Despite what was happening in Germany, and in Soviet Russia, and despite the widespread unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic, new ideas, new works of art, could not be suppressed. In some ways the 1930s were surprisingly fertile.
At the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the depression which followed, the cinema was overtaken by the introduction of sound.1 The first film director to appreciate fully the implications of sound was the Frenchman René Clair. The first ‘talkie’ was The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, directed by Alan Crosland. That film was an example of what the film historian Arthur Knight calls the early ‘tyranny of sound,’ in which raw noise was used at every available opportunity simply because it was new. In early talkies you could hear picknickers crunching celery, in the place of written credits, actors were introduced by other actors wearing capes. Billboards advertised movies as the first ‘100% all-talking drama filmed outdoors,’ or ‘the first all-Negro all-talking picture.’2
Clair was much more subtle. To begin with, he was actually opposed to sound. Overcoming his reluctance, he chose to use dialogue and sound effects sparingly, most notably employing them against the images for heightened effect. He didn’t show a door closing; instead, the audience heard it slam. The most dramatic instance of Clair’s technique is a fight in Sous les toits de Paris, which happens in the dark near a railway line. The clatter and urgent rhythm of the passing trains – which we hear but do not see – adds to the muffled thuds and grunts of the shadowy fighters. Clair’s invention was in essence a new filmic language, an allusive way of adding information, moods, and atmosphere that had been entirely absent hitherto.3
The psychological change that showed in the movies made in America in particular owed a lot to the depression, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his prompt introduction of New Deal relief measures in 1933, designed to stimulate economic revival. This brought a measure of optimism to the public mood, but the speed with which the president acted only underlined the urgency and depth of the problem. In Hollywood, as the depression lasted, the traditional comedies and even the vogue for musicals since the introduction of sound no longer seemed to be enough to help people cope with the grim reality of the early 1930s. Audiences still wanted to escape at the movies, but there was also a growing demand for realistic stories that addressed their problems.
Warner Brothers’ Little Caesar was the first gritty drama in this vein to become big box office, the earliest successful gangster movie (it was based on the life of Al Capone). But Hollywood quickly followed it with a long string of similar films (fifty in 1931 alone) and equally sensational exposés, lifting the lid on rackets, political corruption, prison brutality, and bank failures. Among these were The Big House (1930), The Front Page (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and The Secret Six (1931), each with a story that took the audience behind the headlines.4 Some oversimplified, but by no means all. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) was based on a true story and brought about real changes in the chain-gang system. Poverty was tackled head on in Blonde Venus (1932) and Letty Lynton (1932).5 After Roosevelt’s election, the mood changed again. The focus on social problems – slum housing, unemployment or the conditions of agricultural workers – remained, but films now conveyed the view that these matters needed to be addressed by democracy, that whether the actual story line had a happy or an unhappy ending there were systematic political faults in the country underlying the personal tragedies. The developing taste for ‘biopics’ likewise grew out of the same sensibility by showing the heroic struggle of successful individuals to overcome the odds. Biopics of Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, and Paul Ehrlich all proved popular, though the best was probably The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which in Zola’s classic defence of Captain Dreyfus offered a scathing attack on anti-Semitism, which was not only disfiguring Nazi Germany but prevalent in the United States as well.6
At the New York World’s Fair in 1939, every conceivable kind of film – from travelogue to sales promotion – was on display, but what stood out was a very different way of filming the 1930s. This was the British documentary. In straightforward entertainment films, Britain was already far behind not only Hollywood but other European countries.7 The documentary tradition, however, was a different matter. It owed its early virility to the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, which was begun in 1929 as a propaganda outfit that devised posters and brochures to promote Britain’s food supply from what was then still the Empire. A film unit was added after a gritty Scot, John Grierson, educated in America and much impressed by American advertising skills, persuaded Sir Stephen Tallents, who ran the board, that film could have a much wider effect than the written word.8 Grierson’s aim was to use the talents of major directors – people like Eric von Stroheim and Serge Eisenstein — to bring ‘real life’ to the screen, to convey the drama and heroism of real people, mainly working-class people which he believed was now possible with the invention of sound. For Grierson, the documentary was a new art form waiting to be born.9 The early films, of fishermen, potters, or miners, in fact contained little drama and even less art. Then, in 1933, the Film Unit was moved, virtually intact, to the General Post Office, where it was to remain until the war.10 In its new home the Film Unit produced a groundbreaking series of documentaries; the new art form that Grierson had yearned for was finally born. There was no one style. Basil Wright’s touch in Song of Ceylon was allusive, gently intercutting ‘the ageless ritual of tea-picking’ with the harsher sounds of tea traders and the more prosaic sights of parts of the London Stock Exchange. Harry Watts’s Night Mail was probably the most famous documentary of all for generations of British people (like the others, it was distributed by schools). It followed the nightly run of the mail train from London to Scotland, with a commentary by W. H. Auden and set to the music of Benjamin Britten. Auden was a perfect choice; his poem conveyed at once the lyrical rhythms of the train, its urgency, and the routine ordinariness of the operation, plus the effect that even an unexceptional letter can have on the lives of people:11
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?12
It would take a war for the British to see the propaganda value of film. By then, however, Germany had been living with propaganda for nearly a decade – Hitler moved in on the filmmakers as soon as he moved in on the artists. One of the first initiatives of Joseph Goebbels, when he was appointed propaganda minister, was to call together Germany’s most prominent filmmakers and show them Eisenstein’s Potemkin, his 1925 masterpiece that commemorated the revolution, and which was both a work of art and a piece of propaganda. ‘Gentlemen,’ Goebbels announced when the lights came on, ‘that’s an idea of what I want from you.’13 The minister wasn’t looking for obvious propaganda; he was clever and knew better. But the films he wanted must glorify the Reich: there was to be no argument about that. At the same time, he insisted that every cinema must include in its program a government-sponsored newsreel and, on occasions, a short documentary. By the outbreak of war, Goebbels’s newsreels could be as long as forty minutes, but it was the documentaries that had most effect. Technically brilliant, they were masterminded by Leni Riefenstahl, an undistinguished actress in the Weimar years who had reinvented herself as a director and editor. Any summary of these films sounds boring – party meetings, Göring’s new air force, the land army, the Olympic Games. It was the method of presentation, Riefenstahl’s directorial skills, that made them memorable. The best was Triumph of the Will (1937), at three hours hardly short as Goebbels had stipulated, but then it was commissioned by the Führer himself as a record of the first party convention at Nuremberg. To judge by what was captured on camera – the parades, the oratory, the drilling of the troops, the vast numbers of people engrossed in sports or simply being fed – there were almost as many people behind the cameras as in front of them. In fact, sixteen cameras crews were involved.14 When it was shown, after two years of editing, Triumph of the Will had a mesmerising effect on some people.15 The endless torchlit parades, one speaker after another shouting into the microphone, the massive regularity of Brownshirts and Blackshirts absorbed in the rhetoric and then bellowing ‘Sieg Heil’ in unison, were hypnotic.16
Almost as clever was the film Olympia, which Goebbels ordered to be made about the 1936 Olympic Games, staged in Berlin. It was there that the modern Olympic Games emerged, thanks to the Nazis. The games had been restarted in 1896 in Athens, but it was not until the Los Angeles games in 1932 that Negroes first excelled. Germany won few medals, disappointing to all but the National Socialists, who had opposed participation in the games on the grounds that they were cosmopolitan, and ‘racially inclusive.’ This made it all the more dramatic, then, that the 1936 games were to be held in Germany.17
After taking power, the Nazis glorified sport as a noble ideal, a stabilising force in the modern state. Despite its racially inclusive nature, therefore, Hitler and Goebbels saw the 1936 games as a perfect way to show off the Third Reich, to display to the world its achievements and high ideals – and to teach its rivals a lesson. Jews had been excluded from sports clubs in Nazi Germany, which provoked an Olympic boycott in the United States. But that soon faded when the Germans assured everyone that all would be welcome. Hitler and Goebbels set about making the games a spectacle. Berlin streets were renamed after foreign athletes for the duration of the games, and the main stadium was erected specially for the occasion by Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. The Nazis initiated the ‘torch run,’ whereby a flaming torch was carried by a succession of runners from Greece to Berlin, arriving in time to open the games in style.18
For Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the games, Olympia, she had the use of eighty cameramen and crew, and virtually unlimited state funds.19 She shot 1.3 million feet of film and eventually produced, in 1938, a two-part, six-hour film with sound tracks in German, English, French, and Italian. As one critic wrote, ‘Riefenstahl’s film accepted and hardened all the synthetic myths about the modern Olympic Games. She intertwined symbols of Greek antiquity with motifs of industrial society’s sports theater. She ennobled good losers, supreme winners, and dwelled on fine musculature, particularly that of Jesse Owens,’ the Negro athlete from the United States who, to Hitler’s extreme displeasure, won four gold medals.20 ‘Riefenstahl was the first cinematographer to use slow-motion filming and radical cutting to reveal the intensity of effort required for supreme athletic performance. Some of Olympia’s sections, most particularly the one dealing with platform diving, are unsurpassingly beautiful.’21*
After the war had started, Goebbels used all the powers at his command to make the most of propaganda. Cameramen accompanied the Stuka bombers and Panzer divisions as they knifed through Poland – but these documentaries were not only used for audiences back home. Specially edited versions were shown to government officials in Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Romania to underline ‘the futility of resistance.’22 Goebbels liked to say that ‘pictures don’t lie.’ He must have kept his fingers crossed when he said it.
