Top row from left: James Baldwin, John Barth, William Burroughs, E.L. Doctorow, William Gaddis,
Center row from left: William Golding, Joseph Heller, and Jack Kerouac, Bernard Malamud, Iris Murdoch,Vladimir Nabokov.
Bottom row from left: Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, William Styron, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegu.,
The Flowering Fifties
What is common to all these breakthrough novels is their characters being outsiders.
By Nan Goldberg
Time magazine recently published its list of the hundred best novels written in English since 1923 (the year the magazine was born).
Of course my list would have been very different. For one thing, I thought they often got the author right but cited his or her wrong book.
As I read along, though, what became oddly obvious was how many of the books were published in the Fifties. In this 83-year survey of literature, 27 of the hundred books, or about 30 percent, were published between 1950 and 1962 – about 15 percent of the total 83 years. If you add to that the authors whose listed books were published in other decades, but whose first book appeared in the Fifties, the number of Time’s best authors who came out of the era of the Fifties swells to almost 40 percent.
I’m talking about such literary masters as (in no particular order) Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, William Gaddis, John Updike, John Barth, Iris Murdoch, Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow, William Golding, and William Styron. Among plenty of others.
Quite a list, isn’t it? The reason I found it so strange was that, like most people, I used to think of the Fifties as a cultural wasteland.
What do you remember about the Fifties? Not much, right? Eisenhower, the stalemate of the Cold War, prosperity, self-satisfaction, the steady movement from city to suburbs, keeping up with the Joneses. Everybody dressing alike, thinking alike: conformity. The calm before the storm of the Sixties. The Organization Man, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
All that was, in fact, going on. But underneath, it was a period in which art of all kinds – not just fiction but also painting, for instance – bent into new directions and forms. Inexorably, the tracks were being laid toward the Cultural Revolution that we think of as bursting out of nowhere in the Sixties.
What is common to all these Fifties authors is their characters’ outsider status, and how they sensed and dramatized “the unease of the middle class at its moment of triumph, the air of anxiety and discontent that hangs over this period,” as Morris Dickstein put it in his study of post-war literature, Leopards in the Temple (Harvard University Press, 2002, $17.95). “Theirs was a world of material comfort and its dissatisfactions, including anomie, alienation, and a nagging sense of weightlessness; of a turn inward towards the self and its problems of identity; a world dominated by the utopian ease and abundance made possible by technology, but also the anxiety set off by its huge potential for destruction; a world that knew the fragility of relationships when moral boundaries have been blurred. … The postwar writers were the first to document this great shift.”
I would apend to Dickstein’s theory an historical factor that I think has been minimized as a cause of precipitous cultural change: In 1945, revelations about the Holocaust began to emerge, and humans everywhere were forced to revise their view of humanity to accommodate the undeniable fact of a previously unimaginable brutality – unknown to any other species. Basic beliefs about the nature of man were torn apart. Humanity’s moral compass was spinning wildly or else completely stuck. What kind of monsters were we, anyway? What else were we capable of?
No one in America was ready to write about the Holocaust directly yet (and wouldn’t for many years), but this traumatic new image of ourselves created a moral identity crisis, a confusion and near-paralysis, and both were steadily seeping into our literature.
Consider the youthful misfits of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951), Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty (On the Road, 1957), Kurt Vonnegut’s Paul Proteus (Player Piano, 1952), Joseph Heller’s Yossarian (Catch-22, 1961), just to name a select few.
Yossarian can’t understand what he’s doing in Europe, dressed in a uniform and trying to kill strangers; nor can he understand why “they” are fighting him back. When another young soldier tries to reassure him that war isn’t personal, Yossarian asks, reasonably: “Then why are they shooting at me?” Paul Proteus, in Vonnegut’s debut novel, can no longer function as the automaton that his futuristic, mechanistic (Nazi-like) society demands he try to be. Poor Holden can’t manage to finish high school; and Dean Moriarty can’t even stand still.
Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), is a sexual misfit, attracted only to prepubescent girls. Lolita was much written about last year, the 50th anniversary of its publication, so although I could go on at great length about the myriad ways in which this book broke new ground, I guess I won’t.
In Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), an entire generation of African-Americans, moving in a great human tide from the deep South to the cities of the North, feels lost: “Behind them was the darkness, nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire.”
And in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1959), a group of boys is literally lost – stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash – and quickly devolves into brutality and violence.
Alienation, particularly self-alienation, hovers over these novels like a specter, if it isn’t actually the subject.
Which brings me to a book that did not make it onto the list (although its author did): The Floating Opera, by John Barth, published exactly 50 years ago this year.
Barth’s main character and narrator, Todd Andrews, is the apotheosis (or is it nadir?) of self-alienation; you really cannot get any more alienated than he. Todd, a lawyer, is 54 years old when the book opens: an extremely rigid, overly precise, fussy man, a creature of routine with few moods, no intrinsic beliefs, no expectations, and no apparent empathy – even for himself. He is capable of, and does, describe how he lost his virginity, in clinical detail and with absolute detachment – except when he catches sight of himself and the young lady, mid-act, in the mirror: “– and there we were: Betty June’s face buried in the pillow, her scrawny little buttocks thrust skywards; me gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass. I exploded with laughter.”
