by Simon Warner
Yet Lhamon balances the scales:
Without denying their recent agonies, Americans were distinctly more optimistic following World War II, after taking a decade to think it all over, than during the wallows of despair that followed the trench warfare of the first war and the dislocation of the Depression. In spite of the overwhelming impact of Belsen and Nagasaki, and their warning demonstration of human capacity – mass genocide and world incineration – contemporary American culture has tried to find alternatives rather than bewail the obvious. It has tried therefore to escape the modern feeling of confinement, of complete determination, which Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit so succinctly epitomised. Indeed in many of the central contemporary artefacts – Catch-22, Elvis Presley’s ‘Mystery Train’, Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, for instance – are about this process of finding new ways to overcome despair, reassembling old feelings in new ways so to feel possibility again in the world.16
For black Americans, there were hints of possibility, too – the chance that they may be able to emerge from the long, dark night of political, social and economic disadvantage. For the first half of the twentieth century, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), founded in 1909,17 had been striving on behalf of the Negro population, presenting its case but making only modest headway. However, two developments in the middle of the decade would provide the catalyst for potential change. On the national stage, a Supreme Court ruling in the summer of 1954 would order that schools could not pursue a policy of racial segregation, a landmark decision that would still result in black schoolchildren becoming pawns in a grim game in the years that followed, as whites with a separatist inclination challenged the ruling on the streets and at the gates. But the fact was that the judiciary had backed the principle of non-discrimination, prompting a sea change in Southern American life. As Lhamon puts it: ‘[A]n agency of conservation, affirmed the radical changes already ongoing’.18 The following year, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man ‘as Southern custom demanded’19 on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, the pebble she dropped into the pool would soon build a tidal wave of activism known as the campaign for Civil Rights. That rolling programme of debate and peaceful demonstration would become a prominent focus for progressive energies, black and white, until the murder of its figurehead Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968.
But what were the forces at play in the cultural world by the middle years of the 1950s? We have already hinted at the state of flux, but Raskin provides a lively overview to support such a proposition:
There were visible cracks in the culture of the Cold War and sounds of liberation in rock ’n’ roll, in Hollywood movies like Rebel Without a Cause, and in plays like Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There were popular novels like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit that presented a critical perspective on American corporate culture, and there was provocative and innovative fiction like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita first published in Paris. In baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series, an upset that showed Americans that the raggle-taggle team of bums could defeat the seemingly all-powerful machine and the men in the pinstriped uniforms.20
Hollywood, at this time, was facing its biggest crisis since the boom days of the 1930s with the arrival of a new challenger to its hegemony. Television was an infant to cinema’s adult at the start of the 1950s but it was quickly apparent that the small screen was going to be a significant threat to the much bigger one. Entertainment on TV proved to be a compelling draw to the traditional customers at whom the movie-makers had aimed their product before – adults. Consequently, the Dream Factory’s agenda shifted and its studios began to make pictures which another section of the society – teenagers – would want to see. It is no coincidence that this period saw cinema walk hand in hand with James Dean, Marlon Brando and rock ’n’ roll. Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One, The Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock were as much about Hollywood’s yearning for adolescent dollars, a means of exchange in ample supply, as a representation of the Zeitgeist at play, though Maltby reminds us that Hollywood also proved adept at finding other ways to manage the upstart TV. The film studios, he tells us, also ‘entered television production and rapidly colonised it.’21
In the theatre, the most important play of the time was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), ostensibly an account of the 1692 Salem witch trials but in reality a lightly-veiled allegory for the McCarthy-ite investigations which had not only harried high profile people from positions of influence but demonised their friends and colleagues who had been pressurised into denouncing them. Wardle admires the playwright’s technique of ‘commenting on the present from the vantage point of historical melodrama.’22 The fact that Miller would later be called to appear before the investigating authorities lent this brave exhibition of artistic resistance extra moment still.
