USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 68
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During the 1930's and 1940's a great deal of this ferment was chan- neled in the direction of social protest. The so-called "proletarian novel" became a popular art-form; The Underground Stream by Albert Maltz and Union Square by Albert Halper were interesting samples of this literary genre. Poets such as Genevieve Taggard and critics such as Granville Hicks joined in what was often envisaged as a great crusade to purify society, to redeem the injustices of the underprivileged, and to create a new moral atmosphere in which art, truth, and brotherhood would flourish. There is no need to recount the melancholy disillusion which overtook this movement, or to list the causes for its general abandonment. Suffice it to say that the generation after World War II was, often avowedly, a generation dedicated to conformity, conservatism, and orthodoxy. "The new conservatism" was a phrase in many mouths; Burke, Plato, Joseph de Maistre, and Alexander Hamilton were names to conjure with. Indeed, the new conservatism was often so conservative
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that it insisted upon conserving all the liberal virtues and attitudes; in point of fact it was less conservative than neutralist.
The need for disciplined understanding of world issues led to a fear, often irrational and uncontrolled, of nonconformity at any level. Political pressures and tensions generated a suspicion which verged, sometimes, on the pathological, and men sometimes hesitated to speak their minds freely. And finally, apart from intimidation and conformity for its own sake, mid-century America seemed to have run out of its big ideas-at least for the moment. In the background lay Freud, Marx, Einstein, and Darwin-gigantic minds, formed in the heroic mold by the nineteenth century and now the subject of violent, contending criticisms. But new theories, new impulses, new social attitudes were rarely being put for- ward; the values of thinking conservatively were being explored to the point where they verged on the values of not thinking at all. The cultural climate of New York at mid-century, as of America in general, was tentative and hesitant; our age was often described as an "age of anxiety."
But while the intellectuals hesitated and drew back before the op- portunities and responsibilities of the twentieth century, the twentieth century rolled irresistibly onward. America must have a culture, whether made by intellectuals or not; and in the absence of clear ideas about what the public ought to have, men of enterprise were not lacking to furnish what it wanted. New York City furnished, to a very surprising degree, material for a judgment of what was good and what bad in the mass conformist culture with built-in areas of individual variation.
Least pleasing to contemplate, among all the mid-century develop- ments, was the growing standardization of culture imposed by the immense expansion of those "mass media," which had just become really massive between the two world wars. Big commercial radio programs sought to find a simple formula and stick to it indefinitely; magazine stories were tailored to appeal to the most primitive fantasies of the twelve-year-old mind; book clubs put a premium on nationally mer- chandised mediocrity; plays, articles, and programs of public enter- tainment were all too often pruned of everything "controversial" before being considered fit for public consumption. In the larger sense, these facts were evidence of national and perhaps international trends; New York State took part in these developments, along with the rest of the nation, and New York City, as a major hub of communications and center of the nation's entertainment business, typified them. The phrase "Madison Avenue huckster" in one or another of its many variants came to describe a man, often of great intelligence and discrimination him-
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self, who in the interests of the big advertisers ruthlessly imposed in- fantile entertainment and hypnotic slogans on the apathetic appetites of the great American public. Standards of taste declined precipitously; on the one hand, anything sensational or sentimental, on the other hand the merest empty trivialities of give-away programs and the glib patter of comedians, came to fill the lives of the mass audience. Even the act of reading often became too much for an audience which had less demanding diversions at hand in television and radio.
If we look only at the mass media, the period after World War II presents a depressing picture indeed. Fortunately, the significant culture of any nation is rarely dependent upon the vehicles of the mass media. Alongside the business of purveying clichés in volume, New York City developed, in the course of the first half of the twentieth century, one of the richest and most eclectic cultures in the world.