Todd is the embodiment of an existential nightmare.
Todd’s story is meant to record the events of a single day back in 1937, the day “I changed my mind for the last time” – the day he decided not to kill himself. However, because he believes that “to understand any one thing entirely, no matter how minute, requires the understanding of every other thing in the world,” and because “everything, I’m afraid, is significant, and nothing is finally important,” Todd’s story of the one day involves about a million digressions, entailing stories of many previous days, as well as subsequent ones.
These brief touchdowns at seemingly random points from all over the geography of his life are actually brilliantly organized set pieces – how he befriended, then killed a German soldier in World War I; his discovery that he has a heart condition that could kill him at any moment (“Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared, will I cream? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw?”); his long-running affair with his best friend’s wife; the night he ran into Betty June again in a whorehouse and she tried to kill him; anecdotes from certain of his legal cases; his father’s suicide; the progress of his other writing project, his “Inquiry” into the reasons for that suicide – that, put together, form a nearly perfect book, shocking in its frightening, nihilistic force. Alienation? Barth can do alienation like nobody else.
Life, Todd Andrews thinks, is a series of disconnected events that humans, we poor fools, spend most of our time trying to fit into some kind of context. It’s a Floating Opera.
What’s a Floating Opera? “It’s the name of a showboat that used to travel around the Virginia and Maryland tidewater areas; Adam’s Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera; Jacob R. Adam, owner and captain; admissions 20, 35 and 50 cents. The Floating Opera was tied up at Long Wharf on the day I changed my mind, in 1937, and some of this book happens aboard it.”
But the reason Barth named his book for it is because “it always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn’t be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they’d have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they’d have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they wouldn’t understand what was going on at all, or they’d think they knew, when actually they didn’t.”
Barth was 23 years old when he wrote that. I can’t be the only one who thinks that’s just short of impossible. How did he know life was like that, at 23? How could he possibly have figured that out?
Barth’s novel was also one of the first “postmodern” novels: that is, a novel that is conscious of itself as a novel, that makes no attempt to behave the way life does but is always calling attention to its own artifice. It breaks the fourth wall, to use a theater expression that means to acknowledge that there is an audience out there and that this is a play. That ironic attitude – that you won’t pretend that you’re pretending – is a clear sign of alienation; it is as if the character/author is standing outside himself, looking in at his own actions and thoughts.
So I suppose it is fittingly ironic that the culture we have come to think of as boring and repressed was actually the cauldron in which the Sixties got cooked up. And I also think it explains a lot.
NOTE: You can find Time mag’s list of 100 novels at http://www.time.com/ 2005/100books/the complete list.html.
RECOMMENDED READING
FICTION
QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD, by Gail Godwin; Random House, 352 pp., $24.95: A young women begins her career as a journalist at a Miami newspaper in 1959, just as the Cuban exiles start arriving on Florida’s shores.
TIME WON’T LET ME, by Bill Scheft; HarperCollins, 292 pp., $24.95: In this comedy by a former chief monologue writer for David Letterman, the 50-ish former members of a rock band discover that their only album has become a cult classic, and try to reunite.
HOUSE OF PAPER, by Carlos Maria Dominguez, illustrations by Peter Sis; Harcourt, 104 pp., $18: A comic mystery with bibiophilia at its root, and those illustrations are charming.
GET A LIFE, by Nadine Gordimer; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 190 pp., $21: The 1991 Nobel Prize-winner tells a story about personal relationships set in her native Johannesburg.
NON-FICTION
BARRIER: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by Isabel Kershner; St. Martin’s Press, 256 pp., $24.95: What we have here is that rare, almost extinct creature, the objective report. Ms. Kershner, a senior editor of The Jerusalem Report, interviewed dozens of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians as well as officials and activists, and presents the effects on both sides of the partially built “disengagement fence,” otherwise known as the “apartheid wall,” between Israel and the West Bank.
JOURNALISTAS: 100 Years of the Best Writing and Reporting by Women Journalists, edited by Eleanor Mills with Kira Cochrane; Carroll & Graf, 384 pp., $14.95 (paperback original): Some of these essays are famous, like Martha Gellhorn on Dachau (1945), or Nelly Bly’s “Ten Days in a Madhouse” (1888), or the excerpt from Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1995), which began as a newspaper serial. Some I’d never heard of. But almost all are remarkable.
THE LEGACY OF JIHAD: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, edited by Andrew G. Bostom, M.D.; Prometheus Books, 760 pp., $28: What would happen if the Muslim extremists, the jihadists, won the war? Well, there is precedent. For more than a millennium, Islam has been expanding across three continents (Asia, Africa, Europe). Bostom’s compilation, including essays by scholars, eyewitness accounts, and Muslim theological and juridical texts, tries to clarify the results of jihad for non-Muslims.
THE DEATH OF FEMINISM: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, by Phyllis Chesler; Palgrave/Macmillan, 256 pp., $24.95: Chesler, an early feminist and author of Women and Madness (1972, revised and updated this year) and Mothers on trial: The battle for children and custody (1987), sees the feminist movement as bogged down in reproductive-rights issues, while neglecting more urgent matters elsewhere in the world, such as forced marriages and honor killings of women.