Stalin was not far behind Goebbels in his instinctive understanding of the link between film and propaganda. One of the aims of the first Five-Year Plan was to increase the amount of projection equipment throughout Russia. Between 1929 and 1932, the number of projectors trebled to 27,000, ‘drastically altering the status of the film in the Soviet Union.’23 What the party officials said they wanted from this new industry was ‘socialist realism,’ but it was really propaganda.
The tone was set in 1934 with Chapayev, directed by two brothers, Sergei and Grigori Vassiliev. This was a clever, funny, and romantic film about a Red guerrilla leader during Russia’s civil war, an ordinary peasant who led his people to victory then became ‘a well-disciplined Bolshevik.’ At the same time it managed to be human by not hiding the hero’s faults.24 Chapayev became the model for most Russian films up to World War II. We Are from Kronstadt (1936), Baltic Deputy (1937), and the Maxim trilogy (1938–40) all featured revolutionary heroes who become good Bolsheviks.25 In contrast, films about contemporary life were conspicuous by their absence and it is not hard to see why. ‘Socialist realism,’ as it is commonly understood, would have involved social criticism – a very dangerous enterprise in Stalinist Russia. One development that was allowed was the making of historical films, showing life in prerevolutionary Russia as not wholly bad. This idea had its roots in Stalin’s growing belief, in the mid-1930s, that worldwide revolution would never happen and that Germany was emerging as the greatest threat to the Soviet Union. Directors were allowed to tell stories about Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and others, so long as these figures had contributed to the unification of Russia.26 Soon, however, nationalism was not enough to meet Stalin’s propaganda needs. With the growing tension between Germany and Russia, films with an even stronger message were wanted. In Alexander Nevsky (1938), Serge Eisenstein argued that the eponymous hero had led the Russians to victory over the Teutonic knights of the thirteenth century, and they could repeat the feat if called upon to do so. At the end, Nevsky speaks directly to the camera: ‘Those who come to us with sword in hand will perish by the sword.’27 Other films were more explicit: Soldiers of the Marshes (1938) and The Oppenheim Family (1939) showed the harsh realities of Germany’s anti-Semitism and the desperate conditions inside the concentration camps.28 The trouble with propaganda, of course, is that it can never escape politics. When Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, all anti-German films were suddenly banned.
A different view of film was provided in 1936 in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ published in the newly founded Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), put out by the exiled Frankfurt Institute. Benjamin, born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a Jewish auctioneer and art dealer, was a radical intellectual, a ‘cultural Zionist’ as he described himself (meaning he was an advocate of Jewish liberal values in European culture) who earned his living as a historian, philosopher, art and literary critic, and journalist.
Of a slightly mystical bent, Benjamin spent World War I in medical exile in Switzerland, afterward forming friendships with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the sculptress Julia Cohn, Bertolt Brecht, and the founders of the Frankfurt School. In a series of essays and books – Elective Affinities, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and ‘The Politicisation of the Intelligentsia’ – he compared and contrasted traditional and new art forms, anticipating in a general way the ideas of Raymond Williams, Andy Warhol, and Marshall McLuhan.29 In the most celebrated, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ written when he was already in exile, he advanced his theory of ‘non-auratic’ art.30 According to Benjamin, art from antiquity to the present has its origin in religion, and even secular work kept to itself an ‘aura,’ the possibility that it was a glimpse of the divine, however distant that glimpse might be. As Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and José Ortega y Gasset had said, this implied a crucial difference between the artist and the non-artist, the intellectual and the proletariat. In the era of mechanical reproduction, however, and especially in film – a group rather than an individual activity – this tradition, and the distance between artists and nonartists, breaks down. Art can no longer appeal to the divine; there is a new freedom between the classes, no distinction between author and public, the latter ready to become the former if given the chance. For Benjamin the change is a good thing: in an age of mechanical reproduction the public are less an agglomeration of isolated souls, and film in particular, in offering mass entertainment, can address the psychological problems of society. As a result, social revolution might be possible without violence.31 Benjamin’s arguments, written by a liberal intellectual in exile, may be contrasted with Goebbels’s. Both understood the political power of film. Goebbels appreciated its force as a political instrument in the short run; but Benjamin was one of the first to see that the very nature of art was changing, that part of its meaning was draining away. He had identified a phase in cultural evolution that would accelerate in the second half of the century.
