What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960

Two: The 1930s

{ T W O }£e 1Ω30ß This chapter provides an alternative way of reading the fiction of this decade . I begin by restating the special circumstances under which ’30s historiography has been written and then turn to mainstream critical opinion and its sense of the decade’s achievements and challenges, pausing to examine the adjudicating of taste that book reviewing played at the time. From that perspective, I turn to the middle-class realism of the era, especially observing several of its principal modes of expression—the woman’s novel, the historical novel, the family novel, and the political novel. Along the way, I also study some key episodes in literary history and culture by way of indicating how truly normative this fiction was for American readers. T H E T H R E AT E N I N G T H I R T I E S Describing the history of the American taste for fiction in the 1930s requires confronting both the conventional and revisionist beliefs shaping the era’s current literary historiography. In this chapter, I build on my reading of the centrality of bourgeois fiction to the 1920s to test the proposition that the literary record of the 1930s has been distorted by critics and historians whose business it was to promulgate a canon. Missing from the account that has descended to us is the middle-class fiction that as a matter of course failed to match canonical premises. It could even be argued that the criteria were fashioned precisely to eliminate these books. As a result, a whole tradition of American novels of the middle class that were bought, read, and discussed throughout the Depression years has been lost. We thus have a history of professional choices rather than of actual reading practices.∞ { 118 } THE 1930s The beneficiaries of ’30s historiography were once perceived to be the fiction writers valued by the New Critics, sometimes in curious combination with the intellectual circle associated with the Partisan Review (pr)—the anticommunist left seeking to fuse radical politics and European modernism . Although the pr’s preferences begin with European novelists like Franz Kafka, André Malraux, and Ignazio Silone, not the Southern Agrarian tradition , both groups favored William Faulkner especially. Both camps preferred modernist fiction over the social realism typified by Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932) or James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1935), which appealed more to the politics than to the aesthetic premises of the pr critics. While most works of social realism would be understood as basically serving the left side of mainstream taste, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) was remarkable insofar as a general audience also embraced it. The considerable appeal of popular novels, like Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) and Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse (1933), whose literary merits were easily maligned, worried guardians of critical taste since the patent success of such books expanded the market for romances or heroic tales of American history, as in the realist historical fiction of Kenneth Roberts and Walter Edmonds, that seemed to distract Americans from their own economic and ideological worries by recalling the nation’s past. With the country ’s imagination engrossed in narratives of how Americans responded to earlier dangers, the literary impact of Depression actualities might be diffused , so it became a matter of conscience for leftist critics to reclaim the socialist and proletarian tradition, first through Walter Rideout’s pioneering scholarship.≤ Although novels of labor protest predate the Depression, ’30s literature describing the class struggle, industrial strikes, and the lowly state of the American working class may be said to begin with Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930), extending through Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932), Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1934), and, by the end of the decade, Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939), which when selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club choice achieved mainstream legitimacy for itself as well as the genre. Among other novels that have descended to later generations as worthy of study were such experimental, even eccentric modernist works as the novels of Nathanael West and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Absent from this conventional wisdom is the recognition of the middleclass realism that is essential to understanding the 1930s. These books com- THE 1930s { 119 } peted for the readership that...