America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and the Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars

Chapter Four. Proletarian Middlebrow: Josephine Herbst, Radicalism, and Bourgeois Redemption

[ 115 ] ss FOUR Proletarian Middlebrow Josephine Herbst, Radicalism, and Bourgeois Redemption [][][][] In the 1960s, in response to a query from a professor, Josephine Herbst articulated her vision of reading and writing communities in terms that would have shocked literary critics of the thirties, who had found her writing dispassionate: If you are teaching work of the thirties I believe it would be important to engage the students and a group and to teach the literature of the period as an involvement with life. For the thirties, and the purposes of literature, the involvement was too heavy to make perfect literature, but it broke ground for exciting vistas. Often too documentary, sometimes too much reportage, it still had a vital connection with more than events. But the events were also crucial and the major core of our ill-adjustments remains. . . . The thirties has more often been maligned than not; it happens to have been a lively period in spite of the depression, lively in the arts and lively in human mingling. People cared. It was a decade when people believed in the possibility of their own powers. Farmers did fight for what they believed to be their rights; workers did believe that they could have the right to unionize. . . . But literature is centered always in the values of the human, and for that reason it can shed light far 116 ] america the middlebrow beyond any document, any statistic. . . . Without memory, without some connectedness, there is nothing. Hence, I suppose, some of the tendency to exalt “meaninglessness.” Every major novelist from way back has understood that there is always, somewhere, some time, a sense of the meaninglessness of it all, but there must also be a meaning to so-called meaninglessness or no writing would accrue. To make clarity out of obscurity, to clear a path in the jungle—that’s the thing—and a good reader is as important in the long run as a good writer. They need each other. (Letter to William A. Sutton 6 February 1968) Herbst’s passionate engagement with social issues isn’t surprising in a writer best known for her proletarian trilogy—Pity Is Not Enough, The Executioner Waits, and Rope of Gold. Herbst had always been known as the most modern and rebellious of writers, one who worked for H .L. Mencken, drank with Ernest Hemingway, gossiped with Katherine Anne Porter, and marched with Michael Gold. Her first two novels were devastating indictments of middle-class life, embodying the “terrible honesty” Ann Douglas defines as the epitome of American modernism. Her embrace of proletarian literature in the 1930s placed her in the vanguard of literary rebels once again, “going left” with a host of others. Whatissurprisingisherinsistencethat“literatureiscenteredalwaysin the values of the human,” her focus on the continuity of art and life, and her belief in the symbiotic relationship between reader and writer. She defines a writing aesthetic remarkably consistent with Dewey’s notion of pragmatist aesthetics, one consistent with Dorothy Canfield, Pearl Buck, even Jessie Fauset. Herbst, as we shall see, would have violently disavowed any connection with such popular women’s writers. This connection between literary proletarianism and middlebrow authorship has been unexplored. Josephine Herbst represents this counterintuitive connection between two modes of writing focused on political conversion and affect, particularly through women’s writing and middleclass family dramas. Herbst, I want to argue, was a closet middlebrow author, who came closest to coming out during the 1930s. [ 117 proletarian middlebrow Modern Rebellion and the “Gents”: Herbst’s Construction of Authorship Unlike the other writers in this study, Herbst came to authorship through the cultural rebellion of the moderns, and despite significant differences, she retained this primary identification. For Herbst, writing began as a rebellion against the rigid conformity of Sioux City, Iowa. Writing would saveherfromthemindlesstoilandsuffocatingconventionalityof middleclass small-town life, a trap she and her sister Helen had to escape at any cost. As she wrote years later in a draft of her memoir, “It was in Iowa that I was an exile; not in Europe” (quoted in Ehrhardt 146). She embraced sexual liberation; while working in New York in the early twenties, she had an affair with the married playwright Maxwell Anderson, and then, at his insistence, had an abortion. Her common-law marriage with John Herrman, whom she met in Paris, became respectable only when his parents bullied them into...