Midcentury Suspension, by Claire Seiler (introduction)

INTRODUCTION The Midcentury Problem

On November 9, 1948, the Gotham Book Mart and Vanguard Press cohosted a reception for Dame Edith and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Celebrated as writers and as patrons of modernism, the Sitwell siblings had recently arrived in Manhattan at the start of an American tour. Theirs was one of many such visits British writers made to the United States in the late 1940s, when the easing of wartime travel restrictions coincided with a wave of stateside Anglophilia. No obscure literary affair, the Sitwells’ visit merited a seven-page spread in Life magazine on December 6, 1948.1 There, amid an all but requisite set of photographs of Dame Edith in full aristocraticeccentric splendor, appeared what has since become an iconic photograph of literary Manhattan at the middle of the twentieth century.

Already in 1948, Life’s punning title for this image, “A Collection of Poets,” could not quite hold. The original caption strains by hyphenation to fit “Playwright-Poet” Tennessee Williams and “Novelist-Poet” Gore Vidal into the “collection.” Readers of Life would know Williams, standing at left in the back row, as the author of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), for which he had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and might well know Vidal, third from left in the back row, as the author of one of the year’s more notorious novels, The City and the Pillar (1948). In fact, in the late 1940s, the fourteen writers posed awkwardly around the Sitwells were so plainly

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FIGURE 0.1 Writers gathered at the Gotham Book Mart to welcome the Sitwells, November 8, 1948.

Getty Images. Creator: Lisa Larsen.

working across genres as to defy standard literary categorization or tidy journalistic pun. The photograph captures writers at different stages of their careers, affiliated with various national literatures, involved in several aesthetic movements, representative of disparate political commitments, and situated in a range of institutional contexts. Afforded a fuller identifying caption than Life’s, the Gotham Book Mart photograph records a midcentury literary variety—and, this book will argue, vitality—that reigning models for understanding transatlantic twentieth-century literature and culture tend to elide.

The Sitwells sit, dignified, at the center of the group. Behind them, from left to right, the young writers Williams, Richard Eberhart, Vidal, and José Garcia Villa lean against bookcases. In 1948, Eberhart was a busy poet and verse dramatist who still held a day job at the Butcher Polish Company in

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Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Filipino poet Villa, a favorite of Dame Edith’s, was at work on his book of experimental comma poems, Volume II, which New Directions would bring out the next year.2 Perched on a stool to the Sitwells’ right is the Englishman Stephen Spender. Best known then as a member of the Auden generation of the 1930s, Spender had recently published a memoir, European Witness (1946), about the devastation he saw on two visits to Germany in the summer and fall of 1945, and a new volume, Poems of Dedication (1947). The older American poets Marya Zaturenska and Horace Gregory, a married couple, sit on a bookshelf behind Spender.

Russian-born Zaturenska had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry a decade earlier, for Cold Morning Sky (1937); Gregory was a well-regarded poetcritic and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. The pair had recently collaborated on A History of American Poetry, 1900–1940 (1946).3 At the foreground of the photograph are, from left to right, William Rose Benét, Charles Henri Ford, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz. Though it must have been coincidental, the seating of Benét and Schwartz across from one another, heads to camera, makes a fitting image of a changing literary guard. Benét, a poet and editor who had just brought out a Reader’s Encyclopedia of world literature (1948), had helped found the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924; Schwartz, a prominent poet more than twentyfive years Benét’s junior, was in 1948 an editor of the little magazine Partisan Review, then at the height of its outsize influence on U.S. intellectual and literary culture. Within months of the Gotham Book Mart gathering, the Saturday and Partisan reviews would come to stand for the opposing sides of middlebrow reactionary conservatism and highbrow liberal tolerance, respectively if not entirely fairly, in the controversy surrounding Ezra Pound’s receipt of the first Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos (1948).4 Seated cross-legged on the floor between Benét and Schwartz is Ford, a surrealist poet and another favorite of Dame Edith’s. Not long after the Gotham gathering, she would write a laudatory preface to Ford’s Sleep in a Nest of Flames, which, like Villa’s Volume II, was published by New Directions in 1949. Behind Schwartz, Jarrell leans back against the bookshelves, his eyes cast down. His most recent book of poems, Losses (1948), confirmed his status as a “prominent high-brow soldier-poet of America’s war.”5 That Jarrell never saw combat speaks to the larger redefining, at midcentury, of terms like soldier-poet and war poet.