In literature, in the fields of poetry and the novel, what had been the trends in the years before Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ exploded? Bradbury talks of the situation at the end of the Second World War as the beginning of ‘the age of American hegemony’.23 Modernism had died, he argues, with the passing of Yeats and Freud in 1939, Joyce and Woolf in 1941. In the US, the fall-out from the war’s paradoxical political alliances had a bearing on the way the written word evolved. He remarks: ‘It is significant that the very best of the post-war American writers were those who had acquired their political education in the left-wing atmosphere of the 1930s and were now in the process of coming to terms with the atmosphere of moral ambiguity that ran so strongly through the post-war, cold war atmosphere of the late 1940s and 1950s, when writers throughout the west felt writing needed to begin again’.24 The searing jolt of the Holocaust prompted a string of Jewish intellectuals, who had tarried with Communism and then left it behind, to express their feelings through fiction. He cites Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth as important examples of this trend. ‘Now the theme was no longer the immigrant victim struggling for place and recognition in the New World, rather that of the Jew as modern victim forced by history into existential self-definition, a definition that was not solely religious, political, or ethnic.’25 Cunliffe suggests that Bellow, Malamud, Mailer and Ginsberg ‘all of them in their individual ways […] developed techniques of writing-as-talk (confession, harangue, invective)’ that departed ‘radically from the well-behaved, consistent locutions of the genteel tradition’.26 Mailer would, a little further down the road, publish his widely read essay ‘The White Negro’ in 1957, which contemplated the white need to emulate black behaviour and values. Meanwhile, black fiction, represented best by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and James Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni’s Room (1956) also revealed the rise of a Negro voice that explored a morality that was charged with a sense of political outrage, as identity, religion and sexuality were addressed from the other side of the racial tracks.
Yet there is little doubt that the book which would cast most light on the crisis facing neurotic, affluent white America would come from the pen of J. D. Salinger in the form of 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye. Bradbury says that ‘the moral and realistic novel of the 1950s was always a novel under strain, under pressure from ethical change, sexual expectation, and changing attitudes to personal fulfilment, and above all from the ever-complicating American reality’27 and it was Salinger’s book that perhaps best expressed this quality of tension. He calls it ‘the strongest novel of the Fifties; it caught its mood and became a universal student classic’.28 Cunliffe says that the novel ‘seemed to speak for an era which distrusted public attitudes but had nothing very certain to put in their place’.29 Salinger ‘seemed the voice of the youthful, middle-class urban American’ whose central character Holden Caulfield ‘surveys Manhattan and its hinterland through the eyes of an incoherent but likeably honest teenager’.30
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br /> As for poetry, those pillars of modernism, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, still cast long shadows over the years that followed the Second World War, yet their status and reception was confused, perhaps compromised, by their allegiances, political and national. Pound’s dalliance with fascism tarnished his poetic reputation; Eliot’s decision to take British citizenship in 1927 would alter perceptions among those of his original homeland. It is intriguing that William Carlos Williams should criticise the pair suggesting that by ‘kowtowing to Europe’ they had both harmed American poetry.31 Williams, from the same New Jersey town Paterson, as Ginsberg, would not only leave his own mark on American verse but would become friend of, mentor to and influence on this younger poet.
While we might mention rising poetic figures of this period – Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Marianne Moore and the emerging nexus at Black Mountain College – the importance of Williams, a practising doctor who remained a working poet throughout his life, to Ginsberg should not be underestimated. Williams was also more than a versifier; his theorising on poetry affected a number of young poets including the individual to whom he was especially close and who would eventually unveil ‘Howl’. Explains Mottram:
Williams’ example was effective right through the 1950s and into the 1960s – a long example by poetry and writing on poetry […] Poetry for him […] was not simply personal lyricism and imitations of regular measures and stanzas: it was an innovating function of society. The line of speech is the basic measure, a form which excludes no possibility of intelligent resource. The form is not ‘free verse’ but the measure and spatial control of cadential lengths and the varied placing of a wide range of information.32
He refers to Williams’ own cycle, Paterson, in five books between 1946 and 1958, to typify this manner of expression and adds: ‘In 1948 Williams wrote of a poem as “a field of action”; these works carry the sense of a constructed place to work, into which the poet’s experience is continuously articulated, becoming synonymous with his life, rather than in the sense of the alchemist engaged for life in his work.’33 William Carlos Williams became a supporter of and guide to the young Ginsberg and, when ‘Howl’ was published as the centrepiece of Ginsberg’s debut collection, the older man would pen the foreword.
In the visual arts, the 1950s would see seismic shifts in aesthetic attitudes. At the start, the predominance of Abstract Expressionism, the ultimate statement of the abstract concerns of the modernist ethos as represented by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, was evident. The decline of the representational, the realistic or figurative, had been in progress for the first half the century but when Pollock, specifically, pursued a new style from 1947 involving the pouring or dripping of paint on to the canvas, ‘he dissolved the customary compositional focus on a central image and broke down the illusion of objects in space, arriving at an “allover” composition in which the seemingly limitless intricacy of surface texture creates a vast, pulsating environment of intense energy, completely engulfing the viewer’.34 Yet if this loosely tied American school retained kudos in the opening years of the decade, by the mid-point, a counter revolution would gain crucial momentum. Pop Art would challenge the notions of existential abstraction, adopting rather than rejecting the objects of mass society. Robert Rauschenberg, whose early work at Black Mountain College owed much more to abstraction than the semiotics of Pop, would eventually, alongside Jasper Johns, help trigger a movement that would draw freely on the imagery of the movies and billboards, comic books and supermarket shelves. Their heirs, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and others would produce artworks which represented ‘the first cultural flowering of postmodernism’,35 as the processes of high art became fervently engaged with the semiotics of mass production and consumption, paying homage and lampooning them in an intriguing sleight of hand.
