Contemporary Authors

1. A year of writing dangerously : a scholarly detective story of the lost generation https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008837 Gandal, Keith, author. A year of writing dangerously : a scholarly detective story of the lost generation / Keith Gandal. Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. pages cm PS3607.A44 Z46 2017 ISBN: 9781421423944 (hardback)1421423944 (hardcover) 2. War isn't the only hell : a new reading of World War I American literature https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034504 Gandal, Keith, author. War isn't the only hell : a new reading of World War I American literature / Keith Gandal. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. pages cm PS374.W65 G38 2017 ISBN: 9781421425108 (hardcover : alk. paper)1421425106 (hardcover : alk. paper) 3. The virtues of the vicious : Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the spectacle of the slum https://lccn.loc.gov/96044306 Gandal, Keith. The virtues of the vicious : Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the spectacle of the slum / Keith Gandal. New York : Oxford University Press, 1997. viii, 206 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. PS1449.C85 M334 1997 ISBN: 0195110633 (acid-free paper) 4. The gun and the pen : Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the fiction of mobilization https://lccn.loc.gov/2007039406 Gandal, Keith. The gun and the pen : Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the fiction of mobilization / Keith Gandal. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. xii, 271 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. PS374.W65 G36 2008 ISBN: 9780195338911 (alk. paper)019533891X (alk. paper) 5. Cleveland anonymous : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2002022619 Gandal, Keith. Cleveland anonymous : a novel / by Keith Gandal. Berkeley, Calif. : Frog, Ltd. : Distributed by North Atlantic Books, 2002. 305 p. ; 23 cm. PS3607.A44 C57 2002 ISBN: 1583940626

• Center for the Humanities - https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/participants/keith-gandal

  Keith Gandal is professor of English at City College of New York, with a joint appointment in American Literature and Creative Writing. He also serves as deputy chair for graduate studies in the English Department. He is the author of three scholarly books, including The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (2008) and The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (1997). He is likewise the author of one novel, Cleveland Anonymous (2002).

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  Keith Gandal

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  Keith Gandal is a professor of English at City College of New York. He is the author of The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is also the author of War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature.

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  A New Reading of World War I American Literature
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  One hundred years after U.S. involvement in World War I, it is time....

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  Keith Gandal is Professor of English at City College of New York, with a joint appointment in American Literature and Creative Writing. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books: four scholarly monographs, a novel, and a hybrid book of creative nonfiction combining scholarship and memoir. His research has focused on two areas of American studies: literature and poverty, and literature and war.

  — The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford UP, 1997)

  — Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002)

  — Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

  — The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (Oxford UP, 2008)

  — A Year of Writing Dangerously: A Scholarly Detective Story of the Lost Generation (forthcoming Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)

  — “War Isn’t the Only Hell”: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (forthcoming Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

  He teaches classes on American literature from 1890 through the 20th century, American war and postwar literature, and the craft of the novel.