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Jarrell was also, by any definition, the preeminent young poet-critic of the day, and one peer whose work he especially admired was Elizabeth Bishop. In the Gotham Book Mart photograph, she stands with her hands folded, ladylike, on the back of the chair of her mentor, Marianne Moore.

Bishop made her name with her first book, North & South (1946), and by November 1948 was two years into a first-reading agreement with the New Yorker. Moore, in striking black hat, was at work on her translation of La Fontaine’s fables and was the lone woman among the group of senior American modernists achieving belated or renewed fame—or, in Pound’s case, infamy—after the war.6 Moore’s Collected Poems would win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1951. Last but as far as possible from least, there is W. H. Auden. Taller on his feet than most of the writers in this “Collection,” Auden nonetheless sits atop a library ladder, presiding and removed. A towering figure in American letters by 1948 and a U.S. citizen since May 20, 1946, Auden was the author most recently of The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947), which book-length poem gave “the age” its name.

Finally, at the foreground of the photograph, an empty chair. Who might have sat there? One can make predictable sense of the Gotham picture by imagining the empty chair taken by a writer who obviously “belongs” in one of the literary lineages, affinity groups, or rivalries that by now can be too readily legible in it. Conversely, since the Gotham Book Mart photograph depicts a refreshing literary variety but, unsurprisingly for the late 1940s, next to no racial diversity, another model for reading the image is to imagine seating an excluded writer in the empty chair, thus practicing in microcosm the expansion of the canon that has justly motivated a good deal of literary scholarship since at least the 1970s. In conversation with but in contrast to these and like models for molding the archival particularity of the Gotham Book Mart photograph into period-historical coherence, Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II proposes still a third approach. This book invokes the Book Mart picture not as evidence with which to correct or confirm established critical templates for reading in—or, too often, reading through—the midcentury period, but rather as an emblem of the problem that the midcentury still poses for twentieth-century literary studies. Iconic yet enigmatic, the Gotham Book Mart photograph depicts nothing so clearly as how

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unpictured, how partially seen and selectively analyzed, the literary middle of the twentieth century remains.

Midcentury Suspension asks: what would it mean to approach AngloAmerican literature and culture of the middle of the twentieth century from a critical vantage other than those long afforded by modernism and postmodernism or, in more recent years, by the new modernist studies and Post45? What new insights emerge from approaching the midcentury synchronically, rather than seeking diachronic late modernist causes or cold war or postwar effects? What would twentieth-century literary and cultural study look like if it were to understand midcentury as something more than a dating modifier of such institutionalized fields and categories? What might we gain from reading the century not forward from the modernist heave, but outward from its historical middle? Or from broaching midcentury as a substantive alternative to periodization by ostensibly discrete wartimes?

This book takes the midcentury as problem—and possibility—for thought rather than as foregone conclusion of modernism or bland transition to our own contemporary age. Out of neglected archival, print culture, discursive, and literary records of what it will show was a self-consciously midcentury period, the book finds and asserts suspension—the sense of being between beginnings and endings, lapsed certainties and new potentialities, recent horrors and strange, often opaque futures—as a heuristic for reading transatlantic literature and culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Restoring suspension as a principal imaginative construct of the midcentury and developing suspension as a critical practice for reading it, the book reconfigures periodic logics of twentieth-century literary study that have long produced and still maintain the comparative obscurity of self-reflexively midcentury literary projects, structures of feeling, and habits of mind.

