Generations (5): New Kids
The New Kids, born from 1884-93, were a generation outraged with the world they’d inherited. They were in their teens and 20s in the Nineteen-Oughts (1904-13, not to be confused with the 1900s), during which time — according to Virginia Woolf — human nature underwent a fundamental change, as a result of technological breakthroughs and global violence; and they were in their 20s and 30s during the war-torn Nineteen-Teens (1914-23, not to be confused with the 1910s).
Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1917
“How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated?” demanded NKer Hugo Ball in his 1916 Dada Manifesto. “Make it new,” insisted NKer Ezra Pound. High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the 1884-93 cohort who made it new include: Anna Akhmatova, Antonio Gramsci, Arthur Cravan, Charlie Chaplin, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Egon Schiele, Emmy Hennings, Ernst Bloch, Ezra Pound, F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Georg Grosz, Groucho Marx, György Lukács, H.P. Lovecraft, Hannah Höch, Harpo Marx, Henry Miller, Hugo Ball, James M. Cain, Jean Cocteau, Jean/Hans Arp, Karel Čapek, Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Man Ray, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Mikhail Bulgakov, Olaf Stapledon, Oskar Kokoschka, Randolph Bourne, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, T.S. Eliot, Thea von Harbou, Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Benjamin, William Carlos Williams, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
The romantic anti-capitalism (Lukács’s pejorative phrase) of their elders wasn’t good enough for the New Kids, who dismissed 19th-century utopianism as a quietist longing for a mythical — often neo-medieval — golden age. Instead of looking backward nostalgically (i.e., retrogressively), utopian New Kids discovered and invented what NKer Van Wyck Brooks called a “usable past.” Pound, for example, found inspiration for his modernist poems in classical Chinese poetry, while T.S. Eliot was inspired by the ironic poems of the 19th-century French symbolist Jules Laforgue. NB: Though Pound and Eliot are often regarded as members of the “Lost Generation,” that moniker really belongs to Hardboileds like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley.
A key usable past, for the New Kids, was childhood: Randolph Bourne, for example, lamented that the older generation ruled the world, “hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war.” Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin argued that utopian socialism is nourished by the fairy tales and fantasies of childhood. (Meanwhile, “dada,” one of childhood’s first words, became the rallying cry of a hilobrow movement pioneered by an international gang of New Kids dodging WWI in Zurich.) But this idealization of childhood is not to be confused with today’s “rejuvenilization”; in The New Radicalism in America (1965), Christopher Lasch would write that the American “movement of intellectual renewal of which Bourne was the most courageous and clearsighted exponent” was the closest thing this country ever had to the spirit of the Frankfurt School. New Kids like Bourne, writes Lasch, couldn’t “conceive of enslavement in the uncomplicated categories of the old radicalism, the radicalism of Mill and Marx. Men, they knew, were everywhere in chains, but the chains had become invisible…. Tyranny came to mean to them not oppression but repression, and the battleground between freedom and authority shifted from society to the self.”
A reminder of my generational periodization scheme.
1844-53: The Prometheans
1854-63: The Plutonians
1864-73: The Anarcho-Symbolists
1874-83: The Psychonauts
1884-93: [The Lost Generation] The New Kids
1894-1903: [The Lost Generation] The Hardboiled Generation
1904-13: [The Greatest Generation] The Partisans
1914-23: [The Greatest Generation] The New Gods
1924-33: [The Silent Generation] The Postmoderns
1934-43: [The Silent Generation] The Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: The Boom Generation
1954-63: [The Boom Generation, or Late Boomers, Post-Boomers] The OGXers (Original Generation X)
1964-73: [Generation X] The PC Generation
1974-83: [Generations X and/or Y] The Net Generation
1984-93: The Millennials
1994-2003: [The Millennials] TBA
Another NKer movement was spearheaded by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Marc Chagall, Thomas Hart Benton, Milton Avery, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Alban Berg, each of whom mined the (Psychonaut-discovered) collective unconscious for the “clear essence” of impressions and mental images, which they expressed in the form of simple short-hand formulae and symbols — hence the term Expressionism. Expressionism, which distorts reality for emotional effect, lent itself easily to another, far less exalted NKer aesthetic pursuit: science fiction, horror, and fantasy novels and films. “[W]e drift unfamiliar to ourselves, immersed in darkness,” writes Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia (1918), in a brooding passage that could have been lifted from NKer fabulists and mythopoets like J.R.R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Olaf Stapledon, Thea von Harbou, or Karel Čapek.
