User:ADavis/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Line 126:

woman in a new real environment. A potential twentieth-century bestseller,

instead, got snuffed out and Dreiser, readerless, had vanished.

Consequently, when Crane and Norris died, their muscle-bound canons boomed on, until Dreiser’s new female reality, after a decade hiatus, resurfaced about 1925, American literature’s banner year. Earlier, after ''Jennie Gerhardt'' (a sentimental ''Carrie''), Dreiser shifted into more familiar Zola-Norris

territory with his “Trilogy of Desire,” capped by his masterpiece, ''An American Tragedy'', published in 1925, as was another iconic novel, ''The Great Gatsby''. Those avid female readers of the Jazz Age Flappers also quickly assimilated ''Sister Carrie'' and were fascinated by how its heroine ended. Carrie, now a

generic “sister,” had rebelled and survived, socially unpunished, emotionally

unscathed, except for seemingly natural bemusement. Dreiser’s underlined

theme was that females’ recourse to instinct or intuition immunized them

from emotional tragedy. The 1920s vamps, of course, read Carrie’s “victory” as a call for the “new women” to go into a cultural free fall.

The fourth member of the “modern” literary Quintet was Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916), an odd fit with his literary peers, a media darling of his times, and thus an essential link from Twain and London to later media

masters, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer. Davis was a leading journalist,

a globetrotting, derring-do reporter of wars, such as the Greek-Turkish War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and World War I. Yet he was prolific, his prose was pedestrian, and he “could spin a yarn.” His short stories,

eleven volumes, numbering over eighty stories, were factually crafted, vivid, and exciting, with flashes of local color. His fiction had global settings, was highly theatrical with sensational plots, fast-paced with typed characters, and not exactly “serious” fiction. He wrote twenty-five plays. His novels were outlandishly romantic and superficial. His most representative novel was the

author’s self-image, ''A Soldier of Fortune'' (1897). Davis was known as the Beau

Brummel, or dandy-dressed, of the American press. Then, he was the ideal male—tall, handsome, tough but debonair, at ease at showy wars, in proper salons, and risqué beds—and he was blessed with a manly code of good manners (faint echoes of the later Hemingway hero).

Davis, instead, became a media-created American male hero, to be emulated and revered.

But the “other” Davis, the literary careerist, was radically different, more

like the high-risk lifestyles of Crane and London. On news assignments, Davis actually tempted death. The press loved his go-for-broke front line {{pg|287|289}}

antics. He called the Spanish-American War “splendid fun” and took part in the Battle of San Juan Hill, and made Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders famous. Davis became the newspapers’ darling. He had continuous access to elite personages from presidents to kings and queens, even the

underworld.

All this fame peaked at about age twenty-six and turned into high financial rewards as Davis began to reshape both American history and journalistic fiction. Upon the heels of the 1890 U.S. Census announcing the Closing of the Frontier, Crane toured the West, and rechristened the Wild West, the “Mild West” (see “The Blue Hotel”). Davis went out West, pressed the flesh with sportive cowboys, Texas Rangers, and even Mexican murderers. He temporarily revived the myth of the Wild West, a preview of the coming power of celebrity journalists and other media hounds to temporarily remake history.

Davis also had “splendid fun” with the literary urban crime genre. In his story collection, ''Van Bibber and Others'' (1892), he introduced his new upper-class hero, Courtland Van Bibber, of rich Dutch ancestry, the moneyed young clubman and eternal playboy, the public consummate law-abider who, by night (like today’s comic books’ caped crime-stoppers), descended to the underworld, disguised, to save maidens and right wrongs. Such was the clever packaging of Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Andrew Carnegie, who gave away $350 million dollars and called it, “The Gospel of Wealth.” “Van Bibber’s” ultimate tone was not seriousness, but amusement. Davis’s fiction with media accompaniment had turned American literature into banal comic grand opera.

If Mailer, during the decades of building his canon, ever pondered such quaint cultural and literary goings-on, he probably both winced and smiled at seeing a virtual repeat of those big-media shows, obvious only during

Paine’s two brief stints, and the more prolonged follow-ups by Emerson and Twain. Mailer also probably noted (with Hemingway’s melodramatic demise on his mind) that Davis died naturally in 1916, the same year as Jack London’s more mysterious death, and how Jack (call me “Wolf”), in a much shorter lifespan, and whose one-decade career, attracted intense glaring

media legacy quotient that threatened to eclipse Mark Twain.

The fifth and final Naturalist was Jack London (1876–1916). His early demise was foreshadowed by a storybook life, which read like a boyish yet mannish fantasy. He was born in the slums of San Francisco—illegitimate.{{pg|288|289}}

London’s early life—waterfront Oakland poverty and an eighth-grade education—was spent reading Kipling, Marx, Spenser, and Nietzsche.(Later, at age twenty-one, on his 1897 Yukon arctic-trek, he brought ''The Origin of Species'', ''Paradise Lost'', and read and reread ''Moby-Dick''.)

