Richard Keller Simon

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The American Debate over Mass Culture, 1947-1960

The debate over mass culture in the United States during the 1950s was noisy, contentious, and extremely important, with long term implications for the way Americans were to frame and understand the problem for decades to come. It was an unusually political argument, given the subject matter, with critics on the right and the left blaming each other in very personal ways for the dangers posed by commercial entertainment, and those from different positions within the left sometimes attacking each other with even greater degrees of hostility and contempt. They argued over nearly everything having to do with movies, television, popular music, comic books, advertising, and related topics, even over the terms used to identify what they were arguing about, preferring mass culture, popular culture, mass media, the popular arts, or the culture industry, depending on their academic or political orientations. The specific issues raised in the debate-- the relationship between high culture and mass culture, the subtle and not-so-subtle political biases of entertainment, the difficulties of reconciling free expression with moral values, and the special vulnerabilities of children to the messages of mass media--were not especially new, but they gained new urgency in the years following World War II as mass culture appeared poised to become the only meaningful American culture. The stakes suddenly were much higher than they ever had been before in these dark forebodings of the fifties about our country and our culture (the title of one major symposium on the topic held in 1952), since the group or groups that could control commercial entertainment might effectively control the values and beliefs of the entire country. It was to prove, of course, a Faustian bargain, but as battle lines were drawn and drawn again, few concerns appeared more important than the ability to shape mass culture.

At times it seemed as if the entire future of democracy was at stake. “On whose side do the forces of culture belong, “ V. J. Jerome asked in Culture in a Changing World (1947), “on the side of the people or the people’s oppressors? On the side whose victory will spell death, or on the side whose victory will mean life, for culture?” (9). Advertising “dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards, and it is really one of the very limited group of institutions which exercise social control,” (167), David Potter wrote in People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954). More specifically and comprehensively, C. Wright Mills warned in The Power Elite (1956) that “(1) the media tell the man in the mass who he is—they give him identity; (2) they tell him what he wants to be—they give him aspirations; (3) they tell him how to get that way—they give him technique; and (4) they tell him how to feel that he is that way even when he is not—they give him escape” (314). By the middle 1950s this sense of the media’s power had become part of the conventional wisdom, the basis for a book aimed at popular audiences like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) which opened with a warning about “large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive results, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences” (1).

Everybody who wrote about the nature of mass culture in the fifties, regardless of political emphasis, or degree of paranoia, did so in the shadow of a number of highly publicized actions by the United States government meant to regulate the content of movies, television, and the other mass media. Between 1947 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began an investigation of communist influences in Hollywood, and 1959 when the House Special Committee on Legislative Oversight began investigations of unethical business practices in the television and music industries, the American entertainment industry was under almost continual scrutiny by the federal government. The HUAC hearings, which dragged on throughout the fifties, had the most significant impact on the entertainment industry, resulting in the blacklisting of a great many writers, actors, and directors. The hearings of the Special Committee on Legislative Oversight on the other hand implicated mainstream American businesses in conspiracies to fix the results of television quiz shows and influence the music selected by rock ‘n’ roll disc jockeys. A smaller number of corrupt television producers and bribable radio personalities lost their jobs. Between all this, the Supreme Court, in its Paramount decision of 1948, ordered the major Hollywood studios to sell off their motion picture houses, effectively ending the studio system and weakening film industry. Then in 1952 in its Miracle decision, the court extended free speech protection to the movies, giving filmmakers much greater powers to fight censorship, strengthening the film industry. Between 1954 and 1956, the Senate Subcommittee to investigate Juvenile Delinquency held hearings about the dangers of comic books, pressuring the comic book industry into adopting a voluntary code that eliminated graphic sex and violence. In 1957 the Supreme Court issued its decision on obscenity in the Roth case, extending legal protections to materials with explicit sexual content as long as they did not appeal to the prurient interests of the average person applying contemporary community standards. In 1959 a New York federal court declared that D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not obscene. As a result of these government actions, comic books, which had a significant number of adult readers during and immediately after World War II, lost their adult content, while all manner of novels and movies gained it.

Americans were just as concerned, and just as torn, as their government. Cultural historians who write about the mass culture debate of the 1950s typically focus their attention on a small group of New York intellectuals centered on the Partisan Review and Dissent who worried about the destruction of high culture and its replacement by a vacuous kind of mass-produced culture (Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, Paul Goodman, among others), but a wide range of other critics, academics, moralists, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers were also involved. And they really did debate each other. Over at MGM, for example, the Freed unit answered the attacks from the New York intellectuals in a series of movie musicals about the superiority of mass culture to boring and depressing highbrow culture. In The Band Wagon (1950), one of the best, a pretentious New York theater director tries to turn honest song and dance entertainment into great drama with absolutely horrible results. Fortunately a charming Hollywood song and dance man (Fred Astaire) is able to rescue the show, and while he has to sell his collection of great nineteenth century French paintings to finance the project, it seems an appropriate sacrifice. As the movie ends, the entire cast gathers on stage to thank him, and what matters most, he wins the heart of the classical ballerina who has felt superior to him from the beginning. Hollywood entertainment is the winner in The Band Wagon which also contains the song “That’s Entertainment,” an upbeat celebration of the joys of the movies. But then to compound and complicate the issues in the debate, the Freed unit produced An American in Paris the following year, a movie musical that goes out of its way to praise real artists, and to demonstrate in impressive dance numbers that mass culture can copy the styles of great French painters to the advantage of both high and low. There was clearly debate even within the Freed unit.

Part of the larger debate concerned the movies, still the dominant form of mass culture in the 1950s although it lost a significant part of its audience over the course of the decade. The blacklist was a volatile issue for much of this time, denounced by victims (Dalton Trumbo, Time of the Toad 1949), avoided by would-be victims (Humphrey Bogart, “I’m No Communist,” Photoplay 1948), encouraged by the popular press (“Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts” Life Magazine April 12 1949), and finally studied by scholars (John Cogley, Report of Blacklisting 1956). And at the same time that national politicians were claiming that communists controlled Hollywood, one nationally prominent anthropologist (Hortense Powdermaker) spent a year in the movie capital concluding, “Hollywood represents totalitarianism. Its basis is economic rather than political but its philosophy is similar to that of the totalitarian state” (Hollywood The Dream Factory 327). She was appalled by the place, and asked for a return to democratic ideals in the movies. Years later she explained in her memoirs. “Except for the Hollywood situation, I have never been joyous on leaving, nor have I hated a society I studied.” (Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: W. W. Norton 1956, 255)

The debate centered on the content of movies. Psychologists looked for their hidden psychological meanings (Martha Wolfenstein and David Leites), myth theorists looked for archetypes (Parker Tyler), the left found their deplorable political content (V. J. Jerome, John Howard Lawson, Abraham Polonsky), theologians denounced their sexual depravity (Cardinal Spellman) and called for continued censorship (Pope Pius XII), a journalist followed the production of a single movie in book-length detail (Lillian Ross), and in his memoirs, the most successful screenwriter of all time, Ben Hecht, wrote that “The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.” He called them “an eruption of trash” that “has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people” (Child of the Century 468).

