Fiction in Transition

FICTION IN TRANSITION

Social Realism Exhausted

The 1940s were an in-between era for American fiction. The decade marked an end and also a beginning. Social realism was the trend coming to a close. The 1930s had seen a rise in social concern among fiction writers. Novelists such as James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, and Theodore Dreiser had aimed for socially significant fiction that portrayed working people fighting against the machine of capitalism. Novelists such as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Willa Gather had for three decades presented a realistic fiction entrenched in American landscapes and language. They were often political writers with a political agenda. In 1939, with the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, social realism reached its peak. Steinbeck's novel, which followed the journey of Oklahoma's poor to the "promised land" of California, only to see them crushed by forces beyond their control, was the ultimate statement of social realism. It garnered Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize. After The Grapes of Wrath social realism seemed exhausted in form and content. The social movements of the 1930s were coming to an end, and the fiction that had described them was spent.

Old Lions

Another group of writers was also winding down. The Lost Generation of the 1920s, who had left America for Paris to become the most celebrated group of writers back home, was also declining in stature. F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. Ernest Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 and then remained nearly silent for an entire decade. Two other major American novelists had also become silent. Thomas Wolfe died in 1938, though his You Can't Go Home Again, appeared in 1940. William Faulkner, a prolific writer in the 1930s, published The Hamlet, the first volume of his Snopes Trilogy, in 1940 and Intruder in the Dust, generally regarded as a minor novel, in 1948; his production and his critical reputation diminished significantly during the 1940s. Just five years before his Nobel Prize in 1949 (awarded in 1950), Faulkner was essentially out of print and forgotten by the public while he struggled unhappily as a Hollywood screenwriter. American fiction was looking for new energy, new ideas, and new themes to follow up two fruitful decades of work.

Modernism Arrives

As in American art, the source of the energy for new developments would be Europe. The modernism that had developed in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s finally began to influence American writers in the 1940s. Modernism was the antithesis of social realism and regionalism in America. The works of Europeans that influenced American literature of the 1940s—that of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Mann, and especially Franz Kafka—looked not at social commentary or working people, but at the individual instead. The reportorial style of realism gave way to subjective viewpoints. The thematic novel suddenly seemed old-fashioned. Modernism tried to reinvent the world and force the reader to do the same. The familiar was made unfamiliar. Abstraction increased. Novelistic methods of narrative, characterization, and plotting were replaced or remade, but modernism did not come easily to American writers. The old lions, whose influence on younger writers was tremendous, actually acted as a barrier to modern ideas. Though Faulkner had already adopted modern techniques, he had never attained popularity. One of the first of the "new" novelists was twenty-eight year old Saul Bellow, destined to be among the foremost writers of the post-World War II era. In 1944 his novel Dangling Man appeared. As the title suggests, Bellow was interested in the individual man in the modern world. He showed the influence of the French existentialists and Kafka in his depiction of an individual attempting to determine his place in the world. Bellow followed up with The Victim in 1947 and established himself as an influential voice. Other new voices followed Bellow, among them Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, John Hawkes, and Chester Himes. Modernism was in its youth in America in the 1940s, hardly a dominant form. While Bellow and Hawkes led the movement slowly forward, many other novelists wrote and exerted their influence on other styles. Though regionalism and realism were waning, writers produced a notable body of work in these veins—Warren's All the Kings Men (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1946), John Hersey's A Bell for Adano (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1944), the work of Southern regional writers Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, William Carlos Williams' Stecher Trilogy, Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm (the first National Book Award winner, in 1949), and the stories of John O'Hara (the creator of the so-called New Yorker short story). But modernism was the style that would influence the following generations. In the 1940s it was being done more quietly, against the grain of popular opinion.

The Combat Novel

World War II would of course influence fiction as it did all other aspects of life. In the final years of the war and in the late 1940s, the first fictions describing the war began to appear, but they were not simply reportorial accounts of what had been seen in combat. They became a genre in themselves that would endure through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In a sense they were accounts of the societies that produced the war. The war became a microcosm of America. The military company came to stand for the whole nation. The novels described men in combat or the military mindset about conflict, whether war was actually depicted or not. Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) was the first of this group of novels to appear. Novelists such as Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948), John Horne Burns (The Gallery, 1947), James Gould Cozzens (Guard of Honor, 1949), Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions, 1948), Robert Lowry (The Wolf That Fed Us, 1949), and John Hawkes (The Cannibal, 1949) looked at the war culture and the world in its aftermath. Hawkes as a modernist innovator and Mailer as a major new force in American letters were the most influential of the group.

HEMINGWAY LEARNING TO WRITE
AGAIN

In 1940 Ernest Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls, his most ambitious novel, when he was forty-one years old and at the peak of his powers. He was the best known writer in the world, and in 1945 readers awaited his fictional treatment of World War II, which he had covered as a reporter. He had written novels set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

But Hemingway had sustained two major concussions during World War II. As a result, he suffered from headaches and had trouble concentrating. Worst of all, his memory became impaired, and he had difficulty writing words. He had always been a disciplined writer and he began a strict program to resume his work. It was first necessary for him to limit his alcohol consumption. According to Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker, he began by writing letters. He then wrote short stories. When he was ready to write longer fiction, he began a sequence of novels about the sea, the air, and the land. This project was interrupted by work on Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). (Work-in-progress on the sea-air-land novels was posthumously published in 1970 as Islands in the Stream.) The reception of Across the River and Into the Trees was mixed, but most critics condemned the novel as imitation Hemingway. A victim of his own stature, Hemingway was not allowed to fail. He would produce only one more fictional work of great standing, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which many saw as an answer to his critics.

Source:

Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering (New York: Viking, 1974).

Blacks

The 1940s marked a new beginning for black writers. With the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s, American black culture had thrived, but it had been largely ignored by white America. In 1940, with the publication of Richard Wright's Native Son, black America gained a voice that could not be ignored. The next generation of black writers would refer to Wright as their "father" because Native Son, and his subsequent autobiography (Black Boy, 1945), placed Wright among his contemporaries as a prominent American writer, regardless of racial distinctions. Wright's energy and the anger in his voice opened up new channels of discussion for American black authors, many of whom disagreed with his portrayal of blacks. Zora Neale Hurston, whose Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is now an American classic, published her autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road in 1942 and Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948. William Attaway, Chester Himes, and Hurston were the preeminent black writers of the decade. The decade would end with promise. Himes and Attaway were established. James Baldwin had begun his work. Wright had given black Americans a voice. In the late 1940s and the 1950s they would begin to speak with that voice.

Sources:

Edward Margolies, Native Sons (New York: Lippincott, 1968);

Frederick R. Karl, American Fictions, 1940-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).