Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (69 page)

And

Cellophane and stockings. They were, in fact, much more impressive than Garbo’s salary.
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The 1930s, even as Linus Pauling was discovering the nature of the chemical bond, were also the decade when Baekeland’s discovery of plastic began to deliver its legacy in a proliferation of synthetic substances that hit the market one after another. The first acetylene-based fabrics were marketed in 1930, as was acrylic plastic, leading to Perspex, Plexiglass, and Lucite. Cellophane proper appeared wrapped around Camel cigarettes, also in 1930.
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Neoprene synthetic rubber was available a year later, and polyamide synthetic fibres in 1935. Perlon, an early form of nylon, was introduced in Germany in 1938, and commercial polythene in 1939. In 1940 in America cellophane was voted the third ‘most beautiful’ word in the language (after ‘mother’ and ‘memory’), a triumph of that other ‘m’ word, marketing. But it was the chemistry that mattered, and here nylon was the most instructive.
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Despite being on the losing side in World War I, Germany had maintained a strong base in industrial chemistry. In fact, because the Allied naval blockade had been so successful, Germany was forced to experiment with synthetic foods and products, keeping her ahead of her enemies. Beginning in 1925, with the formation of I. G. Farben Chemical Group, a team of talented organic chemists was brought together to carry out basic research in polymer chemistry, aiming to build specific molecules with specific properties.
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This was categorised as fundamental research and so escaped the Allied sanctions against military products. The team synthesised a new polymer every day for a period of years. British and American industries were aware of this commercial threat, even though the politicians dismissed the military risk, so much so that in 1927 the
Du Pont Company of Wilmington, Delaware, increased the research budget of the chemical department from $20,000 a year to $25,000 a month.
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At the time it was believed that chemical substances were divided into two, those like sugar or salt whose molecules would pass through a fine membrane, and which were crystal; and those with larger molecules, like rubber or gelatin, which would not pass through such a membrane, classified as ‘colloids.’ Colloids were conceived as a series of smaller molecules held together by a mysterious ‘electrical’ force. As Linus Pauling’s experiments were showing, however, the chemical bond was basic, a part of physics: there was no ‘mysterious’ force. Once the mystery was removed, and the way molecules were linked together became clearer, the possibility of synthesising substances similar to, and maybe better than, rubber or gelatin became a practical option. In particular, there was a need for a silk substitute, silk being expensive and difficult to obtain from Japan, which was then at war with China. The fundamental breakthrough was the work of Wallace Hume Carothers, ‘Doc,’ who had been lured to Wilmington against a rival offer from Harvard with the promise of ‘massive funds’ for basic research. He began to build up ever larger chain molecules – polyesters – by using so-called difunctional molecules. In classical chemistry, alcohols react with acids to produce esters. In difunctional molecules, there are two acid or alcohol groups at each end of the molecule, not one, and Carothers discovered that such molecules ‘are capable of reacting continually with each other to set off chain reactions,’ which grow into longer and longer molecules.
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As the 1930s progressed, Carothers built up molecules with molecular weights of 4,000, 5,000, and then 6,000 (sugar has a molecular weight of 342, haemoglobin 6,800, and rubber approximately 1,000,000). One of the properties to emerge was the ability to be drawn out as a long, fine, strong filament. To begin with, says Stephen Fenichell, in his history of plastic, these were too brittle, or too expensive, to be commercially useful. Then, in late March 1934, Carothers asked an assistant, Donald Coffman, to try to build a fibre from an ester not studied before. If any synthetic fibre were to be commercially viable, it needed the capacity to be ‘cold drawn,’ which showed how it would behave at normal temperatures. The standard test was to insert a cold glass rod into the mixture and pull it out. Coffman and Carothers found that the new polymer turned out to be tough, not at all brittle, and lustrous.

