Customer Reviews

The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century

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Thomas Beer wrote an idiosyncratic, name-dropping account of the last decade of the nineteenth century. This is history from a personal viewpoint, his own of course, and it was totally skewed and off-balance. At first, I didn't know what to make of his style, and then I caught on; his wit was as dry a mouthful of cotton! I had to re-read the first few chapters, and the second time I was delighted. This is a one-of-a-kind book!

Granted that it's always more fun to make fun than to praise, I can't recommend this book enough. It's without question criticism as performance, an inspired ridicule of an era's desires, its beliefs and its confusions.

I don't have enough experience with literary and/or cultural history as a genre to know if this performance was exceptional or ordinary for its time, but I sure wish I could find more of its kind now. Beer relishes presenting famous figures of the time as immoral or incompetent buffoons. He frames heros in their mundane, unflattering, moments. Few escape the sarcastic insult or elegant putdown: only those apparently bulletproof idealist slash humanitarians like WD Howells, or Frank Norris.

A key to understanding Beer's bleak and pessimistic tone may depend on the following choice. You can assume that it was artificial, based on the book's premise. That is, if a writer looks back into history, and chooses a decade in which he/she thinks everything fell apart, such an attitude is a natural accompaniment. Or, you can attribute the sour tone to real circumstances, such as those surrounding the year of this book's publication, 1926. In short, a post Great War cynicism, a disgust with and disbelief in mankind, would likely prejudice anyone against optimism of any kind, much less the material optimism of the 1890s (and 1920s). Beer seems on intimate terms with the pathos of two of the decade's great poems that have since been held up as both symbolic of the period and as standards of Modernism: Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Yeats "The Second Coming."

Beer's style is difficult but brilliant: dense, concise, vivid, allusive, sly, and subtle. The points slide in and out of view like popup targets in a shooting gallery. The thread is often lost because the subject - the he, she, they, or it - is not restated. Certain conjunctions that we can't function without are left out consistently. Sentences are laden with meaning, allusion and irony, some autonomous and conceptually complete, some only clues that make sense when coupled with a partner. Arguments proceed by wild leaps of association. The breadth of reference has no boundaries. It's often formal, but it can't be called academic, not the way we use the term. The modern reader is so used to passive voice and "to be" verbs that writing like Beer's, which travels swiftly on action verbs, poses a major challenge.

Books like this are what happen when writing is immediate, fresh, full of compressed anecdote, full of real detail. There is no clear judgment, no dogma, no agenda, no leading the witness, no unmistakeable expectation, no condescension or cheerleading, no plain morality to which you must subscribe. The narrator is a cipher, and in achieving that non-identity, the author becomes an artist. That modern readers might feel a little lost without a clear narrative position to guide them is too bad.

I like to think that one read isn't enough for any great book. The Mauve Decade is one.

The author's free-flowing narrative style makes this book a strange read, with very few paragraphs and no notes of any kind. His highly opinionated tone almost causes the reader to quit early on, but interest is maintained. His myriad references without full identification has the reader scrambling to use Wikipedia. This is alright, but time-consuming. Mr. Beers should have taken the time to further explain his statements.

Every once in a while one comes across a gem of book and is not quite sure what to do with it. That is the case with this gossip-laden, satirically biting literary book, "Mauve Decade", that deals with the highs and lows of American culture in the last decade of the 19th century. You, know the time of the well-known "robber barons who until recently were the main villains in the on-going American saga. And they were! And their descendants, literally or not, still are!

As a matter of course I should explain that I picked this book up for the purpose, I thought, of taking a look at the period of the emergence of the American imperial presence that we continue to live with. I also was looking to round out the milieu in which the American labor movement was beginning to feel its oats. The period of the great trade union, and later Socialist Party leader, Eugene V. Debs-led Pullman Strike and other bloody labor battles that should have told even the most naïve militant that the struggle ahead was going to be long and arduous. Those 'robber barons" meant to keep their profits. That is the book I bargained for but I got something quite different.


What I got was one of the most obscure, but intrinsically interesting, takes on the American literary scene, the so-called "Republic of Letters" movement that was being pushed at the time in order to create a separate and distinct American cultural haven. The author, writing in 1926 (at least that is when the book was published) is taking a broad look back at the 1890's based on his own observations, the recollections of literary friends and those with some kind of ax to grind. Thomas Beer is not a name that I am familiar with either in my various reviews of American literary history or in any other capacity. I have not, at this point when this review is being written, taken the time to find out exactly who he was. That, I do not believe is necessary, in order appreciate what a little gem he has produced.

Most of the names that Beer drops, and there is a great deal of name-dropping in the book,, are very familiar to readers of this space-Mark Twain, William Cullen Bryant (these were the days when every other Brahmin used three names to beef up his or her resume), William Dean Howells, Charles Godkin, The James brothers-in short, the literary establishment, make that the Brahmin establishment, that coalesced after the Civil War and was entering, according to Beer, its decline. I will not argue that point here but merely point out that his style is to be droll and venomous as he lists the roll call of the famous that get recognition at the expense of his own favored authors.

Needless to say this book centers on the Boston/New York literary scene with a few passing remarks about the Westerners who would go on to create a very different type of literature. There are also many, many dry comments on the "Irish" problem, which is the fact that this `race' has started to come into its own politically. Along the way Beer comments on the then new obscure and now long forgotten political scandals of the day, the literary sexual censorship that was being enforced by public officials and magazine/newspaper editors alike (I can only imagine what Beer would have made of the current wide open sexual references.), the fashions and watering holes of the rich and famous and their pet peeves. Wonderful stuff, all done in a rather arcane style that would not pass today's rapid repartee standards. This guy knows how to skewer even from long distance. We can always appreciate a little of that no matter what generation we are in. Nice work, Thomas Beer.

Is it possible that this paperback published in 1997 is a completely different book than the one I just took out of my local library? *That* book was also called "The Mauve Decade" and was also by Thomas Beer, but it was originally published in 1926 and might as well be written in a foreign tongue, for all its incomprehensibility to my modern mind. It's not that the language didn't make sense: yep, subjects, predicates, familiar words in English... But overall, the book was written in some abstract style that I just didn't "get" at all. I am terribly interested in this historical period, and I was looking forward to reading this book full of witty anecdotes. Sigh. Good thing I took it out of the library, because had I purchased it, I would have felt ripped off.