In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art had opened in New York, its first exhibition devoted to Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh. Arguably more influential, however, was an exhibition about architecture since 1920, held at the same museum in 1932. This was where the terms ‘international style’ or ‘international modern style’ were first coined. In New York at that time the new buildings attracting attention were the Chrysler headquarters (1930) and the Rockelleder Center (1931–9). Neither was in the international style, but it was the Manhattan designs that were the anachronisms. In the twentieth century, the international style would prove more influential than any other form of architecture. This was because it was more than just a style, but rather a whole way of conceiving buildings. Its aims were first clearly set out at the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), meeting during a cruise between Marseilles and Athens in 1933.32 There, CIAM issued a dogmatic manifesto, known as the Athens Charter, which insisted on the importance of city planning, of ‘functional zoning’, and of high-rise, widely spaced apartment blocks. The moving spirit behind this approach was a forty-six-year-old Swiss, christened Charles-Edouard Jeanneret but known since 1920 as Le Corbusier. Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto (a Finn), Philip Johnson (the curator of the MoMA show, who coined the term International Style), and even Frank Lloyd Wright shared Le Corbusier’s passion for new materials and clean straight lines in their search for a more democratic form of their art. But Le Corbusier was the most innovative, and the most combative.33
Le Corbusier studied art and architecture in Paris in the early years of the century, much influenced by John Ruskin and the social ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He worked in Peter Behrens’s office in Berlin in 1910–11 and was affected by Wright and by the Bauhaus, many of whose aims he shared, and who produced similar buildings.34 After World War I, Le Corbusier’s schemes for new architecture gradually became more radical. First came his ‘Citrohan’ houses, a variation of Citroën, suggesting that houses were as up-to-date as cars. These houses abolished conventional walls and were raised on stilts or piloti.35 In 1925, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels, in Paris, he designed a stark white house with a tree growing out of it. The house was part of a plan voisin (neighbourhood plan) that envisaged demolishing much of central Paris and replacing it with eighteen huge skyscrapers.36 Le Corbusier’s distinctive international style finally found expression in the Villa Savoye at Passy (1929–32) and in his Swiss pavilion at University City, near Paris (1930—32). These were both plain white rectangular slabs, raised off the ground.37 Here, and in the Salvation Army Hostel, also in Paris (1929— 33), Le Corbusier sought to achieve a simplicity and a purity, combining classical antiquity and modernity with the ‘fundamentals’ of new science.38 He said he wanted to celebrate what he called ‘the white world’: precise materials, clarity of vision, space, and air, as against the ‘brown world’ of cluttered, closed, muddled design and thinking.39 It was a noble aim, publicly acknowledged when he was given the commission to design the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1937 (where Picasso’s Guernica was shown).
Unfortunately, there were serious problems with Le Corbusier’s approach. The available materials didn’t do justice to his vision. Plain white surfaces soon stained, or cracked, or peeled. People didn’t like living or working inside such buildings, especially minimalist apartment blocks.40 The white world of the international movement would dominate the immediate post-World War II landscape, with its passion for planning. In many ways it was a disaster.
It is common now to speak of an ‘Auden generation’ of poets, which included Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, John Betjeman and, sometimes, Louis MacNeice. Not all of them spoke in an identical ‘Audenesque’ voice – nonetheless, Audenesque entered the language.
Born in 1907, Wystan Hugh Auden grew up in Birmingham (though he went to school in Norfolk), a middle-class boy fascinated by mythology and by the industrial landscape of the Midlands – railways, gasworks, the factories and machinery associated with the motor trade.41 He went to Oxford to read biology, and although he soon changed to English, he always remained interested in science, and psychoanalysis especially. One of the reasons he changed to English was because he already knew that he wanted to be a poet.42 His first verse was published in 1928, by Stephen Spender, whom he met at Oxford, who had his own hand press. T. S. Eliot, by then an editor at Faber & Faber, had previously rejected one collection of Auden’s poems, but the firm published a new set in 1930.43 The collection showed that at twenty-three Auden had achieved a striking originality in both voice and technique. His background in the already decaying industrial heartland of Britain, and his interest in science and psychology, helped him to an original vocabulary, set in contemporary and realistic locations. At the same time he dislocated his syntax, juxtaposing images in deliberately jarring ways, reminiscent of the arrhythmia of machines. There was something familiar, almost ordinary, about the way many lines ended.
The dogs are barking, the crops are growing,
But nobody knows how the wind is blowing:
Gosh, to look at we’re no great catch;
History seems to have struck a bad patch.44
Or:
Brothers, who when the sirens roar
From office, shop and factory pour
’Neath evening sky;
By cops directed to the fog
Of talkie-houses for a drug,
Or down canals to find a hug
Until you die.45
Reading Auden is strangely calming, as though a ‘stranger were making our acquaintance,’ perhaps because, in the changing insecure world of the 1930s, his familiar, clear images were something to hold on to.46 He was not averse to drawing his ideas from sociology and the sort of information gleaned from surveys carried out by Gallup, which started its polling activities in America in 1935 and opened an office in Britain a year later.47 Auden’s later poems, as Bernard Bergonzi has observed, had a more political edge, but it was really the new ‘palette’ he discovered that characterised the Auden style, appropriating the rhythms of jazz, Hollywood musicals, and popular songs (now infinitely more popular than hitherto because of the radio), and peppering his lines with references to film stars such Garbo or Dietrich.
The soldier loves his rifle,
The scholar loves his books,
The farmer loves his horses,
The film star loves her looks.
There’s love the whole world over
Wherever you may be;
Some lose their rest for gay Mae West,
But you’re my cup of tea.48
Auden was quickly imitated, but the quality and intensity of his own poetry fell off at the end of the 1930s, after one of his finest works, Spain. Auden was in Spain in January 1937, not to take part as a combatant in the civil war, as so many prominent intellectuals did, but to drive an ambulance for the Republican side, though that didn’t happen. While there he came across the desperate infighting among the different Republican factions, and he was shocked by their cruelty to the priests. Despite these misgivings, he still thought a fascist victory needed to be prevented, and on his return to Britain he wrote Spain, which was completed in less than a month.49 His main concern is liberalism, what it is and whether it can survive.
All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive.50
Among the lines, however, was the following:
Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.
George Orwell, who wrote his own account of the civil war, in which he himself fought, Homage to Catalonia, vehemently attacked Auden for this poem, saying that these lines could have been written only ‘by a person to whom murder is at most a word.’51 In fact, Auden was unhappy about the phrase and later changed it to ‘the fact of murder.’ He was subsequently attacked for being one of a group of intellectuals who favoured political murder and turned a collective blind eye to the terror in Russia.
Orwell didn’t go that far. Like Auden, he feared a fascist victory in Spain and so felt obliged to fight. So did many others. In fact, the range of writers and other intellectuals who travelled to Spain to take part in the civil war was remarkable: from France, André Malraux, François Mauriac, Jacques Maritain, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard; from Britain, besides Orwell and Auden, there was Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Herbert Read; from the United States, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreiser; from Russia, Ilya Ehrenburg and Michael Kol’tsov; from Chile, Pablo Neruda.52 There was not yet the grand disillusion with the Soviet system that would come later, and many intellectuals were worried about the further extension of fascism beyond Germany and Italy (fascist parties existed in Finland, Portugal, and Britain, as well as elsewhere). They thought it was a ‘just war.’ A small number of writers supported Franco – George Santayana and Ezra Pound among them – because they thought he might impose a nationalistic and aristocratic social order, which would rescue culture from its inevitable decline; and there were a number of Roman Catholic writers who wanted a return to a Christian society. Some authors, after the senseless slaughter in the nationalist zone of Spain’s own best poet, Federico García Lorca, also joined the fight. From among these writers the war generated several first-person accounts.53 Most of the issues raised were overtaken by World War II and the Cold War that soon followed. But the Spanish Civil War generated at least two great novels that have lasting value, and one painting. These are André Malraux’s L’Espoir (translated as Days of Hope), Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.