Gandal, Keith: A YEAR OF WRITING DANGEROUSLY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gandal, Keith A YEAR OF WRITING DANGEROUSLY Johns Hopkins Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 12, 10 ISBN: 978-1-4214-2394-4
A sabbatical year proves both personally and professionally stressful.In his last book about three giants of the Lost Generation, Gandal (English/City Coll. of New York; The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization, 2008, etc.) made the provocative argument that the three writers, frustrated by their failure to serve in World War I, infused their fiction with their own feelings of emasculation. He reprises that argument in his candid, digressive, often repetitious memoir about the sabbatical during which he fitfully embarked on a scholarly quest to formulate his insights and to find evidence to support them. Academic detective work is not all that occupied him: the book begins with a death threat, which is quickly dispatched and has little to do with the rest of the memoir except that it left him and his wife caring for his school-age niece. Besides driving her to and from school, the author hardly mentions the girl, and his wife similarly has a scant walk-on role. Instead, Gandal ruminates exhaustively on his frustrations with his field and the tribulations of scholarly work (he hates doing research, he admits); his literary discovery, which he reiterates throughout; and his new obsession with tennis, which he took up as a "refreshment from the mental strain of thinking and writing." That strain was exacerbated by his feeling ostracized from academia because of "my profession's seeming taboo on literary-historical research about the military" and some scholars' refusal to see WWI as relevant to the works he was examining. Still, Gandal persisted in arguing that "American modernist style had been born out of nothing less than the need to hide these embarrassing mobilization wounds while being unable to stop writing about them and thus still compulsively writing about them." His manuscript completed, he spent nail-biting months trying to find a publisher, feeling at the mercy of hostile manuscript reviewers. Revelations about self- doubt, authority, competitiveness, and striving for recognition may resonate with other
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academics, less with general readers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gandal, Keith: A YEAR OF WRITING DANGEROUSLY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217640 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ab547621. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217640
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Gandal, Keith. The Gun and the Pen:
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner,
and the Fiction of Mobilization
Thomas K. Meier
Studies in the Novel.
41.3 (Fall 2009): p383+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.press.jhu.edu
Full Text:
GANDAL, KEITH. The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xii +271pp. $55.00.
Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen is an ambitious and important book that deserves the scrutiny of a wide scholarly audience. He sets out to do nothing less than to redefine critical understanding of American fiction beginning with the novels of the 1920s involving soldiers and other literary characters affected by World War I. His method, though limited in scope, serves him well; he restricts his study primarily to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.
Gandal's major contentions (among many) regard the ways that settled opinion and widespread critical consensus have poorly or wrongly interpreted vital areas of inquiry into early twentieth- century American fiction: first, regarding the actual conditions under which men served or not in the World War I military as well as the type and experience of their wartime assignments; second, regarding a hitherto unnoticed critical understanding of the social effects of the radical changes of personnel policies in the "New Army" of the United States during World War I; and third, regarding identifying the origin of the sexual mores of the "new woman" of the 1920s as portrayed in American novels.
The first contention, which will undoubtedly (and perhaps unfortunately) receive the most attention from fellow literary scholars, is Gandal's reformulation of the concept of war wounds and other lasting effects of war upon its veterans by introducing a new concept, that of "mobilization wounds." In contrast to the medical or psychological ravages visited by war on young men, the concept of mobilization wounds is a sociological one, the damage to one's self- esteem or perceived status as a result of not being accepted (mobilized) into the military or by not being commissioned an officer. (Until the middle of the Vietnam War, we may recall, the Congressional commission conferred on its recipients the status of both "Officer and Gentleman.") Gandal's mobilization-wound concept is wide-reaching, also subtracting status for not being sent to a theater of war (or not to a major theater), not being given troops to command, not achieving high rank, or not being tested in combat.
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This mobilization wound concept could well become a new critical instrument for the study and understanding of American war literature from World War I onward. A difficulty with Gandal's book, however, is the apparent conflation of a fictional character's mobilization wounds with those Gandal imputes to the author himself. He maintains that all three of the writers themselves have mobilization wounds, inflicted by the circumstances of their own mobilization. A mobilization deficit worthy of the term "wound," however, should perhaps cross some common- sense threshold of lack of worthiness. None of the three writers even approached such a threshold in their own lives; all were volunteers, and all saw service. As Gandal himself points out, Hemingway was "the first American to be wounded on the Italian front in World War I" (4); he does not prove the point that the three authors or their peers saw them as socially "emasculated" by mobilization wounds, "which were at once inescapable and embarrassing" (5).
Too young for the military, and with a bad eye that barred him from the U.S. Air Corps, Hemingway nevertheless sought to take part in the war as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and saw action. Faulkner was too small for the Air Corps but joined the Canadian Air Force. While the circumstances of their mobilization no doubt rankled them, they were by no means "slackers." As for Fitzgerald, he was actually commissioned into the infantry and promoted to First Lieutenant although not seen as fit for a combat command. Given his well-documented erratic ways, his peers must have been amazed that one so seemingly unsuited to military life would have done as well as he did.
Just as Gandal has created a new way of analyzing war fiction with his concept of the mobilization wound, he adds enormous value to literary study by drawing attention to "lost knowledge" (51), newly rediscovered in this decade, which points to personnel practices of the U.S. Army that clearly led to major social and literary consequences. Because of the widely- noted Army practice of discrimination against African-Americans during World War I, literary scholars have assumed that the Army acted upon similar prejudices against Jews, immigrants, and sons of recent immigrants. In fact, the U.S. Army introduced new and thoroughly meritocratic processes for selecting those fit to serve and to hold officer rank. (Indeed, the Army intended to extend the same objective selection procedures to blacks but was dissuaded by Congress.) This "lost knowledge" has been rediscovered within the present decade by scholars such as Jennifer Keene (Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, 2000), Nancy Gentile Ford (Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I, 2001), and Richard Slotkin (Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality, 2005.) Gandal points to these discoveries to explain the increasing appearance of "ethnics" (other than blacks) in the literature of the 1920s and beyond: because of forced association in the Army, such figures had become more familiar to both writers and readers.
Gandal's third point, like the second one, applies not only to war novels but generally to fiction beginning in the 1920s. Whereas formerly scholars had been unable to account for the sudden appearance of the promiscuous "New Woman" in novels of the 1920s, it is now clear that there was a major change in sexual behavior of the younger generation during the War years. By detailing statistics on condom use, prostitute incarceration, doughboy activities in France, and the like, Gandal shows that the New Woman was not merely a phenomenon of fiction but primarily of plain observation in contemporary American life.
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Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen deserves to be read, discussed, and debated widely; it adds new depth to the study of not only war novels but of twentieth-century American literature at large.
THOMAS K. MEIER, Elmira College Meier, Thomas K.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Meier, Thomas K. "Gandal, Keith. The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and
the Fiction of Mobilization." Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009, p. 383+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A223658257/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=7b38b2d0. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A223658257
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The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob
Riis, Stephen Crane, and the
Spectacle of the Slum
CYNTHIA J. DAVIS
Studies in the Novel.
33.2 (Summer 2001): p237. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.press.jhu.edu
Full Text:
GANDAL, KEITH. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 206 pp. $49.95.
I first stumbled upon Keith Gandal's argument about slum ethics while looking for a good essay on Stephen Crane's Maggie for my graduate class. Scholarship on this novella was pretty sparse a few years back, and Gandal's 1993 ELH piece stood out from among the crowd.(1) His reading of Maggie as documenting the shift from an old morality of sin and character-building to a newer ethics--and a new form of subjectivity--premised upon spectacle and personality struck me as deeply insightful then, and it certainly augured well for the book-length study.
The Virtues of the Vicious delivers on its promise. Its major contribution is its redefinition of morality, or rather, what we have taken to be amorality. Gandal argues that Americans typically associate morality with a repressive Protestantism and envision the alternative as a rebellion against its strictures. His original move is to redefine that rebellion as itself an emergent morality, one that promotes as admirable virtues such qualities as self-esteem and toughness--the very qualities that needed to be regulated or repressed according to traditional morality. Following T. J. Jackson Lears's lead, Gandal regards these virtues as compensating for the sentimentality and feminization of Victorian culture.(2) What men like Jacob Riis and Crane found refreshing about the other half's life was its overtly masculine ethos.
Gandal's study pinpoints the moment when these two sets of ethical standards began their dalliance. Though he notes that an array of writers, photographers, and reformers were attracted to the urban poor as subjects, Gandal zooms in on Riis and Crane in order to explore his points in depth and at length. The Virtues of the Vicious is divided into three sections: the first devoted to close readings of his primary texts, the second to discussing "slum spectacle" or the aesthetics of slum representation, and the last to examining "slum psychology" or the ethics of self- representation among slum dwellers.
From the first, Gandal characterizes Riis as a moral schizophrenic, at times embracing traditional morality, at times reveling in the slum's attractions. How the Other Half Lives thus reads like a
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combination charity book and travelogue, a not-always-palatable mixture. Also challenged are traditional readings of Crane as either amoral or at least a compromised moralist. Gandal positions the author instead as the champion of an emergent ethics of individuality, pride, and bravery. Crane corrects traditional slum fiction via Maggie by retelling its same old story with a different point: in Crane's rendition, the girl's death comes about not because she sins but because she can't stand up for herself. Gandal positions Crane as an ethnographer, focusing more on "codes and violations" than on "absolute good and evil" (p. 52). The ethical code violated in the streets of New York inverts traditional Protestant mores: in Maggie's environs, the self is to be indulged and promoted rather than denied.
Gandal is not content merely to elucidate this alternate ethics. As he acknowledges, the period when Crane and Riis were writing also saw the emergence of an alternate aesthetics--in particular, a new style of representing the urban poor. The tendency at mid-century to draw traditional moral distinctions between "virtue" and "viciousness" became by the Gilded Age an increasingly "aesthetic and touristic interest in the poor as spectacle," an interest that earlier charity writers would have considered "lurid and immoral" (p. 5). As concerned with aesthetics as he is with ethics, Gandal is also rightly concerned that we don't view the two as discrete. As he concludes, "the new styles of urban representation were themselves evidence of the ethical transformation they were helping to popularize; conversely, these aesthetics would be unthinkable without a shift in morals" (p. 17).
Gandal's recognition of the spectacular aspect of interest in the slums allows him to pose a third alternative to the typical responses of either pity or contempt: "fascination or amusement" (p. 62). Although Riis did seek to stir empathy even while occasionally expressing contempt for the "other half," Gandal locates numerous moments throughout The Other Half that can only be described as providing spectacle for spectacle's sake: they are designed to prompt neither action nor emotion but merely passive viewing. Such moments clearly represent a departure: "What is good for traditional morals and Americanization--cleanliness and privacy--is bad for sight-seeing. And what is bad for Protestant virtue--filth and crowds--is good for viewing pleasure" (p. 79).
While other critics have certainly glossed Riis's work as touristic, they also tend to interpret this quality as indicative of the author's distance from, or even condescension toward, his subjects. Gandal argues by contrast that Riis's appreciation of the picturesque led him to an even greater sympathy with the poor, as it was a trait both he and they shared. In the worlds of Riis and Crane, actual and fictional slum dwellers are portrayed as valuing excitement above traditional virtue, and both authors suggest that they've got their priorities straight. Gandal challenges conventional understandings of the interaction between the classes even further when he contends that the poor "eventually convert the middle class to their morality--not the other way around" (p. 85). Even today, attempts to crusade for reform on behalf of the poor must be framed as spectacle in order to garner the necessary attention. From Maggie's day to our own, if we want to cure we must first entertain.
Gandal is at his best when discussing the ethos of the slum "tough," which he does in his penultimate chapter. Recognizing that both Riis and Crane adopt the language of environmentalism supposedly developed by Progressives, he also recognizes the degree to which they adapted it. In this new configuration of the slums, its environment does not merely corrupt
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and infect its inhabitants; it also restrains their natural and healthy impulses and flattens the individuality that is every person's birthright. This recasting of the dialogue between environment and self certainly would have met with the disapproval of the charity writers who had sought to squelch the natural impulses and cockiness of those they tried to reform. It also helps to explain why both Riis and Crane would prefer the "tough" or the "thief" to the "pauper" or "victim." To survive if not thrive in the slum, both Riis and Crane concur, one needs to retain self-respect. Pride, once considered a character flaw if not a sin, is now touted as the basis of subjectivity.
Riis is more conflicted on this matter than is Crane, vacillating back and forth between praising toughness and pitying those who lack it. Crane, on the other hand, poses a psychological challenge to the notions of moral character and conscience by identifying the struggle for respect and admiration as central to identity formation in the Bowery. Crane's characters are performers; it is through performance that they achieve self-esteem. Only on occasion are they motivated by fellow-feeling, which, Gandal contends, represents true ethical action in Crane's lexicon. While such occasions are noticeably absent in Maggie, they do animate such works as "The Open Boat" and Red Badge of Courage. Isolating such moments, Gandal identifies Crane as a moralist, though the fact that only a few of his characters ever show such concern reveals his moral elitism. Yet if Crane does base his ethics in care, it is with a decided twist: to care for others one must first develop an "insulated sense of self," and one can only attain this insulation through anger, resistance and opposition. Accordingly, anger in Crane's world view is the prerequisite for caring. His is a world in which feelings reign supreme.
Ultimately, Gandal contends that the psychologies developed by both authors possess a normative element, and that Riis's is even at times prescriptive. As such, both of these texts, and both of these writers, put forward ethical agendas. Gandal's conclusion persuades because he has already clarified that psychology and morality are not opposed terms, and that to oppose them is to mask the moral implications of psychological claims; it is to fail to recognize that psychology does not reject or lower moral standards but instead alters them.
Gandal's compelling argument might have been even more convincing had there not been some minor distractions. For one, the endnotes are overly discursive and defensive, and many might usefully have been incorporated into the text. Several points and quotations are repeated more than once, a tendency explained in part by the book's somewhat circular structure. The tightness of Gandal's focus may explain why in places the argument feels under-historicized, with too much responsibility placed on Riis's and Crane's shoulders. Finally, the "Afterword," which attempts to identify modern literary inheritors of the slum ethos, is a bit too sketchy to be persuasive. But in the end these problems by no means detract from Gandal's accomplishment. There are also many compensatory moments, including the new insights he provides into these well-examined texts. For example, I have taught the book a dozen times yet never knew until reading The Virtues of the Vicious that an initial never-published version of Maggie contained no proper names. All told, Gandal has done what we all hope to do: he has changed the way we need to read not only the authors he studies but their times, and all scholars of the United States at the turn of the century should take note.
NOTES
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(1) Keith Gandal, "Stephen Crane's `Maggie' and the Modern Soul," ELH 60 (1993): 759-85.
(2) See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
CYNTHIA J. DAVIS, University of South Carolina
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
DAVIS, CYNTHIA J. "The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle
of the Slum." Studies in the Novel, vol. 33, no. 2, 2001, p. 237. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A76427903/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c599c219. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A76427903
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The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction
of Mobilization
Alex Vernon
The Hemingway Review.
28.2 (Spring 2009): p136+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 Ernest Hemingway Foundation
Full Text:
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization. By Keith Gandal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 271 pp. Cloth $55.00
To our significant if doomed scholarly efforts to unknot the complex tangle of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and war, we have new help in the form of Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization.
