One Summer: America, 1927 (55 page)

Grey, in an interestingly secretive way, was much the more intriguing of the two. Newspaper and magazine profiles in his lifetime portrayed him as a pleasant and unassuming dentist from Ohio who wrote adventure stories in his spare time, hit pay dirt in 1912 with
Riders of the Purple Sage
, then cranked out a succession of highly popular books, mostly westerns, over a period of nearly thirty years. He invented, or at the very least cornered the market in, many of the conventions of the genre—the blackhearted villain, the bullied rancher and his chaste, pretty daughter, the strong, silent cowboy “whose heart belongs to no female save his warm-nosed mare,” as one writer once nicely put it.

But Grey had a great secret. In private, he was spectacularly libidinous. An ardent outdoorsman, he often went on long trips into the
wilderness with attractive, high-spirited young women—his wife’s two young cousins, friends of the family—and slept with them all. Sometimes he took as many as four at a time away with him. Occasionally he brought them home with him afterward. As his biographer Thomas H. Pauly reports: “There exists an enormous, totally unknown cache of photographs taken by Grey of nude women and himself performing various sexual activities, including intercourse.… These photographs are accompanied by ten small journals, written in Grey’s secret code, that contain graphic descriptions of his sexual adventures.”

In between these invigorating breaks Grey lived quietly with his wife, a woman of stoic temperament, in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, and later Altadena, California, and wrote two or sometimes three books a year. He produced some ninety-five books altogether, and left so many manuscripts when he died, suddenly of a heart attack in 1939, that Harper & Brothers was still publishing new Zane Grey books fourteen years afterward. At his peak he earned $500,000 a year. In 1927, he made just under $325,000. For purposes of comparison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his best year, earned $37,599.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had a tamer life than Grey—then again who didn’t?—but wrote racier stuff. Three years younger than Grey, Burroughs was born in 1875 into a well-off family in Chicago, but he was something of a black sheep and struggled to find a role for himself in life. He went west as a young man and tried storekeeping, ranching, panning for gold, and working as a railroad policeman, all without success, before he discovered he had a knack for writing stories. In 1912, at the age of thirty-five, he produced his first hit,
Tarzan of the Apes
.

Burroughs was no hack. He used pulp fiction plots but wrote with a certain panache, as if he didn’t quite understand the genre. Here are the opening lines to
Tarzan of the Apes:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own sceptical incredulity for the balance of the strange tale.

It is not perhaps Tolstoy, but it is certainly far removed from the usual simply worded, straight-into-the-action openings of most cheap fiction of the day. In a career that lasted almost forty years, Burroughs produced some eighty books, including twenty-six Tarzan novels, a great deal of science fiction, and a few westerns. All his efforts were characterized by exhilarating action, lightly clad females, and an unwavering attachment to eugenic ideals. Tarzan himself could have been the poster boy for the eugenics movement.
Tarzan
, as many readers will surely know already, is the story of an aristocratic English infant who is left orphaned in the African jungle and is brought up by apes. Fortunately, because he is white and Anglo-Saxon, he is innately brave, strong, decisive, and kind, and clever enough to solve any problem. He even teaches himself to read—quite a feat considering that he speaks no human language and doesn’t know what a book is when he first sees one. Thank goodness for racial superiority.

The creation or maintenance of superior beings is something that preoccupied Burroughs throughout his career. Nearly all his outer space books are concerned with the breeding of master races on Mars or Venus.
^*
In
Lost on Venus
, he writes admiringly of a society in which “no defective infant was allowed to live” and citizens who were “physically, morally or mentally defective were rendered incapable of bringing their like into the world.” Back on Earth, writing as himself in an article in the
Los Angeles Examiner
, he insisted that the world would be a better place if all “moral imbeciles” were systematically eliminated. He even titled one of his books
Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid
. Oskaloosa was the birthplace of Harry H. Laughlin.

As time went on, Burroughs became increasingly slapdash. He recycled plots and was often arrestingly careless with his prose. His lone novel of 1927,
The War Chief
, begins:

Naked, but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide, and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior leaped and danced to the beating of drums.

Four paragraphs later we get:

Naked, but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide, and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior moved silently among the boles of great trees.

Occasionally he just slipped into drivel. Here is a Martian warrior named Jeddak whispering sweet nothings to Thuvia, Maid of Mars, in a book of that title in 1920:

Ah, Thuvia of Ptarth, you are cold even before the fiery blasts of my consuming love! No harder than your heart, nor colder is the hard, cold ersite of this thrice happy bench which supports your divine and fadeless form!

Such passages could run on for some time. It hardly seemed to matter. People were still devotedly buying his stuff when Burroughs died in California of a heart attack in March 1950, age seventy-four.

Among serious writers of fiction, only Sinclair Lewis enjoyed robust sales in the summer of 1927.
Elmer Gantry
was far and away the bestselling fiction work of the year. A satire on evangelist preachers, it was roundly condemned across the nation, especially by evangelist preachers. The fundamentalist firebrand Billy Sunday, apprised of its content, called on God “to strike Lewis dead,” which doesn’t seem terribly Christian of him. The Reverend C. S. Sparkes of the Congregational Church of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s own hometown, bitterly contrasted Lewis with the saintly Charles Lindbergh, saying that Lewis possessed a mind “that is dead—dead to goodness and purity and righteousness,” while Lindbergh was “clean in mind and soul.”

Elmer Gantry
was banned in several cities—in Boston, selling it was
made an indictable offense, as opposed to just a misdemeanor, as an indication of how severely disagreeable it was—but of course such prohibitions merely made the book seem more juicily desirable to those who could get it. The novel sold 100,000 copies on its first day of sale, and was cruising toward 250,000 by the end of summer—numbers that not even Grey and Burroughs could count on.

