How Are You Goin’ to Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)

How Are You Goin’ to Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?) is a popular-song refrain that recurs in fragments across the novel, turning a comic question about soldiers’ return into a sharper measure of what war and travel have changed. Its wording shifts from the farm to Broadway, and its appearances beside stories of uncertain futures give the refrain an unsettled answer: seeing the wider world may make going back possible, but it does not make homecoming easy.

A refrain in the news collage

The song enters a book where popular lyrics are part of the historical noise, not decorative pauses outside it. The Newsreels splice newspaper headlines, news fragments, advertising slogans, and song lyrics into quick, discontinuous sequences. Against this collage, the refrain sounds both familiar and newly pointed: a question that popular culture can repeat even as the surrounding reports register political upheaval and the consequences of war. The clipped form matters. Rather than stopping to explain what the song means, the text lets a recognizable line appear among other public words and leaves the reader to feel the friction between its jaunty premise and the unsettled world around it.

The refrain is printed first in two successive pieces: “How are you goin’ to keep ’em down on the farm” and “After they’ve seen Paree.” That division makes the title’s question feel like a small call and response. The first fragment imagines home as a place that can hold people; the second gives the reason that assumption has become doubtful. Paris is not simply a destination in the lyric. It stands for experience beyond the familiar, and the song’s humor depends on the possibility that such experience will alter the traveler’s attachment to home.

From farm to Broadway

A later variation changes the destination that exerts the pull. The line becomes “How are you goin’ to keep ’em away from Broadway,” followed by the fragments “Jazzin’ around” and “Paintin’ the town.” The movement is telling: the question no longer concerns only how to bring people back to rural life after Paris. It turns toward the city as a continuing attraction, then lets jazz and nightlife supply a brisk, repeatable answer. The song’s structure is adaptable enough to carry the transformation. Its central question survives while the place and pleasures that challenge home change.

That variation does not supply a settled judgment about city life. Instead, its compressed phrases make urban freedom sound at once lively and commercialized: a refrain that can be passed along in shorthand. The text’s collage form preserves that doubleness. The song can register the excitement of movement without pretending that excitement resolves the material or personal difficulties of the people who move. Its repeated question remains open even when the lyric’s rhythm seems buoyant.

The refrain beside unsettled futures

The song’s question becomes particularly charged when a former artillery trainee and Richard Ellsworth Savage meet in Paris before the Peace Conference’s first plenary session. Looking at the uniforms, jewels, and wartime splendor around them, the former trainee invokes the refrain: “How are you goin’ to keep ’em down on the farm . . . After they’ve see Paree?” The familiar lyric sits beside talk of what either man will do when military service ends. Richard Ellsworth Savage says he does not know what he will do after leaving the army; the other man has no clear plan either, does not want to return to the United States, and wishes revolution would come. The song’s joke about keeping people at home thus brushes against a more consequential uncertainty: neither a return nor a new direction is assured.

Richard Ellsworth Savage responds uneasily, warns that enemy ears are listening, and changes the subject. The exchange gives the refrain a sharper edge without turning it into a political program. The men’s conversation is constrained by the setting and by the possibility of being overheard; the lyric, by contrast, makes the question sound safely familiar. Their unease exposes the gap between the lightness of a popular line and the difficulty of speaking plainly about what follows war.

Other life stories in the novel deepen the contrast between the idea of home and the life actually available there. Eveline Hutchins spends an unhappy year in Santa Fe caring for her parents and managing a household, while her artistic ambitions and relationships pull her beyond that domestic role. In Paris, she and Paul Johnson make plans to return to the United States, marry, and find work; then, during a walk near the Seine, she tells him she is pregnant, abruptly changing those plans. Ben Compton and Helen Mauer, meanwhile, begin a free union while poor and politically committed, sharing a precarious room and imagining a society in which workers and lovers would have more choice. Read alongside these distinct circumstances, the song’s question about where people can be kept suggests more than a contrast between country and city: returning, staying, and making a home are shaped by obligations and economic limits as well as desire.

Repetition and meaning

The refrain’s force comes from recurrence with variation. It first names the farm and Paris, then turns toward Broadway and its nightlife, and later reappears in spoken conversation where two former servicemen face the uncertain prospect of civilian life. Each appearance retains the same underlying question while changing its immediate pressure. The song does not narrate a character’s resolution; it provides a public phrase through which movement, return, and resistance to return can be recognized.

That function fits the novel’s larger formal method. Alongside the Newsreels, the book uses “The Camera Eye” for subjective passages drawn from sensation and memory. These modes do different work: the refrain belongs to the shared, circulating language of popular culture, while “The Camera Eye” marks a more personal perspective. Their coexistence helps prevent any single voice from making the period’s meaning final. The song is neither a reliable forecast nor a simple celebration of escape. It is a tune-shaped question that keeps returning as the novel’s people confront the distance between where they have been and where they can go next.