Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s

by George Hutchinson

Mythologized as the era of the "good war" and the "Greatest Generation," the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment.

Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art's ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson's capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Theory

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 23, 2018

Reviews

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Hutchinson's aim in Facing the Abyss is to prove that American literature of the 1940s lives up to the seriousness of the times. He succeeds.

Hutchinson cites Gore Vidal, who said this was a time when serious literature was popular. Even people who hadn't read some of the modernist writers were aware of their place in public culture. Just having a public culture may distinguish the forties from now.

There were discussions of literature on mass media such as radio shows. Public libraries were sites of democracy, where many readers (and soon-to-be writers) of all economic classes were able to find literature and encounter philosophies and political theories that explained the times.

After Americans came into the war, the government ensured that there were small editions of classic and recent literature for troops to read overseas. Council Books and Armed Services editions were selected for entertainment and educational value, but did not include titles that would be offensive to different groups of Americans.

Unfortunately that meant not including books by black writers like Richard Wright, in order to try to keep the racial status quo in effect. Maybe the 1950s would have been a little less traumatic if white soldiers—who felt they were coming home to inherit the new America that was evolving—had been able to read what some black authors had to say.

Hutchinson points out that many of the publishers who brought new literature to young Americans were Europeans who had just escaped the Nazis. Pantheon published The Stranger by Albert Camus and started a conversation about human responsibility that still continues.

Hutchinson says the forties were a time when writers started learning their craft in colleges, not writing for newspapers or for pulp magazines. It was natural for creative writing programs (Hutchinson talks about Wallace Stegner's program at Stanford) to sprout when the G.I. Bill gave so many the chance to study.

Hutchinson analyzes the connections between pop culture and avant-garde art. This is the period when literature in the very broad sense—stories--began to be aimed at both adults and children. Many of the pulps of the 1930s already appealed to both. Even now some literature (Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, and Daniel Keyes, for example) with juvenile protagonists is considered legitimate literature even though it's aimed at young readers.

All through Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson describes American literature of the 1940s as having a goal—defeating totalitarianism. That's certainly what many of its practitioners believed.

Even accepting the reality of atomic weapons, Hutchinson is hopeful for the future. That's understandable. Literature by its nature—the unfolding of a story by a voice inside the reader—expects a tomorrow for the next installment.

(Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for a digital review copy.)

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have found this excellent book hard to review. One reason is that the book is so packed that it is hard to write a review that avoids being a list of the book's topics. Another reason is that I kept focusing in my mind on the present day state of the USA which the themes of this book directed my mind to. I think I should stick with what I believe to be the book's big themes. And I do think I can say what, in my opinion, Mr. Hutchinson sees as the themes of the literature and art of the 1940s.

But, first, I needed to make sense of the book's title, and the following is how I did so. This book is about literacy, art (mainly literature), literacy, and culture. Therefore, it is ultimately about the shadowy and complex region of the mind which art tries to cross in an attempt to meet reality. This region is the "abyss" that the artist plunges into in translating perceptions of reality into fiction. The "translating" is done in the best way, in my opinion, by the similes of poetry and by the giant similes of novels and stories. Mr. H., at page 54, quotes Alfred Kazin: "The mind can describe many processes in nature, but sooner or later the mind, despite what science boasts, cannot be satisfactorily correlated with all that exists outside it. This is the abyss that great literature fills, though never so fully that we cannot still hear the wailing of Job and Lear."

So, one task of this book is to see how the artist of the 40s and the critics and intellectuals and so forth looked at the abyss. And Mr. H. does a wonderful job here --- from the explosion of literacy, the paperback revolution which includes the millions of books distributed to soldiers, the foment over what art is which includes the clashes of homegrown and European refugee intellectuals, the surge in popular culture and its avant garde nature in comics, jazz, and film noir. And always Mr. H. gives us long discussions of books including African-American, LGBT, and war literature.

I think the book points out two main themes. The first can be described as a reaction to settled ideas of what art should be. These settled ideas appear in the ideology of the Communist Party which demanded an art of ideas and foregone conclusions. To a degree, the settled ideas included also the concept of art as "autonomous" or existing on its own and for itself. The reactions were the movement towards art as process with a foundation in human experience. This would not be an art of foregone conclusions or broadly accepted ideas. For example, it could be an art in which your enemy is seen as a person or in which gay army life can be viewed as human.

The second theme that I believe Mr. H. found is that art had a tendency to universalism. That is, art was not about specific groups. Mr. H. points this out in his discussion of Richard Wright. Mr. H. says that Wright certainly wrote "Native Son" out of the African-American experience, but also wrote from the vantage point that his protagonists experience as a human could apply to every human. Perhaps, this theme is why Mr. H. ends the book with a chapter on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, now criticized by some as colonialist, but seen in its day as consciously universalist because the drafters debated the issues of colonialism and particularity at the time of the drafting!

I thought a lot of this book points out how the themes are with us to this day in different forms. Is political correctness like Communist dogma? Have we lost the sense of universalism in a world of corporate greed, maximization of shareholder profit, globalism, or identity politics? Is the experience of the 40s relevant to us today? Did those years have good ideas we should go back to? Etc., etc.