There were larger issues. Academic sociologists warned about the conformity and passivity built into mass culture (David Reisman, Ernest Van Den Haag, Daniel Bell), from the right (Edward Shils) and the left (Leo Lowenthal, C. Wright Mills), denounced television (Adorno), and worried about advertising (David Potter). Middlebrow journalists wrote about many of these same problems and added some new ones of their own (Vance Packard, Norman Cousins, William Whyte, Russell Lynes). A psychologist launched a remarkably effective attack against comic books (Fredric Wertham,) which was rebutted by comic strip creators (Al Capp), and education professors (Frederic Thrasher, “The Comics and Delinquency: Cause of Scapegoat, Journal of Educational Sociology 23, 195, 1949), and popularization by journalists (Judith Crist, “Horror in the Nursery Colliers May 29, 1948, 22-23). Journalists also worried about the promises and problems of the new medium of television (Jack Gould, Robert Lewis Shayon, Norman Podhoretz), media historians about the failed promises of mass culture (Gilbert Seldes), poets about the nature of the popular arts, (e.e.cummings, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell), and some local politicians about the depravities of rock ‘n’ roll (the mayor of Jersey City stands out). The relationship between juvenile delinquents and rock ‘n’ roll was widely debated in the popular press. A handful of intellectuals celebrated mass culture (Leslie Fiedler, Robert Warshow) or analyzed their aesthetic content with respect (Leo Spitzer, Marshall McLuhan) which made the New York intellectuals really mad. “Every discovery of significance in Li’l Abner or Mickey Spillane helps to destroy the distinction between that spurious mental and esthetic substance known as ‘kitsch’ and art, good or bad, art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in The Tradition of the New. “One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bas movies while proving that modern art is meaningless” (260).

Three anthologies of essays from the fifties guide many critics today in their attempts to understand the nature of this debate: America and the Intellectuals, a Symposium, a 1953 book version of a Partisan Review issue from 1952 symposium on “Our country and our culture,” Bernard Rosenberg’s and David Manning White’s 1957 book of readings, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, and Norman Jacobs, 1961 book of essays from a 1959 symposium sponsored by Daedalus and the Tamiment Institute, Culture for the millions? Mass Media in Modern Society. But since the anti-Stalinist left in New York produced these anthologies they are far from perfect guides. Excluded from them are the voices of the Stalinist left, especially the work of the two greatest Communist Party critics writing about mass culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, screenwriter John Howard Lawson and editor and party ideologue V. J. Jerome. Because Lawson and Jerome both ended up in prison in 1950, Lawson for a year as one of the original Hollywood Ten, Jerome until 1957 under the Smith Act, they would hardly have been wise people to legitimate during the 1950s, even if the Partisan Review critics had not loathed them for other reasons, given the really contentious rivalries between left factions in New York in the 1930s. And yet Jerome’s Culture in a Changing World: A Marxist Approach (1947), The Negro in Hollywood Films (1950), and Grasp the Weapons of Culture (1951) and Lawson’s Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953) were just as important as anything published in the debate over mass culture at this time. They were also far more explicitly political, clear announcements that the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans would now be fought at the movies. Sometimes brief tracts, and sometimes much longer explanations for the need to write stories from orthodox Marxist points of view, the essays by Jerome and Lawson also provided ammunition to their enemies on the right who were looking for Communist conspiracies to take control of the movie industry. “A decisive turn is needed in the Party’s cultural work,” Jerome wrote in 1951. “We must abandon the old concept that cultural work is activity only among cultural workers. Cultural work has to be viewed as organically related to the Party’s mass tasks. . . . Cultural activity is an essential phase of the Party’s general ideological work (Grasp the Weapon of Culture 21). “The artist who ignores the class struggle in the field of art abandons the field to the enemy,” Lawson wrote in 1953. “We must examine the film and all forms of art and communication as class weapons, serving a specific purpose in the cultural superstructure of capitalism” (Film in the Battle of Ideas 22).

But even if the New York intellectuals did their best to pretend Lawson and Jerome did not exist, other writers and critics were paying attention, along with the police The superiority of Soviet art and film to American entertainment, which had been a preoccupation of the New York intellectuals in the 1930s, and by the late 1940s and early 1950s was still a major theme in Lawson’s and Jerome’s work, was thoroughly rebuked in Silk Stockings (1955) the George S. Kaufman Cole Porter and Abe Burrows stage musical modeled on the 1939 movie, Ninotchka and later turned into a movie musical by the Freed unit at MGM (1957). American entertainment, Silk Stockings demonstrated, was far superior to Soviet art, and all aspects of American consumer society were equally superior to Soviet life.

II

Even when books and essays by Lawson and Jerome are added to the lists of frequently anthologized works from during the 1950s, many of the most best studies of mass culture in this period are still unaccounted for: the plays, novels, and movies written (and directed) by insiders, who knew first hand what was going on and were doing their best to make sense of it. They are often far more complex and interesting than any of the straightforward books and essays. Excluding stories about the blacklist that are not also about the entertainment industry, like the Carl Foreman/ Fred Zinnemann movie High Noon, (1952), Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, (1952), the movie Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), and the Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg movie, On the Waterfront (1954), there are still a great many significant works to take into account: The Hucksters (1946) Frederic Wakeman’s novel about the corruption of American culture by the advertising industry, which was made into a movie in 1947; Gore Vidal’s novel The City and Pillar (1948) which while not primarily about mass culture may contain the first important descriptions of gay subculture in the film industry; Clifford Odets’s stage melodrama The Big Knife (1949), a story about the corruption of a talented actor in Hollywood and his ultimate destruction, which was made into a movie in 1955; Odets’s play about the life of actors in the theater, The Country Girl (1950) made into a movie in 1954; Gore Vidal’s mass market novel A Star’s Progress (1950) written under the pseudonym of Catherine Everard, about the rise and fall of a Hollywood star; Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted (1950), about his drunken adventures with Scott Fitzgerald writing a movie during Winter Carnival at Dartmouth a decade earlier; The revival of the 1940 Rogers and Hart Musical about the unpleasant side of nightclub life, Pal Joey (1952) made into a film in 1957; the revival on Broadway in 1953 of Odets’s play Golden Boy about a man who must choose between being a boxer or a violinist; Fahrenheit 45l, (1953), Ray Bradbury’s novel about the destruction of literature and its replacement by mindless entertainment placed in the science fiction future; John Dos Passos’s novel Most Likely to Succeed (1954) a story about the corruption of Hollywood by murderous Communists modeled on John Howard Lawson and V. J.. Jerome; Silk Stockings (1955), already described; Norman Mailer’s novel The Deer Park (1955) about life in the movie industry as a series of betrayals and sexual adventures; the stage musical Gypsy about the early life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (1959); and Tennessee Williams’ play about an aging movie actress in difficult circumstances, and her relationship with a young man, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959).