André Malraux was involved in the war far more than most other intellectuals, and far more than as a writer. He was an accomplished pilot, and spent time obtaining tanks and airplanes for the Republicans and even travelled to the United States to raise funds (successfully). His novel L’Espoir followed the fortunes of the International Brigade, in particular the air squadron, from the beginning of the war, in Madrid, to Barcelona and Toledo, ending at the battle of Guadalajara in March 1937.54 It is in part a combat diary and at other times an exploration of different philosophies as reflected in the experiences and attitudes of the various members of the brigade.55 The underlying theme is that courage alone is not enough in war: victory will go to the side that best organises that courage. This was designed to be a two-edged message. L’Espoir was published while the war was still going on, so Malraux was speaking to his fellow combatants as well as to the world at large. While courage is clearly needed for a revolution, the author says, organisation raises entirely different issues, of discipline, rank, sacrifice. With one eye firmly on Lenin and Stalin, organisers par excellence, Malraux drew attention to the dangers inherent in revolution, reminding readers that organisation can be a weapon, and as with any weapon, in the wrong hands it is a calamity.
Ernest Hemingway’s book is set later in the war, in the early summer of 1937, an important date because at that time a Republican defeat was beginning to seem likely. The plot centres on a group of Republican partisans, drawn from all over Spain, subsisting in a cave high among the pines of the Sierra del Guadaramas, one hundred kilometres southwest of Madrid, and behind fascist lines. Much more than in L’Espoir, Hemingway’s book is a study of doom and betrayal, of a dawning awareness among some of the characters that the cause for which they are fighting cannot win and the beginning of an analysis of who and why that situation has come about. Hemingway’s view was that the Spanish people had been betrayed, by the international powers who had not delivered on their promises, but also by Spain herself, by self-interest, factionalism, undisciplined individualism. Some of the power and poignancy of the novel arises from the fact that the American Robert Jordan realises that there is a stage in every war when the possibility of defeat appears, and yet that possibility cannot be admitted, and one has to go on killing. Where does that leave the liberal conscience?56
A month after the battle of Guadalajara, which formed a set piece in Malraux’s novel, on 26 April 1937, forty-three Heinkels from the German Luftwaffe attacked the tiny Spanish town of Guernica in the Basque region. One aircraft after another descended on the town in the afternoon light and strafed and bombed the defenceless roofs and churches and squares of an ancient and sacred place. By the time the attack was over, 1,600 of Guernica’s 7,000 inhabitants had been killed, and 70 percent of the town destroyed. It was an amazing act of wanton cruelty. Prior to this, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a canvas for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair later in 1939. He had procrastinated despite the fact that he hated Franco and, at the beginning of the year, had composed ‘Dream and Lie of Franco,’ a poem full of violent imagery, designed to ridicule the general, whom he presented as a loathsome, barely human hairy slug. Having dithered for months over the government commission, the attack on Guernica finally stimulated him into action. He started within weeks of the attack and completed the huge canvas, twenty-five feet by eleven feet, in a frenzy in only a month or so.57 For the first time Picasso allowed himself an audience while he worked. Dora Maar, his companion, was always present, photographing the development of the composition; Paul Eluard was another member of this select group, together with Christian Zervos, André Malraux, Maurice Raynal, and Jean Cassou, watching him, sleeves rolled up, often talking about Goya, whose paintings had recorded the horrors of the Napoleonic wars.58 The painting was a distillation of forty years of Picasso’s art, deeply introspective and personal as well as having wider significance.59 It shows a woman, bull, and horse as terrified companions in a black-and-white nightmare. The novelist Claude Roy, then a law student, saw Guernica at the Paris World’s Fair and thought it was ‘a message from another planet. Its violence dumbfounded me, it petrified me with an anxiety I have never experienced before.’60 Herbert Read said, ‘Art long ago ceased to be monumental, the age must have a sense of glory. The artist must have some faith in his fellow men, and some confidence in the civilisation to which he belongs. Such an attitude is not possible in the modern world…. The only logical monument would be some sort of negative monument. A monument to disillusion, to despair, to destruction. It was inevitable that the greatest artist of our time should be driven to this conclusion. Picasso’s great fresco is a monument to destruction, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius.’61
The painting is above all Picasso. The frantic, screaming woman, the horse, shrieking in pain, its eyeballs distended in agony, the sinister bull, all broken, disfigured by war and bereavement, are entirely in black and white, with traces of newsprint on the horse’s torso. In his despair, Picasso is hinting that even his monument may prove no more permanent than a newspaper. As Robert Hughes has written, Guernica was the last great history painting.62 It was also the last major painting that took its subject from politics ‘with the intention of changing the way large numbers of people thought and felt about power.’ By the end of World War II the role of ‘war artist’ would be rendered obsolete by war photography.63 Early in the war, in the autumn of 1940, when Picasso was living in occupied Paris, the Nazis checked up on his assets. They visited the strongrooms in his bank and inventoried his paintings there. Then they visited his apartment. One of the officers noticed a photograph of Guernica lying on a table. The officer examined the photo and said, ‘Did you do this?’
‘No,’ Picasso replied. ‘You did.’64
Picasso was wrong about one thing, though. The images in Guernica have lasted, and still have resonance today. So does the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell, who fought with the Republican partisans in and around Barcelona and produced a splendid account, Homage to Catalonia, explained how the war seemed a catalyst to him: ‘The Spanish Civil War and other events in 1936–7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.’65 In other words, Orwell knew what totalitarianism was like in 1936. It would take others decades to admit as much.
Homage to Catalonia not only conveys the horror of war, the cold, the lice, the pain (Orwell was shot in the neck), but also the boredom.66 It was impossible to fight off the cold or the lice, but in a brief aside Orwell says that he staved off the boredom because he had brought with him, in his knapsack, ‘a few Penguins.’ This is one of the first references in print to a new literary phenomenon of the thirties: the paperback book.
Homage to Catalonia itself became a very popular Penguin, but the books available to Orwell in Spain were unlikely to have been particularly highbrow. Penguin Books had a difficult and rather undistinguished birth. The idea for the company arose from a weekend visit which Allen Lane made to Devon in the spring of 1934 to stay with Agatha Christie and her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist. Lane was then managing director of the Bodley Head, a London publisher. He very much enjoyed the weekend, finding his hosts in excellent spirits. (Christie used to say, ‘An archaeologist is the best person to be married to – the older you get the more interested he is.’) On the journey home, however, Lane found himself with nothing to read.67 Changing trains at Exeter, he had an hour to wait, time to inspect the station’s bookstalls. All he could find were magazines, cheap thrillers, and romances in dreary hard covers. The very next day, at the morning meeting with his two brothers, Dick and John, who were also directors of the Bodley Head, he said that he had had an idea for a new kind of book: reprints of quality fiction and nonfiction, but bound in cheerful paper covers which would mean they could be priced at sixpence, well below the price of normal hardcovers and the same as a packet of ten cigarettes. The idea did not go down well with the brothers. If the books were to sell for sixpence, they said, how could they hope to make a profit? Allen’s answer was one word: Woolworth – though it might easily have been Ford, or Fordism. Because these paperbacks would be unimaginably cheap, he insisted, they would sell in unimaginably large quantities. Unit costs would be minimal and income maximised. Allen’s enthusiasm gradually won over his brothers. There had been cheap books before, but none of them spawned the change in reading habits that Allen Lane brought about.68 His first choice of name for the new series was Dolphin, part of the coat of arms of Bristol, Lane’s hometown. It was already being used, and so was Porpoise. Penguin, however, was free. It proved far harder to sell the idea to the rest of the book trade than Lane had envisaged, and Penguin only became remotely commercial, says J. E. Morpurgo, Lane’s biographer, after the wife of Woolworth’s senior buyer happened to be present at one of the meetings and said she liked the range of titles for the first ten books, and the jacket design.69 Her husband then placed a bulk order.