“But the thought of [utopia] is at hand,” continued Bloch. “For only we proceed slowly forward, darkly, atomistically, individually, subjectively, within everything moving or amassing, as the unresolved utopian tension constantly undermining everything shaped.” There is something utopian, or at least anti-anti-utopian about the New Kids Generation. Before Dada was an aesthetic movement, after all, it was a transnational community of misfits, an Argonaut Folly. D.H. Lawrence urged his friends to help him found an island commune, but to no avail; perhaps this was because the friends he asked were either too old (E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell) or too young (Aldous Huxley) to be New Kids.
New Kids John Reed and Louise Bryant
In America, New Kids like Floyd Dell, John Reed, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Eugene O’Neill formed an illiberal, non-repressive social order of sorts in New York’s Greenwich Village. Listen to Malcolm Cowley, writing in Exile’s Return about the older Villagers (”They”) that he and his fellow Hardboileds (”We”) encountered after 1917:
“They” had once been rebels, political, moral, artistic or religious — in any case they had paid the price of their rebellion… “We” had avoided issues and got what we wanted in a quiet way, simply by taking it…. “They” had been rebels: they wanted to change the world, be leaders in the fight for justice and art, help to create a society in which individuals could express themselves. “We” were convinced at the time that society could never be changed by an effort of the will.
Unlike their immediate elders, the Psychonauts, the New Kids weren’t interested in leaving civilization behind, or escaping into uncharted territories of the mind and spirit; and unlike their immediate juniors, the Hardboileds, they didn’t grow up “to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man [i.e., ideologies] shaken,” as Hardboileder F. Scott Fitzgerald would put it. Instead, the New Kids were the generational cohort who accomplished the shaking (up).
I could go on and on about this fascinating cohort. But after mentioning that Axis leaders Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, not to mention most of the Algonquin Round Table (Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, New Yorker founding editor Harold W. Ross, and Alexander Woollcott), as well as many of the New Yorker’s notable early writers and cartoonists (Woollcott, Benchley, Parker, James M. Cain, Janet Flanner, Charles Brackett, Helen Hokinson, and honorary NKer James Thurber) are members of the New Kids Generation, I’ll stop.
Meet the New Kids.
Honorary New Kids (born 1883): Walter Gropius, Lon Chaney Sr., William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini
1884: Eleanor Roosevelt (Activist, First Lady under FDR), Damon Runyon (Journalist, Guys and Dolls), Norman Thomas (leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America), Waldo Peirce (American painter), Hugo Gernsback (influential SF author and editor, founded Amazing Stories in 1926), Harry S. Truman (33rd US President, 1945-53), Roger Nash Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Robert J. Flaherty (Film director, Nanook of the North), Bronislaw Malinowski (founder of social anthropology), Walter Huston (Actor, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Ivy Compton-Burnett (Novelist), Georges Duhamel (Novelist, Civilisation), Hideki Tojo (Prime Minister of Japan 1941-44), Max Beckmann (ex-Expressionist painter associated with Neue Sachlichkeit), Hugh Walpole (best-selling English novelist), Clement Davies (Leader of the UK Liberal Party, 1945-56), Alexander Belayev (Russian SF writer). Honorary Psychonauts: A. Merritt (SF author), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka’s literary executor), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess), Jean Piccard (extreme balloonist).
