“The American boy’s name was Lanning Budd; people called him Lanny, an agreeable name, easy to say” (opening line).
As part of my Pulitzer Prize reading project, I decided to go back through and explore some of the novels that are part of a larger series beyond the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. In this case, Upton Sinclair’s Dragon’s Teeth (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943) was the third book in his popular Lanny Budd series, an eleven-book epic saga which follows a young man named Lanny Budd as he accidentally encounters some of the most important events of the 20th century. Once again, I was fortunate enough to read a first edition copy of World’s End, the first book in the Lanny Budd series, thanks to my local library.
At the outset of this historical fiction work, Upton Sinclair reminds readers that some characters portrayed in the novel are intended to be factually accurate representations of real people, while others are very clearly intended to be fictional. Our series protagonist is Lanning “Lanny” Budd, a privileged boy with long wavy brown hair, brown eyes, and a slender build. He was born in Switzerland and grew up along the French Riviera. We first encounter Lanny at the age of thirteen as he has been left alone in Dresden at the Hellaru School where he has taken up dancing and performance arts, w here he dreams of being a Dalcroze dancer and learning philosophy, while his parents travel elsewhere across the world. His father Robbie is in the United States tending to the family company, a producer of small arms and ammunition (Budd Gunmakers Corporation) while his fashionable mother Beauty is on a yachting trip to the fiords of Norway. His parents claim they are divorced (though, in truth, we later learn they were never actually married). Lanny’s father has a proper family back in Connecticut while his mother has taken a secret lover, Marcel Detaze. While Lanny delves further into the arts, his newfound passion is contrasted with the foreboding rise of European nationalism shortly before the outbreak of World War I:
“Forty-two years had passed since Europe had had a major war, and it was evident to all that love and brotherhood were stealing into the hearts of the furies, and that Orpheus was conquering with his heaven-sent voice and golden lyre” (6).
“On a wide plain just below Hellaru was an exercise ground of the German army. Here almost every day large bodies of men marched and wheeled, ran and fell down and got up again. Horses galloped, guns and caissons rumbled and were swung about, unlimbered, and pointed to an imaginary foe. The sounds of all this floated up to the tall white temple, and when the wind was right, the dust came also. But the dancers and musicians paid little attention to it. Men had marched and drilled upon the soil of Europe ever since history began; but now there had been forty-two years of peace, and only the people remembered war. So much progress had been made in science and international relations that few men could contemplate the possibility of wholesale bloodshed in Europe. The art lovers were not among those few” (9).
Throughout the novel, Lanny experiences some extraordinary moments in 20th century history, such as a flying Zeppelin which akin to “a giant silver fish, gliding slowly across the sky.” From his home in the Cote d’Azur Mediterranean community, Lanny travels across Europe, making friends like Kurt Meissner (the dauphin of a Prussian family) and Eric “Rick” Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson (son of a prominent English family), while rubbing shoulders with diplomats, dignitaries, and aristocrats from around Europe during his formative teenage years (at one point he is amusingly taught the “facts of life” from a doctor).
“Suppose they were to fail – what then?… We should sink into barbarism again, into another dark age. That is why the mission of art is such a high one, to save humanity by teaching a true love of beauty and respect for culture” (25).
The novel serves as a kind of travelogue as Lanny visits friends from England and France to Greece and the United States. But as the war rages on in Europe, Lanny is sent home with his father to Newcastle, Connecticut where he meets this side of his family. He falls in love with Rosemary Codwilliger (pronounced “Culliver”) when he turns sixteen, and later finds a new paramour in Gracyn Phillipson –all while his father dutifully ensures his son makes the proper choices in life, he is particularly concerned with Lanny falling for the rising tide of “syndicalist” propaganda. This all occurs while the United States enters World War I and the question of patriotism becomes paramount:
“First of all Lanny ought to make up his mind on the subject of war. Did he agree with his father that men would go on fighting forever and ever, because that was their nature and nothing could change it? Did he agree with his grandfather that God had ordained every war, and that what happened on this earth was of little importance compared with eternity?” (400).
Lanny observes as the hostile political dynamic in Europe unfold from afar, including the Russian Revolution, and then Woodrow Wilson’s decision for the United States to join the “war for democracy.” When he turns nineteen, Lanny becomes the secretary to Professor Alston and he sails back to France for the Peace Conference wherein President Wilson’s Fourteen Points and League of Nations are agreed upon (the end of the book even includes a brief stint in jail as Lanny is arrested by French authorities for protesting the excessive punishment of Germany) while the “Big Four” imperial powers begin carving up the world.
“Lanny found himself, with hardly any warning, thrust into the midst of a beehive of creatures in a state of violent activity. It has always been the practice of scholars and specialists to meet in congresses and conventions, and they always feel that what they are doing is of vital importance, but it may be doubted if any group of such persons had ever had such good reason to hold this conviction. Some fifty American scholars, plus librarians and custodians of documents and typists and other assistants, several hundred persons in all, had been appointed to remedy the evils of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia, which had been accumulating for no one could say how many hundreds of years. All the world had been told that the evils were to remedied, and all but a few skeptical ones believed it, and waited in suspense for the promises to be kept. The fate of hundreds of millions of persons for an indefinite future might depend upon the advice which these scholars would give; so the learned ones carried in their souls a colossal burden of responsibility, and never in the history of mankind had so much conscientiousness been crowded into one structure as was to be found at the junction of the Rue Royale and he Palace de la Concorde at Christmas time of the year 1918” (486).
While there are themes of antisemitism and nationalism in this novel, as well as Upton Sinclair’s jaded view of war, the true “world’s end” in this novel is the demise of Lanny’s youthful optimism for his idealistic world of art and reason. The First World War carries with it many casualties, some seen and others unseen. World’s End concludes with Lanny returning to his family home in the Cote d’Azur, but with ten more books ahead in the series, Lanny’s adventures are only just beginning.
Sinclair, Upton. World’s End. The Literary Guild of America, New York, 1940.