The first Penguins were a mixed bunch. Number one was André Maurois’s Ariel, followed by Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Then came Eric Linklater’s Poet’s Pub, Susan Ertz’s Madame Claire, Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. These were followed by Beverley Nichols’s Twenty-five, E. H. Young’s William, and Mary Webbs’s Gone to Earth. At number ten was Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival. It was a solid list, but it cannot be said to have broken new ground intellectually – sensible but safe, in the words of one friend.70 It was, however, an immediate commercial success. Some of the sociological reasons given at the time for the impact made by Penguin were more plausible than others. For example, it was argued that during the depression books were a cheap form of escape; alternatively, that large private libraries were no longer possible, in the smaller houses that J. B. Priestley had written about in English Journey, an examination of the social changes in Britain in the 1930s.71 But a better understanding of Penguin’s success emerged from a study Lane was familiar with, since it had been published only two years before, in 1932, which had examined people’s reading habits. This was Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public. Queenie Leavis was the wife of F. R. Leavis, a controversial don and literary critic in the English department at Cambridge. ‘English’ was then a relatively new subject at that university. The department, formed shortly after World War I, was run by the professor there, Hector Munro Chadwick, and his colleagues I. A. Richards, William Empson, and the Leavises. They had two main interests: the belief that literature was man’s noblest adventure, the attempt above all others to forge an ethical, moral, and therefore ultimately an enjoyable and satisfying life; and the corrupting influence on literature, and therefore on the mind, of commercial culture. In 1930 F. R. Leavis had produced Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, in which he argued that the ‘discerning appreciation’ of art and literature always depends on a small minority and that ‘fine living’ stems crucially from the ‘unprompted first-hand judgement’ of this minority.72 High culture was led by poetry.
In Cambridge, Richards and the Leavises were surrounded by scientists. Empson originally went to Cambridge to read mathematics, Kathleen Raine was there and read biology, and the leading student literary magazine was edited by a man better known as a scientist, Jacob Bronowski. There is no question but that they were affected by this. As Leavis’s biographer tells us, poetry, for him, ‘belonged to the “vast corpus of problems” that are addressed by subjective opinion, rather than scientific method or conventional rule of thumb: “The whole world, in brief, of abstract opinion and disputation about matters of feeling.” Poetry invited subjectivity, so it was an eminently suitable bait for anyone who wishes to trap current opinions and responses” ’73 (italics in original). Leavis and Richards were interested in what ‘ordinary’ people (as opposed to critics) thought about poetry, about specific poems, and carried out surveys (science of sorts) to gauge reactions. Discussion of these ‘protocols’ introduced a new interaction in the lecture room, which was also revolutionary for the time. It was an attempt to be more objective, more scientific, as was Fiction and the Reading Public, in which Q. D. Leavis described herself as a sort of anthropologist looking at literature.
The focus of her attention was ‘the best-seller’ and why best-sellers are never regarded as great literature. Her early chapters were based on a questionnaire sent to best-selling authors, but were overshadowed by the rest of the book, which was historical, describing the rise of the fiction-reading public in Britain. Leavis noted how in Elizabethan times the most popular form of culture was music; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Puritan conscience maintained a canon of literature that was designed to be uplifting, a reflection of the fact that, at the least, the established church put ‘a scholar and a gentleman in every parish’ who helped to lead taste. The changes that followed all stemmed from one thing: the growth in and changes to journalism. In the late eighteenth century, with the growth in popularity of periodicals like the Tatler and the Spectator, the reading of fiction quadrupled. This change, Leavis says, was so rapid that standards fell; novelists wrote more quickly to meet the expanding demand, producing inferior works. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the demand for novels written in serial form meant that novelists were forced to write more quickly still, in instalments, where each instalment had to end in as sensational a way as possible. Standards still fell further. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the rotary press and the modern newspaper – and Lord Northcliffe and his Daily Mail in particular – standards fell yet again under the rubric ‘Give the public what it wants.’ By stages, Leavis said, the novel acquired a standing and then lost it; where once it had been a highbrow exploration of man’s essential ethical nature, it had since fallen a long way, step by step, to become mere storytelling. By the end of her book, Leavis had quite abandoned her anthropological stance and her scientific impartiality. Fiction and the Reading Public ends up as an angry work, angry with Lord Northcliffe in particular.74
The book did, however, offer some clues as to the success of Allen Lane and Penguin Books. Several of the authors Leavis mentions – Hemingway, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc – were included in the early lists. Hemingway, she said, glorified the ‘regular man,’ the figure set up by journalists in opposition to the highbrow; Chesterton and Belloc used a prose that, though more polished than journalism, was recognisably of that genre, carefully crafted to make no intellectual demands on the reader.75 This was not entirely fair on Lane. His lists were a mix, and with some of his other titles he did try to raise people’s horizons. For example, the second ten Penguins were better than the first ten: Norman Douglas’s South Wind, W. H. Hudson’s Purple Land, Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man, Vita Sackville-West’s Edwardians, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. In May 1937 Lane launched the Pelican imprint, and it was this range of nonfiction books that may have brought him his greatest triumph.76 It was the 1930s, and something was clearly wrong with Western capitalism, or the Western system.77 Pelican actually started after Allen had been sent one of George Bernard Shaw’s notorious postcards, in the summer of 1936. Shaw’s message was that he liked the first Penguins, and he recommended Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World as a ‘distinguished addition.’ Lane had already dismissed that very tide on the grounds that, at sixpence a book, it was far too long to make a profit. And so, when he replied to Shaw, he was careful to make no promises, but he did say that what he really wanted was Shaw’s own Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism. Shaw simply replied: ‘How much?’78 With Shaw on board, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, G. D. H. Cole, and Leonard Woolley soon followed. As this list shows, Penguin moved into science immediately and took a predominantly left-of-centre view of the world. But by now, 1937, the world was turning darker, and to adjust, Lane introduced a third innovation: the Penguin Special.79 The first was Germany Puts the Clock Back, which came out in November 1937, written by the opinionated American journalist Edgar Mowrer. The tone of the text was polemical, but also relevant to its success was the fact that the book had been quickly produced to address a specific predicament. This note of urgency was new, making Penguin Specials feel different from the traditional, leisured manner of the book trade. Before the outbreak of war, Penguin produced thirty-six specials, among them Blackmail or War?, China Struggles for Unity, The Air Defence of Britain, Europe and the Czechs, Between Two Wars?, Our Food Problem, and Poland (the latter released only two months before Hitler’s invasion).80
Allen Lane, and Penguin, were often too left-wing for many. But commercially speaking, the great majority of titles were a success, selling on average 40,000 but with the political specials reaching six figures.81 And in a way, Queenie Leavis had been confounded. There might not be much of a taste, by her standards, for serious fiction, but there was a healthy demand for serious books. It was, as no one needed to be reminded, a serious time.