There were just as many important movies about mass culture. Some indicted Hollywood for corrupting or destroying its writers or actors or directors, like Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), an earlier story about an aging movie actress in difficult circumstances and her relationship to a young male screenwriter; In a Lonely Place (1950), the Andrew Solt Nicholas Ray collaboration about the corruption of an aging Hollywood screenwriter; Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) about the destruction of a young Hollywood star at the hands of a series of selfishly cruel men, Clifford Odets’ drama The Big Knife (1955) already described; The Goddess (1958), Paddy Chayefsky’s drama about the destruction of a young Hollywood star with strong resemblances to Marilyn Monroe; Beloved Infidel (1959) the film version of Sheila Graham’s memoir about her life with F. Scott Fitzgerald as he was self-destructing in Hollywood. Other movies acknowledged corruption in the film industry but pointed out compensating factors that somehow made up for it, like Warner Brothers’ The Star (1952) the story of an aging star abandoned by Hollywood who is able to find a new life for herself as a wife and mother; and Vincent Minelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) a film that acknowledges terrible selfishness and cruelty on the part of a studio producer modeled on David O Selznick, but which insisted that he did it all to advance the careers of the people he injured. Some movies attacked other forms of the media: the drive for the sensational news story in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (195l), regardless of its consequences for human life, the conspiracy by right wing politicians to use television to push their agenda in the Budd Schulberg Elia Kazan collaboration, A Face in the Crowd (1957), and the power of a morally depraved right wing gossip columnist to control politicians and entertainers in the Ernest Lehman Clifford Odets collaboration Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Some were parables about the nature of the crisis in Hollywood even though they were made about other forms of entertainment: the selfishness and evil destroying the New York theater from the inside in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950); the cruelty and right-wing prejudices destroying the stage performer in Charlie Chaplin’s left leaning Limelight, (195l); the melodramatic problems of the circus in Cecil B. DeMille’s right leaning The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), in Elia Kazan’s anti-communist Man on a Tightrope (1953) and in the more centrist Lili (1953), a story about the way innocent fans respond to entertainment, confusing fantasy with reality; and the melodramatic problems of the music industry in the song and dance remake of A Star is Born (1954). There were biopics about musicians, beginning in the middle forties with Rhapsody in Blue, about George Gershwin (1945), Night and Day, about Cole Porter (1946), Jolson Sings Again (1948), Words and Music about Rogers and Hart (1948), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), and The Benny Goodman Story (1955) all meant to present entertainers as hard working good hearted Americans with normal melodramatic problems. The real life of the performers was seldom presented in any meaningful way, and sometimes not at all. And there were a number of musicals about show business, all of which celebrated the democratic good sense of the American entertainment industry as opposed to stuffy highbrow art, a movie form that Hollywood had used effectively since the Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930s and the Mickey Rooney Judy Garland musicals of the 1940s to justify the popular arts. The Freed unit at MGM carried the primary responsibility for defending Hollywood against these kinds of attacks in the fifties. Musical melodramas like the remakes of Show Boat (1951) and Pal Joey (1957), and musical comedies like Summer Stock (1950) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), were ideally suited to present defenses of the entertainment industry. Many of the most interesting self-reflexive musicals of the 1950s starred Fred Astaire as an immensely talented but often misunderstood American artist/entertainer, including The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), The Band Wagon (1953), Silk Stockings (1957) and Funny Face (1957). MGM’s Blackboard Jungle (1955) neatly updates the formula: When a naïve new high school teacher tries to get his rock n roll loving students to appreciate jazz, they turn into juvenile delinquents and break his records instead. The culture wars have a long adaptable history.

This is by no means a complete list of all the stories about mass culture from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s, only those that clearly and carefully address the issues in some substantial way. Many more were produced, novels about Hollywood like Harold Robbins’ The Dream Merchants (1949), and Stephen Longstreet’s The Beach House (1952), light movie comedies for the adult market like Merton of the Movies (1947) one of several film adaptations of Harry Leon Wilson’s 1922 novel of the same name, There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and movies for the child market like Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a story that celebrates the power of storytelling, and Artists and Models (1955), a Dean Martin Jerry Lewis story about comic books.

Each one of the major novels, plays, and movies that takes on the problem of mass culture in some significant way deserves careful attention, and even stories that seem relatively simple and straightforward become much more interesting when placed in the context of the debate of the 1950s. The movie The Star, for example, is a standard enough Hollywood melodrama which makes a number of criticisms of the film industry, that it uses and abandons people, that it tries to destroy independent producers, but because the movie is also a very clever rebuttal of Sunset Boulevard, taking all of the central features of that much harsher attack on the film industry and reversing them, it is a wonderful example of the richness and complexity of the larger debate. nice lead-in to sunset blvd

Sunset Boulevard was one of the earliest attacks on the Hollywood blacklist, a movie about how the film industry corrupts and destroys its writers. A symbol of old Hollywood, the fabulously wealthy silent movie star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who lives in her dreams of past glory, meets, corrupts, and murders a symbol of the new Hollywood, handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) who is down on his luck and badly in need of rescuing. Norma takes him in to her gothic mansion, replete with creepy butler who later turns out to be an ex-husband and ex-director, and gives him a job writing a screenplay for her. She offers him a life with her, but he has second thoughts, and spends some time trying to get back into the film industry on his own, without much success. He slowly accepts her money, gifts, and lifestyle, and allows himself to become her kept lover. It is never easy for him, and later, as he tries to walk out on her, she kills him. In 1950, just as the blacklist was taking full effect, Billy Wilder offered a clear little parable about how writers get entangled and destroyed by the selfishness of the film industry; it was an attack that Hollywood could not allow to go unanswered. Warner Brothers answered with The Star, the story a once fabulously wealthy but now down on her luck movie star Margaret Eliot (Bette Davis) who lives in her dreams of past glory, and meets and is rescued by a handsome young former film actor, Jim Johannson (Sterling Hayden). The Star is Sunset Boulevard all over again, with the roles reversed. Now working happily as an ordinary boat mechanic Johannson takes Margaret in to his humble apartment at the docks, and does what he can to make her understand that there is life outside of the movies. There is absolutely nothing creepy about the plain and simple place he lives. He offers her a life with him, but she has second thoughts and spends some time trying to get back into the film industry, without any success. By the end of the movie she does accept Jim’s life and his love, which also means she can live again with her very sweet teenage daughter Gretchen (Natalie Wood) and be a real wife and mother for the first time in her life. Everything that goes badly in Sunset Boulevard for Norma and Joe ends up happily in The Star for Margaret and Jim, though Margaret’s transformation to 1950s domesticity takes some time. This gives her the opportunity to denounce the heartlessness of the studio system that ruined her attempts to be an independent producer, but at each of her tantrums, Jim smiles patiently and suggests it is time to move on. The movie does not completely whitewash Hollywood. There was more than a little irony in the casting of Hayden as the rescuer of the injured movie industry veteran here, since Hayden had testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and named a number of movie industry veterans who were later blacklisted. But that was part of Harry Warner’s answer to Sunset Boulevard as well.

The fifties may have had a reputation for being a quiet time, but whether this was true or not, one of its noisiest chapters concerns the role of commercial entertainment in American public and private life. But even with so many people actively involved, arguing about all manner of issues, there were really only two competing agendas of any significance, that of the right which attacked the entertainment industry for hiding communist ideology in movies, songs, and stories, and that of the anti-communist left, which attacked the entertainment industry for making movies, songs and stories into pure mindlessness, conformity, and commercial control. There was a communist left, to be sure, but it was increasingly isolated, unemployed, blacklisted, persecuted by the government, and/or in jail. New York intellectuals worried about the commercial destruction of an artistic tradition. Hollywood filmmakers worried about their jobs.

