swivel chairs in Wall Street and take the fruits of her toil’. ‘Negro writers’, in short, ‘should seek through the medium of their craft to play as meaningful a role in the affairs of men as do other professionals.’ But to this Wright always added a caveat. ‘Writing has its professional autonomy,’ he admitted; ‘it should complement other professions, but it should not supplant them or be swamped by them.’ The relation between the world and the book was ‘not always direct and simple’. ‘If the sensory vehicle of imaginative writing is required to carry too great a load of didactic material,’ Wright pointed out, ‘the artistic sense is submerged’; and, in any event, art was ‘not a carbon copy of reality’. For Wright, literature was coextensive with life. And the major task in each was to make a mark, find a signature: which is to say, establish a sense of wholeness and presence. They were co-extensive but not, however, to be confused with each other, not least because those staples of literature ‘image and emotion possess a logic of their own’. ‘Every first rate novel, poem, or play’, Wright concluded ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’, ‘lifts the level of consciousness higher.’ It was in this sense, as he saw it, that imaginative writing got its social work done: as a vital agent of awareness and luminous revelation of change – in short, an enabler of life.

Mass Culture and the Writer

Western, detective and hardboiled fiction

In many of his stories, Wright revealed a lifelong fascination with the conventions of such popular genres as dime novels and detective stories. He would probably not have agreed with the claim made by the poet Kenneth Rexroth that ‘the only significant fiction in America is popular fiction’, nor with the curt declaration of the detective story writer Raymond Chandler that ‘there is no such thing as serious literature’. Nevertheless, in this, he was taking the measure of his times. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed an exponential increase in the production and consumption of fiction. Compulsory education in most American states had created a growing number of readers interested in escapist entertainment. Erasmus Beadle revolutionized mass-market publishing. The first of Beadle’s slender, cheaply printed booklets appeared in 1860. Many could not afford the twenty-five cents for which paper-covered novels were then sold. But they could manage the two cents needed for each volume in Beadle’s Dime Novel series, as it was known. The dime novel became an instant success, and Beadle’s venture soon had scores of competitors from other publishers. And, after just four years in the publishing business, Beadle found himself at the head of a company with five million of its little books, dime novels and nickel novels, in circulation. Dime novels thrived on melodramatic adventure. Some had historical or sea settings. But of all the genres the new mass readership and mass methods of production generated, none was more popular, to begin with, than the cowboy tale. Very early on, too, the dime novel Western became formulaic. There was a hero who presented a synthesis of civilization and

the wilderness; there was an emphasis on action, Progress and the blessings of Manifest Destiny; and the settings were appropriately epic, with vast, wild, open spaces. The dime novel operated at the level of fantasy, where conflicts that could not be resolved in the real world could find appropriate resolution. It celebrated the self-reliance, natural nobility and individuality of a modern American whose daring actions confirmed the inevitable onward march of his nation. When the writer Edward Judson (1823–86), known by his pseudonym Ned Buntline, discovered William F. Cody in Nebraska in 1869 and later that year dramatized him as ‘Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men’, a story published serially in the New York Weekly, the Western dime novel had found its most influential icon. Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904) followed Buntline with more than a hundred ‘Buffalo Bill’ novels, nine of them written in 1892 alone. This tidal wave of fiction, working together with Buffalo Bill’s own immensely popular ‘Wild West Show’, helped confirm the formulaic character of the Western and a dominant literary identity for the West and the Western hero – the one a place of sublime landscapes and splendid adventure, the other a splendid adventurer. And, in the first half of the twentieth century, three novels in particular were to underwrite the romance of the West, and, in the process, acquire enormous popularity. They were The Virginian (1902) by Owen Wister (1860–1938), Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) by Zane Grey (1872–1939) and Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer (1907–91 ).

Owen Wister, who was born in Pennsylvania, wrote The Virginian after he had travelled to Wyoming to improve his health. This rejuvenating experience encouraged him to construct a moral geography in which the East represented custom and culture and the West energy and individualism. Wister, himself a member of the Eastern elite, was torn between these opposites – which clearly mirrored the opposing elements in the historical American dialectic of wilderness and civilization. And in his portrait of the Virginian he created a synthesis, to illustrate the claim made in the novel that ‘the creature we call a gentleman lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type’. The mythic status of the Virginian is emphasized by the fact that he is given no name: he is purely and simply, as the subtitle puts it, ‘a horseman of the plains’. Although nominally a cowboy, he is rarely seen doing cowboy work. The narrative revolves around incidents intended to prove his courage and nobility, and a romantic plot in which his innate gentility enables him to woo and win a young, cultured schoolteacher from Vermont. The narrator, who arrives from the East in the opening chapter, supplies a suitably heroic perspective, as he records, in awe and wonder, the epic stature and skills of this man who is at once a rugged individualist and a perfect gentle knight. And, in the closing sequence, this hero of the West is also seen to be a hero of America. ‘With a strong grip on many enterprises’, he marries the schoolteacher and becomes an entrepreneur, so contributing his vitality, energy and natural morality to the onward march of Progress. ‘If this book be anything more than an American story,’ Wister declared in the Preface, ‘it is an expression of American faith.’ It was an expression of faith that touched many readers. It sold more than 50,000 copies in just two months and

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helped determine the character of the mainstream Western hero, as a romantic individualist, and of the mainstream Western story, as an epic of freedom, Progress and Manifest Destiny.

