130. Ibid., 126. 131. Bulletin describing the section on Women and Girls, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 126. 132. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 127, 129–130. 133. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 313–314. 134. Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 54–55. 135. Edward F. Allen, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 21. 136. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 5. 137. Ibid., 11. 138. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 101. 139. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 115. These were cases between April 1917 and December 1917. 140. Wilson, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 18. 141. CTCA pamphlet quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 20. 142. Posters displayed in Bristow, Making Men Moral, following 112. 143. Quoted in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 101. 144. Brandt and quotations from Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 101, 96. 145. One of Dos Passos’s three soldiers falls afoul of the military’s General Orders about refraining from sex and avoiding venereal disease. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 355–356. 146. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 98, 101–104. 147. CTCA publicist quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 21. 148. Edward F. Allen in a book-length study of the CTCA, assisted by its chairman, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 21. 149. The importance of chastity in the seduction novel needs no rehearsal. But the fidelity of the female in the seduction plot can be something even more extraordinary.

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Charlotte Temple remains faithful to the very end to the soldier who seduced and then abandoned her on a foreign shore, far from friends and family. Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 73, 95–96. In like manner, the last word of George Lippard’s 1845 novel, The Quaker City, is the seduced girl’s heartfelt repetition of the “love name” of the man who has defiled her and caused her ostracism and suffering. Lippard, The Quaker City: Or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 575. 150. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 114. 151. According to anecdotal reports of some soldiers after the war, the efforts of the CTCA to create this chivalrous new man failed miserably. For example, Frank Tannenbaum, who spent time in a military training camp in 1918, claimed that the camp had a corrupting influence in terms of attitudes about women. Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1980), 147. 152. Page numbers in parentheses refer to Willa Cather, One of Ours (London: Virago, 1986). 153. Cather’s One of Ours, quoted in Hermione Lee, “Introduction” Cather, One of Ours, xxii. 154. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 86.

chapter 4 1. On Hemingway’s sense of the epigraph, see chapter 1, n104. Again, what we now think of as various European “ethnic” groups, including Jews, were considered in the era to be “racially” different from Anglos; see chapter 1. And again, in contrast to its equal treatment of ethnic Americans, the army practiced discrimination against blacks; see chapter 1 and below. 2. Jerome Karabel and Dean Frederick Sheetz Jones of Yale quoted in Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 77, 75. 3. Lowell argued a Jewish quota would be good for Jews. “Harvard’s Jewish Problem,” The Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semi tism/harvard.html (accessed July 26, 2007). 4. Karabel, The Chosen, 86–88. 5. Quoted in Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920–1955,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56:2 (2001), 143. There was a similar trend and reaction at medical schools (145). 6. Karabel, and Leon Michael Levy (letter to Wilson) and E. E. Slosson, author of Great American Universities, quoted in Karabel, The Chosen, 64–68, 74–75. 7. American military schools had no official relationship to the U.S. military, but they tended, then as now, to mimic its values and some of its training methods. Rod

Notes to Pages 117–125

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Andrew Jr., “Soldiers, Christians, Patriots: The Lost Cause and Southern Military Schools, 1865–1915,” The Journal of Southern History, 64:4 (1998), 680, 679. 8. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 141–142. 9. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 141. The 1925 figure is from Karabel, The Chosen, 126. 10. Harvard’s faculty committee that considered and rejected Lowell’s proposal for a Jewish quota, quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 142. 11. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 141–142. 12. Karabel, The Chosen, 114–115. 13. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 28. 14. “Medical Colleges Accused on ‘Quota,’ ” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1950, 21. 15. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 149–150. 16. Ibid., 150. 17. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 143–144. 18. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 142–143. 19. Charlotte G. Borst, “Choosing the Student Body: Masculinity, Culture, and the Crisis of Medical School Admissions, 1920–1950,” History of Education Quarterly 42:2 (2002), 196. 20. Letter quoted in Karabel, The Chosen, 126. 21. Karabel and Harvard’s “Report of the Committee on the Limitation of Students,” December 18, 1923, quoted in Karabel, The Chosen, 102. 22. Karabel, The Chosen, 131. 23. See Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (New York: Signet, 1981) or George Lippard’s The Quaker City: Or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). In these earlier texts, the Jew is money-grubbing, sinister, and physically deformed or grotesque. In fact, Fitzgerald’s Wolfshiem fits some of these older stereotypes of the Jew: Wolfshiem is “small,” with “a large head” (73), and Fitzgerald gives his “tragic nose” (77) a lot of attention; Wolfshiem speaks with an accent, and he is a somewhat sinister crook and swindler, having “fixed the World’s Series back in 1919” (78). 24. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 143. 25. Quoted in Karabel, The Chosen, 129, 112. 26. A. R. Loraine, in a 1934 letter. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 153. 27. Dr. J. T. McLintock, in a 1934 letter. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 151–152. 28. Quoted in Karabel, The Chosen, 585n104. 29. Harry G. Dunham, in a 1934 letter. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 154–155. 30. Dr. W. J. Moss, in a 1934 letter. Quoted in Halperin, “The Jewish Problem,” 153. 31. See chapter 1.

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Notes to Pages 126–132

32. On World War I exemptions for husbands and fathers, see David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 156. 33. Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 39. 34. Ibid., 38. 35. War Department Commission on Training Camp Activities, Rules for Boxing (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1918), 2, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 38. 36. Allen, Keeping Our Fighters Fit, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 38. 37. According to Hemingway biographer Baker, he wasn’t particularly successful at either. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969), 22–23, 26. 38. Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 233–234. On Roosevelt’s meaning to Hemingway’s generation, see Michael S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 11, 16. 39. Michael S. Reynolds, “False Dawn: The Sun Also Rises Manuscript,” ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 121. On Loeb and Hemingway in 1925, see also Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 298–307. 40. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” ed. Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 520, 522. 41. Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home,” In Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 72. 42. On the Twysden, Hemingway, Loeb triangle, see Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, 288–291, 297, 300–302. 43. Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 51. 44. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 38. 45. Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 107–108. 46. Griffin, Along with Youth, 51. 47. See Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 179–181n5. 48. Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 120. See also Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, 295. 49. Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 124. 50. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, 340. 51. Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 120. 52. On Hemingway’s critique of Fitzgerald’s novel, see Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 120. 53. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 36.

Notes to Pages 134–142

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54. Wendy Martin, “Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays on The Sun Also Rises (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 72. 55. Griffin, Along with Youth, 51. 56. Reynolds and Theodore Roosevelt quoted in Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 23. 57. Hemingway quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 52. 58. Ernest Hemingway, “In Another Country,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 1987), 208. 59. “ ‘Yellow-streaked slacker’ was the phrase much in vogue by the end of the war for those able-bodied men who somehow avoided the front lines.” Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 23. 60. This theme is much more developed (and developed explicitly, not symbolically) in A Farewell to Arms, in which the Hemingway narrator, Henry, is, like Hemingway himself was, “not really [in] the army . . . only the ambulance” service. By contrast with France, where the real action is, “There’s not really any war of that sort down here,” in Italy, remarks Nurse Barkley (17, 18, 19). 61. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway handles his anger differently. It isn’t only muted but transposed. See chapter 1. 62. Reynolds notes that Lady Duff Twysden, the main model for Brett, used Hemingway much like she used homosexuals. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, 289. 63. David F. Burrelli, “An Overview of the Debate on Homosexuals in the U.S. Military,” ed. Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994), 17. Francine D’Amico, “Race-ing and Gendering the Military Closet,” ed. Craig A. Rimmerman, Gay Rights, Military Wrongs: Political Perspectives on Lesbians and Gays in the Military (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 5. B. R. Burg, ed., Gay Warriors: A Documentary History from the Ancient World to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 191–192. 64. Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military, Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 15. 65. Shilts and Dr. Albert Abrams quoted in Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 15. 66. “Everybody’s sick. I’m sick too,” she says (Sun, 16). 67. Reynolds, “False Dawn,” 121. 68. Ibid., 120. 69. “The men of the AEF . . . told grim jokes in the midst of artillery attacks and made fun of the horrifying (ambulances were ‘meat wagons’).” Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 164. 70. Hemingway is not the only writer to play, consciously or unwittingly, on the military’s conflation of German ordnance and American sexual activity. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is another, later candidate for study as mobilization literature.

