Dancing in the Dark

Dancing in the Dark

Review by Sanford Levinson

Morris Dickstein has written a marvelously comprehensive overview of American culture during the period of the Great Depression. He notes in his preface that the book has become all too timely, as the United States struggles through its worst financial crisis—and attendant suffering of concrete human beings—since then. Readers will almost inevitably bring a double consciousness to the book, both learning a great deal about a time long ago and wondering about what is applicable to our own world. Consider only two apt quotations: The first is from Budd Schulberg’s classic What Makes Sammy Run?, where its subject is described as subscribing to the view that “going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.” The second is a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up. During the ‘20s, Fitzgerald “saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible’ come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good.” The ‘30s, of course, challenged this view, as lots of very “good” people, however one defined “goodness,” lost their jobs, took to the road and otherwise found themselves struggling in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier.

Dickstein has written a truly “reader-friendly” book. Never didactic, he offers enough about the books, movies, plays and poems he discusses to enable readers who have never read or seen them to grasp his argument (and even to disagree with him on occasion). The title itself is wonderfully rich. “Dancing in the Dark” might suggest romance, but the lyrics also note that “time hurries by, we’re here…and gone.” But “we can face the music together, Dancing in the dark.” This “is a way,” Dickstein writes, “of asserting a life-saving grace, unity, and style against the darkness,” which, he audaciously suggests, is “not that different from more socially conscious hard-times fables like The Grapes of Wrath: separately we fail, we lose heart and fall into confusion; together we have a chance.”

This is a large and sometimes sprawling book. Inevitably, some of the chapters work better than others. The best chapters, though, including those on both some of our best-known writers (Fitzgerald and Steinbeck) or now-forgotten or ignored figures (Mike Gold or Nathaniel West, among others), are truly splendid. Another such chapter was on the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, which explains why on Independence Day we rented and watched Shall We Dance. I am sure that I will not be unique in my desire to pick up books written during the Depression or to watch a wide swath of movies that whether about gangsters or “screwball comedies” appeal to our social conscience, or “simply” the great enactments of the possibility of sheer movement by Astaire and Rogers or by the unique Busby Berkeley, evoke various ways of coping with the multiple realities that constituted the Great Depression. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2009.

Hardcover: 624 pages

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. ( September 14, 2009 )

Item #: 64-3512

ISBN: 9780393072259

Product Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.25 x 1.56 inches

Product Weight: 34.0 ounces