A more prolific writer than Wister, Zane Grey also grew up in comfortable circumstances in the East and became an enthusiast of the West after a restorative trip there, to the Grand Canyon. In his fiction, the Western wilderness becomes a force that leads to redemption. The typical plot involves a jaded and perhaps frail member of Eastern society travelling westward and there experiencing renewal. He is revitalized and reoriented towards a new set of values that bear a close resemblance to social Darwinism, the ethic of the survival of the fittest. So, in Riders of the Purple Sage, which rivals The Virginian for popularity among classic Westerns, the man whom the wilderness makes strong and independent is Bern Venters. Many things happen to him, as he experiences the rugged wildness of canyon country and encounters various adventures. But everything is summed up by one simple statement: Venters ‘had gone away a boy’, from the East, the reader is told, ‘– he had returned a man’. A man is what the eponymous hero of Shane already is, when he appears right at the beginning of the story. ‘He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89,’ the opening sentence declares. Immediately, he is given the mythic status of a man who does not even have to be named, set in the epic vastness of the West (he can be seen from ‘several miles away’, we are told two sentences later), and associated with an elegiac moment, the closing days of the frontier. There is the same awe in the narrative voice as there is in The Virginian: this time because the narrator is recalling a period when he was ‘a kid . . . , barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck-wagon’. And the story itself unfolds with the simplicity and inevitability of myth, as the narrator recalls how Shane defended his family, and the surrounding homesteaders, against the greed and violence of a cattle baron. Shane seems not so much a knight as a natural saint, as he uses his strength and his skills to protect the settlers and, in the end, kill those who would drive them off their land. At the end, having completed his mission, he rides off wounded into exile, never to be seen again. He has made the valley safe for Progress.

The mass production and circulation of popular myths of America took another step in 1895, when a magazine publisher called Frank A. Munsey decided to revamp one of his publications, Argosy, in two distinct ways. He turned it into a publication devoted to fiction and designed for adult readers; and he decided to have it printed on rough wood-pulp paper, which was much less expensive than the smooth paper stock standard for periodicals at the time. The conversion to wood pulp enabled Munsey to print and distribute a greater number of copies of Argosy and his other magazines. And the rewards were immediate. By 1900, Argosy had a circulation of more than 80,000 a month; by 1910, it was up to 250,000. Rivals soon brought out pulp magazines of their own; and the pulps generally became the medium for popular fiction, including Westerns. One pulp periodical in particular, Western Story, was the main descendant of Western dime novels when they died out in the 1920s. It did much to confirm the character of the Western and the Western hero, not least because its editors demanded stories with predictable plots

and stereotypical characters. Other pulp magazines devoted to the Western genre arose and flourished. Popular ‘slick’ periodicals, such as the Saturday Evening Post, featured Western fiction. And writers like Grey and Max Brand (1892–1944), the author of a prodigious number of cowboy stories (such as Destry Rides Again [1930] ), ensured that the general popularity of the Western, as a myth of American progress, continued to be sustained. Illustrating that popularity is the extraordinary career of Louis L’Amour (1910?–88), a self-taught scholar of Western history from North Dakota. During the course of a long career, he produced two hundred novels and fourteen books of short stories, all on the West. By the time of his death, those works had sold no fewer than 182,000,000 copies.

Among the other genres popular in dime novels were detective stories. From the 1870s on, stories of street life in New York City, Philadelphia and elsewhere came into fashion, and soon afterwards the mass-audience tale of detection emerged. ‘Old Sleuth, the Detective’ was published in Fireside Companion in 1872 and was soon followed by many other fictional investigators. Not all of them were men; successful series featured such female sleuths as Round Kate and the Western Lady Detective. But the most popular of them was Nick Carter, whose career spanning two decades of publication began in 1886 in New York Weekly. These dime-novel detectives offered little in the way of character complexity or development; they were, for the most part, narrative ciphers, convenient vehicles for carrying a plot full of action and adventure to its inevitable conclusion. Contrivances though they were, however, they signalled the beginning of the transference of the hero from the wide open spaces of the West to the cavernous streets of the city. Following on from them, the detective in American twentieth-century fiction would slowly supplant the cowboy as a mythic embodiment of national values: an urban individualist whose commitment to his own code was more internalized, more a matter of manoeuvring his way within the labyrinth of society rather than outside it. From 1915, prototypical detective stories also began to appear in the pulp magazines, the first being a conversion of a dime novel thriller, Nick Carter, which, in addition to the eponymous hero, featured tales about other sleuths. In this genre, as in the others, pulps soon replaced dime novels and story-paper weeklies as the staple source of cheap fiction. So, by the late 1920s, dime novels and weeklies were virtually extinct. Prior to that, in 1920, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had founded a pulp monthly called The Black Mask. Their aim in starting what Mencken dismissively referred to as ‘a lousy magazine’ was to subsidize another periodical they owned, the Smart Set, a ‘magazine of cleverness’ that was in constant financial trouble. The magazine began by publishing traditional drawingroom mysteries, with mannered characters modelled after English stereotypes. After Mencken and Nathan sold it, however, at a tidy profit, it became the medium for a new kind of detective tale, involving hardbitten detectives and tough-minded stories, and reflecting the gritty realities of post-First World War America. Many writers were to experiment with writing in this vein for The Black Mask, before it began to decline in the 1940s, supplanted by its numerous imitators like Black Aces, Dime Detective, Detective Tales and New Detective. They included Carroll

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John Daly (1889–1958) and Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970). But easily the most important were Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) and, later in the history of the magazine, Raymond Chandler (1888–1959).