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Notes to Pages 142–148

71. Ernest Hemingway, “A Very Short Story,” In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1986), 65, 66. 72. The relationship between this short story and A Farewell to Arms “presents a special, and celebrated, case for criticism.” See Paul Smith, “The Trying-Out of A Farewell to Arms,” ed. Scott Donaldson, New Essays on A Farewell to Arms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38–39. Meanwhile, the relationship between the story and Sun has been much less explored. 73. Kennedy, Over Here, 186–187. 74. On the censorship issue, see chapter 7. Page number in parentheses refers to Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove, 1961). 75. Edward F. Allen, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 21.

chapter 5 1. Faulkner may have known a family with a mentally disabled child (see Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography [New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989], 316), but that doesn’t diminish my claim. Historical contextualization of Benjy’s idiocy is rare in Faulkner criticism. For an exception, see Karen Keely, “Sexuality and Storytelling: Literary Representations of the ‘Feebleminded’ in the Age of Sterilization,” ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent, Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 212–214. However, this article contextualizes the issue of feeblemindedness without discussing the Great War. 2. Letter titled “The Training School at Vineland New Jersey,” from E. R. Johnstone of the CPFM to Mr. R. Bayard Cutting of the same committee, 1, 1918, CPFM. 3. Raymond E. Fancher, The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985), 126. 4. “The Training School at Vineland New Jersey,” 1, 3. 5. Karl, William Faulkner, 110. 6. Ironically, in August 1918 Congress changed the draft age from 21 to 18, making Faulkner—as well as Hemingway—both of whom had already made other arrangements to get to the war, eligible to serve. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 166–167. 7. Karl, William Faulkner, 110–112. 8. Ibid., 111–112. 9. Faulkner was born in September 1897. See also Faulkner’s notes on the novel, quoted in Karl, William Faulkner, 320. 10. Karl, “Introduction,” William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Liveright, 1997), xiii, xii. 11. “Committee on Psychology” report, dated “1918,” 8–9, MRSD-NRC, CP. 12. “The Training School at Vineland New Jersey,” 2–3.

Notes to Pages 149–155

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13. Nina Ridenour, Mental Health in the United States: A Fifty-Year History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 48. See also Stephen Jay Gould, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter,” Natural History 7 (1984), 14. 14. Ridenour, Mental Health in the United States, 48. 15. Along these lines—that is, considering some of these 1920s modernist novels as anxious about new rationalities of government and extensions of government social control—my study obliquely complements Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); see, for example, 82–84. 16. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 122. 17. James G. Watson, “Faulkner and the Theater of War,” ed. Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie, Faulkner and War: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2001 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 30. 18. See chapter 3. 19. Faulkner had already created an obvious alter ego for himself—and his disappointing experience of getting to training camp and not to war—in the pathetically self-pitying Cadet Julian Lowe in Soldiers’ Pay. 20. Watson, “Faulkner and the Theater of War,” 30. 21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 22. Colonel E. O. Anderson, quoted in Jennifer Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 99. 23. Hankins quoted in Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995),162–163n123. 24. Congressional Record—House (1924), 5693, quoted in Michaels, Our America, 143n4. 25. “The Training School at Vineland New Jersey,” 3. 26. Robert M. Thorndike and David F. Lohman, A Century of Ability Testing (Chicago: Riverside, 1990), 55. 27. Fancher, The Intelligence Men, 128, 127. 28. Thorndike and Lohman, A Century of Ability Testing, 55. 29. See Charlotte G. Borst, “Choosing the Student Body: Masculinity, Culture, and the Crisis of Medical School Admissions, 1920–1950,” History of Education Quarterly 42:2 (2002), 197–206. 30. In 1910, Goddard presented the classification of three levels of feeblemindedness: idiot, imbecile, and moron (moron being the highest capacity, idiot being the lowest). Ridenour, Mental Health in the United States, 47. 31. Michaels, Our America, 23. 32. Goddard experimented with intelligence tests on immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. And though Goddard “found large numbers of immigrants from eastern Europe” with low scores, he did not simply conclude—as a white or Nordic supremacist (such 248

Notes to Pages 155–165

as Tom) would have and Yerkes and Brigham (leaders of the army testing program) in particular did—that his results indicated the racial inferiority of eastern Europeans. Fancher, The Intelligence Men, 112–113, 127–128. 33. See Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Explanatory Notes,” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1992), 209. 34. Fancher, The Intelligence Men, 130–131. 35. Borst, “Choosing the Student Body,” 205.

chapter 6 1. Her phrase is “a sublimation of abjection.” Julia Kristeva, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 26. 2. Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 268 (and 268n), 110–111, 11. 3. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969), 50. 4. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 116. 5. Ibid., 199–204. 6. “The novel allowed Fitzgerald to dramatize the most powerful experiences in his love for Zelda: his courtship in 1918, the break in 1919, his triumphant restoration in 1920 [with its attendant financial rewards], and her betrayal in 1924” with Jozan. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 199–204. 7. By “implicit rejection by the military,” I mean that Hemingway didn’t even bother attempting to volunteer for the marines or get a commission as an aviator because he knew that, without question, he would be rejected on physical grounds. In the fall of 1917, Hemingway told people “he would try to enlist in the Marines . . . unless he could ‘get into aviation when I am 19 and get a commission.’ He knew of course that his nearsightedness would keep him out of both services.” Peter Griffin and Hemingway quoted in Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 51. 8. Ernest Hemingway, “A Very Short Story,” In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1986), 65, 66. 9. This motif of the woman who rejects a soldier for an officer who outranks him appears in other American postmobilization fiction. For example, see John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, Dos Passos, Novels 1920–1925 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 180–181, 177. 10. On this score, only the reference to having been posted to a “joke front” is present in Sun. 11. Karl, William Faulkner, 296. 12. Quentin tells his father he was “afraid” to “try to make” Caddy make love to him because she “might” very well have gone along with it (Sound, 220). 13. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 93. Notes to Pages 165–178

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14. On tragedy being a new achievement for Fitzgerald with Gatsby, and absent from The Beautiful and Damned, see Ruth Prigozy, “Afterword,” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Signet, 2007), 375. 15. Jay Parini, “Introduction,” Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, xiii; Prigozy, “Afterword,” 375. 16. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 11. 17. On Fitzgerald’s racism, see Prigozy, “Afterword,” 374. 18. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly, 33.2 (1981), 123–139.

chapter 7 1. That is, Anglo Barnes was female, West was Jewish, and Miller was the child of German American immigrants. As a female, Barnes could not, of course, be a soldier in World War I; West, born in 1903, was a few years too young to enlist or be drafted, and Miller, 25 in 1917 and so of draft age, had no interest in serving and in essence got married in order to avoid being drafted. Mary V. Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 57–58. 2. Critics have noticed West’s parody of the novels of Hemingway and Fitzgerald: for example, the way in which Hemingway’s bullfighting is parodied by West’s cockfighting. 3. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 326. 4. Page numbers in parentheses referring to West refer to Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1982). This gathering is hosted by a “screen writer” from Mississippi, “a little man” who impersonates a “Civil War colonel” (13)— that is, a man reminiscent of William Faulkner (who, as we have seen, “impersonated” an officer in the Canadian Royal Air Force). 5. Pictured in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Women Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, Sexchanges (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 298. 6. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 186. 7. Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 34. 8. Kennedy, Over Here, 187. 9. CTCA, Keeping Fit to Fight, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 31. 10. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 34. 11. “Description of Facilities Offered by the CTCA—Social Hygiene Division,” quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 34. 12. Kennedy, Over Here, 186. “One CTCA pamphlet carefully explained that wet dreams were normal and that masturbation, common folk wisdom notwithstanding,

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Notes to Pages 179–189

would not lead to insanity. The clear implication was that natural emission, or even masturbation, was greatly preferable to potentially infectious liaisons.” 13. Michael S. Reynolds, “The Sun in Its Time: Recovering the Historical Context,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays on The Sun Also Rises (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 55. 14. A similar sense of postwar loss and degradation is associated with or symbolized by venereal disease in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story,” In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1986). 15. Bristow, Making Men Moral, 33. 16. Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 39–40. Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 108–109. The YMCA’s presence in France, in assisting the military, is depicted in American literature from the 1920s, for example, in Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. 17. Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 131. 18. Page numbers in Nightwood refer to Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961). 19. The old red-light district in San Francisco. 20. Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920– 1955,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56:2 (2001), 157. 21. Back cover text of the New Directions paperback edition of Nightwood. 22. Page numbers in parentheses refer to Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove, 1961). 23. Though aware it wasn’t dangerous if treated in time, Hemingway’s narrator in A Farewell to Arms (167–168) takes it much more seriously than Miller’s. 24. In terms of his critique of the war and the postwar American obsession with cleanliness and the “unsanitary” French way of life, Miller is following in tracks originally laid out by E. E. Cummings in The Enormous Room (New York: Penguin, 1999), 3, 7. 25. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 115. 26. Worldwide figures are from John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking, 2004), 4. Alfred W. Crosby, Epidemic and Peace, 1918 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 322, estimates 300,000 dead Americans; the one-half million figure is from Kennedy, Over Here, 189n. 27. Kennedy, Over Here, 189n. Barry, The Great Influenza, 239. 28. The Bantam Medical Dictionary, 5th ed. (New York: Bantam, 2004), 339–340. 29. Barry, The Great Influenza, 284–285. 30. Ibid., 169–184. 31. His suffering at Mona’s hands is much more developed in Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove, [1936] 1961).

