Ordinary people become heroes.
That high culture and popular culture go past one another is a phenomenon that arrived with Modernism, meaning Joyce and Kafka and maybe Mann, who is straightforward in style but difficult in that he is highly philosophical. Remember that this division was not clear in Browning who had clubs devoted to the reading of the author by their middle class followers. I suggest that the addition of silent movies as they supplemented vaudeville provided popular culture alongside the new high culture. How was this divide to be overcome? It was not done in the Forties even though late Faulkner and Hemingway were published in popular magazines, culminating in Life Magazine in 1952 publishing “The Old Man and the Sea”, which strikes me as a parody of Hemingway rather than the real thing. Nor was it in movies that tried to be high class by having Katheryn Grayson singing what was called at the time “light classical” or Di9sney versions of high music in “Fantasia”or a biopic about George Gershwin. The real adaptation took place in the Fifties when literature in both high and popular culture engaged in modifying presentations that were tragic in themes but with ordinary or even working class people and so engaging the audience rather than having to confront the lofty people like Oedipus who do disgusting things and with whom one cannot engage the sympathies of those lofty people.
A good example is Eugene O’Neill, a popular playwright for decades who was discovered in the fifties by Quintaro as having depth in O’Neill’s later plays. O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” is about a group of losers each of which cultivates an illusion about themselves, the tragedy being that all people carry one or another illusion within themselves. That we all do that doesn’t add up to grandeur, just the usual pathetic human situation. The same is true of “Long Day’s Journey into Night”, where the patriarch of the Tyrones is a drunkard who laments that as an actor he became typecast. Well, many actors like Patrick Stewart might think it a good gig and a wealthy one for doing one series after another in a science fiction series after having been a Shakespearean actor. And so on, people are not being tragic just because they are disappointed.
The granddaddy, the source, of the new dispensation is the very self-consciously crafted “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller, in 1949, the war past in that Miller’s previous play “All My Sons”, was about a war profiteer. Miller was on new ground, which was how to assess the American man in mid-century, how he ticked. Miller worked off the well made plays of the Thirties by Lillian Hellman so as to find a moral crux.. Miller posits an ordinary man who led an ordinary life who thought, as his wife Linda says in his epitaph, he should be respected. I never saw Lee J. Cobb’s original production but I saw a revival thirty years later when Dustin Hoffman played Willy Loman (“low man”, get it?) which was brilliantly done and well integrated around its theme, but as my wife said when we saw the revival, Loman had gone psychotic and that explained his action, but Hoffman’s performance was to miss the point which is how pedestrian Willy was, managing to pay off his mortgage and plying the secretaries in the businesses he sold to with nylons and maybe other favors and thinking the most important thing was to be well liked, which is an understandable occupational set of blinkers for a salesman. Willie wasn't deep, much less crazy, just persistent at bearing up under his burdens. Nothing elevating and the deep truth of Miller was to discover that rather than the burst of freedom and defeat that make true tragedy liberating.
Miller’s other star playwright in the Fifties was the very different Tennesse Williams who more or less abandoned the well made play to rely on the verbal pyrotechnics to enhance character, whether Blanche DuBois or Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” or Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. But then again, “Salesman” was also about character regardless of its elevating theme, that ordinary people should be recognized for their tenacity and dedication and, like O’Neill, their superficial illusions.
The direct descendant of “Salesman” was Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” which started out as a live television presentation in 1953 on one of the Sunday night drama series, “The Philco Television Playhouse”, before it became a movie. Marty is a Bronx butcher who is shy with girls and he lives with her mother who says he should go to a dance and meet some “hot tomatoes”, so desperate she is for him to find a girl. He does go and meets a girl who is something of a wallflower and they dance for a while and talk and she can’t handle a goodnight kiss, but says to his friend that he likes her and will continue to see her and maybe marry. This is just the reverse of “Romeo and Juliet” where the two are star crossed lovers who speak in poetry and cannot give one another up. They are not the glass of fashion. They are ordinary people who are seeing if they can make do. Marty is tragic in that he acts decisively to court a woman of whom his friends do not approve, hardly an unusual situation in that friends can be jealous or mindful of themselves without mates, but what matters is that someway or another men and women tend to cleave with one another and that is a fact of life rather than either a tragic flaw as with David and Bathsheba or an existential tension enjoined by the gods as with Samson and Dililah. It is more like Ruth whose mother in law arranges for a socially acceptable marriage. That is sweet rather than tragic.
Television had another example of a low class man who is kind of a hero. Thought of as the time as popular television having become high art, Jackie Gleason fashioned Ralph Kramdon in “The Honeymooners” as the ambitious but ineffectual bus driver who aspires to better work and station and and always retreats back to his loving and long suffering wife Alice to salve his wounds. He is profound when he is only heartfelt, an ordinary man honored for not being more than he is. That is the substance of Fifties realism.
