“ANOTHER LOOK” BRINGS THE ROARING ’20s TO STANFORD WITH ANITA LOOS’ GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Once Marilyn Monroe vamped “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” the 1925 bestselling novel was all but forgotten. Stanford hopes to restore the balance with its seasonal book club event.

Frontispiece for 1925′s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (Courtesy Anita Loos Estate)

Edith Wharton called Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “the great American novel” and declared its author a genius. Winston Churchill, William Faulkner, George Santayana and Benito Mussolini read it – so did James Joyce, whose failing eyesight led him to select his reading carefully. The 1925 bestseller sold out the day it hit the stores and earned Loos more than a million dollars in royalties.

Everyone, of course, has heard of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the short novel’s fame was eclipsed by the 1953 movie of the same name, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Once the bombshell blonde vamped “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” the effervescent Jazz Age novel became a shard of forgotten history. Who has taken the send-up novel seriously since?

Brava, Anita! (Courtesy Anita Loos Estate)

Stanford’s “Another Look” book club would like to restore the balance. The book club launched by the English/Creative Writing Department is taking on the comic masterpiece at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 28, in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Levinthal Hall. “Another Look” is a gift to the community – the event is free, open to the public, with no reservations required.

The evening will be moderated by the English department’s Hilton Obenzinger, well known for his “How I Write” series of conversations with authors (available on iTunes here); he will be joined by English Professor Mark McGurl and Assistant Professor of English Claire Jarvis.

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HILTON OBENZINGER: “THE FEMALE HUCK FINN OF THE FLAPPER ERA”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes features one of the classic voices in American literature, Lorelei from Little Rock, the imagined author of, as the subtitle puts it, “The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady.” Lorelei is the female Huck Finn of the flapper era, writing her book with misspellings, funny constructions and unintentional ironies, who’s out to snag her rich man; she is naive, shrewd and seemingly unaware as she exposes the absurdities and pretensions of boom-time capitalism. Published in 1925, the novel introduced the new woman, now able to vote, smoke, dance, and drink – and finagle her rich escorts. It’s a hilarious send-up of new social dynamics, particularly the idea that women could get rich too through sexual manipulation. Her friend Dorothy describes Lorelei’s brains as a miracle: “I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.” The novel is that masterpiece.

GAVIN JONES ON THE 1920s: “THERE WAS A FEELING THAT IT COULDN’T REALLY LAST. AND IT DIDN’T.”

This season’s “Another Look” book club selection is Anita Loos’s comic masterpiece Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  The 1925 book was published the same year as another book that looks at the same era: F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  In a fortunate coincidence, the Stanford Alumni Association’s Book Salon is featuring the Fitzgerald book in an online discussion hosted by Gavin Jones, chair of the Stanford English Department. Both events coincide with the release this month of a major motion picture, The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo di Caprio:

“Another Look” stopped to chat with Gavin about the two books, the two worldviews, and the Roaring Twenties.

Cynthia Haven:  Two novels from the same year.  One ends with marriage, the other with death – the comic and tragic sides of an era. Can you give us a little of the historical context that would help us understand the 1920s?

Gavin Jones:  The decade began in turmoil, with the end of World War I and with a mood of socialist revolution in the air. It ended with the Stock Market crash of 1929.

It was very much a boom time.  A time of intense competition as well.  In a way, American society began to look like it does today in the twenties.

Business became a kind of religion. By the end of the twenties, over 40 percent of the world’s manufactured goods came from the U.S.  The U.S. became an enormous global power during this decade.

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MARK McGURL:  “TRAPPED IN THE MIND OF AN IDIOT”

Excerpted from McGurl’s “Highbrows and Dumb Blondes,” The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James:

“I wanted Lorelei to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation,” wrote Anita Loos of the heroine of her novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925).  That, Loos explained, is why she is said to have been born and raised in Little Rock, a backwater city in the region her friend H.L. Mencken had cruelly dubbed the ‘Sahara of the Bozart.’