London, at age thirteen, became an oyster pirate, purchasing a sloop in San Francisco Bay. At age fifteen he drank heavily and had a mistress. At age seventeen he sailed for seven months in the Pacific. Still seventeen, London won a newspaper prize for an account of a typhoon off Japan. He then returned to Oakland for one more high school year and, in 1896, at age twenty, he spent one semester in college, where he joined a radical wing of the Socialist Party as an activist speaker. He was occasionally jailed.

In 1898, after time in the Klondike, he returned to Oakland to begin serious writing. What followed was a short but brutal ordeal (he called himself a “work

beast”). There were a sea of rejections, dramatized in his later autobiographical novel, ''Martin Eden'', and, in 1900, his breakthrough happened—

nine collected stories, ''The Son of the Wolf'', and sudden national fame. Like

Mailer, London achieved substantial notoriety in his mid-twenties. Yet the

London corpus of work, incredibly large for its sixteen-year span, was a mix

of throwaway pulp, but also some excellent writing, and thus a mixed career.

America’s natural topographical frontier was rapidly fading after the U.S.

Census declared the frontier officially closed. President Teddy Roosevelt embodied the “strenuous life” and London was its chief literary embodiment. The boy “oyster pirate” turned into a frontier strong man, a primitive adventurer who sniffed out new raw settings. There was the Klondike near-Arctic wilderness, then the bottomless South Seas, and onto the “submerged tenth” of London slums and the San Francisco waterfront. Interestingly, by Mailer’s time, the pristine frontier was truly closed shut.

London’s lifestyle also turned him into a literary pioneer. Destined to become a serious writer, he nonetheless gave birth to enhanced he-man ''Argosy'' stories and other pulp magazines, and he also toughened up the sudsy Horatio Alger (how-to-succeed) Dime Novels, with a new dose of rugged individualism. Unlike his compatriot Quintet, his canon had heavy pulp content

but it was muscular and moving, peopled at times with (successful) abysmal brutes. London’s tone, however, was excessively melodramatic, sentimental, and outlandish at times.

London’s Naturalism, at its most exotic, took place in the Klondike-Arc-{{pg|289|290}}

tic—“Seward’s Folly,” or Russia’s “white elephant gift”—that later turned into an icy golden U.S. forty-ninth state. This mammoth chunk of the near-Arctic was then mostly uncharted literary territory when London arrived

with his gold pan, ink pen, and well-thumbed ''Moby-Dick''. He wrote about

the awesome setting, people, and animals, especially the primal dog family. ''The Call of the Wild'' (1903) and its reverse-sequel ''White Fang'' (1906), two novels with dogs as makeshift protagonists, made London the first such

American writer whose canon featured serious fiction that deeply probed canine consciousness. And these probings were not only high quality experiments. They are also high canon content. London’s two canine heroes—

Buck and White Fang—could be likened to Kurtz and Marlowe in Conrad’s ''Heart of Darkness'', with canines substituting for humans in white Arctic America. Such dog destiny also played well in the Darwinian-Spenserian

context—that is, atavism or species reversion, with Buck from domestic farm dog to wolf, and, White Fang, the opposite, from wolf to subjugated dog. After studying these two canine creations, London critics either approved

or snidely remarked that London could fictionalize dogs better than people.

The Mailer canon, despite its chic “now” surface, also co-existed as a primordial descent, an American version of Jung’s racial memory, as if America had its own mythic dream life, the American as civilized animal at zero-primitive—as if Mailer were retelling London’s atavistic tale of Buck and White Fang, now transformed into the “now” human condition, with infused American superpower angst. And so the Mailer canon, periodically, would lurch into Jungian night-mythos, such as America’s primordial racism

in the celebrated essay, “The White Negro,”—or (with a global canon in the

Mailer mind), why not switch from the customary Greek-Roman American roots and lurch back to ''Ancient Evenings'' in Egypt, more at home with magic

rather than logic? And the Mailer canon was laced with primitive ornaments, such as Mailer’s—and his American Dream murderer, Rojack’s—lust for smell, Homo sapiens’ most primitive sense. Long live Buck and White Fang, and note how the positive legacy quotient light turns a dark green.

