Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Morris Dickstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2009

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism: from Agee to Astaire, Steinbeck to Ellington, the creative energies of the Depression against a backdrop of poverty and economic disaster.

Only yesterday the Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into the hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that the calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet the recent economic meltdown has once again riveted the world’s attention on the 1930s.

Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called “one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature,” explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein’s fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of the more exuberant side of the era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and the lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing the influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how the arts were then so integral to the fabric of American society.

While any lover of American literature knows Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Dickstein also reclaims the lives of other novelists whose work offers enduring insights. Nathanael West saw Los Angeles as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longing that exposed the pinched and disappointed lives of ordinary people, while Erskine Caldwell, his books Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre festooned with lurid covers, provided the most graphic portrayal of rural destitution in the 1930s. Dickstein also immerses us in the visions of Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Roth, only later recognized for their literary masterpieces.

Just as Dickstein radically transforms our understanding of Depression literature, he explodes the prevailing myths that 1930s musicals and movies were merely escapist. Whether describing the undertone of sadness that lurks just below the surface of Cole Porter’s bubbly world or stressing the darker side of Capra’s wildly popular films, he shows how they delivered a catharsis of pain and an evangel of hope. Dickstein suggests that the tragic and comic worlds of Broadway and Hollywood preserved a radiance and energy that became a bastion against social suffering. Dancing in the Dark describes how FDR’s administration recognized the critical role that the arts could play in enabling “the helpless to become hopeful, the victims to become agents.” Along with the WPA, the photography unit of the FSA represented a historic partnership between government and art, and the photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, created the defining look of the period.

The symbolic end to this cultural flowering came finally with the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, a collective event that presented a vision of the future as a utopia of streamlined modernity and, at long last, consumer abundance. Retrieving the stories of an entire generation of performers and writers, Dancing in the Dark shows how a rich, panoramic culture both exposed and helped alleviate the national trauma. This luminous work is a monumental study of one of America’s most remarkable artistic periods. 24 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The gloom of the Depression fed a brilliant cultural efflorescence that's trenchantly explored here. Dickstein (Gates of Eden), a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, surveys a panorama that includes high-brow masterpieces and mass entertainments, grim proletarian novels and frothy screwball comedies, haunting photographs of dust bowl poverty and elegant art deco designs. He finds the scene a jumble of fertile contradictions—between outward-looking naturalism and introspective modernism, social consciousness and giddy escapism, a hard-boiled, increasingly desperate individualism and a new vision of singing, dancing, collective solidarity—which somehow cohered into extraordinary attempts to cheer people up—or else to sober them up. Dickstein's fluent, erudite, intriguing meditations turn up many resonances, comparing, for example, the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will to Busby Berkeley musicals and Gone with the Wind to gangster films. While tracing the social meanings of culture, he stays raptly alive to its aesthetic pleasures, like the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers collaboration, which expressed the inner radiance that was one true bastion against social suffering. The result is a fascinating portrait of a distant era that still speaks compellingly to our own. 24 illus. (Sept.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Although Dancing in the Dark risks falling into the category of books suffering from "decaditis," as the New York Times calls it, Dickstein's focus on the good that art can do and the many places from which it can arise saves the day here. The project's broad scope gives the author's insights an inevitable scattershot quality—Walt Disney, perhaps the most famous artist and visionary to come out of the period, doesn't figure at all in the book—and Dancing in the Dark certainly isn't meant to be an exhaustive study of the period's politics. Through his appreciation for Depression-era culture, though, Dickstein ably articulates the "crucial role that culture can play in times of national crisis."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (September 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393072258
• ISBN-13: 978-0393072259
• Product Dimensions: 1.8 x 7 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #411,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars As accessible as it is authoritative October 24, 2009

By Joseph Triebwasser

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I found "Dancing in the Dark" to be an embarrassment of riches. The elegance of its writing, the political and psychological sophistication that inform it, the depth and clarity of its argumentation, and the jaw-dropping breadth of source material at Morris Dickstein's command all combine to make this a magisterial work of cultural history. Dickstein accomplishes what all cultural historians attempt, but few manage, to bring off, creating a palpable sense of what it must have been like to live, think and feel during the period in question - here the era of the gravest U.S. crisis after the Civil War, the 1930s. With breathtaking erudition, Dickstein draws together insights from disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, film theory, art history, sociology and psychoanalysis, making connections among them that are unexpected but never facile or strained. And "Dancing in the Dark" gives the reader the best of both worlds, bringing together the rigor and careful documentation of the serious academician Dickstein is, with the galloping narrative verve associated with the best popular history writing. Whether you're a professional student of the Great Depression looking for sparkling insights or fresh information, or just a lover of a good, rich read, you'll be entranced by this deeply beautiful book.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sorry to see the last page January 11, 2010

By Tim Kotora

Format:Kindle Edition

"Dancing in the Dark" is not the typical survey of the Great Depression years. Politics, economics, foreign policy take back seats to the arts produced in the Thirties--novels and poetry, music, film, drama, operetta, architecture, interior design. Of the many books I've read and documentaries I've watched about the Depression, this book more than most made the bleakness, despair, and grim fight to continue in the face of disaster palpable. The arts surveyed in "Dancing in the Dark" glow that much brighter in contrast.