Periodic complaints were heard of the decadence and debility of the commercial theater, menaced by the competition of radio, the movies, and television, squeezed by high rents, and hamstrung by labor regula- tions. These complaints were not altogether without foundation. The number of plays and musicals produced each season declined from an aggregate of 186 in 1923-1924 to an aggregate of sixty in 1953-1954. Compared with London or Paris, New York had relatively few plays before the lights, and those few were in good measure ripe old chest- nuts of well-tested appeal. A revival of Shakespeare or Shaw might be expected to hold the boards; a "leg show" was usually a good bet; but even with the best of reviews an intelligent and challenging new play sometimes faded for lack of public support.
Still, no theater could be described as "decadent" which continued to produce the powerful family dramas of Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), the tortured symbolic visions of Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire), and the religiously colored social comedy of T. S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party), not to mention musical comedies like Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, and My Fair Lady.
Around the time of World War I native American drama received a great stimulus with the development of little theaters, especially the Provincetown Players, and with the emergence of a particularly creative group of New York playwrights. Previous American playwrights had tended to avoid contemporary problems and had attempted to amuse their audiences with stereotyped characters and melodramatic or senti- mental plots. But during and immediately after World War I there appeared a number of workmen in the theater who were interested in social satire, dramatic realism, and psychological expressionism, who put meat into their dramas and vitality into their writing.
Foremost among these authors, by common consent, was Eugene
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O'Neill. Catholic in his tastes as in his background and receptive to new ideas and dramatic techniques, O'Neill at various stages in his career could be described as a Freudian, a mystic, a nihilist, a radical, a romanticist, and a realist. His writing was often turgid and bombastic and his thinking sometimes muddled, but his instinct for the theater was powerful and sure. He wrote neither to instruct, to entertain, nor to reform, but to explore man's tragic relation to the universe without -the cosmos-and the universe within-his own psyche. Beyond the Horizon (1919) won a Pulitzer Prize, as did Anna Christie and Strange Interlude in the 1920's. The height of his achievement was probably his Civil War trilogy on classical themes, Mourning Becomes Electra. O'Neill's talent earned for him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1935, and it has caused him to be genuinely revered by later writers for the serious American stage. For example, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine makes use of many symbolic devices akin to those used by O'Neill; Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!, in addition to its Chekhovian over- tones, analyzes the flawed American dream in a way made familiar by O'Neill; and Arthur Miller has written tragedies about humble and half- articulate characters which are in the very spirit of The Hairy Ape or The Emperor Jones.
Other fine plays which have graced the New York stage are Winterset (1935) by Maxwell Anderson; Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) by Robert Sherwood; The Little Foxes (1939) by Lillian Hellman; Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder. Tennessee Williams, in the 1940's and 1950's, was contributing many excellent plays. George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, S. N. Behrman, Rachel Crothers, and Philip Barry wrote popular comedies. On another level were those great successes, Abie's Irish Rose and Tobacco Road.
During the 1920's the musical comedy stage was largely, though not entirely, devoted to the production of lush extravaganzas, featuring splendidly undressed showgirls and loud and vulgar jokes-such for the most part were the Ziegfeld Follies and George White's Scandals. But at the same time Sigmund Romberg was writing his sentimental, well-loved musicals; Cole Porter was beginning his long and successful career as a composer of musical comedies (later to include such hits as Anything Goes, the Gay Divorcee, and Kiss Me Kate); the sophisticated review Three's a Crowd and the Negro review Blackbirds of 1929 won wide acclaim; and Jerome Kern was writing Sunny, Sally, and the immortal Show Boat.
In the 1930's more comedy and satire were brought into musical comedy. In 1931 Of Thee I Sing appeared, a side-splitting travesty on politics, the vice-presidency, and life in the White House which won the first Pulitzer Prize ever bestowed for a musical play. This frothy
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satire combined the comic talents of George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin with the music of George Gershwin, who was later to write the score for the classic folk opera Porgy and Bess. Meanwhile, Richard Rodgers was rapidly coming to the fore as a com- poser of popular scores. He teamed at first with the lyricist Lorenz Hart, and then with Oscar Hammerstein II, and in both combinations his output was little short of prodigious. When he and Hart dissolved partnership in 1942 they had collaborated on twenty-three musical shows, including Garrick Gaieties, A Connecticut Yankee, and Pal Joey. Nine of their shows had been made into motion pictures, and together they wrote nearly four hundred songs.
