Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark

Focusing on the function of art and media in the time of crisis, Morris Dickstein's study of the Great Depression has contemporary relevance.

As we all know, it's good to be good, but it's better to be lucky. Morris Dickstein must have felt himself to be one of the few fortunate individuals in the United States when, as he was completing Dancing in the Dark, his history of the culture of the Great Depression, the American economy sailed over the edge of the known world. Now a year and a half into the Great Recession, his project has the kind of contemporary relevance most historians can only dream about. The topic – America's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade and the artistic attempts to interpret its meaning – is interesting enough in itself, but it contains what should – but unfortunately probably won't – be important lessons for our current condition.

Readers should not approach this book expecting to learn much about the political or economic history of the period; its focus is almost entirely on symbolic expression, the "function of art and media in a time of crisis." Generalizing about the cultural temper of historical eras, even one neatly bookended by the stock market crash in 1929 and the entry of America into the Second World War in 1941, is a risky business, and Dickstein wisely acknowledges early on that no single description can really isolate some "essential spirit of the thirties" or adequately encompass the range of responses to the economic disaster. He opts instead for tensions and oppositions; his title, taken from the 1931 Bing Crosby hit, encapsulates the nervous alternation of paralyzing fear and stubborn optimism that finds expression in both the serious and popular work of the period. This turns out to be a usefully flexible approach, since it enables Dickstein to locate the effects of hard times both in the zeal of artists to confront the ugly economic truth in all its sordor, and in the multitude of entertainments whose whole reason for being was to keep that truth well out of sight.

Chief among the former group were the novelists who turned with disgust, and not a little self-righteousness, from the fascination with the rich and glamorous that F. Scott Fitzgerald had made the literary fashion of the previous decade. That fashion was one more victim of the crash: the romance of infinite and insatiable desire – the green light at the end of the dock – began to seem rather beside the point at a time when the desires of so many people focused on their next meal. This turn had a stylistic counterpart in the reaction against what was seen as modernist formalism and solipsism in favour of a naturalistic depiction of things as they unfortunately are.

Dickstein does his best to make a case for still relatively neglected proletarian novels like Mike Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) and Edward Anderson's Hungry Men (1935), but his heart is not really in it. His own tastes reflect the modernist-humanist consensus of the late ’50s in which he was educated, and it's clear that he prefers the linguistic complexity and subtle depiction of individual psychology found in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1930) to the deliberate simplifications and blunt didacticism of the more politically committed writers. (Poetry of the Depression offers a still stronger contrast: leftist magazines were full of proletarian verse by forgotten writers, but the major American poets of the time had little to say about the economic and political problems of their time. Robert Frost's vigorous declaration of indifference, which Dickstein quotes, still makes bracing reading: "I wouldn't give a cent to see the world, the United States or even New York made better. I want them left just as they are for me to make poetical on paper.”)

As the book proceeds, Dickstein's literary approach begins to reflect his preference for individuals over collectivities; to explain a cultural development, high or low, he typically selects a representative figure to discuss in some detail – history as group portrait. Thus we have chapters devoted to Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie, and Frank Capra, and extended discussions of such varied artists as Clifford Odets, Cary Grant, and Bing Crosby. Dickstein is especially fond of parallels and contrasts: John Steinbeck is set against William Faulkner, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston are paired off, George Gershwin and Cole Porter get their measures measured, and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman engage in a battle of bands (with some interference by Artie Shaw). Dickstein works hard to construct connections between the differing styles and personalities of these diverse figures, but sometimes any sense of cultural unity is none too clear.

If there is one predominant theme that that brings together the various reactions to and interpretations of the economic crisis, and one that seems especially relevant for our contemporary situation, it is a general sense that the old American shibboleths celebrating the inevitable success of individual enterprise were bankrupt. In the ’30s, that traditional rhetoric provided neither psychological comfort nor economic improvement, and the American people began to appreciate the concept of a collective responsibility. In both politics and culture, as Dickstein puts it in his conclusion, the "initial sense of crisis and personal isolation gave way to a dream of community, a vision of interdependence." It is such a dream and such a vision that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inspired by the idealism of common sense, pointed to in his second inaugural address:

"Old truths have been relearned; untruths have been unlearned. We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays … Today we reconsecrate our country to long-cherished ideals in a suddenly changed civilization. In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people."

Could we hear that again, please?