London’s addiction to socialism was Americanized, less revolutionary, and more akin to the Progressive Movement. But his core beliefs, nonetheless, were fervent. At age eighteen, to protest the 1893 “Panic’s” unemployment, London joined Kell’s “March on Washington” (early intimations of

Mailer’s “March on the Pentagon”). At age twenty, London formally joined

the Socialist Party. Immediately, his canon turned socio-political didactic.{{pg|290|291|}}

@@ Line 126: / Line 126: @@
 woman in a new real environment. A potential twentieth-century bestseller,
 instead, got snuffed out and Dreiser, readerless, had vanished.
+Consequently, when Crane and Norris died, their muscle-bound canons boomed on, until Dreiser’s new female reality, after a decade hiatus, resurfaced about 1925, American literature’s banner year. Earlier, after ''Jennie Gerhardt'' (a sentimental ''Carrie''), Dreiser shifted into more familiar Zola-Norris
+territory with his “Trilogy of Desire,” capped by his masterpiece, ''An American Tragedy'', published in 1925, as was another iconic novel, ''The Great Gatsby''. Those avid female readers of the Jazz Age Flappers also quickly assimilated ''Sister Carrie'' and were fascinated by how its heroine ended. Carrie, now a
+generic “sister,” had rebelled and survived, socially unpunished, emotionally
+unscathed, except for seemingly natural bemusement. Dreiser’s underlined
+theme was that females’ recourse to instinct or intuition immunized them
+from emotional tragedy. The 1920s vamps, of course, read Carrie’s “victory” as a call for the “new women” to go into a cultural free fall.
+The fourth member of the “modern” literary Quintet was Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916), an odd fit with his literary peers, a media darling of his times, and thus an essential link from Twain and London to later media
+masters, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer. Davis was a leading journalist,
+a globetrotting, derring-do reporter of wars, such as the Greek-Turkish War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and World War I. Yet he was prolific, his prose was pedestrian, and he “could spin a yarn.” His short stories,
+eleven volumes, numbering over eighty stories, were factually crafted, vivid, and exciting, with flashes of local color. His fiction had global settings, was highly theatrical with sensational plots, fast-paced with typed characters, and not exactly “serious” fiction. He wrote twenty-five plays. His novels were outlandishly romantic and superficial. His most representative novel was the
+author’s self-image, ''A Soldier of Fortune'' (1897). Davis was known as the Beau
+Brummel, or dandy-dressed, of the American press. Then, he was the ideal male—tall, handsome, tough but debonair, at ease at showy wars, in proper salons, and risqué beds—and he was blessed with a manly code of good manners (faint echoes of the later Hemingway hero).
+Davis, instead, became a media-created American male hero, to be emulated and revered.
+But the “other” Davis, the literary careerist, was radically different, more
+like the high-risk lifestyles of Crane and London. On news assignments, Davis actually tempted death. The press loved his go-for-broke front line {{pg|287|289}}
+antics. He called the Spanish-American War “splendid fun” and took part in the Battle of San Juan Hill, and made Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders famous. Davis became the newspapers’ darling. He had continuous access to elite personages from presidents to kings and queens, even the
+underworld.
+All this fame peaked at about age twenty-six and turned into high financial rewards as Davis began to reshape both American history and journalistic fiction. Upon the heels of the 1890 U.S. Census announcing the Closing of the Frontier, Crane toured the West, and rechristened the Wild West, the “Mild West” (see “The Blue Hotel”). Davis went out West, pressed the flesh with sportive cowboys, Texas Rangers, and even Mexican murderers. He temporarily revived the myth of the Wild West, a preview of the coming power of celebrity journalists and other media hounds to temporarily remake history.
+Davis also had “splendid fun” with the literary urban crime genre. In his story collection, ''Van Bibber and Others'' (1892), he introduced his new upper-class hero, Courtland Van Bibber, of rich Dutch ancestry, the moneyed young clubman and eternal playboy, the public consummate law-abider who, by night (like today’s comic books’ caped crime-stoppers), descended to the underworld, disguised, to save maidens and right wrongs. Such was the clever packaging of Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Andrew Carnegie, who gave away $350 million dollars and called it, “The Gospel of Wealth.” “Van Bibber’s” ultimate tone was not seriousness, but amusement. Davis’s fiction with media accompaniment had turned American literature into banal comic grand opera.
+If Mailer, during the decades of building his canon, ever pondered such quaint cultural and literary goings-on, he probably both winced and smiled at seeing a virtual repeat of those big-media shows, obvious only during
+Paine’s two brief stints, and the more prolonged follow-ups by Emerson and Twain. Mailer also probably noted (with Hemingway’s melodramatic demise on his mind) that Davis died naturally in 1916, the same year as Jack London’s more mysterious death, and how Jack (call me “Wolf”), in a much shorter lifespan, and whose one-decade career, attracted intense glaring
+media legacy quotient that threatened to eclipse Mark Twain.