The new musical-comedy team of Rodgers and Hammerstein has already produced such hits as Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951). Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls, based on the short stories of Damon Runyon, was another tremendous success; and so was a musical version of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, titled My Fair Lady (1956). Indeed, so far as the musical stage was concerned, it might fairly be argued that the New York stage had become more adult and sophisticated during the 1950's than it ever was before.
As an economic enterprise, to be sure, the commercial theater in any form is clearly the very next thing to suicide and insanity. From 1948 to 1953, members of Actors' Equity averaged only $790 a year from their theatrical work; and they worked, on the average, only ten weeks out of the fifty-two. Before it ever opened on Broadway, a show might cost anywhere from $30,000 to $375,000; and its chances for survival in the Big Town were desperate indeed. If it survived at all, a musical might have to attract packed houses for as much as a year (selling its seats at up to ten dollars each), before it recovered the cost of produc- tion. An accepted break-even figure for a one-set dramatic play with no orchestra and few characters was $20,000 a week. Yet the profes- sional theater continued to exist and in its own febrile, half-commercial, half-artistic way, to flourish.
The theatrical climate was immensely enriched, too, by the mushroom growth of an off-Broadway theater. Playing in converted warehouses and lofts, the amateurs and semiprofessionals making up these com- panies were able to produce plays of relatively limited appeal. They had their problems with copyright and fire regulations, with inexperi- enced or unreliable performers, with ramshackle organizations and an appalling lack of capital. Yet they survived and flourished, producing many young actors who graduated to Broadway or Hollywood and many memorable shows in their own right.
A federal, municipal, or state subsidized theater was often discussed
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as a means of providing training for young actors, a place for produc- tion of standard items of the repertoire, and an economic cushion for a desperately uncushioned industry. But, except for a brief and promising venture into federal theater made by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930's, the idea of a subsidized theater has remained an idea. Actors and actresses, meanwhile, solve the problem of making a living by working as bellhops and elevator operators. During the sum- mers they sometimes venture forth to act in converted barns or on the resort circuit. This depressing and familiar story provides evidence of the theater's irresistible attraction for young people of undaunted and resilient optimism.
One branch of show business, indeed, succumbed as early as the 1930's, under the impact of competition from the movies. Vaudeville died when the famous old Palace closed in 1932; and periodic attempts to revive it only emphasized its total demise. In one sense, it was the purest of the performing arts; for a great vaudevillian like Frank Fay had no prepared act, no special tricks or routines. He commanded each audience he faced by sheer power of personality, and to see him work a Sunday night audience at the Palace (an audience itself composed almost entirely of theatrical people) was a tremendous experience. Other famous vaudevillians were Tony Pastor, Sophie Tucker, W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, Will Rogers, and Nora Bayes. Something of the old- time vaudevillian's sharp and rakish attitude may still be seen in the pages of Variety, a newspaper put out by, for, and about the boys and girls in show-biz. Variety, like most of its readers, has a fondness for New York City which borders on the chauvinistic; and the city responds with a special affection for its brightest, noisiest, and most flamboyant children.
To the music lover, New York City offers probably the richest diet of any city of the world-a perpetual festival of musical art. In the field of opera, New York is still the only city in America where one can see and hear the full standard repertoire, spread out over a five-month season; where the great voices and the great performers regularly and inevitably appear. The Metropolitan Opera House is of course the center of operatic production. Undeniably conservative in its selection of operas for production, the management offsets this quality by lavish- ness in the acquisition of singers. Caruso, Chaliapin, Flagstad, Bac- caloni, Pinza, and Erna Berger-the list is all but endless. One goes a long time at the "Met" between productions of Berg's Wozzeck and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress; yet where else in America can one hear them at all? If the standard repertoire is performed and overperformed, it is only by European standards that one can complain of lack of variety. And in opera, as in the theater, the big commercial enterprise
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is augmented by more or less informal groups-no less than fifty-three of them in New York City. The New York City Opera, the Amato Opera Company, Community Opera, Inc., the L. Petri Opera Co., the San Carlo Opera Co., the Juilliard School of Music, and the Little Orchestra Society are only a few of the groups sponsoring operatic performances.