After this discovery, Du Pont went into frantic action to be the first to create a successful synthetic silk. The patent was filed on 28 April 1937, and the world was introduced to the new substance at Du Pont’s ‘Wonder World of Chemistry’ at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Nylon – in the form of nylon stockings – stole the show. It was originally called fibre 66; hundreds of names had been tried, from Klis (silk backward) to nuray and wacara (imagine asking for ‘a pair of wacaras, please’). Nylon was preferred because it sounded synthetic and couldn’t be confused with anything else. After the fair demand for nylon built up; many stores restricted customers to two pairs each. There was a serious side to the nylon frenzy, however, which the
New York Times
pointed out: ‘Usually a synthetic is a reproduction of something found in nature…. This nylon is different. It has no chemical counterpart in nature…. It is … control over
matter so perfect that men are no longer utterly dependent upon animals, plants and the crust of the earth for food, raiment and structural material.’
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In the depths of the depression, only twenty-eight of the eighty-six legitimate theatres on Broadway were open, but
Eugene O’Neill
’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
had sold out even its top-of-the-range six-dollar seats.
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O’Neill had been confirmed as ‘the great US playwright, the man with whom true American theatre really begins,’ long before
Mourning,
which premiered on 26 October 1931.
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Curiously, however, it was not until the other end of the decade, by which time O’Neill had turned fifty, that his two great masterpieces
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day’s Journey into Night,
were written. The intervening years have become known as ‘The Silence.’

More than for most artists, certain biographical details of O’Neill are crucial to understanding his work. When he was not yet fourteen, he found that his own birth had precipitated a morphine addiction in his mother. He also discovered that his parents blamed their first son, Jamie, for infecting their second son, Edmund, with measles, from which he had died, aged eighteen months. In 1902 Ella O’Neill, who was addicted to drugs, had run out of morphine and tried suicide; this set off in Eugene, then in adolescence, a period of binge drinking and self-destructive behaviour; he also began to hang around theatres (his father was an actor).
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After an unsuccessful marriage, O’Neill attempted suicide himself, overdosing in a flophouse in 1911, after which he saw several psychiatrists; a year later his TB was diagnosed. In 1921 his father died tragically from cancer, his mother following in 1922; his brother Jamie died twelve months after that, from a stroke, which itself followed an alcoholic psychosis. He was forty-five. O’Neill had intended to study at Princeton, taking a science course. At university, however, he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, adopting an approach to life that his biographer calls ‘scientific mysticism.’ He was eventually removed from the course because he attended so few classes. He began writing in 1912, as a journalist, but soon turned to plays.
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Autobiography apart, O’Neill’s dramatic philosophy may be understood from this verdict on the United States.: America, he said, ‘instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country…. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.’
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Both
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day’s Journey into Night
are very long, lasting several hours, and both are talking plays, with little action. The characters, and the audience, are trapped within the same room: here conversation is unavoidable. In
The Iceman,
the characters all wait in Harry Hope’s saloon, where they drink and tell each other the same stories day in, day out, stories that are in fact pipe dreams, hopes and illusions that will never happen.
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One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician, a third simply wants to go home. As time goes by, from one thing and another that is said, the audience realises that even these far-from-exceptional aims are, in the case of these characters, illusions – pipe dreams, in O’Neill’s own words. Later it becomes clear that the
characters are spending their time waiting, waiting for Hickey, a travelling salesman who, they believe, will make things happen, be their saviour (Hickey is the son of a preacher). But when Hickey finally appears, he punctures their dreams one by one. O’Neill is not making the glib point that reality is invariably cold. Instead he is saying there is no reality; there are no firm values, no ultimate meanings, and so all of us need our pipe dreams and illusions.
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Hickey leads an ‘honest’ life; he works and tells himself the truth, or what he thinks of as the truth. But it turns out that he has killed his wife because he could not bear the way she ‘simply’ accepted the fact of his numerous, casual infidelities. We never know how she explained her life to herself, what illusions she had, and how she kept herself going. But, we realise, they
did
keep her going. The Iceman, of course, is death. It has often been remarked that the play could be called
Waiting for Hickey,
emphasising the similarities to Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot.
Both, as we shall see, provided a chilling view of the world that followed the discoveries of Charles Darwin, T. H. Morgan, Edwin Hubble, and others.