III

The best way of understanding the debate over mass culture in the 1950s is not to skim a great many critical essays, but to read three of the most interesting novels, Bradbury’s anti-blacklist Fahrenheit 451, Dos Passos’s anti-communist Most Likely to Succeed, and Mailer’s anti-Hollywood The Deer Park. These works place the problems of mass culture within the context of many of the other core issues that haunted the post war era in the United States, and make them matters of great consequence for their central characters. The fight over commercial entertainment was part of larger debates over sex, prosperity, freedom, conformity, and national purpose, along with real fears of atomic warfare and communist attack. However emotionally involved the essay writers can become in detailing the problems of television or the movies, nothing communicates the high stakes nature of the debate better than these novels, where mass culture really does become a matter of life and death, and the future of American society is constantly at risk—because of totalitarian control of the entertainment industry in Fahrenheit 451, Communist infiltration of the movie industry in Most Likely to Succeed, and the moral depravity of the Hollywood elite in The Deer Park. The novels take left, right, and left/center positions on the problems of mass culture and thus replicate the larger debate.

Fahrenheit 451 is the only one of these novels that is widely read today, in part because it has not become dated by reference to specific events. Bradbury relied on the science fiction models of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 to generalize about a future world where reading books is a crime and everyone is entertained by emotionally engaging but intellectually meaningless forms of mass culture. Fahrenheit 451 does not require knowledge of the Hollywood blacklist or particular interest in the issues of the 1950s, and as other threats to reading arouse later in the century from the popularity of mass cultural forms, Bradbury seemed brilliantly prescient rather than old-fashioned. He also had the inspired idea of incorporating a rousing defense of literature into the novel (also present in Huxley and Orwell in somewhat more muted forms) that generations of beleaguered middle school and high school English teachers have loved requiring their TV-addicted students to read. One could hardly imagine a more perfect novel for literature teachers, since the future of civilization as we know it depends on the availability of great books and a population of educated readers. And because he wrote it simply, without any of the explicit sexual content in Huxley and Orwell that school boards might worry about, it has become a classic of the public school curriculum.

Every writer of every book has been blacklisted in Fahrenheit 451 although the term itself is not important. What is important is its impact on society. All books must be burned by the firemen who are the novel’s main characters because their content has the ability to unsettle people and make them think, conditions the state wants to prevent at all costs. These are not necessarily political books, or books by former members of the Communist Party, but books as mainstream as the Bible or the poetry of Matthew Arnold, both of which Bradbury cites for special attention. There are no Communists in the novel or members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or conflict between them, although there is a struggle for the freedom to read and think led by a rag tag group of unemployed professors against the oppressive powers of the state represented by a smug fire chief. Haunted by despair they cannot understand, the ordinary citizens of this future world have lost all interest in politics, personal relationships, and an interior life, and as their civilization drifts toward atomic war, they have only the compensations of three-dimensional life size television rooms called parlor families which keep real families from relating to each other in meaningful ways. It doesn’t seem quite enough for Bradbury’s protagonist, the fireman Guy Montag, who is traumatized when his wife Mildred tries to commit suicide, and when an unconventional neighbor girl named Clarisse tries to get him to understand his own unhappiness. As Montag struggles with himself over what to do, and what is wrong with his world, the debate over art and mass culture of the 1950s becomes the defining crisis of his life.

Captain Beatty, the fire chief, is literate and articulate, a reader of the great books who understands all too well the dangers they pose to the state, and in a series of speeches he makes to Montag, he sounds at times like a Partisan Review intellectual who has gone over to the other side and become a neo-conservative. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere,” he tells Montag. “They could afford to be different” (54). But as population increased so did the mass market, which demanded brevity, simplicity, and blandness. Under these conditions Beatty explains that books become dangerous and unsettling, and need to be replaced by mindless entertainment. “It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitations, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God” (58). The spokesman for the other side, the retired English professor named Faber “thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage” (75), is equally articulate. “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books,” he tells Montag. “The same thing could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not…. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” (82-83). Books are hated and feared, he tells Montag, because “they show the pores in the face of life.” (83).

The conversation between Beatty and Montag follows a very similar conversation between the Mustapha Mond, the world controller, and the savage in Brave New World. (One of the ironies here is that Bradbury’s novel is a simplified and shortened version of Brave New World, but it is not for that reason a worse book.) Faber’s comments echo similar sentiments found in Orwell’s 1984. Montag must decide what to do after hearing these opposing points of view and not surprisingly he repeats the journeys of those two earlier book-loving rebels, Winston Smith in 1984, and the savage in Brave New World. He becomes first a murderer when he must escape from the clutches of Captain Beatty, then a fugitive, and finally one of a small number of book-loving marginalized intellectuals, sustained by their own love of literature, but since everyone else appears to die in the atomic war that comes at the end of the novel, this doesn’t turn out to be such a bad choice after all. The future depends on their ability to remember the great books of the past in the construction of a new, healthier, and non-fascist civilization.

III

Most Likely to Succeed, Dos Passos’s novel about mass culture at the time of the blacklist, has never been widely read or appreciated, in part because it is such an passionately angry account of New York intellectuals and Hollywood filmmakers in the decades before World War II, in part because only a small audience of people would have understand all the references, Dos Passos’s old friends on the left who were the subject of his attack. These old friends were completely finished with him by the middle 1950s, though they would also have felt betrayed by his portraits of John Howard Lawson and V. J. Jerome as corrupt, self-serving bastards and the rest of them as drunks or fools. Lawson had been one of his closest friends in the late 1920s and early 1930s). Based on Success Story, Lawson’s play about selling out in the thirties, and his own great novel about American life from the end of World War I to the depression, The Big Money (1938), Most Likely To Succeed is about a very specific moment of American cultural history. The novel attacks the leaders of the American Communist Party for destroying honest drama in New York, and decent entertainment in Hollywood, and a larger group of American artists and intellectuals for being their willing and unwilling dupes. No story better captures the hostility and outright loathing that led to the blacklist, or identifies the key players in the debate over mass culture, although only readers who knew Success Story and The Big Money were reasonably well-positioned to appreciate it. And they wouldn’t give Dos Passos more than insults in return.

Jed Morris, the protagonist of Most Likely to Succeed, is Dos Passos’s portrait of Lawson, with whom he worked in the New Playwrights theater company in New York in the late 1920s. Morris, like Lawson, is at first a struggling playwright in New York in the 1920s, committed to honest and meaningful drama, and then a successful screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1930s, committed to advancing his own career regardless of the consequences. Large sections of the novel detail these worlds of art and mass culture and to the differences between them, since everyone from Morris’s theater company ends up in Hollywood in one capacity or another, where their youthful idealism is replaced by a new and dangerous toughness. Entangled in both places by the Communist Party, which sabotages his artistic work in New York and his personal life in Hollywood, Morris becomes little more than a pathetic, deluded, and very well paid studio hack. Whatever the limitations of the experimental theater, which suffers from too much art and too little money, and commercial entertainment, which suffers from too little art and too much money, both turn out to be vulnerable to Communist manipulation. There is no happy middle ground for art or mass culture.

Morris combines the characteristics of the three main characters of The Big Money: Like Charley Anderson, who comes back to American from Europe at the start of Dos Passos’s earlier and much more celebrated novel to make his fortune, he goes for the big money at the expense of his integrity and is willing to betray his closest friends; like Margo Dowling, who rises from poverty in New York to stardom in Hollywood only to fall again at the end, he figures out how the movie industry works, and makes his way through it as best he can, succeeding on its own terms; and like Mary French, who works selflessly for the good of the common man regardless of the consequences, he is committed to leftist political causes but finds that the movement is controlled by selfish people incapable of love. Morris is also a compulsive womanizer, never passing up the opportunity to have sex with women, whether he is married or not, or whether the women mean anything to him or not. He thus resembles most of the men in Mary French’s life who work for leftist causes but use women extremely selfishly. Attracted to women out of his class and apparently out of his reach, like the aristocratic Marlowe, who finally becomes his salvation and his muse, Morris often mistreats women from his own class, like his long time and long suffering girl friend and fellow artist Felicia, the mother of his children. Torn between his desire for the big money, the lures of he movie industry, and his commitment to the common man, he lives the contradictions with great difficulty.