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chapter 8 1. Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 731. 2. Ibid., 731n. 3. “Camp Horror Films Are Exhibited Here,”New York Times, May 2, 1945, 3. 4. “Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps,” New York Times, July 3, 1944, 3. “No Peace with Butchers,” New York Times, July 8, 1944, 10. 5. “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp,” New York Times, August 30, 1944, 1. “Nazi Death Factory Shocks Germans on a Forced Tour,” New York Times, April 18, 1945, 1. 6. “War Crimes Groups to Inspect Camps,” New York Times, April 25, 1945, 3. “Camp Horror Films Are Exhibited Here,” 3. “Films Back Charges of German Crimes,” New York Times, February 20, 1946, 6. 7. Karel Hudec, “All Germans Are Indicted,” Letters to the Times, New York Times, July 7, 1944. 8. “No Peace with Butchers,” 10. 9. “U.S. Officer Blames Germans for Crimes,” New York Times, April 30, 1945, 5. 10. “About—Death Camps,” “About—Those Generals,” New York Times, May 27, 1945, 58. 11. Whereas many of the Faulkner critics who write about Caddy and the Compson Appendix tend to see Faulkner’s association of Caddy with a German officer in 1946 as continuous with her portrayal in the 1929 text, there are several who have trouble with that association. For examples, see Stacy Burton, “Rereading Faulkner: Authority, Criticism, and ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ ” Modern Philology 98.4 (May 2001), 617–618; Thadious Davis, “Reading Faulkner’s Compson Appendix: Writing History from the Margins,” ed. Donald Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, Faulkner and Ideology: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 238, 246. 12. “Camp Horror Films Are Exhibited Here,” 3. 13. Burton, “Rereading Faulkner,” 622. 14. For example, Billy Wilder, director, Double Indemnity, 1944. 15. Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 163, 166–168. 16. Quoted in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 107. 17. Wilson quoted in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 119. 18. Quoted in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 163. 19. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, pictures following page 164. 20. Karl, William Faulkner, 756. 21. Ibid., 696. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Quoted in Karl, William Faulkner, 696. 25. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 168.

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Notes to Pages 200–207

26. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 285. 27. In a couple of key job sectors, beyond the traditional female professions of teaching and nursing, women’s presence increased after the war: clerical and sales work. The “working girl” was “glamorize[d]” after the Great War. George E. Mowry, The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, and Fanatics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 43. 28. Orville Prescott, “Book of the Times,” review of Kay Boyle’s Primer for Combat, New York Times, Nov. 2, 1942, 19. 29. “Topics of the Times,” by a reader, New York Times, April 14, 1943, 22. 30. Harold Callender, “Ghosts of French Past Return with Petain,” New York Times, April 29, 1945, E4. 31. Commander Robert C. Lee, quoted in “Lee Warns Nation to Unite or Perish,” New York Times, May 23, 1941, 41. 32. Lansing Warren, “Paris Greets Peace Envoys in Somber Mood,” New York Times, July 28, 1946, E3. 33. Ibid. 34. See, for example, Arno Dosch Fleurot, “Die Stadt Paris,” New York Times, Sept. 1, 1940, SM3. 35. Michael S. Reynolds, “The Sun in Its Time: Recovering the Historical Context,” ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays on The Sun Also Rises (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 59. 36. Ibid., 58–59. 37. Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Introduction,” ed. Bruccoli, New Essays on The Great Gatsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5–6. 38. Raymond Daniel, “Paris Jews Awake from Nightmare,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 1944, 5. 39. “100 Hostages Shot by Nazis in France,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 1941, 1. 40. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 29.

afterword 1. Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988), 207. 2. Burroughs’s novel is quite removed even from the romantic and erotic longings of the thirties novels of Barnes, Miller, and West. 3. Allen Ginsburg, “Introduction,” William Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin, 1977), viii. 4. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 207. 5. Page numbers in parentheses refer to William Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin, 1977).

Notes to Pages 207–214

253

6. See Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 207, 79–80, 82. According to Morgan’s account, some of Burroughs’s rejections were on physical grounds; others were on grounds of personality. 7. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 82. 8. On these contents of a World War II medic’s pouch, see “A Closer Look inside a Medic’s Pouch,” http://home.att.net/˜steinert/acloser.htm (accessed January 11, 2008). 9. Quoted in Michael S. Reynolds, “False Dawn: The Sun Also Rises Manuscript,” ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 120. 10. See chapter 1.

254

Notes to Pages 215–218

Index

absent desire, 217 AEF (American Expeditionary Forces), 16, 28, 105 African Americans discrimination against, 124, 127, 133, 161– 62, 219 domination of in modernist novels, 10 and the draft, 22 ethnic quotas, 241n112 in The Great Gatsby, 133 intelligence testing program, 93 military rank and, 15 and mobilization, 6 – 7, 14 –15, 88 – 89 92nd Division, 16 as noncombatants, 21, 226n49 officer selection in WWI, 81 Second Conference on Control of Morale, 91– 92 in The Sound and the Fury, 161– 62, 224n18 in The Sun Also Rises, 133 World War I records, 18 Aldridge, John W., 24 Alger, Horatio, 25, 80 Alien Act of 1918, 15 Allen, Edward F., 135 Alpha tests cultural bias, 95 distribution of test scores, 100 ethnic Americans, 164 intelligence testing program, 237n23 Interpretation of Scores in Intelligence, 84 ambulance corps, 31, 34, 137 America in the Great War, 94 American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), 16, 28, 105 American Journal of Public Health, 205

American Legionnaire, 206 American Plan, 111 American Protective League, 15 Americans All!, 18 Anderson, E. O., 226n49 Anderson, Sherwood, 39, 69 Anglo-Americans competition with ethnic Americans, 9 –10, 132 –33, 159 – 62, 223 – 24n16, 243n1 emasculation of, 11–13, 29 –30 and ethnic quotas, 108, 241n112 Immigration Restriction Acts, 53 impotence themes in modernist novels, 47 and Jewish Americans, 129, 211 love triangles and, 11–12, 158 – 59, 224n20 postwar backlash against meritocracy, 39 as racists in Gatsby, 107 – 8 anti-Semitism. See also Jewish Americans American Legionnaire, 206 athletics and, 130 in The Beautiful and Damned, 179 – 80 Faulkner novels, 41 Great American Universities, 125 in The Great Gatsby, 179 Harvard University, 126 Hemingway novels, 41, 206 after the Holocaust, 210 –11, 223n12 in The Sound and the Fury, 160 in The Sun Also Rises, 125, 128 – 29 university quotas, 41 Application for Appointment in the Regular Army, 105 aptitudes, 50, 128, 154, 165 – 66 255

Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby, 210 Army. See U.S. Army Articles of War, 145 – 46 Asian-Americans, 19 Association of American Medical Colleges, 165 Association of New England Deans, 124 athletics anti-Semitism, 130 and chastity, 117 Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), 117, 134 –35 and masculinity, 134 –35 military school training, 139 – 40 and the New Man, 134 and the U.S. Army, 138 Auerbach, Eric, 37 –38 The Awakening, 62, 65, 233 –34n24 Axis Powers, 205 Baker, Carlos, 31 Baker, Newton D., 83, 115 Bara, Theda, 57 Barbary Coast, 251n19 Barbeau, Arthur E., 15, 18, 81, 99 Barnes, Djuna, 8, 57, 250n1. See also Nightwood Barth, John, 58 Baym, Nina, 180 The Beautiful and Damned. See also Fitzgerald, F. Scott Anglo-Americans and the military, 13 Anglo-ethnic competition, 62 – 63 anti-Semitism, 179 – 80 bitterness in, 56 charity girls, 110 –11 egalitarianism, 17 frustrated military ambitions, 34, 216 military/romantic rejection, 177 – 79 racism in, 56 Benjamin, Walter, 73 Berryman, John, 61 bestialism, 12 Beta tests, 100, 237n23 Big Game, 33, 36 Big Show, 33 bilingualism

