Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Morris Dickstein takes the title of his new book from the haunting Depression-era song "Dancing in the Dark," by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. The song, in Dickstein's view, reflects the cultural history of the period, evoking a "darkened ballroom" or "our own darkest feelings, the existential limits of the human condition." Perhaps so, though it is the habit of academics -- Dickstein has taught for many years at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York -- to read more into things than they may actually contain. Still, Dickstein is absolutely right about the period: "The mood of the Depression was defined not only by hard times and a coming world crisis but by many extraordinary attempts to cheer people up -- or else to sober them up into facing what was happening. Though poor economically, the decade created a vibrant culture rich in the production of popular fantasy and trenchant social criticism. This is the split personality of Depression culture: on the 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. Looking at both sides of this cultural divide, we can see how closely linked they are." In the course of his overview, Dickstein discusses movies, plays, music and photographs, but his principal emphasis is on books, not surprising since literature has been the focus of his scholarly career. His most extensive discussion is of the work of John Steinbeck. "With the exception of Harriett Beecher Stowe in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' Upton Sinclair in 'The Jungle,' and perhaps Richard Wright with 'Native Son,' no protest writer had a greater impact on how Americans understood their own country" than Steinbeck did, Dickstein writes, which certainly is the case; the influence of "The Grapes of Wrath" cannot be overestimated. But when Dickstein moves from the political, social and cultural aspects of Steinbeck's work to the literary, he loses his grip. "Thanks to his earthiness, sensuous immediacy, and sheer storytelling ability," he writes, "Steinbeck's work has not dated like that of more ambitious or grimly topical contemporaries," which simply isn't true; for all the sincerity of Steinbeck's writing, he had a tin ear and his prose is graceless, even allowing for its "proletarian" subject matter. Dickstein does make one interesting and useful point about the "proletarian" writers, most of whom are long (and deservedly) forgotten: "Writing in the thirties was in many ways an experiment in downward mobility. Only a few of the 'proletarian' authors, such as Jack Conroy and Tillie Olsen, actually came from the working class." The work of writers such as Nelson Algren and Nathanael West wasn't necessarily slumming, but it was an effort to understand and explain other people's circumstances rather than explore the writer's own. The same is true of the work of Erskine Caldwell, the son of an itinerant Southern minister. Caldwell had a deep sympathy for the poor whites of his region and portrayed them vividly in his two mostly popular novels, "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre," which "sold many millions of copies in cheap paperbacks" but now are neglected -- "unfairly" so, says Dickstein, a judgment I applaud. The great writer of the period, of course -- indeed, the greatest of all American writers -- was William Faulkner. His "career sits oddly in our study," Dickstein writes, "since he was by no means a 'Depression author' though his best work, beginning with 'The Sound and the Fury' in 1929, coincides with these years. Faulkner looms over this period from which he seems historically detached." Dickstein places him nicely: "Thanks to Hemingway's influence and the journalistic notion of the writer as a transparent observer, a fly on the wall, the 1930s were also the high-water mark of the Simple Declarative Sentence. Faulkner offered writers a real alternative: a complex, at times baroque prose that might permit them to do justice to the inner lives of [their] characters as well as their social circumstances. At the same time, perhaps to their regret, he showed them how to become difficult rather than popular writers, writing books that could hardly sell. Above all, he taught how to deal with the poor without turning them into The Poor -- a constant temptation for social realists in the Depression years." My only qualm about this astute interpretation is that, with the probable exception of James Agee, there's not much evidence that many of Faulkner's fellow writers were reading his work, much less being influenced by it, during the Depression. Not until the publication in 1946 of "The Portable Faulkner," edited by Malcolm Cowley, did the full extent of Faulkner's achievement begin to become clear, and not until later in that decade and beyond did his influence on other, younger Southern writers manifest itself. Dickstein is right to say that Faulkner was "historically detached" from his period, not merely because apart from "As I Lay Dying" he rarely used contemporary settings in fiction written during the Depression, but because his great, abiding subject was the Deep South before, during and after the Civil War. The most popular Southern writer of the Depression years was Margaret Mitchell, whose "Gone with the Wind" was published in 1936; the movie adaptation appeared three years later. Both book and film were astonishing successes. "Once I asked a film class to compare 'Gone with the Wind' to 'The Grapes of Wrath,' Dickstein writes: "social catastrophe, family disintegration, a world held together, but just barely, by a grimly determined woman. The relevance of 'Gone with the Wind' is more striking because less obvious: both Rhett and Scarlett are survivors, strong personalities who batter their way through terrible times." To what extent if any Mitchell was influenced by the Depression in writing the novel is virtually impossible to determine, but the themes Dickstein outlines probably appealed to readers and moviegoers as much as did the book's vivid characters and plot. As he says, "There's a great deal of fantasy and melodrama in the best of Hollywood's social films, and a rich lode of meaning in its 'escapist' and genre films." Dickstein is an admirer (as am I) of the decade's popular culture, which "was striking for its lightheartedness and frivolity," and indeed what's not to like in the films of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn? Dickstein also admires (again, me too) the popular music of the decade, early jazz and swing most particularly, but there's a gaping omission here: country music. Dickstein, the Manhattanite who's open-minded enough to call Erskine Caldwell unjustly neglected, apparently has no room in his heart for Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills or the Grand Ole Opry, to name only three. Probably no music of the period except the blues arose more directly from the social and economic circumstances of the rural poor, and certainly none expressed more poignantly or, in its fashion, eloquently the plight of these people. Surely readers of "Dancing in the Dark" would be interested to know that in the first year of the decade Rodgers recorded his historic "Blue Yodel #9," accompanied on trumpet by none other than Louis Armstrong, at the time an almost unimaginable fusion of races and musical styles. To my mind the omission of country music seriously weakens "Dancing in the Dark," as does its author's tendency to overanalyze just about everything that crosses his desk. But it's a smart, ambitious piece of work, the product of prodigious research and careful thought, and those who read it will come away with a clearer understanding of an important but widely misunderstood period in the country's cultural life. [e-mail]
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (September 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393072258
• ISBN-13: 978-0393072259
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,756 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #3 in	Books > History > United States > 20th Century > Depression
  #11 in	Books > History > Historical Study > Social History
  #68 in	Books > History > Americas

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 24 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 "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Joseph Triebwasser "tl67" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of America's top literary critics at his very best, October 24, 2009

By	Merce Fan (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

If you're a fan of Morris Dickstein (and if you've read any of his books, you probably already are), you can look forward to another gem from this distinguished scholar, critic and author. A lifetime of complex but unpretentious wisdom, of lightly-worn learning, and love of human creativity yield a feast for the mind and spirit.