I find it hard to imagine a world without “Superman” or “Batman” but I can imagine a world without “Spiderman” but not without “Mickey Mouse.” Ubiquity makes it difficult to take apart the mythology strand by strand but one of the key cultural resonances of “Superman” was that of the outsider, the alien who had to find a way to fit into his New World of America but hidden away were dreams of heroic deeds and success.
Thoughts: My most intense experience of Superman was watching George Reeves playing him and crippled by Kryptonite and feeling an intense five year old sexual desire to protect him. So “Superman” for me was a window onto my gay identity and certainly with his rippling muscle and chiseled features, Superman was stuff of gay male fantasies as well as for straight men wishing they could be bold and brave.
Photos. That is what made Life magazine – Life. Not just any photos but great, big, bold, heroic ones that captured viewers and overwhelmed them so that they didn’t mind the meager and often unhelpful text i.e. accompanying articles.
Two women made Life. Clare Booth Luce tried to pitch the idea of Life to Conde Nast but he was too broke to purchase the name Life for the new bold, photographically rich magazine Clare Booth not yet Luce had in mind. When she finally became Luce, he purchased the name for $92,000 and engaged the second woman, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White to splash her images across the large, dynamic pages. Her latter description of the magazine’s concept was that of “horizon widening” and involving a “great rush of wind.” Ah, I long for the days people could unself-consciously write like that.
Thoughts: There is another element to Life besides its larger than life quality and that is advertising. Just as the pictorial articles could now sweeping across the wide open prairie of larger pages, so could advertising. It too could become bold and overwhelming. Remember, Life came about in the mid-thirties. Television had already been invented but didn’t become accepted until after WWII. By that time, America had become conditioned to learning through photos – Life as it were and advertising in the same manner was accepted as the wave of the future. Henry Luce was never a TV guy but Life paved the way for NBC and CBS to conquer the airwaves and ultimately give us the noisy, flashy world we now inhabit.
Placing these two Southern authors in the same title could elicit a guffaw as would a title that read, “Dr. Phil and Carl Jung.” That initial reactions is based on snobbery, the high brow disdain for middle brow literature. Sure, Faulkner used experimental techniques and Mitchell wrote in the 19th century realist fashion but both share something in common: a desire to strip away the mythology surrounding the Southern way of life and history that its not that so far-fetched to clump them together.
But the critical difference between the two is their messages about race. In Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner confronted the ugliest of racial facts – that American democracy rode on slavery’s back while Mitchell viewed slavery as a regretful but mostly necessary fact because of the “Negro’s” child-like nature. Faulkner’s work never achieved anything like Mitchell’s popularity because the myth of the gracefully noble but doomed civilization of the South comforted Americans much more than a work that confronted the core of our democratic existence.
Thoughts: Americans don’t really like history. They much prefer mythology as it allows them to view their founding fathers like Greek gods in which they can be acknowledged as having faults, but their basic divinity is never questioned. But if Americans accepted as fact that slavery was embedded within the civilization that proclaimed equality and liberty for all, would we be able accept the ongoing shame of racial disparity in American society?
Is there any irony in the fact that AA was born two years after prohibition ended? Had a repeal bender driven home the point to Bill Wilson that he was powerless over alcohol or was it just coincidence? Surely the nation wasn’t finished with its bender – popular culture lit up over alcohol from hard-boiled detective fiction to film noir, jazz joints and neon martini glasses burning up the urban sky.
Alcoholics Anonymous spins the Great American myth a bit – yes there is the quality of rebirth, clean slate, freedom to create a life of one’s choosing but there is an added element here, the sense of hitting bottom and humbling oneself before God which isn’t very American at all. But in true American fashion the moment of humbling is just that – a moment. Then its on to the bright future which includes a healthy dose of the converteds’ self righteousness which is an American evergreen.
Thoughts: What to make of applying the AA model to everything? Its sad how something so powerful and effective is cheapened and dismissed because it becomes a tedious cliche rather than a living testament to changed lives. AA for sex, food and gambling addictions has turned every one into a victim turned hero. And now AA,merged with the celebrity memoir. makes everyone believe can be saved by its simple and powerful creed. But the thousands of lives lost every year to alcoholism suggests that is not for everyone.
Americans were suspicious of the skyscraper. It represented the ultimate triumph of the city and there was something unAmerican in its push upward rather than outward. But to immigrants for whom America was as much idea as place, they saw the skyscraper as freedom, breaking free of the shackles of space and height.
Thoughts: America use to be the unquestioned king of the skycraper, not just the inventor but the land of the tallest. That ended a decade or more ago as asian countries began to assert their economic might. Now the skycraper is king in Dubai, a fake place aiming simply to have the tallest at all cost. There is no context, no real city or civilization to support the efforts. But that original burst of height that culminated in the early thirties with the Chrysler and Empire State buildings will always be an awe-inspiring moment in the gee-whiz wonder of American urban life.
Edmund Wilson was the Christopher Hitchens of his day only American. And that is critical to understanding Wilson. He had a fascination with lower-case democracy, including a serious flirtation with American Communism before breaking off the relationship in blazing literary fashion.
