The Good Life: Weakness in the Survival Years A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Robert St. Lawrence IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jani Scandura and Maria Damon December 2018 Copyright Robert St. Lawrence, 2018 i Acknowledgments This dissertation project would never have been completed without the continued support and engagement of my advisors, Maria Damon and Jani Scandura, and the other members of my dissertation committee, Tony Brown and Christophe Wall-Romana. It would have been equally incomplete without my colleagues, including Mike Rowe, Wes Burdine, Andrew Marzoni, Val Bherer, Stephen McCulloch, Hyeryung Hwang, Annemarie Lawless, and the many others whose conversation and advise helped shape my work since 2009. I have drawn great inspiration from those who have taken the time to provide mentor- and friendship along the way, such as Joe Hughes and Charles Legere. And my colleagues in the state of Washington have been both patient and generous as I worked toward completing this project. Of course, I would never have embarked down this path without the support and love of my partner, Carrie Graf. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Alma Lyell Graf St. Lawrence. iii Abstract In a 1948 questionnaire, the editors of the Partisan Review felt safe in asserting that “it is the general opinion that, unlike the twenties, this is not a period of experiment in language and form.” The socially aware writers of 1948 felt the impasse of their situation acutely, a suspended sensibility given its clearest expression by John Berryman, who explained that “this has been simply the decade of Survival.” The decade’s self- image for many of its “Leftish” writers was bereft of the creative, life-building activity that had marked the revolutionary realisms of the past decades. It was underwritten with anguish about the perceived foreclosure of unity between political and aesthetic action from within the total entanglement of both World War 2 and its postwar settlements. My project in this dissertation discloses the conflict between such despairing positions and experiments in the literary re-production of the good life undertaken in the midst of these survival years. By examining a set of writers whose negotiation with the representation of the good life has remained substantially unstudied, I explore the ways their work attempts to suspend an aperture in the “anguish” of the 1940s and early 1950s. The objects of study span from Marshall McLuhan’s turn to popular culture in The Mechanical Bride to the premiere performance of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 1951, from the anarchist neo-Romantic writing of British writer Alex Comfort in the first years of the 1940s to the decade-spanning influential work of Paul Goodman. Weaving through multiple genres and critical methods, I demonstrate the persistence of an aspiration to unify the production of radical literature and politics throughout the survival years. I show that this persistence is realized by writers not necessarily by opting out or taking on heroic conflict, but through the tools made available by their weakness within an inescapable system. iv Table of Contents List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... v Introduction - In Which Theory and Practice Are Unified: Writing Good Lives ............... 1 Chapter One - Alex Comfort and Romantic Responsibility ............................................. 22 Chapter Two - Structures of Relief: Despairing Domesticity ........................................... 92 Chapter Three - Private Mourning Keeps a Public Silence: Mac Low, McLuhan, and Aesthetic Exercise ........................................................................................................... 163 Chapter Four - “In Darkness and Luminosity:” The Living Theatre’s Gertrude Stein .. 215 Conclusion - Survival and Method ................................................................................. 282 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 290 v List of Figures Figure 1: “Private Life” Advertisement, for Celanese Jersey .................................. 186 1 Introduction - In Which Theory and Practice Are Unified: Writing Good Lives In 1932, after fifteen years getting by on the income received working as a “freelance teacher,” as he would later describe it, Scott Nearing and his second wife Helen Knothe purchased a hill farm in Vermont on which to live the good life.1 The Nearings were opting out of what they considered “a revolting and increasingly intolerable social situation” by leaving New York City for the countryside, and they entered into a two-decade experiment in homesteading.2 By that time in his life, Scott Nearing had transitioned from earning his income as a professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to working for the Socialist Party of America funded Rand School of Social Science as a pamphleteer—in which capacity he would be tried under the Espionage Act in 1919 for his pamphlet The Great Madness: A Victory for the American Plutocracy. He continued on as a teacher and speaker throughout the 1920s, even as he left the Socialist Party, joined the Workers Party (CPUSA), and was expelled from the CPUSA in 1930.3 Having lost any organizational political affiliation, increasingly at odds with both the institutional left and right, Scott and Helen Nearing concluded that “western civilization would be unable 1 Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical: a Political Autobiography (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1972/2000), 210. In these later reflections, Nearing identifies the pressures that led to his removal from a teaching livelihood as specifically “right-wing pressures.” 2 Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (New York: Schocken Books, 1954/1970), 5. 3 For more on Nearing’s shifting political affiliations, see John Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing: an Intellectual Biography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 2 henceforth to provide an adequate, stable and secure life even for those who attempted to follow its directives,” and took flight from the city.4 The Nearings were hardly alone in this gesture. There was a small but significant movement to the country in the early years of the Great Depression, documented and inspired by books like Ralph Borsodi’s 1929 treatise This Ugly Civilization and his 1933 elaboration on the homesteading ideal, Flight from the City.5 The primary appeal that the homesteaders made, emerging as a minor movement in a moment of deepening economic insecurity, was that the transition to a household economy could serve as a method for ensuring the livelihood of a family. The cover of Borsodi’s Flight from the City advertised the book as “the story of a new way to family security.”6 Borsodi argued that “insecurity is the price we pay for our dependence upon industrialism for the essentials of life,” and “if the unemployed are to be made secure at least to the needs of life, nothing short of [ensuring the family can support itself by producing food, clothing, and shelter on its own homestead] is adequate.”7 He also took issue with the provision of home relief in a register that would later be mirrored in Franklin Roosevelt’s own language. Borsodi claimed that direct relief was “demoralizing to the unemployed,” and was a false solution to the problem of insecurity, which “destroy[s] their sense of responsibility and self- 4 Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life. 4. 5 In the prelude to Borsodi’s Flight from the City, he uses US Census and Bureau of Agricultural Economics data to demonstrate that in the years after 1929, the migration of farm population to the city reverses itself—the net movement from city to farm in 1932 is over a half-million individuals. 6 Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City (New York: Harper Bros., 1933). 7 ibid.,146; 139. 3 reliance,” except in those circumstances where truly “temporary assistance” is provided (in which case, Borsodi suggests we view the aid as “hospitality”).8 The Nearings aligned their own experiment with this rhetoric, describing their project—at least in retrospect—as a move toward just the sort of stability and security that had been promised in Borsodi’s tracts on homesteading. In The Making of a Radical, Scott Nearing asserted “homesteads have been an answer for unemployed teachers throughout the ages.”9 One of the passages the Nearings drew on to situate their 1950 guide, The Maple Sugar Book, among the rich archive of writings on farming and household economy was the anonymously authored 1864 text Ten Acres Enough. The Nearings included as an epigraph a passage in which the author indicates they write for those who are “anxious to break away from the bondage of the desk, the counter, or the workshop, to realize in the country even a moderate income, so that it be a sure one.”10 And most importantly for the purposes of my own project, in their 1954 book Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, the Nearings open the question of how to live the good life by presenting a heuristic in which “many a modern worker, dependent on wage or salary…has watched for a chance to escape the cramping limitations of his surroundings, to take his life into his own hands and live it in the country.”11 8 ibid., 133-4. 9 Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical: a Political Autobiography. 210. 10 Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing. The Maple Sugar Book (New York: Schocken Books, 1950/1970), 209-210. 11 Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing. Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. 3. The Nearings were driven to write their two lengthiest works after “interest in the enterprise was 4 Much of their book on living the good life is given over to topics such as the logistics of building a stone house in the “Flagg system,” tending a compost pile and sowing sweet peas, or the benefits of raw food.