Dashiell Hammett had worked as a private detective for the Pinkerton Agency in San Francisco, shortly before serving in the army in the First World War. That experience served him well in his stories for The Black Mask, set in a sharp and credibly drawn northern California landscape. Beginning in 1923, they featured a character called the Continental Op, the toughest and shrewdest investigator in an outfit called the Continental Detective Agency. Altogether, the Op was to appear in two dozen Black Mask stories, and in the serialized versions of the novels The Dain Curse (1929) and Red Harvest (1929). His other, hugely influential heroes were the mildly inebriated husband and wife team of Nick and Nora Charles, in The Thin Man (1934), and the protagonist in what is perhaps the single most important private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), Sam Spade. Raymond Chandler wrote of Hammett and his followers that they were responsible for ‘taking murder out of the library and putting it back on the streets where it belonged’. Of Hammett, in particular, he observed that he ‘wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life’. Such people, Chandler added, ‘were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.’ Hammett created heroes who were not merely cool, tough, cynical; they confronted the conditions surrounding them with a full knowledge of their latent violence and their pervasive, inherent corruption. Favouring a rapid tempo and economy of expression, Hammett nevertheless wove elaborate patterns of intrigue and deceit. His novels became narrative labyrinths, replicating the literal labyrinths of the city streets and the social labyrinth of urban power, in which it became just about impossible to know whom to trust – other than oneself. Pursuing the fabulous jewel-encrusted black bird that supplies the title of The Maltese Falcon, ‘the stuff that dreams are made of ’, Sam Spade discovers what in a sense he has always known: that there is little he can rely on, apart from his own nerve and work – and the simple code that tells him, ‘when a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it’, even if he did not like him.

What fires the work of Hammett into life, above all, is what came to be known as his ‘hardboiled style’. The style of all his fiction is hard, brittle, unadorned. The emphasis is on dialogue, the vernacular and basic colloquial rhythms. Hammett did not invent the style, of course. In the short term, it was an offshoot of the styles deployed by Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner. In the longer term, its antecedents could be traced back to that concern for American speech shown by Mark Twain or even Walt Whitman. What he did add to it, though, was what another detective storywriter, Ellery Queen (the pseudonym of Frederic Dannay [1908–82] and Manfred Lee [1905–71] ), called ‘romantic realism’. Placing his stories against a stark backdrop, Hammett peopled them with protagonists who combined cynicism with a strange kind of commitment: to their own sense of things, not a vision perhaps but a stern sense of vocation. The longtime partner of Hammett, Lillian Hellman, said that he was the kind of person who had

a ‘reserve so deep that we all know we cannot touch it with charm or jokes or favors. It comes out as something more than dignity and shows on the face.’ The poet Richard Wilbur, she recalled, said that ‘as you came toward Hammett to shake his hand in the first meeting, you wanted him to approve of you’. That is precisely the reaction that, despite their toughness, even bitterness and occasional brutality, the detective heroes of Hammett tend to inspire. The style, as it were, underwrites this. Just as the hero is the one true thing in a deeply duplicitous world, so the style, spare to the point of verbal starvation, is a true coinage that defines more complex styles as counterfeit. Surrounded by masks and metaphors, it is the man and the speech closest to silence that we trust.

The fiction of Hammett brims, then, with undisclosed romanticism. In the work of Raymond Chandler, that romanticism is more or less disclosed. Many of the familiar elements of the hardboiled detective story, as perfected by Hammett, are still there: the setting in an urban labyrinth (it was Chandler, after all, who coined the phrase ‘mean streets’), the sense of a conspiratorial network of evil, the terse dialogue, rapid narrative tempo and flashes of violence. What is relatively new with Chandler, however, is a more highly wrought style and more open concern with a code of honour. Chandler was born in Chicago, educated in England, and only began writing fiction at the age of forty-five. When he began writing, he mixed the hardboiled with other idioms, which he saw at least as the product of his European education. ‘All the best American writing’, Chandler argued, ‘has been done by cosmopolitans. They found freedom of expression, richness of vocabulary’ in the United States. ‘But they had to have European taste to use the material.’ That taste, in his case, led to a vivid use of metaphor and allusion, sharp street language and a trenchant use of wisecracks. It also led to evocative scene-setting: creating the sense of a neon-lit jungle. Chandler helped originate what later became known as a noir world: rainswept streets, dark, empty buildings, shadows and fog punctuated by the occasional streetlamp, light from the window of a lonely room or an all-night café. This is the world in which Chandler’s solitary detective makes his way. Usually, as in The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953), that hero is Philip Marlowe. Marlowe, more than most detectives of his kind, is a man of honour, committed to justice and principle, a righter of wrongs as well as an agent of the law. As Chandler was well aware, he bears little resemblance to any real private detectives; ‘the real-life private eye’, Chandler observed, ‘is a sleazy little drudge’ with ‘about as much moral stature as a stop and go sign’. In the mean streets, but morally not of them, Marlowe is more like the familiar figure of the American Adam, redrawn and resituated in California. Surrounding him are vicious villains, corrupt cops, avaricious businessmen and politicians, and usually decadent women. Somehow, he manages to keep his integrity in the midst of all this. He is as much alone as the mythic cowboy in the vastness of the West is: that is the source of his pride, as well as his strange pathos.

