The Columbia History of the American Novel

complete access to traditional forms of male power. At the same time, however, homosexual behavior was officially deemed pathological by the religious, legal, and medical establishments. In the popular imagination sexual preference was lumped with other forms of social and political deviance as threats to the national security. Literary treatments of sexuality, like all public expressions on the topic, were carefully regulated. Lesbian fiction had enjoyed a renaissance in the first half of the century, in such high modernist classics as Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (1909) and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1937). In the decades after the war, however, lesbian novels were more discreet. Bantam Press published a highly successful line of mass- market lesbian paperbacks, of which the most notable was the interconnected series of conscious-raising works by Ann Bannon. In more prestigious publications, like the sexually ambiguous thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and her pseudonymous The Price of Salt (1952), however, the sexual references tended to be coded and indirect. Only after the rebirth of feminism in the early -501- 1960s did fiction regularly represent lesbians as other than deviants or martyrs, most notably in Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart (1964).

Gay male fiction was more mainstream. Gay writers like Burroughs and Rechy held positions of authority in the counterculture. Large commercial houses published such gay love stories as Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948), and Fritz Peters's (Arthur Anderson Peters's) Finistere (1951). The price of such publicity was capitulation to heterosexual stereotypes. These novels depicted gay love as pathological, gay life as criminal, gay culture as nonexistent. The plots were deterministic and most ended in violence, often with the death of the protagonist. Although the self-loathing of such narratives cannot be denied, gay readers probably did not take seriously their melodrama and sentimentality. The value of these novels in forging a gay identity resided instead in those neutral moments when they reassured isolated homosexuals of the existence of others like themselves, even hinting subtly how such others might be met and identified in the straight world.

A more indirect strain in gay male writing avoided homosexual themes or situations altogether. Instead it presented straight plots in a gay style of parodic writing usually called 'camp.' Patrick Dennis (Edward Everett Tanner) wrote a string of wildly successful comic novels, most notably Auntie Mame (1955), that used extravagant female characters as mouthpieces for a gay critique of heterosexual behavior. Dennis's domestication of camp entered into the establishment tradition in the work of Truman Capote. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) obscured the sexual dynamics between its male narrator and female protagonist to afford to both a gay sensibility only slightly less flamboyant than Dennis's Mame. Similar sexual undertones informed all his subsequent work. In his uncompleted final novel Answered Prayers (1987), Capote acknowledged the explicitly sexual character of his more discreet narratives through controversial stories about a gay hustler and the straight rich women he entertained.

As a sophisticated form of the literature of identity, minority novels tended to face directly questions of assimilation and cooptation. Yet in the problematic work of such popularizers as C. Y. Lee and Patrick Dennis we can begin to sense a more covert attempt to define -502- group identity. For while some commercial works did not treat seriously the moral and political dilemmas facing a subculture, they nevertheless studied community dynamics with sociological precision. Though not significant additions to the literature of ethnic sensibility, these novels might be said to have contributed to a related subgenre — the literature of environment — which defined cultural identity less in terms of who or what one was than in terms of where one lived and worked.

Novels of environment rarely experimented with the technical innovations of the age. The fractured time scheme and unreliable narrators favored by modernist authors in the first half of the century were largely rejected. Nor was it a literature of high sensibility and fine moral distinctions. The narrative voices were matter-of-fact rather than ruminative. Characters were stereotypes, and their moral dilemmas relatively straightforward. The authors avoided ambiguity and frequently displayed an explicit hostility to psychological explanations of human motivation. While not, like the Beats, in conscious revolt against academic criticism, they ignored traditional aesthetic criteria and valued as antecedents works little admired by the New Critics.

In some respects, the novels of environment looked back to the proletariat fictions of the 1940s; their prose was simple and declarative, crafted to reach the widest audience possible. They recalled as well the work of the turn-of-the-century naturalists, especially Norris and Dreiser, in their precise attention to the minutiae of everyday experience. Yet they possessed none of the reforming tendencies of these earlier traditions: neither the socialist underpinnings of proletariat novelists nor the philosophical pessimism, sexual candor, and social outrage of the naturalists. These works tended instead to be politically conservative, celebrating middle-class mores. In this conservatism, their truest antecedents were perhaps the English Victorian novel, especially the chronicles of Anthony Trollope, and its American counterpart, the sentimental novel of domesticity. Like their three-volume ancestors, these postwar popular fictions were often leisurely works, rich in descriptive detail, and overflowing with characters and plot. And like them, they coddled rather than challenged the bourgeois expectations of their readers.

The success of these commercial novels can be understood socio-503- logically. There had long been popular fiction — indeed, the novel as a genre was sometimes understood as a middle-class alternative to more elite literary forms like poetry. During the 1930s, however, technical advances in printing and binding made possible the publication of large printings of inexpensive texts. These advances culminated in the rise of the paperback edition in the final years of the decade and the shifts in production and marketing policy associated with that development. Drugstores and bus stations replaced bookstores as the primary sites for these new paperbacks. To maximize sales potential, editors sought work that was familiar, even formulaic, in nature. Such traditionalism was probably augmented by Broadway's and Hollywood's interest in optioning popular novels whose characters and plot lent themselves most readily to dramatic treatment. In postwar authors' response to these developments, the modern best-seller was born.

Such commercialized accounts had only a rudimentary interest in the political and psychological realities of ethnic identity. Leonard Q. Ross's (Leo Rosten's) The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L *A *N (1937) reduced problems of acculturation to the low comedy of the dialect tradition. Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (1955) and Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) and My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) simplified the problems of Reform and Orthodox Judaism examined more fully by Bellow and Roth. Wouk's Marjorie Morgenstern, for example, fought off threats to her virtue and career goals for four hundred pages only to capitulate on both counts in her final retreat into middle-class domesticity. And Potok's Asher Lev was merely Roth's Portnoy recast as a 'nice Jewish boy.' Similarly stereotypic and inspirational were Betty Smith's account of Irish Americans in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) and Kathryn Forbes's (Kathryn Anderson McLean's) reminiscences about Scandinavian San Francisco in Mama's Bank Account (1943). Yet even as they pandered to the sentimentality and self-satisfaction of their readers, they did get on the record some of the sociological details essential to the process of identity construction. Although Hyman Kaplan was a baggy-pants comic, he had a better feel for living language than the smug WASP teacher who narrated the novel. If Wouk's understanding of Marjorie's libido was weak, his depiction of Jewish teenagers on the Upper West Side was precise. And while it left un-504- examined a whole set of family stereotypes, Forbes's sentimental portrait of a community of urban-dwelling Norwegians at least overturned the clichéd representation of Scandinavian Americans as stoic Midwestern farmers.

The function of such a popular 'literature of environment' as a necessary preliminary to social change could be best seen in postwar women's fiction. Even after the reinstatement of oppressive models of female domesticity, some women writers continued to work valiantly against gender stereotyping. Carson McCullers examined the alienation of African Americans, children, the handicapped, and especially women in such works as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), and The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her lyrical prose and her interest in the isolating aspects of love strongly resembled those of males writing in the same tradition of Southern gothic. Yet her sexual candor, eye for domestic detail, and focus on the female viewpoint made her narratives proto-feminist (and implicitly lesbian).

Late in the postwar period the generalized sense of female unrest received a name and a focus from the publication of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique in 1963. Even such universalizing writers as Mary McCarthy began to admit the existence of experiences uniquely female. In her best-selling The Group (1963), McCarthy directed at a circle of Vassar graduates the same jaundiced eye with which she analyzed all her