The crux of Gandal's argument is threefold: (1) Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner experienced the U.S. mobilization for the Great War but were denied the manhood-conferring experience of proper combat service on a real front; (2) the military's new meritocratic system gave ethnic Americans unprecedented opportunities to upstage "native" white Americans; and, finally, (3) the military's campaign to prevent casualties from sexually transmitted diseases demonized female promiscuity while sanctifying manly restraint. These three issues converge in interesting if different ways in what Gandal calls the three writers' mobilization (or postmobilization) racist promiscuity novels: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury.
Much of Gandal's book performs the important task of introducing literary scholars to work being done by our historian colleagues and in doing a good deal of historical work himself. About ethnicity, Gandal makes the case that the World War I experience in training camps and the war itself was "arguably the first moment in American history when the socially and ethnically privileged are meeting the rest of the nation (minus blacks), not as servants, service .people, employees, or charity cases, but rather on equal footing" (17). In particular, "the army's new meritocratic personnel procedures, including but not limited to intelligence testing, gave leadership opportunities [such as officer rank to command immigrant companies] to educated ethnic Americans," (18).
I have always read the relationship between Gatsby's veteran status and his obsession with Daisy in terms of a common trend among returning veterans to deny the war by re-inhabiting their prewar selves in some form. Such denial is, of course, futile. Thus Gatsby's insistence that Daisy deny she ever loved Tom; thus his being reclaimed by violence at end of the book. But Gandal
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relates Gatsby's obsession with Daisy and his rise to greatness to his pre-combat mobilization experience. As a German-American "nobody" Jay Gatz "could be chosen for officer training, and specifically promoted to captain, while still at camp, on the basis of his own measurable and observable abilities, in the context of a new meritocratic moment" (81). Gandal sees Daisy as "one of the 'charity girls' or 'silly girls' that the moralistic U.S. wartime Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) fretted were compromising servicemen, morally and hygienically" (109). Gatsby's "'feminine' romanticism" toward her "is precisely consonant with the lesson of the wartime training camp authorities committee" which strove to generate "a 'new man,' who for one thing could resist the temptations of sex with a potentially infected woman" (113). In other words, the military fostered a chivalric sensibility in soldiers from all walks of life that discouraged male promiscuity by encouraging their roles as protectors of female honor. Such attitudinal training fit neatly with representations of the enemy as rapacious beasts. The exaggerated presentation of Gatsby comes to us, of course, through Nick--the Anglo-American who Gandal supposes probably felt "stymied" and "underused" by the military as Fitzgerald had (120), and whose ridiculing of Gatsby's romanticism functions as a ridiculing of the military system that lifted Gatsby to greatness and did nothing for Nick.
In The Sun Also Rises, the Jew from the military school "'where.... no One ever made him feel he was a Jew'" (Gandal 124) and the Spanish boy who embodies the true warrior get the promiscuous girl (and split Gatsby into two characters, the sentimental wuss and the professional killer). Whereas university types today probably imagine academia as more progressive than the military, Gandal niftily contrasts Robert Cohn's time at military school and at Princeton. The latter "'made him race-conscious'" (124) in keeping with U.S. higher education's historical effort to limit Jewish access. Jake, Gandal reminds us, served on the same joke front where Hemingway and Frederic Henry did, his war wound ironically condemning this Anglo to live the chivalrous celibate life of training camp indoctrination as a symbolic expression of the military's underutilization of him. My own disinclination to see Pedro Romero as a soldierly paragon or bullfighting as analogous to combat has me now connecting Jake the pilot, not Jake the soldier, with Pedro the bullfighter--even Brett's first husband, however shattered and unmanned by war, experienced "real" combat as a sailor and consequently experienced her embrace. With apologies to the Air Force, I wonder whether Hemingway, whose bad eye disqualified him from flying and who experienced the trenches (however briefly and in whatever capacity and even on the Italian front), used Jake's branch of service as another means of characterizing his masculine anxiety-- not just a joke front but a joke job, and one that exhibited the problematic romanticizing of modern warfare.
For this reader, The Gun and the Pen begins to lose its persuasiveness after the Hemingway chapter. I can't place Benjy's mental deficiencies in the context of the U.S. military's intelligence testing and screening for feeblemindedness as readily as Gandal. In his scheme, Benjy's gelding for failing to meet mental standards and Quentin's preclusive incestuous desires work like Jake's war wound to provide something "objective" between the Anglo man and the Anglo woman. Gandal also contends that Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury displaces the mobilization's training in chivalry onto Quentin's ancestry and the legacy of the Confederate gentleman-officer. He sees Quentin's chastity as channeling the spirit of "the 'new man' of the training camps" (157). Because Dalton Ames, who secures that desideratum, the Anglo woman, is an Anglo combat veteran, ethnic competition in this postmobilization racist promiscuity novel occurs elsewhere, by
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"identify[ying] Quentin with Italians and Jason with Jews [even] as it puts them both in competition with ethnic Americans" (160).
After a short chapter bringing the three major texts together, The Gun and the Pen moves quickly through three other short chapters to conclude. The first interprets Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer as parodying or otherwise playing with the 1920s postmobilization racist promiscuity novel. This second trio "spoof[s] ... the notion of impossible love, and ethnic Americans are no longer scapegoated" (186). The "sublimation of mobilization wounds in tragic love stories" and the "military's chivalric new man [....] are replaced, on the one hand, by an openly perverse eroticization of the charity girl, the prostitute, and even venereal disease and, on the other hand, by a disassociation of masculinity and bravery as well as a mockery of the army's social hygiene campaign and its YMCA idealists" (198). The second closing chapter provocatively examines Faulkner's continuation of the Compson story in the "Appendix (1699-1945)" (Viking Portable Faulkner). Dropping Caddy in Paris on the arm of a German officer, for a 1946 audience, places her on "a special shelf in hell," and participates in the post-World War II "backlash against the new female sexuality and power that he at least tolerated in the late 1920s" (203). Parisian decadence becomes associated with French military weakness in a way that culturally reinforces the Great War's training camp message. The last chapter renders the book a little more contemporary in reminding post-Vietnam War generations "how powerful the call to the military was to American young men" through William Burroughs's Junky, "a thinly fictionalized, autobiographical novel in which his [military] ambition and rejection was transmuted and absorbed into a grand indifference" (217).
In closing, I would like to offer a friendly amendment to Gandal's hypothesis. All literary argumentation is circumstantial, and The Gun and the Pen provides significant new circumstantial considerations. But to the emphases on the role of the U.S. Army in promulgating the chaste chivalric warrior, as well as the wartime threat of ethnic Americans and promiscuous Anglo women, I propose we add a more explicit recognition of these trends prior to the mobilization effort. Decades prior, in fact, though one need only go as far back as Edgar Rice Burroughs's prewar Tarzan of the Apes (1912) to see a novel that values "physical fitness and prowess" (117), offers a model for "Gatsby's famous double-sidedeness, over which critics have long puzzled--as chivalrous lover and cold-blooded killer" (119), promotes (white) male sexual restraint and championing of female virtue, and registers an Anglo response to ethnic and meritocratic threats--this last, among other things, in the guise of Jane's suitor Canler, a businessman whose ability to buy her in marriage suggests the meritocratic threat inherent in a democratic capitalist. system industrializing at an unprecedented pace. Like those military training camps, Tarzan teaches ethnic American doughboys that they too can rise from subhuman status to a new nobility by means of raw talent, hard-knocks schooling, and old-school virtues.
--Alex Vernon, Hendrix College Vernon, Alex
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vernon, Alex. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of
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Mobilization." The Hemingway Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 2009, p. 136+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199864446/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ac717bf7. Accessed 17 May 2018.
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The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction
of Mobilization
Steven Trout
War, Literature & The Arts.
22.1-2 (Jan. 2010): From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2010 U.S. Air Force Academy, Department of English http://wlajournal.com/home.html
Full Text:
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mob ilization Keith Gandal
Oxford University Press, 2008. $24.95 paper, 288 pp
Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen argues forcefully that classic works of American Modernism from the 1920s have less to say about the horrors of the First World War--horrors long thought to have shaped the so-called Lost Generation--than about the social and cultural upheaval introduced by wartime mobilization. Few who finish this study will find themselves in disagreement with Gandal's provocative thesis. Indeed, this is a book likely to change our conception of American World War I literature--or, more specifically, the relationship between the Great War and American Modernism--for good.
As Gandal reminds us, the three central Modernists of the interwar period (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner) were all losers where World War I mobilization was concerned. For all his martial bluster, Hemingway entered the Great War via a non-combatant organization, the American Red Cross. The US Army rejected him because of his nearsightedness. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, successfully pursued a commission as a Second Lieutenant; however, his superiors judged him largely incompetent, and the war ended before he could reach the Western Front. As for Faulkner, his mobilization story is the most pitiful of all. Too short to serve in the American military, the Mississippian lied his way into an RAF training camp in Canada, allegedly by perfecting a phony British accent. Faulkner joined too late to see action in France (or even to experience actual flight training), but this inconvenient fact did not prevent him from dressing up as a fighter pilot and describing ferocious dogfights to gullible audiences in Oxford, Mississippi.
The anomalous nature of these writers' war experiences has not gone unnoticed by scholars. Never before, however, has a critic made "mobilization wounds"--Gandal's term for the emasculating trauma experienced by Anglo males who missed out on the fighting--the focus of a
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sustained rereading of canonical Modernist fiction. As explored here, even familiar works such as A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby suddenly become quite different from the Lost-Generation chestnuts that we thought we knew. Setting aside the notion that these novels explicitly express postwar disillusionment, Gandal instead unpacks the bundle of mobilization-related anxieties (and resulting plot similarities) that they share. In particular, he demonstrates that each text pits a character of impeccable WASP credentials (a traditional recipient, that is, of the prestige attached to frontline service) against a hyphenated "upstart" who has benefited in some way from Progressive wartime policies. Thus, in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, the quintessential old-moneyed New Englander, collides with Gatsby, a German- American who successfully uses America's entry into the war as a springboard for his ambitions. And thus, in The Sun Also Rises, impotent Jake Barnes tussles with Robert Cohn, a Jewish- American who, while not a war veteran per se, utters the same chivalric language of chastity and righteousness absorbed by Gatsby in the AEF. For Gandal, such novels not only compensate in various ways for their creators' embarrassing war records, they also lash out at ethnic veterans, implicitly condemning mobilization policies that led members of minority groups to achieve a level of recognition once reserved exclusively for Anglo warriors.
For many readers, this part of Gandal's thesis may seem a stretch. After all, World War I historiography has long emphasized the War Department's hostility toward ethnic and racial minorities. Bogus intelligence tests, we have been told, prevented non-Anglos from rising in the ranks. And then there is the AEF's notoriously discriminatory treatment of African-American troops, most of whom served as laborers in uniform. Fortunately, however, Gandal's rethinking of 1920s American Modernism coincides with an ongoing historical reevaluation of the US Army in World War I. Indeed, The Gun and the Pen is an excellent example of intellectual fertilization across disciplinary lines. Drawing upon the recent work of social historians such as Nancy Gentile Ford and Jennifer Keene, Gandal demonstrates that despite their built-in bias, World War I era intelligence tests actually gave many troops--particularly second-generation immigrants-- unprecedented access to positions of authority. Of course, African-American soldiers benefited little from this progressive side of wartime mobilization; skin color trumped ethnicity where intolerance was concerned. Nevertheless, Gandal's radical new construction of American Modernism dovetails persuasively with an equally revolutionary vision of The Great Adventure of 1917-1918 as The Great Opportunity for many hyphenated Americans.
Since the central argument in The Gun and the Pen rests so heavily upon social-historical evidence, Gandal understandably spends much of the book backing up his claim that American participation in World War I was, more than anything else, a mobilization event. He even goes so far as to suggest that War-Department policies pertaining to draft eligibility, progressive standards of soldierly conduct, and merit-based promotion ultimately mattered more, in terms of Twentieth-Century American history, than the (relatively brief) experience of the AEF in battle. However, the most exciting moments in this study come when familiar texts suddenly change before our eyes. Unlike lesser New Historicists, Gandal does not eschew close reading. On the contrary, he proves himself a master at bringing text and context into dialogue. Consider, for example, his detailed analysis of Daisy in The Great Gatsby. As Gandal observes, "a common misreading" of Fitzgerald's text "is to perceive Daisy as a traditional woman and a foil to Jordan Baker's new woman" (108). Why a misreading? As it turns out, the object of Gatsby's obsession is no less shaped than he is by the social and sexual turmoil of mobilization. However, while
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Gatsby embraces and absurdly exaggerates the AEF's official standards of clean-living and selfless devotion to an idealized girl at home (a moral posture that he maintains even during his subsequent career as a bootlegger), Daisy discovers that mobilization brings sexual empowerment and variety. It is she, in fact, who makes Jordan aware of the erotic possibilities opened up in a society knocked sidewise by total war. After marshalling evidence from passages in the novel that are rarely, if ever, discussed in detail, Gandal asserts that Daisy is "a romanticized version of the charity girl" (III); in other words, she bears a strong resemblance to the kind of woman (one overly susceptible to the charms of a man in uniform and thus likely to engage in promiscuity) specifically targeted as a threat by the US Army. Indeed, we learn that military authorities in 1917 and 1918 rounded up more than 30,000 such "charity girls" in a bizarre program of "misogynistic law enforcement" (112). Read in this way, Gatsby's romance with Daisy is itself a mobilization event; the rapidly shifting social conditions of wartime bring the two characters together, but not, ultimately, in a way that will allow their relationship to flourish beyond the Armistice.
One can quibble with parts of The Gun and the Pen. Although always absorbing, Gandal's close reading sometimes seem overly determined to draw everything back to the theme of mobilization, and his excessive defense of his methodology, an entire chapter in length, seems to have been, well, mobilized unnecessarily. But these are minor matters. By any standard, The Gun and the Pen is the most important book on American Modernism and World War I to appear in decades. And no one who claims to know the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner can afford to ignore it.
REVIEW BY STEVEN TROUT, FORT HAYES STATE UNIVERSITY Trout, Steven
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Trout, Steven. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of
Mobilization." War, Literature & The Arts, vol. 22, no. 1-2, 2010. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A239353017/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=579c8b3b. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A239353017
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The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction
of Mobilization
Steven Trout
War, Literature & The Arts.
21.1-2 (Jan. 2009): p436+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 U.S. Air Force Academy, Department of English http://wlajournal.com/home.html
Full Text:
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mob ilization by Keith Gandal
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008
Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen argues forcefully that classic works of American Modernism from the i920s have less to say about the horrors of the First World War--horrors long thought to have shaped the so-called Lost Generation--than about the social and cultural upheaval introduced by wartime mobilization. Few who finish this study will find themselves in disagreement with Gandal's provocative thesis. Indeed, this is a book likely to change our conception of American World War I literature--or, more specifically, the relationship between the Great War and American Modernism--for good.
As Gandal reminds us, the three central Modernists of the interwar period (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner) were all losers where World-War-I mobilization was concerned. For all his martial bluster, Hemingway entered the Great War via a non-combatant organization, the American Red Cross. The US Army rejected him because of his nearsightedness. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, successfully pursued a commission as a Second Lieutenant; however, his superiors judged him largely incompetent, and the war ended before he could reach the Western Front. As for Faulkner, his mobilization story is the most pitiful of all. Too short to serve in the American military, the Mississippian lied his way into an RAF training camp in Canada, allegedly by perfecting a phony British accent. Faulkner joined too late to see action in France (or even to experience actual flight training), but this inconvenient fact did not prevent him from dressing up as a fighter pilot and describing ferocious dogfights to gullible audiences in Oxford, Mississippi.
The anomalous nature of these writers' war experiences has not gone unnoticed by scholars. Never before, however, has a critic made "mobilization wounds"--Gandal's term for the emasculating trauma experienced by Anglo males who missed out on the fighting--the focus of a
17 of 33 5/17/18, 10:05 PM