Not all writers associated with the hardboiled school concentrated on stories with detectives at their centre, however. Particularly as the Depression set in, many turned their attention to the lives of apparently average people caught up in a cycle

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of deprivation – turning to sex or violence or both in a desperate attempt to break that cycle. Or, perhaps mindful of the way the boom times of the 1920s had suddenly been turned upside down, they showed ordinary men and women spiralling down into nightmare worlds, victims of chance and coincidence – a malign fate, a malevolent system or an unknown, malicious individual. Among such writers was Cornell Woolrich (1903–68). Author of many novels and short stories, including The Bride Wore Black (1944) and ‘Rear Window’ (1941), his bleak view of life is summed up in just one phrase he coined, ‘First You Dream, Then You Die’. There was also David Goodis (1917–56) and Horace McCoy (1897–1955). Goodis wrote a series of fictions, beginning in 1939 and including the novel Dark Passage (1946), that have as their guiding impulse a sense of dislocation. ‘That’s fine piano,’ a character in one of his novels, Down There (1956), thinks, hearing music. ‘Who’s playing that? He opened his eyes. He saw his fingers caressing the keyboard.’ McCoy, in turn, describes a world of seedy hotels, cheap dance halls, rundown movie theatres and precinct station backrooms, all inhabited by drifters, loners, the victims and the corrupt. In his first and most notable novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), for instance, the narrator is a man awaiting his own execution. He tells the story of how he came to kill his marathon dance partner, at her insistence. ‘They shoot horses, don’t they?’ he remembers her saying to him, in order to persuade him. She feels like an animal for which the world has no use, no place or vocation. The only logical next step, then, is a swift and efficient death.

At the core of these hardboiled or noir novels is a myth of success with no social world to sustain it. That is especially true of the fiction of one hardboiled writer in particular, James M. Cain (1892–1977), who for a while, in the 1930s and 1940s, was the most notorious writer in the United States. Cain started his career by writing editorials for the New York World under the supervision of the critic and commentator Walter Lippman (1889–1974). He then became magazine editor of the New Yorker. In 1934, he published his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice. It tells the story of Cora Papadakis and a drifter Frank Chambers, lovers who murder Cora’s wealthy husband for his money, making it look like an accident. Cora then dies in a car crash, and ironically Frank is convicted of murder for her death when it was in fact an accident. Other novels followed, notably Double Indemnity (1936), in which again an unmarried man and a married woman plan and execute the husband’s ‘accidental’ death, this time for the insurance money. They established Cain as a master of what became known as hardboiled eroticism: with sex, presented with a frankness unusual for the time, seen as a primary motive, the instinct driving people to escape from their mean, petty, sometimes impoverished lives. However, Cain himself insisted that he made ‘no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim’. ‘I merely try to write as the character would write,’ he said, ‘and I never forget that the average man . . . has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent.’ In this sense, his work, like that of McCoy, Goodis, Woolrich and others, is a version of the American demotic tradition in literature. In prose rhythms that imitate those of ordinary American speech, in an idiom that is as hard and elemental as the everyday vernacular of the

street, he shows ‘the average man’ and woman caught up in the dullness of their lives and dreams of leaving: destroyed by the very passions – adultery, incest, hatred, greed, lust or whatever – that, however perversely, they see as their avenues of escape.

Humorous writing

Far removed from the cold eye that many hardboiled novelists like Cain cast on American society were the more affectionate, even accepting perspectives of contemporary humorists. ‘The humorous story is American,’ Mark Twain declared, explaining that what he meant by this was that American writers had devised and perfected the kind of storytelling humour that depended on how something was said rather than what was said. True or not, Twain himself was capable of corrosive satire: humour that went beyond the wry pleasure of recognition to sardonic, even bitter exposure of social and moral corruption. Few humorists between the two World Wars ever ventured that far. Clarence Shepard Day (1874– 1935), for instance, produced a series of popular books, God and My Father (1932), Life With Father (1935) and Life With Mother (1937), that depicted a quaint, indignantly conservative character whose habits of thought had passed out of fashion. Public life was certainly infested with ‘chuckle-headed talk and rascality in business and politics’: that was admitted. But the clear implication was that to expect otherwise, or to want to alter the way things were, was to become like ‘father’: an absurdly quixotic figure, a charming but anachronistic eccentric, whose tirades could only be a source of amusement rather than instruction. Similarly, and in their different ways, Robert Benchley (1889–1945) and Ogden Nash (1902–71) appeared to follow the dictum that small is beautiful – or, at least, beautifully, and modestly, humorous. The character Benchley portrays in such books as From Bad to Worse (1934), My Ten Years in a Quandary (1936) and Inside Benchley (1942) is always thwarted from doing the little, simplest things: like leaving a party, smoking a cigarette or wearing a white suit. The resulting comic cameos neatly capture the frustrations of modern urban existence but also make them seem tolerable, even attractive: a source of amusement, ingratiating entertainment, rather than anxiety. Ogden Nash, in turn, knocks language out of shape and into a wisecrack. His comic verse is pointed by rhythms that become funnier the more strained and tortuous they are. His swiftly epigrammatic verse seems somehow designed to obey the injunction that another humorist, S. J. Perelman (1904–79), used as the title for one of his books, Keep it Crisp (1946).