Only in the melancholy sense that their devotion was meagerly re- warded could one call the practitioners of modern dance "amateurs," for their training was always arduous and their standards exacting. The great period of vital experiment in this medium was the 1930's; many groups and soloists sprang into prominence at this time, and recitals were numerous and enthusiastic. But the talent which gained public notice through dance recitals was quickly drained off into more lucrative lines of endeavor. Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, and Agnes de Mille, for example, concerned themselves more and more with work for the movies or the musical-comedy stage; and only a few established com- panies, such as those of Martha Graham, Pearl Lang, and José Limon, continued into the 1950's the old, unrelenting experiment of expressive modern dancing. To some extent this void was filled, after World War II, by a revived interest in ballet. The most talented and glamorous companies of Europe-the Sadlers Wells Company of England, for example, and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo-established New York seasons, and were received with éclat. Fine ballet is a very fine spectacle indeed, and one would not wish New York to be without it. Yet the modern dance had, at its best, a creative spark, a flair for the distinc- tively modern idiom, which one hopes the vogue for ballet will not permanently extinguish.
After the great days of Arturo Toscanini in the 1930's and 1940's, the New York Philharmonic was not quite as distinctive a force in the musical world as, say, the Boston Philharmonic under Koussevitsky or the Cleveland Symphony under Rodjinski. A succession of guest con- ductors gave the New York organization no chance to develop an individual character of its own. Still, it was a fine symphony orchestra, more widely heard (owing to the Sunday afternoon broadcasts ) than any other orchestra in the nation. And around it there flourished an amazing proliferation of more or less specialized musical organizations. "Little symphonies" were numerous; chamber-music groups were beyond computation; vocal ensembles and composers' forums flourished. Through- out the city organizations might be found for the performance of baroque music, medieval music, music for wood-winds, Finnish music, children's music, music for ancient instruments. There was no limit to the amount and variety of music that New Yorkers made and heard. Recitals, of course, continued to be the order of the day-recitals so many and so
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various as practically to defy description. There are also fine musical organizations outside the metropolis. One thinks at once of the Rochester and Buffalo symphonies and the fine orchestra associated with the Eastman School of Music at Rochester-but for sheer richness of musical life, New York City stands alone.
Above all, the musical climate of the city was enriched by a variety of radio programs available over small stations, and appealing to an audience of specialized interests. On the big networks, a lover of classical music had to content himself with two hours of Sunday-afternoon symphony; in New York City, one had available, via long-playing records, frequency modulation radio, and high-fidelity sound reproduc- tion, twenty-four hours a day of string quartets, operas, cantatas, con- certs, and symphonies. Composers clustered together in New York in sufficient numbers to create at least the illusion of a community; and in the circles they frequented, the twelve-tone scale, the prepared piano, and the intricacies of atonality were discussed with passion and under- standing. Here at least "the world of music" was not a mere metaphor; a person of musical interests and abilities might actually live in New York amid a society where the language of music was constantly spoken and where the value of fine music was accepted without question. Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Paul Creston, Norman Dello Joio, Randall Thompson, Virgil Thompson, David Diamond, Ulysses Kay, and Douglas Moore are all well-known New York composers.
On a somewhat different plane, New York City also became the great jazz center of the nation. The Original Dixieland Five had played New York, of course, as early as 1919; but this venture represented an ex- cursion into the hinterland from the great central headquarters of jazz in New Orleans and Chicago. It was not till the middle 1930's that jazz really became domesticated in New York, and not till after World War II that New York became a central headquarters of the art. Originally, the best music in this genre was to be heard either uptown in Harlem, or downtown in Greenwich Village. But after a while, Benny Goodman and others brought jazz into Carnegie Hall, and then the art acquired practitioners in the bistros of the East Fifties. Nowadays, one may hear good jazz at Nick's, Eddie Condon's, or Café Society in the Village; at the Savoy Ballroom or the Apollo Theater in Harlem; and at The Embers or Birdland, in midtown. "Cool" styles have had their vogue, and for a while the cry of the bopster was loud in the land; but the backbone of jazz remains good old polyphonic Dixieland with a solid beat.
