The Short Story in Midcentury America

Countercultural Form in the Work of Bowles, McCarthy, Welty, and Williams

Sam V. H. Reese

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780807165782
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Short Story in Midcentury America provides in-depth case studies of four major writers of the post–World War II era—Paul Bowles, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams—examining how they used the contained aesthetics of short fiction to map out an oppositional stance to the dominant narratives, both political and literary, of mid-twentieth century U.S. culture.
Sam V. H. Reese presents a new understanding of the connections between politics, ideology, and literary form, arguing that writers employed the short story to critique the cultural mores of the early Cold War. The four authors under discussion found themselves socially marginalized by mainstream U.S. culture due to such factors as their gender, sexual orientation, religion, and foreign residence. Reese shows that each author embraced the short story's compressed form as a means of resisting political coercion and conformity, speaking out in support of freedom and open expression.
Reese argues that these four writers used the formal restrictions of the short story to develop a type of fiction that became recognizably countercultural, challenging the expansive, sprawling novels then receiving acclaim from critics. His analysis underscores the means by which each author's short stories utilized the aesthetic practices of mediums outside conventional narrative fiction: Bowles's career as a composer, McCarthy's criticism and memoirs, Williams's playwriting, and Welty's photography. By studying both their prose and its conceptualization, Reese reveals how writers resisted the political and stylistic pressures that defined U.S. literary culture in the early years of the Cold War.
In The Short Story in Midcentury America, Reese establishes a new framework for considering countercultural literature in the United States, reassessing the critical standing of the short story and re-evaluating the relationship between marginal social positions and literary form during the mid-twentieth century.

chapter one

Writing Counterculturally in Midcentury America

In his 1971 monograph on American fiction between 1950 and 1970, City of Words, Tony Tanner described the “abiding dream in American literature that an unpatterned, unconditioned life is possible, in which your movements and stillness, choices and repudiations are all your own.”¹ Having established a model in which the desire for freedom is the underlying principle in American literature, Tanner conceived of the dream for “a genuine freedom from all cultural patterning” as the defining feature of the postwar novel.² While his argument could seem naïve in hindsight, oversimplifying some of the complications that the period presents, it does capture something particularly compelling about America’s imaginations of itself. Indeed, it builds upon solid ground: almost from its inception, America has defined itself by its unique brand of freedom and by its progress toward greater liberty. John Dewey, writing on the cusp of war in 1939, declared that “the attainment of freedom is the goal of [America’s] political history”—in a crucial sense, Tanner was capturing what was essential to America’s understanding of its own history and future.³ The idea of freedom, moreover, was to become radically charged after the Second World War, as America took on an international burden as democratic superpower, and “the American novel itself took on a new world role.”⁴ Previously a detached configuration, the narratives of democratic freedom and the specific literary form of the novel were drawn together systematically by critics and writers in order to explain America’s past and project its future global significance.

The fate of the short story, on the other hand, was to prove paradoxical. Practitioners used the form to work subtle but incisive changes, both aesthetically and culturally, on the fabric of U.S. society; however, the critical regard for short fiction was colored by these same political concerns that saw it maligned and neglected in a way that has had lasting repercussions. But if, from a critical standpoint, the decade after the Second World War marked a decline in the fortunes of the short story, from a publishing perspective the midcentury seemed, for a moment, to be its zenith. Indeed, reflecting back on the previous year in an article from 1951, the prominent critic Leslie Fiedler noted in wonder that there had “never been so favourable a moment for the short story.”⁵ Despite his substantial reservations about the value of these works, he drew attention to the fact that “after years of assuring us and themselves that the publication of such books is the surest way to bankruptcy,” publishing houses had nonetheless “given us a more imposing list of short fiction than we have ever seen in a comparable period” (“Style” 156, 155). Many of the collections to which he refers, moreover, bear names readily recognizable for later readers. Among the thirteen different volumes that his extended review encompasses, collections stand out by high-profile figures like William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Mary McCarthy, and Irwin Shaw. This roll call was further expanded by the annual anthologies of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards, which between them featured works by Kay Boyle, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, and Fiedler himself.⁶ Tellingly, however, none of these authors, save Cheever, remain primarily recognized for their work in the form of the short story, and even in the face of this wealth of publication, Fiedler’s review acknowledges the tenuous position that the short story had in his own contemporary culture. Stressing the “paucity of new writers and their quick turning away to the novel under pressure from agents and publisher,” Fiedler captured the cultural and economic factors which signaled a change in fortunes for the short story; his more pointed criticism that the short story had “fallen heir to various alien obligations” gestures to the larger political concerns which formed the background to this shift (“Style” 156, 158). In many ways, his criticism replicates the cultural logic of writers like Dewey, who associated American identity with freedom and a sense of cultural expansiveness.