Midcentury Suspension advances four interlocking arguments, each at a deliberate pace and place. It begins by excavating the seemingly drab term midcentury from print, public, and literary culture of the Anglophone North Atlantic in the wake of the Second World War. It thereby traces the emergence of the rhetorical and discursive conditions for a distinctly midcentury literature that cohered around the 1950 mark. Next, over four

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chapters, the book discerns how various registers of suspension— including the tropological, affective, behavioral, and sensory—shaped the midcentury works of a group of major writers. More accurately, the book attends to the suspensions that structure the midcentury works of a deliberately wide-ranging collection of writers who have not been studied together before—a nongroup composed of Auden, Samuel Beckett, Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. If this “collection” seems at least as eclectic as the one squished into the Gotham Book Mart photograph, then this apparent eclecticism bespeaks the third line of argument running through Midcentury Suspension. As it recovers material and conceptual connections among its six core writers and the irreducibly historical atmosphere of the midcentury, the book demonstrates that the apparent idiosyncrasy of its core archive is extrinsic to middle of the century itself. As distinct from the progressive, prepositional grammar of from . . . to that underpins much twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary scholarship across national and linguistic traditions, Midcentury Suspension hovers at midcentury. What it finds there, or then, is a critically rich but unmined set of experiences, feelings, and ideas of suspension in the century’s fraught middle. Much more than a shared theme among writers, suspension constitutes, in this book’s final line of argument, a historically rooted and conceptually expansive new model for reading transatlantic literature of the midcentury.

EPOCHAL KEYWORDS

Each term of this book’s title names a site of inquiry. To the extent that suspension harmonizes with concepts that, despite generally negative connotations, have helped to drive the discipline of literary studies since at least the New Critical turn (e.g., ambiguity, indeterminacy, deferral), it invites scholarly attention. But it is hardly self-evident that midcentury merits critical inquiry. For one thing, only in the histories of art and industrial design and in the market for antiques and replicas does midcentury currently do any reliably descriptive work. In those fields and spaces, midcentury modern denotes the sleek, streamlined aesthetic meticulously recreated in the television series Mad Men (2007–15), set in the late 1950s and early 1960s.7 For another, midcentury lacks the aesthetic potency or geopolitical referentiality of the terms or phrases—such as postwar or late modern, cold war

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or after 1945—for which it is often used as a rough synonym. It scans as neutral or arbitrary. For still another, although midcentury applies now mostly as a time stamp, the time stamp it provides is imprecise. In twentiethcentury historiography, literary and otherwise, midcentury is an accordion term: it expands and contracts to designate any span of years from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Nor does persistent underestimation of midcentury literature help.

Maybe counterintuitively, one finds ample evidence of routine minimization of midcentury writing in the expanding body of scholarship aiming to reanimate interest in the midcentury, in its assorted spans, or to revalue specific writers and works of the 1940s and 1950s.8 In this burgeoning field, it has become common practice to proceed from, so as to correct, an inherited assumption that midcentury writing was somehow lacking and resigned to being so. Scholars of British fiction of the period are prone to cite as their provocation Malcolm Bradbury’s essay “ ‘Closing Time in the Gardens’: Or, What Happened to Writing in the 1940s” (1987), in which the novelist, who came of age in 1950, describes the “relative artistic silence of the period from 1939 till toward the end of the late 1940s.”9 Not that anyone had to wait until the 1980s to receive this wisdom. In August 1948, Bishop and Robert Lowell, for example, had fun with a “wonderful” letter she received from Poetry magazine: “It requests a contribution & congratulates me on my poetry’s having ‘perceptivity’ & ‘sureness,’ etc., that ‘seem often to be lacking in the output of the run-down sensibility of the forties.’ I think we should make a modest fortune by working out a prescription for run-down sensibilities,” Bishop wrote.10 The apparent vacancy of midcentury finally points to two larger, mutually inflected habits of mind that shape familiar perceptions of the chronological progress and ethical-historical regress of the twentieth century. The first habit, to which I will return, is academic and disciplinary: especially but not exclusively in the British and U.S. contexts, modernist and twentiethcentury literary and cultural studies still tend to describe the midcentury in terms of cultural or historical forces that were either spent or incipient, or as a period remarkable primarily for witnessing the dusk of modernism or the dawn of “the period formerly known as the contemporary.”11 The second habit is a popular one: it has long been commonplace to think of oneself or one’s times as located within a century, and to attach some meaning, however vague, to the unit of the century itself. One might consider in