256

Index

Camp Gordon Plan, 106 ethnic Americans and, 88, 90 A Farewell to Arms, 136 intelligence testing program, 163 and rank, 4, 19 biographical criticism, 49 – 50 birth control, 27 – 28 birth rate, 28 Borst, Charlotte G., 108 boxing, 134 –35, 157 Bradbury, Malcolm, 59 Brandt, Allan M., 26 – 27, 116 Brigham, Carl, 101, 163, 165, 248 – 49n32 Bristow, Nancy K., 222n6 British military mobilizationain, 32, 92, 98 – 99 British WWI literature, 30 –32 Brodkin, Karen, 223n12 Brooks, Peter, 60 Brown, Dorothy M., 114 Brown, William Hill, 57 Bruccoli, Matthew J., 13 –14, 175, 236n5 bullfighting, 130 –31, 139, 147, 187 Bureau of Salesmanship Research, 83 Burroughs, William, 42, 214 –17 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 126 Camp Devens, 84 Camp Dix, 84, 109 –10 Camp Gordon, 87, 89 – 90, 106 Camp Leavenworth, 33 Camp Meade, 84 Camp Sheridan, 34, 87, 120, 238n50 Camp Upton, 110 –11 Camp Zachary Taylor and Fitzgerald, 33 –34, 55, 81, 87 and Gatsby, 81 German Americans and, 90 intelligence testing program, 84 – 85, 237n26 officer selection in WWI, 87 Canadian military, 34, 80, 153, 155 – 56 Caporetto, 35 Cather, Willa My Antonia, 233 –34n24 New Man, 224n19 and the seduction plot, 57 on the Twenties, 23 war romanticization, 31

Catholics, 127, 193, 241n112 censorship, 15, 189 charity girls. See also New Woman; prostitution American Plan, 111 in The Beautiful and Damned, 110 –11 Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), 109 –12 Committee on Protective Work for Girls, 111–12 defined, 222n6 detention of, 111, 114 Faulkner backlash against, 203, 211 fraternization, 7, 10 in The Great Gatsby, 112 –13 khaki-mad girls, 156 in Nightwood, 190, 192 1930s era novels, 186 in postmobilization novels, 12, 48, 174 Section on Women and Girls, 112 in Soldiers’ Pay, 110 in The Sound and the Fury, 155 – 56 in Three Soldiers, 227n70 U.S. Army, 9 –10 as Whoring Teens, 9 –10 and Zelda Fitzgerald, 111 Charlotte Temple, 57, 233n23, 242 – 43n149 chastity and athletics, 117 and the impotent man, 169 and modernist novels, 61 and the New Man, 56 in the seduction novel, 66, 242 – 43n149 soldiers as defenders of, 114 –16 and the U.S. Army, 114 –16, 148, 181, 188 – 90 chemical prophylaxis, 116 Chicago Medical School, 130 Chopin, Kate, 57, 62, 65, 233 –34n24 The Chosen, 124, 128 Civil War, 21 cockfighting, 187 Cold War, 207 Columbia University, 125 – 27 Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) athletics, 117, 134 –35 and charity girls, 109 –10 detention camps, 114

failure of, 242n151 Keeping Fit to Fight, 188 – 89 masturbation, 250 – 51n12 parodied in Tropic of Cancer, 196 and sexual hygiene, 188 – 89 venereal diseases and prostitution, 204 – 5 wet dreams, 250 – 51n12 Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army ethnic Americans’ morale, 91 intelligence testing program, 98 – 99 meritocratic mobilization, 82 – 84 rating scale, 85 – 87, 93 Committee on Protective Work for Girls, 111–12 Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded, 83, 152 – 55, 163 Committee on Psychology, 84, 98 Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits, 82 Compson Appendix. See also The Sound and the Fury charity girl backlash, 202 –3 and the end of the modernist novel, 200 and the Holocaust, 206 – 7 misogyny, 197 promiscuous woman, 42, 203, 210, 252n11 Comstock Laws, 28 condoms, 26 – 28 Conference (Second) on Control of Morale, 91 Cooperman, Stanley, 23 – 24, 37 The Crack-Up, 33, 135, 166 Crane, Stephen and Hemingway, 61, 235n40 Maggie, 61– 62, 64 – 65, 233 –34n24 and modernism, 61 The Red Badge of Courage, 61 seduction plot, 57 Cultural Studies, 233n21 Cummings, E. E. ambulance corps, 31 disillusionment with war, 31, 229n98 ethnic Americans, 223n10 mobilization wounds, 217 postmobilization novels, 8 Index

257

Daisy Miller, 114, 233 –34n24 Dartmouth College, 125 The Day of the Locust. See also West, Nathanael Faulkner parodied, 187, 250n4 parody of Sun and Gatsby, 187 plotlessness, 56 promiscuity novel, 12 venereal disease in, 188 – 89 Dearborn, Mary V., 250n1 death of the author, 47 Department of Justice, 15, 111 deportation (aliens), 15 detention camps (women), 28, 32, 111–12 development battalions, 89 Dijkstra, Bram, 58 Discipline and Punish, 54 disability, 11, 19, 42, 49, 149, 173, 177, 180 discourses, 49 – 52, 54 – 56 Distinguished Service Medal, 99 Dodge, Raymond, 98 – 99 Dos Passos, John. See also Three Soldiers ambulance corps, 31 disillusionment with war, 31, 229n98 frustrated military ambitions, 36 mobilization and ethnic Americans, 225 – 26n43 mobilization wounds, 217 postmobilization novels, 8 Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, 226n49 Douglas, Ann, 57 – 58 draftees, 16 Dreiser, Theodore, 57, 65 dysentery, 142 eating clubs, 125 egalitarianism in The Beautiful and Damned, 17 intelligence testing program, 93 military school, 125, 243 – 44n7 mobilization effort, 6, 219 mobilization novel, 22 and modernism, 7 – 8 officer selection in WWI, 32 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 201 Eliot, Charles, 116 Ellis Island, 248 – 49n32 emasculation

258

Index

Anglo-Americans, 11–13, 29 –30 frustrated military ambitions, 36 –37 mobilization wounds, 5 – 6 in The Sound and the Fury, 158 in The Sun Also Rises, 143, 146 endogamy, 51 episteme, 24, 47, 52, 227n65 Espionage Act, 15 ethnic Americans achievement of rank, 4 – 5 Camp Gordon Plan, 89 – 90 censorship, 15 competition with Anglo-Americans, 9 –10, 132 –33, 159 – 62, 223 – 24n16, 243n1 defined, 222n4 deportation, 15 development battalions, 89 dialect in modernist novels, 70 egalitarian treatment in mobilization, 6, 18, 219 in A Farewell to Arms, 136 –38 in The Great Gatsby, 218 –19 intelligence testing program, 6, 18 –19, 93, 106, 166 love triangles and, 9 –12, 30, 158 – 59 military prejudice against, 78 – 79, 89 moralism in the modernist novel, 62 name changes and success, 80 and the New Woman, 25, 32 –33 1930s era novels, 186 officer selection in WWI, 88 – 89, 99 –100 in postmobilization novels, 8 promiscuity novel, 12 and the promiscuous woman, 131 racist promiscuity plot, 41 Red Scare, 223n13 resentment of, 41 scapegoating of, 56, 174, 180 – 81 Second Conference on Control of Morale, 91 stereotypes in the modernist novel, 74 university quotas for, 97 war service of, 47, 232n5 WWI mobilization, 16 –18, 51, 219, 225 – 26n43 eugenics, 155 eunuch, 144 Evans, Robert K., 21– 22

exogamy, 51 expatriation, 137 –38, 208 fallen woman, 57, 172, 233 –34n24 A Farewell to Arms. See also Hemingway, Ernest ethnic Americans in, 4 – 5, 136 –38 gonorrhea, 251n23 joke front, 145 and the mobilization, 34 –35 mobilization wounds, 13, 35 New Man, 136 New Woman, 227n70 rejection of moralism, 66 slacker raids, 143 and A Very Short Story, 247n72 war romanticization, 31 Faulkner, Estelle, 173, 177 Faulkner, William. See also Compson Appendix; Soldiers’ Pay; The Sound and the Fury alter ego, 248n19 anti-Semitism, repentance for, 205 – 7 aviation dreams, 33, 230n106 backlash against military meritocracy, 152, 162 Canadian air force, 34, 153, 155 – 56 and Estelle Faulkner, 173, 175 frustrated military ambitions, 31–33, 153, 157, 175, 216 Lost Cause, 25 love triangles, 177 and the mentally disabled, 247n1 military/romantic rejection, 175 – 76 misogyny, 211 mobilization wounds, 5 – 6, 30, 40, 74, 166, 176, 217 –18 moral hygiene, 38 Nobel Prize, 218 parodied in Day of the Locust, 187, 250n4 racist promiscuity plot, 9 romanticism, 166 Sartoris, 176 self-mythologizers, 25 and the sexual revolution, 23 sublimations of rejection, 173 war romanticization, 31 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 15 feeblemindedness

in The Sound and the Fury, 25, 152 in the American population, 94, 162 characterization of in the modernist novel, 10 classification system, 248n30 Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded, 83, 152 – 55, 163 intelligence testing program, 19, 32 Interpretation of Scores in Intelligence, 84 fellatio. See oral sex female promiscuity. See promiscuous woman female submission, 66 feminist theory, 59 fetishism, 12, 186 fetishism of the signifier of language, 222n3 Fiedler, Leslie, 49, 113 –14, 187 Fitzgerald, F. Scott. See also The Beautiful and Damned; The Great Gatsby athletic ambitions, 135 aviation dreams, 33, 230n106 Camp Gordon, 90, 238n50 Camp Leavenworth, 33 Camp Sheridan, 34, 238n50 Camp Zachary Taylor, 33 –34, 87 charity girls, 110, 178 The Crack-Up, 33, 135, 166 as cuckold, 174 edits Hemingway, 141 expatriation, 208 fetishism of the signifier of language, 222n3 Fort Snelling, 88 frustrated military ambitions, 31–33, 78 – 79, 120, 178, 236n5 and Hemingway, 8, 54, 73, 135, 147, 218 I Didn’t Get Over, 33 –34 Irish American, 179 irony in, 74 Jazz Age, 23, 25 Jewish American representations, 53 – 54 military service, 142 military/romantic rejection, 175 mobilization wounds, 5 – 6, 30, 40, 74, 166, 217 –18 moral hygiene, 38 officer selection in WWI, 81, 87 racist promiscuity plot, 9 Index