…Lorelei’s hilariously breezy diary works, in another dimension, as a fairly rigorous narratological experiment in perspectival limitation. Since Lorelei’s is the only account we have of the events she describes, and since she is not conscious of her own intellectual limitations, the contempt that motivated Loos’s writing is present in her text only by implication.  Lorelei’s friend Dorothy, in many ways a projection of Loos herself, might easily have been used as an ironic observer-narrator in the manner of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925). But her sarcastic commentary appears in the text only as reported by Lorelei, and intermittently at that. Mostly remain trapped in the mind of an idiot, and can only draw inferences as to what the intelligent version of her story might be.

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GOOD NEWS!  GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES IS MEDICINAL!

Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis, a former visiting fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, was delighted to hear of the “Another Look” choice.  The author of Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression  claimed the book helped bring about better spirits.  Here’s what she wrote:

“Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (and its sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes) is a natural antidote to gloom, lassitude and should be part of the long-term treatment of depression. It is a diamond in itself – with properties of intelligence, style and wit of the hardest substance known the man. The novel’s joie de vivre is as far from censoriousness as it’s possible to be, giving us a glimpse of a mind so liberated and unsolemn that it’s certainly therapeutic.”

READ ANITA LOOS’S GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES WITH US!

More to come shortly.  Meanwhile, please join our mailing list (link at the top of this page) for news and updates. There are no reservations required for this event, but seating is limited and available on a first-come basis.

WE’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU! THE WIFE OF MARTIN GUERRE, CONTINUED…

Last night’s discussion of The Wife of Martin Guerre was galvanizing.  Clearly, the standing-room-only event had only started to scratch the surface of Janet Lewis‘s troubling novel in the allotted ninety minutes.  The lively occasion seemed to end with an explosion of “but… but… but…” as we teased out the implications of the 16th-century tale of imposture.

Is Bertrande a hero of conscience – or a victim of inherited conventions? What are we to make of the imposter Arnaud du Tilh?  And, as Stein Visiting Writer Richard Powers noted, isn’t there a moment in every marriage where a husband or wife says to a spouse, “You aren’t the person I married”?

We thought it might be fun to continue the discussion.  Send your comments to clh@stanford.edu, and we’ll post them below.  (Or leave a comment on the “reply” button below, and we’ll move it into this post.)

As always, we’d love to hear from you.

Comments:

– Glen Worthey

I was not too convinced on what happened to the characters in the story. I thought the story was like a tall tale for me. However, I was intrigued by the theme of truth and lies. The author forced her characters to face with truth and lies and lead to their different responses to the challenge. Isn’t it often easier to live with a lie than dealing with truth? Facing the truth can be very painful. Who likes to be in pain? You can find these kind of examples all over the Old Testament. People prefer to look away from the truth. What choice will we make for ourselves: facing the truth with pain and live happily in a lie? How much truth can one handle?

– Sunny Chen

Thank you. It was a terrific evening. Also the “keepsake give away” was very special – thanks for that.

– Wendy Webb

Thank you so much for a sumptuous reading and discussion of The Wife of Martin Guerre. I so appreciate your saving me a seat as I cam coming up from Carmel to enjoy the spirited conversation.  Since my son is a sophomore at Stanford, seeing him during the quarter was an extra bonus!

In doing a bit of family history digging, I found out that my grandmother Bernice Taylor FitzGerald and her sister Della Taylor Hoss, were great pals with Janet Lewis. From what my mother remembers, those ladies had many adventures throughout the years: art, book, camping and excursions to Yosemite undertaken as they crisscrossed paths at Stanford.

– Bryndie Beach

I found myself comparing Bertrande to one of those wives who have been married happily for years and finds out her husband is a bigamist. I don’t care how happy you’ve been, the idea of ‘forgiving and forgetting’ would be repugnant. She was lied to in the most fundamental way. As Glen [Worthey] said, “he was…guilty of the most fundamental sort of fraud.”