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sustained rereading of canonical Modernist fiction. As explored here, even familiar works such as A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby suddenly become quite different from the Lost-Generation chestnuts that we thought we knew. Setting aside the notion that these novels explicitly express postwar disillusionment, Gandal instead unpacks the bundle of mobilization-related anxieties (and resulting plot similarities) that they share. In particular, he demonstrates that each text pits a character of impeccable WASP credentials (a traditional recipient, that is, of the prestige attached to frontline service) against a hyphenated "upstart" who has benefited in some way from Progressive wartime policies. Thus, in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, the quintessential old-moneyed New Englander, collides with Gatsby, a German- American who successfully uses America's entry into the war as a springboard for his ambitions. And thus, in The Sun Also Rises, impotent Jake Barnes tussles with Robert Cohn, a Jewish- American who, while not a war veteran per se, utters the same chivalric language of chastity and righteousness absorbed by Gatsby in the AEF. For Gandal, such novels not only compensate in various ways for their creators' embarrassing war records, they also lash out at ethnic veterans, implicitly condemning mobilization policies that led members of minority groups to achieve a level of recognition once reserved exclusively for Anglo warriors.
For many readers, this part of Gandal's thesis may seem a stretch. After all, World War I historiography has long emphasized the War Department's hostility toward ethnic and racial minorities. Bogus intelligence tests, we have been told, prevented non-Anglos from rising in the ranks. And then there is the AEF's notoriously discriminatory treatment of African-American troops, most of whom served as laborers in uniform. Fortunately, however, Gandal's rethinking of 1920s American Modernism coincides with an ongoing historical reevaluation of the US Army in World War I. Indeed, The Gun and the Pen is an excellent example of intellectual fertilization across disciplinary lines. Drawing upon the recent work of social historians such as Nancy Gentile Ford and Jennifer Keene, Gandal demonstrates that despite their built-in bias, World- War-I era intelligence tests actually gave many troops--particularly second-generation immigrants--unprecedented access to positions of authority. Of course, African-American soldiers benefited little from this progressive side of wartime mobilization; skin color trumped ethnicity where intolerance was concerned. Nevertheless, Gandal's radical new construction of American Modernism dovetails persuasively with an equally revolutionary vision of The Great Adventure of 1917-1918 as The Great Opportunity for many hyphenated Americans.
Since the central argument in The Gun and the Pen rests so heavily upon social-historical evidence, Gandal understandably spends much of the book backing up his claim that American participation in World War I was, more than anything else, a mobilization event. He even goes so far as to suggest that War Department policies pertaining to draft eligibility, progressive standards of soldierly conduct, and merit-based promotion ultimately mattered more, in terms of TwentiethCentury American history, than the (relatively brief) experience of the AEF in battle. However, the most exciting moments in this study come when familiar texts suddenly change before our eyes. Unlike lesser New Historicists, Gandal does not eschew close reading. On the contrary, he proves himself a master at bringing text and context into dialogue. Consider, for example, his detailed analysis of Daisy in The Great Gatsby. As Gandal observes, "a common misreading" of Fitzgerald's text "is to perceive Daisy as a traditional woman and a foil to Jordan Baker's new woman" (108). Why a misreading? As it turns out, the object of Gatsby's obsession is no less shaped than he is by the social and sexual turmoil of mobilization. However, while
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Gatsby embraces and absurdly exaggerates the AEF's official standards of clean-living and selfless devotion to an idealized girl at home (a moral posture that he maintains even during his subsequent career as a bootlegger), Daisy discovers that mobilization brings sexual empowerment and variety. It is she, in fact, who makes Jordan aware of the erotic possibilities opened up in a society knocked sidewise by total war. After marshalling evidence from passages in the novel that are rarely, if ever, discussed in detail, Gandal asserts that Daisy is "a romanticized version of the charity girl" (111); in other words, she bears a strong resemblance to the kind of woman (one overly susceptible to the charms of a man in uniform and thus likely to engage in promiscuity) specifically targeted as a threat by the US Army. Indeed, we learn that military authorities in 1917 and 1918 rounded up more than 30,000 such "charity girls" in a bizarre program of "misogynistic law enforcement" (112). Read in this way, Gatsby's romance with Daisy is itself a mobilization event; the rapidly shifting social conditions of wartime bring the two characters together, but not, ultimately, in a way that will allow their relationship to flourish beyond the Armistice.
One can quibble with parts of The Gun and the Pen. Although always absorbing, Gandal's close reading sometimes seem overly determined to draw everything back to the theme of mobilization, and his excessive defense of his methodology, an entire chapter in length, seems to have been, well, mobilized unnecessarily. But these are minor matters. By any standard, The Gun and the Pen is the most important book on American Modernism and World War I to appear in decades. And no one who claims to know the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner can afford to ignore it.
Trout, Steven
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Trout, Steven. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of
Mobilization." War, Literature & The Arts, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2009, p. 436+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A221023054/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=88d65bce. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A221023054
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The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction
of Mobilization
Rebecca Sanchez
South Atlantic Review.
74.3 (Summer 2009): p158+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 South Atlantic Modern Language Association http://www.samla.gsu.edu/sar/sar.html
Full Text:
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization. By Keith Gandal. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 271 pp. $55.00.
Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen provides a revised account of the impact of World War I on American literature. Drawing on extensive archival research, much of which has not previously been examined, he offers a compelling new narrative of the development of some of the most famous novels of the period: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Methodologically, Gandal takes aim at New Historicist approaches. While acknowledging his debt to Walter Benn Michaels' Our America, he critiques the breadth of Michaels' account (which he feels glosses over historical particularity), as well as its attention to certain biographical details (the writers' privileged positions as white males) and its exclusion of others (their marginalization by the discourses leading up to the First World War).
By contrast, Gandal presents his approach as one that more precisely analyzes a particular subset of a field--what he terms mobilization modernism--drawing on the later Foucault to examine "not master discourses or epistemes, with internal coherences, but a variety of related discourses and practices, which are changing and which are often logically inconsistent or contradictory, but interact in some way" (54). Gandal proposes that such a method can illuminate hitherto inexplicable elements of these novels as well as explaining their experimental style. The very notion of modernism itself, Gandal provocatively claims, "has functioned as a smoke screen, and one that was initially crafted or subscribed to by these twenties novelists precisely to function as such, to cover up and hide their 'mobilization wounds'" (14).
Such "mobilization wounds," by Gandal's account, stem from the writers' twin rejections by the military and by desirable women; their inability to join the war effort in anything other than a "trivial" capacity (all three fail to be promoted as officers), and the accompanying emasculation. Gandal connects their resentment to the new military intelligence tests. While the tests were subsequently used to justify racist legislation, Gandal argues that during the war they increased egalitarianism by allowing "ethnic" Americans with a certain kind of educational background to
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serve as officers. While blacks continued to face fierce discrimination, other groups, such as German and Italian Americans, found unprecedented acceptance in the military. This shift displaced white men like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulker, who could previously have expected to be granted choice positions. Denied access to officer camps, where young men were bombarded by both the rhetoric of the chaste and chivalric "New Man" and the attention of "charity" girls, these writers responded by ridiculing such figures. Out of this resentment developed "the distinctive profile of the narrator of this particular postmobilization brand of modernist novel: Anglo, underappreciated by the army, ironic, immune somehow to the ultimate losses involved in love and in a special, nonsexual relationship with the promiscuous Anglo princess who began her sexual career with a man in uniform" (121). After the war, these emotions fueled a fierce backlash against ethnic Americans.
Such dynamics, Gandal argues, drive the narratives in all three of the novels he focuses on. In The Great Gatsby, both Tom and Nick resent the German-American Gatsby's service, his association with Daisy while at camp, and the old-fashioned notions of romance he would have picked up there. Such dynamics are entirely missed by critics insufficiently attentive to the historical specificity of the character, but would have been painfully apparent to "An Anglo officer with a fairly nondescript or simply frustrated military experience, like Nick and Fitzgerald" (120). Fitzgerald distances himself from the worst of the ridicule of Gatsby by attributing it to the dislikable Tom, but this attempt to simultaneously participate in and distance himself from this discourse shapes both the structure and style of the book.
In The Sun Also Rises, we are also given in Robert Cohn a character whose experiences at Princeton and in the war, as well as later in Spain, fit neatly into this account of mobilization discourse and backlash. Gandal argues that Cohn represents a "historically identifiable figure of the era" (131): a Jewish student accepted to an elite university before the implementation of quotas, who also had distinguished service in the war and, like Gatsby, came away from training camp with an old-fashioned sense of romance. Gandal claims that because of the democratization of the armed forces, Hemingway would have felt himself in direct competition with ethnic Americans in ways he was not with foreigners or blacks; hence, Jake resents Cohn but is willing to help Romero. Jake is also literally emasculated by the war, continuing the trope of humiliated Anglo men who watch as ethnic Americans have distinguished service as well as relationships with desired Anglo females. Likewise, in The Sound and the Fury, both Quentin and Benjy are kept from the object of their desire--Caddy-by her love for the soldier Dalton Ames. Here, Gandal's attempt to draw direct parallels between the novels leads him to gloss over the distinction between characters like Nick and Jake, who would not have scored highly on military intelligence tests, and Benjy, who is severely mentally disabled. The similarities do, however, point to the widespread influence of mobilization wounds, even on novels that have only tangential relation to the war.
Such anti-military, pro-war mobilization novels, with their tolerance of promiscuous women and hostility toward ethnic others, were only possible at a particular historical moment, as demonstrated by Faulkner's radical reworking of his story in the 1946 Compson "Appendix". The relevance of the genre, however, did not end with the 20s. Gandal demonstrates that many of the difficult to classify works of late modernism--Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust--can be better understood as
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postmobilization works that replace earlier tropes with "an openly perverse eroticization of the charity girl, the prostitute, and even venereal disease and, on the other hand, by a disassociation of masculinity and bravery as well as a mockery of the army's social hygiene campaigns and its YMCA idealists" (198). Mobilization wounds also provide a frame for reading much later texts, including William Burroughs' 1977 Junky.
The Gun and the Pen offers a compelling account of what we have come to think of as American high modernist fiction, fusing detailed historical research with insightful close readings. It presents an explanation that is almost too complete, one that accounts for nearly every aspect of these books in terms of the historical context of their writers' biographies. The picture it offers of these literary giants is of failed military men naive enough to resent their lack of "opportunity" to fully experience the war, who take out their frustrations on ethnic "others" from behind the screen of fiction. Perhaps, however, this is precisely the kind of sobering reappraisal we need. Gandal's book is groundbreaking in that it both contributes to the project of establishing a forgotten chapter in our history and demonstrates the relevance of that history to the literary canon.
Rebecca Sanchez, University at Buffalo (SUNY) Sanchez, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sanchez, Rebecca. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of
Mobilization." South Atlantic Review, vol. 74, no. 3, 2009, p. 158+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A301283625/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e1798cf7. Accessed 17 May 2018.
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The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob
Riis, Stephen Crane, and the
Spectacle of the Slum
Stanley Wertheim
Studies in American Fiction.
27.2 (Autumn 1999): p249. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1999 Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.press.jhu.edu
Full Text:
Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. 206 pp. Cloth: $49.95.
Using the poststructuralist approach of Michel Foucault, this impressive short book focuses on a modification in fin de siecle attitudes toward the urban poor in America as embodied primarily in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Only supporting attention is devoted to other studies of the slums by Riis and Crane or by writers of the period with similar concerns. Employing Crane and Riis as exemplars, Gandal traces a transformation in ethnographic, aesthetic, and psychological styles of depicting poverty in American cites--from traditional moralistic perspectives to an alternative ethics centered on spectacle, excitement, and a modern psychology of "self-esteem," what Warren Susman in Culture as History (1984) describes as a shift from the culture of character to the culture of personality. A provocative afterword discusses some twentieth-century bohemian writers whose ethics of resisting restraints rather than controlling the passions, Gandal believes, are implicit in Crane's life and writings: Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Kathy Acker.
Gandal demonstrates effectively that while Riis did not eschew the traditional moralistic and didactic language of urban reform, How the Other Half Lives, with its enticingly vivid imagery and the pioneering use of photographs, is also travel literature whose amusement features were at times inconsistent with Riis's reformist goals, proffering a conflicting image of the slums as picturesque and entertaining locales as well as haunts of destitution and vice. The pervasive use of irony and mockery in Maggie enjoins such confusion on Crane's part. Crane's view of the Bowery is clearly detached, and he apparently lacks Riis's empathy with the urban poor. Nevertheless, the voyeuristic styles of urban representation employed by Crane were also often more engaging than monitory and presented the slums as a form of entertainment to be consumed by middle-class readers.
