JAMES T. FARRELL
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the source of values and excitement. The best picture of the
attitude that was defeated, I think, can be found in a writer like
Booth Tarkington. Tarkington's smugness was genuine at least,
but that kind of small-town smugness was one of the things that
the "revolt from the village" was all about. By the 1920s the city
had triumphed. Of course, in the Bible Belt the city was the place
of sin and damnation far beyond what Sodom and Gomorrah ever
were. (As a matter offact, I went to Sodom and Gomorrah and
all
I found there was sand .)
Interviewer:
I suppose you refer to Mencken ' s attack on the
"booboisie" ?
Farrell:
Mencken ' s criticism was that America, particularly in the
towns and the countryside, didn ' t use its leisure in a more civi–
lized fashion. He said that farmers make love in their underwear;
they drink bad booze; and they don ' t have good conversation and
don't like good music. Mencken and Lewis agreed , of course.
Prohibition was put over by the rural districts out of jealousy of
the city. Prohibition gave greater emphasis to the idea of the
tough guy, and then we got the phenomenon of the tough guy in
literature; he became a romantic hero . By the 1920s the romantic
idea had degenerated into romanticism: it's always three o'clock
in the morning, we dance the whole night through. We get
the romanticism of an empty, juvenile character like Scott
Fitzgerald' s Great Gatsby, who tries to create in fact-out of a
popular song-the love he once had for a girl of seventeen. This is
after he has become a gangster and rich. Benito Mussolini was
taken as an example of a tough guy, one of the new types that had
grown as a consequence of the war. Some Americans noticed that
he made the Italian trains run on time and decided they needed
someone like him to rule them. The tough guy in Ernest
Hemingway's stories is male fantasy; strength and virility become
the basis for a picture of reality. The whole tough-guy concept is
largely a masculine dream. I've lived to see the effect . It's affected
many girls in the radical women's movement. This is not only my
own independent observation; Carl Becker, the historian, made
observations of a similar character. One of the connecting links
between the twenties and thirties was this tough-guy idea, felt and
expressed in many ways , particularly in the Communist
movement in New York during the thirties. But the thirties is
another story.