Perelman himself tended to obey his own injunction. As a contributor to the New Yorker for over forty years, he wrote many short satirical pieces, collected in volumes with titles like Parlor, Bedlam and Bath (1930), Crazy Like a Fox (1944),

The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1953) and Chicken Inspector No 23 (1966). They often took the form of fantastic dramas which, with a surreal style and a feeling for the slapstick possibilities of language, lampooned advertising, the movies, the mass media and popular fiction. And one of their virtues was, nearly always, their

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brevity. Ring Lardner (1885–1933) also excelled in the kind of short sketch or story that was more than half in love with the thing it satirized. With Lardner, however, there was something more: a remarkable ear for American speech and an extraordinary capacity for catching on paper what Marianne Moore called the accuracy of the vernacular. Lardner was an established sports journalist before he began writing a series of letters in the disguise of ‘Jack Keefe’, a newcomer to a professional baseball team. Published first in the Chicago Tribune, they brought him fame as an explorer of semi-literate idiom and an exposer of demotic vanity, incompetence and self-deception. They were published in 1914 as You Know Me, Al: A Busher’s Letters. Other subsequent volumes included Bib Ballads (1915), a collection of verse, The Big Town (1921), a humorous novel and the collections How to Write Short Stories (1924) and The Love Nest (1926). Americans of all walks of life appear in his writing, their personalities defined by their utterances. And, although that writing appears to obey the conventional limits of contemporary American humour, it is in fact unusually mordant, even cynical. The songwriters, barbers, stenographers and others to whom Lardner gives voice are reduced to their essential banality or dullness, cruelty, violence or stupidity. The sardonic surfaces of his fiction only partially conceal a deeply pessimistic viewpoint, as Lardner allows his ‘average’ characters to condemn themselves out of their own, forever open mouths.

Apart from Lardner, the two most renowned humorous writers in the first half of the twentieth century were James Thurber (1894–1961) and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967). Thurber was a regular contributor to the New Yorker for many years, as both a cartoonist and a writer. His sketches and stories were collected in such volumes as The Owl in the Attic, and Other Perplexities (1931), The Seal in My Bedroom, and Other Predicaments (1932) and My World – and Welcome to It!

(1942). With E. B. White (1899–1985) he wrote Is Sex Necessary? (1929), satirizing pseudo-scientific sex manuals. With Elliot Nugent (1899–1980), he produced a successful dramatic comedy, The Male Animal (1940). Of his own prose and drawings Thurber said, ‘the little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy’. This was in keeping with his view that, as he put it, ‘humor is the best that lies closest to the familiar, to that part of the familiar which is humiliating, distressing, even tragic’. The strange and whimsical characters Thurber describes, some of them animals and many of them people, respond to upsets, incredible accidents, with a sad persistence. They all seem repressed and misshapen, subject to malignant circumstances that somehow they survive, even combat. ‘Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect,’ Thurber observed. The chaotic times on which Thurber’s own humour, in particular, forces attention stretch ‘from the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to the year coffee was rationed’: that is, the period between the two World Wars. And the victims of chaos who receive his special attention are all his sad middle-aged men, caught by the dreariness of their lives, custom and predatory women – and quietly dreaming of escape into a world of adventure, where they can perform feats of daring that range from the quaintly romantic to the comically bizarre.

The humour of Dorothy Parker was considerably more acerbic. Her writing career began as a dramatic and literary critic in her native New York City; and she soon acquired an almost legendary reputation for her malicious and sardonic wisecracks. She once described the actress Katharine Hepburn, for instance, as ‘running the whole gamut of emotions from A to B’. Then, in 1926, she published her first book of poems, Enough Rope. A best-seller, it was followed by two other books of verse and, in 1936, by her collected poems, Not So Deep As a Well. The poems show that Parker was just as sceptical about relations between the sexes as Thurber was. Only, whereas Thurber tended to show feckless husbands at the mercy of tyrannical wives, Parker was more cynically evenhanded. She simply dismissed the possibility of romantic fulfilment for either sex. ‘By the time you swear you’re his, / Shivering and sighing,’ she declares in ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’, ‘And he vows his passion is / Infinite, undying –/’, then, she concludes, ‘Lady, make a note of this: / One of you is lying.’ Parker pursued similar caustic variations on the frustrations of love and the futility of idealism in her prose work. The short stories and sketches collected in Laments for the Living (1930), for example, and in After Such Pleasures (1933) and Here Lies (1939) are marked by their wry wit, their economy and polish, but, above all, by their refusal to take any prisoners. And she could be just as devastating in conversation as she was in print: on hearing that ex-President Calvin Coolidge – famously inactive while in office – had died, she responded, ‘How could they tell?’ Parker could be tough on herself. ‘I am just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute,’ she once observed. She could write successfully in many different genres. Apart from poetry, stories and sketches, reviews and criticism, she collaborated with Elmer Rice on the play Close Harmony (1929) and with Arnaud d’Usseau on Ladies of the Corridor (1953); and she also produced articles, columns and reportage for many different magazines and newspapers. She was even aware of the limits of humour, or at least her own brand of it. ‘I know now that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be,’ she wrote in New Masses in 1937, after witnessing the Spanish Civil War firsthand. ‘And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.’ But it was with her epigrammatic wit, which usually instilled fear in those around her, that she made her mark – a wit that moved between the cool, the clever and the cynical and could even turn her own death into a wisecrack: ‘Excuse my dust’, was the epitaph she prepared for herself.