New York City in its relation to literature offers us a wide and wonder- ful topic, too bewildering in its multiplicity for easy analysis. As the center of the American book-publishing business, New York provided
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writers with a marketplace and a germinal source of ideas. Perhaps these two functions did not always harmonize perfectly. A marketplace is not always the best place to carry out projects of high imaginative quality, especially when it is dominated (as is the New York literary marketplace) by mass-distribution organizations like the Book of the Month Club and its several imitators. Some writers were distracted by professional operations involving paperbacks, reprint houses, movie rights, and anthologies; others were drawn into commercial projects like quiz shows, blurbwriting, and gossip mongering; still others suc- cumbed to the general pursuit of fashionable and merely flashy ideas. As a rule, authors tended to find the intellectual atmosphere of New York too thick, the pace of ideas, projects, and personalities too dis- tracting to encourage their best work. Typically, they dipped into the turbid stream of literary ferment and discussion for a while, and then withdrew to a retreat in Westport, Connecticut, the south of France, or Oxford, Mississippi, where life was more leisurely and rents more reasonable. In their seclusion they evolved manuscripts, which were sent to New York, to be produced as books, which produced more ferment, into which they dipped again. And thus the cycle proceeded.
Of "New York City novelists" in the strict definition, there were not, perhaps, very many. Miss Betty Smith recorded her childhood in the borough across the river (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn); Mr. Thomas Gallagher etched some memorable pictures of the neurotic lace-curtain Irishry around Columbia University (The Gathering Darkness); and Mr. Jerome Weidman did an incisive study of the manners and mores of the garment district titled I Can Get It for You Wholesale. But in general the New York novel at the midpoint of the century did not seem to be concerned, as it once was, with the analysis of a neighbor- hood. After a splurge during the 1930's, when the so-called "proletarian" novelists tried to make their novels out of their neighborhoods (usually the Lower East Side ), a change took place. Perhaps the chief practitioner today of the older genre is Mr. Budd Schulberg; What Makes Sammy Run? had a tenderness and Waterfront a toughness which seem to be derivative from the novels of social protest which dominated the 1930's. But on the whole, the neighborhood novel has now moved to the suburbs, where the fate of the pretentious intellectual snob is investigated by Mr. Edmund Wilson and that of the man in the gray flannel suit by Mr. Sloan Wilson.
By and large, then, New York City became a backdrop for novelists, rather than a subject matter. John O'Hara did a fine mordant study of a doomed young wanton and an advertising man at the dangerous age, in Butterfield 8; Frederic Wakeman, in The Hucksters, explored the gilded slave-marts of Madison Avenue; and Herman Wouk, in
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Marjorie Morningstar, reported at length on the difficulties of being a nice young lady on West End Avenue. Ludwig Bemelmans created around the Plaza Hotel (in his terms, the "Splendide") an entire world of imagination, not so much New York in its coloring, or even American, as cosmopolitan. And Greenwich-Village novels continued to chronicle the grubby events of that grubby little Bohemia, though not (on the whole) with great zest.
If one can generalize abruptly on a slippery subject, the relation of the novelist to New York City seems to have become more flexible; he is not dependent on it for his materials, at least not exclusively de- pendent; rather, he uses as he needs them its literary facilities, its colorful properties and social materials, its editors and advisers, its perpetual interest in style, its reservoir of literary ideas-and occasionally its magnificent gift of absolute privacy. William Faulkner could only have written The Sound and the Fury out of a lifetime of frustration and angry torment in Mississippi: but the breakthrough just happened to come during the solitude and concentrated travail of a two-month sojourn in the apartment of his Manhattan editor. Mr. John Steinbeck is known as a California novelist; but his imagination dwells most lovingly on the rancheros of the San Fernando Valley from the security of a brownstone in the East '90's.
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