Section One Brief Introduction to The Background Of History

After World War II, the peace seemingly restored in 1945 proved not to have been restored at all. Far from being able to relax and enjoy the fruits of victory, America faced more serious and more intractable problems than ever before in her history. True, she was also richer and more powerful than ever before. But the prosperity was accompanied by acute tensions and divisions; and world leadership did not come easily to a nation that had so long prided itself on being exempt from the conflicts and alliances of the Old World. Intelligent Americans urged their fellow-countrymen to accept their new responsibilities. Less intelligent and more bigoted Americans, finding a spokesman in the late Senator McCarthy, sought a simple explanation for their problems. With him, they believed that they were the victims of a conspiracy ? the conspiracy of world Communism, acting inside the very centers of American life: the federal government, the schools, Hollywood, even within the churches. Witch-hunts and spy-manias swept the country. Caution and conformity became epidemic. It was difficult for writers and other intellectuals, while the mood lasted, to maintain their dignity. Some claimed, a little exaggeratedly, that they were being persecuted: it became almost a point of pride, for some, to insist that their telephones were being tapped. Others hastened to apologize in public for past errors in their thinking. Others again, insensibly, abandoned their interest in political ideas in favor of a kind of apolitical conservatism. The national mood was nervous, aggressive- defensive, lost. Americans looked back nostalgically to the supposed certainties of the early Republic, or to the highly colored drama of the Civil War (the subject of score upon score of books), or to the informalities of the 1920s and the dedications of the 1930s. In retrospect, each of these eras seemed to be enviably self-possessed and extraordinarily remote. Americans felt cut off from their own past.

Shock upon shock continued to buffet the America of the 1960s. No sooner did one crisis die away than another claimed the headlines. The courage and growing militancy of the civil rights movement, the disciplined intransigence of the Black Muslims and the killing of their chief spokesman, Malcolm X; the reluctant discovery that the nation’s affluence was accompanied by widespread and perhaps growing poverty; the murder of President Kennedy, in circumstances of weird confusion; the involvement in Vietnam: all these outran conjecture so swiftly that it began to seem that the old division of history into generations of twenty or thirty years would have to be replaced by some shorter unit ? say, a lustrum of five years. One consequence was an intense desire to know exactly what was going on. More than ever Americans discussed their ‘identity’, personal and national.

After the war, it was not fiction by young writers which flourished, but rather literary criticism. New methods were applied, old masterpieces were re-examined, and 20th Century literature was re-assessed in relation to what had gone before. Universities took on this work on a grand scale. The most influential critics and leading poets became professors. The relationship between Faulkner and Hawthorne was clarified. Hemingway’s prose style was traced back through Mark Twain to earlier writers. The social realist writers of the 1930’s were seen to have roots in the 1890’s. A kind of pompousness and unadventurousness settled over American intellectual life which was centered in the universities during much of the 1950’s.

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan caused great fear in America and Europe. It made the destruction of Western civilization a possibility and it led to serious questioning by intellectuals of science’s role in human progress. Added to this uneasiness was the Cold War, a mutual fear and hostility between capitalist and communist nations, led by America and Russia.

In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy began an official persecution of Communists, and all Popular Front left-wingers, which included almost all intellectuals who had been active in the 1930’s. Writers, playwrights, film-makers, movie stars, teachers, were called to Washington, investigated, questioned and branded as “Red” or “Pink”. Some went to prison; many lost their jobs or went into exile. In such an intellectual climate, the only safety was to be found in the universities and in non-political writing. Senator McCarthy met his downfall in 1952, but the climate of caution, dullness and fear continued for several years more.

The average citizens enjoyed a time of prosperity during the 1950’s. The returned soldiers settled down to get married, have large families, physical comforts, a car and a TV. People wanted to behave, look and think like their neighbors, and avoid trouble. It was, in general, a self-satisfied, dull decade, but under the surface, movements were forming which would explode in the 1960’s and shatter America’s complacency for good.

In the Fifties, many books were published which popularized new theories of psychology, religion and philosophy. The books were often superficial and over-simplified, but they were easy to understand. In many ways they opened people’s minds and introduced them to ideas which unsettled their traditional ways of thinking. The new ideas led toward a growing emphasis on individuality and discontent with the society.

American writers became more and more alienated, feeling like foreigners in their own land. This process, which began with McCarthy’s persecutions and the Korean War, continued as many of them joined the rebellions of the 1960’s. The gulf between the American government and a sizable portion of the population, including many groups of intellectuals, grew steadily wider. However, there was no unifying movement among writers. Rather, they wrote from the point of view of a particular region or a particular “interest group.” But by the end of the 1950’s, the writers were being heard and literature took on a vigorous new life.