The most compelling aspect of The Virtues of the Vicious is an innovative interpretation of Maggie. Despite its emphasis on conflict, survival of the fittest, and social indifference, the
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novelette has not been viewed by most modern critics as simple deterministic fiction. Maggie's downfall is usually attributed less to the pressures of external environment than to the projection by herself and her family of theatrical romantic illusions and middle-class moral values on the atavistic world of the slums. Gandal, in contrast, finds a generation gap in Maggie. Maggie's mother and neighbors condemn and ostracize her for conventional moralistic reasons, but her brother Jimmie and her lover Pete are disturbed only by the potential loss of self-esteem that the social consquences of her fallen state may have for them. Like Riis, Crane admired toughs such as Jimmie and Pete because their amour-propre insulates them from the animadversions of others. Maggie also feels no shame or pangs of conscience over her defection from traditional conceptions of virtue, nor is she affected emotionally by self-righteous judgments. The younger characters in Maggie experience inner disharmony, but theirs is not a conflict between virtue and vice but rather a psychological straggle to maintain self-esteem. For Crane, Gandal convincingly argues, the dynamics of self-protection and self-assertion have superseded accepted values. Crane dispensed completely with the prerogatives of moral judgment that had been weakend by Riis's depiction of the slums as a form of amusement. Maggie explores the alternative ethical codes on the Bowery and challenges the universal status of Protestant conceptions of morality and justice.
Gandal's challenging thesis is undermined to a considerable extent by the sometimes obsolete and faulty scholarship that supports it and the unbalanced presentational format of The Virtues of the Vicious. The 129 pages of actual text and photographs are corroborated by 54 pages of documentation and lengthy textual notes, many of which interrupt the flow of the narrative and might readily have been incorporated into the body of the book. Inexplicably, Crane's letters are quoted from the out-of-date and inaccurate Stephen Crane: Letters (1960) or from R. W. Stallman's deeply flawed Stephen Crane: A Biography (1968) rather than from the two-volume The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988), and Gandal ignores subsequent journal essays challenging the authenticity of what had formerly been accepted as the canon of Stephen Crane letters. In consequence, a significant number of fraudulent letters and events ultimately derived from Thomas Beer's fictionalized biography, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923), are used to support Gandal's arguments. A notable case in point is at least a dozen excerpts from and references to an ostensible Crane letter addressed to a Miss Catherine Harris in which Crane opines that "I do not think that much can be done with the Bowery as long as the ... [blurred] ... are in their present state of conceit. A person who thinks himself superior to the rest of us because he has no job and no pride and no clean clothes is as badly conceited as Lillian Russell. In a story of mine called `An Experiment in Misery' I tried to make plain that the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking." These redoubtable apothegms do not exist in drafts of this letter in the typescripts of Beer's book, and the letter is a demonstrable fabrication; it was written by Thomas Beer, not Stephen Crane. While Crane may in part have shared such sentiments, his view of the human condition was always ambiguous and paradoxical, and he had an aversion to preachy, doctrinaire statements. Unfortunately, Beer's spurious letters and incidents have spread like a computer virus through Crane biography and criticism, and their origin is often overlooked. The result is a seriously distorted view of Stephen Crane's life and literary vision.
Stanley Wertheim William Paterson University Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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Wertheim, Stanley. "The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum." Studies in American Fiction, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, p. 249. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A59515419/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=041096a2. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A59515419
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Ethnicity, race, and the great war:
exploring an underexplored topic
Nancy Gentile Ford
Journal of American Ethnic History.
30.3 (Spring 2011): p62+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 University of Illinois Press http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
Full Text:
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization. By Keith Gandal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xii + 288 pp. Notes, photos, and index. $55 (cloth).
The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. By Mark Whalan. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. xxii + 303 pp. Photos, illustrations, notes, index, and bibliography. $65 (cloth).
North American Indians in the Great War. By Susan Applegate Krouse. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 272 pp. Photos, table, appendix, notes, index, and bibliography. $24.95 (paper).
The First World War escalated the modernization of the armed forces of the United States, expanded the size and power of the federal government, and drew an unprecedented number of young men into service. Considering the enormous influx of immigrants who arrived in the four decades before the war and the participation of African Americans and American Indians in the conflict, it should come as no surprise that the U.S. military fought its European foes with a massive, multiethnic army. Yet the topic of ethnicity and race in the Great War Era has been left largely underexplored.
The three books in this review help to close the gap as they examine the impact of the war on ethnic and racial identity, citizenship, cultural conflict, and masculinity. Two of the books, Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen and Mark Whalan's The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, build upon historical studies to provide an insightful look at the intersection of war, ethnic and racial identity, and literature. Gandal's strength is in his analysis of the postwar modernists' reaction to the new meritocratic military system that brought advancements for first- and second- generation immigrant soldiers. Whalan ventures beyond postwar discrimination to explore the positive impact of the war on the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Anthropologist Susan Applegate Krouse offers a new look at the American Indian by utilizing a postwar collection of interviews, photographs, and other documents compiled by a noted advocate for Indian rights. In North American Indians in the Great War, Krouse refutes the traditional argument that military service helped Indians obtain U.S. citizenship. All three books take a big step toward a better
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understanding of ethnicity, race, and war.
In The Gun and the Pen, Keith Gandal takes a revolutionary approach in his study of the Great War's impact on ethnicity and literature. He focuses on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Traditionally, literary scholars have maintained that the writings of the three modernists reflected their war experiences, which was exemplified by the terror of industrial warfare, the mass slaughter of millions of young men, and disillusionment with civilized society. Gandal refutes this interpretation and instead argues that the authors' stories were actually in response to their exclusion from a combat experience as well as their frustration with the new, more egalitarian military. Their irritations particularly focused on changes in the U.S. Army's selection of commissioned officers, which now included newly arrived immigrants and second- generation "Americanized ethnic Americans" (p. 78).
Gandal utilizes recent work of historians who examine issues of ethnicity, race, and gender in the U.S. military during World War I. (1) He also uses archival sources to fully understand the dramatic changes taking place in American society and in the U.S. military before and during the war. Each chapter provides detailed background about immigrant soldiers, followed by a thought- provoking study of the three literary giants. Careful analysis of the writers' characters now takes on new meaning, as Gandal does an exceptional job of connecting ethnic history to postwar literature.
With the arrival of over twenty million new immigrants prior to 1917, America entered the war with a multiethnic military. In fact, foreign-born soldiers made up over 18 percent of the U.S. Army, with an estimated 15 percent coming from second-generation immigrants. Many of the foreign-born did not have enough command of the English language to be effective fighters. Therefore, the War Department organized the soldiers into ethnic-specific companies and promoted educated, bilingual first- and second-generation immigrants to serve as commissioned and noncommissioned officers. The new officers came from the professional and business sectors of their ethnic enclaves. This policy became known as the "Camp Gordon Plan," and it was widely executed in training camps throughout the United States. It marked a critical change, since prior to this, the selection process for military officers (particular those commissioned) focused on the educated, white Anglo-Saxon community, which had the right family connections. In addition, the War Department told the "old stock" soldiers in officer training schools to avoid expressing prejudice against their fellow students with accents, noting that the immigrants would make splendid officers. (2)
Hemingway and Faulkner either could not get into the military or were not success ful at achieving commissioned officer rank. Fitzgerald and Falkner never saw battle. After failing his medical exam, Hemingway became a Red Cross ambulance driver. Fitzgerald served, but never left the United States. Due to his inferior performance as a young lieutenant, Fitzgerald was denied leadership of his own platoon. The U.S. Army Air Corps rejected Faulkner's application for a commission because of his small size. He joined the Canadian air force but never rose to an officer position.
Gandal clearly demonstrates that all three men held a romantic view of wartime military service and that their failure to succeed deeply affected their lives. Hemingway was wounded delivering
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cigarettes and chocolate to the troops. However, he fabricated an account of being a military leader who bravely rescued a fellow soldier, despite having been seriously wounded by machine- gun fire. In one of his short stories, Fitzgerald's character, who never saw action, referred to the mud and sweat of the returning soldiers as "ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him" (p. 33). Like Hemingway, Faulkner also lied about his service record, crafting a false account of being an air force officer shot down over France. After the war, the novelist feigned a limp.
Gandal maintains that the three men felt undervalued, emasculated, and angry with the conversion "of the army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class differences (though not racial or black-white differences)" (p. 5). This frustration made its way into the pages of their modernist writings and also into the native-born Anglo and southern and eastern European immigrant characters featured in their books.
Gandal provides an outstanding analysis of the army's intelligence testing program. He agrees with other scholars that the tests were culturally biased and, in actuality, tested only a person's educational level. However, Gandal looks at the IQ results from the perspective of the military, not from that of the psychologists who administered and studied them. According to the author, "It is evident that the testing program, alongside and in conjunction with the personnel classification program, gave unprecedented opportunities to individual ethnic Americans who were educated or talented or good test takers." Therefore, IQ testing, along with the Camp Gordon plan, resulted in the "largely ethnically egalitarian make up of the officer's corps" (p. 106).
Gandal also discusses the widespread anti-Semitism found in universities and medical schools and the harsh quota system applied to keep Jews out of prestigious institutions during and after the war. His linking of this to the egalitarian policies of the U.S. military is well done. Another theme addressed is the relationship between battle experience and masculinity. The author examines cultural conflict and competition over the soldiers' relationships with the "new" and "promiscuous" women of the 1920s. Gandal notes, "These rejections [of Anglo Americans] by the military and by desirable women are twin ... because the military had the power at this wartime moment to confer or deny masculinity and sex appeal" (p. 174).
As a literary scholar Gandal, not surprisingly, spends much of his book discussing the various characters in novels by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner and relates them to the issues of military egalitarianism, meritocracy, and masculinity. Among the many characters discussed, we are reminded that Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby) was a German American who rose through the ranks to become a "romantic soldier-officer [and] bootlegger" (p. 78). Hemingway said of Jewish American Robert Cohen (in The Sun Also Rises), "at military school where he prepped ... no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew and hence any different from anybody else" (p. 134). Gandal demonstrates that some of the characters in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury also represent a "backlash against the meritocratic forces let loose by the Great War" (p. 152).
The chief audience for The Gun and the Pen is no doubt those who study literature. However, a brief synopsis of the novels would have helped readers from other disciplines to recall the various
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plots. Also, had it been possible for the author to provide statistics of first- and second-generation immigrants who served as officers, his argument would have been even stronger. (This reviewer found that she, too could not document this in her own study of immigrant soldiers in World War I.) That said, this is a well-crafted and insightful book. Keith Gandal does a brilliant job reassessing the great modernist novelists and connecting the authors and their writings to the history of ethnicity in the early twentieth century.
The Great War also had a dramatic impact on African American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Mark Whalan provides an outstanding study of the complexity of the New Negro Renaissance and argues that "the war and its immediate aftermath saw the worst in American racial attitudes, but also offered inspiring possibilities outside the straight-jacket of American racial politics" (p. 14). In The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, Whalan closely explores the crossroads of racism, patriotism, imperialism, and cultural nationalism as it intersected with the wartime experience and memories of African Americans. These forces, sometimes diametrically opposed, led to the flourishing of a new black modernity reflected in the poetry, novels, plays, essays, songs, memorials, and photography of the Harlem Renaissance. The author also utilizes key African American periodicals (The Crisis, The Messenger, Negro World, The Crusader, and the Chicago Defender) in an effort to understand how "writers and artists strove to imaginatively . . . transform what they perceived to be the most significant and powerful legacies and experience of war" (pp. xiv-xv).