In 1932, he wrote “The American Jitters” which was a comprehensive survey of the nation’s people from coast to coast. He caught the language, the desperation but also the crazy American optimism that never dies. He didn’t romanticize the common man or think that communism was the answer but stuck to reporting as he saw it. Wilson went on to act as Critic Laureate, pushing for the Library of America series that started up shortly after his death.
Thoughts: Wilson was a polymath, a literary adventurer who took projects of wide scope and surprising depths. There is really no one like him and the whole idea of serious, non-academic criticism focused on the American experience is moribund. But maybe the record of American literary seriousness has gone into print and that is the greatest legacy Wilson could ask for in the handsome volumes of the Library of America.
Sound wasn’t just noise it was talk and in the early year of the movies, crisp, slangy, witty dialog was celebrated and savored. Robert Gottlieb makes the important point that before radio and then the movies, talk wasn’t a cultural experience. People talked amongst themselves, at conventions, churches and ceremonies. What if Americans had heard Lincoln’s second inaugural spoken?
The movies of the thirties and forties conveyed a heightened sense of gritty, poetic talk that make them an art form for their dialog alone. And music was full of talk too and in the twenties, thirties and forties, popular songs had lyrics of such pungent economy and insight that they are with us still and never topped.
Thoughts: Gottlieb doesn’t explain the demise of brilliant talk as anything more than staleness but I think its more than that. Blame marketing because it is premised on phony talk, talk that hides and lies, that repeats and repeats in your ear like a form of brainwashing that in the end drains the color and distinctness out of our language until we live in a world of ”at the end of the day” “best of breed” “lessons learned” “dude” “sweet” “hella” and all the rest.
More signs that our consumer culture can be traced to the 1920s. The Book of the Month Club (BOMC) was born in 1926 and sold to the busy businessman as a cure for cultural inadequacy. The club advertised to this well-do-to market by suggesting that when his wife and her friends discussed the latest book over dinner, the business man (Babbit?) would be left out unless he too was a member of the club.
The founders of the club recognized that many people didn’t have easy access to big city bookstores and the club was a way to market directly to this audience bypassing the usual retail outlets. BOMC was also a cultural phenomenon, recognizing that people thirsted for ideas but safe ones in keeping with their privileged middle class status. The avant garde spread filthy notions about sex, race, poverty and class warfare while the mass book market focused on genres such as romance, detective stories and Westerns. Why shouldn’t the middle class be included in the great idea mart where they could learn about tasteful notions of racial issues, poverty and troubles in exotic locales?
Thoughts: Following the addiction model, marijuana is seen as a gateway drug to heroin and meth. Why can’t this apply to the propagation of safe ideas to the middle class? Why aren’t people’s appetites whetted by exposure to challenging ideas to try out even more challenging ones? My answer has to do with form. The problem with the middlebrow is that it delivers ideas in a familiar, reassuring package. To really challenge people requires the adoption of modernism – the explosion of form – the challenge of delivery and that is too overwhelming and therefore scary to an aspiring middle class that has believed that by following the rules they will find success and therefore happiness.
One of the most American of qualities is optimism. That can-do boosterism that chirps along under much of our public conversations. Yet one of the signature genres of American fiction is the hard-boiled detective novel where everything is shit and yet our detective hero, without hope, soldiers towards the dim light of justice, tweaking it to brighten for a moment before it returns to its natural state of weakness.
Walter Mosely in his essay, poses the quintessential hard-boiled question: can I do right in a world gone wrong? He claims there are many answers to that question but I’m not so sure. I think the answer is always yes but in the end its doesn’t ever matter because that the bright light of justice will always dim.
Thoughts: I don’t think hard-boiled fiction is an antidote to optimism as much as its a reaction to extreme freedom. Human beings aren’t all that comfortable with freedom. Its overwhelming and scary and uncertain. Those are the fears that engender the hard-boiled fantasy. And it is by and large a fantasy – a mind full of foreboding, lurking disasters that I have often fallen into when I awake at 3am and torture myself with all the worst “what ifs” my mind can whip up at that awful time of night.
So American freedom lives in the daytime of optimism and hard-boiled fantasy lurks in the back of our minds coming alive at night when we can do nothing but worry. This may explain how America can turn so quickly from feel-good self help to scary paranoia.
The Harlem Renaissance sparked a new identity for black people, the so-called “new negro.” But there was an Avant-garde group of blacks that didn’t buy into the safe and acceptable definition. They saw themselves as sexually alive, potent and powerful. They even saw themselves as sexual creatures which went against the norm that saw white folks as threatened by that aspect of black men in particular.
These black intellectual published “Fire!!” the first highbrow literary journal by and for black people. It failed after just one issue but these folks announced a new identity for black people – unapologetic, adventuresome, sexually aware and powerful. Even other blacks had problems with them but no matter. They live on as an paragon of what black could be in American society.
Thoughts: We are a long ways from Booker T. Washington with this group in terms of black identity but not in terms of years – really only a generation has passed. But in white culture, no one has heard about “Fire!!” or these black intellectual because the truth is that white people can’t deal with black people who don’t allow themselves to be defined by white culture.