“I talk with the authority of failure.’’ When thinking about the popular culture of the 1930s, that icon of Jazz Age decadence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, rarely comes to mind. And yet it is Fitzgerald’s words that haunt Morris Dickstein’s judiciously researched, persuasively argued, elegant analysis of Depression culture, “Dancing in the Dark.’’ Failure was in the air - the country itself had failed, in a way - and the weightless fantasies of a prior decade had lost their savor. A new language was required. Failure was not always the subject, but its vocabulary was required, and inescapable.
Fight and flight
How Americans dealt with the Depression by facing up to it, yet escaping into entertainment and art
Americans wanted blunt truth at the same time that they wanted escapism. They were like Ginger Rogers being swept across the dance floor by Fred Astaire, taking one step toward their partner, then two steps away. The dance required both motions. “This is the split personality of Depression culture,’’ Dickstein argues. “On one hand, the effort to grapple with unprecedented economic disaster, to explain and interpret it; on the other hand, the need to get away, to create art and entertainment to distract people from their trouble, which was in the end another way of coming to terms with it.’’
The former - John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’’ and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’’ - are the more obvious relics of Depression culture, but Dickstein, author of the well-regarded “Leopards in the Temple,’’ makes a stronger case for the latter. He sees the ugly realities of the Depression cleverly hidden inside the decade’s swing music, its backstage movie musicals - even its décor. Dark times made for light-hearted entertainment; Astaire, Duke Ellington, and art deco all spoke to Americans’ desire for fleet-footed elegance. As Dickstein reminds us, “Great art or performance helps us understand how people felt about their lives; it testifies to what they needed to keep going.’’
Having ignored so much of the American experience in the preceding decades, writers, photographers, and musicians were rediscovering a vast aching America. Woody Guthrie’s topical ballads, the proletarian fiction of Michael Gold and Henry Roth, Walker Evans’s photographs - each was, in its own way, awaking to a confounding new country, suffering and calling out for anything that might soothe the pain.
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