Facing the Abyss, by George Hutchinson (introduction)

AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE 1940S

Facing the

Abyss GEORGE HUTCHINSON

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INTRODUCTION

W

arren French was undoubtedly right when he wrote that the decade of the 1940s was “one of the longest, unloveliest and most ominously significant decades in human history,” beginning with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in late 1939 and ending with the invasion of South Korea, encompassing the dawning global awareness of the Nazi concentration camps and the invention and use of the atomic bomb.1 How did such epochal moments and events register in the contemporary literary culture, and how did writers and artists still armed with the tools and techniques of the early twentieth century attempt to bring shape and meaning to the world in their wake? That is the question from which this book began.

In the very center of the 1940s, anything seemed possible, from human extinction to the first real promise of universal peace: planetary consciousness, ecological awareness, world government. Subtending it all was dread—unprecedented, planetary dread. Maybe humanity would be scared into a functional unity to remake the world, or maybe everyone would die.

Decades are arbitrary designations, yet I was drawn to using the decade in this case as a frame. Studies of modern American literature and culture tend to end or begin at 1945, and they tend therefore to focus on

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2 | Introduction what preceded or followed the 1940s—the modernism of the 1910s–1930s, the “Cultural Front” of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance of 1920–1935, on the one hand, and, on the other, postmodernism, the Cold War, the Black Arts Movement, the New York School, the Beat Movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so forth of the 1950s and after. Because their center of gravity lies earlier or later in the century, the forties are screened out even as the year 1945 is regarded as pivotal. While hundreds of books have covered the political, social, cinematic, and military history of the United States during the 1940s, that decade has been the black hole of American literary history.

To take just one recent example, the nearly encyclopedic six-volume A History of the Book in America treats in volume 4 “The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940” and in volume 5 “Print Culture in Postwar America.” The period 1940–1945 is barely mentioned, and the “postwar” volume scarcely touches on the late 1940s.

Major overviews of American literary history fall into a similar pattern, one that tends to exaggerate a sense of total transformation identified with 1945. Some excellent exceptions to the rule have recently arrived, yet each of these focuses on a particular sector of the field—the discourse of a “crisis” over the nature of humanity, popular middle-class realist novels, ethnic literature, paperback books, or African American literature.2 All of these themes play through this book but with different conclusions or emphases, arising from considering the situation more holistically— paying attention to how the different literary forms and concerns function in interrelation and within particular conditions of the literary field.

I set off on this study in 2010 with no particular thesis to prove. It was an exploration of a period about which I had always been curious, shortly preceding my birth and shaping my childhood, the era when my parents came of age. My aim was to discover the distinctive themes, motifs, and aesthetic tendencies of a murky period in American literature but a momentous one in “History” and how these both refracted and bore witness to the times. I ended up thinking of the project as ecological, bringing attention to relationships between different actors and sectors of the field, how they interconnected, rather than taking the specialist’s approach to

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Introduction | 3 one particular feature. Intriguing patterns emerged, and by way of these the basic organization of this book.

Surprising connections also developed. Whereas, for example, philosophical pragmatism by most accounts was losing all purchase from the late 1930s through the 1940s, in some spheres of imaginative literature, art, and even human-rights activism it was going strong. Perhaps the authors and artists were “behind” the curve of theory—or simply relatively autonomous from it. Most of them were writing out of personal origins and experiences and trajectories that derived from childhood and early adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s. These connections met up with developments in racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation clustering about the desire for “universality.”

Many have concluded that the universalizing discourse of the 1940s, so important to the first universal declaration of human rights, the first international war-crimes trials, and the creation of the United Nations, effectively excluded most nonwhite, nonmale (and by extension nonheterosexual) subjects from the realm of the “human.” One critic has approvingly noted, in speaking of Mark Greif ’s recent book on the discourse of the “Crisis of Man” from 1933 to 1973, We have largely forgotten about all this rumination on the ethics, char-

acter, and ontology of the human, and Greif understands, of course, that much of the reason why is that in capitalizing (on) the figure of “Man” in various forms of existential crisis, writers of the period reified

the exclusion of most men and women on planet Earth from whole de-

partments of academic inquiry—particularly in the humanities and in literary criticism—as it was practiced in and out of the university.3

This may have been true in the universities, yet I had discovered in American literature of the 1940s an unprecedented level of attention, mainly outside the academy, to just such subjects, testing the limits of “universals” with particulars while maintaining universality as an aspiration. Attacks on antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia were ubiquitous in the 1940s, along with fear for survival of life as we know it.