Whalan sets the stage with America's entrance into the world conflict. The voices of those who supported Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the eugenics movement grew louder as men like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard argued that the war was killing off the "fittest" whites of the Nordic "stock," consequently endangering the "future of American and European civic and political life" (p. 16). Not surprisingly, African Americans defined the war in very different terms. After decades of unfulfilled promises, strict segregation, illegal disenfranchisement, and frequent violence, an internal struggle ensued in the black community concerning whether to support the American war effort. Whalan examines African American literature to understand this painful dilemma. Some black intellectuals clearly connected European imperialism and colonization with global racism, especially exemplified in the assault on Africa. Many writers had difficulty recognizing the superiority of the European Allies over Germany, especially when the very same nations actively engaged in the brutality of African colonization. But the Espionage Act of 1917 and government scrutiny of the community's leadership limited open criticism of the war effort.
Black literature also expressed the hope that military service would lead to economic and political gain for African Americans. Many African American intellectuals were encouraged by President Wilson's assertion that the war could help spread democracy and promote self- determination for all nations. Therefore, they hoped participation in the conflict would weaken white power, bring about true equality, and realign the political structure of America.
The war, however, brought a dramatic curtailment of civil liberties, promoted an overzealous propaganda machine, and led to unbridled hysteria that gripped the nation to the detriment of radicals, German Americans, and nonconformists. Whalen shows how war propaganda effectively dehumanized Germans and depicted them as racially threatening and sexually dangerous to women. The author demonstrates how this propaganda mirrored racist charges
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leveled at African Americans, thus serving to reinforce the idea that white soldiers were "racially distinct and racially superior" (p. 31). While the concept of "American" now expanded to include new European immigrants who served with the U.S. Army, this privilege was not so quickly extended to black servicemen or veterans.
Over two hundred thousand African Americans fought in World War I, and Whalan devotes the rest of his book to the war's legacy and its impact on the Harlem Renaissance. Although answering the call in 1917, many black soldiers saw themselves as fighting a "double battle" against the German enemy and against the overt racism of white America. Whalan especially focuses on the black soldier's experience in France, the politics of gender, and the connection between memory and history. African American soldiers who fought with the French army found a hospitable environment and discovered a comparative absence of racism. Not only were the French people grateful for the military service of the black soldiers, they rewarded these soldiers' performance with medals and unit citations. Many African Americans who served in the U.S. Army, especially in noncombatant positions, also regularly interacted with the French population and found a similar welcome. Whalan discovered that postwar black writers celebrated the "colorblindness" of France as a beacon of true equality and democracy while purposely ignoring French imperialism and France's abuse of its colonial troops. In this way, French egalitarianism would serve to highlight America's appalling race relations, shame its political leaders, and pressure the nation to reform. Ironically, at the same time, the Pan-African Movement began to emerge, which argued for self-government, independence, and an end to colonization. The choices of many black writers to glorify France created "a situation where, at its crudest, 'transnational black solidarity [was] traded in for a certain kind of national currency, an anti- racism in one country'" (p. 65).
In addition, Whalan found that African American writers often used the black soldiers' front-line experience to serve as a great equalizer. In no-man's land, color and class disappeared, replaced by a "desegregated space" where men shared a colorless, common experience of sacrifice and camaraderie. Building on the maxim that "warfare is one of the privileged arenas within which male identities are forged and negotiated," Whalan also examines the New Negro politics of gender (p. 110). He found that African American literature and photography purposely connected the drive for civil rights and economic advancement to military discipline and masculinity. Cultural images of capable, responsible, brave men who were skilled in combat and leadership elicited racial pride in the "new" African American. Especially renowned was the heroic black officer. Whalan further examines the complexity of race, gender, and class reflected in the new urban environment and in the newly developed black middle class. But the literature also revealed that the soldier-heroes of the era were not without feelings of "disillusionment and a sense of national betrayal" (p. 248).
Finally, Whalan examines the process of memory and memorial. Public expressions of suffering and sacrifices in the white community generally excluded black Americans and ignored their contributions. In response, African American writers openly objected to the "racial politics of [postwar] memorialization" that resulted in the almost complete absence of African American participation in the nation's commemorations (p. 198). Artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance demanded the right to publicly mourn their dead. Unwilling to accept the white version of history and remembrance, they defined their own culture, safeguarded their own
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memories, and crafted their own memorials to African American soldiers who fought and died in the Great War. Essays, poems, and songs often tied memorialization to the call for civil rights.
Mark Whalan's powerful and insightful study demonstrates that despite the sorrow left by unanswered expectations of the First World War, African Americans "helped to shape the artistic, subjective, and political innovations that made the 1920s such an accomplished era in African American cultural life" (p. 246). This book is a must-read in exploring the complexities of the New Negro Renaissance and understanding the powerful impact of war on race in American society.
The U.S. military during World War I also included over twelve thousand American Indians, and their experience is the focus of Susan Applegate Krouse's North American Indians in the Great War. The author points out that there are few studies on this topic and that those which do examine Indians in the First World War generally contend that their military participation helped the group obtain U.S. citizenship. Krouse attempts to refute this argument. Although the author clearly demonstrates that American Indians remained proud of their military accomplishments, she argues that Indian veterans expressed disappointment at their lack of advancement inside or outside the military by war's end.
Krouse reaches her conclusions after examining a large collection compiled by Joseph K. Dixon between 1917 and 1926. As an activist for Indian rights, Dixon documented the roles Indians played in the war in order to advocate for their U.S. citizenship. As such, he interviewed over 2,800 Indian veterans and collected over ten thousand photographs (many taken by Dixon himself). The collection also includes questionnaires, letters, and information from the family members of servicemen. As with other reformers of his day, Dixon pushed for enfranchisement, individual allotments of Indian lands, and eventual acculturation into the greater society. Dixon planned to compile his research in a book to be titled "From Tepee to Trenches," but this never came about, and his massive research collection is now housed in the Mathers Museum at Indiana University.
According to Krouse, the Dixon records "illuminate the struggle for Indian citizenship and the confusion surrounding citizenship status for Indians in the early decades of the twentieth century" (p. 6). In her book, the author also highlights the reasons why American Indians served in the U.S. military in combat or non-combat positions, their service as scouts and runners, their pride in honoring the traditional warrior role, and their postwar frustrations. In many ways, Krouse's work serves more as a primary source reader than as a critical-thinking piece. Each chapter provides a brief introduction followed by both quotes and excerpts from Dixon's collected words of American Indian servicemen and veterans.
Krouse begins by examining the reasons why American Indian men chose to serve, citing loyalty, patriotism, adventure, family traditions, warrior customs, and economic opportunities. Persuasion from U.S. Indian boarding schools, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and from tribal leaders also played a role in Indian enlistments. Other Indians served in the hope that their participation would lead to justice for their people. In the author's chapter on the battle experience of American Indians, she selects interviews that highlight some of the soldiers' combat and trench experiences. Excerpts also capture the Indian pride in serving America, their ability to stand up to the enemy,
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the citations they received, and the people and places they visited.
The rest of the book follows the same pattern. A very brief introduction is followed by excerpts from the Dixon records along with short background information. We learn that many American Indian soldiers volunteered or were assigned to dangerous jobs as scouts, runners, or snipers. Since these positions put a disproportionately high number of men on the front line, Krouse contends that the death rate for Indian soldiers was more than double that of other Americans who died. Indian interviewees discuss their injuries or health issues related to battlefield wounds, disease, and poison gas. The author also provides some information about servicemen who did not see combat. Krouse's sources clearly reveal the soldiers' pride in both their Indian culture and in their military service. Although one chapter is titled "Proud to be a Warrior," additional examples would have helped to exemplify the author's contention that "many Indian men chose to fight ... to uphold the tradition of the warrior" (p. 119).
Ceremonies and celebrations to honor the troops greeted the young men when they returned to their reservations. However, at war's end many American Indians were troubled to learn they had lost land allotments and livestock and had to fight for back pay. Beginning in November 1919, federal policy allowed American Indian veterans to petition to become citizens of the United States. However, according to Krouse, the naturalization process was complex and "none of the [Dixon] records indicate that any veterans knew it was even possible to petition for citizenship" (p. 155). Returning veterans became confused, frustrated, and full of uncertainty.
In her introduction, Krouse argues that Dixon's records must be contextualized and interpreted. Unfortunately, the book's chapters lack much-needed critical analysis and fail to provide essential historical perspective of the time period. The information provided sets up the passages selected, but offers little in the way of interpretation or historical frameworks for better understanding the primary sources.
Key information provided in the afterword and appendix should have been provided in the introduction. Although the author refers to the drafting of Indians and the granting of citizenship to Indians early on, explanations of both processes are placed in the last chapter. Also, Krouse describes Dixon as a controversial figure, but fails to provide a full discussion of contemporary and recent analysis of this matter until the end of the book. Early-twentieth-century critics of Dixon called him "over romantic" and saw little merit in his dramatically staged photographs. Some even questioned the "validity of his work" in the journals of the day (p. 167). Most recent scholars are openly "critical of his methods and motives" (p. 169). At the start, this reader had similar concerns. In her appendix, Krouse admits to problems with Dixon's questionnaires and interviews (and other documents he chose to use), since they were carefully selected to promote the reformers' mission of assimilation and citizenship. Despite this, however, Krouse does a good job of arguing for the importance of Dixon's materials. She clearly demonstrates that Indian veterans provided far more key information than Dixon was trying to elicit.
Placing the critics' concerns in the introduction would certainly cast a dark shadow on the collected works. But this shadow could easily have been brightened had the author also provided a critical analysis of Joseph Dixon upfront, along with her emphasis on the legitimacy and importance of the Dixon collection. Susan Applegate Krouse gives voice to American Indian
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soldiers who served in the Great War. It is definitely worth the read--but start with the back of the book.
The history of the First World War is often overshadowed by the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. However, as Keith Gandal, Mark Whalan, and Susan Applegate Krouse prove, the Great War had an important impact on America's postwar culture. The three books demonstrate the value of studying this underexplored area to better comprehend ethnicity and race in the United States.
Nancy Gentile Ford
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania NOTES
(1.) Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All: Foreign-Born Soldiers in World War I (College Station, TX, 2001); Nancy Bristow, Making Men Moral (New York, 1996); and Jennifer Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore, MD, 2000).
(2.) See Ford, Americans All, 3, 68-87. Ford, Nancy Gentile
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ford, Nancy Gentile. "Ethnicity, race, and the great war: exploring an underexplored topic."
Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, p. 62+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A397135295/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=1858aa96. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A397135295
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"Gandal, Keith: A YEAR OF WRITING DANGEROUSLY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217640/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ab547621. Accessed 17 May 2018. Meier, Thomas K. "Gandal, Keith. The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization." Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009, p. 383+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A223658257/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7b38b2d0. Accessed 17 May 2018. DAVIS, CYNTHIA J. "The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum." Studies in the Novel, vol. 33, no. 2, 2001, p. 237. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A76427903/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c599c219. Accessed 17 May 2018. Vernon, Alex. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization." The Hemingway Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 2009, p. 136+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199864446/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ac717bf7. Accessed 17 May 2018. Trout, Steven. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization." War, Literature & The Arts, vol. 22, no. 1-2, 2010. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A239353017/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=579c8b3b. Accessed 17 May 2018. Trout, Steven. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization." War, Literature & The Arts, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2009, p. 436+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A221023054/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=88d65bce. Accessed 17 May 2018. Sanchez, Rebecca. "The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization." South Atlantic Review, vol. 74, no. 3, 2009, p. 158+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A301283625/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e1798cf7. Accessed 17 May 2018. Wertheim, Stanley. "The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum." Studies in American Fiction, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, p. 249. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A59515419/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=041096a2. Accessed 17 May 2018. Ford, Nancy Gentile. "Ethnicity, race, and the great war: exploring an underexplored topic." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, p. 62+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A397135295/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1858aa96. Accessed 17 May 2018.

