Love, Literature, and Politics in the Machine Age

Abstract

Love, Literature, and Politics in the Machine Age Lynn Dumenil (bio) Douglas Clayton. Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994. xv 335 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $30.00. In the years shortly before World War I, New York’s Greenwich Village was a vibrant community of mostly young intellectuals enthralled with what one of them, Max Eastman, called a “universal revolt or regeneration, of the just-before-dawn of a new day in American art and literature and living-of-life as well as in politics.” 1 A tenuous sense of coherence united a wide spectrum of people, including such luminaries as John Reed, Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, and Margaret Sanger, who congregated at the offices of exciting little magazines like Seven Lively Arts and The Masses or met at the famous salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan to debate socialism, birth control, feminism, free love, Freud, modern art and literature. The village was not only the scene of experimental theater and art, but also of experiments in living — as the young radicals pursued an unconventional life style that flew in the face of bourgeois respectability. With Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel, Douglas Clayton provides a useful addition to our understanding of the men and women who shaped this exciting cultural moment. Although Clayton surprisingly makes no reference to any other scholar’s account of Dell, his eagerness to prove Dell’s seriousness of purpose and intellect seems to have been designed to correct negative views of his subject, such as Leslie Fishbein’s 2 largely critical assessment of Dell as inconsistent and narcissistic. Clayton presents his subject as a literary and social critic of unusual merit and originality, a major contributor to the shape and quality of The Masses, and a novelist of critical and popular acclaim. He further argues that even after Dell ceased to be at the center of American intellectual life (by the mid 1920s), he nonetheless continued to be a serious intellectual who continually grappled with the questions that had concerned him for decades: the contradictions between a life dedicated to art and one dedicated to radical politics; between a life in search of a stable home life and one committed to literature and individual self expression. [End Page 699] Clayton’s account is particularly engaging as he traces Dell’s early life in the Midwest, where he was born in Barry, Illinois in 1887. The recurring depressions of the late nineteenth century had a devastating impact on his family, which laid the groundwork for Dell’s socialism. He was also deeply moved by literature, and thus early on the intertwining of art and radical politics shaped his ideas and character. These interests found fuller expression when he moved to Chicago in 1908 and quickly made a name for himself as a literary critic for The Friday Literary Review, a supplement to The Evening Post. It was also in Chicago that Dell adopted his bohemian life style, constructing an unconventional, “feminist” marriage with Margery Currey. Dell’s “credo of self-expression” eventually led to numerous openly conducted affairs that put a strain on his marriage, which failed shortly before his move to New York and to Greenwich Village. When he arrived in 1913, the rebellion was already in full swing, but Dell seems to have made his mark quickly. As associate editor of The Masses, he expanded the literature review and reinforced the exciting directions Eastman was taking the magazine as “an attention-grabbing hodgepodge of radical politics and culture, with criticism, fiction, and artwork, much of it shot through with irreverence and an irascible, satiric spirit” (p. 110). Dell was active in the founding of the Provincetown Players, the theater group that was to transform significantly American theater. At the same time, he embarked on a long-term live-in relationship with photographer Marjorie Jones. After that affair broke up, he conducted a number of romances, among the most passionate, with Edna St. Vincent Millay. His sexual exploits, coupled with his eager embrace of Freudianism that Dell and others interpreted primarily as a struggle against repression, made him a...