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4 | Introduction Often these emphases connected with pragmatism’s dialectical conception of the relationship between individuality and community as well as between culture and democracy. Seen as shaping both the ethical consciousness of individuals and the communities in which they were formed, aesthetics was reconnected to common experience, with an emphasis on creative process and extending ethical boundaries beyond the fixed and traditional. In the context of a global war, it might extend toward an imagined planetary humanism.

One striking connection between now distinct fields of inquiry is the way black, queer, and Jewish authors in particular resisted minoritizing discourses in favor of universalizing ones, to borrow terms from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. They did this because they came to believe, in an era shadowed by fascism, that all forms of minoritization and oppression interconnect and that the battle for liberation must always be fought on broader grounds than identity politics alone provides, even though oppression operates by way of particularizing identity—marking the Jew, the Negro, the homosexual for subordination or worse. The universal exists not in the abstract human being, the classical liberal subject, but as a potential emerging at the shifting crossroads of social identities—never a fixed point—and a guard against ­limiting chauvinisms, separatist idealizations, or calcifying and monumentalizing traditions that curb the reach and power of creative imagination and that support inhumanity, to use a common term. The heroes of identity politics were Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, and the Ku Klux Klan. They have their much-diminished avatars today.

The universalism and self-professed humanism of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Jo Sinclair, Isaac Rosenfeld, Robert Duncan, Truman Capote, and many others in the immediate postwar period fly in the face of current academic prejudices. In his keynote address to the Modern Language Association at its 2016 Convention, the MLA president, Roland Greene, assumed the collective assent of the humanities professors he addressed when he asserted “that the war dealt a more decisive blow to universalist assumptions about literature than did any theory,” above all because the European scholars who had fled to the United States felt

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Introduction | 5 that the unreflective universalism of Eurocentric scholars had been shattered. “What I mean to suggest is that the history of the larger discipline of literary studies in the twentieth century can be divided into the universalist and postuniversalist periods, roughly before and after World War II.”4 The war, in this view, inspired such scholars as Eric Auerbach and René Wellek to resist “an unspoken universalism—a resistance that must be enacted afresh with every turn of method and articulated again in nearly every piece of scholarship.” Behind this address is the assertion of incommensurability—the notion that historical experience has created gaps impossible to traverse between different groups of human beings.

“Universalism haunts the study of literature, as the founding article whose repudiation, once unthinkable, came to be necessary for the field to maintain its connection to history and to lived experience.”5 On the contrary, World War II profoundly reinforced aspirations toward universalism among suppressed peoples, in multiple registers that resonate in the present. Those aspirations were splintered by the Cold War and its residues, not by World War II. It was not universalism but Eurocentric and “white” bourgeois parochialism that had failed (and were revived during the fifties). In fairness, I should add that Greene later asks, “Are we connected to each other? And might literature be understood not as the sign of a connection determined elsewhere—say, in nationality, language, or education—but as the fabric of that connection itself? How can literary works (and, we would add, film, video, rhetoric, and so on) not merely assume but establish collectivity?”6 That is precisely what important American writers of the 1940s were after, as are some artists today who are regarded as avant-garde in diverse media. The universal for these writers was not a fixed point, anterior or foundational, nor even a Platonic ideal, but an aspiration, even at times an ecstatic experience, always to be called forth in acts of making.

When Richard Wright narrates episodes of his youth in Black Boy (1945), he doesn’t mean to say that the fear, shame, and hatred that haunted his childhood can only be true for him, nor are they only relevant to other African Americans. He writes as an embodied human being to other human

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6 | Introduction beings—who also are afraid, shamed, and hateful for their own reasons— with a faith in the possibility that they will listen and come to a “human” (his term) understanding of his experience and also of themselves, whoever and wherever they are—and that they will be changed by that understanding as he was (so he said) in the very writing of his autobiography of 1945.

American authors from early on have entered the institution of literature from different social positions, for different purposes. In the history of the United States, that diversity of position and approach has inspired literary invention—from the early captivity and fugitive-slave narratives to the essays of Emerson (often shaped to appeal to far-flung lyceum audiences) and the chants of Whitman, the fascicles of Dickinson, the revolutionary use of point of view in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or the blues and jazz poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, the stories of Sui Sin Far, the sentences of Gertrude Stein. The force of such inventions endures in endless recurrences and transformations.