1885: Ezra Pound (American poet, The Cantos), D.H. Lawrence (British novelist, Lady Chatterley’s Lover), Emmy Hennings (German Dadaist performer and poet), György Lukács (Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, founder of Western Marxism), Ernst Bloch (German Marxist philosopher, utopian theorist), Leadbelly (American musician, “Goodnight Irene”), Sinclair Lewis (American novelist, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry), George S. Patton (American military leader), Will Durant (American historian), Ring Lardner (American journalist, Gullible’s Travels), Charles Merrill (Founder of Merrill Lynch), Milton Avery (American modern painter), Theda Bara (American actress), Wallace Beery (American actor), Harry Blackstone (American magician), Jerome Kern (American composer), Edna Ferber (American novelist, Show Boat and Giant), Gabby Hayes (American actor, perennial sidekick), Billie Burke (American actress), Louis Untermeyer (American poet, anthologist), Erich von Stroheim (Austrian actor, director), Louis B. Mayer (Belarussian-American film and TV producer, the final “M” in MGM), Alban Berg (Viennese composer), François Mauriac (French novelist), Allan Dwan (Canadian film director), Lionel Atwill (English actor), Niels Bohr (Danish physicist, father of Quantum Theory), St. John Philby (British spy, Arabist)
1886: Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Hugo Ball, Martin Heidegger, Raoul Hausmann, Olaf Stapledon, Karl Korsch, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jean/Hans Arp, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Ma Rainey, H.D., Aldo Leopold, Ed Wynn, Margaret Anderson, Willis O’Brien, Clarence Birdseye, Ty Cobb, Henry King, Edward Everett Horton, Joyce Kilmer, Alain Locke, Fred Quimby, Charles Ruggles, Rex Stout, Edward Weston, Nell Brinkley, Hugo Ball, Martin Heidegger, Al Jolson, Diego Rivera, David Ben-Gurion, Michael Curtiz, Karl von Frisch, Frank Lloyd, Hugh Lofting, George Mallory, Kay Nielsen, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Williams
1887: Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Arthur Cravan, Jimmy Finlayson, Boris Karloff, Erwin Schrödinger, John Reed, Sylvia Beach, Raoul Walsh, Robinson Jeffers, Chico Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Marianne Moore, Georgia O’Keeffe, Floyd Dell, George Abbott, Fatty Arbuckle, Ruth Benedict, Walter Connolly, Jim Thorpe, Jack Conway, John Cromwell, Norman Foerster, William Frawley, Conrad Hilton, Alvin York, Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Marcus Garvey, Rupert Brooke, Julian Huxley, Chiang Kai-Shek, Paul Lukas, Edith Sitwell, Blaise Cendrars, Bernard Montgomery, Ernst Roehm.
1888: T.S. Eliot, Irving Berlin, Harpo Marx, Raymond Chandler, Josef Albers, F.W. Murnau, Nestor Makhno (Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader), Eugene O’Neill, Maxwell Anderson, Beulah Bondi, Anita Loos, John Foster Dulles, Heywood Broun, Richard E. Byrd, Dale Carnegie, S.S. Van Dine, Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert Moses, Franklin Pangborn, John Crowe Ransom, Tris Speaker, Edgar Church, Katherine Mansfield, Vicki Baum, Georges Bernanos, Nikolai Bukharin, Maurice Chevalier, Giorgio de Chirico, Barry Fitzgerald, T. E. Lawrence, Fernando Pessoa, Knute Rockne, Ernst Heinkel
1889: Charlie Chaplin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Höch, Jean Cocteau, Walter Lippmann, Thomas Hart Benton, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anna Akhmatova, R. G. Collingwood, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Conrad Aiken, Seabury Quinn, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Ray Collins, W. S. Van Dyke, Waldo Frank, Erle Stanley Gardner, Alfred E. Green, Lambert Hillyer, Edwin Hubble, Shoeless Joe Jackson, William Keighley, Robert Z. Leonard, Donald MacBride, DeWitt and Lila Wallace, Adolf Hitler, Arnold Toynbee, James Whale, Gabriel Marcel, John Middleton Murry, Claude Rains
1890: Groucho Marx, Man Ray, H. P. Lovecraft, Ho Chi Minh, Fritz Lang, Charles de Gaulle, Egon Schiele, Karel Čapek, Stan Laurel, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Frank Morgan, E. E. “Doc” Smith, Marc Connelly, Robert Armstrong, Edward Arnold, Robert L. Ripley, Clarence Brown, Jelly Roll Morton, Katherine Anne Porter, Frederick Lewis Allen, Edwin H. Armstrong, Birdman of Alcatraz, Conrad Richter, Eddie Rickenbacker, Colonel Sanders, Ossip Zadkine, Agatha Christie, Michael Collins, Naum Gabo, Vyacheslav Molotov, Aimee Semple McPherson, Claude McKay, Adolphe Menjou, Boris Pasternak, Jean Rhys.