• John Hopkins University Press
  https://www.press.jhu.edu/news/blog/new-reading-world-war-i-american-literature-keith-gandal
  Word count: 1056

  A New Reading of World War I American Literature with Keith Gandal
  Submitted by eea on Tue, 2018-04-10 2:57 PM

  One hundred years after U.S. involvement in World War I, it is time to revisit our literature that came out of that conflict--because we are only now, finally, able to understand it in its actual historical context. That is the purpose of my new book, War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature. It draws on military archives and cutting-edge research by social-military historians to fully and properly come to terms with the works of thirteen of our major writers, including some of our most famous authors and some who were in their own time well-known but have been mostly forgotten.

  The Great War is sometimes called “America’s forgotten war.” This is the case, not only because World War I came to be overshadowed by World War II, but because, as Steven Trout suggests, there is no single prevailing account of the war that became registered in the national memory, as there is with World War II. Instead, we supposedly have two sets of contradictory narratives, some patriotic and excited, some haunted and disillusioned. We know what American involvement in World War II was about; we are less clear what World War I meant to the country. Historians and literary critics have tended to divide our Great-War literature into pro- and antiwar works, but this is too blunt a procedure because it fails to do justice to the mixed reactions that in fact characterize most of these works. Moreover, it is misleading because commentators have largely mistaken the motivations behind a large portion of the disillusionment and excitement.