In most European and Asian countries, the ethnic and especially class origins of authors were not as diverse as in the United States. This is not a “nationalist” claim but a simple and important distinction relevant to the subject at hand. When university professors sought to impose a selective set of evaluative criteria on American literature just as it was entering the academy in midcentury, they narrowed the field to a canon of texts by white and mostly middle-class men. They posited standards of literary excellence that narrowed the field of attention. Not coincidentally, they found the literature of their own time, the 1940s, lacking. The story took hold that the literature of this decade doesn’t measure up to the enormity of its time. It is a main aspiration of this book to change that story.

The 1940s was a period of accomplishment—producing major works by established modernist writers as well as by new ones, including Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.

Native Son was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Gwendolyn Brooks

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Introduction | 7 published the book that would win her the Pulitzer Prize. The plays of Williams and Miller, still considered “classics,” gained instant fame.

The decade saw American literary and artistic culture become less insular and more deeply internationalized than ever before. It gave birth to film noir, abstract expressionism, and what later would be called postmodernism. It was the period in which the study of American literature became academically respectable, when American studies moved from a small hole-in-the-wall operation led by democratic socialists and New Deal liberals to an institutionalized and international field. Thus the 1940s is not only the vortex of the past century but a period in which literature—especially contemporary American literature—mattered to more people than ever before or since. Hovering around the abyss of meaning that the war opened up, literature of the forties is the most probing witness we have of the nation’s history and character in that pivotal period.

But not just that period: it opened up depths covered over in less extraordinary times.

The United States emerged as a dominant cultural force, New York replacing Paris and London as the culture capital of the Western world, in part because of the influx of European refugees and in part because of the devastation suffered by Europe and Asia in World War II. But another factor was the rising prestige of American literature in the preceding decade. American writing gained from its embrace by European trendsetters like Sartre, and American writers were huge on the international stage. Three Americans had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1930s: Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O’Neill (1936), and Pearl S. Buck (1938). (Lewis was the first American writer ever to win the award.)

In 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1943, no prizes were awarded in literature; in 1948 and 1949 T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner won the prize back to back.

Never before or after was American literature so dominant internationally. And much of the publishing industry of Europe had migrated to Manhattan, joining American firms in making it the center of international print culture.

The country was largely isolationist in the 1930s, despite fascism’s ominous spread, but between Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia and the

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8 | Introduction Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a dramatic reversal occurred. By 1941, as Allan Nevins pointed out in the 1948 Literary History of the United States, “National safety was seen to lie in international union. It was one of the most dramatic and drastic volte-face in all American history.” 7 The conversion affected every area of American thought and work. In the course of the decade, a culture formerly reluctant to engage in international entanglements emerged as a superpower, and its financial and cultural capital, New York, became what many regarded, particularly as the UN took form, as the capital of the world.

Yet in the literary culture one finds very little triumphalism. Instead, the dominant emotion is a new sense of dread, a haunting sensation of radical evil both without and within. Against popular recent notions of the “good war” and the “greatest generation,” authors engaged in the war as well as conscientious objectors and those largely uninvolved moved beyond the disillusionment of early modernists with World War I to a probing of existential guilt and the nature of “man,” attacks on racism and homophobia, questions about the survival of the human race, and ecological concerns.

Throughout the 1940s, the social consciousness and collectivist ethos of the thirties and the imperatives of the Popular Front lived on even as the Left splintered. Trotsky was assassinated; Stalinism, exposed. Zionism drew Jewish radicals to the cause of Israel. A reaction against communism took hold, but not against social democracy. By the latter years of the Depression, Americans had chosen two new paths that carried through the 1940s. Under Roosevelt’s leadership but with the help of leaders in both major parties, as the Literary History of the United States pointed out in 1949, the nation “had decided to seek domestic security in social measures, and world security in collective policies. National individualism and isolationism were seemingly forever dead.”8 The country had committed itself to a reshaping of the social order and a major recalibration of the relationship between the national government and society.

There would be drastic curtailment of concentrated wealth at one ­extreme and a commitment to end poverty on the other, to free the poor from want, hunger, and fear and to make them consumers. Plutocrats like the

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Introduction | 9 Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Morgans would no longer plot the course of society; elected federal, state, and local governments would.

Communism in the United States lost its intellectual cachet to other forms of social-democratic thinking that had more interest in aesthetics.