Fiction and popular culture

Margaret Mitchell (1900–49) would never qualify as a humorist. The closest she came to humour, outside of Gone With the Wind (1936), was her sardonic comment that ‘long ago’ she gave up thinking about her long romantic tale set in Georgia during the Civil War and Reconstruction as her book. ‘It’s Atlanta’s, in the view of Atlantians,’ she said, ‘the movie is Atlanta’s film.’ That says something about the phenomenal success of her novel. An instant best-seller, it set a sales record of 50,000 copies in one day and one and a half million during the first year

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of publication. At least twenty-five million more have been sold since then. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages and published successfully in thirtyseven countries. In turn, the film of the book, which had its premiere in 1939, has been seen by more people than the entire population of the United States, with gross earnings estimated at over three hundred million dollars. Some of the lines from both book and film (‘Tomorrow is another day’, ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn’) have passed into popular currency and been subject to endless repetition and parody. No wonder the citizens of Atlanta, in Mitchell’s view, wanted to claim Gone With the Wind as their own. And no wonder Mitchell was to complain, ‘alas, where has my quiet peaceful life gone?’ after publication of the one book she ever wrote. Despite her subsequent efforts to protect her family and herself from the treadmill of publicity and the gaze of adoring fans, she became a kind of public property. The book that brought all this about is a fundamentally simple tale that, in the tradition of plantation and Civil War romance, tells the story of the South entirely from the point of view of the middle-class planters. More specifically, it is the tale of Scarlett O’Hara and how, under the pressures of war and hardship, she grows from a girl to a woman, a belle to a matriarchal figure who has developed a ‘shell of hardness’. Many of the familiar, stereotypical characters of Southern plantation romance are on display here. There is the world-weary plantation Hamlet, played here by Ashley Wilkes, the roguish, dangerous plantation Hotspur, a role taken here by Rhett Butler. There are, inevitably, a ‘Mammy’, various ‘Uncle Tom’ figures who faithfully serve and save their white masters, a vicious white overseer, melodious field hands and women like Scarlett’s friend, the gentle Melanie Hamilton, who fulfil Southern expectations of what it means to be ‘a very great lady’. What ignites Gone With the Wind, however, is its heroine. Here, with Scarlett O’Hara, Mitchell revisits a familiar character type, the strong woman – particularly popular in the 1930s, when such characters were often seen as potential redeemers of a barren land – and gives that character type new complexity and depth, not least through subtle inflections of gender.

Like the heroine of many popular female narratives, from romance through the prototypical early feminist novel to soap opera, Scarlett O’Hara is an initially unexceptional girl who is forced into an exceptional maturity. As the opening line of the novel has it, she is ‘not beautiful, but men seldom realised it’ thanks to her wiles. Nor is she educated, or even a reader (‘I don’t read novels,’ she declares); she does, however, have ‘sharp intelligence’ – and, as it turns out, determination and guile. Like the central character in many a female narrative, in her love trials she is torn between respectability and risk, in the respective figures of Ashley and Rhett. However, while she possesses some of the stereotypical ‘feminine’ characteristics, such as a lack of interest in war and politics, what makes her remarkable is her possession too of supposedly ‘masculine’ traits. As she develops, during the course of the narrative, she shows herself to be tough, ruthless, competitive. She is committed to the land, her property, and money as a means to keep that land. What is more, she is quite unsentimental: marrying men she does not love and giving birth to three children she uniformly finds a nuisance – as Rhett observes, ‘a cat’s a

better mother than you’. According to the conventions of Southern society, Scarlett is very often a scandal: dancing in widow’s weeds, driving a hard bargain, leasing convict labour and cavorting after the war with Yankees. Like the central character of the classic historical novel, too, she herself becomes a site of struggle between the old order and the new. Or, as the narrative puts it, ‘her mind pulled two ways’, between nostalgia for the past and the necessities of the present and future. At the end of the novel, Scarlett does turn back, to Tara, her homeplace. She also turns back, in intention, to a man who is himself, he says, seeking to recapture some of the ‘honour and security, roots that go deep’ of the old, antebellum days, in that she determines to try to win back Rhett. But even this apparent victory for the backward glance, the past, is more ambivalent than at first appears and suggests the richly layered nature of the heroine of Gone With the Wind. In going back, Scarlett is perhaps going forward, trying for a synthesis of the new aims and the old values: a balance between past and future registered in her famous closing remark, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.’

What is striking, and regrettable, about this most popular of American romances is that it combines this relatively sophisticated representation of gender, the role of women, with a presentation of race, and in particular the African American race, that is regressive to the point of being obscene. The opening references to ‘darkies’ ‘pop-eyed with fear’ over some scary matter, and the ‘laughter of negro voices’ as the hands return from the fields, set the initial tone. African American characters are, at best, comic, choric commentators, at worst ignorant and mischievous, or they are turned into anonymous, helpless and occasionally shiftless shadows. All this, the traditional stuff of antebellum romance, is bad enough. What is worse is what happens when the narrative turns to the Civil War and, even more, Reconstruction. There are scattered references now to ‘drunken blacks’, ‘illiterate negroes in high office’ who ‘conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do’ when faced with political responsibility. ‘Like monkeys or small children turned loose’, the freed slaves, and especially the men, are seen as a threat: to white society in general, and to white women in particular. The ‘peril to white women’, the reader is told, created ‘the tragic necessity’ of the Ku Klux Klan. And Rhett Butler himself is jailed for killing an African American who ‘insulted’ a white woman. ‘He was uppity to a lady,’ Rhett explains, ‘and what could a gentleman do?’ Scarlett O’Hara herself is attacked by a ‘ragged’ white man and black man, whose ‘rank odour’ she can smell as he tears off her basque. She is rescued, however, by ‘Big Sam’, an Uncle Tom figure who declares, after rescuing her, ‘Ah hope Ah done kill de black babboon’. ‘Ah done had nuff freedom,’ Sam adds, ‘Tara mah home’: a sentiment later echoed by Scarlett’s ‘Mammy’, when she declares ‘Ah’s gwine home’ to Tara. The deep racial flaw of Gone With the Wind is a matter of omission as much as anything else. The humanity of black men is a conspicuous, constitutive absence in the novel. So, too, are the humanity and sexuality of black women, since the only black women who receive any attention are asexual. Miscegenation here, apart from occasional references to ‘the enormous

