Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War IIby Claire Seiler

Abstract

In The Sense of an Ending (1967), based on his 1965 Mary Flexner Lectures, Frank Kermode notes that, while the end of epochs attaches itself most easily to the end of centuries, we also “have it now” (97), now being the mid-twentieth century. For Kermode, the end-feeling of modern times is most clearly registered in and voiced by modernist literature: “The End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus . . . we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends” (30). Kermode’s touchstones—Wallace Stevens certainly, but especially Beckett and Sartre—reveal “a pattern of anxiety that we shall find recurring, with interesting differences, in different stages of modernism. Its recurrence is a feature of our cultural tradition . . . for in some measure our ways of thinking and feeling about our position in the middest, and our historical position, always at the end of an epoch, are determined” (96). This sounds to me rather like 2021, but of course the “mood of end-dominated crisis” (97), for Kermode, was that of the atomic age, of the midcentury.The Sense of an Ending is never mentioned in Midcentury Suspension, but I heard it echoing throughout Claire Seiler’s important book on “being at the middle of the twentieth century and feeling self-consciously midcentury, inhabiting an epochal middle at once freighted with historical significance and merely chronological” (137). Seiler’s critical frame of reference are other midcentury projects, notably Raymond Williams’s and William Empson’s, as well as Alain Badiou’s more recent examination, in Le siècle, of the century as a conceptual attractor for meaning not just for scholars but for those living it. Her book comes in, indeed, to rehabilitate the midpoint that frequently loses any sense of itself, falling, in popular and scholarly imaginations, into a vague historical postwar period or into an aesthetic gap between modernism and postmodernism. She asks instead how the midcentury felt at the time, how writers and readers “attach[ed] historical significance to it or . . . conceptualiz[ed] themselves as mid-century subjects” (136) and how “such experiences attest to the period’s sense of suspension” (137).Dispensing with the book review’s usual suspensions, I weigh in now: this is a terrific book. Not just “the most scholarly study of the midcentury to date,” as Allan Hepburn writes in his backcover blurb, it offers some truly impressive readings and some fascinating archival findings that add up to an invaluable, generative intervention into the “critically rich but unmined set of experiences, feelings, and ideas of suspension in the century’s fraught middle” (6). Seiler does the study of twentieth-century literature a major service, bringing us a significant step away from its “chronic underestimation” (197). I sense that midcentury literature is on the verge of becoming a field in its own right—witness, for example, recent studies by Hepburn (2018), Carole Sweeney (2020), and Mary Esteve (2021). If so, Seiler’s book will be one of the field’s seminal works, providing a historical and conceptual framework that links disparate works of fiction, poetry, and drama under a broad but discrete experience of inhabiting the years after the Second World War. Essential reading for any scholar of twentieth-century Anglo American literature, Midcentury Suspension performs the impressive feat of examining, in close detail, several works by important Anglo American writers while linking them to each other and to their time through the heuristic of suspension. This heuristic brings into relief the various authors’ engagements with “the midcentury’s sense of its own historical freight emerg[ing] everywhere from the period’s idiolect and intellectual discourse, creating a record in the print culture of a discursively generated sense of historicity” (65).Over four long chapters bookended by an introduction and pithy afterword, Midcentury Suspension disentangles four manifestations of suspension in midcentury literature and its surrounding discourses: suspension as a trope and ethos of midcentury historicity in Elizabeth Bishop, as the affect of anxiety in W. H. Auden and Ralph Ellison, as the behavioral mode of waiting in Elizabeth Bowen, and as the sound of war in Frank O’Hara (228). Following these various threads requires a wide range of approaches and critical frameworks, and it is with little fanfare but great dexterity that Seiler succeeds, demonstrating how much historicism can benefit from a thoroughgoing attention to form and technique—and vice versa. Doing enough work for two chapters, the introduction persuasively embeds the upcoming studies of individual authors in a larger cultural context, supporting the need for a specifically midcentury framework, thus not the familiar “modernism,” “postmodernism,” “Post45,” “late modernist,” “cold war or postwar” (5). This framework reflects but also highlights the wealth of self-conscious discourse about the midcentury circulated at the time by, as