But if Morris is a mess, a poster child for the problems of art and mass culture, the members of the Communist party who dupe him for their own purposes are many times more disagreeable. They sound very much like V. J. Jerome, who was in jail at the time Dos Passos published the novel, and confirm the very worst fears of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a communist organizer explains to a meeting of people who work in the movie industry: “Most of you are not workers with your hands, but workers with your heads and with your painfully acquired skills. In behalf of the Central Committee I want to say that you belong in the Communist Party just as much as the most exploited migratory form worker. To each his own special task. Some will take over the farms and the factories, but the workers in motion pictures, in radio, in the press will take over the country’s communications, which means the country’s brains” (240). Later this organizer is even more emphatic: “Communications are the brains and nervous system of the country. . . That is the importance of our work out here. Mass communication. Motion pictures are the mind of the masses. Through the war effort we move into radio. We eliminate fascists from the newspaper workers’ unions, we install progressives in the writers’ organizations and the projected authors’ authority. By the time this war is over we shall have captured the brains of the nation. For the first time we can see emerging the outlines of a Soviet America” (295).

V. J. Jerome himself appears in the novel as the creepy Communist Party ideologue V. F. Calvert, “a thin man with a small black beard. Everything was yellow about him, his skin, his teeth, his tobaccostained fingers, his eyeballs, except the black irritated peering pupils of his eyes”(105). Calvert makes sure Morris and everyone else stays true to the party line, very much as Jerome did with Lawson and others in New York and Hollywood. (Budd Schulberg was another. In fact Lawson apologized for errors pointed out to him by Jerome in his Film in the Battle of Ideas, published in 1953, one year before Dos Passos’s novel appeared.) And he keeps Morris in line at the end of the novel, after Calvert and Morris have both witnessed a communist party official (and an old friend from New York theater days) order the murder of an innocent bystander who may have overhead communist plottings. This doesn’t bother Morris very much, but when the party orders him to abandon Marlowe, with whom he has been very happily living, because she may be a spy for the FBI, Morris doesn’t like the idea. But he capitulates, afraid Calvert is going to kill him, and as the novel ends, he appropriately has a heart attack. From Dos Passos’s point of view, it was a fitting end for Lawson.

It was also a fitting revision of Lawson’s play about a man who abandons the principles of radical egalitarian politics for the big money. The major difference is that in Lawson’s play the never-explicitly-named Communist party is entirely good, and when the main character is destroyed because he has not been true to its ideals, the fault is entirely is own. Dos Passos kept the outlines and major characters of Lawson’s story, but not its point of view, correcting his former friend’s earlier critique of mass culture. Sol Ginsberg, the protagonist of Success Story is a young radical from the New York tenements who abandons his commitments to the common man to rise in a large advertising firm writing copy for worthless overpriced Glamour Cream (made from alligator glands.) In the course of mastering the deceits of mass culture, he also abandons his loyal girl friend Sarah who grew up in the tenements with him, and he takes up with Agnes, a woman out of his class and apparently out of his reach whom he finally courts and marries, for the sheer challenge. She had been his boss’s mistress and Lawson makes her into a kind of corrupt muse of advertising, demanding more and more from Ginsberg while giving him less and less. Their relationship is a tangle of lies based on a corruption of desire. Incapable of love himself, Ginsberg appears to care only about power and money and is ideally suited to the advertising business, although, toward the end of the play, as he schemes to take complete control of the firm, he is haunted by the principles he has long abandoned. In a final confrontation with Sarah, he tells her that knows he has lost his way, and comes close to admitting his love for her. But when he shows he is unwilling or unable to break with Agnes, Sarah snaps under the strain and shoots him. Thus justice is administered. As he dies, he tries to make it look like a suicide, as does Agnes who comes upon the murder scene, but Sarah insists on the truth. (Odets at the end of The Big Knife was to use this final scene in his own much more sympathetic reworking of the play.) Lawson, Dos Passos says in Most Likely to Succeed, got it all almost exactly right: the corrupting role of mass culture, the lure of big money, the loss of youthful values, the contradictions. What he didn’t properly understand was the murderous role of the Communist Party, and the nurturing role of aristocratic women.

A year earlier, in his Film in the Battle of Ideas, Lawson had ridiculed Dos Passos for praising Witness, Whittaker Chambers’ story about his experiences as an informer, in the Saturday Review. “Dos Passos is no less fervent than Nixon in urging thought-control. Not content with the persecution of authors, Dos Passos wants to extend the witch-hunt to readers who dislike Chambers’ work. He holds that everyone who doubts Chambers’ veracity is under ‘Communist influence!’ The existence of such doubts raises questions in his mind which, he tells us are ‘so grave and urgent that a man breaks out in a cold sweat to think of them’” (73). Dos Passos returned the favor in Most Likely to Succeed.

IV

The Deer Park, Norman Mailer’s brilliant but flawed novel about Hollywood, has never received the kind of critical attention it deserves. Wide-ranging and sprawling unlike Fahrenheit 451 and Most Likely to Succeed, The Deer Park may be more valuable as a guide to the debate about mass culture than as a stand-alone story. But even its weaknesses are connected to the problems of mass culture. The novel contains excessively long and repetitive paeans to the wonders of sex that seem lifted from the pages of Wilhelm Reich, a 1950’s favorite, though descriptions of actual sexual behavior are necessarily vague given the difficulties Mailer experienced in finding a publisher. Writing about sex was one of the areas where the battle over culture had shifted, as politics became a much riskier subject. “Congressional hearings in 1955 and again in 1959 built an ideological connection between left-wing politics and the exposure of minors to ‘obscene materials,’” Marjorie Heins wrote in Not in Front of the Children (51). The novel also suffers from Mailer’s imperfect attempts to combine great literature with popular fiction and the story lurches between moments of pop sensationalism and all-too-obvious attempts to imitate James Joyce (a poem in the novel imitates Joyce, a late chapter reads like Molly's section of Ulysses.) The literature/mass culture divide was one of the central issues of the period. Still the novel does many things well: It connects the blacklist to other problems affecting the movie industry, sets up a detailed and sustained contrast between the serious writer and the commercial filmmaker, examines the ways in which the studio system dehumanizes actors, directors, and writers, and presents a detailed sociology of Hollywood culture in the late 40s and early 50s by using the lives of many of the most important people of the time as the models for its major characters. The novel makes many of the same points as the best scholarly studies of the period, Leo Rosten’s Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (1941) and Powdermaker’s Hollywood the Dream Factory (1950).