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increase in mulatto babies since the Yankee soldiers settled in town’, is a matter of forced relations between black male rapists and pure white women. Mitchell shows absolutely no sense of what writers like Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison have understood: that the use of black women by white men – with its equation of sex and power, its interrogation of the colour line and its revelation of a secret history – is the repressed myth of the South and, maybe, of America. Her book is an inescapable fact of American literary history; it represents a confluence of narrative traditions; and it has at its centre one of the most memorable heroines in American fiction. But that fact is an ugly one, in some ways. And the book shows how romance may have its dark side, may even depend on or feed off that dark side to survive. To that extent, Gone With the Wind is far more frightening than its author intended, because it is a symptom rather than a diagnosis of historical failure. Recalling an American dream, Mitchell inadvertently exposes an American nightmare. In the process her novel illustrates the famous remark of Walter Benjamin that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Despite the enormous success of the film of her book, Mitchell had very little interest in Hollywood or visiting there. In fact, she rarely strayed outside Atlanta. Unlike her, though, one thing many of the humorists and hardboiled writers did have in common was precisely their experience of the film capital of the world. Together with novelists like Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and playwrights like Hecht and Odets, Cain and McCoy, Benchley and Parker were among those lured west to write film scripts. And, while they were there or afterwards, some writers at least felt compelled to write about the experience. Fitzgerald did so, of course, in The Last Tycoon. McCoy did so in I Should Have Stayed Home (1938), the title of which suggests just how much this was a novel about failure in the dream factory. Even Faulkner, who despised a place where he said ‘they worship death,’ had to write about it: ‘Hollywood which is no longer Hollywood,’ the narrator observes in The Wild Palms (originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem), ‘but is stippled by a billion feet of burning colored gas across the face of the American earth.’ Of those who came to Hollywood, however, and registered the impact of popular culture generally in their writing, no author was more perceptive than Nathanael West (1903– 40). Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in New York City, West lived in Paris for two years, where he completed his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). A surrealist fantasy about the wandering of its eponymous hero within the Trojan horse – where, among others, he meets a naked man in a bowler hat who is writing a history of Saint Puce, a flea who lived in Christ’s armpit – it was completely ignored. It did, however, prove useful for its author: West’s apprenticeship to surrealism undoubtedly freed him from the constraints of naturalism. His later work presents and is preoccupied with a border territory, situated somewhere between the actual and the absurd, the naturalistic and nightmare. This is, West intimates, the world in which we live now: mediated for us by the strange dreams, the visions of ourselves that our culture throws up for us and marked by excess, a seemingly endless surfeit of commodities. The subsequent fiction of West, written

after he returned to the United States in the early 1930s, sprang from his confrontation with America at its most meaningless. Something of that is registered in his third book, A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934), a brutally comic attack on the American myth of success, the rise of the self-made man from rags to riches. But the works in which West explored and exploited the absurd – as the essential narrative of life and entire story of America – were his second, and fourth and final ones: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), written just after he returned from Europe, and The Day of the Locust (1939), written while he was working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood – and published just a year before his sudden death.

The hero of Miss Lonelyhearts is – Miss Lonelyhearts. The reader never learns his real name. He is the agony aunt on the New York Post-Dispatch, which tells its customers: ‘Are-you-in-trouble? – Do-you-need-advice? – Write-to-Miss- Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you.’ The trouble is, the people who write to Miss Lonelyhearts really do need help. He is appalled and obsessed by their sufferings. ‘For the first time in his life,’ as he explains to his girlfriend Betty, he is forced ‘to examine the values by which he lives.’ And, finding nothing, he realizes that his taking on of the agony column as a kind of joke has backfired: ‘he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator’. The nothingness Miss Lonelyhearts finds can, however, be described, and is. Life, Miss Lonelyhearts knows, has always been meaningless. ‘Man has a tropism for order,’ he reflects, ‘the physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy.’ ‘Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed’ and everything is running down. What is different, now, is the absence of a saving illusion. ‘Men have always fought their misery with dreams,’ Miss Lonelyhearts tells himself at one point. ‘Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio, and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.’ And Miss Lonelyhearts is among those who feel most fiercely betrayed. In his agony, the sense of his own futility, Miss Lonelyhearts momentarily becomes the persecutor of the wretched, whose suffering he cannot extenuate or explain. Twisting the arm of a poor old man in a public toilet, ‘he was twisting the arm of the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticulate and impotent’. He is really twisting his own arm because, as he senses, he is ‘capable of dreaming the Christ dream’, passionately embracing a saving fiction. He is, in fact, a Christ figure himself, even if an absurd and impotent one. And this is underlined in the story by his editor Shrike, who plays the part here of Satan. Shrike, named after a bird of prey, is a man of inexhaustible cynicism. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, he has lost belief but appears to revel in that condition. And, offering Miss Lonelyhearts the kingdoms of the earth, he mocks all possible faiths

– religion, art, nature or whatever: anything that might give some significance to life. The climax, a darkly comic one, comes when Miss Lonelyhearts has a religious experience. Succumbing to the temptation of the ‘Christ dream’, he is convinced he has become one with God. Driven by that conviction, he holds out his arms Christlike to the crippled husband of a woman who has written to him for advice, whom he has met and with whom he has had sexual relations. He is persuaded that, when he has embraced him, the crippled man will be made whole, and that,

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in running to help him, he is running to all the wretched of the earth ‘to succour them with love’. But the crippled husband fights to escape from his embrace. In the struggle that follows, the gun the man is carrying suddenly goes off, and Miss Lonelyhearts is killed. Miss Lonelyhearts’s bid to become a saviour, a redeemer, ends in a black, bleak farce.