Dr. Morris Dickstein's commentary goes beyond cataloging; he goes beyond appreciation of the works. He holds them up for the reader to examine with him and thus makes them multi-dimensional instead of just a "good movie" or a "good book." His cataloging, though, is first-rate, as he introduces artists rarely mentioned outside of the academic world. Too much to read and watch, not enough time.

I highly recommend "Dancing in the Dark." It revealed the Thirties in ways I had never considered, introduced works and artists with whom I was not familiar, and entertained me so that I looked forward to the times I could pick it up again.

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Depression vs. The Arts, and Vice Versa September 29, 2009

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Over twenty years ago, Morris Dickstein began gathering reference material for _Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression_ (Norton). He did not realize at the time that his book would be coming out in the worst financial crisis since the Depression. It might be that our own crisis is being tamed, and if so, it will never be the subject of a book like this one, which details the cultural forces at work in America in the 1930s. Dickstein admits that it seems a daunting task: "How can one era have produced both Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio Center Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek toward the pastures of plenty in California?" I think he would admit that he hasn't been able to untangle all the artistic efforts and influences of the time, but he has made a big and inclusive book on an important theme. "My subject here," he tells us, "is at once concrete--the books, the films of an era: the stories they told, the fears and hopes they expressed--and yet intangible, the look, the mood, the feel of the historical moment." A reader comes away from this book with awe at how much has gotten included. Dickstein is very good at analyzing popular culture; when he considers films and songs, for instance, or popular novels, he scores one hit after another. Much of his book, however, has to do with novels that, well, few people read anymore. Dickstein has read them, and admired them, but literature has been the focus of his life of scholarship. Anyway, the books of the period are not as much fun as the songs or movies. He himself writes, "As serious writers began to emphasize the limitations and distortions of the American Dream, popular artists became obsessed with fantastic, even magical images of success."

Dickstein rightly discusses most at length the work of Steinbeck, especially _The Grapes of Wrath_. Dickstein shows how the book was a sensation followed by a movie version that was far more faithful to its source novel than most Hollywood films were. F. Scott Fitzgerald everyone remembers for _The Great Gatsby_, but that was a 1920s story. Dickstein shows that Fitzgerald came into his own with his confessional "Crack-Up" essays of the next decade, and _Tender Is the Night_, works in which he "... tried to build a new career by exploring the ways in which he had been overextended, self-destructive, like America itself during the boom years." Dickstein's descriptions and analyses of movies are much more fun. After describing the Fascist films of Leni Riefenstahl, Dickstein compares her "appalling choreography of human masses" to that of Busby Berkeley. In _Gold Diggers of 1933_ Ginger Rogers may have opened by singing "We're in the Money", but the show closed with the phantasmagorical "Remember My Forgotten Man", about the veterans who were now neglected and destitute. The movies of the time are famous for their escapism, but Dickstein sees the situation differently; the "let's put on a show" crowd of the movie is hard pressed by financial worries, and before the "We're in the Money" number ends, the chorus girls are thrown out when the sheriff closes the show because the producer can't pay his bills. The torch song of the final number is not uplifting. Rather than escapism, this film like many others Dickstein writes about here reflects the anxieties of poverty, solitude, and loss of hope. The films of the depression were famous for their dance numbers, as in the Astaire / Rogers film _Shall We Dance_, and Dickstein stresses the importance of their physical energy, with dance countermanding the Depression: "It offers a lift to those who feel `down in the dumps,' a sense of movement and relationship to those who feel hemmed in and isolated, a democratic kind of classiness, available in fantasy if not in fact, to replace stiffly hierarchical notions of class." Depression movies might have shown people striving to get ahead, but in line with a darker theme, the people getting ahead were often gangsters; Edward G. Robinson's Rico in _Little Caesar_ has even been analyzed as a proponent of the success principles promoted by Andrew Carnegie. Another movie that shows the darkness of success is _Citizen Kane_. Dickstein's descriptions of the movies, and his acute summations of relevant scenes, are not only penetrating but will make readers want to go back to the originals again (something that will probably not happen with the frankly pessimistic books he describes).

There is a glow of nostalgia for the 1930s as a time when we may not all have been happy, but we were serious and united. As the current economy has its own troubles and individual Americans are helpless to do much about it, it is genuinely inspiring to learn from Dickstein how highbrow and popular art reflected the understanding of that last depression. He has a superb description of screwball comedies, including of course _My Man Godfrey_, wherein William Powell plays a forgotten man himself, restored to high society but only as a butler. He gets a chance to rescue some of the outcasts he used to tent with, realizing that "the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job." He provides the jobs in the movie, and he resists the implication that the men are not his responsibility. It may be just a screwball comedy, but the big question of how we can extend opportunities to the needy remains with us.