Musically, the early 1950s would see John Cage, another Black Mountain activist, as the exemplar of the modernist impulse. His Music of Changes had been a ground-breaking experiment in 1951. The following year, his production Theater Piece #1, which also incorporated Rauschenberg’s minimal ‘White Paintings’ and Merce Cunningham’s choreography, became regarded as the first ‘happening’.36
Yet in less rarefied circles – in the cities, on the streets, in the bars and concert venues – the sounds of America were undergoing a thrilling evolution. Dramatic developments such as bebop, the chosen style of most of the Beat circle, would maintain its momentum as the cutting-edge of jazz. In the 1940s, and Kerouac and his Manhattan friends were first-hand witnesses to this process, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk brought a new frenetic sound to the clubs of Manhattan’s 52nd Street and the concert venues of Harlem. Their tempestuous improvisation left the formal features of swing and the big band far behind, a sign that the Negro artist could still speak with a voice that was fiercely individual, determinedly original, in the face of widespread artistic appropriation by white band-leaders and musicians. For Ralph Ellison bebop marked nothing less than ‘a momentous modulation into a new key of musical sensibility; in brief, a revolution in culture’.37 When Kerouac and Ginsberg sought means to reflect the fracture and fury of the world around them in their writing, the pulse and patter of jazz phrasing served their prose and poetry well.
Yet, to return to earlier themes in this essay, if bebop, and the bigger umbrella of modern jazz, was the soundtrack to a particular cool urban clique, a crowd aware of Miles Davis, of marijuana and maybe the attitudes framed in the French existential literature of the time – Sartre and Albert Camus – then younger, mainstream audiences across the US were discovering a musical hybrid that veered toward the visceral rather than the cerebral. Rock ’n’ roll, long-time black slang for the sexual act, represented a cross-fertilisation of genres that had not found common ground until the early 1950s. Blues and R&B, the sounds of Negro America, had been broadly confined to black audiences, segregated in their own ‘race’ chart. Country music, a style which had been dubbed hillbilly in its early incarnations then called Country & Western as the form expanded from its roots in the South to the younger states in the West, was associated with white consumers. Yet this period was ripe for change and the barriers would not remain in place for long. When musicians and managers, producers and promoters, black and white, blues and country, intermingled in centres like Memphis, where the North met the South, the chemistry would forge alliances and provide new opportunities. As Palmer states: ‘[A] new breed of American musicians and entrepreneurs found the literal and imaginative space to create something fresh’.38
The stimuli for this changing climate had been triggered in the 1940s. A number of industrial and technological factors had paved the way for a transformed popular music scene. At the start of that decade the four national radio stations became embroiled in a dispute with the biggest performance rights society ASCAP – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. When the artists’ body sought higher rates for airplay, the radio companies refused and a strike ensued. The vast majority of the most significant song repertoire became unavailable to the airwaves. But the radio stations did not capitulate. Instead they set up a new royalty collection operation called BMI, Broadcast Music Incorporated.39 This new agency did not restrict itself to songwriters in the dominating Broadway tradition of Gershwin, Porter and Kern. Blues, R&B, country and Latin composers had the chance to be played and earn from their music in a way that would have been quite unlikely without the ASCAP dispute. When the industrial disagreements were settled – and the process took around two years – the old monopolies were broken and BMI artists had their foot in the door.
Other factors would play their part – the re-emergence of independent labels, the rise of television and its surprising side effects and the invention of a versatile and long-lasting material, vinyl, an offshoot of war-time plastics research, for the creation of records. Independent labels were first called so in the 1940s. The Wall Street Crash of 192
9 had seen dozens of small record labels collapse. Only the biggest players, companies like RCA, Decca and EMI – eventually dubbed the majors – would survive. As the Depression ebbed and war erupted, a new generation of immigrant businessmen moved into the sector creating small operations which took particular interest in musical styles at the edges – blues, jazz and R&B. Thus the Bihari brothers from Lebanon established Modern in Los Angeles, the Turkish Ertegun brothers founded Atlantic in New York and, in Chicago, the Chess brothers from Poland, built their eponymous record company.40 Through these outlets, performers such as Muddy Waters, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Little Walter and John Lee Hooker would gain national profiles.