One reason the influence of Marxism over writers waned after the 1930s is that, though a powerful mode of historical explanation, it failed in its aspirations to predict. Communist Party methods in both labor organizing and cultural directives also turned artists off. But more importantly, Marxism could not address the need to bring form to unprecedented experience. Many writers grew bored with it. Rather than seeing literature as a means of changing the world in line with a materialist theory of history, in the 1940s authors saw it as a mode of witnessing and seeking meaning in absurdity. But unlike the avant-garde of the 1920s, they also emphasized the importance of communicating with a public.

The “art film” became commercially viable at the same time the paperback revolution began—first with pulp fiction but quickly spreading to “literary” fiction. And for the first time books by African American authors became bestsellers. Refugee publishers from the European continent arrived, along with a host of other editors and writers who changed the literary culture of the United States.

This is the decade in which the universities began replacing journalism and pulp factories as the training grounds of creative writers—and as patrons. Before and during the war, most poets and novelists supported themselves with journalism, scriptwriting for Hollywood, stories for slick magazines, adaptations of their novels for film, or pulp fiction. At the end of it, the returning soldiers inspired an expansion of creativewriting instruction in universities and the establishment of faculty lines and fellowships for novelists and poets—a main support for American literature since.

Literary scholarship in the United States tried to reconnect with contemporary life and letters. The pursuit of imaginative literature came under the purview of English departments just as creative writers grew more restive about their vocational reliance on journalism, advertising, and film. A renewed attention to aesthetic form rapidly gained stature as

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10 | Introduction a crucial concern for antifascists. The so-called New Criticism gained hold not as an apolitical scholasticism, as it later became and is most often remembered, but as part of a reclamation of the centrality of the humanities to higher learning and a mode of training critical, democratic citizens. Motivating this shift was a belief that concern for values and meaning had been subordinated in Western culture to scientific method, with catastrophic results. This interest in values and meaning was believed to distinguish the arts and humanities from journalism and the social sciences.

While the United States emerged as a global power, its most important writers questioned its moral bases. Fascism was not seen as only ­existing in Europe. Authors as diverse as Hemingway, Faulkner, Bulosan, Tolson, Mailer, and Rukeyser recognized and worried about forms of fascism at home, often identified with antiblack racism and, specifically, lynching. Two runaway bestsellers in nonfiction during the war concerned native fascism: Under Cover, by John Roy Carlson—pen name for Arthur Derounian, an underground spy who had infiltrated the ranks of the far right—and Sabotage: The Secret War Against America, by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, about the profascist activities of several congressmen, which the Dies committee attempted to suppress. Martha Gellhorn often expressed her belief that fascism would never have gained ground, nor a second world war have ultimately broken out, had the ruling elites of England and the United States not been secretly in favor of it (as a buffer to socialism) throughout the 1930s, which is one of the themes of her 1940 novel set in Czechoslovakia, A Stricken Field. In fact, the theme is one that links the writing of the 1940s to that of the 1930s, when Sinclair Lewis published his lacerating attack It Can’t Happen Here (1935). In this period, the Bollingen Prize of the Library of Congress, intended to be the nation’s highest poetry award, went to an unrepentant fascist, Ezra Pound, for a book of poems, blatantly worshipful of Mussolini, he wrote while detained in an open cage awaiting trial for treason.

The controversy convulsed the republic of letters.

In some of the best of the war novels—by Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), John Hersey (A Bell for Adano), and John Horne Burns

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Introduction | 11 (The Gallery)—American officers are characterized as fascists. A broadbased critique of antiblack racism and anti-Semitism, both of which were perceived through the lens of antifascism, was central to the literature of the decade from early on, continuous with leftist strains of the 1930s.

Critiques of the suppression of homosexuality inspired an extraordinary amount and quality of literary invention, in part because of the sexual energies and opportunities created by the war. Yet, as with African American and Jewish writers, “queer” writers resisted identity politics and aspired to universality. All forms of oppression, they stressed, interlocked. Alienation was the universal modern condition, and national minorities exemplified it.

No feminist identitarian movement like that of the 1970s emerged, either, but the critique of misogyny (which was epidemic in the forties) and of the hypersexualization and disempowerment of women constituted one of the most characteristic features of literature by women, in which satire and wit, perennial tools of the powerless, found a place at the table of the New York literary establishment—a subordinated one, provoking serious, sometimes self-lacerating indignation.