1891: Henry Miller, Antonio Gramsci, Max Ernst, Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian dramatist, author), Cole Porter, Fanny Brice, Leo Burnett, W. Averell Harriman, George E. Marshall, Archie Mayo, Irving Pichel, Carl Stalling, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Earl Warren, David Sarnoff, Otto Dix, Rudolf Carnap, Edward Bernays, Ronald Colman, Reginald Denny, Edmund Goulding, Pär Lagerkvist, Gene Lockhart, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergei Prokofiev, Erwin Rommel, Herbert Asbury (Novelist, The Gangs of New York), Otis Adelbert Kline (SF writer).
1892: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Lubitsch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Harold W. Ross, J.R.R. Tolkien, James M. Cain, Charles Atlas, Djuna Barnes, Grant Wood, Janet Flanner, Maxwell Bodenheim, Oliver Hardy, Gummo Marx, Archibald Macleish, William Powell, William Beaudine, Charles Brackett, Joe E. Brown, Pearl S. Buck, Eddie Cantor, William Demarest, Alfred A. Knopf, Gregory La Cava, Alfred Lunt, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mary Pickford, Hal Roach, Frank Tuttle, Wendell Willkie, Leo G. Carroll, J. Paul Getty Sr., Erwin Panofsky, Basil Rathbone, Haile Selassie, Manfred von Richthofen, Jack L. Warner, Rebecca West
1893: Dorothy Parker, Mae West, George Grosz, Lillian Gish, William Moulton Marston, Helen Hokinson, Beatrice Wood, Clark Ashton Smith, Dean Acheson, Russel Crouse, Donald Davidson, Allen W. Dulles, Edsel Ford, Harold Lloyd, Huey Long, Hattie McDaniel, Karl Menninger, Hermann Goering, I. A. Richards, Chaim Soutine, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Howard, Victor Gollancz, Alexander Korda, Karl Mannheim, Mao Zedong, Eimar O’Duffy (Irish satirist, author). Honorary Hardboileds: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró, Jimmy Durante, John P. Marquand.
Honorary New Kids (born 1894): Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess
MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró, Jimmy Durante, John P. Marquand (all born 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (1891, but claimed she was born in 1901, so I think we can make an exception for her).
MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: A. Merritt, Gerald Gardner, Emil Jannings, Max Brod, Amedeo Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Jean Piccard (all born 1884)
Authors of Radium-Age science fiction born 1884-93 include: Clark Ashton Smith (The Uncharted Isle), Seabury Quinn (The Phantom Fighter), Hugo Gernsback (Ralph 124C41+, editor of Amazing Stories, coined term “science fiction), Yevgeny Zamyatin (WE), Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker), Joseph O’Neill (Land Under England), Ray Cummings (”The Girl in the Golden Atom”), Frigyes Karinthy (Voyage to Faremido, Capillaria), Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, The Rocket to the Moon), Miriam Allen deFord, Karel Čapek (The Absolute at Large, Krakatit, R.U.R.), H. P. Lovecraft (SF includes At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness), E.E. Smith (The Skylark of Space), Edward Shanks (The People of the Ruins), F. Britten Austin (Battlewrack, By the Aero-Mail, On the Borderland, The War-God Walks Again), Otis Adelbert Kline (The Prince of Peril, numerous stories in pulp SF magazines), John Ernest Bechdolt (The Torch), Alexander Belayev (The Amphibian, The Struggle in Space), Eimar O’Duffy (King Goshawk and the Birds, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, Asses in Clover), Pearl S. Buck (Command the Morning, post-Radium Age), Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here, post-Radium Age). NB: A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool) is an honorary member of the Psychonaut Generation.