Another theme of the Fifties is the problem play, borrowing that term from Shakespeare to mean social problems to be addressed, something in society that has become disjointed, whether in “Measure for Measure” in that nascent puritanism had become rampant in the culture, or in “Coriolanus”, where the military has gone beyond its bounds
Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” was supposed to be the definitive novel of the Second World War though I thought far superior was “Guard of Honor”, a novel of the war composed by the just older generation novelist, James Gould Cozzens, who portrayed the dynamics of an air force combat command but was also preachy in his message that military organizations could right themselves out of their dysfunctions if you let them alone. Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Mailer was also preachy. He gave some juicy and daring presentations about how soldiers on leave or before the war manage their sex lives with their girlfriends and wives, but the big message was about how to manage a democratic war. A general offers a theory which the hero rejects is that Amerricans are poor fighters because they require good food and services while Japanese troops are better fighters because they will do so with a little rice and no comforts.A thought to think about but it doesn't go very deeply. Germany fielded a great fighting force that was also well equipped. Mailer was jejune, a young man, who did better later on.
Another novelist that didn't quite make it as literature and for the same reason that it was a preachy obiter dicta was Herman Wouk, well regarded at the time. His “The Caine Mutiny” has vivid stories of what being a minor officer in the U. S.Navy was like during world War II, including becoming a “ninety day wonder” whereby SWillie Keifer becomes an officer and what it is like to run and do the military duties of a minor ship, what with their very different social backgrounds and their conflicting personalities and their petty intrigues. But the climax, which is to take command of the Caine during a storm at sea is unnecessary in that Captain Queeg could have been put aside or disregarded while the abler seaman was practically in charge. The only excuse is that M. was egged on to do that by the devil in the machine, the playwright, a doubtlessly suspicious customer. What Wouk does in the subsequent trial is to reverse all the premises previously established, he having planned that the facts established would be undercut, and so providing a moral dilemma to which the reader is left, when the fact of the matter is that Queeg was a lousy captain who should have been handled with a bit more finesse. The same thing happens in Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar”, The reader follows a young woman who wants to get into the theater and has a illicit affair all of which gets reversed when in a long coda the girl turns into becoming a suburban housewife with traditional values who has returned to at least a semblance of religion. Just wild oats before settling down and so a bit pat, like giving up his love when it is time for him to settle down, acceptable rather than unsettling to a properly prim middle class audience.
“High Noon” was another faux tragedy. It was a movie thought at the time to be a movie of social significance. The influential David Riesman in “The Lonely Crowd”, a study of how America was losing a sense of community, interpreted the movie to show that the community had abandoned the sheriff when he asked help in confronting the desperados. It was an object lesson in what was happening everywhere, a direct challenge to the American ideal that Americans were united in what was called at the time their “togetherness”. The disillusionment of the sheriff was regarded as the tragic temper of the time. I take a very different and non social interpretation, which is that the sheriff had chickened out of his obligations to be the person appointed to deal with violence. Contrary to Gary Cooper type, he was afraid and what would happen then, which is that the townspeople would forget about him, and he is finally rescued by his wife, which is not the manly thing to do, and so the movie is a parody of western heroes, though I think mine is a minority interpretation. It would have to be broadened to farce to appreciate it, which is what happened a generation later in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” but the pretentiousness of “High Noon” keeps it from escaping from its genre of a hero vindicated.
I think that Cozzens’ even later novel, “By Love Possessed”, that was just under the wire for being a Fifties rather than a Sixties novel, comes closest to the themes and elegiac style that raises the novel from being a kitchen sink faux tragedy into being a full blown one. The hero is an upstanding wealthy lawyer deeply into wills and trusts and buffeted by the changing mores of race and ethnicity and circumstances beyond the social in that his first wife died and he is now deeply devoted to his much younger second wife, the object of the title of the novel. But he too has to bend with the winds and compromise his moral integrity, which is a lesson that the gods do not let you off scot free, everyone subject to circumstance. Be gentle even to the miscreants and so this is not a book about just social mores but the nature of things, however much the book went out of fashion because it cut too close into how social mores slowly evolved.
There was, then, a unity of themes and emotions during the Fifties of popular and high culture. These were melodramatic in that people underwent sorrowful social circumstances unlike the elegiac history of the southland elaborated by Faulkner, and the sorrowful emotions, like a Bette Davis movie but unlike the freedom offered in the thirties in movie screwball comedy or a Broadway comedy by George F. Kaufman. Or the deep social issues found in early Steinbeck. No wonder people couldn’t make out what Nabakov was up to when “Lolita” arrived in the mid Fifties. Lionel Trilling categorized it as a love story, also a breaker of conventions, as in “Romeo and Juliet” but not seeing something even more which was an anarchic streak based on sex, Humbert caring only what he cared about, which was literature and Lolita, nobody else, sex the problem that would in a later decade confront Roth and Updike, however much more romantic sex was in Updike while threatening for Roth.
There was another unity between high and popular culture in the Fifties. It was institutional rather than thematic. All of these novels that I note were considered seriously at the time as literature and had each of them worked themselves to the top of the best seller list. High culture, such as it was. Moreover, the live tv dramas were free to everyone and were as high quality as was available on Broadway or in novels. There was Sumner Locke Eliott and Robert Alan Arthur, writers portraying a woman who was poignant for having missed her chance to marry, first too young, then cut off by a fiance who died in the war and then later too old. There were aesopian stories of racial killings in a small town and plays about isolated geniuses, all accompanied by sorrow about how something better might have happened. And that reached everyone. I remember on Monday morning in junior high school discussing the weekend live tv dramas, positing their significance, and I thought adults did the same around the water cooler. So the Fifties may have been merely melodramatic but it was the universal culture or at least a facsimile of that.