Good husbands required more than a lure of
the body to take them off. And when they gave up a great romance
for respectability, like Newland Archer, at least they remained
gentlemen. There was a tragedy of thwarted development, of
martyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however
misguided, remained.
Not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of the 1920's,
drunk part of the time and reckless all of it, codeless, dutiless,
restless. For the virtuous among them Aphrodite, a vulgar,
shameless Aphrodite, was a nightly menace; for the weak among them
(such as Peyton Morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear;
for the wayward, like Lee, she was the only illusion worth
pursuing. To resist for a woman was to become "blasted and twisted
out of her purpose," to be "steeped in vinegar or filled with
tallow"; to resist for a man was to lose the integrity of his
personality. There were no moral compensations, for there is no
morality but self-development, at least in Mr. Hergesheimer's town
of Eastlake. There is no god for a man in love but Cytherea.
And this is one way of describing Mr. Hergesheimer's study of love
in idleness in the 1920's.
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