Long Day’s Journey
is O’Neill’s most autobiographical work, a ‘play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.’
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The action takes place in one room, in four acts, at four times of the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime, when the members of the Tyrone family gather together. There are no great action scenes, but there are two events: Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction, and Edmund Tyrone (Edmund, remember, was O’Neill’s brother who died) discovers he has TB. As the day wears on, the weather turns darker and foggier outside, and the house seems more and more isolated.
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Various episodes are returned to time and again in the conversation, as characters reveal more about themselves and give their version of events recounted earlier by others. At the centre of the play is O’Neill’s pessimistic view of life’s ‘strange determinism.’ ‘None of us can help the things life has done to us,’ says Mary Tyrone. ‘They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.’
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Elsewhere, one brother says to the other, ‘I love you much more than I hate you.’ And then, right at the end, the three Tyrone men, Mary’s husband and two sons, watch her enter the room in a deep dream, her own fog.
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The men watch as she laments, ‘That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’ These are the last lines of the play and, as Normand Berlin has written, it is those three final words, ‘for a time,’ that are so heartbreaking (O’Neill’s relatives hated the play).
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For O’Neill, it was a mystery how one can be in love, and then not in love, and then be trapped for ever. In such devastating ways, O’Neill is saying, the past lives on in the present, and this is nothing science can say anything about.
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It is arguable whether the works of Orwell, Auden, or O’Neill best encapsulate the 1930s. The period was far from being the disaster, ‘the low dishonest decade,’ that Auden called it. Yet there is no escaping the fact that it was a journey toward the night, with the iceman waiting at the end. Whatever
happened in the 1930s – and a lot did – it was cold comfort.

‘Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours?’ One kind of epitaph was set on the period by
Alfred Kazin,
the critic, who uses this quote from Abigail Adams to John Adams to open the last chapter of his
On Native Grounds,
published in New York in 1942. It was an apt enough sentence, for his argument in the book was that, between the Civil War and World War II, American literature had come of age, explained America to itself, and now, with Europe bent on self-destruction, it fed to America to maintain and evolve the Western tradition.
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But the book’s other main message lay in its use of material, which was itself peculiarly American. Kazin’s subtitle was ‘An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature.’ This meant of course that he left out poetry and drama (and therefore figures like Wallace Stevens and Eugene O’Neid) but did not mean that he confined himself, as a European critic might well have done, to fiction only. Instead Kazin included as literature: criticism, muckraking journalism, philosophy, and even photojournalism. His argument here was that American fiction was firmly rooted in pragmatic realism (unlike Virginia Woolf, say, or Kafka, or Thomas Mann or Aldous Huxley), and that its chief battle, its big theme, within this overall context, was with business and materialism. Discussing the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, E Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe alongside the writings of Thorsten Veblen, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson, Kazin first identified the various influential segments of the American psyche – pioneers, scholars, journalists/muckrakers, businessmen, and the leftovers of the feudal South. These competed, he said, to produce a literature that sometimes ‘touches greatness’ but is often ‘half-sentimental, half-commercial.’ His own analysis, as this comment reveals, was wholly unsentimental. He identified as peculiarly American the theme of ‘perpetual salesmanship’ highlighted by Sinclair Lewis, Van Wyck Brooks’s complaint that the most energetic talents in America went into business and politics and not the arts or humanities, that several writers, like John Dos Passos in
USA,
‘feel that the victory of business in America has been a defeat for the spirit, and that this had all achieved a tragicomic climax’ in the late 1930s, where education was ‘only a training for a business civilisation, in politics only the good life of materialism.’
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At the same time, Kazin noted the development of criticism, from liberal criticism in the 1920s to Marxist criticism to ‘scientific criticism’ in the early 1930s, with such books as Max Eastman’s
The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science
(1931), in which the author argued that science would soon have the answer to ‘every problem that arises’ and that literature in effect ‘had no place in such a world’.
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Kazin also recorded the early rise of ‘semiosis,’ the understanding of language as a system of signs.