The Deer Park also borrows from a number of earlier stories about Hollywood, correcting or completing the best works from earlier decades and earlier debates over mass culture including Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Dos Passos’s The Big Money (1936), F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (l941), and Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941). Mailer’s greatest borrowings however are from Clifford Odets’s 1949 play, The Big Knife which he uses as the fundamental structure of his novel. In its fictionalization of the lives of real Hollywood celebrities, it imitates the model established by the movie The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952, which does the same. And finally, the novel captures the split within the left over the blacklist, presenting in a reasonably sympathetic manner a character who names names before a Congressional committee looking for communists in Hollywood. At a time when such a figure would have been celebrated by the right or condemned by the Hollywood left, Mailer went out of his way to show moral intricacy. Aligned with the anti-Stalinist left in New York when he wrote the novel, Mailer was unwilling to make people who had turned on the Communist Party into outright villains. They were sell-outs of course, but then so was everyone else in The Deer Park, regardless of their politics. How and why that was so becomes Mailer’s great interest in the novel.

The Deer Park takes place in Desert D’Or California, a resort on the edge of the desert almost exclusively populated by members of the Hollywood film community. Two men meet and become friends there, Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the narrator, who has just returned to the United States after serving a fighter pilot in the Asian war, and Charles Francis Eitel, a famous Hollywood director. Each has come to Mailer’s fictional version of Palm Springs to recover from a major trauma, Sergius because he is haunted by his bombing missions that set women and children on fire, Eitel because he has been blacklisted, having refused to name names before the hearings of a Congressional Investigating Committee looking for Communist influence in Hollywood (Eitel as in I tell). One did what the government asked of him and the other did not. Both suffer. In the course of the novel both find themselves, though in absolutely opposing ways: Sergius rejects Hollywood though he is offered a lucrative career, and moves first to Mexico, then New York, to try to become a “brave” writer (23). Eitel accepts Hollywood, though he must first sacrifice his principles and name names before the Committee, and then sacrifice the story he really wants to tell and allow it to be replaced by something that is commercially viable and formulaic.

The novel is about the adventures they have together as friends in Desert D’Or that causes one to choose literature and the other mass culture. Sergius quickly enters Eitel’s world and meets his various friends, rivals, and enemies, though everyone it turns out is all of them at the same time. Eitel and Sergius face parallel sexual and professional seductions, invitations from attractive women to dangerous and exciting sexual relationships, and invitations from repulsive Hollywood men to dangerous and profitable creative relationships. Eitel accepts both, prostituting himself in the end, while Sergius does not. A quotation at the beginning of the novel suggests that Hollywood is a gigantic whorehouse, and by the end of the novel almost everyone is a whore or failed whore, pimp or john, in either professional or sexual ways, or both. The professional seductions come from Eitel’s old colleagues, the powerful Hollywood producer Collie Munshin, and his even more powerful father-in-law, studio head Herman Teppis. Collie wants Eitel back writing and directing pictures, although he must overcome the objections of his right-wing father-in-law, while Teppis wants Sergius as the subject of a war hero story, perhaps also as an actor and they make extremely attractive offers to both of them. The sexual seductions come from Eitel’s third wife, the sexy actress Lulu Meyers, who starts an affair with Sergius, and from Collie’s ex-mistress Elena Esposito, who starts an affair with Eitel but only after Munshin has pushed them together. Their parallel affairs are stormy, highly sexual, and finally frustrating, but while Sergius pulls away from both Lulu and Hollywood and escapes to a writer’s garret in New York, Eitel marries Elena, resumes an affair with Lulu, and re-enters Hollywood.

There are dual losses here, both professional and sexual. The professional loss is that Eitel has a great story to tell, and in spite of Collie Munshin’s promises, Hollywood will not let him tell it. Eitel’s screenplay, on which he works throughout the novel, is a parable of his own predicament in Hollywood, the story of a man who becomes a very popular television star by sentimentalizing and cheapening the real troubles of other people, and who then loses his audience when he tries to give real advice. “My hero tries to give genuine advice to his supplicants, and thereby destroys the interest of his program” (126). This man, whom Eitel calls “a modern saint” (126), wanders through the dark parts of a civilization until he finally “destroys himself with some pathetic violence” (127). This is of course the fate waiting for Eitel at the end of the novel, though he is only psychologically destroyed. (The novel ends in an act of pathetic violence for other characters.) And while Collie appears to love the story, he convinces Eitel to make so many changes in it, substituting so many Hollywood clichés, that the end result is just silly. But it does make money for the studio, and allow for Eitel to return to his old job, and Eitel seems not to notice he has been destroyed. As other critics of The Deer Park have noted, Eitel’s story is an updated version of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, a story Mailer himself was hired to turn into a film by Samuel Goldwyn in the late 1940s. Mailer spent a year in Hollywood, fresh from his success from The Naked and the Dead, but Goldwyn didn’t think Mailer’s script was commercially viable, and killed the project. Years later, Dory Schary finally turned West’s story into the melodramatic Lonelyhearts (1959), a production denounced by Dwight Macdonald for being heartbreakingly stupid.

The other loss here, for Mailer, is that sex promises so much, but can be compromised so quickly, and it is closely related to the professional loss. When his affair with Elena is new and still very erotically charged, Eitel believes that sex with her is actually a way for him to achieve everything he wants as a writer and a man. “He saw it now that he had one true love—those films which had flowered in his mind and never been made. In betraying that love, he had betrayed himself. Which led into another theory. The artist was always divided between his desire for power in the world and his desire for power over his work. With this girl it was impossible to thrive in the world except by his art. . .”(124).But by the end of the novel this kind of special sexual relationship turns out to be a delusion and Eitel has neither love, art, or integrity. The film industry prevents it by chipping away at everyone’s self-esteem. Elena’s insecurities come from the way men and women trade sexual partners in the film industry, and Eitel’s from the way Hollywood hires and fires and blacklists talent. People are always getting screwed over in The Deer Park, both literally and figuratively, and the film industry employs middlemen to help facilitate the processes, like the publicist Jennings James, known in the novel as Jay-Jay, who is always ready to help turn someone into a prostitute.

There have been many studies of the blacklist. What is impressive about The Deer Park is the extent to which Mailer can make it seem like a normal part of life in Desert D’Or, just another of the ways that Hollywood does business. There have also been a great many stories about writers or artists who sell out, but Mailer makes a truly compelling case for the how and the why. Like other lengthy novels that gain effectiveness from their ability to overwhelm the reader, The Deer Park makes the obsessions of the characters with sex, money, and success seem convincingly real. Eitel is bright and immensely talented, capable of great insight and integrity, but this energy and drive is also responsible for his downfall. It gives a tragic dimension to his story.

Mass culture is indeed an insidious force, and Mailer is obviously fascinated by the ways it cheapens people. The novel was infamous at the time of its publication in for a scene of oral sex between Herman Teppis and a part-time amateur prostitute named Bobby, so censored as to be entirely incomprehensible unless you knew what you were looking for, (ok, it’s at the very end of chapter 20), but other interactions and entanglements are far more destructive. The scene is also so unromantically presented as to constitute anti-pornography. Teppis sits at his desk, and when Bobby sits on his lap and assures him he can trust her, he opens his legs and drops her onto his office floor. After she has left the room, Teppis remarks “There’s a monster in the human heart” and whispers to himself, “like a bitter old man, close to tears, ‘They deserve it, they deserve every last thing that they get’” (285). Teppis is one of the most comically repulsive villains of the piece, a studio head who ties to force Lulu Meyers into marrying her co-star, the gay Teddy Pope, because it would be good for the studio, even though both oppose it. But when Lulu outsmarts Teppis by marrying someone else she does not love, everyone ends up feeling miserable, especially Sergius, who loses Lulu in the process.

