- Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form
David Earle's got a beef with modernist periodical studies. According to Earle, critics and historians of modernism and modernist print culture have archived, studied, and valorized an extremely narrow range of literary practices and publishing venues, thus ignoring modernism's broader products. During its initial development, he argues, modernism was entirely imbricated with popular forms, and it was often promulgated by commercial publishers who were more interested in making a buck than in promoting anything as profitless as an autonomous realm of art. In subsequent decades, however, elite and coterie forms of modernism—which prized the scarcity and artisanal quality of little magazines and first edition hardbacks—became the accepted focus of canonization. Earle maintains that our current picture of modernism is incomplete, because elite and popular modernisms have co-existed and drawn sustenance from each other ab ovo.
As an antidote to the hegemonic version of an elite modernism marked by cliquishness, linguistic impenetrability, and a (disingenuously) professed disdain for mass culture and the marketplace, Earle proposes to undertake an archeology of modernism. In Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form, he peels back the accretions of critics and scholars who have created largely fictitious boundaries between populist and experimental forms. When canonical modernists appeared in lowbrow venues such as pulp reprint magazines or hyper-produced paperbacks with lurid covers, these republications could not be viewed as acts of hostile colonization, but as fitting revelations of the long and thoroughly intertwined relationship between the popular and the avant-garde. The history of the pulps offers yet another example of the problematic nature of Andreas Huyssen's theory of a "great divide" between mass culture and other elite and experimental forms.
After a relatively brief introduction, Re-Covering Modernism is comprised of three long chapters. Chapter One focuses on The Smart Set, a magazine that has received surprisingly scant attention but which was, under the joint editorship of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, [End Page 89] an important outlet for modernist writers. Earle suggests that Mencken and The Smart Set were largely ignored during the canonization of modernism because Mencken valued accessibility over experimental prose and stylistic difficulty, and because The Smart Set was too popular and too clever to fit with the little magazines that became the focus of much critical inquiry. Ultimately, however, Earle's interest in The Smart Set has less to do with the identifiable modernists who sought Mencken's seal of approval than in the magazine's "lost legacy... as a progenitor of a subgenre of early popular modernism dependent upon moral and social change rather than stylistic inscrutability" (22).
Chapter Two considers a wide range of interwar pulp magazines. In the first half of the chapter, Earle considers the purported antagonisms inherent to a "pulp/modernism binary" (72), and he concludes this section by asserting that the pulps were considered a threat to modernism's self-image because they emphasized the disposability of printed matter. Modernists and other arbiters of culture found themselves recoiling from a "Pulp Peril" (93). In the second half of this chapter, Earle breaks down the supposed divide between modernism and the pulps by limning a "pulp/modernist nexus." The pulps were the popularized version of the dynamics and tensions of modernism in the public sphere; the pulp form was modernism "consumable for the masses" (104).
In his final chapter, Earle examines the marketing and "re-covering" of modernism during the paperback phenomenon of the late-1940s and 1950s. Paperback books superseded pulp magazines as the preferred popular form at this time, and many titles were published by pulp houses, which could draw upon already-existing networks of authors, production, and distribution. A number of these luridly-packaged books were written by now-canonical modernist writers, and Earle concludes his chapter by considering Hemingway and Faulkner as popular, paperback modernists. At the heart of this chapter, and the book as a whole, is Earle's claim that "the paperback...