  I would suggest that another reason for World War I’s “forgotten-war” status, which also explains the reductive critical approach, is that, until very recently, we had forgotten a tremendously important aspect of the U.S. experience. In fact, that war involved a chapter of American history that eventually changed this country forever. As I argue in my book, World War I began America’s national embrace of meritocracy, a conception of status and a practice of governance that had roots in the founding principle of human equality and that would move the country toward an understanding of equality not simply as equality of political rights but also as equality of socioeconomic rights, or equality of opportunity for advancement.

  To raise and organize a huge army and officer corps almost from scratch, as I show in War Isn’t the Only Hell, the army conducted America’s first, large-scale national experiment with meritocracy, mostly assigning men to positions and ranks based, not on class, family, and ethnicity, as had been the practice in the Civil War, but on merit. Though the army was notoriously discriminatory against African Americans, it nonetheless made a groundbreaking attempt to extend egalitarian treatment to all other ethnic groups, as well as to the poor and working class. This policy was not a matter of social justice but of the practical, bottom-line aim of winning the war. Indeed, the army’s original plan was for no discrimination against African Americans as well, but the military brass was overruled by a federal government pressured by alarmed white southern leaders. And meanwhile--despite, on the one hand, the vicious army discrimination instead instituted, and, on the other, continuing protests by white southern officials concerning black participation--inclusion of African Americans in the war effort involved some black troops in battle, saw a limited number of black officers, and gave hundreds of thousand of black men a chance to experience a country (France) that was not governed by racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws and that came to embrace them.

  Because we have forgotten this aspect of the American war experience, we have failed to properly understand our World War I literature. The well-known American World War I Lost Generation writings of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Cummings have long been interpreted as an alienated and disillusioned outcry against modern warfare, brutal military discipline, and government propaganda. In fact, as I demonstrate, their works were largely motivated, not by the experience of the horrors of war, but the failure to have those experiences--because, despite their privileged backgrounds, and because of the new meritocratic policies, they all ended up as noncombatants at a moment when the culture granted masculinity only to combatants. Their books spoke for the noncombatant majority of doughboys who experienced a different alienation and disillusionment: that of shame.

  In the book, I argue that American World War I literature was a response not only to the shock of war but to the culture shock of meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors addressed--often in coded ways because it was embarrassing--the noncombatant failure to measure up. Our best literature by combat-soldiers, writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, Hervey Allen, and Victor Daly, have also been considered by literary critics and historians to be straightforward antiwar narratives. But these books, while depicting the hell of war, are also profoundly shaped by experiences of meritocratic or French recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. The sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Daly, reveals a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Likewise, some of our most famous World War I women writers--Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte--were reacting not only to the shock of modern war, but to new employment and social opportunities for women at the front and stateside, including their new power, at home, as arbiters of masculinity, a power that temporarily altered gender relations. Ultimately, my new book, War Isn’t the Only Hell, shows how American World War I literature registers the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.

  Keith Gandal is a professor of English at City College of New York. He is the author of The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is also the author of War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature

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  War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature by Keith Gandal
  Hardcover: 288 pages
  Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press (March 28, 2018)
  Language: English
  ISBN-10: 1421425106
  ISBN-13: 978-1421425108
  American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men―except, notoriously, African Americans―to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame.
  Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers―Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte―who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn’t the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.

  Available Formats: Kindle and Hardcover

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