– Elizabeth Waldo

READ JANET LEWIS’S THE WIFE OF MARTIN GUERRE WITH US!

More to come shortly.  Meanwhile, please join our mailing list (link at the top of this page) for news and updates. There are no reservations required for this event, but seating is limited and available on a first-come basis. 

MAXWELL’S SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW: “THE DOG HOWLS. THAT IS THE SOUND OF THIS NOVEL FOR ME.”

Good news for the new year! A podcast for our inaugural “Another Look” event is now available here: AnotherLookBookClub-11-12-12. It will also be available on Stanford iTunes soon.

The November 12 session discussed William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, with award-winning author Tobias Wolff;  Bay Area novelist, journalist and editor Vendela Vida; and Stanford Assistant Professor Vaughn Rasberry.

Enjoy these excerpts from the discussion, offered by one of the top-ranked English and creative writing departments in the nation:

Tobias Wolff: In 1979-80, this book appeared in three installments in the New Yorker.  I still remember the excitement of reading them.  I was absolutely stunned by what I was reading.  I have to admit I read it as a memoir, despite all his warnings, such as, “In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” And “this memoir, if that’s what I’m writing…”

We must pay attention to the word on the cover: “novel.”  So how do we read this? How seriously do we take his warnings that this is perhaps to be read with a little bit of caution as to its utter veracity?  When you read it are you drawn in to give it a little more credulity than you would a novel?

Vendela Vida:  Maxwell took years of analysis – and he talks about that in the novel as well – to really realize that we are the architects of our own lives. … For me, the book is all about how our memories are also designed by us.  Of course, there are so many architectural references in here, references to building and corridors. In a way, it’s a very empowering book – and I don’t use that word lightly –  about how we can reshape our past, our stories and the way we see them.  The book is born out of shame, and how he can come to terms with that.  It’s also his apology …

Vaughn Rasberry:  Despite an apparent simplicity of diction and the apparent straightforwardness of the narration, there were moments in the novel that stopped me dead in my tracks. … There’s one sentence, in particular, that I just has kept me up the last couple of nights.  It’s on page 30, and I’ll read it: “She had a son who was a year or two older than I was and everything a boy of that age ought to be – open and easy with adults, bright in school, and beyond being pushed around by his contemporaries.” When I read that phrase “beyond being pushed around by his contemporaries,” I didn’t know what that meant, exactly.  Does this mean that he has never been pushed around? This is a really extraordinary thing to claim about someone. Can anyone here claim to be beyond being pushed around by your contemporaries?  Raise your hand.  I’d like to shake it afterwards.”

Tobias Wolff:   The pulse that animates this book is this sense of absolutely, devastating loss, and inexpressibility of that loss, in this case his mother. In fact, if you think about it, all the boys in the book lose their mother, every one of them.  … The mother’s sudden removal from the life is a kind of violence that registers on this narrator and resounds through his whole life.  At the end, when he records that conversation with his analyst and starts to say, “I couldn’t bear it” – and he’s elderly man now – he says, “I can’t bear it.”  It’s still with him, that hole that this has been blown into his soul …  It is the kind of organizing emotion – the pulse, really – of this novel.

All these losses! It’s as if he cannot trust his story to convey the full power of his loss and grief. He lives in a middle-class home, his father has a job, and there’s no sense of disunion in the family. How does he find a story that will convey this?  Then it becomes this terrible thing, also associated with sexuality, where he feels his own self divided.  Even that doesn’t carry the power of grief that he wants to convey, so he gives it to the dog, who cannot give any reason for his own suffering, and so finally, one of the most powerful things in this novel.  This whole funnel of suffering and loss and grief becomes a howl.  When that man leaves that dog tied up – the words are gone, there are no words to express it – the dog howls.  That is the sound of this novel for me.