Clive Bell, the artist, was in no doubt about the cleverest man he had ever met: John Maynard Keynes. Many people shared Bell’s view, and it is not hard to see why. Keynes’s Political Economy Club, which met in King’s College, Cambridge, attracted the cleverest students and economists from all over the world. Nor did it hurt Keynes’s reputation that he had made himself comfortably rich by a number of ventures in the City of London, a display of practical economics rare in an academic. Since publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes had been in an anomalous position. So far as the establishment was concerned, he was an outsider, but as part of the Bloomsbury group he was by no means invisible. He continued to correct politicians, criticising Winston Churchill, chancellor of the exchequer, in 1925 for the return to the gold standard at $4.86 to the pound, which in Keynes’s view made it about 10 percent overvalued.82 He also foresaw that as a result of the mines of the Ruhr being allowed back into production in 1924, coal prices would drop significantly, leading to the conditions in Britain which provoked the General Strike of 1926.83
Being right did not make Keynes popular. But he refused to hold his tongue. Following the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the depression that followed, when unemployment rose to nearly 25 percent in the United States and 33 percent in areas of Europe, and when no fewer than 9,000 banks failed in America, most economists at the time believed that the correct course of action was no action.84 Conventional wisdom held that depressions were ‘therapeutic,’ that they ‘squeezed out’ the inefficiency and waste that had accumulated in a nation’s economy like poison; to interfere with that natural economic homeopathy risked inflation. Keynes thought this was nonsense. Worse, given the hardship caused by mass unemployment, it was immoral nonsense. Traditional economists based their views of inaction on Say’s law of markets, after Jean-Baptiste Say, the nineteenth-century French economist. Say’s law maintained that the general overproduction of goods was impossible, as was general unemployment, because men produced goods only in order to enjoy the consumption of other goods. Every increase in investment was soon followed by an increase in demand. Savings were likewise used by the banks to fund loans for investments, so there was no real difference between spending and saving. Such unemployment as arose was temporary, soon rectified, or voluntary, when people took time off to enjoy their earnings.85
Keynes was not the only one to point out that in the 1930s the system had produced a situation in which unemployment was not only widespread but involuntary, and far from temporary. His radical observation was that people do not spend every increase in income they receive. They spend more, but they hold back some. This may not seem very significant, but Keynes saw that it had a domino effect whereby businessmen would not spend all their profits in investment: as a result the system outlined by Say would gradually slow down and, eventually, stop. This had three effects: first, that an economy depended as much on people’s perceptions of what was about to happen as on what actually happened; second, that an economy could achieve stability with a significant measure of unemployment within it, with all the social damage that followed; and third, that investment was the key matter. This led to his crucial insight, that if private investment wasn’t happening, the state should intervene, using government credits, and manipulation of interest rates, to create jobs. Whether these jobs were useful (building roads) or merely wasteful didn’t really matter: they provided cash that would be spent in real ways, generating income for others, which would then be passed on.86
Keynes was still outside the heart of the British establishment, and it would need another war to bring him in from the cold. He had always been a ‘practical visionary,’ but others refused to recognise that.87 Ironically, the first place Keynes’s policies were tried was in Nazi Germany. From the moment he assumed office in 1933, Hitler behaved almost like the perfect Keynesian, building railways, roads, canals, and other public projects, while implementing strict exchange controls that prevented Germans sending their money abroad and forced them to buy domestic products. Unemployment was abolished inside two years, and prices and wages began to rise in tandem.88 Germany, however, didn’t count for many people. The horror of Hitler prevented them giving him credit for anything. In 1933, on a visit to Washington, Keynes tried to interest Franklin D. Roosevelt in his ideas, but the new president, preoccupied with his own New Deal, did not fully engage with Keynes, or Keynesianism. After this failure, Keynes decided to write a book in the hope of gaining a wider audience for his ideas. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money appeared in 1936. For some economists, it was sensational, and merited comparison with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and Marx’s Capital of 1867. For others, Keynes’s radicalism was every bit as odious as Marx’s, and maybe more dangerous, because it stood a greater chance of working.89 To begin with, the book had a bigger practical effect in America than in Britain. The universities there took up The General Theory, and then it spread to Washington. J. K. Galbraith remembers that ‘on Thursday and Friday nights in the New Deal years the Federal Express out of Boston to Washington would be half-filled with Harvard faculty members, old and young. All were on the way to impart wisdom to the New Deal. After The General Theory was published, the wisdom that the younger economists sought to impart was that of Keynes.’90
In 1937, a few months after Keynes’s book was published, it seemed that the depression was easing, and signs of recovery were at last showing themselves. Unemployment was still high, but production and prices were at least creeping up. No sooner had these green shoots begun to appear than the classical economists came out of hibernation, arguing that federal spending be cut and taxes raised, to balance the budget. Immediately, the recovery slowed, stopped, and then reversed itself. Gross national product (GNP) fell from $91 billion to $85 billion, and private investment halved.91 It is not often that nature offers a natural laboratory to test hypotheses, but this time it did.92 War was now not far away. When hostilities began in Europe, unemployment in the United States was still at 17 percent, and the depression was a decade old. World War II would remove unemployment from the American scene for generations and herald what has aptly been called the Age of Keynes.
The essence of the 1930s as a grey, menacing time is nowhere more contradicted than in the work – and words – of Cole Porter. Queenie Leavis and her husband might lament the influence of mass culture on the general quality of thought (and their pessimism would be echoed time and again in the years to follow), but once in a while, individuals of near-genius have produced popular art, and in music, Porter stands out. Although he continued to produce good work up to 1955 (in Silk Stockings), the 1930s were his decade.93 Porter’s oeuvre in the 1930s included ‘Don’t Fence Me In,’ ‘Night and Day,’ ‘Just One of Those Things,’ ‘In the Still of the Night,’ ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin,’ ‘You’re the Top,’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Easy to Love,’ and ‘I Get a Kick out of You’:
I get no kick from champagne;
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you.
I get no kick in a plane.
Flying too high with some guy in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do,
Yet I get a kick out of you.
Porter’s work suffered when a horse fell on him in 1937, crushing both legs, and he became a semi-invalid, but until then his sophistication and cleverness were only part of his genius. His topical eye for detail was second to none, even Audenesque, according to Graham Greene.94
You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain
You’re the National Gallery
You’re Garbo’s salary
You’re cellophane!
