The year 1925 was a very good one for American literature — in fact, probably the best ever. The Great Gatsby was published that year, and so was Hemingway's short story collection, 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 won the Pulitzer Prize. There's also Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and, I'll stop there, except to say that The New Yorker magazine was also founded in 1925.
Amidst all these heavyweights, it's easy to overlook a cheeky little comic novel; but, in 1925, Anita Loos was the author laughing all the way to the bank. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — a tale of two flappers on the prowl for sugar daddies bearing diamonds — was a runaway bestseller, translated into multiple languages, made into a stage play and a silent film, now lost. In 1953, Loos' novel was updated and reimagined as a musical, starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee, the blondest blonde of them all, and Jane Russell as her snappy brunette side kick, Dorothy.
I've only seen the film, 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 desire — both sexual and material — of Sex and the City. No wonder James Joyce was one of the novel's many highbrow modernist fans.
Loos wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the form of diary entries written by Lorelei: There's not one continuous plot here so much as there are dozens of vignettes, lots of them satirizing social issues like Prohibition and censorship. Here, for instance, is Lorelei's description of one of her many suitors, a reformer named Mr. Spoffard. She tells us:
... Mr. Spoffard spends all of his time looking at things that spoil peoples morals. So Mr. Spoffard really must have very very strong morals or else all the things that spoil other peoples morals would spoil his morals. ... So I told Mr. Spoffard that I thought that civilization is not what it ought to be and we really ought to have something else to take its place.
Is Lorelei truly naïve or faux? Reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is like listening to a Gracie Allen skit on olde time radio: The surface humor derives from how harebrained Gracie, like Lorelei, seems to be, but perhaps the joke is really on anyone who dismisses either of them as just another dizzy dame.
Courtesy of their male admirers, Lorelei and the more obviously shrewder Dorothy dine out at swank Manhattan joints like The Colony and Trocadero and accept tributes of champagne and square-cut diamond bracelets. Early in her diary, Lorelei tells us that she's decided to flee to Paris — with Dorothy in tow — in order to "improve my writing" and avoid marriage "to an author, where he is the whole thing and all I would be [is] the wife."
A train excursion to Vienna follows that sets the stage for one of the weirdest encounters in all literature: an overwrought Lorelei's session with "Dr. Froyd." Here's a snippet from that session:
So it seems that everybody seems to have a thing called inhibitions, which is when you want to do a thing and you do not do it. So then you dream about it instead. So Dr. Froyd asked me, what I seemed to dream about. So I told him that I never really dream about anything. I mean I use my brains so much in the day time that at night they do not seem to do anything else but rest. ... So then Dr. Froyd said that all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.
Case closed.
Edith Wharton, who was another famous fan of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, declared that it was "the great American novel." I wouldn't go that far. But in this retro era of cottagecore, trad wives and puffed-sleeved prairie dresses galore, how fun it is to travel back to the dawn of the modern age and revel in the giddy freedoms of flapperdom.
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