The 1940s is the period in which conservationist thinking turned ecological, partly in response to the war. Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and its essay on a “land ethic,” long revered in the modern ecological movement, were composed during the war and are rife with metaphors deriving from it. The war fundamentally shaped not only Leopold’s metaphorical arsenal but the very form of his thinking. Also striking in Leopold’s work is its emphasis on aesthetics in the struggle to preserve the balance of the natural world that people inhabit. As in Hemingway and Wright, the need for an aesthetic transformation supersedes purely political-­ economic approaches to the current situation. Attachment to the land is anchored in its beauty.

I have found much of the work treated here both unexpected and inspiring, yet I do not claim that the views of these artists suffice for our time nor that they represent the common sense of their own. We can never climb back into the many common senses of that era. Yet neither are their responses merely specific to their moment. They tapped into

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12 | Introduction and took inspiration from earlier experiments and have had both acknowledged and (mostly) unacknowledged repercussions ever since.

It is difficult to resist the rhetorical drama of the revolutionary change, singular “event,” or historical “break” around the date 1945, what the historian Ian Buruma has called “Year Zero.” It was one of the most extraordinary moments in modern history. But a fundamental and paradoxical finding of this book is that even through an “event” or historical turning point as dramatic as World War II, cultural forms tend toward recurrence, despite previously unimaginable changes. The fifties put a lid on many of the energies of the late 1930s and 1940s (which have antecedents in the 1850s and the 1910s–1920s), but that lid, too, would soon be blown off. We need new ways of thinking about cultural transformation, ways less dependent on narratives of radical rupture and historical periodization, which tend to screen out the role of habit, processes of incremental cultural change, and the recursive nature of experience and expression.

This book covers a broad swath but is necessarily selective; I bring attention to books and poems that reward reading today, some well known and others not. It is organized by what I have found to be the most important themes and motifs, especially those that would have an enduring importance in American culture to the present day. I also talk about changes in literary form, the melding of realism with surrealism, and the interplay between modernist abstraction and vernacular forms. Both thematically and institutionally, literature worked in close relationship with other realms of artistic and intellectual endeavor that were part of what might be called the “literary ecology” of this extraordinary period.

In thinking ecologically, so to speak, about the literary field, I hope to suggest how these various themes and motifs intersect.

Ecology involves studying relationships among organisms and between organisms and their nonorganic environment. To separate organisms and study them individually has merit but also contributes to specialization, hypercategorization, and, ultimately, myopia. Here I take the American literary-cultural field during a slice of time—the time considered epoch

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Introduction | 13 making—and investigate what seem to me its most significant features in interrelationship and across specialties. I do not always group authors by the social identities that are now routine (gender, race, sexuality, class), although each of these is fundamental to my argument. Most authors of the time would appreciate this, which means something in itself, regardless of what we might make of it today—realizing that whatever we make of it today is not what they would have made of it. The major concerns of the time are both like and unlike ours.

The literatures in each of what many scholars now think of as separate literary traditions turn out to be less separable from one another than we have come to assume, even as the authors created works that have been used to define those traditions. The authors functioned in specific artistic and social environments and intersected in the field of the “literary,” which cannot be easily mapped, for the very reason that artists are drawn to boundaries. They usually come from or address the borders of social categories, reaching for new resources of language. That may be one reason we find some literary work unfixed in meaning and having an aura of timelessness, regardless of how particular and formative was the social ground in which it arose. Significant artists, in postfeudal societies at least, emerge from the interstices, from shadows cast by what is understood, a threshold position that affects their relationship to common time.

The point here is not that traditions are unimportant but that they are always retrospective and consolidating. Invention happens at the edge of cultures and their temporal orderings. Like biotic communities, cultures are always imbricated with others, changing in relationship to others, in process, yet they adapt and persist if possible.

As pivotal as the decade of the forties was, as profound its political and economic contortions, it was a turn not a break, culturally speaking.

Cultures reconstitute themselves; language, habit, and memory persist across catastrophic shifts. They interconnect and remake themselves in relation. We can see this, from the long view, in the national cultures and structures of power that survived World War II, in altered form, particularly those of the United States. This takes me beyond my subject but

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14 | Introduction not beyond the method of this book, which finds both succession and repetition amid change even through what Isaac Rosenfeld called an Age of Enormity. Finally, in drawing attention to American literature of the 1940s I hope to demonstrate its distinctive qualities and what it accomplished that no other medium could during a high tide of both patriotism and planetary consciousness.