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this vein the powerful career of Henry Luce’s phrase “the American century.” First articulated in Life in February 1941, the phrase yoked a call for the international exercise and expansion of U.S. power to the apparent neutrality of the chronological unit. Or one might think of the many early prognostications about the character of the twenty-first century, such as the “Google century,” the “China century,” and the “digital century” or its epochal cousin, the “digital age.” These descriptors respectively accede to corporate branding of historical time, imply the threat posed to U.S. power by an implicitly racialized nation-state, or assert a tacitly optimistic technological paradigm in the face of the political, humanitarian, and environmental crises that characterize the twenty-first century thus far. In each formulation, the arbitrary unit of the century launders loaded assumptions about what the future must be and on whose terms it ought to be envisioned or protected.

At and in part motivated by the turn of the present century, the philosopher Alain Badiou began to concentrate on what thought might be contained in the unit of the century. His book Le Siècle (2005; English translation, 2007) describes the historical emergence of the century as a keyword only in the twentieth century and asks “if the phrase ‘twentieth century’ bears a certain pertinence for thinking, in a manner that goes beyond mere empirical calculation.”12 Rather than take “the century as an objective datum,” Badiou begins his investigation by sketching out three historical narratives to which the phrase twentieth century can “plausibly” refer: the communist century (1914–89), the totalitarian century (1917–76), and the liberal century, which begins, “at the earliest, after the seventies (the final years of revolutionary fervor), [and] lasts only thirty years.”13 To facilitate “the passing of judgments” on what occurred in the twentieth century, Badiou argues, these and like distillations at once curtail the span of the century and summon the century as “some kind of objective or historical unity.”14 The century’s chronological wholeness validates, at least rhetorically, historical narratives that are necessarily partial and ideologically suspect.

Checking habitual historiographical recourse to “the century” as a manifest whole, Badiou asks how the twentieth century “has come to be subjectivated.”15 The century needs philosophical inquiry, he argues, not only because the idea of the century itself prompted much of the most significant thought and art of the twentieth century but also because “the

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century” became a principal means by which that art and thought, especially avant-garde art and thought, understood or effected its own historicity. This reasoning might seem tautological. For Badiou that is part of the point—and the stakes of attempting to “think” the century could not be higher. By his logic, if we assume we cannot or need not “think” the century, then we risk ceding this key category of understanding to the “order of the unthinkable, or of the intractable” attributed to Nazism specifically or Evil in general.16 For Midcentury Suspension, the utility of Badiou’s Le Siècle resides equally in its core project—the exertion of intellectual pressure on a category so accustomed as to seem inconsequential—and in its principle of selection.

Badiou announces his intention to work inductively: “Our privileged documents will be the texts . . . which evoke the meaning that the century held for its own actors; documents which, while the century was still underway, or had only just begun, made ‘century’ into one of their keywords.”17 The canon that comes across in Badiou’s lessons evinces, and extends, the history of imperialist chronologies: in his study, the twentieth century is “subjectivated” mostly by white European male artists. His privileged documents are also often documents of privilege. But it also noteworthy that Badiou’s program implies that the substantive meanings of the century become perceptible or somehow important at either the beginning (“only just begun”) or the end (“was still underway”) of the twentieth century. If the century’s “meanings” are tacitly assumed to coalesce at its chronological poles, or to be articulated only toward epochal turns, then even in the most thoroughgoing contemporary philosophical investigation of the century as a category, the midcentury drops out of view. In constructing the twentieth century as an ideational whole made up of the sum of its early and late parts, Badiou’s method forecloses even the question of the particular “relation” the midcentury “entertained with the historicity of its own thought.”18 At the historical middle of the twentieth century, however, midcentury, 1950, the half-century, and like terms achieved the status of keywords in Raymond Williams’s sense. Though Badiou does not acknowledge Williams, it is difficult to think of his conceiving of Le Siècle without the model of Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). Or perhaps without William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words (1951), either. That both Keywords and Complex Words originated at midcentury is no coincidence.