When writing Miss Lonelyhearts, West gave it the provisional title ‘a novel in the form of a cartoon strip’. That suggests the tone of this book, which turns a potentially tragic theme into a comedy of the absurd. Beneath the surface of the narrative, West makes sly, allusive play with all manner of myths, all kinds of stories that other, earlier cultures have used to endow their (as West sees it) fundamentally meaningless lives with a sense of meaning. Along with being a mock Christ, for instance, Miss Lonelyhearts is a mock Oedipus, a mock quester and a mock hero of vegetation myth. On the surface, however, what the reader is presented with is precisely that: a world of surfaces. The characters are, intentionally, ciphers, caricatures, identified by one or two exaggerated features. Each short, sharp chapter is a comic routine, a cartoon strip the nature of which is announced by its title: ‘Miss Lonelyhearts in the dismal swamp’, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts and the cripple’, and so on. Within each routine, too, each character seems to be doing no more than playing a game, telling a story or adopting a role to give himself or herself the illusion of human presence. ‘There was something clearly mechanical about her pantomime,’ we are told of one character; while of Miss Lonelyhearts it is said that his ‘gestures’ are ‘too appropriate, like those of an old-fashioned actor’. With characters reduced to objects – parts of their own bodies, say, or ‘machines for making jokes’ – or a label – and one that, in the case of the protagonist, is not even accurate in terms of gender – objects are magnified, take on a life of their own. So, on one day, we learn, the ‘inanimate things’ over which Miss Lonelyhearts ‘had tried to obtain control took the field against him. When he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the floor. The collar button disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil broke, the handle of the razor fell off, the window shade refused to stay down.’ This is a world in which things, evidently, are more animated than people: where character is commodified and commodities assume character, and an often malevolent one at that. It is also a world stripped of meaning: where there is a play of surfaces, and nothing else (apart, that is, from the old, redemptive myths that the narrative allusively mocks). In its self-evident artifice, Miss Lonelyhearts effectively reminds the reader what its protagonist learns, and then forgets: that nothing can explain things – least of all, a story like the one we are reading. To that extent, West was writing here on the borderline between Modernism and postmodernism: negotiating a move from art as explanation, a source of redemption or redress, to art as game, a verbal playfield. Miss Lonelyhearts anticipates many books written several decades later that play with the premise that everything, including the book before us, is insignificant, a play of signs – in a word, a fiction.

For West, the difference with popular culture was not that it was superficial: in a depthless world, as he saw it, such comparative terms were impossible. All was depthless, a veneer. The difference was that, in its pursuit of the appearance

of depth, the appropriation of meaning, it succeeded in being only, as Miss Lonelyhearts put it, ‘puerile’. That puerility is the subject of The Day of the Locust. The novel opens with a brief impression of a film set. The central character, Tod Hackett, a painter working at a film studio, looks out of his office window to see an eighteenth-century battle in progress. The armies disappear behind ‘half a Mississippi steamboat’. It is all absurdly artificial. But the reader then accompanies Tod through Los Angeles, past ‘Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon’. So, it is clear, what is depicted in the studio is no more unreal than what lies outside. This is a place where ‘the need for beauty and romance’ has issued in ‘the truly monstrous’, and nothing is what it seems. Its inhabitants are those who hang about the studios, waiting for a break: cowboys who have never roped a steer, young women who have become imprisoned in the masks and masquerades they have assumed in the hope of becoming stars. They are also the nameless crowd, the spectators: the retired, middle class and middle-aged, who have travelled to southern California at the end of years of ‘dull, heavy labour’ in the Middle West, in search of ‘the land of sunshine and oranges’, the dream world described to them in the movies and magazines. Once there, they have become overwhelmed by a sense of tedium and betrayal. ‘The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.’ In an ironic inversion of American myth, these are people who have bought into a commodified version of paradise, a cheap vision of the West, only to find how counterfeit the dreams sold to them are. And the discovery prompts them to violence, of the kind that their own jaded appetites, fed to saturation by the popular media, had led them to expect would be waiting for them to watch and enjoy in California. At the end of The Day of the Locust, the hopeless hordes of Midwesterners who have poured locust-like into California now pour into Hollywood to gaze at the celebrities arriving at a movie premiere. There, the crowd becomes a mob, goes berserk; and Tod, crushed almost to death, sees in a kind of vision the canvas he has been working on, ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’, as if it were completed. It is an appropriately apocalyptic note on which to end a story that announces the selling and subversion of the American dream. The America West describes is one that has lost touch with the real. All it has left is boredom and fear, the resignation of the crowd and the rage of the mob: the both of them signs of a culture that has no sustaining connection with the past – and no adequate means of imagining its future.

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