JAMES T. FARRELL
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Austin, a very important writer, once described by an Oxford don
as the most intelligent woman in America. The novel is the story
of an artist coming from a small town in Illinois, as Mary Austin
herself did; it is based upon her own life and her experiences as an
artist.
A }1IOman oj Genius
anticipated Dreiser's
The "Genius,"
which
is about the working life of an artist. But Dreiser always made the
working lives of his characters part of his stories. The working life
of Frank Cowperwood in Dreiser's "Trilogy of Desire" -
The
Financier, The Titan,
and
The Stoic-is
a major part of the novels.
Even the working life of Carrie Meeber, when she becomes an
actress, is an important part of her story. And Sinclair Lewis dealt
with the working lives of George Babbitt, Martin Arrowsmith,
Sam Dodsworth, and Elmer Gantry at length.
In contrast, if you take the women who are portrayed in
books by Hemingway or Faulkner or Fitzgerald, the idea of their
growing
is not a part of their characterizations. The idea of growth
and development, and the attempt to characterize people in a
more full , all-sided way, including their working lives, tended to
drop out in the twenties. These works depict more the life of
leisure-and of course the life ofleisure is the life of consumption.
With that change, the Midwest declined in cultural importance.
Interviewer:
You seem to have a considerable grasp of the twenties as a
crucial decade, which is probably quite natural, it being the
decade of your own young manhood and the time that marked
your own start as a writer.
Farrell:
My intent is not to come to any hard and fast conclusions
about the twenties, or even perhaps to a coherent or all-inclusive
interpretation, but rather to discuss some aspects of life in that
time socially, politically, in terms of literature, and otherwise.
There is a common tendency to treat decades in terms of the
cliches. The twenties are considered to be the "Roaring Twen–
ties." There was, partly because of the First World War, an
explosive feeling on the part of youth, designating that period the
"J
azz Age. " Skirts became shorter, dancing became more sexual,
and there was much public announcement to the effect that there
was more "necking" (though I presume that the amount of
"necking" that goes on in the world is common and universal).
It
was also the time of the so-called Lost Generation, a phrase that
Gertrude Stein spoke to Ernest Hemingway and he quoted in his
