Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
By Morris Dickstein
(W.W. Norton, 598 pp., $29.95)
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
By Linda Gordon
(W.W. Norton, 536 pp., $35)
American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty In U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
By Gavin Jones
(Princeton University Press, 248 pp., $38.50)
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a story of 1926, at the height of the economic boom and his own creative powers. “They are different from you and me.” Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” he explained, which makes them cynical and haughty. “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” The passage is best known not for its psychological insight, but for Ernest Hemingway’s withering rejoinder. Yes, the rich are different, he conceded: “They have more money.” As with so many of their recorded exchanges, Hemingway is supposed to have come out on top. We are meant to feel that Fitzgerald, in his usual romantic way, believed that the rich really were better, and that he needed Hemingway’s bracing realism to bring him back to earth.
But what if Fitzgerald had claimed instead that the poor are different? Even Hemingway entertained the idea that poverty--at least the bohemian frisson of being momentarily poor--might carry with it certain advantages. In A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris during the flush Twenties, Hemingway included a chapter in praise of hunger:
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy … the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted…. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Of course, one may feel that Hemingway is not describing real hunger, since his was voluntary: he had given up lucrative journalism for the riskier rewards of fiction. (Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer shows what it was really like to be a hungry American in Paris during the 1920s.) And besides, Hemingway’s chapter ends with a check in the mail and a rousing dinner at the Brasserie Lipp. “Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry,” Hemingway concludes evenhandedly. “Eating is wonderful too.”
Still, Hemingway’s two kinds of hunger--the hunger that gnaws at the belly and the hunger that fuels artistic ambition--are central to any discussion of how poverty is represented by American artists and writers. Now three books have appeared that seek a fresh understanding of depictions of the poor in American life--what Morris Dickstein calls “the starvation army.” Edmund Wilson--who crisscrossed the desperate country as a roving reporter for this magazine in 1931 and 1932, contributing to what Alfred Kazin called “the vast granary of facts on life in America put away by the WPA writers, the documentary reporters, the folklorists preparing an American mythology, the explorers who went hunting through darkest America with notebook and camera”--once observed “how difficult it is for persons who were born too late to have memories of the Depression to believe that it really occurred, that between 1929 and 1933 the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces.” Perhaps the experience of the past year has made it somewhat easier to imagine.
It is good to be reminded that poverty did not enter American literature with the crash of 1929 and the stark photographs of the Farm Security Administration. Gavin Jones identifies three main bodies of American writing about poverty, corresponding roughly to the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, the prolonged economic downturn of the 1890s, and the Great Depression. He finds that “moral and cultural approaches to poverty in the antebellum era merged into biological and social explanations in the Progressive age, and then into psychological and subjective responses during the Great Depression.”
Before the Civil War, poverty was widely regarded as “a chronic rather than a temporary condition,” Jones notes, with a family such as the disenfranchised Maules in The House of the Seven Gables “plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts … living here and there about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the alms house, as the natural home of their old age.” Classic American writers showed little appetite for schemes to improve the lot of the poor. “Are they my poor?” Emerson asked sardonically in “Self-Reliance.” Despite his employer’s efforts to provide aid and shelter, Melville’s Bartleby--whose “innate and incurable disorder,” Jones notes, is defined as “poverty”--pursues a seemingly preordained trajectory to the Tombs.
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