259

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (continued) rejection of moralism, 63 self-mythologizers, 25 and the sexual revolution, 23 sublimations of rejection, 173 war romanticization, 31, 55 and Zelda Fitzgerald, 87, 173 – 74, 249n6 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 87, 173 – 74, 249n6 Flags in the Dust, 176 flappers, 23, 108 – 9, 222n6 A Fool There Was, 57, 203, 234n25 Ford, Nancy Gentile, 15, 18, 20 Foreigners, 40 Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection (FSS), 82, 89 – 90 Fort Leavenworth, 87 Fort Snelling, 88 Foucault, Michel discourses, 51 episteme, 24, 47, 227n65 and Gandal, 54 – 55 France collaboration in WWII, 208 – 9 French way, 7, 26 – 27 and the Holocaust, 210 military venereal disease cases, 115 Paris Peace talks, 209 post-WWII, 207 – 9 quickie divorce, 209 –10 Franklin, Cornell, 173 fraternization, 6 – 7, 10. See also charity girls free love, 29 gay dragnet, 146 General Orders, military, 96 – 97, 105, 116 –17 George Washington University, 165 German Americans, 90, 179 Germany, 201– 2, 205, 209 –11 Goddard, Henry H., 164 – 65, 248n30, 248 – 49n32 gonorrhea, 115, 149, 175, 195 – 96 good-time Charlottes, 204. See also prostitution Gordon, Linda, 27 – 28 Gould, Stephen Jay, 94 – 98, 100 –104, 106 Grant, Madison, 39, 50 Graves, Robert, 30 Gravity’s Rainbow, 246n70 260

Index

Great American Universities, 125 Great Depression, 23, 25 The Great Gatsby. See also Fitzgerald, F. Scott Anglo-American backlash in, 107 – 8 anti-Semitism in, 179 Armed Services Edition, 210 charity girls, 112 –13 and Daisy Miller, 114 ethnic Americans in, 70, 81, 131 as Great American Novel, 218 homosexuality, 158 impossible love, 168 incest themes, 177, 249n12 irony in, 62, 80, 121 Jewish Americans in, 74, 80, 129 and Junky, 216 –17 love triangles and, 156 – 58 masculinity redefined, 39 meritocratic mobilization and, 108 military/romantic rejection, 177 mobilization novel, 8 mobilization wounds, 13 New Man, 113 –14, 118 – 21 New Woman, 24 – 25, 108 – 9 parodied in Day of the Locust, 187 plot style, 60 profile for, 78 – 79 promiscuity novel, 8 racism in, 56 relationship to Sun, 141 Roaring Twenties, 13 –14 seduction plot, 113, 117 white breeding-disaster/ mark-of-distinction, 48, 232n7 Great Immigration, 223 – 24n16 Griffin, Peter, 249n7 Gullason, Thomas, 235n40 Gutowski, Stanislaw, 89 – 90 Haas, Robert, 206 Hankins, Frank, 162 Harding, Warren G., 207 Harvard University, 116, 124, 126 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 233 –34n24 Hemingway, Ernest. See also A Farewell to Arms; In Our Time; The Sun Also Rises and Agnes von Kurowsky, 173, 175 In Another Country, 144

anti-Semitism, 206 aviation dreams, 33, 230n106 boxing, 135 Caporetto retreat, 35 –36 and Cather, 229n97 competition with ethnic Americans, 135 –38 defective vision, 138, 143, 175, 249n7 expatriation, 137 –38, 208 fetishism of the signifier of language, 222n3 and Fitzgerald, 8, 54, 73, 135, 141, 147, 218 frustrated military ambitions, 31–33, 35 –37, 175, 216, 249n7 and Grant, 50 irony in, 74 Italian Army fiction, 143 Jewish Americans in, 41, 54, 231n132 and the joke front, 141– 46 and Lady Twysden, 138, 145, 173, 175 linguistic style, 70 and Loeb, 173 Lost Generation, 23, 25, 32 –33 military draft, 34 military service rejection, 143 military/romantic rejection, 175 mobilization wounds, 5 – 6, 30, 40, 51, 74, 166, 217 –18 moral hygiene, 38 Nobel Prize, 218 nurse and injured soldier trope, 148 – 49 parodied by West, 187 The Passing of the Great Race, 39 Plimpton interview, 147 race consciousness, 124 racist promiscuity plot, 9 Red Cross ambulance driver, 34, 137 rejection of moralism, 63 self-mythologizers, 25 Seventh Missouri Infantry service, 139 and the sexual revolution, 23 Soldier’s Home, 137 and Stein, 124, 229n104 and Stephen Crane, 61, 235n40 and Stoddard, 50 sublimations of rejection, 173 A Very Short Story, 148 – 49 war romanticization, 31, 55

wounding of, 4 – 5, 37, 144 yellow-streaked slacker, 144, 246n59 Henri, Florette, 15, 18, 99 heroin, 214 –15 Hibben, John Grier, 130 Higham, John, 15 history of discourses, 46 – 47 The History of Sexuality, 54 Hollywood, 210 Holocaust and anti-Semitism, 41– 42, 223n12 in the Compson Appendix, 206 – 7 impact of, 210 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 200 – 202 homophobia, 145 homosexuality gay dragnet, 146 in The Great Gatsby, 158 homophobia, 145 in Junky, 214 –15 military sanctions against, 12 in Nightwood, 190 – 93 in The Sun Also Rises, 145 – 46 and the U.S. Army, 145 – 46, 191 homosocial desire, 158 – 59 Hoover, J. Edgar, 15 Hopkins, Ernest, 125 Hurston, Zora Neale, 68 hyphenated-Americans. See ethnic Americans I Didn’t Get Over, 33 –34 idiot, 164, 248n30 illiterates, 100, 105, 163, 237n23 imbecile, 164, 248n30 immigrants, 94, 107, 248 – 49n32 immigration criminal population, 232 –33n14 and the draft, 22 Great Immigration, 223 – 24n16 Immigration Restriction Acts, 9, 52 – 53, 107, 163, 223n13 Immigration Restriction League, 124 intelligence testing program, 19, 162, 219 literacy requirements, 14 and racism, 8 – 9 restrictions on, 40 – 41 xenophobia, 97 Index

261

impossible love, 42, 168, 171– 72, 179, 186, 192, 194 – 95, 217 impotent man theme, 47 – 48, 168 – 72, 177 In Another Country, 144 In Our Time, 13, 137, 148 – 49, 227n70. See also Hemingway, Ernest incest themes in modernist novels, 168 and nativism, 47 – 48 postmobilization novels, 168 – 69 in The Sound and the Fury, 69, 171– 72, 203 infidelity, 108 – 9 influenza epidemic, 197 intelligence testing program biases in, 92 – 94, 97, 100 Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army, 98 critique of, 84 – 85, 104 – 5 ethnic American opportunities, 6, 18 –19, 81, 165 – 66, 219 and the feebleminded, 152 General Orders, 96 – 97 and General Pershing, 152 Interpretation of Scores in Intelligence, 84, 237n26 mobilization and, 10 nativist concerns, 107, 162 – 63 officer selection in WWI, 32, 84, 97 – 98, 102 –3, 106 – 7 postwar biases, 19 Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, 84, 103, 237n26 scoring, 87 – 88 usefulness of, 104 versions of, 237n23 after WWI, 105 Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, 112 International Herald Tribune, 210 interracial marriage, 132 Irish Americans, 190, 192 irony in The Great Gatsby, 74, 80, 121 modernist novels, 62 – 63, 179 in The Sun Also Rises, 62, 71– 72, 74, 148, 150 Italian Americans, 91, 136 –38, 160 – 61, 239n57 Italy, 34 –36, 143, 145 262

