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Bullitt resembled, in many ways, his richer but less fortunate peer Jay Gatsby, who came to embody the postwar generation as protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel. “I see Bill Bullitt, in retrospect, as a member of that remarkable group of young Americans . . . for whom the First World War was the great electrifying experience of life,” George Kennan wrote in 1972. “They were a striking generation, full of talent and exuberance, determined—if one may put it so—to make life come alive. The mark they made on American culture will be there when many other marks have faded. But in most of them there seems to have been a touch of the fate, if not the person, of the Great Gatsby.”1
For Kennan, Bullitt’s generation derived its talent from the legacy of the First World War. Theirs was not a “lost” generation, as Ernest Hemingway described it. Mourning for friends who perished in the fight fueled a desire to “make life come alive,” to revive themselves and the world, to return to a prewar condition. The lasting influence of the war in civil life was one of Fitzgerald’s central themes. In The Great Gatsby, Jay desperately resists this impact; throughout the novel, he tries to rewind time so that he and Daisy, the woman he loves, can regain their prewar innocence. It does not work. Facing the irreversibility of time, Gatsby is killed, and only the narrator mourns him. To both the protagonist and the reader, the plotline demonstrates that time cannot be reversed, war is irrevocable, and the beloved is not innocent: a mother and the wife of a jealous husband, Daisy is eager for a different kind of relationship—an affair, but not one of love.
Kennan carefully chose a key word to describe how the war affected the Gatsby generation: far from exhausting or paralyzing them, the war was an “electrifying experience” for its survivors. The incomplete revolutions in Europe energized them and gave them hope, while the unjust peace that concluded the war mingled mourning and anger. While fighting in Europe, American soldiers came upon discoveries that addressed civil life in America; after many trials and errors in postwar America, the disappointed survivors returned to the memories of the Great War. Now they mourned not only the loss of human lives but also the loss of humanistic ideas that the war obliterated. Electrified by war, these people failed to realize this energy in peace; as Kennan put it, “they knew achievement more than they knew fulfillment.” Their ends were mostly “tragic,” wrote Kennan, but their experience was “electrifying”—in other words, both painful and productive.2
It so happened that Bullitt published his first novel, It’s Not Done, in 1925, the same year Fitzgerald published Gatsby. Ironically, Bullitt’s novel was more successful than Fitzgerald’s at the time of publication. The first printing of Gatsby totaled just 20,000 copies; It’s Not Done was rapidly republished many times, selling 150,000 copies. Bullitt’s more traditional novel conformed to readers’ expectations, making it an easier sell than Fitzgerald’s innovative masterpiece. Only during the Depression did The Great Gatsby emerge as a complex portrait of the American man, a model through which Kennan and millions of other readers would come to understand the country they had lost. For now it was easier for the public to appreciate Bullitt’s novel, which tracked the development of the protagonist from privileged childhood to disappointed maturity in a traditional psychological manner. Emulating the classical realism of Dickens and Balzac, the novel detailed the historical life of the protagonist typical of America’s upper-middle-class, East Coast urban elite. During and after the First World War, the United States resembled Bullitt’s rapidly changing, strife-filled, lusty Philadelphia rather than Gatsby’s Long Island, a playground for the rich and beautiful captured in a rare moment of catharsis and death.
At the center of It’s Not Done are a dozen families who know one another all too well, and together rule over the large and prosperous city that Bullitt chose to name Chesterbridge. The name has classical connotations (English schools still teach their pupils that cities containing “chester” in their names were established by the Romans) and is a certain allusion to Bullitt’s native Philadelphia. With their inheritances and black servants, the protagonists live luxurious, lazy lives. But to their surprise, they often lose their financial, legal, and even marital battles to the new rich, whom they do not consider “gentlemen.” The protagonist’s father is a prominent doctor who owns properties in the city and the country. His children have horses; when they grow up they have personal servants. When the son causes trouble at school, his father intervenes and dismisses the teacher; when the mother hints that the sermons at church are too long, the pastor makes them shorter. The family’s tough practices are inherited from the good old times. When the son brings home a new friend, the daughter of a French artist, the servants feed her in the kitchen because she is too low-class to enter the living room. If anything threatens to undo the family, it is philanthropy: the family opens a free clinic for blacks and it drains the accounts. These American aristocrats are concerned about the sudden emergence of rivals from the lower classes, but nothing in this idyllic picture warns them of the forthcoming catastrophes of the First World War and the Depression. The central protagonist, journalist John Corsey, is overwhelmed by anxiety about the new century, in which automobiles were replacing horses, department stores ruining nice little shops, movies replacing the theater, and blackmail replacing duels. “The country is running away as fast as it can from every standard it ever had, from every ideal of Washington or Hamilton or even Jefferson. Yes, and of Walt Whitman, too,” Corsey remarks.3 It helps a bit that Corsey’s brother-in-law becomes the mayor of Chesterbridge. “We’re colonials, that’s all, who’ve made a bit of money and built up our own brand of snobbery,” he says in the novel. Corsey’s understanding of the local elite is instructive; they are not aristocrats, he says, just snobs. “Not one of them will receive a manufacturer. . . . Can anyone tell me why it’s respectable for us to own coal mines and to deal in coal but not to manufacture saws or rope?” (171).