+The fifth and final Naturalist was Jack London (1876–1916). His early demise was foreshadowed by a storybook life, which read like a boyish yet mannish fantasy. He was born in the slums of San Francisco—illegitimate.{{pg|288|289}}
+London’s early life—waterfront Oakland poverty and an eighth-grade education—was spent reading Kipling, Marx, Spenser, and Nietzsche.(Later, at age twenty-one, on his 1897 Yukon arctic-trek, he brought ''The Origin of Species'', ''Paradise Lost'', and read and reread ''Moby-Dick''.)
+London, at age thirteen, became an oyster pirate, purchasing a sloop in San Francisco Bay. At age fifteen he drank heavily and had a mistress. At age seventeen he sailed for seven months in the Pacific. Still seventeen, London won a newspaper prize for an account of a typhoon off  Japan. He then returned to Oakland for one more high school year and, in 1896, at age twenty, he spent one semester in college, where he joined a radical wing of the Socialist Party as an activist speaker. He was occasionally jailed.
+In 1898, after time in the Klondike, he returned to Oakland to begin serious writing. What followed was a short but brutal ordeal (he called himself a “work
+beast”). There were a sea of rejections, dramatized in his later autobiographical novel, ''Martin Eden'', and, in 1900, his breakthrough happened—
+nine collected stories, ''The Son of the Wolf'', and sudden national fame. Like
+Mailer, London achieved substantial notoriety in his mid-twenties. Yet the
+London corpus of work, incredibly large for its sixteen-year span, was a mix
+of throwaway pulp, but also some excellent writing, and thus a mixed career.
+America’s natural topographical frontier was rapidly fading after the U.S.
+Census declared the frontier officially closed. President Teddy Roosevelt embodied the “strenuous life” and London was its chief literary embodiment. The boy “oyster pirate” turned into a frontier strong man, a primitive adventurer who sniffed out new raw settings. There was the Klondike near-Arctic wilderness, then the bottomless South Seas, and onto the “submerged tenth” of London slums and the San Francisco waterfront. Interestingly, by Mailer’s time, the pristine frontier was truly closed shut.
+London’s lifestyle also turned him into a literary pioneer. Destined to become a serious writer, he nonetheless gave birth to enhanced he-man ''Argosy'' stories and other pulp magazines, and he also toughened up the sudsy Horatio Alger (how-to-succeed) Dime Novels, with a new dose of rugged individualism. Unlike his compatriot Quintet, his canon had heavy pulp content
+but it was muscular and moving, peopled at times with (successful) abysmal brutes. London’s tone, however, was excessively melodramatic, sentimental, and outlandish at times.
+London’s Naturalism, at its most exotic, took place in the Klondike-Arc-{{pg|289|290}}
+tic—“Seward’s Folly,” or Russia’s “white elephant gift”—that later turned into an icy golden U.S. forty-ninth state. This mammoth chunk of the near-Arctic was then mostly uncharted literary territory when London arrived
+with his gold pan, ink pen, and well-thumbed ''Moby-Dick''. He wrote about
+the awesome setting, people, and animals, especially the primal dog family. ''The Call of the Wild'' (1903) and its reverse-sequel ''White Fang'' (1906), two novels with dogs as makeshift protagonists, made London the first such
+American writer whose canon featured serious fiction that deeply probed canine consciousness. And these probings were not only high quality experiments. They are also high canon content. London’s two canine heroes—
+Buck and White Fang—could be likened to Kurtz and Marlowe in Conrad’s ''Heart of Darkness'', with canines substituting for humans in white Arctic America. Such dog destiny also played well in the Darwinian-Spenserian
+context—that is, atavism or species reversion, with Buck from domestic farm dog to wolf, and, White Fang, the opposite, from wolf to subjugated dog. After studying these two canine creations, London critics either approved
+or snidely remarked that London could fictionalize dogs better than people.
+The Mailer canon, despite its chic “now” surface, also co-existed as a primordial descent, an American version of Jung’s racial memory, as if America had its own mythic dream life, the American as civilized animal at zero-primitive—as if Mailer were retelling London’s atavistic tale of Buck and White Fang, now transformed into the “now” human condition, with infused American superpower angst. And so the Mailer canon, periodically, would lurch into Jungian night-mythos, such as America’s primordial racism
+in the celebrated essay, “The White Negro,”—or (with a global canon in the
+Mailer mind), why not switch from the customary Greek-Roman American roots and lurch back to ''Ancient Evenings'' in Egypt, more at home with magic
+rather than logic? And the Mailer canon was laced with primitive ornaments, such as Mailer’s—and his American Dream murderer, Rojack’s—lust for smell, Homo sapiens’ most primitive sense. Long live Buck and White Fang, and note how the positive legacy quotient light turns a dark green.
+London’s addiction to socialism was Americanized, less revolutionary, and more akin to the Progressive Movement. But his core beliefs, nonetheless, were fervent. At age eighteen, to protest the 1893 “Panic’s” unemployment, London joined Kell’s “March on Washington” (early intimations of
+Mailer’s “March on the Pentagon”). At age twenty, London formally joined
+the Socialist Party. Immediately, his canon turned socio-political didactic.{{pg|290|291|}}