” This timeless moment… warm, mindless, immediate” …
John Held Jr.’s moment came with the season of Coolidge prosperity, a season so warmly sunlit that few noticed the slanting rays were autumnal. The conflicts of the postwar adjustment period were over, 1914 with its fashions and its foibles had sunk below the horizon, the now was here. Intellectuals sitting in self-conscious exile at the Dome drinking their cognacs might consider themselves the lost generation, but the new generation in America was Held’s- sheiks in coonskins with hip flasks, shebas in helmet hats carrying tapered cigarette holders. They are models rather than caricatures, hey-hey sayers to a life that reaches its thundering climax in the cheering sections at the Saturday big game.
After the game there are ritual dances along fraternity row. Over the fieldstone mantel of th fraternity-house living room stand the cabalistic Greek letters. In the corner the saxophones wail and the bulb flashes on and off in the interior of the bass drum to light up a windmill or a waterfall or a sailboat by moonlight painted on the drumhead. A few couples are dancing, a few more are in the kitchen mixing drinks, but most are twined in each others’ arms in the convenient alcoves or along the wide staircase as they neck with concentrated unconcern.
After the dance there is the ride home. Some of the dough-heavy sheiks may drive a Jordan Playboy, with port and starboard lights, but most settle for the modified Model T, the tin-Lizzy touring with the top and windshield removed and its sides daubed with legends: Four Wheels-No Brakes; Stop Me If You’ve Heard This; Enter by rear. Under the trees the last sheik parks with the last sheba for the last drink and the last neck. Yet for all this hip-flasked groping in the moonlight, it is somehow innocent, or almost so, and has the poignancy of everything that is brief.
The lengthening of women’s skirts was the curtain ringing down on John Held’s campus world, and it was the skirts rather than the stock market that marked the end. Sheiks andshebas danced no more. Held himself turned back to his earlier woodcut style and forward to the New Yorker where with mock-primitive sophistication he illustrated the Franki and Johnnie songs of the nineties. The Depression did not cut him down materially. With his first surge of success he had bought a stock farm in Connecticut and he continued to live there through the thirties as the artist of Pious Friends and Drunken Companions and as a dapper country gentleman.
Tall, dark, and still exuberant- heavily tattooed with eagles, girls, anchors and roses- he often amused himself by dancing in public.Although in his illustrationshe stuck to the archaisms of his woodcuts, in several volumes of short stories he now wrote- Grim Youth, The Flesh is Weak, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to reacapture the coon-coated past.
When, in the 1950’s, another generation began to look back with a certain sentimental wistfulness to the manner of the twenties,Held tried to revive the bright and brittle dream of the lost midwestern campus. The impulse failed, and with it Held himself. He dies in 1958. In a sense his failure was that of his sheiks and shebas who, gaily unprepared, had to learn suddenly the most ancient of lessons- that time is fleeting, that winter alwa
ollows autumn, and that whatever the next spring may bring, it is always another season.