This untitled nobility, owing everything to their ancestors who chose the right time and place to emigrate, nevertheless believe that their own education and virtue secure their well-being. The novel depicts the protagonists from both good and bad families of Chesterbridge falling in love, getting married, committing adultery, and divorcing. Very few of them are happy, least of all John Corsey. His wife prefers social pleasures to his company, and their son leaves for voluntary service in the British army. The novel takes a critical, even satirical view of American society. It depicts the wartime administration in Washington as a helpless bunch of crooks who are easily manipulated by a depraved, witty beauty who spies for Germany. When America entered the war, the patriotic Corsey was a fan of Woodrow Wilson, who told him with tears in his eyes, “I hate this war, I hate all war, and the only thing I care about in life is the peace I’m going to make at the end of it” (263). With time, Corsey grows to detest the Versailles treaty as much as Bullitt.
Bullitt’s novel depicts a world that preached, though it did not always practice, family values, good education, and fair competition. The world of It’s Not Done is one in which election results remain unknown until the last vote is counted; a world in which the editor of a local newspaper could get an audience with the president, or have a prisoner released from the city jail; a world in which the people from the lower classes compete, sometimes successfully, with old money; a world in which Wagner and Schopenhauer come up in small talk; a world that denied women equality but supported their efforts to keep themselves occupied by singing opera, writing book reviews, working in military hospitals, and even spying. Education and prestige had cachet; the author never misses an opportunity to point out who graduated from Princeton and who from Harvard. Corsey’s uncle is the president of the University of Chesterbridge (which, we are told, ranked sixth among American universities). Like Bullitt, John Corsey becomes a journalist after failing to finish Harvard Law School, is promoted to editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, and then becomes ambassador to Italy (ten years after writing this novel, Bullitt would become ambassador to France). Corsey has some of Bullitt’s biographical traits, but he also resembles Bullitt’s older friends, like Steffens. At the end of the novel, however, Corsey becomes a weak, restless man who does not know what to do with his unfaithful wife, corrupt power, and wasted life.
It’s Not Done is a psychological novel rather than a bildungsroman. Corsey’s maturity brings him major problems. Smart, rich, and lucky, Corsey is unsatisfied in his marriage, though still in love with his wife and too moral to pursue any affairs. The novel suggests that Corsey’s emotional problems are symptomatic of his generation, class, and nation—of a new, “modern” condition. Blaming modernity for betraying high moral principles, Corsey is nostalgic for the bygone world satisfied by simple morality. Still, he believes in progress. “We sit up and . . . blame modern life. But you weren’t killed by modern life and I wasn’t killed by modern life; we were killed by our inherited ideas,” he says in conversation with his uncle (370).
Throughout his life Corsey remains in love with two women, the French girlfriend of his youth, who gave birth to his illegitimate son and then left for Europe, and the American wife who (it so happened) fell pregnant almost at the same time as the girlfriend. Both women ultimately reject him, but this double misfortune earns Corsey the attention of both the author and the reader. The novel follows him across three decades, starting from his sensitive adolescence and ending with his frustrated middle age, when, after an attempted suicide, he decamps to Italy. This move conveniently occurs in 1921, so Bullitt’s imagination let Ambassador Corsey watch Mussolini come to power and deal with the fallout. But the novel ends shortly before the Mussolini era, giving just a hint of Corsey’s involvement in the seminal events of the century. Politics aside, the reader witnesses Corsey’s erotic passions, which he usually fails to bring to consummation. Various women—ladies of his circle, his secretaries, or just street prostitutes—continuously tempt him. Sometimes he tries to approach this or that woman, but he shies away at the last moment. Meanwhile, the men around Corsey—his friends, enemies, and even his beloved brother—all indulge in affairs, cheat on their wives, buy sex, divorce, and marry again. Involved in various intrigues, not too scrupulous in his journalism, and increasingly disillusioned in his “principles,” Corsey remains sentimental to the end.