Index

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 223n12 James, Henry, 61 Jazz Age, 8, 23, 25, 80 Jefferson Barracks, 216 Jewish Americans. See also anti-Semitism; Holocaust and Anglo-Americans, 129 and boxing, 135 characterization of in the modernist novel, 10 in The Chosen, 124 eating clubs, 125 ethnic quotas, 241n112 in The Great Gatsby, 74, 80, 129 kidnapping of, 107 medical aptitude tests, 165 – 66 medical school quotas for, 124, 127 –31, 192 – 93, 223n15 military rank and, 18 officer selection in WWI, 99 –101, 106 – 7, 240n86 promiscuity novel, 12 and race, 132 Samuel “Nails” Morton, 78, 107, 119 in The Sound and the Fury, 160 – 61 stereotypes in the modernist novel, 244n23 in The Sun Also Rises, 147, 231n132 in Tropic of Cancer, 186 in Ulysses, 224n21 university quotas for, 9, 10, 41, 53 – 54, 101, 107, 126 –31, 164, 211 as WWII pilots, 206 – 7 joke front A Farewell to Arms, 145 – 46 Hemingway service, 141– 46 Italian front, 34 The Sun Also Rises, 30, 145 – 46, 148, 174, 249n10 Joyce, James, 224n21 Jozan, Edouard, 173, 249n6 Junky, 42, 214, 216 –17 Kansas City, 139, 143 Karabel, Jerome, 124, 128 Karl, Frederick, 176, 200, 205 – 6 Keely, Karen, 247n1 Keene, Jennifer, 22, 226n49 Keeping Fit to Fight, 188 – 89

Kennedy, David M. Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), 188–89, 250–51n12 draft age, 247n6 intelligence testing program, 94, 96, 103, 105, 106 nativism, 15 Kevles, Daniel J., 98, 103, 105 – 6 khaki-mad girls, 156. See also charity girls khaki-wackies, 204. See also prostitution Klein, Marcus, 40 Kristeva, Julia, 172 Ku Klux Klan, 9, 15 Kuhn, Joseph E., 21 lesbianism, 12, 149 letter of recommendation, 128 Lippard, George, 63 – 64, 233n23. See also The Quaker City literacy requirements, 14, 95 Literary Digest, 205 Loeb, Harold, 54, 135, 138, 173 Lohman, David F., 163 – 64 Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality, 19, 223n12, 232n5, 239n57 Lost Cause, 25 Lost Generation fiction from, 8 and Hemingway, 23, 32 –33 and Stein, 124, 229n104 Love and Death in the American Novel, 49 love triangles Faulkner marriage, 177 in Flags in the Dust, 176 homosocial desire, 158 – 59 modernist novels, 9 –12, 30, 156 – 58 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 124 – 26 Loyola University, 127 Lukacs, Georg, 58, 73 Maggie, 61– 62, 64 – 65, 233 –34n24. See also Crane, Stephen manhood, 38 –39, 217. See also masculinity Martin, Wendy, 24, 52 Marxist theory, 58 – 59 masculinity and athletics, 134 –35 frustrated military ambitions, 36, 174

and homosexuals, 145 – 46 love triangles and, 9 and mobilization, 6 – 7, 29 –30 redefinition of, 6, 38 –39, 143 and sexual purity, 115 and the U.S. Army, 38 –39, 217 master discourse, 52 masturbation, 189, 250 – 51n12 McFarlane, James, 59 McTeague, 65 – 66, 244n23 Medical Aptitude Test, 165 – 66 medical schools ethnic restrictions, 163, 192 Jewish quotas, 124, 127 –31, 192 – 93, 223n15 letter of recommendation, 128 Menand, Louis, 235n55 mental retardation, 155, 247n1. See also feeblemindedness meritocratic mobilization (WWI). See also mobilization (WWI) and Anglo-Americans, 29 –30 backlash against military, 162 and ethnic Americans, 18, 219 in The Great Gatsby, 108 and intelligence testing, 6, 106 Jewish Americans and, 129 and modernist novelists, 5 – 6, 13 –15, 50 officer selection in WWI, 81 postwar backlash against, 39 racist promiscuity plot, 158 and segregation, 5 – 6, 103 – 4 and university attendance, 107 Michaels, Walter Benn Anglo impotence, 232n7 discourses, 46, 49 – 50 methodology of, 51 modernist novels’ plotlessness, 58, 73 – 74 on modernism, 60 nativism, 47, 63, 223n13 New Historicism, 43 Roaring Twenties, 13 –14 military draft African Americans, 22 and Hemingway, 34 and immigration, 22 instituted, 92 intelligence testing program, 97 Index

263

military draft (continued) lowering of draft age, 144, 153, 247n6 and social change, 29 Soldier’s Qualification Card, 104, 240n94 World War II, 215 Military Intelligence Branch, 78 – 79, 82, 89, 91 Military Morale Section, 82 military school, 124, 125, 138 –39, 243 – 44n7 Miller, Henry. See also Tropic of Cancer critique of American cleanliness, 251n24 lesbianism, 149 military mockery, 250n1 mobilization themes, 8 The Mismeasure of Man, 94 – 98 misogyny Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), 112 Compson Appendix, 211 modernist novelists, 38 in postmobilization novels, 12 U.S. Army, 197 mobilization (WWI). See also meritocratic mobilization and African Americans, 6, 10, 133 condom introduction, 27 – 28 egalitarianism, 6, 32, 93 and ethnic Americans, 16 –18, 51, 225 – 26n43 intelligence testing program, 6, 10, 17 –18, 42, 92 –107 and the modernist novel, 5, 25, 73 – 74 officer selection in WWI, 97 – 99 parodied in 1930s novels, 197 – 98 Section on Women and Girls, 112 segregation in, 15 –16 and the sexual revolution, 26 mobilization fiction, defined, 217 mobilization modernism, 51 mobilization novel. See also postmobilization novel defined, 8, 222n8, 224 – 25n25 egalitarianism, 22 Gravity’s Rainbow, 246n70 Junky, 42 Tropic of Cancer, 42

264

Index

mobilization wounds and emasculation, 5 – 6 Faulkner and, 5 – 6, 40, 166, 217 –18 Fitzgerald and, 5 – 6, 40, 166, 217 –18 Hemingway and, 5 – 6, 40, 166, 217 –18 in Junky, 216 military/romantic rejection, 180 – 81 in modernist novels, 13, 30, 217 –18, 224n22 parodied in 1930s novels, 198 in The Sun Also Rises, 150 modernist novelists. See also Faulkner, William; Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Hemingway, Ernest frustrated military ambitions, 49 meritocratic mobilization, 50 mobilization wounds, 5 – 6, 30, 40, 74, 166, 176, 217 –18 postmobilization novels, 31–33 self-mythologizers, 23, 25, 218 –19 modernist novels. See also The Great Gatsby; The Sound and the Fury; The Sun Also Rises feminist theory, 59 impossible love, 42, 168, 171– 72, 179, 186, 192, 194 – 95, 217 impotent man, 168 incest themes, 168 irony in, 62 – 63, 179 linguistic style of, 70 – 72 love triangles, 9 –12, 30, 156 – 59, 176 – 77 Marxist theory, 58 – 59 and mass politics, 234n33 and mobilization, 5, 8, 25, 73 – 74 mobilization wounds, 13, 30, 217 –18, 224n22 moralism, 61– 62 nativism, 47, 55, 63 New Historicism, 218 plotlessness, 12 –13, 56 – 60, 73 – 74, 218 postmobilization genre, 57 and the promiscuous woman, 131 and realism, 58 romanticism in, 58 sexual revolution, 41 symbolism in, 74, 173, 176 – 77, 179 – 80 tragedy in, 49, 74, 168 – 69, 173, 175, 177, 179 – 80 Winesburg, Ohio, 69

modernism defined, 14, 224 – 25n25, 227n59 and egalitarianism, 7 – 8 international, 12, 224n21 literary style and, 73 – 74, 235n55 Love and Death in the American Novel, 49 meritocratic mobilization and, 13 –15, 25 and nativism, 51– 54, 223n13 New Deal Modernism, 235n55, 235n56, 248n15 New Historicism, 233n21 New Man, 62 ontology of the sign, 60 – 61, 63, 73 – 74 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, 43 and the sexual revolution, 23, 188 style shift in, 235n42 and World War I, 5 – 6, 30 –31 and World War I mobilization, 5 – 6, 30 –31 moral hygiene, 38 moralism, 61– 64, 66 – 67 morons, 164, 248n30 Morton, Samuel “Nails,” 78, 107, 119 Mowry, George E., 253n27 My Antonia, 233 –34n24 NAACP, 16 National Academy of the Sciences, 82 National Guard, 99, 139 nativism Brigham study, 163 – 64 Espionage Act, 15 and ethnic Americans, 22 intelligence testing program, 93, 107, 162 and the mobilization, 14 –15 in modernist novels, 47, 55, 63 and modernism, 51– 54, 223n13 ontology of the sign, 74 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, 43 return to normalcy, 207 A Study of American Intelligence, 101 Nazis, 208 – 9, 210 –11 New Criticism, 73, 218 New Deal Modernism, 235n55, 235n56, 248n15