Seiler shows, just about everyone: writers, publishers, journalists, historians, politicians, Jewish and Black American communities taking stock of recent history and future prospects. This self-consciousness, which is not always self-awareness, provides Seiler with the grounds for examining the midcentury as something other than the midpoint between 1900 and 2000 or the aftermath of the Second World War.The first chapter, “The Timely Suspensions of Bishop’s A Cold Spring,” explores how the “discursive habitat” of Bishop’s lesser-read second book in its totality, as well as its genetic and publication contexts, enacts midcentury suspension in ways that were both subtly innovative and crucial for Bishop’s establishment as a writer of “serious” (78) poems. Whether described, suggested by syntax or lineation, or even explicitly named, suspension weaves through the volume, acting “as trope and as ethos for perceiving the midcentury present” (37) and thus reconfiguring the traditional “lyric subject” into a more distributed, discursive “critical perception” (54) that self-consciously reflects on and, at the same time, produces its own historicity. Seiler thus recuperates A Cold Spring from critical neglect by reading its poems as not “timeless” but, rather, embedded within “the patently ‘historical’ discourse of the period. . . . a deeply timely investigation of historical subjectivity and knowledge” (37). These are theoretically sophisticated insights, often arrived at by tangled routes, but they are ultimately earned thanks to some exceptional close readings. Identifying the suspension trope in “strategies of deferral” (71) in Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” for example, Seiler acknowledges how easy it would be to make such claims and notes, in one of the book’s delightful shifts in register, that “it would risk cuteness to gather these [strategies] under the under the heading of ‘suspension,’ except,” she adds with a palpable wink, “except that the poem already does.” Time and again, Bishop’s language and poetics serve as firm grounding for the most abstract interpretation. As Seiler puts it in this most challenging chapter of her book, the “organizing trope” of suspension “remakes the lyric I as . . . a mid-century historical subject” (138), and “the suspensions perceived and created in her poems of the late 1940s are also self-consciously and critically historical” (78).The going is significantly easier in Chapter 2, “W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and the Midcentury Anxiety Consensus.” Identifying anxiety as “the affect most suited to the self-conscious midcentury” (96) and one that is particularly slippery (eluding definite origins, resolution or diagnoses), and self-referential (feeling anxious is an occasion for anxiety), Seiler notes that though the period was probably not unusually anxious, it was particularly aware of and discursively involved in its own anxiety. Yet Auden and Ellison complicate this “anxiety consensus” by questioning and historicizing its seeming contemporaneity, perspectives they gain by virtue of their vexed relations to American citizenship (Auden as British expatriate, Ellison as African American) and their experiences with wars of different types. Anxiety provides the thematic and affective link, complemented by a striking coincidence of publication history: the first published excerpts of both Auden’s The Age of Anxiety and Ellison’s The Invisible Man appeared in the same issue of Horizon in 1947. Both authors complicate the ready association of the postwar with anxiety, whose indefinite etiologies blur historical boundaries. The Age of Anxiety refers more to the war than its sequel, the affect relating—a fascinating connection—to the poet’s postwar work as an interviewer of German civilians with the Morale Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Meanwhile the seemingly contemporary anxieties of Ellison’s Invisible Man are, as Seiler compellingly argues, merely the extension of an “ongoing, even perpetual, civil war” (120) characteristic of African American life after the American Civil War, a struggle embodied in the reverberations, in the narrator’s life, of his grandfather’s deathbed confession. The chapter’s joint focus on Auden and Ellison is noteworthy, both being “central figures in effectively separate modernisms” (87). Yet they sit strangely together in the same chapter, though perhaps simply because the reading of Ellison is so brilliant, eclipsing the discussion of Auden, fascinating as it is, into relative insignificance.The third and best chapter focuses on Elizabeth Bowen’s first postwar novel, The Heat of the Day (1949), where suspension manifests as the act of waiting. An “experience of functionally endless suspension,” waiting is synonymous with “wartime” (150) and is thus built into the novel’s odd syntax (causing Bowen some trouble with editors) and into its travesty of suspense as the expected mode of war and espionage stories. This perspective, Seiler argues, would have been impossible to recover had Bowen not enjoyed “the