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Different as they are from one another, Empson’s esoteric and Williams’s demotic project are alike in step with a broad, intense scrutiny at midcentury of the deceitful, immoral, and ultimately murderous ends toward which various actors, including politicians and literary critics, had bent language and distorted plain vocabulary. (Deceitful, immoral, murderous: I adapt these damningly accurate adjectives from George Orwell’s classic essay “Politics and the English Language” [1946], the pithiest distillation of the period scrutiny of usages so contorted and lexicons so euphemistic as to amount to criminality.)19 Whereas Empson and Williams are now often taken as emblematic of, respectively, the academic ascendance of the New Criticism and the assertion of Marxist theory after the Second World War, Complex Words and especially Keywords also attest to disparate thinkers’ need at midcentury for a conceptual and practical vocabulary to make sense of their historical moment. Inconspicuous in their ubiquity, midcentury and its cognates spoke to this need.

The association of Empson with the New Criticism is mistaken, but it does manage to keep the midcentury origin of Complex Words in view.20 Meanwhile, the midcentury provenance of Williams’s keywords project has perhaps been a victim of the enduring utility of keywords as method. The interdisciplinary and cross-field adaptability of Keywords pulls critical attention away from the felt historical conditions, shared affective experiences, and lived atmosphere within which Williams began his “record of an inquiry into a vocabulary” in the late 1940s.21 The irony is plain: it is to Williams, more than to any other literary or cultural theorist, that we owe the expansion of literary and cultural analysis to include such inchoate things as felt conditions, shared affects, and lived atmospheres.22 The midcentury provenance of Keywords is crucial to Midcentury Suspension; so, we will come to see, are Williams’s first inklings, at midcentury, of structures of feeling, which he began to sketch out in print in 1954.

But to keep our gaze on Keywords for the moment: in part because the book was not published until 1976, Williams opened the introduction to the first edition with a brief intellectual-institutional memoir in which he traces the roots of his inquiry to the years 1945–48: In 1945, after the ending of the wars with Germany and Japan, I was released from the Army to return to Cambridge. University term had already begun, and many relationships and groups had been formed. It was in any case strange to travel from

“This is a powerfully illuminating and eloquent reconstruction of a moment when transatlantic writers understood themselves as citizens not so much of particular places as of their own fraught and ambiguous historical period. Anyone thinking about early postwar literature will have to reckon with the implications of this absolutely compelling book.”

—Marina MacKay, author of Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic “Seiler offers the most scholarly study of the midcentury to date—the literary midcentury in all its irresolution, time-consciousness, anxiety, and nuclear expectancy.

With a pitch-perfect sense of detail, Seiler draws upon unknown archival sources to explain what history felt like to Anglophone writers in Britain and the United States.

Written with great verve, this book is a lucid—and necessary—account of why the midcentury matters.”

—Allan Hepburn, author of A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British Literature Claire Seiler is associate professor of English at Dickinson College.

MIDCENTURY SUS PE NSI ON

“It is impossible not to be impressed by the highly accomplished results on offer in Seiler’s reconfiguration of early postwar transatlantic literature in terms of the concept of the ‘midcentury’ and the forms of temporal and theoretical suspension she identifies with it. I suspect that her revisionist efforts to construct the intellectual framework of the midcentury and its suspensions will significantly reshape our understanding of this period for years to come.”

—Deak Nabers, author of Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American Literature

SEILER

How did writers in the Anglophone North Atlantic confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler argues that a feeling of suspension shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment. Drawing its evidence from literary, print, and public cultures of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary studies around the epoch’s fraught middle. It offers fresh readings of works by W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara.

MODERNIST LATITUDES Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover image: Alexander Calder, Untitled.

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu

MIDCENTURY SUSPENSION

L I T E R AT U R E A N D F E E L I N G I N T H E WA K E O F W O R L D WA R I I

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CLAIRE SEILER COLUMBIA