A cheeky comedian novel turns 100 : NPR

The 12 months 1925 was an excellent one for American literature — actually, most likely one of the best ever. The Great Gatsby was printed that 12 months, and so was Hemingway’s quick story assortment, In Our Time, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Alain Locke’s landmark Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro, and Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, which gained the Pulitzer Prize. There’s additionally Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and, I’ll cease there, besides to say that The New Yorker journal was additionally based in 1925.

Amidst all these heavyweights, it is simple to miss a cheeky little comedian novel; however, in 1925, Anita Loos was the creator laughing all the best way to the financial institution. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — a story of two flappers on the prowl for sugar daddies bearing diamonds — was a runaway bestseller, translated into a number of languages, made right into a stage play and a silent movie, now misplaced. In 1953, Loos’ novel was up to date and reimagined as a musical, starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee, the blondest blonde of all of them, and Jane Russell as her snappy brunette aspect kick, Dorothy.

I’ve solely seen the movie, so the novel, newly reissued as a Modern Library paperback, was a revelation to me. Think: the zany surrealism of the Marx Brothers crossed with the need — each sexual and materials — of Sex and the City. No marvel James Joyce was one of many novel’s many intellectual modernist followers.

Loos wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes within the type of diary entries written by Lorelei: There’s not one steady plot right here a lot as there are dozens of vignettes, plenty of them satirizing social points like Prohibition and censorship. Here, as an illustration, is Lorelei’s description of one in all her many suitors, a reformer named Mr. Spoffard. She tells us:

… Mr. Spoffard spends all of his time issues that spoil peoples morals. So Mr. Spoffard actually should have very very robust morals or else all of the issues that spoil different peoples morals would spoil his morals. … So I advised Mr. Spoffard that I assumed that civilization will not be what it should be and we actually should have one thing else to take its place.

Is Lorelei actually naïve or fake? Reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is like listening to a Gracie Allen skit on olde time radio: The floor humor derives from how harebrained Gracie, like Lorelei, appears to be, however maybe the joke is basically on anybody who dismisses both of them as simply one other dizzy dame.

Courtesy of their male admirers, Lorelei and the extra clearly shrewder Dorothy dine out at swank Manhattan joints like The Colony and Trocadero and settle for tributes of champagne and square-cut diamond bracelets. Early in her diary, Lorelei tells us that she’s determined to flee to Paris — with Dorothy in tow — to be able to “improve my writing” and keep away from marriage “to an author, where he is the whole thing and all I would be [is] the wife.”

A practice tour to Vienna follows that units the stage for one of many weirdest encounters in all literature: an overwrought Lorelei’s session with “Dr. Froyd.” Here’s a snippet from that session:

So evidently everyone appears to have a factor known as inhibitions, which is once you wish to do a factor and you don’t do it. So you then dream about it as an alternative. So Dr. Froyd requested me, what I appeared to dream about. So I advised him that I by no means actually dream about something. I imply I take advantage of my brains a lot within the day time that at evening they don’t appear to do anything however relaxation. …

So then Dr. Froyd mentioned that every one I wanted was to domesticate just a few inhibitions and get some sleep.

Case closed.

Edith Wharton, who was one other well-known fan of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, declared that it was “the great American novel.” I would not go that far. But on this retro period of cottagecore, trad wives and puffed-sleeved prairie attire galore, how enjoyable it’s to journey again to the daybreak of the fashionable age and revel within the giddy freedoms of flapperdom.