Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and the Lost Generation: An Interview with Kirk Curnutt
Kirk Curnutt is the author of several books about the Lost Generation including Coffee with Hemingway, Key West Hemingway, The Cambridge Introduction to F Scott Fitzgerald, Critical Responses to Gertrude Stein and more. He also writes contemporary fiction. More information about Kirk, including his website, is listed below.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask Kirk that I created two separate interviews. This first interview is focused on the Lost Generation experience. Kirk’s book, Literary Topics: Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate Modernist Movement is a wonderful resource for readers who want to know more about the generation of artists and writers who lived in Europe in the 1920′s. The second interview will be about our friend Ernest, whose 111th birthday is tomorrow!
Thank you to Joe Grant for contributing questions about Zelda. Readers are always welcome to submit questions for any upcoming interviews.
AB: Although Gertrude Stein’s car mechanic is credited with coining the term “lost generation”; it must have started before it was named. When did the migration to Europe start?
KC: Americans have been living abroad in Europe as long as there has been an America to run away from. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though, traveling overseas for extended periods as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry James did was a matter of getting “cultured.” After World War I, it wasn’t so much about immersing oneself in the history of Europe as getting away from the perceived Puritanism of America as opposed to its lack of history and tradition. The lost generation felt uprooted by the experience of war, and they felt the homefront couldn’t deal with the reality—at least that’s one version. You see it in “Soldier’s Home,” in which Harold Krebs, a scarred vet, has to deal with the inanities of his mother. But again, that’s a version. A lot of young people simply escaped to Europe for the abandonment. You could drink legally in Paris, after all.
AB: What conditions made young people want to leave the United States in the 20’s?
KC: I think there was a general dissatisfaction with prudery. As I mentioned, the Volstead Act pretty much put a crimp in your style if you were just entering your twenties. And remember that this was a period you couldn’t check into a hotel with a member of the opposite sex unless you were married—or a good liar. That’s a scene dramatized in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. The morality police were in hot pursuit of anyone and everyone who didn’t look like a Rotarian. Also, America seemed too business-minded. Later in the twenties Calvin Coolidge said that the business of America was business. That didn’t bode well if you were an artist and your business was art.
AB: Did the expats integrate with the French, or did they stay in English speaking circles? How did the French feel about them?
KC: The degree of integration really depended on the individual American. Hemingway is usually celebrated for living outside of an expatriate center—at least during his first foray in 1921-23. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, always seemed to want to center himself among fellow expatriates. But by and large Americans formed isolated colonies. If they interacted with the French, it was as employers for housekeepers (such as Gertrude Stein) or babysitters (Hemingway). Henry Miller had a whole other level of integration: he loved French prostitutes. The cannier French entrepreneurs learned how to service Americans by being more American. Thus, the general absence of moustaches on waiters in Paris after 1926. Restaurant and bar owners wanted them clean-shaven to look American.
AB: The first mention of the poverty in Paris during the 20’s I’ve heard is a comment Hadley makes about how the streets of Paris felt poor and dirty and were frightening to her when she first arrived. What was the city like then?
KC: Paris was not unlike any other metropolitan city: there were extremes of poverty and extremes of great wealth. Hadley was exposed to them in Paris because she’d come from a fairly sheltered middle-class life and suddenly her husband was insisting they live in a working-class quarter. In all fairness, a lot of lost generation exposure to poverty was what today we would call slumming. The Hemingways still ate in restaurants, took vacations, bought wine, and bet on horses. They had a decent amount of money but were intent on living cheaply.
AB: Were there other cities in Europe where expats also gravitated?
KC: There were several other expatriate centers: London, Berlin, Zurich, Mallorca, the Nice and Antibes the Riviera, of course, even Morocco. That’s not to mention lesser-known cities, little pockets of isolation, such as the Camargue where Hemingway set The Garden of Eden.
AB: Bobbed hair was a symbol of youthful rebellion, a new kind of woman, and independence. Which side of the ocean did the Bob originate?
KC: That’s a good question. I’m not sure anyone can trace its origin. But it’s clear it was in America by 1915 with the dancer Irene Castle. What’s interesting is the outrage it excited in America. Because women with short hair were perceived as rejecting conventional femininity. A few out-of-control city councils even tried to outlaw bobbed hair. So that’s another reason to expatriate to Europe: you could have whatever kind of hairstyle you wanted.
AB: Can you give me a picture of the expat process, how long did it take to get to Paris by ship? What was the exchange rate like? How much money could a young person live on?
KC: In general the trip abroad was only six to seven days, depending on your points of departure and arrival. It’s not widely remembered, for example, that Hemingway actually journeyed back to America in early 1926 to sign his contract with Scribner’s for The Sun Also Rises—a pretty expensive thing to do for a piece of paper, but one that didn’t cost him but a week of time. Seven days over, eleven days in NYC, seven days back—about a month. Some work, lots of partying—he even went and saw the Broadway version of The Great Gatsby during this trip. In the early to mid-twenties, the exchange rate hovered anywhere between roughly fourteen and twenty-five francs to the dollar, which made living cheap. The Hemingways paid 250 francs for their first apartment, or $20 a month. You could eat in a restaurant for fifty cents. Depending on the degree of austerity you could accommodate, you could live cheap. Ernest and Hadley initially made it on about $2,000 a year, and that was with excursions and jaunts and plenty of nights out.
AB: In your book on the expatriate modernist movement, you describe how the Great War influenced modernist literature and introduced a feeling of irony and aloofness to literature; can you tell me more about that?
KC: I think the War was the first crack in the culture of reverence. The brutality of violence and the lack of moral purity in the outcome—the political revenge exacted on Germany in 1919—inspired a lot of cynicism. Combine that with the rise of a youth culture that defined itself in opposition to adults, and you had a lot of young people who didn’t feel inclined to be respectful. The thing about irony is that is allows for emotional detachment—it introduces a distance in your relationship with the people or things you observe. Once you can feel you’re free to say whatever pops in your head, without concern for being labeled moral or vulgar, you can mock, ridicule, and be as profane as you want. And once it becomes an attitude promoted in the mass media and consumer culture as style, it becomes even easier to imitate. A lot of the literature of the period was exploring the boundaries of freedom by exploring taboos far more openly in print than had ever been allowed. I mean, Hemingway wanted to use words that even today we find impolite. And even when he was forced to hyphenate them, readers knew what he was saying when he used the F— word or said “c—s—r.”
AB: Overall, what did the lost generation write about? Where were most lost generation books set? Were there common themes or conflicts, (cultural, personal, generational, historical) found in the literature of this period?
KC: Lost generation books tended to be very biographical, because the writers were aware they were mythologizing their experience. They were convinced they were the products of a generational breach, and they wanted to capture the experience of newness in the world around them. As such, they tended to write about alienation, unstable mores (drinking), divorce, sex, and different varieties of unconventional identities (gender-bending, for example). There was very little interest in writing about “others.” And they weren’t particularly gracious to people who weren’t like them. There is a lot of satire in lost generation fiction, and most of it makes fun of elders or figures of authority—and, unfortunately, Jews. Perhaps the truly contradictory thing is that these writers wanted it both ways. They wanted to write about breaking boundaries, but they also wanted to reserve the right to lament their “falling away” from norms and standards.
- In your own words, define “The Lost Generation”
- What did The Lost Generation write about? What were major themes?
- Who were some of the most famous writers of The Lost Generation? Where did they live abroad?