No one can stay happy in Desert D’Or for very long. Collie Munshin promises Eitel his career back in Hollywood, but must also convince him to write according to Hollywood formulas, and because Eitel has been blacklisted, he still needs to be ritually cleansed. Dorothea O’Faye, a retired right-wing gossip columnist who has welcomed Sergius into her little alcoholic salon in Desert D’Or, has connections to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and facilitates Eitel’s second appearance before the Committee. Having betrayed his principles, Eitel is then free to return to work. But this change of heart so enrages her adult son, Marion Faye, a part time pimp who courts danger, that he turns on Eitel and destroys Eitel’s relationship with Elena. And after that succeeds, he almost convinces Elena to commit suicide, a plan that backfires at the end of the novel when Marion nearly kills Elena in an automobile accident, and injures himself much more seriously. This is the act of pathetic violence predicted by Eitel’s original script. In his last good dead, Sergius gets Eitel reunited with Elena, and flees Desert D’Or for places that are much kinder to writers, beginning with a Hemingway-like sojourn in Mexico, and ending with a Mailer-like return to the world of the New York intellectuals.

V

There are moments in all of this that echo earlier Hollywood novels, as Mailer makes an attempt to include the insights of other novelists and playwrights: The Big Money (the story of a repulsive Hollywood studio head who arranges a marriage between two younger stars), What Makes Sammy Run? (the story of a repulsive Hollywood producer who steals story ideas from talented writers and takes credit for them himself), and The Last Tycoon (the story of a likeable Hollywood producer who falls for much younger woman). But Mailer’s most significant debts are to Odets’s play The Big Knife, which he used as the fundamental structure for his novel, correcting what Odets either could not or did not say at the time, and elaborating at length what a play does not have time to make clear. Odets’s play, written while he waiting to be called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as the prison sentences for the Hollywood Ten were working their way through the courts, is most interesting for what Odets was afraid to say in 1949: that people in Hollywood may indeed have been Communists, and may be vulnerable because of it. Mailer was to fix all of this in 1955. What he did not change was Odets’s cast of characters and their basic relationships to each other, but because he was not himself worried about the blacklist, Mailer had a different perspective. Everyone is either good or bad in The Big Knife, but in The Deer Park all of the main characters are good and bad.

The Big Knife concerns the downfall of a very successful Hollywood star named Charlie Castle with a past in the progressive New York theater. Torn between art and mass culture, Castle collects real art, talks about real literature, loves the work he did in the real theater, and is typecast in one-dimensional movie roles that he hates but makes him a fortune. He is also a compulsive womanizer, and has hurt his long-suffering wife Marion quite badly because of it. As the play opens gossip columnist Patty Benedict tries to get Castle to admit marital difficulties and Communist connections, Odets’s single clear reference to the blacklist. Marion pleads with him to get out of the movies and return to New York, where they can he whole again, while Nate, his sweet and loving agent tries to save his career in Hollywood by urging him to sign. But Castle has a guilty secret that makes this impossible. Years earlier he killed a child in a car accident, an incident covered up studio head Marcus Huff and his assistant Smiley Coy, who arrange for Castle’s publicist Buddy Bliss to take the blame and go to prison. Huff now blackmails Castle into signing a new contract with the studio, and when Castle cannot tell his wife the real reason why he has refused to give up his film career, she tells him she will divorce him and move to New York with Hank Teagle, a family friend who is writing a novel about life in Hollywood. Additional melodramatic complications develop when Dixie Evans, the young woman who was with Castle at the time of the car accident becomes drunk and threatening at a neighbor’s party. Tired of being put off by the studio in her efforts to get a real acting job, Dixie appears ready to reveal the truth. Coy see only two alternativeness—that Castle must divorce his wife and marry Dixie, since wives cannot testify against husbands, or that Castle will have to help him murder Dixie. Castle is appalled, and in a moment of moral lucidity exposes all the sordid details to his wife in the presence of Huff and Coy, who deny any knowledge of a murder plot. A short time later, Castle kills himself, though it turns out to have been unnecessary, since Dixie Evans has dies conveniently and accidentally in a car crash. The play ends with the same kind of debate about whether the truth will come out that ends Lawson’s Success Story.

Mailer turned all of this into a much better story, elaborating upon each of Odets’s characters, and his basic plot line. Charlie Castle, the talented artist torn between money and integrity, becomes Charlie Eitel, although his past indiscretion is not the car crash, but membership in the Communist Party. Castle’s lack of nerve, running from the hit and run accident, which has nothing to do with the real problems of the film industry, is replaced by Eitel’s much more significant lack of nerve involved in testifying before HUAC, which does. Castle’s sexual behavior, which is presented without much explanation by Odets, is replaced by Eitel’s sexual behavior, which is described at great length by Mailer as something essential about the nature of creativity. The novel explains what the play does not. But Mailer’s most significant change reverses Odets’s major point. Castle’s death at the end comes from his awareness about selling out and betraying his wife, while Eitel’s life at the end comes from his indifference about selling out and his ongoing pleasure about betraying his wife. Eitel succeeds at exactly that which has destroyed Castle, although Sergius (and perhaps also Mailer) doesn’t think much of the success.

The same pattern works with other characters. Mailer replaced minor character Hank Teagle, the writer with integrity who romances Castle’s wife and goes off to New York to write the great novel about Hollywood, with central character, Sergius, the writer who romances Eitel’s third ex-wife and goes off to New York to do the same. Castle’s wife Marion, who loves her husband but will not put up with his corruption, and is driven to an adultery and escape with Teagle becomes Eitel’s wife Elena who first is driven to adultery and escape with Marion Faye, and then returns to marry Eitel and put up with his corruption. Both women have young children they adore who have very little to do with their fathers. Marcus Hoff, Castle’s cruel, powerful, and dangerous studio boss, who succeeds in forcing Castle to sign contract, but fails to force him to marry Dixie, becomes in Mailer’s revision old, doddering, and pathetic studio boss Herman Teppis who is able to keep Eitel from working for most of novel, and who fails to force Lulu to marry Teddy Pope. Smiley Coy, Odets’s other simple-minded villain who plots Dixie Evans’s murder to protect studio profits becomes Marion Faye, the most complicated figure in Mailer’s novel, who stands part of the time for the truth, but who also plots Elena’s suicide out of his deep disappointment with people. He becomes a kind of agent of divine justice, and Mailer even hints as his priestly functions. Castle’s agent, Nate, a sweet moral man who tries to save his career by advising him to resign with Huff, becomes Collie Munshin, neither sweet nor moral, although he wants the best for Eitel and Elena, who tries to save Eitel’s career by advising him to do what is necessary to rejoin Teppis. Castle’s innocent publicity man Buddy Bliss becomes Teppis’s much more corrupt publicity man Jay-Jay. Entirely evil right-wing gossip columnist Patty Benedict who threatens Castle becomes the much more sympathetic former right-wing former gossip columnist Dorothea O’Faye who helps Eitel (in her own way) and befriends Sergius. Having been frustrated by Samuel Goldwyn in his attempts to rewrite West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Mailer rewrote Odets’s The Big Knife. And he did it brilliantly.

