A Novel Marketplace. Evan Brier
this division, to the large extent that it is merely evaluative, obscures rather than clarifies the relationship between American novels and mass culture in the 1950s. Novels of the 1950s—regardless of whether they were deemed high or low culture at the time or since—were always also a form of commercial if not mass culture; to examine the effects of the emergence of mass culture on American novels, it is necessary to consider these novels not as high or low culture, categories so fluid as to be useless except as historical markers of critical opinion, but as commodities produced in the pursuit of admittedly varying amounts of both prestige and profit.
Doing this work, I argue throughout this book, entails shining a brighter light on the postwar book trade, that set of institutions that produced, marketed, and sold novels, occupying crucial but neglected intermediate space between the much discussed twin extremes of mass-culture corporations and highbrow critics and, in a literal sense, sometimes, negotiating with both of them. The specifics of these types of institutional negotiations have gained the attention of literary scholars in recent years. Influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s study of the transformation of the public sphere, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, and the idea of the institution as that which mediates between the individual and society, institutional accounts of twentieth-century literature and of the novel as the product not just of an author but of assorted institutions, including publishers, literary agents, critics, booksellers, and readers, have gained in prominence.11 To date, these accounts have focused primarily on either genre fiction once deemed lowbrow or the production of literary texts in the first half of the twentieth century: Lawrence Rainey on high modernists Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and H.D.; Janice A. Radway on romance novels and on the Book-of-the-Month Club as a quintessentially modern, middlebrow institution; and Catherine Turner on the successful marketing of modernist texts in America during the 1920s and 1930s.
This book extends the institutional focus into the postwar era, from which it has, with a few important exceptions, been absent, and uses it in two related ways: first, to sketch a necessarily episodic narrative of postwar novel production, of modernization in fits and starts, during the postwar mass-culture explosion; and, second, to explore a paradox that ran deep in literary culture throughout the decade but has yet to be examined.12 The 1950s is likely the time during which alarm over the fate of both reading in general and high literature in particular was at its apex. These were, in fact, two distinct forms of alarm: as I discuss throughout this book, those intellectuals concerned with the fate of culture for the few—Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, and Greenberg—had little interest in, if not outright hostility toward, more humanistic assertions of the importance of mass literacy, concerns that were more properly the purview of secondary school English teachers, mainstream commercial publishers, and Rudolf Flesch, author of the best-selling literacy jeremiad Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955). There was a tension between the missions of self-appointed protectors of high culture and those who wished to spread literacy, promoters of the value of reading for everyone.
But the tension was easily elided in the light of shared assumptions about declining literacy in the age of television, and the two forms of alarm were easily conflated in the face of the common enemy that mass culture represented. “Who is to blame,” Saturday Review asked in 1956, “for the plight of contemporary reading?” (“The Battle” 5). The premise of the question, the idea that there was a plight, was taken as self-evident, the point of departure for much of the discussion of the future of reading and literature in the 1950s. At the same time, as contemporary issues of Publishers Weekly and the recent study Literacy in the United States suggest, in the 1950s more books than ever before were produced and sold to a growing population of educated consumers. “The increase in trade book sales during 1956,” Publishers Weekly reported in January 1957, “will top the 7 per cent increase which 1955 registered over 1954” (“Highlights of 1956” 47). Literacy in the United States confirms Publishers Weekly’s conclusions, citing the “widespread popularity of book reading by the 1950s” (Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, Tinsley, and Trollinger 150) and noting that reading expenditures, controlled for both inflation and population growth, rose throughout the decade (153–54), despite the fact that, for much of the 1950s, spending on magazines and newspapers was in steep decline. This rise is not merely an effect of the economic boom, either; at the same time that book sales were increasing, borrowing from libraries was also increasing, “contrary,” the study notes, “to all the dire predictions” (165).13 In 1959, Publishers Weekly reported the happy news that the book-publishing business was “approaching a billion-dollar level” (“A Year of Reading” 79). In short, throughout this decade of alarm over the plight of reading, the book trade was benefiting from the public’s growing consumption of books, mostly nonfiction but also fiction.14 This raises two important and, as it turns out, related questions: Why did the public buy more books than ever in the 1950s? And what produced the disconnect between the rhetoric of crisis and the reality of increasing book production and sales?
To the latter question, the Cold War is one inescapable and essential answer, but in broaching its role, caution is advised. As Deborah Nelson has noted, we are likely past the point where the “containment” metaphor for an anxious postwar culture needs to be asserted and defended as a counternarrative to what was once the standard, idealized version of the content 1950s.15 Now that the cultural power of Cold War ideology has been established by Ross, Donald Pease, Elaine Tyler May, and Alan Nadel, among others, the opportunity exists to shine a light on how that ideology intersected with other, also formidable, cultural, commercial, and institutional imperatives. It is important to recognize the Cold War’s role, but it would be a mistake to view the concern about literacy after World War II as another instance of perhaps manufactured Cold War paranoia, whereby fears of the consequences of illiteracy, fed by anxiety about Communist infiltration, the masses, and totalitarianism, overwhelm empirical evidence that suggests those fears are baseless if not, at least, premature.
For one thing, such a view misses how interlocked were the articulations of alarm and the book trade’s commercial success. As I discuss throughout this book, and in depth in Chapter 2, about Ray Bradbury’s fantastically successful science fiction paperback Fahrenheit 451, institutions of the book trade, the ones that were benefiting most from the increase in reading expenditures, did much to disseminate the idea that the literary sky was falling, suggesting that what seems to be a disconnect between perception and reality might be better understood as a successful and shrewd, but not cynical, marketing strategy, one that paid off in the form of the sizable increase in book production and sales throughout the era. All of this is meant not to deny but to complicate the Cold War’s considerable role in the marketing of culture during a tense historical moment. Anxieties about Communism did in many instances script the marketing of novels, sometimes directly but often indirectly, as a consequence of government and educational efforts to promote national literacy as a bulwark in the battle against Communism. Although the Cold War plays an essential role, it does so only alongside and in conjunction with other factors that demand but have received little or no attention from literary scholars, such as the previously mentioned modernization of the book trade after World War II and the exponential growth of America’s college-educated population in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a process that began before the Cold War.16 Rebecca Lowen’s assessment of the “Cold War university” applies as well to this study of early Cold War culture: “While America’s research universities … were undoubtedly shaped by the more than forty years of cold war … other forces, which are not neatly bound by the beginning and end of the cold war, were shaping them as well” (1).
Shining a light on these “other forces” that shaped novel production at this crucial moment and on their intersections with Cold War ideology is one of this book’s primary aims.17 Throughout the 1950s, institutions of the book trade engaged in a paradoxical project: using the genuinely felt alarm over the emergence of mass culture as a means to carve and define a space for the novel within a newly crowded commercial field, not just articulating a Cold War–inflected rationale for novels in the age of mass culture but also disseminating that rationale more widely and effectively than had ever been done before. That project—how it came about; how and why novelists, critics, and the book trade participated in it and how