Elmer Gantry
was the fifth in a string of critical and commercial successes for Lewis that made him the most admired writer of his day. The others were
Main Street
(1920),
Babbitt
(1922),
Arrowsmith
(1925), and
Mantrap
(1926). In 1930, he would be the first American awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. Not everyone was a fan. Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to his editor, said: “If I wrote as sloppily and shitily as that freckled prick I could write five thousand words a day year in and year out.” Though Lewis had no sense of it just yet, 1927 would mark the apex of his career trajectory. His later novels would fall out of fashion, and he would end up a hopeless alcoholic, so racked with delirium tremens that he would be confined in a straitjacket.

Hemingway produced no novel in 1927. He was mostly preoccupied with personal affairs—he divorced one wife and wed another in Paris in early summer, just about the time Lindbergh was flying in—but did come out with a volume of short stories,
Men Without Women
. Dorothy Parker in
The New Yorker
called it “a truly magnificent work,” adding, “I don’t know where a greater collection of stories can be found,” but the book didn’t stir the same public excitement as Hemingway’s debut novel of the previous year,
The Sun Also Rises
. Also well received, but not runaway commercial successes, were
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by a new writer named Thornton Wilder, and
Mosquitoes
by another newcomer, William Faulkner.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the other American literary giant of the age—to us, if not to his contemporaries—produced no book in 1927. Instead he made his first trip to Hollywood, lured by a commission to write the screenplay for a movie called
Lipstick
. The fee was $3,500 up front with a further $12,000 on acceptance, but his completed script was deemed inadequate and turned down, so the bulk of the fee was never paid.
Fitzgerald also had a screen test, but he didn’t do well at that either. In the end, the trip to California cost him far more than he earned. Fitzgerald was fading fast in 1927.
The Great Gatsby
, published two years earlier, had been a failure. Unsold stacks of the book sat in the warehouse of Charles Scribner’s Sons, his publisher, and would still be there when Fitzgerald died, broke and all but forgotten, in 1940. Not until the 1950s would the world rediscover him.

The publishing industry was in a state of interesting flux in 1927, and that was largely owing to a long-standing prejudice. Traditionally, publishing was closed to Jews (except at menial and dead-end levels). All the old firms—Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Putnam’s—were solidly white and largely Protestant, and their output tended to be carefully conservative. That began to change in 1915 when a young Jewish man named Alfred A. Knopf, the son of an advertising executive, started the imprint that still bears his name. Knopf brought America the works of Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Thomas Mann, and many others. The preponderance of foreign authors was explained simply by the fact that many American agents would not deal with a Jewish publisher.

All this cast the conservatism of the old-line WASP publishers into sharp relief. Charles Scribner’s Sons, a family firm founded in 1846, boasted for years that it never published a word that would make a maiden blush, but now found itself struggling to keep up with changing mores. In early 1927, when Maxwell Perkins, its most celebrated editor, was working on Hemingway’s aforementioned volume of short stories, he felt he had to alert Charles Scribner II, the firm’s head, that the book contained certain words that might shock him. Perkins was so old-school that he could not bring himself to utter the actual words but wrote them down. One word he couldn’t even write down. (There appears to be no record of what words he wrote or whether any of them made it into the finished book.)

Interestingly, although Scribner’s was squeamish about publishing profanities, it had no hesitation in 1927 in publishing one of the most
violently racist books of the decade,
Re-forging America
, by the amateur eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s previous book with Scribner,
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy
, hints a little more clearly at where he stood on matters. In
Re-forging America
, Stoddard argued that America should create a “bi-racial” society, by which he meant not one in which people mingled harmoniously, but rather the very opposite: one in which whites and nonwhites were kept separate from cradle to grave so as not to risk cross-contamination to the detriment of either. The book was favorably reviewed in several places.

While Knopf was carving out a lucrative niche for itself among foreign authors, another new Jewish firm was finding great success by discovering—or in some cases rediscovering—American writers. The firm was Boni & Liveright, named for brothers Albert and Charles Boni and for Horace Liveright, and for a short while it was perhaps the most interesting and dynamic publishing house in America. The Boni brothers had until recently run the Washington Square Bookshop, a leftist hangout on MacDougal Street, and Liveright was a bond salesman. Although the three founders didn’t have a lot of expertise in publishing, the firm quickly made a name for itself.

The men squabbled endlessly, and by the early 1920s both Bonis had departed, leaving Liveright (pronounced, incidentally, “live-right,” not “liver-ight”) as sole head. In the three years 1925 to 1927, he produced what was perhaps the most dazzling parade of quality books ever to emerge from a single publishing house in a concentrated period. They included
An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser,
Dark Laughter
by Sherwood Anderson,
In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway (who then eloped to Scribner’s),
Soldier’s Pay
by William Faulkner,
Enough Rope
by Dorothy Parker,
Crystal Cup
by Gertrude Atherton,
My Life
by Isadora Duncan,
Education and the Good Life
by Bertrand Russell,
Napoleon
by Emil Ludwig,
The Thibaults
by Roger Martin du Gard (forgotten now, but he was soon to win a Nobel Prize),
The Golden Day
by Lewis Mumford, three plays by Eugene O’Neill, volumes of poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robinson Jeffers, and a work of cheery froth by Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos called
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. Purporting to be the diary of a dizzy gold digger named Lorelei Lee,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
wasn’t great literature, but it sold and sold and sold. James Joyce was said to be enchanted by it.

Liveright was a great publisher but a terrible businessman. He gave advances that were too indulgent, employed far more people than he needed to, and paid them more than he should have. Because of his bad business decisions, Boni & Liveright made profits of just $1,203 in 1927 and was in serious danger of going out of business.