Asked at a recent conference to recount why his second book had been an interdisciplinary anthology analyzing the culture of 1950s America, film historian Lary May admitted that the Fifties had seemed rather remote and irrelevant to him as he looked for a project to follow his history of the silent movie era: "And then Ronald Reagan was elected." The suggestion that Reaganism marked a return to Fifties ideologies, and made the contested nature of Fifties culture and history a central social issue, is sound: Reagan and his speechwriters sought to return to an age when the American people were filled with faith in their leaders, fear of the Communist menace, and gratitude for the comforts of the nuclear family, when no one worried terribly much about racism, poverty, homosexuality, or the rights of women. Students and survivors of the Fifties could legitimately feel an urgent need to remind people that the era was hardly so idyllic, and that to credit the American people of that time with such faith, fear, gratitude, and insouciance was to limit severly those who constituted "the American people."
But May's 1989 anthology, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Cold War, and the conference it documented, were not the first attempts to challenge dominant views of that era's culture and history. What distinguishes Recasting America from most earlier Fifties studies is its suggestion that there was culture in the Fifties rather than an undifferentiated lump of grisaille. With the exception of Paul A. Carter's 1983 Another Part of the Fifties, previous efforts to give a critical account of that decade had been effective in dispelling Happy Days nostalgia for the era but also notable for their attempt to reduce the Fifties to a monolithic age of oppression. Such volumes present an era in which everyone was either a victim of the Red Scare or an enthusiastic accomplice of McCarthy, no one questioned the myth of universal prosperity, Herman Wouk's novels were seen as the peak of literary achievement, and suburban women-all of them housewives-were only dimly aware that there could be other sources of ecstasy than a new Frigidaire. We are told that until the early Sixties, when Michael Harrington discovered the poor (in 1962's The Other America) and Betty Friedan discovered women (in 1963's The Feminine Mystique), people in Fifties America thought of their time in a more or less Reaganesque fashion, and that Reagan was only wrong in averring that such a state of affairs was a good thing.
One aspect of Fifties culture to which such a view of the decade did a great disservice was the realm of prose fiction. In his 1974 book, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, historian Lawrence Wittner writes that at the height of the Cold War,
literary rebellion was virtually nonexistent. Popular fiction stressed the themes of individual acquisition, business success, conformity, and anti-Communism. Even "serious" fiction skirted America's social problems. Of all the novels published between 1945 and 1960, perhaps only Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man [sic] could be called a significant work of social criticism. Here, the protagonist confronts and finally understands the real world; then, rejecting it in horror, he retreats underground. (129-130)Such broad generalizations contrast sharply with the meticulousness with which Wittner documents economic and political history, but they are not unusual. Marty Jezer's The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960 suggests that "At a time of political silence, the Beats were, in actuality, the only rebellion around" (274). Even Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowack in their 1977 volume The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, a study that seems to be immersed in the era's culture, suggest that Kerouac and Ralph Ellison were the only exceptions to the decade's abandonment of the social novel, although they give a nod to Norman Mailer. This view of the decade as a dark age with perhaps a single bright spot suggests a certain self-congratulatory impulse among Seventies scholars, who at times seem to be celebrating how secular and vital and liberated we have become since that pious, deadening, dismal era.With the advent of the Eighties and the successes of the Reagan revolution-including the renewal of religious fundamentalism as a force in government, the pacification of the press, the increase in Cold War tensions, the celebration of U.S. imperial projects, and the decimation of organized labor-historians and scholars learned firsthand that life in a conservative era did not preclude critical thought, political resistance, and vibrant artistic movements. If the Eighties were depressing but hardly soulless, could the Fifties have been as unremittingly dystopic as all that? Recasting America analyzed the struggles and contests for hegemony that were waged in academic, political, artistic, and literary milieux in the Fifties, showing that the decade's inhabitants were far from grim postindustrial automata, and in the process established that the liberatory movements of the Sixties were emergent long before that decade. Analyses that followed, among them Stephen J. Whitfield's 1991 The Culture of the Cold War, Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's 1994 Seeds of the Sixties, Joanne Meyerowitz's Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America 1945-1960 (1994), Joel Foreman's (ed.) The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (1997), and Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert's (eds.) Rethinking Cold War Culture (2001), one by one presented complications in the "Dark Ages" view. Scholars focusing specifically upon literature included Robert Caserio, who uncovered eight books in the postwar decade that portrayed gay characters sympathetically, and James R. Bennett, who listed twenty-four novels from the years 1945-1960 that decried the era's anticommunist hysterias. And David Cochran's America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (2000) convincingly depicts the greatest genre writers of the Fifties as seething with social protest.
