Tag: Vanity Fair (magazine)

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The Mortician and the Masses: Aldous Huxley’s “The Perversion of Values” (1926) Reconsidered

Elgin ad, Vanity Fair, Oct. 1926

“Something is happening on the western shore of the Atlantic.”  Aldous Huxley said as much.  To be sure, given the long stretch of this vaguely defined region, something is bound to happen there at any time.  Huxley was in fact referring to the United States of America when he made that statement in his article “The Perversion of Values,” which was published in the October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair.

The English author and philosopher was a frequent contributor to the periodical in those days, and “The Perversion of Values,” like the previously discussed article “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” of the same year, was presented as part of a series of provocative commentaries on the provoking currents of the age.  What was “happening” in the United States, Huxley opined this time around, was “something” that “threaten[ed] to separate it still further from the older civilizations, unless (which God forbid) the older civilizations should themselves fall victims to the same distorting process.”

You said something there, I said to myself, as I caught up with Huxley’s argument a century later.  Having said as much, I feel compelled as well to follow this up by that time-honored cry of exasperation: “you don’t know the half of it.”  Then again how could Huxley have known just how much further values could be perverted in an age in which a US President acts like—and as—a perverter-in-chief?

Alive to the dangers of presentism, I acknowledge that the phrase “victims to the same distorting process” is not a response to the political landscape of our day but to the radical and rapid transformation of Western societies in the Roaring Twenties.  Huxley was not, as I am, concerned with the threat to democracies the world over but with the dangers posed by democratic values and the to him dubious revaluation of established standards.  And it was not some pamphleteering demagogue, political rally or protest staged by wary and worked-up citizens that triggered, or at any rate occasioned, Huxley’s public performance of panic.  It was, he claims, a page in the Chicago telephone directory.  How anxious can you get?

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“Hello, Big Boy,” Goodbye: Thoughts Occasioned by Sherwood Anderson’s Independence Day “Inquiry into America’s Progress” (1926)

Cover of the July 1926 Vanity Fair issue in which Anderson’s “Inquiry” appeared

 

“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926.  “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.”  That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add:

As a nation we are still young.  It has only been a hundred and fifty years.  What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now.  Such a job we tackled—whew!

Never mind “whew!”  How about “whoa”? A “still young” nation? I have heard that one before—back in 2018, at the wedding here in Wales of an international trans student from the United States whose sister told me, probably in response to a reference of mine to the still fresh wound inflicted on democracy by the MAGA king’s first term, that her homeland was bound to make mistakes, and presumably be excused for making them, because the Republic was still so very new.

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“The Present Fad of Self Confession” (1926): Aldous Huxley and the Paper “monster of spiritual impudicity”

Cover of the May 1926 issue of Vanity Fair
in which Aldous Huxley’s essay
“The Present Fad of Self Confession” was first published

I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure.  They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time.  The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular culture of yore, traces of which I sample in a twenty-first century context and, more narrowly, from the perspective of my own experience.

For quite some time now I have been browsing vintage US American periodicals ranging from Radio Broadcast to Vanity Fair in search of materials ripe for centenary processing.  Seriously dated though my selections inevitably are, I am more intrigued by resonance than I am concerned with variance, let alone obsolescence.

That is to say, even at the risk of presentism, I am drawn to the relatable—and am committed to relating—instead of concentrating on what makes the past so unalike from the present as to appear entirely and solely of its time.  Context need not be confinement, just as difference does not have to spell distance. 

Declaring something “past” assists in creating an air of critical detachment.  It fosters an attitude of authorial but nonetheless assumptive command over a given subject, a superciliousness that, like an eyebrow hovering prominently above the inspecting eye draws—or should draw—attention to the viewpoint of the writer whose imperiousness gainsays any claims to objectivity.

In my own catchings-up with the presumably out-of-date, I resist assuming an authoritative posture or persona.  All the while, I am aware of—and aim to foreground—my queer biases and spectatorial limitations as an absent witness or indirect observer.  

Far from clinical, the choosing of a subject matter and the manner in which we approach it reveal personality, whether the self at work is acknowledged or not.  Whenever we put our name to them, our published words proclaim “I wrote this”—unless, as is increasingly the case in a grim reality inconceivable to those living in 1926—they hush up, however vainly, that “AI wrote this.”

Despite obvious differences, both technological and social, in the ways in which we communicate and consume—how we take in and dole out prose for public consumption—the question of the “I” in journalistic writing, be it as a peek-a-boo tease between the lines or as a treatise writ large, continues to raise itself, to this day, even—or especially—as distinctions between fact and fiction, news and commentary, intelligence and artificiality have become all but erased.  Brave New World, indeed, this domain of public discourse.  

For that reason alone, Aldous Huxley’s “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” published in Vanity Fair in May 1926—coincidental with the author’s first visit to Hollywood—struck me as worth revisiting one hundred years later, at a moment in time when I question my own willingness to give so freely of myself in projects such as Retroactive Selfies, currently all but shelved on Instagram, and the visual narrative Envelope that I have proposed for display in a local gallery.

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“99% slush, hokum and flap-doodle”: Having Words with a Pugnacious Pundit

Walter Prichard Eaton’s words as printed in Vanity Fair, April 1926

“Who he?” I thought.  Or make that “hooey!” The “he” in question is Walter Prichard Eaton (1878–1957), a theater critic and academic of whose voice I first took note while flicking through the digitized pages of Vanity Fair’s April issue.  April 1926, mind.  The “hooey!” is Eaton’s, or rather, it is my response to his sweeping dismissal of motion pictures in an article titled “The Strangling of Our Theatre,” the first in a series of reports from the cultural battlefield that Vanity Fair billed as a “Symposium” on the “Future of the Theatre in America.”

In a succession of articles, prognostications on the fortunes of the theater in the United States were made by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sydney Howard (May issue), theater mogul Lee Shubert (June), independent theater manager Brock Pemberton (July), Ralph Block, production manager of the Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation (August), and John Emerson, President of the Actor’s Equity Association (September).  Eaton’s response to them in the October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair drew the curtain on the “Symposium.”

Now that “Motion Picture Producers” were beginning to exert “direct control of the drama,” as the editors of Vanity Fair put it, a number of questions, however leading, arose:

Will this result in the production of only such plays as will make good motion pictures, in other words, cheap, obvious and sensational plays?

Will the intelligent minorities who are sponsoring non-commercial playhouses succeed where the commercial houses have failed?

Is our stage to lend itself still more to the standards of Moronia, or will a new theatre of the Intelligent Minority arise, overthrow the theatre of commerce and release the latent dramatic talent of America?

Now, “Symposium” literally means “drinking together.”  Perhaps the water cooler was contaminated to begin with, given this set-up, but the intemperance of Eaton’s verbiage has no convivial air about it.

What follows, which may well be “hooey” to you—or “flap-doodle,” to borrow the term used by Eaton that started me off on this tangent—is an attempt at having a word on having words: words as thought, words as theatrics, and words as troll.

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