I say, check this book out!

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s by George Hutchinson is the discussion of American literature in the 1940s. Hutchinson is an American scholar, Professor of English and Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture at Cornell University. He is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell. From 2000 to 2012, he was the Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies, at Indiana University, where he chaired the English department from 2006-2009.He graduated from Brown University with an AB in 1975. He graduated from Indiana University with an MA in 1980, and Ph.D. in English and American Studies, in 1983

American literature was booming after the Great War. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner flourished in the interwar years. American was becoming an advanced nation. Education was rising and mass marketed paperback books made reading cheap. It's pretty easy to identify interwar authors in America and well as the Beat authors that rose in the 1950s. What happened in the 1940s is a blank to many. Certainly, World War II changed many things. WWI brought out poets in England. Americans went to the Left Bank and to England to write. There was a pride in American literature and America’s rising on the world stage in power, industry, and literature.

America faced large changes in the 1940s. Warren French would write that the 1940s were “one of the longest, unloveliest, and most ominously significant decades in human history.” It was sandwiched between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and punctuated with the atomic bomb. In that same period Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks all produced major works. Three Americans won the Nobel prize for literature in the 1930s. War would interrupt the 1940s but still Faulkner an Eliot would win Nobels. The 1940s were also the golden age of American libraries. They offered free shelter, entertainment, and education to all.

The army spread books among the ranks. There wasn't an area of combat where soldiers were not reading. Not all authors were read. Richard Wright was not included and other African American writers were left out as well as those writers whose works were considered insulting to racial, ethnic, or religious groups. Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage was excluded because of its negative portrayal of Mormons. Reading was a necessary escape for those in combat. Many read their first books straight through while serving. This sudden interest in reading also lead to an interest in writing. The G.I. Bill allowed many to attend college and many took to writing and instead of writing to change the world the new authors thought to write about the attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible.

The rise of cheap paperbacks also brought along another form of media. The comic book entered its golden age. Superman and Batman became heroes fighting the bad guys. The bad guys in Batman were complex -- Once innocent people transformed into supersociopaths through childhood trauma or social inequity. Even Two-Face was based on a Poe short story.

The 1940s was influenced by many factors outside of the war. Racial issues especially African American and Jewish were on the rise. The mass migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers was perhaps the largest migration of people over the shortest period of time in American history. Jazz changed music. Communism rose and fell; its peak membership in the US was in 1942. The world was changing and the United States found itself as the leading country, politically, economically, and militarily. It had its own internal problems and its growing pains. This can be seen in the literature of the period. Hutchinson writes an interesting cultural and literary history of one of the most important decades in American history.

[Stuart]

The 1940s were the beginning of America's brief love affair with intellectualism. WWII and its aftereffects made it acceptable for American males to think about their interior lives. Reading of serious books began to flourish and for the first time in America, book culture (and bookstores nationwide) took hold. Americans began to attend college in large numbers, as well. It was a time when middle class America aspired to at least look smart and intellectually engaged. Much of this profound shift in American culture is documented here in an engaging way. What isn't documented is the end of intellectual culture in America and the end of Americans, in particular American males, valuing their interior lives four decades later. But that's stuff for another book.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a readable and comprehensive piece of scholarship! This was a must-read for me, as my proposed dissertation focuses upon the 1940s. I was mostly interested in Hutchinson's approach to the decade as a framework and in the kinds of texts that he cites as pivotal to the period. The book did not disappoint me in that regard; I learned about a variety of works that I would like to read in full. Hutchinson's argument about the impulse to universality is fascinating and led to some really compelling passages. At other times, though, I thought the argument became a little tenuous or lost, due to the sheer volume of texts that Hutchinson discusses.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tried to take on too much in a single sitting - this should be 4-5 books to do justice to these different topics/identities and provide proper context/evidence.

[Sam T. Frost · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has to be living, to learn the
speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time
and to meet
The women of the time. It has to
think about war......

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is essential: a clear-eyed and wide-ranging look at a decade whose literature is very rarely examined as a whole.

[Tom Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Among the things I most look for in cultural and literary criticism are interesting new insights and a list of new things to read. Hutchinson's work does not disappoint. After a bit of meandering start, he digs expertly into the rich, often radical debates unleashed in the US first by the crisis in Europe and then by America's participation in both the War and its aftermath.

The profound displacement and disruptions precipitated by global conflict are reflected in a range of works illuminating the inequities, unfairness, and violence facing workers, women, Jews, African-Americans, LGBT+, and the planet itself. Many of the works he cites -- Lilian Smith's "Strange Fruit," Ann Petry's "The Street" -- weave multiple of these threads together -- "intersectionality" avant le lettre. While many of the cited writers -- Baldwin, Capote, Tennesse Williams -- many others seem long overdue for rediscovery.

Hutchinson ties it together with a consistent critique of the power relations embedded in mass capitalism, a framework that while potentially offputting to some seems both thoughtful and right. Overall, a book rich with sharp thinking that will have you jotting down a long list of books for your reading list.