The Light Brigade: John Erskine
Hi readers! I’m slowly working my way to a schedule as I try to figure out how to get as many eyes as possible (given the low interest that my subjects will inevitably arouse) on everything I write for my various projects. This entry was first posted January 27th on my Patreon, but since I posted its sequel today, here it is for everyone else. A week later, it’ll go up on my website. More is planned.
John Erskine was a Professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 30 years, developing a curriculum that would later be known as the Great Books movement. His 1915 essay "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent" was influential on the Lost Generation of writers and critics, less for its actual argument (a grounding in the classics will give you clearer sight than those moved by the whims of fashion) than for its valuation of individual intelligence over what H. L. Mencken called the booboisie: the self-satisfied conventionality of sober middle-class know-nothings.
That valuation is at the heart of Erskine's first novel, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, an unexpected bestseller towards the end of 1925. The column it earned in The Saturday Review admitted that it was more in line with French than English novelistic tradition: a "novel of ideas," the bulk of its pagination is concerned with conversations on abstract subjects: principally, what the individual owes to society versus what they owe to themselves.
Which makes it sound like a tediously philosophical read. It's not, although very little happens: Erskine is having a lark, and although it's very much a dry, professorial lark, it remains amusing throughout, largely for his inspired choice to cast Helen, back from the Trojan War with her short-tempered but ultimately pliable husband Menelaos, in more or less a Socratic role. I kept seeing Catherine Deneuve as I read: an aging beauty who has not lost an ounce of either her beauty or her self-possession, Helen is supremely sure of who she is and what she wants, and refuses to apologize for either running off with Paris to Troy or for returning to Sparta with Menelaos despite the fact that conventional wisdom says she deserves ostracism for the first choice and to lie about her past for the second.
Meanwhile their daughter Hermione, who has raised herself in the twenty years since mother and father left for Troy, is in love with her cousin Orestes, who is plotting vengeance on his mother Clytemnestra for betraying his father Agamemnon — the entire plot of Sophocles' Electra takes place in the background while Helen and Hermione and Menelaos and their gatekeeper Eteoneus argue about love and sex and womanhood and self-respect — and the overall effect is much less like a novel and more like a play: say one of those reimaginings of classic literature in modern dress.
The point of view that emerges from Helen (who is nearly always right, or at least victorious, in these arguments) is presumably Erskine's, as well as roughly Joan Didion's in her essay on self-respect: seize life as much as you wish without being cowed by the opinions of others, but when they condemn you for that, live with it. Try to live morally by your lights, but when you fail at it (as you will), you must continue to live with yourself as well. Fear neither the gods nor death, but do what you can to propitiate them and keep living.
All of which is, more or less, the Lost Generation's code, a reaction to the stultifying conventionality and small-town gossippiness of American society in the years leading up to World War I. Indeed, much of the humor of the book comes in the implicit parallels it draws between the Trojan War and the Great War, and how society, particularly the younger generation, has changed as a result of that cataclysm.
Spurred by the popularity of The Private Life, Erskine would go on to write other novels putting modern socio-philosophical arguments in the mouths of figures from classic literature: Galahad (1926), Adam and Eve (1927), Penelope's Man (1928), Cinderella's Daughter (1930), Tristan and Isolde (1932), and so on — the last was Venus, the Lonely Goddess in 1949. None of them were ever as popular: the brief vogue in the mid-20s for any work which could be read as arguing for greater sexual freedom was what really propelled Helen of Troy to its limited shelf life as a modern classic, and as American literary culture developed so that that was no longer such a startling idea, Erskine's urbane, cultivated ironies fell out of fashion as well.
Erskine is one of a group of American writers of the 1920s and 30s that I label the Philosopher-Comedians: others include Elmer Davis, Ben Hecht, Christopher Morley, Carl Van Vechten, and James Branch Cabell. For all of them (Davis occasionally excepted), ideas are more important than plot, but they also approach their ideas with such a light touch that they end up being part of Light Fiction anyway: amusing (when they are) rather than riotous, the Philosopher-Comedians make up their own quiet backwater apart from the main stream of light fiction, which was primarily carried out in the cacophonous, vertiginous, polyvocal pages of popular magazines.