He borrowed one other brilliant idea, following the pattern of the movie, The Bad and the Beautiful, which based its stories on the lives of living Hollywood actors, directors, and producers. Mailer similarly merged Odets’s play with Hollywood reality. Almost all the details of Eitel’s life, for example, repeat those of Hollywood film director Elia Kazan’s, from his physical appearance “his head was half bald, crowned with a circle of strong-curly hair” (28) to his experiences at an elite Eastern college and the New York theater, his marriage to a political wife, his success in Hollywood, his initial refusal to name names for HUAC and his subsequent cooperation. Kazan was the poster boy for sell-outs when Mailer wrote the novel, and Lawson had denounced him for outdoing all other informers “in treachery to his friends and in personal abasement” (Film in the Battle of Ideas 40). In a similar fashion Sergius recalls movie star Audie Murphy, although he is a pale imitation of the real soldier who returned from World War II as a hero to become the subject of a motion picture, and then an actor. Teppis wants Sergius to do the same but Sergius finally has other ideas. Wily deal-maker and producer Collie Munshin, who is married to Lottie Teppis, daughter of studio head Herman Teppis recalls wily deal-maker and producer David O Selznick, who was married to Irene Mayer, daughter of studio head Louis B Mayer. Munshin has been having an affair with sexy would-be actress Elena Esposito, just as Selznick was having an affair with sexy actress Jennifer Jones and had just left his wife for her. Sexy actress Lulu Meyers is Mailer’s first fictional take on Marilyn Monroe, Dorothea O’Faye a mix of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, and Teddy Pope Mailer’s version of Montgomery Clift, “a tall man with an open expression and dark-brown hair which fell in a cowlick over his forehead” (78). The novel is more than revision of The Big Knife then; it is also a powerful critique of real people about which the public read in gossip columns.

VI

But then, in a very tragic way, so was The Big Knife. Odets had written the play at least in part about his friend, the stage and film actor John Garfield who also played the part of Castle on Broadway in 1949. Garfield was, like Castle, a compulsive womanizer married to a politically active woman on the left, and a charismatic actor stuck in very limiting movie roles though he had starred in socially meaningful plays in New York. Odets, Garfield, and Kazan had been friends together in the Group Theater in the 1930s, along with John Howard Lawson. An angry man involved in fights with his movie studio over the nature of his contract, Garfield was, like Castle, someone badly torn between art and money. He was also a huge money-maker for his studio. But Castle’s error of judgment was very different from Garfield’s, or Odets, or Kazan’s or Lawson’s, since all of these men had been involved in left activities in New York that made them very vulnerable. And in The Big Knife, as we have already seen, Castle kills himself when this error of judgment comes back to haunt him.

Lawson refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 but did not go to prison until 1950. Garfield testified under oath in 1951 that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. The Committee did not believe him and asked the FBI to see if there were grounds for perjury; from that moment on he could not get work in Hollywood. Kazan testified before the Committee in early 1952, admitting his own associations with the Communist Party but refusing to name anyone else. Pressured to cooperate more fully if he wanted to avoid the blacklist, Kazan named names in a closed executive hearing in April. When that testimony was made public, Kazan took out an ad in the New York Times, urging others to do the same. At that time, and perhaps because of Kazan’s change of heart, Garfield became involved in informal negotiations with HUAC to see if he could change his earlier testimony and avoid perjury charges. On May 8 he met with journalist Victor Riesel about an article he would write for Look magazine about how Garfield had been used by the Communists. It was to be titled “I was a sucker for a left hook.” (Garfield had appeared in many boxing films.) The following day Garfield’s friend, the African American actor Canada Lee, who had worked with him on the movie Body and Soul, and who had also been blacklisted, died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 42. Then on May 18 Garfield finished a long confession and began walking the streets of New York-- in despair apparently, according to friends interviewed after the fact. Odets appeared before the Committee on May 19 and 20, having already taken Kazan’s testimony to heart, and while he did not name Garfield, he did name another Group Theater friend, recently blacklisted and recently dead (prematurely) of an apparent heart attack at age 48, J. Edward Bromberg. Because Odets’s testimony was broadcast live on the radio, Garfield would have heard the voice of his old friend coming from open apartment house windows as he walked about the city that day. It must have been stressful, since sometime during the early morning hours of May 21, he died in the New York apartment of Iris Whitney, a woman friend. Garfield was only 39, the victim of an apparent heart attack. Two days later The New York Times reported that over 10,000 people crowded his funeral, and printed a letter from Odets who proclaimed his undying love for his friend, Julie. (Born Jacob Garfinkle, he was known as Jules or Julie Garfinkle growing up in New York, and changed the name when he became an actor. He was always Julie to his friends.)

Apparently Garfield had a heart condition, as did his friends and fellow blacklisted performers Bromberg and Lee, but the coincidences are curious. A novel written by Jay Richard Kennedy in 1953 about a character based on Garfield, Prince Bart: A Novel of Our Times makes the case that he committed suicide by deliberating eating food high in cholesterol for a number of days. Along with butter, the main character eats a great many carrots, which evidently were considered bad for hearts in 1953. Odets’s response to Garfield’s death is also curious, especially since Garfield’s death looks like nothing so much as the suicide from The Big Knife or from a number of other Odets’s plays in which Garfield also appeared. In Awake and Sing, the earliest, the grandfather of the family jumps off the roof of their apartment house, but makes it look like an accident so the impoverished family can get the insurance money for their son. In Golden Boy, a boxer, unable to face what he has done in the ring and already deeply compromised, kills himself and a friend in a car crash.

Garfield, Kazan, Lawson and Odets were equally talented individuals who had grown up in the left theater in New York. Garfield ended up prematurely dead because he refused to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Odets ended up deeply humiliated but still employed although he wrote very little of any value after his testimony and died too young of cancer in 1963. Lawson’s career was over after he was released from prison, though he did write for a while in Mexico, and then became a visiting lecturer at a number of American universities. He died in 1977. Kazan, who cooperated with the committee after some initial misgivings, was the only one to go on to a gloriously successful Hollywood career. Among the movies he would later direct were On the Waterfront (1954), a powerful justification for informing on evil colleagues written by fellow cooperative witness, Budd Schulberg, and A Face in the Crowd (1957), a warning about the right-wing take-over of television, also written by Schulberg. Many years later he directed the film version of Fitzgerald’s Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon (1976). Kazan’s memoirs, published in 1988, are long, ungainly, boastful (about having an sexual affair with Marilyn Monroe), crude, and unrepentant. “I am not a forgiving man. I do not ask for the forgiveness of my enemies nor do I forgive them. Damn them and the company they keep. Not forgotten are those actors who joined with one another against me and who – many of them –still sought my help. Not forgiven are those newspapermen who fitted me for a noose—or a cross-who, day after day, held me up to shame in their papers” (484). Norman Mailer wrote the blurb on the jacket cover. “This is the best autobiography I’ve read by a prominent American in I don’t know how many years. It is endlessly absorbing and I believe that is because it concerns a man who is looking to find a coherent philosophy that will be tough enough to contain all that is ugly in his person and his experience, yet shall prove sufficiently compassionate to give an honest judgment on himself and others. Somehow, the author brings this off.” A decade later Kazan received an honorary Academy Award, although not everyone in the audience was willing to applaud and he remained despised by those of his old friends on the left who were still alive. It is not possible to understand the debate over mass culture in the 1950s without knowing this history as well.

Chronologically, four best studies of these debates are Morris Dickstein’s Gates of Eden: American Culture in the 1960s (1977), Andrew Ross’s No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), Stanley Aronowitz’s Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife (1993), and Paul Gorman’s Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth Century America (1996).