Dr. Metablog

New Old Books from the 1940s

I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade.

When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air. Yet Hutchinson brings to attention whole shelves of important writing of which I was shamefully ignorant. Through the resources of Interlibrary Loan and second-hand internet bookstores, I've now become acquainted with a bunch of new old books. Here's some of them (with more to follow). 

Hutchinson claims that Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946) is an important contribution to the Jewish-American novel. Perhaps it is, by priority, but I found it disappointing and superficial. The main man, Jacob Braunowitz changes his name to John Brown and hides his Jewishness, but it doesn't work -- he lives in a "wasteland" neither integrated into America nor bolstered by his inherited religion. Along comes a Freudian psychoanalyst and in a few magical sessions Brown is liberated to embrace his Judaism. For me, the novel was simplistic and implausible. Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) is the most persuasive and realistic war novel I've ever read -- it accomplishes more in 150 pages that Norman Mailer achieved in 600. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949 is a pioneering classic of environmentalism -- though nowadays less widely known than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but much more learned and innovative. It's a very good book but frankly I found the "lyrical" prose a bit too gooey for my taste. Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home is a distinguished novel of adolescent alienation. It's kinky (about a boy's semi-sexual relationship to his deceased mother's sister). It's a far better novel, I think, than Salinger's similar and imitative Catcher in the Rye. What a pity that Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at age 38!  A great loss to literature. I also read Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage, a memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1940s although not published until 1985. It's a noteworthy collection of short essay, able to be much more candid about sex and sexuality than if it had appeared during the time it chronicles. Broyard claims that 1946 was the best year ever: the war was over and he had freedom and the G I Bill. 

A pretty good for me too -- in 1946 just seven years old, sitting on the sunny stoop eating raisins.

Trump, Chaucer, etc.

Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear -- perhaps "female eunuch" -- whatever that entails -- or a gay male or possibly even a woman cross-dressed as a man. In any case, a person of ambiguous sexuality -- "gender fluid" in modern idiom. 

Update: the Naval Academy Nimitz library at Annapolis has purged from its shelves a book by Robert S. Sturges called  "Chaucer's Pardoner: Gender Theory." Isn't it reassuring that our national security will no longer be endangered by a discussion of the Pardoner's identity.

The list of 381 censored books can be found at

https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS%20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY.PDF

Cornell English Then and Now -- 6

After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis, 

It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.

Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my doorstep until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their most relevance. There are also many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise -- and underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well -- I never caught Rye fever although many of my friends were quite taken. 

Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.

Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is a most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had come to half accept. 

After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about -- as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped how Anker defines paradox.

I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it. 

 

[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."

[April 4]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (or whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty could make heads or tails of it."

[April 6]  Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I"m not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."

[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.

[April 9]  Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."

[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."

[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."

 

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"