In the South, a special type of writing developed using themes similar to Faulkner’s. Some of the best Southern writers were women, of whom Flannery O’Connor is considered the best. They often wrote about extremes of abnormal behavior, grotesque characters and violence, as symbolic of their own twisted history. In the North, especially in New York, Jewish writers wrote about American city life, using Jewish subjects. Two recent Nobel Prize winners for literature were American Jews: Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Other writers wrote on behalf of sections of the society which felt alienated from the mainstream. Salinger and Vonnegut wrote for the youth who were too young to remember the war and who did not share the same attitudes as their parents. Ellison, Baldwin and many other black writers expressed the anger and desire for independence of blacks.

In 1957, Norman Mailer wrote a pamphlet, The White Negro, repudiating the obedient, selfsatisfied, unthinking way in which Americans accepted an unjust, rotten society. He named the conformists “square” and called on disenchanted whites to join the blacks in rejecting a “square” way of life, advising them to live boldly and dangerously. Other writers, such as Paul Goodman in his book Growing Up Absurd(1959) joined Mailer in demanding reforms which would put Americans in charge of their own lives again, to bring them closer to Jefferson’s ideal, rather than being swept helplessly along by absurd economic and commercial forces.

But the literary expression of disaffection which received the most public attention came from a group of San Francisco writers who called themselves the Beat Generation. The Beats wrote and behaved exactly as they felt, which was frequently outrageous. They cultivated qualities of spontaneity and freedom from all formality. They revered Walt Whitman and practiced Zen Buddhism. Led by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, they read their works in coffee houses and bars, while their comic, unpredictable antics shocked the public. The literature of the Beats constituted a challenge to the carefully constructed poetry and fiction which was most characteristic of the 1950’s.

The year 1960 represented the beginning of a new era. Young President John Kennedy’s election brought a new generation to power. He first alleviated the Cold War, temporarily, by agreeing with the Russians to stop nuclear tests. He promised social justice, and set an example by including several prominent blacks in his government. He loosened the laws of censorship and permitted many books to be read which had formerly been banned as pornographic (including modern English classics by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence). The liberation from official standards of correctness gave rise to a burst of satirical, bizarre, ribald novels by new American writers who specialized in “black humor” as a way to criticize the Army, the bureaucracy and other inflexible, repressive aspects of American society.

Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 coincided with the beginning of riots and uprisings by poor people and blacks in the cities. Unrest and rebellions began to sweep the nation, and the 1960’s are now remembered as a time of widespread social disturbances. In the South, Dr. Martin Luther King organized the black Civil Rights Movement, demanding fully equal treatment for blacks under the law. Many students, young people and older open-minded whites went to the South to join the movement. Throughout America, students and youth rebelled against the Vietnam War. Writers and intellectuals, among them Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell, led some of the protests and defied the authority of the government. Students seized control of many universities. America was split between supporters of “the American way of life” and the customary capitalist system, and those who rejected all authority, dropping out of the society to form a “counterculture”. The violence culminated in the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, the brother of the late President, and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.

In the same year, President Nixon was elected because of his promise to restore law and order in America. He failed to do so. On the contrary, his policy to bomb Cambodia in 1970 caused such protests that white students at Kent State University and black students at Jackson State University were killed by government troops. In time, Nixon withdrew the American army from Vietnam and the rebellions subsided. He made great achievements in foreign policy, notably his friendly approach to China, but at home he failed to win the confidence of the people. When he resigned in disgrace in 1974 the authority of the government was weakened and disunity in the society was made worse by a common dislike and distrust of all national leaders.

The violence of the 1960’s was replaced by disgust with social affairs in the 1970’s and a rampant kind of selfish individualism which one popular writer dubbed the “Me Generation”. The single important social movement of the 1970’s has been the Feminist, or Women’s Liberation Movement, commonly known as Women’s Lib. Although it has met with strong opposition, it has brought about remarkable changes in American life. It has given rise to a new feminist literature and a feminist school of literary criticism which has strongly influenced intellectuals. Like many other writers, these women writers feel driven to extremes of expression by the chaotic world they live in.

It is difficult to sum up the state of American literature in the 1980’s. Less fiction and poetry are being written than in earlier times. A new form of “journalistic fiction” has emerged, in which major writers examine true, often shocking events, with exhaustive care and produce works of high literary value, which seek the underlying truths of present-day existence in America. Perhaps the unstable society has reached a point where the truth is stranger than fiction.

Picture3
Picture4