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It's a Living: the Post-War Redevelopment of The

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It's a Living: the Post-War Redevelopment of The IT’S A LIVING: THE POST-WAR REDEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS NOVEL A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY BY STEPHEN HARDMAN UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY 2006 CONTENTS Introduction..........................................................................................................1 Chapter I: Class and the Post-war American Novel ........................................10 Chapter II: The New York Intellectuals, Liberal Consensus and the Novel....34 Chapter III: It’s a Living! Harvey Swados and the Culture of American Labour in the 1950s .......................................................................................................76 Chapter IV: Working Class Identity and the Transformation of American Capitalism in Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker ........................................... 120 Chapter V: Race, Class and Literary Form in Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go …………………………………………………………………160 Chapter VI: Post-industrial Culture and Working Class Identity in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn …………………………………………….. 202 Conclusion: Class, Theory and the Working Class Novel………………… 230 Works Cited……………………………………………………………….. 246 Abstract A recurrent premise of post-war criticism is that World War II marked the end of the American working class novel. This thesis challenges this assumption and argues that the working class novel redeveloped throughout the 1940s and 1950s in response to major social, political, economic and cultural changes in the United States. A prime justification for the obituary on the working class novel was that after 1945 the United States no longer had class divisions. However, as the first two chapters of this study point out, such a view was promulgated by influential literary critics and social scientists who, as former Marxists, were keen to distance themselves from class politics. Insisting that the working class novel was hamstrung by a dogmatic Marxist politics and a fealty to social realism, these critics argued that the genre’s relevance depended on the outdated politics and conditions of the 1930s. As such they were able to use literary criticism as a means of justifying their own ambiguous politics and deflecting any close scrutiny of their accommodation with the post-war liberal consensus. In a close examination of four writers in the subsequent chapters it is shown that, in fact, working class writers were extremely successful in adapting to post-war conditions. Harvey Swados, in his novel On the Line (1957) and in his journalism, provides crucial insights into the effects of the transition from a Fordist to a post- industrial society on the identity of the industrial worker. In The Dollmaker (1954) Harriette Arnow dramatises an important migration from the rural South to Detroit during World War II which exposes the ways in which American capitalism was able to diffuse a national working class identity. Chester Himes’ novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and his experiences as an African American writer in the 1940s, highlight the intersections between race (and racism) and class in the United States. Hubert Selby, in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), undermines the hegemonic ideology of post-war consumerism by drawing attention to the poverty and violence in an urban working class community. All these writers share a common concern with continuing, and re-developing, the dynamic and heterogeneous tradition of American working class cultural production. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Leonard Wilcox and John Newton, for their excellent readings of many drafts, their patience, and their commitment to the project. Their help and advice was particularly impressive considering the stress and strain of working for the final year under the threat of redundancies and cost-cutting at the University. The staff in the English and American Studies programmes at the University of Canterbury provided a stimulating, and at times oddly fascinating, working environment. I would particularly like to thank Huw Griffiths, Alex Evans, Patrick Evans and Jessica Ritchie for their support and friendship over the past few years. The thesis really began at St Louis University and I would like to thank Lewis Perry and Jeff Clymer for providing me with the confidence and the skills to embark on the PhD, and Shirley Loui for her love and her genuine and infectious belief in people’s abilities and aspirations. At the University of Central Lancashire I would like to thank Will Kauffman, Heidi Macpherson and John Joughin who instilled the desire to pursue an academic career, and for Will and Heidi giving me the opportunity to study at the Maastrich Center for Transatlantic Studies, which was such a defining moment for me. Finally I would like to thank Kathy for her love and support, Annie Finnie for her friendship and advice, Yolander Courtney for knocking some sense in to me when it was needed, and my parents and my sister, Sue, for their love and support and for constantly reminding me that theory can only take you so far. 1 Introduction This is a study of four writers – Harriette Arnow, Harvey Swados, Chester Himes and Hubert Selby – who, through the late 1940s and 1950s, continued the tradition of the American working class novel and, along with a broad range of frequently overlooked writers, contributed to the redevelopment of its form and direction in the second half of the twentieth century. While these writers were relatively successful in the post-war years, they all subsequently suffered from a degree of marginalisation in mainstream critical studies of post-war fiction. The few studies that do acknowledge these writers generally focus on a narrow interpretation of the writer’s subject matter or on their contribution to a particular genre. The result has been that Arnow is remembered as a regional feminist writer, and primarily for the film version of her novel The Dollmaker , Swados as a labour novelist and journalist, Himes as a writer of crime fiction, and Selby as a counterculture writer who chronicles the extremes of violence and addiction. While these descriptions are, to a certain degree, accurate representations of their work, they are only partial interpretations, and as such obscure the possibilities of a critical examination of the shared class interests between these writers. To take up this investigation raises important questions about the intersection between class identity and the development of the American novel after 1945. It is the contention of this study that these writers share a common interest in dramatising and depicting working class experience. Their marginalisation is symptomatic of a failure to recognise how American working class fiction made important advances in the post-war years, with many writers responding to the major 2 changes in American society through the 1940s and 1950s. This failure stems from an anxiety over the application of a class analysis to American literature and society that emerged during the same post-war period, in which the dominant discourse of consensus reinforced the belief in the classless nature of American society. This hegemonic post- war ideology perpetuated an understanding of working class novels as anachronistic cultural products, determined by a commitment to social realism and Marxism, and unsuited to the complexities of post-war America. However, as this study aims to show, these writers were drawing on a powerful and heterogeneous working class cultural tradition, able to utilise a wide range of literary forms and styles, and capable of developing this tradition into the second half of the twentieth century. These writers are representative of a crucial moment in American literary history, in which the working class novel redeveloped at the precise moment that class was being effaced as a legitimate identity marker, and as a tool for the analysis of society and of cultural production. In major surveys of twentieth century fiction, novels of the 1940s and 1950s tend to be identified under the rubric of what Malcolm Bradbury refers to, in his chapter heading for these years in The Modern American Novel (1983), as “Liberal and Existential Imaginations”. According to Bradbury, there was a “new spirit in fiction, seeking to make the novel more than a politics, rather a way into a history no longer open to innocent ideological interpretation”, which resulted in a “modern absurdism, a writing left pained and almost silent in front of an onerous and dark history, dividing self from society” (130). As the first two chapters of this study argue, Bradbury’s assessment of 3 the novel in the 1940s and 1950s, like many of the major studies, is strongly influenced by the hegemonic cultural and intellectual ideas that emerged in the 1950s. Bradbury’s argument that there was a “weakening of ideological commitment” and a “growing preoccupation with moral and metaphysical complexity” (130) stems directly from the ideas developed by the influential group of critics known as the New York intellectuals who are the subject of Chapter Two. What this study argues is that evaluations of post- war fiction such as Bradury’s ignore the fact that a large number of writers, including those in his survey, retained ideological commitments to working class issues, and that the “preoccupation with moral and metaphysical complexity” was not as pervasive as he suggests. Indeed, this preoccupation was driven primarily by the middle class ideology underpinning the prevailing political and cultural critical consensus. This is not to say that novels that focus on working class issues have been completely ignored. However, due to the dominance of the ideas articulated in influential studies such as Bradbury’s, working class fiction has been regarded as a peripheral, and minor, category of writing. The first wave of scholarship that attended to working class fiction in the post-war years included Walter Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900 - 1954 (1956), Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left (1961), Chester Eisinger’s Fiction of the Forties (1963) and James Gilbert’s Writers and Partisans (1968).
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