Indeed, Dewey’s declaration on freedom ultimately proved prophetic: postwar political rhetoric conceptualized the new role of America as one of “protector of freedom.” While the kind of freedom that had engaged politicians—and writers—before the war had been an individual, or at least local, one, in the power vacuum after the Second World War, America “had to assume a world role.”⁷ Moreover, as it found itself competing for hegemony against the Soviet Union, the concept of freedom was increasingly co-opted as part of the rhetoric of American dominance—“the claim to global authority” that “cold war American asserted . . . in a narrative that permeated most aspects of American culture.”⁸ This narrative relied upon a competition between two modes of existence—one free, one restricted—and the explicit equation of freedom with democracy. Turning to a speech delivered in July 1950, the same year that produced the unexpectedly (and unrepeatably) high yield of short story collections, in which President Harry S. Truman addressed the American people on the subject of the Korean War, it is clear the extent to which concepts of freedom and democracy were conflated with an ideal of America as global superpower. They were a nation “determined to preserve . . . freedom—no matter what the cost . . . for all people”; Truman’s stress on America’s exemplary brand of democracy, “how free men, under God, can build a community of neighbors, working together for the good of all,” suggests the universal benefits of freedom and the necessity of American involvement in its expansion.⁹ But perhaps most importantly, his pronouncement that “the American people are unified in their belief in democratic freedom [and] are united in detesting Communist slavery” established a polar difference between America and the Soviet Union, where America’s democratic freedom rendered it an exemplary world power. America’s image abroad and its own conceptualization of itself were now intrinsically tied to an identity of freedom—a freedom that was at once individual and contingent upon a democratic society.

Of course, this ideal of a shared American passion for freedom did not simply exist as an empty term in the realm of political rhetoric. Profoundly influential, it was argued for with equal force and conviction by a large body of literary critics in the postwar period who, from a liberal bastion in New York, developed a model of “ethical fiction” whose goals accorded with those expressed by Truman to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, to understand the position from which American readers approached short stories, it is important to understand the priorities associated with liberalism in postwar America. Liberalism has often been considered as a unifying feature of the American political scene in the mid-twentieth century. To this effect, Louis Hartz, in his 1955 text The Liberal Tradition in America, offered a narrative of American history that was characteristic of the position held more widely by a loosely associated group of New York Intellectuals, in that it placed the concept of liberalism at the center of American culture and history.¹⁰ Basing his argument on what he described as “the storybook truth about American history”—where the country was founded by men escaping the oppression of Europe to find freedom in a “New World”—Hartz considered the most salient feature of American society to be that “the American community is a liberal community.”¹¹ Rather than liberalism sitting at one end of an ideological spectrum, in opposition to a conservative alternative, Hartz argued that there had “never been a ‘liberal movement’ or a real ‘liberal party’ in America” and that, instead, the belief in the primacy of individual freedom constituted the foundation for national identity: American society “only had the American Way of Life.”¹² His characterization of this transpartisan ideology, where “‘Americanism’ brings McCarthy together with Wilson,” suggests the particular importance that liberalism had taken on with the onset of the Cold War.¹³ It had become the defining feature around which Americans could orient themselves against the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, whether one aligned oneself with red-baiting McCarthyism or Wilsonian politics. Ironically, this position was itself defined through a totalizing narrative, which made authors and readers who engaged with it complicit in its logic.

