Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
by Morris Dickstein
Dancing in the Dark
A review by Jonah Raskin
The specter of communism haunted America in the 1930s, and would not fade away. By the 1940s, Communists and anti-Communists alike would be haunted by their deeds and misdeeds in the decade that began in 1929, when the Stock Market crashed, and ended in 1941, when the country went to war in Europe and Asia, and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane -- the quintessential 1930s motion picture - arrived in movie theaters.
Given the ruckus Communists caused, it makes sense that the first thing writer Morris Dickstein tackles in this big, brilliant and beautifully written book about 1930s culture and society is Mike Gold, the pugnacious author of Jews Without Money -- the first "proletarian novel" of the era -- and a longtime member of the U.S. Communist Party.
Doesn't dwell on Reds
Communists, such as playwright Clifford Odets, appear throughout Dancing in the Dark -- you can't write about the 1930s without them -- but Dickstein wisely doesn't dwell on the Reds who wanted to overthrow capitalism and turned to art as a weapon in the class struggle. Fortunately, there is much more to write about.
Dickstein covers the 1930s thoroughly, moving gracefully from novels and poetry to theater and film, Harlem to Hollywood, and from magisterial works like Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath to miniature masterpieces like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. Again and again he offers new readings of American classics, and provides reinterpretations of the masters of our literature, placing F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Depression, not the Jazz Age, where he has long been located.
Definitive work
A New York intellectual, but younger than the generation of New York intellectuals that boasted Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling -- who experienced firsthand the rancor and revere of the 1930s -- Dickstein has written the definitive book about Depression culture for our time, which, with the economic downturn, has unmistakable echoes of that decade.
Other authors may see events and people he doesn't describe, or doesn't discuss at length -- Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler -- but Dickstein encompasses the full spectrum of creative energies in the 1930s, writing about Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Aaron Copeland, Duke Ellington. He writes lyrically about American dance, the American Dream, gangsters and screwball comedy. He brings the era to life.
In an introduction titled "Depression Culture," he observes that the era produced art that enabled audiences to escape from and, at the same time, face reality directly.
'30s split personality
Indeed, as Dickstein understands so well, the 1930s had "a split personality." In that sense it's similar to the 1960s, an era that he experienced, and that he wrote about in his first book, The Gates of Eden. Since then he has written several outstanding books, including A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature in the Real World and Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction.
A professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, he discusses the responses of his students to the literature of the Depression, and uses that essential tool of English teachers everywhere -- the compare and contrast exercise.
The big picture
A master of comparing and contrasting, he places African American literary giants Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston side by side and shows how they were the same and at the same time very different. He plunges into the books and movies he writes about and describes characters and plots in detail; he also steps back and looks at the big historical picture and the sweep of social movements. Dancing in the Dark is by far the best book, ever, about American creative expression in the Depression.
Jonah Raskin is the author of The Mythology of Imperialism: A Revolutionary Critique of British Literature and Society in the Modern Age (Monthly Review Press). E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.
Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 850 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. To learn about how to join, click here. |
|
Don't Miss