In his combination of unscrupulousness in business and unusual selectivity in matters of love, Corsey does indeed look and act like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. Both live among peers engaging in old and new kinds of debauchery, but both remain loyal to the lovers of their youth. For Fitzgerald and Bullitt, their stories exposed the excessive, decorative decadence that their protagonists erroneously took for modernity. Their alienation does not prevent Corsey and Gatsby from participating in the business and politics of modern life; it only stops their participation in social and sexual pleasures, the only realm of modernity in which they both feel vulnerable. When Corsey’s son goes off to fight in Europe, Corsey mostly fears that his son would pick up a disease from European women. He attempts to talk to his son about the need for precautions, but the words fail him. His son would be killed in battle.
If anyone in Bullitt’s fictional world knew how Chesterbridge really worked and what could help it, it was doctors like Corsey’s father. His best friend is also a doctor, who interprets Corsey’s little diseases as manifestations of one big problem, his sexual dissatisfaction. The diagnosis is unmistakably Freudian: “You will never let yourself feel right about anything short of marriage with a girl your mother approves of. And you will want her to be a virgin nymphomaniac. Unfortunately, they do not exist” (98). Corsey’s mother is confident that he would never deliberately publish a lie or blackmail, if only because he is a gentleman of Chesterbridge. In the course of the novel Corsey betrays those expectations, but he religiously follows his mother’s rules about women. The author persistently depicts the conflicts between Corsey’s ideas about sexuality and “modern life,” and the reader feels that this is the author’s unresolved question, the “it” that’s “not done.”
But women are not the only threat to the fashionable world of Chesterbridge, however much the town operates like a gentlemen’s club. Coming from the best family of this booming but still provincial town, Corsey observes the unprincipled parvenus capturing power, wealth, and influence. A permanent theme of the novel is the failure of people from good families who lose their old money to the more cynical nouveau riche. One example comes in the form of a casual acquaintance from Corsey’s youth, the son of a drunken manufacturer, who finishes college, turns into a journalist and businessman, becomes the indispensable deputy editor of Corsey’s newspaper, and wins the sympathy of Corsey’s wife. The war intensified the generational conflict, and when it concluded, new people like Gatsby claimed Corsey’s women and assets.
Bullitt’s novel tragically culminates in the death of Corsey’s son in battle after he volunteers to join the British army well before America enters the war. Mourning him, Corsey manages to save his illegitimate son, Raoul, from jail. Raoul, who grew up in France, has come to America as a socialist agitator. Calling himself a Bolshevik, he is imprisoned in Chesterbridge after lecturing to striking miners about the Soviet constitution. Corsey does not share his interest in this subject, but he does see irony in the fact that the last heir to the bourgeois Corseys is a Communist. During the war, Corsey makes a second career as an intelligence officer in Washington, where he exposes (and sometimes shields) the German spies embedded in the federal government.
At the end of the novel, Corsey admits that he feels closer to the ancient Greece he studied in school than to the generation returning from war. These young veterans brought with them new technologies, new money, and a tectonic shift in tastes and values. “Paris has become a suburb of New York, London is trying to become one.” But instead of accepting this new responsibility, the privileged Americans from Chesterbridge abhor it: “We are brought up in the age of horses. . . . Happiness to you and me is quiet country beauty,” Corsey tells his uncle while they sit in the police station trying to rescue Raoul from prison (370). Corsey cautiously acknowledges the possibility that his pro-Bolshevik son, Raoul, could be right: “The whole world has passed into the new machine age and you and I are as alien to it as if we were fifth-century Athenians,” his uncle says, to which Corsey responds, “And all we have to look forward to is Raoul’s world. Communism! But who in hell knows anything!” (371).
Corsey is more conservative than his author, who ironically shows how Corsey misunderstands the new French art practiced by his girlfriend. But the novel’s struggle to resolve issues of love, family, and sexuality in a postwar world of capitalism and Cubism is a problem that Corsey and Bullitt both share. The theme is a common one in the great literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, explored by Tolstoy, Freud, Joyce, and Fitzgerald. Despite the half century separating them, Tolstoy’s Karenin would find much in common with Corsey; and his wife, Anna, would probably feel at home in the salons of Chesterbridge and Washington as Bullitt described them. Even the title of It’s Not Done refers to the mainstream tradition of Russian socialism. The title is Bullitt’s response to the bible of Russian radicalism, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? In his novel Chernyshevsky calls for social protest by focusing not on economic inequality but on the unresolved issues of family and sexuality, on the impossibility of divorce, on the woman question, and prostitution. He offers hazy solutions—such as the organization of a sewing cooperative for street girls or emigrating to America for unhappy husbands. It was not these recipes that brought Chernyshevsky’s novel its fame, but a timely question: What is to be done? Writing from across the ocean half a century later, Bullitt offered an oblique, somewhat bitter reply: It’s not done.