And
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
Now heaven knows, anything goes!95
Cellophane and stockings. They were, in fact, much more impressive than Garbo’s salary.96 The 1930s, even as Linus Pauling was discovering the nature of the chemical bond, were also the decade when Baekeland’s discovery of plastic began to deliver its legacy in a proliferation of synthetic substances that hit the market one after another. The first acetylene-based fabrics were marketed in 1930, as was acrylic plastic, leading to Perspex, Plexiglass, and Lucite. Cellophane proper appeared wrapped around Camel cigarettes, also in 1930.97 Neoprene synthetic rubber was available a year later, and polyamide synthetic fibres in 1935. Perlon, an early form of nylon, was introduced in Germany in 1938, and commercial polythene in 1939. In 1940 in America cellophane was voted the third ‘most beautiful’ word in the language (after ‘mother’ and ‘memory’), a triumph of that other ‘m’ word, marketing. But it was the chemistry that mattered, and here nylon was the most instructive.98
Despite being on the losing side in World War I, Germany had maintained a strong base in industrial chemistry. In fact, because the Allied naval blockade had been so successful, Germany was forced to experiment with synthetic foods and products, keeping her ahead of her enemies. Beginning in 1925, with the formation of I. G. Farben Chemical Group, a team of talented organic chemists was brought together to carry out basic research in polymer chemistry, aiming to build specific molecules with specific properties.99 This was categorised as fundamental research and so escaped the Allied sanctions against military products. The team synthesised a new polymer every day for a period of years. British and American industries were aware of this commercial threat, even though the politicians dismissed the military risk, so much so that in 1927 the Du Pont Company of Wilmington, Delaware, increased the research budget of the chemical department from $20,000 a year to $25,000 a month.100
At the time it was believed that chemical substances were divided into two, those like sugar or salt whose molecules would pass through a fine membrane, and which were crystal; and those with larger molecules, like rubber or gelatin, which would not pass through such a membrane, classified as ‘colloids.’ Colloids were conceived as a series of smaller molecules held together by a mysterious ‘electrical’ force. As Linus Pauling’s experiments were showing, however, the chemical bond was basic, a part of physics: there was no ‘mysterious’ force. Once the mystery was removed, and the way molecules were linked together became clearer, the possibility of synthesising substances similar to, and maybe better than, rubber or gelatin became a practical option. In particular, there was a need for a silk substitute, silk being expensive and difficult to obtain from Japan, which was then at war with China. The fundamental breakthrough was the work of Wallace Hume Carothers, ‘Doc,’ who had been lured to Wilmington against a rival offer from Harvard with the promise of ‘massive funds’ for basic research. He began to build up ever larger chain molecules – polyesters – by using so-called difunctional molecules. In classical chemistry, alcohols react with acids to produce esters. In difunctional molecules, there are two acid or alcohol groups at each end of the molecule, not one, and Carothers discovered that such molecules ‘are capable of reacting continually with each other to set off chain reactions,’ which grow into longer and longer molecules.101 As the 1930s progressed, Carothers built up molecules with molecular weights of 4,000, 5,000, and then 6,000 (sugar has a molecular weight of 342, haemoglobin 6,800, and rubber approximately 1,000,000). One of the properties to emerge was the ability to be drawn out as a long, fine, strong filament. To begin with, says Stephen Fenichell, in his history of plastic, these were too brittle, or too expensive, to be commercially useful. Then, in late March 1934, Carothers asked an assistant, Donald Coffman, to try to build a fibre from an ester not studied before. If any synthetic fibre were to be commercially viable, it needed the capacity to be ‘cold drawn,’ which showed how it would behave at normal temperatures. The standard test was to insert a cold glass rod into the mixture and pull it out. Coffman and Carothers found that the new polymer turned out to be tough, not at all brittle, and lustrous.
After this discovery, Du Pont went into frantic action to be the first to create a successful synthetic silk. The patent was filed on 28 April 1937, and the world was introduced to the new substance at Du Pont’s ‘Wonder World of Chemistry’ at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Nylon – in the form of nylon stockings – stole the show. It was originally called fibre 66; hundreds of names had been tried, from Klis (silk backward) to nuray and wacara (imagine asking for ‘a pair of wacaras, please’). Nylon was preferred because it sounded synthetic and couldn’t be confused with anything else. After the fair demand for nylon built up; many stores restricted customers to two pairs each. There was a serious side to the nylon frenzy, however, which the New York Times pointed out: ‘Usually a synthetic is a reproduction of something found in nature…. This nylon is different. It has no chemical counterpart in nature…. It is … control over matter so perfect that men are no longer utterly dependent upon animals, plants and the crust of the earth for food, raiment and structural material.’102
In the depths of the depression, only twenty-eight of the eighty-six legitimate theatres on Broadway were open, but Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra had sold out even its top-of-the-range six-dollar seats.103 O’Neill had been confirmed as ‘the great US playwright, the man with whom true American theatre really begins,’ long before Mourning, which premiered on 26 October 1931.104 Curiously, however, it was not until the other end of the decade, by which time O’Neill had turned fifty, that his two great masterpieces The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, were written. The intervening years have become known as ‘The Silence.’
More than for most artists, certain biographical details of O’Neill are crucial to understanding his work. When he was not yet fourteen, he found that his own birth had precipitated a morphine addiction in his mother. He also discovered that his parents blamed their first son, Jamie, for infecting their second son, Edmund, with measles, from which he had died, aged eighteen months. In 1902 Ella O’Neill, who was addicted to drugs, had run out of morphine and tried suicide; this set off in Eugene, then in adolescence, a period of binge drinking and self-destructive behaviour; he also began to hang around theatres (his father was an actor).105 After an unsuccessful marriage, O’Neill attempted suicide himself, overdosing in a flophouse in 1911, after which he saw several psychiatrists; a year later his TB was diagnosed. In 1921 his father died tragically from cancer, his mother following in 1922; his brother Jamie died twelve months after that, from a stroke, which itself followed an alcoholic psychosis. He was forty-five. O’Neill had intended to study at Princeton, taking a science course. At university, however, he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, adopting an approach to life that his biographer calls ‘scientific mysticism.’ He was eventually removed from the course because he attended so few classes. He began writing in 1912, as a journalist, but soon turned to plays.106
Autobiography apart, O’Neill’s dramatic philosophy may be understood from this verdict on the United States.: America, he said, ‘instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country…. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.’107 Both The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night are very long, lasting several hours, and both are talking plays, with little action. The characters, and the audience, are trapped within the same room: here conversation is unavoidable. In The Iceman, the characters all wait in Harry Hope’s saloon, where they drink and tell each other the same stories day in, day out, stories that are in fact pipe dreams, hopes and illusions that will never happen.108 One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician, a third simply wants to go home. As time goes by, from one thing and another that is said, the audience realises that even these far-from-exceptional aims are, in the case of these characters, illusions – pipe dreams, in O’Neill’s own words. Later it becomes clear that the characters are spending their time waiting, waiting for Hickey, a travelling salesman who, they believe, will make things happen, be their saviour (Hickey is the son of a preacher). But when Hickey finally appears, he punctures their dreams one by one. O’Neill is not making the glib point that reality is invariably cold. Instead he is saying there is no reality; there are no firm values, no ultimate meanings, and so all of us need our pipe dreams and illusions.109 Hickey leads an ‘honest’ life; he works and tells himself the truth, or what he thinks of as the truth. But it turns out that he has killed his wife because he could not bear the way she ‘simply’ accepted the fact of his numerous, casual infidelities. We never know how she explained her life to herself, what illusions she had, and how she kept herself going. But, we realise, they did keep her going. The Iceman, of course, is death. It has often been remarked that the play could be called Waiting for Hickey, emphasising the similarities to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Both, as we shall see, provided a chilling view of the world that followed the discoveries of Charles Darwin, T. H. Morgan, Edwin Hubble, and others.
Long Day’s Journey is O’Neill’s most autobiographical work, a ‘play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.’110 The action takes place in one room, in four acts, at four times of the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime, when the members of the Tyrone family gather together. There are no great action scenes, but there are two events: Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction, and Edmund Tyrone (Edmund, remember, was O’Neill’s brother who died) discovers he has TB. As the day wears on, the weather turns darker and foggier outside, and the house seems more and more isolated.111 Various episodes are returned to time and again in the conversation, as characters reveal more about themselves and give their version of events recounted earlier by others. At the centre of the play is O’Neill’s pessimistic view of life’s ‘strange determinism.’ ‘None of us can help the things life has done to us,’ says Mary Tyrone. ‘They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.’112 Elsewhere, one brother says to the other, ‘I love you much more than I hate you.’ And then, right at the end, the three Tyrone men, Mary’s husband and two sons, watch her enter the room in a deep dream, her own fog.113 The men watch as she laments, ‘That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’ These are the last lines of the play and, as Normand Berlin has written, it is those three final words, ‘for a time,’ that are so heartbreaking (O’Neill’s relatives hated the play).114 For O’Neill, it was a mystery how one can be in love, and then not in love, and then be trapped for ever. In such devastating ways, O’Neill is saying, the past lives on in the present, and this is nothing science can say anything about.115
It is arguable whether the works of Orwell, Auden, or O’Neill best encapsulate the 1930s. The period was far from being the disaster, ‘the low dishonest decade,’ that Auden called it. Yet there is no escaping the fact that it was a journey toward the night, with the iceman waiting at the end. Whatever happened in the 1930s – and a lot did – it was cold comfort.
