THE WAY IT WAS (310 pp.)—Harold Loeb—Criterion ($5.95).
Early in 1924 in Paris, Harold Loeb was the proud possessor of: 1) a little magazine with big pages called Broom; 2) a mistress; 3) the manuscript of a novel, soon to be accepted with the publisher's proviso that Loeb put back all the "a's" and "the's" he had deliberately left out; and 4) the friendship of a fledgling expatriate writer, amateur boxer and soso tennis player named Ernest Hemingway, who dubbed Loeb "one of the better guys of all time." By the end of the fiesta at Pamplona, Spain in the summer of 1925, Broom had folded, Loeb had all but parted from his mistress. His novel was still unpublished, and the friendship with Ernest Hemingway had so cooled that Hemingway would shortly bury it with his waspish portrayal of the Loeb-inspired Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises.
These shifts account for much that is fascinating in Author Loeb's memoirs. They also help to explain the seemingly endless appeal of the '20s. The Lost Generation had one abiding faith—that something would happen in the next 20 minutes that would utterly change one's life. From this great expectation sprang the wild parties, the free verse and the freer love. In the spirit of the '20s. changing partners meant changing patterns.
The Papa of Dada. Harold Loeb changed more patterns than most. His father was a Wall Street broker, his mother a Guggenheim. Like his cousin Peggy Guggenheim, Harold found the climate of wealth intellectually suffocating, the security guilt-edged. After working in a construction gang in Alberta and tending a bookstore, Harold found himself, in 1921, by founding Broom. Names famed and forgotten spill from Author Loeb's pages like unstuck pictures from a family album. There was Ezra Pound, "dressed like one of Trilby's companions" in "black velvet jacket and fawn-colored pants"; James Joyce, dour and uncommunicative on everything but French provincial cooking (he loved it); and Tristan Tzara, the papa of Dada, leading his esthetic Bolsheviks with a wave of his monocle.
And then there were the parties. There was the night Isadora Duncan, plump and middleaged, yelled her favorite toast ("To Life and Love") and complained to Harold: "The others—they are so heavy." There was the night Louis Aragon and Malcolm Cowley started a living-room bonfire of books they didn't like, but full-bladdered e. e. cummings acted as a one-man fire department. There was the artists' ball at which Harold danced with a friend's wife, who was dressed in green powder and a black string.