The revisionist critics have hardly overturned the view of the Fifties as an oppressive time, but their work reveals that the proponents of the view that "literary rebellion was virtually nonexistent," for all of their skill as historians, cast far too wide a net in their generalizations about literature. In their rush to show how much better off we were in the Seventies than in the Fifties, to support Miller and Nowack's conclusion that "fear and prosperity [had] combined to make us a mediocre people"(385), the Seventies authors in their discussions of literature abandoned their historical perspective to embrace the most pessimistic Fifties social critics' view of their time as a decade of alienation and unremitting conformity, of gray flannel suits and organization men. But this totalizing view had been questioned even as it was gaining currency.
Suggesting in 1992 that that there was as much radical fiction being produced in the Forties and Fifties as there had been in the Thirties, but observing that such fiction "did not receive as much attention during the Cold War," Alan Wald was echoing assertions made by Walter Rideout in his 1956 study, The Radical Novel in the United States (Bennett 92). The impact of Cold War ideologies upon the journalistic public sphere and the publishing world in the Fifties is difficult to overestimate: marketing and reviewing energy was focused upon creative works that could in some way assuage national anxieties or aid us in our competition with the Soviets. But the artists themselves, and the audiences who appreciated them, operated under no such constraints. The culture of conformity and aversion in the Fifties US was not the only, or the universally accepted, culture.
The "Fifties Fictions" of our title are both the stories written in the era and the decade's dominant ideologies. Our goal in assembling this issue has been to address both those works and ideologies that manifested "literary rebellion" and those that helped to "make us a mediocre people" without making a priori assumptions as to which was which. David Riesman and Richard Robertiello, for example, have traditionally been seen as forces for conformity, scathingly denounced by Norman Mailer and Joanna Russ, respectively. Yet Andrew Hoberek makes a convincing case for the utility of Riesman's sociological imagination to today's progressive thinkers, and Julia Creet, armed with a rigorous knowledge of the coercive uses to which psychoanalysis was put in the Fifties U.S., explores the fascination that Robertiello's sensational Lesbian case study exerts upon her. Justine Larbalestier and Helen Merrick contest the assumption that to depict female protagonists in domestic roles is of necessity to endorse patriarchal values. Among the many accomplishments of Kurt Hemmer's essay on the life of Bonnie Bremser is its calling attention to the misogynist oppressiveness inherent in the careers of the oft-idealized Beat poets.
All of our contributors advance the mission of addressing hitherto marginalized, noncanonical, or countercanonical works and authors, presenting novel insights into paraliterature that has only recently, if at all, attracted scholarly attention. A theme underlying several celebrations of such works herein is the question of what constitutes protest fiction. It is rare to find literature in the Fifties that celebrates a protagonist who resists the pressures of his time: the acts of literary rebellion that occur most often do so through exposure of intolerable conditions, the victims of which are either destroyed or, at best, able to register their protest through an act of disavowal such as Invisible Man's repudiation of society. Stephanie Brown explores Chester Himes's strategies for the use of satire in the face of otherwise unspeakable trauma. Holly Hutton explores the philosophy behind a roman maudit by Richard Wright, an author who had been canonical in earlier decades but who began to see his work marginalized in the Fifties. I employ insights gleaned from social psychology in order to illuminate Patricia Highsmith's use of crime fiction as a protest against the stultifying conventionality that Fifties norms demanded of upwardly-mobile professionals. All three of these articles address bleak stories of doomed protagonists who lack even the freedom to retreat underground.
