Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s Ann Douglas Farrar Straus and Giroux 606 pp. $25.00 Review by Adam Kirsch Featured in BBR June 1995 In the era of Newt Gingrich, it has become a popular political pastime to guess at when the rot began in America. The sense that our culture has decisively shifted in the recent past, that a nation which was once whole and optimistic is now fragmented, ironic and addicted to speed and pleasure, is widespread. The Republicans locate this break with the past in the counterculture of the 1960s. But Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas's sprawling history of Manhattan in the 1920s, makes it clear that it was in that decade, and in that city, that modern American culture, with its destructive passions and its international allure, first came to life. Douglas's book takes its title from a phrase of Raymond Chandler, but in her hands it becomes a summary of the 1920s ethos: the belief that life is painful and frightening, and that glory is achieved only by acknowledging that fact, even at the cost of personal destruction. The artists whose names are indelibly linked with that decade-Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith and Bix Beiderbecke, Dorothy Parker and Louise Brooks-waged war on complacency and optimism, and they paid a deep price for it, in alcoholism, wasted talent and suicide. When Hemingway wrote of Gertrude Stein that she only wanted to know "the gay part of the world...never the real, never the bad," he was expressing what Douglas sees as the essence of "terrible honesty"-the belief that "the 'bad' is the 'real.'" The lens through which Douglas analyzes this culture shift is an uneasy combination of feminism and Freud. "Terrible honesty," to Douglas, is an eruption of the male principle after generations in which American culture was dominated by the Victorian matriarch, with her insistence on moral uplift and the power of positive thinking. The defining movements and figures of 19th-century America, from Christian Science and the Women's Christian Temperance Union to the much-derided Pollyanna, share the belief that the world can be improved if it is met with unrelenting optimism. For Douglas, it is this attitude which the Manhattanites of the 1920s-at least the white ones-were intent on destroying; the whole cultural moment was matricidal, trying to substitute a stoic pessimism for the maternal lies of the pre-War years. The vogue which Freud enjoyed at the time in America (much to his dismay, as Douglas points out) was due to the perfect match between his theories and "terrible honesty." The Oedipus complex, repression, the idea that man is motivated by unknown drives and compulsions, made sense to a generation which had begun to challenge and despise their mothers' naiveté. This is the basic idea behind Terrible Honesty, and it is intriguing at first sight. Douglas falters, however, when she begins to set up a kind of Manichean opposition between these masculinist forces, represented by the elite white male modernists, Eliot, Hemingway and Freud, and an assortment of comparatively minor figures who, in various ways, are used as symbols of a more agreeable, feminist, tolerant kind of modernism. Against the mandarins of terrible honesty Douglas anoints Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein and William James as exemplars; in Douglas's hands, these heterogeneous writers are transformed into a kind of pluralist Popular Front, and we are clearly intended to sympathize with them. The problem is that, as the title of the book suggests, it was the pessimists, the elitists and the neo-Calvinists, not their scattered opponents, who captured the Zeitgeist and shared its basic assumptions. James' psychology is not nearly as important in modern culture as Freud's; it is James' general good nature-his openness to the psychic phenomena so dear to the Victorian matriarchs, his conception of a "subliminal self" which is a kind of friendly alternative to the Freudian subconscious-that leads Douglas to suggest him as an alternative to Freud's pessimism. But she provides no thorough explanation of James' actual theories. Instead, Douglas relies on trivial and manipulative comparisons in order to win the reader over: "One must consider the contrast between Freud at work in his dark, private, book-and-object crammed study, and James, thinking aloud as he lectured, liking to stop in the classrooms and look out the window." Argument by affective anecdote rather than analysis is more than a weakness in this book; it is a method. Douglas acknowledges with some pride that she prefers vague, impressionistic descriptions of culture, rather than theoretical explanations, in Terrible Honesty's most revealing passage: I do not wish to slight the various theories of historical causality...I only wish to acknowledge that such theories stop short of full explanation, that the road ends before we do, that we make our way, nonetheless, traveling through the dark by some other form of knowledge. If this view puts history and cultural production in the realm of the recalcitrantly mysterious, that may be where they belong. History may be closer to weather than we care to admit. The view that history is like weather is disputable, but it provides a deep insight into Terrible Honesty. It explains why Douglas is trying to rewrite 1920s history according to a trendy, 1990s idea of cultural and political virtue, why she skips manically from one topic to the next, without any apparent method: she has nothing to guide her investigation of the past except her personal impressions and judgments. This is postmodern history, in which the past is a pile of interesting fragments and personalities which can be put together in any way, since everything is plausible. Perhaps history does resist all attempts at total explanation, but surely that is the conclusion one should reach after seriously attempting to explain it, not a premise which justifies the abandonment of analysis and causality. The book's lack of principles and method is painful to witness. It allows Douglas first to defend racist Victorian matriarchs against charges of "essentialism" ("the white middle-class Victorian woman was more susceptible than the members of any other group to extremes of self-serving and...the tactics of essentialism...and she was not so because of inherent depravity or weakness but because of her historical situation"), and in the same chapter make the supreme essentialist claim that "...appropriation always means the elevation of theory over therapy, of masculine artifice over feminine experience." It motivates her almost perverse identification of skyscrapers, the ultimate phallic symbols, with the "feminine" principle because of their "toploftiness." Terrible Honesty becomes a series of casual judgments on people and ideas according to Douglas' confused moral code. If this is what comes of equating historians with weathermen, perhaps "theories of historical causality" aren't so bad after all. Terrible Honesty is interesting insofar as it treats a decade that marked a tremendous and enduring shift in American culture. But beyond the simple framework of feminine and masculine, optimist and pessimist, Douglas provides nothing but a jumble of half-hearted theories, thumbnail biographies, and lists of dates, people and things. True to her avowed principles, she does not explain history, she plays with it. Adam Kirsch is a writer living in Cambridge, MA. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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