A new deal for thirties literature

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000 by Entin, Joseph

MICHAEL SZALAY, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 343, cloth, $59.95, paper, $18.95.

SEAN MCCANN, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 370, cloth, $59.95, paper, $19.95.

EM SMITH, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), pp. 215, cloth, $64.50, paper, $19.95.

Literary criticism of the American 1930s remains, for the most part, locked within two contrasting paradigms: the first approach emphasizes the decade's radical art and politics; the second emphasizes the era's largely conservative focus on the "folk" and the national craving for individual and social commitment. These three studies, examples of a new generation of historically-oriented, interdisciplinary scholarship, offer provocative revisions of this heavily explored decade, bursting prevailing patterns of interpretation and shedding new light on the relationship between literature and liberalism, pulp fiction and cultural politics.

One consequence of the emphasis on radicalism and the "folk" in critical work on the thirties is that the prime focus of the political history of the decade-the New Deal-has received remarkably scant attention from a literary perspective. It is this oversight that Michael Szalay's New Deal Modernism sets out to correct. Focusing on what Szalay calls the "literary politics of the welfare state" (16), New Deal Modernism offers a strikingly innovative re-mapping of thirties literary culture that complicates long-standing oppositions of left and right, modernism and realism, production and consumption.

Szalay focuses on the New Deal program of social security, not only as a government policy, but also as an ideology about the marketplace that had profound implications for artistic production. By enabling citizens to consume while they were not actively producing value in the market, the Social Security Act represented a legislative solution to "underconsumption," the notion that the nation's economic troubles derived not from a lack of production, but a failure of Americans to consume available goods. A host of writers from the left and the right, Szalay argues, engaged the risk management procedures of the New Deal state in an effort to imagine forms of artistic production that would be secure from the vagaries of the radically unpredictable Depression-era literary market. The aesthetic analogue to social insurance's compensatory mechanisms is what Szalay calls the New Deal performative, an ethic of artistic creation in which production and consumption become identical.

Szalay begins his exploration of the aesthetics of security by arguing that the Federal Writers Project promoted a conception of authorship as salaried labor that allowed writers to work without concern for the vicissitudes of the literary marketplace. By paying writers for the work they perform rather than whether or not the products of their labor find favor in the marketplace, the FWP offered a professional-managerial solution (a salary) in the guise of working-class rhetoric (labor valued for its own sake) that also met classic avant-garde criteria (hostility towards the artistic marketplace). As Szalay shows, this state-sponsored ideology of writing as process rather than product was embraced by many radical writers, including Richard Wright, Joseph Freeman, and John Dos Passos.

If writers on the Left promoted the ability of a government salary to protect authors from the market, a conservative strain of (anti) New Deal modernists, exemplified by Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, contended that the organic integrity of the work of art could provide a model of organization and wholeness that government policy could not. For these writers, autonomous art compensates for the failures of political planning and the fractures of the social world, bringing then into ideological proximity with a progressive theorist like Theodor Adorno, who also promoted organic art as compensation for social fragmentation. In the densest chapter in the text, Szalay invokes John Maynard Keynes, John Dewey, and linguist Benjamin Whorf to explain Wallace Stevens's comparison of poetry and insurance, both of which, Stevens suggests, face the fact that neither the poetic nor the social world can be adequately secured. Like Stevens, John Steinbeck and Betty Smith embrace the abstraction at the heart of social insurance, but through the conversion of traditional sentimentalism. Both The Grapes of Wrath and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn promote social security through sentiment that is extended from the private sphere to anonymous members of an abstract national community; both authors suggest that the transformation of sympathy into a public phenomenon is a function of the departure of male figures whose disappearance facilitates the extension of emotion beyond the family's borders. For Steinbeck, in particular, anonymous sympathy-in which every person is a potential giver or receiver of aid-is analogous to the collapse of reader and writer, literary consumer and producer. Finally, examining the work of several writers in the forties and fifties, including Robert Frost and Richard Wright, Szalay argues that insurance-which understands individuals as both "isolate victims of circumstance and collectivized agents of their own salvation" (206)-promotes identification with a larger social community that is ironically achieved by imagining one's own death-"the kind of anticipatory self-sympathy that leads one to purchase insurance in the first place" (207). Once again, consumption and production-of sympathy, of insurance, and, ultimately, of art-are rendered identical.