New Historicism biographical criticism and, 49 – 50 history of discourses, 46 – 47 and Michaels, 51 and modernist novels, 218 and modernism, 233n21 and New Criticism, 73 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, 43 New Man and chastity, 56, 188 creation of, 9, 134 in A Farewell to Arms, 136 and female promiscuity, 140 in The Great Gatsby, 113 –14, 118 – 21 in modernist novels, 55, 62 moral hygiene, 38 in One of Ours, 117 –18, 224n19 and prostitution, 147 in The Sound and the Fury, 157, 204 and the U.S. Army, 117 New Woman. See also charity girls; promiscuous women and ethnic Americans, 32 –33 in The Great Gatsby, 108 – 9 love triangles and, 9 –12, 30 in modernist novels, 8, 24 in Nightwood, 190 – 91 quickie divorce, 209 –10 and the sexual revolution, 23 in The Sound and the Fury, 24 – 25 in The Sun Also Rises, 24 – 25, 147 – 48 New York Times, 201– 2, 208 – 9 Newport, Rhode Island, 146 Newport Hospital, 131 Nightwood. See also Barnes, Djuna charity girls, 190, 192 homosexuality, 190 – 93 linguistic style of, 69 plotlessness, 56 promiscuity novel, 12 university quotas, 41 92nd Division, 16 Nobel Prize, 218 Noll, Steven, 247n1 Nordics, 108, 130, 163 – 64 Norris, Frank, 65 – 66 North, Michael, 58 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 200 – 202

Index

265

One of Ours, 117 –18, 224n19 ontology of the sign, 60 – 61, 63, 73 – 74, 218 oral sex, 26 – 27, 169 The Order of Things, 47 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, 43 Over Here: The First World War and American Society, 15, 94 Oxford University, 80, 107 – 8 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 36, 168 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 15 The Passing of the Great Race, 39 patriarchy, 11 Pershing, John, 116, 152 Personnel Manual of the U.S. Army, 97 Petain, Philippe, 208 – 9 phallic symbolism, 147 – 48 Pinkney, Tony, 224 – 25n25 Plimpton, George, 147 plotlessness feminist theory, 59 in modernist novels, 12 –13, 56 – 60, 73 – 74, 218 ontology of the sign, 73, 218 pluralism, 43 Portable Faulkner, 200, 203 Porter, Katherine Anne, 36, 168 – 69, 180 – 81 postmobilization novels. See also mobilization novel; promiscuity novels and charity girls, 12, 48, 174 and chastity, 61 Compson Appendix, 200 defined, 12, 222n8 female promiscuity and, 9, 174 The Great Gatsby, 121 impotent man theme, 168 incest themes, 168 and international modernism, 12, 224n21 meritocratic mobilization and, 29 military rejection metaphors, 174 military/romantic rejection, 249n9 mobilization themes, 8 and modernist novelists, 31–33 1930s era, 186 parodied in Tropic of Cancer, 195 266

Index

and prostitution, 12, 48 racist promiscuity plot, 12, 41 reproblematization, 55 sentimentalism in, 66 The Sound and the Fury, 152, 160 style of, 60 sublimations of rejection, 172 – 81 Ulysses, 224n21 venereal disease fetishism, 188 postmodernist novels, 214, 217 poststructuralism, 59 The Power of Sympathy, 57 premarital sexual activity, 28 Princeton University, 124 – 25, 128, 130 Progressive Era, 8, 23, 61– 62, 64 – 66 promiscuity novels The Day of the Locust, 187 The Great Gatsby, 8, 60 impotent man and promiscuous woman, 171 and modernist novels, 57 New Historicism, 43 1930s era, 186 and postmobilization novels, 12 rejection of moralism, 67 – 68 and the seduction plot, 57, 61 sensualism in, 64 – 66 The Sound and the Fury, 8 The Sun Also Rises, 8 promiscuous women. See also charity girls as ally of the German Army, 205 backlash against, 207 and the Compson Appendix, 203 and ethnic Americans, 133 –34 and the impotent man, 170 – 72 love triangles and, 11–12, 158 – 59, 224n20 in modernist novels, 131 nativism and modernist novels, 47 parodied in Day of the Locust, 187 postmobilization novels, 9, 140 and sensualism, 68 and sexual self control, 180 – 81 in The Sound and the Fury, 159 in The Sun Also Rises, 140 prophylaxis stations, 27 prostitution. See also charity girls American Journal of Public Health, 205 detention camps for, 114, 204

eroticization of, 198 in France, 7, 26 – 27 good-time Charlottes, 205 khaki-wackies, 204 and the New Man, 147 in postmobilization novels, 12, 48 red light district, 204, 251n19 Social Protection Division, 207 in The Sun Also Rises, 147, 149 – 50 in Tropic of Cancer, 193 – 97 U.S. Army and, 193 – 94 and venereal disease, 204 – 5 victory girls, 204 vivandières, 188 World War II campaign against, 204 Psychological Division, 96 Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, 84, 103, 237n26 Psychology Committee, 82, 88 Psychology Section, 105 The Purple Land, 130 Pynchon, Thomas, 246 – 47n70 The Quaker City happy ending, 172 Jewish stereotypes, 244n23 seduction plot, 63 – 64, 233n23, 242 – 43n149 quickie divorce, 209 –10 racial purity, 162 racial slurs, 91– 92, 133, 159, 239n57 racism. See also anti-Semitism in The Great Gatsby, 56 and immigration, 8 – 9 Immigration Restriction Acts, 9 and mobilization, 88 – 89 and modernist novelists, 39 postwar backlash against meritocracy, 39 racist promiscuity plot Compson Appendix, 200 and ethnic Americans, 41 homosocial desire, 158 impotent man theme, 169 and the modernist novel, 9 postmobilization novels, 12, 224n21 The Sound and the Fury, 160

Ragged Dick, 80 Rainbow Division, 78 Random House, 206 rating scale, for military officers, 83, 85 – 87, 93 Rating Sheet for Selecting Captains, 85, 87 – 88 realism, 58, 62 Recruit Psychological Examination for Illiterates and Non-English-Speaking Citizens and Aliens, 105 The Red Badge of Courage, 61. See also Crane, Stephen Red Cross, 34, 137, 139, 143 red light district, 28, 204, 251n19 Red Scare, 15, 207, 223n13, 232n13 referent, 60 – 61 reproblematization, 54 – 56 return to normalcy, 207 Reynolds, Michael, 141, 143 Rhodes Scholarship, 130 Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, 164 Roaring Twenties, 8, 13 –14, 23, 25 romanticism and ethnic Americans, 134 in The Great Gatsby, 71 in modernist novels, 39, 58, 62 in The Sound and the Fury, 160 – 61 in The Sun Also Rises, 71 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 146 Roosevelt, Theodore, 92, 135, 143 Rowson, Susanna, 57 sadism, 65 – 66 Said, Edward, 58 Sartoris, 176 Sassoon, Siegfried, 30 scapegoating, 56, 162, 180 – 81 The Scarlet Letter, 233 –34n24 Schaffer, Ronald, 94, 97, 99, 240n81 Scott, Walter Dill, 98 – 99, 106 Scribners, 189 Second Conference on Control of Morale, 91 Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, 16 Section on Women and Girls, 112 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 158 – 59 Index

267

seduction plot Charlotte Temple, 242 – 43n149 and chastity, 66, 242 – 43n149 The Day of the Locust, 190 defined, 224n20, 233n23 and the fallen woman, 233 –34n24 The Great Gatsby, 60, 113, 117 impotent man theme, 169 nineteenth century, 57 promiscuity novel, 57, 61 The Quaker City, 172 and sensualism, 63 – 66 and vampire novels, 57, 234n25 segregation. See also African Americans meritocratic mobilization and, 5 – 6, 20 – 21, 103 – 4, 161– 62 Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, 16 Selective Service Act, 92, 111 self-mythologizers, 21– 29, 79 – 80, 218 –19 sensualism promiscuity novels, 64 – 66 and the promiscuous woman, 68 seduction novels and, 63 – 66 The Sound and the Fury, 67 – 68 in The Sun Also Rises, 147 after WWII, 210 sentimentalism postmobilization novels, 66 rejection of in The Sun Also Rises, 69 – 71, 149, 169 in seduction novels, 63 – 64 77th Battalion, 19 Seventh Missouri Infantry, 139 sexism, 39 – 40 sexual abstinence, 117 sexual hygiene, 32, 189 – 90. See also Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) sexual revolution backlash against, 207 birth control, 28 in modernist novels, 24 – 25, 41 and modernism, 23 and World War I, 6 – 7, 26, 29, 188 shell-shocked, 29, 142, 228n94 Shilts, Randy, 146 Sister Carrie, 57, 65 slacker raids, 143