Yet the world of Fifties protest literature was not devoid of hope, laughter, and creative visions of a better world. Victoria Hesford analyzes the role of geographic space and community in one of Highsmith's few tales of successful escape from such conventionality. Tova Cooper elaborates upon the use of comics as a medium of social critique, with a close reading of a satirical story by the great Al Feldstein. Two men who were writing radical science fiction in the Fifties, William Tenn and Chandler Davis, talk at length about their work, their genre, and their era-neither was in the habit of writing hopeful stories, but their lives and careers manifest the possibility of creative resistance to oppressive milieux. And three generations of noir and horror writers come together in a conversation among James Sallis, Jack O'Connell, and Richard Matheson. Finally, Samuel Delany recounts his experience of the Fifties and attempts to lay bare some of the cultural signs of that era, in the process illuminating the critical tools which enable us to see in Fifties America what it could not see in itself, and analyzing what our possession of those very tools can tell us about how the Fifties gave way to more liberated times.
The reviews that follow discuss recently-published books that have some points to make about Fifties U.S. paraliterature and culture. The reviewers' approaches range widely, from Christina Klein's celebration of Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters, to reviews in which Elayne Tobin and Brian McHale use the works of M. Keith Booker as a stepping-off point to discuss what they would like to see addressed in Fifties criticism, to Wendy Pearson's personal reminiscence of Judith Merril, inspired by the posthumous publication of that author's memoir. Scholars of minority literature, Ann Keefer and Tracy Floreani, give their responses to exciting new works of criticism by Justine Larbalestier and Catherine Jurca; and novelists L. Timmel Duchamp and James Morrow bring their unflinching critical gazes and stylistic resources to bear upon the writing of Camille Bacon-Smith and W.R. Lhamon. We conclude with the comments of four scholars on the late Leslie Fiedler, to whom this issue is dedicated. Like the whole of Fifties literature, Fiedler is too often unfairly characterized as conservative-bordering-on-reactionary; the recollections included here encourage the interrogation of such a view.
If the bulk of the pieces collected in Fifties Fictions have a common tendency or a cumulative effect, it is to emphasize the contemporary relevance of that era's cultural features, norms, and expectations. Unlike the look-how-far-we've-come volumes of Fifties studies, this collection makes few claims about America's having transcended all Fifties problems, tending more toward seeing what we can learn through recovering insights that were created in response to the oppressiveness of that era. Institutional racism and homophobia are incredibly less severe than they were forty years ago and more, but the forces that drive the protagonists of Wright's The Outsider, Himes's The End of a Primitive, and Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to violence are still here, as are normalizing discourses of the sort that oppressed Bonnie Bremser and Robertiello's patient. The Cold War psychology discussed by Cooper and Hendershot, long since satirized by William Tenn and fought by Chandler Davis, has some analogies in the current manifestation of the national security state. And, as McAlister, Booker, Jurca, and Lhamon have revealed, many recent or current American cultural formations can only be understood by considering the Fifties schemata from which they evolved. For good and ill, Fifties fictions will not go away.
Works Cited Bennett, James R. "Questioning the Supreme Obsession: Novels about Anti-communism in the United States Since World War II." Works and Days 20 (Fall 1992): 89-118.
Carter, Paul A. Another Part of the Fifties. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
Caserio, Robert L. "Queer Passions, Queer Citizenship: Some Novels about the State of the American Nation 1946-1954." Modern Fiction Studies. 43.1: 170-205.
Cochran, David. America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2000.
Foreman, Joel, ed. The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963.
Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Jamison, Andrew, and Ron Eyerman. Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Jezer, Marty. The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960. Boston: South End Press, 1982.
May, Lary. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945- 1960. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1994.
Miller, Douglas T., and Marion Nowak. The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Second Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Wittner, Lawrence. Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate. New York: Praeger, 1974.
Josh Lukin, Ph.D. teaches at SUNY Buffalo. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction, MLN, Anarchist Studies and Exquisite Corpse.