‘Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours?’ One kind of epitaph was set on the period by Alfred Kazin, the critic, who uses this quote from Abigail Adams to John Adams to open the last chapter of his On Native Grounds, published in New York in 1942. It was an apt enough sentence, for his argument in the book was that, between the Civil War and World War II, American literature had come of age, explained America to itself, and now, with Europe bent on self-destruction, it fell to America to maintain and evolve the Western tradition.116
But the book’s other main message lay in its use of material, which was itself peculiarly American. Kazin’s subtitle was ‘An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature.’ This meant of course that he left out poetry and drama (and therefore figures like Wallace Stevens and Eugene O’Neid) but did not mean that he confined himself, as a European critic might well have done, to fiction only. Instead Kazin included as literature: criticism, muckraking journalism, philosophy, and even photojournalism. His argument here was that American fiction was firmly rooted in pragmatic realism (unlike Virginia Woolf, say, or Kafka, or Thomas Mann or Aldous Huxley), and that its chief battle, its big theme, within this overall context, was with business and materialism. Discussing the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, E Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe alongside the writings of Thorsten Veblen, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson, Kazin first identified the various influential segments of the American psyche – pioneers, scholars, journalists/muckrakers, businessmen, and the leftovers of the feudal South. These competed, he said, to produce a literature that sometimes ‘touches greatness’ but is often ‘half-sentimental, half-commercial.’ His own analysis, as this comment reveals, was wholly unsentimental. He identified as peculiarly American the theme of ‘perpetual salesmanship’ highlighted by Sinclair Lewis, Van Wyck Brooks’s complaint that the most energetic talents in America went into business and politics and not the arts or humanities, that several writers, like John Dos Passos in USA, ‘feel that the victory of business in America has been a defeat for the spirit, and that this had all achieved a tragicomic climax’ in the late 1930s, where education was ‘only a training for a business civilisation, in politics only the good life of materialism.’117 At the same time, Kazin noted the development of criticism, from liberal criticism in the 1920s to Marxist criticism to ‘scientific criticism’ in the early 1930s, with such books as Max Eastman’s The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science (1931), in which the author argued that science would soon have the answer to ‘every problem that arises’ and that literature in effect ‘had no place in such a world’.118 Kazin also recorded the early rise of ‘semiosis,’ the understanding of language as a system of signs.
But Kazin, as that quote at the beginning of his last chapter showed, felt that since 1933 Europe had been closed and that now, in 1942, American literature, for all its faults and its love-hate affair with business, was ‘the repository of Western culture in a world overrun by fascism.’119 This, he felt, was a profound shift, coinciding with a reawakening of America’s own tradition. The stock market crash and the rise of fascism, which led many in Europe to question capitalism and to gravitate to Russia, had the effect in the United States of driving Americans back on themselves, to a moral transformation realised through nationalism as a coalescing force that, at the same time, would counteract the excesses of business, industrialisation, and science. For Kazin, this nationalism was not blind or parochial: it was a kind of conscience, which gave America dignity. Literature was only part of this society-wide trend, but Kazin thought that its role could only grow in the future. That was cold comfort too.
A parallel with Kazin’s main thesis, albeit in a very different medium, can be found in what for some people is the greatest film ever made, released not long before On Native Grounds appeared. This was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Welles, born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was a prodigy, an innovative man of the theatre and radio by his mid-twenties, during which time he had staged a successful Macbeth with black actors, and startled the entire nation with his version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, presented as a news program, which many people were panicked into believing was a real invasion from Mars. He was brought to Hollywood while he was still in his early twenties and given a virtually unique contract in which he was to write, direct, and star in his own movies.
Destined by his bulky frame to play ‘big’ characters (as he himself put it), he sought a subject for his first, much-publicised and much-awaited movie and hit on Kane, it seems, because his first wife, Virginia Nicholson, had married the nephew of Marion Davies, the film star who lived with William Randolph Hearst.120 Citizen Kane was filmed in great secrecy, partly for publicity purposes and partly to prevent Hearst finding out, and some effort was made for legal reasons to distance the main character from the newspaper baron. But the fact remains that the film is about a media mogul who uses his power to help the theatrical career of his consort, while living in a palatial mansion peopled by an esoteric mix of friends and hangers-on. There was really no disguising who Kane was, and for a time, when filming had been completed, there was doubt as to whether the film would be released, RKO fearing a massive libel and invasion-of-privacy suit from Hearst. In the event Hearst did not sue, but some cinema chains did not carry or show the film for fear of him. Partly for that reason (and partly because, as impresario Sol Hurok said of the punters, ‘If they don’t want to come, nothing will stop them’), Citizen Kane was not a commercial success.
It was, however, a massive critical and artistic success. To begin with, it introduced technical innovations on a wide scale. This was partly the work of the cameraman, Gregg Toland, and of Linwood Dunn, in the special effects department.121 In those days, special effects did not mean creating beings from outer space, but filming scenes more than once, so that, for example, all that greets the eye is in focus, thus providing an experience more akin to theatre – quite new in cinema. Welles also played scenes from beginning to end without intercuts and with the camera following the action. He himself, in the role of Kane, aged some fifty years – the makeup on the film was another major special effect. Other technical innovations were the introduction of a ‘newsreel’ into the film, to tell the life story of Kane. The film had its corny elements: at the beginning a reporter is set off on an ‘investigation’ to find the meaning of Kane’s dying word, ‘Rosebud.’ But people were impressed.
When the film finally premiered, in three separate cities, the reviews were ecstatic: ‘sensational’ (New York Times); ‘magnificent’ (New York Herald Tribune); ‘masterpiece’ (New York World-Telegram); ‘unfettered intelligence’ (New York Post); ‘Something new has come to the movie world at last’ (the New Yorker).122 The more partisan right-wing press accused Welles of mounting a Communist attack on Hearst, and this is where the link to Kazin’s thesis comes in. For Kane was an attack on big business, but not so much a political attack, such as a regular Communist might have made, but a psychological attack. Kane shows that, for all a man’s possessions, for all his power, his vast acres and thousands of sculptures that populate those acres, he may lack – as does Kane – an emotional core, and remain lonely and unloved. This was scarcely a new message, as Kazin had shown, but in America at the end of the 1930s, it was no less powerful for all that, especially in the way that Welles told it. The enigma that has remained (Jorge Luis Borges called Kane a labyrinth without a centre) is whether Welles meant the film to have a cold centre too.123 He once said that personality was unknowable (‘Throw away all biographies’), and it is at least possible that another aim of the film was to show this unknowability in Kane. In general, though, the verdict of his critics is that this aspect of the film was a failure, rather than an intentional device.
Riches, for Welles, as for Kane – as indeed for Hearst – were cold comfort. The rest of Welles’s career was really a coda to his early flowering and the magnificence of Kane. The film had closed everywhere by the end of the year, before Kazin’s book appeared. After that, it was for Welles – albeit very slowly – downhill all the way.