268

Index

Slotkin, Richard, 19, 20, 239n57 Smith, Paul, 247n72 social hygiene military propaganda campaign, 116 parodied in 1930s novels, 198 parodied in Tropic of Cancer, 193 and promiscuity, 110 Red Cross campaigns, 139 Social Hygiene Association, 188 Social Protection Division, 207 sodomy, 145 – 46 Soldier’s Home, 137 Soldiers’ Pay. See also Faulkner, William Anglo-Americans and the military, 13 bitterness in, 56 charity girls, 110 Faulkner alter ego, 248n19 French way, 27 frustrated military ambitions, 34, 153 – 54, 157 military/romantic rejection, 176 – 77, 179 New Woman, 227n70 Soldier’s Qualification Card, 104, 240n94 The Sound and the Fury. See also Faulkner, William African Americans and, 224n18 Anglo-ethnic competition, 159 – 62 anti-Semitism in, 160 charity girls, 155 – 56 emasculation, 158 ethnic dialect in, 70 feeblemindedness in, 152 impossible love, 168 impotent man and promiscuous woman, 170 – 72 incest themes, 171– 72, 203, 249n12 Jewish Americans, 160 – 61 and Junky, 216 linguistic style of, 69 love triangles and, 156 – 58 masculinity redefined, 39 military/romantic rejection, 177 mobilization novel, 8 mobilization wounds, 13 nativist modernism, 164 New Man, 157, 204 New Woman, 24 – 25 plotlessness, 59

promiscuity novel, 8 and the promiscuous woman, 159 racist promiscuity plot, 161– 62 sensualism in, 67 – 68 and World War I, 25 Stein, Gertrude, 32 –33, 124 sterilization, 155 Stoddard, Lothrop, 39, 47, 50, 164 Strangers in the Land, 15 A Study of American Intelligence, 101, 163 subjection, forms of, 50, 233n21 submissive woman, 108 – 9 Sudduth, Elizabeth, 236n5 The Sun Also Rises. See also Hemingway, Ernest antimilitary bent, 143 anti-Semitism in, 125, 128 – 29 antisentimentalism, 69 – 71 bullfighting litmus test, 130 –31 censorship, 189 emasculation themes, 143, 146 and ethnic Americans, 124, 131, 164 homophobia, 145 – 46, 158 impotent man theme, 48, 169 – 70, 175 intercourse alternatives, 168 – 69 irony in, 62, 71– 72, 74, 148, 150 Jewish Americans in, 147, 231n132 joke front, 30, 145 – 46, 148, 174, 249n10 and Junky, 216 linguistic style, 72 love triangles and, 156 – 58 masculinity redefined, 39 military school vs. military combat, 138, 146 mobilization novel, 8 mobilization wounds, 13 New Woman, 24 – 25, 147 – 48 parodied in Day of the Locust, 187 phallic symbolism, 147 – 48 plotlessness, 59 promiscuity novel, 8 and the promiscuous woman, 140, 175 prostitution, 147, 149 – 50 quickie divorce, 210 race consciousness, 125 – 26 racial slurs, 133 rejection of moralism, 66 – 67 relationship to Gatsby, 141 sensualism in, 147

shell-shock, 228n94 unpublished foreword, 40 venereal disease in, 189 The Survey magazine, 110 Susman, Warren, 80 syphilis, 115 Szalay, Michael, 37 –38, 235n55, 235n56, 248n15 Terrible Honesty, 58 Thorndike, Robert M., 163 – 64 Three Soldiers. See also Dos Passos, John charity girls, 227n70 ethnic Americans, 8, 223n10 military/romantic rejection, 249n9 officer selection in WWI, 238n36 Tone, Andrea, 27 trade tests, 82, 83 Trading with the Enemy Act, 15 transvestites, 190 – 93 Tratner, Michael, 234n33, 235n55 Trent, James W., 247n1 Tropic of Cancer. See also Miller, Henry antimilitary themes, 197 Commission on Training Camp Activities parody, 196 lesbianism, 149 mobilization novel, 42 promiscuity novel, 12 prostitution in, 193 – 97 YMCA parody, 198 The Turn of the Screw, 62 Twain, Mark, 61 The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, and Fanatics, 253n27 Twysden, Duff, 138, 145, 173 Ulysses, 224n21 University of Georgia School of Medicine, 131 University of Iowa College of Medicine, 130 The Unknown Soldiers, 18, 81 U.S. Army. See also intelligence testing program; mobilization (WWI) Application for Appointment in the Regular Army, 105 and athletics, 117, 138 bilingualism and rank, 4

Index

269

U.S. Army (continued) and charity girls, 9 –10 chastity campaign, 114 –16, 148, 181, 188 – 90 Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), 117, 134 –35, 242n151 Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded, 152 – 53 ethnic Americans, prejudice against, 78 – 79 fraternization, 6 – 7 and homosexuals, 145 – 46, 191 Individual Rating Sheet for Selecting [Officer] Candidates in Each Training Unit, 81, 85 and masculinity, 38 –39, 217 Medical Corp, 31 meritocratic mobilization, 82 – 84, 93 military draft, 29, 34, 104, 240n94 Military Intelligence Branch, 78 – 79, 82, 89, 91 military rejection metaphors, 174 – 81 misogyny, 197 moral hygiene, 38 New Man, 9, 117 officer selection in WWI, 32, 83 – 87 Personnel Manual, 97 in the promiscuity novel, 12 propaganda posters, 139, 148, 194 prostitution crusade, 193 – 94 Recruit Psychological Examination for Illiterates and Non-English-Speaking Citizens and Aliens, 105 Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, 16 segregation in, 5 – 6, 103 – 4, 161– 62 Selective Service Act, 92 sexual hygiene, 32 venereal diseases, 6, 42, 55, 115, 196 – 97 and Yerkes, 95 – 96 and the YMCA, 189 – 90 vamp novels, 61, 203, 210 vampires, 57, 203, 234n25 venereal diseases celebrated in Tropic of Cancer, 194 courts-martial for, 38, 116 detention camps for women, 114

270

Index

development battalions, 89 military propaganda campaign, 6, 42, 115 –16 number of infections in the U.S. Army, 196 – 97 parodied in Day of the Locust, 188 – 89 in the promiscuity novel, 12 prophylaxis stations, 27 and prostitution, 204 – 5 Red Cross treatment for, 139 in The Sun Also Rises, 189 Walker report, 26 – 27 Venetienne, 194 A Very Short Story. See also Hemingway, Ernest Anglo-Americans and the military, 13 bitterness in, 56 A Farewell to Arms, 247n72 military/romantic rejection, 175 – 77, 179 nurse and injured soldier trope, 148 – 49 victory girls, 204. See also prostitution Vietnam, 26 virginity, 169 vivandières, 188 von Kurowsky, Agnes, 173 Walker, George, 26 – 27 war romanticization, 31, 55, 229n97 Weinstein, Nathan. See West, Nathanael West, Nathanael, 8, 57, 80, 250n1. See also The Day of the Locust West Point, 105 wet dreams, 250 – 51n12 Wharton, Edith, 31, 229n97 White, Kevin, 222n6 white supremacy, 164 Whoring Teens, 9 Wilson, Woodrow eating clubs, 125 military propaganda campaign, 115 –16 Paris Peace talks, 209 Selective Service Act, 92 venereal diseases and prostitution, 204 – 5 Winesburg, Ohio, 69

Women’s Ferry Squadron, 206 working girls, 253n27 World War I. See also mobilization (WWI); U.S. Army effects of, 23 – 24 return to normalcy, 207 and the sexual revolution, 26, 29 working girls, 253n27 World War I and the American Novel, 23 – 24, 37 World War II and Burroughs, 214 –15 and the draft, 215 and the Holocaust, 42 lessons from, 25 propaganda campaign against prostitution, 204 Red Scare, 207

Social Protection Division, 207 venereal diseases and prostitution, 205 xenophobia, 15, 97 Yale University, 107, 124, 126 – 27 yellow-streaked slacker, 144, 246n59 Yerkes, Robert M. ambitions of, 106 and Brigham, 101 intelligence testing program, 94, 248 – 49n32 and the military, 95 – 96 Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, 84, 103, 237n26 Psychology Committee, 88 scientific personnel system, 106 YMCA, 189 – 90, 196, 198, 205

Index

271