The position that American critics adopted was naturally related to the larger political narratives of the period, so it should not be surprising that critics like Hartz sought to conceptualize American history in terms that reinforced this dominant ideology. Alan Nadel has noted the seductive logic of this postwar position, where “the narrative called democracy placed Americans in the roles of reader and viewer of a series of adventures, in which the heroes and villains were clear, the desirable outcomes known, and the undesirable outcomes contextualized as episodes in a larger narrative that promised a happy ending.”¹⁴ What is more surprising is the extent to which such critics promoted programs of novel writing that dictated the stylistic and formal characteristics of works that could be considered American. Nadel, however, astutely contends that “the boundaries between narratives of personal policy and narratives of national policy are, in fact, hard to maintain, because if our narrative of national hegemony contained both the free world and the Communist world, it also contained the readers who consumed this narrative, making them participants in the narrative by virtue merely of the fact that they had consumed it. At the same time, it also protected them by containing them within that narrative in the privileged position of readers, implicated only vicariously in the narratives with which they identified.”¹⁵ As such, the totalizing embrace of the American narrative of democracy necessarily co-opted future cultural production and implicated authors within an aesthetic program contingent upon America’s hegemonic position within an international sphere.

From this perspective, it is easier to understand why American critics of this era, particularly other New York Intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase, positioned themselves deliberately along liberal lines and conceptualized the role of criticism in the postwar period as particularly concerned with promoting novels (as opposed to short stories) that emphasized personal responsibility and bore a close relationship to the lived experience of the American people. This emerging strain of “modern” literary criticism was designed, in Trilling’s words, “to construct people whose quality of intelligence, derived from literary study or refined by it, would ultimately affect the condition of society in certain good ways.”¹⁶ Underpinning their desire for a new paradigm of fiction and criticism was a belief that, in the wake of the inexplicable violence that characterized the Second World War, contemporary society was uniquely in need of such a change. The ethical dimensions of their program were impelled by the sense that “perhaps at no other time has the enterprise of moral realism been so much needed.”¹⁷ Their perspective, however, just like the broader currents of liberalism, was further inflected by the shadow of the Cold War and the demonization of the Soviet Union as coercive and totalitarian. Geraldine Murphy has demonstrated how “formerly radical intellectuals like Trilling . . . felt it incumbent on them to deplore the ‘totalitarianism’ of the Soviet Union and embrace the ‘freedom’ of the West.”¹⁸ The concern that Fiedler expresses regarding the “alien influences” upon contemporary short fiction is reflective of this broader concerns to shape a literature that could oppose a Soviet culture characterized as restrictive and oppressive through a democratic, American aesthetic.

As Trilling proposed, in one of the clearest enunciations of the ambitions of this liberal criticism, society needs “books that raise questions in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses.”¹⁹ Literature could be a powerful tool in bettering individuals and helping to develop them into more sophisticated citizens. Trilling was not endorsing a program of self-help, however, but one of literature that could communicate something that made the individual freer. After all, as Dewey argued, in America “the idea of freedom has been connected with the idea of individuality of the individual”; fiction that could offer its readers a greater level of self-awareness would necessarily give them a greater degree of liberty.²⁰ Just as Truman’s speech suggested that the freedom of the individual could be co-opted as part of a strategy to win greater freedom for mankind, however, Trilling and fellow liberal critics argued that literature should be leveraged to engender a greater level of freedom for society as a whole. As such, the postwar author had an obligation to engage with contemporary issues and communicate a vision for a better world, as literature needed “people who are specifically and passionately concerned with social injustice.”²¹ Of course, fiction could not exist in a critical vacuum or enact its social benefit without the help of a secondary apparatus. The vision of freedom that fiction could offer would be refined by the emerging strain of modern literary criticism: designed “to construct people whose quality of intelligence, derived from literary study or refined by it, would ultimately affect the condition of society in certain good ways.”²² Underpinning the desire for this new paradigm of fiction and criticism in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a belief that contemporary society was uniquely in need of such a change. The urgency of their program was impelled by a sense that at “perhaps at no other time has the enterprise of moral realism been so much needed.”²³ In this light, it seems hardly surprising that critics like Fiedler should place so much emphasis on the lack of freedom displayed by the characters of the contemporary short story—the issue of freedom formed the heart of contemporary criticism’s concerns.

Trilling’s assertion that society was in need of moral realism, moreover, suggests a particular aspect to this model of so-called ethical literature. Ideally, it would espouse a specific kind of engagement with reality. On a superficial level, this could manifest in works that were in touch with the reality of contemporary America and the particulars of contemporary life. Such an understanding certainly reflects critics’ insistence that authors turn their attention to peculiarly American subjects and turn away from the bizarre and frequently international premises that had characterized the short fiction of the previous decades. As Trilling argued, “the novel, then, is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of a man’s soul.”²⁴ Moreover, the sense that writers should be dealing with specifically American themes, presented in an idiom and with an energy that was peculiarly American, was charged with the ideals of William Carlos Williams, whose concept of writing “in the American grain” had, by the 1940s, gained traction. Like Benjamin Franklin, one of Carlos Williams’s central American figures, the midcentury author ought to be “borrow[ing] . . . from the primitive profusion of his surroundings.”²⁵ But critics were also demanding a more particular model of engaging with “reality.” Trilling and his fellow liberal critics were deeply concerned with how the individual reacted to, received, and processed the “real world” around them, arguing that fiction ought to provide a similarly nuanced interaction. In part, this could be engendered by a return to realism in fiction; certainly, critics prioritized realistic prose, and as Malcolm Bradbury notes, after the Second World War there was a tendency of writers “moving back towards realism.”²⁶ But this neorealism was inflected by a new sense of complexity, suggested by the experiences of war. As Thomas Schaub has argued, “the novel’s relationship to social history—to ‘reality’—was the central preoccupation of the critics who wrote about narrative fiction in the years after World War II.” It was no longer possible to consider “reality” as a straightforward, or self-evident, monolithic concept.²⁷ Instead, they prescribed an attitude to reality that was at once realistic and nuanced with an awareness of the uncertainty of experience and the nebulousness of morality. They, and many of the prominent authors of the era, were “much concerned with moral uncertainty and metaphysical complexity.”²⁸ In fact, because the novel was such a “perfect vehicle for the ironies and paradoxes of the moral life and the social history it produces,” authors had an obligation to acknowledge the uncertainty of modern experience, to produce “a fiction deeply conscious of alienation and anomie, often voiced in the despairing intonations of modernism, yet also turned towards society.”²⁹

So far, my argument has focused on the liberal critics based largely in New York and has overlooked the dissenting voices of the southern New Critics and their emphasis on technique and style. Instead, it has followed a model that understands Trilling and his peers to be unconcerned with the finer points of prose styling and attuned instead to the ideas and meaning of a text. But as Schaub so neatly emphasizes, the New York critics and New Critics were surprisingly “in accord” that “how literature achieved [relevance] relied . . . on form.”³⁰ The presentation of the kind of reality that the liberal critics advocated relied upon extended, novelistic prose that was sophisticated and attuned to doubleness, uncertainty, and indeterminacy; their “moral realism” was as much a concept of style as it was of intent. The most prominent victim of this stylist ethos was naturalism—increasingly eschewed by authors and condemned by critics, it presented a view of the world that was labeled simplistic and, in light of the newly complex understanding of the world, actively misleading. As Schaub explicates: “During this time, ‘naturalistic’ methods seemed to provide too little access to how things really are or might be. In its materialism, its assumption of determinate behavior, and its documentary methods [naturalism] relied too much for its truths upon surface detail and failed to provide an adequate po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction “A Snail of Language”
• 1 Writing Counterculturally in Midcentury America
• 2 Mary McCarthy and the Containing Mask
• 3 Tennessee Williams and the New School of Decadence
• 4 Paul Bowles’s Verbal Violence and Patterns of Words
• 5 Eudora Welty and the Photographic Capture
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index