historical and conceptual vantage afforded by her writing from another middle that fascinated her: the midcentury” (140). In Seiler’s fascinating reconstruction of the novel’s composition, we find Bowen working hard, after the war, once its end was known, to recover the feeling of waiting and suspended action in the undifferentiated middle of the war. What would be a merely plausible though still fascinating argument from the evidence of the novel becomes much more thanks to Seiler’s careful enlistment of Bowen’s correspondence and nonfiction, both of which reveal her abiding concern for the question of the Now in art.Seiler turns in the final chapter to “how the war sounds” (187) in Frank O’Hara’s winning entry to the 1951 Hopwood Award competition, whose prize did not include book publication. Many though not all the poems were eventually published, but their arrangement in “A Byzantine Place: 50 Poems and a Noh Play,” argues Seiler, is uniquely revealing of O’Hara’s self-fashioning as a midcentury poet, musician, and wartime sonar technician exploring the auditory suspensions of war through poems of silences and acts of listening. This excavation of a neglected early work allows Seiler to reveal a “poetics” that would live on in O’Hara’s better-known mature works, a “predicated on the posture of listening and on the trained practices of assessing sonic effects and experiences” (222), postwar sounds in which the “war remains audible” (223).A recurring concern of the book, ever-present if never fully articulated as argument, is the question, “Where did the war go in writing of the immediate postwar period?” (186). Seiler suggests throughout her study that war (mainly WWII but also, in Invisible Man, the Civil War) radiates into midcentury, influencing its self-consciousness and its various modes of suspension; sometimes this influence is detectable only in the evidence of early drafts or in paratexts. This attention to war gives a strong revisionist flavor to much of Seiler’s interpretation. It displaces the titular focus of Auden’s Age of Anxiety from the postwar to the war itself, for example, and unearths specific wartime observations concealed beneath the seemingly universal pictures of Bishop’s timeless, rural poems. It also remakes O’Hara into a war poet, “disprov[ing] any presumed exclusivity between war poetry and queer poetry” (209). Yet it is not always clear whether the war lives on as the Repressed, as an indelible but invisible primal scene, or whether it compulsively repeats the anxiety that, for many in the United States and Britain, characterized the Second World War. To query this somewhat underdeveloped line of argument is not to criticize it; I was left not unsatisfied but, rather, wanting to know more. Indeed, the worst I can say about Midcentury Suspension is that its chapters felt long and that including Beckett in the title of the Bowen chapter was a bit misleading, since Waiting for Godot is little more than a frame for the discussion of The Heat of the Day. Mere quibbles.Midcentury Suspensions asks its readers to undergo their own suspensions, revealing the full scope of its argument gradually, evidence and various angles of interpretation accruing slowly into a powerful case. Though initially cause for some impatience, this slowness is indicative of the book’s value not only as a study of the “substance and feeling of the midcentury” (225) but more generally for literary studies as a field. Seiler refuses the grand gestures of some historicisms, never compromising individual works’ texture and specificity in the desire to periodize or build systems; at the same time, the highly detailed readings of individual works are never left to speak for themselves, whether these are supplemented with archival or other paratextual sources. Seiler’s project is ambitious, and the result a great success, yet it also practices a form of critical modesty that should not be yet really is noteworthy. “The felt if not fully articulated dimensions of a period,” argues Seiler, channeling Raymond Williams, “constitute grounds of inquiry into it” (23). Seiler’s phrasing here is telling: suspension as “a key imaginative construct” (32)—not the key—provides “grounds”—not the grounds—for research. Without explicitly wading into debates about weak theory or critical modesty, Seiler demonstrates in inspiring fashion what responsible reading might look like. When the field is continually forced to question its purpose and fate, spurring seemingly endless self-reflection and meta-self-reflection about critique and postcritique, Seiler coolly recalls us to the joy of reading, and reading about, literature. Her book’s intellectual rewards come with other pleasures, occasioning some delightful shifts in register: “Many readers, myself among them, plain love O’Hara” (186), writes Seiler, not as irrelevantly as some might grumble. If anything justifies studying literature qua literature, “plain love” is it. That it can underwrite and justify scholarship is only one of this outstanding book’s valuable contributions.Another, hinted at earlier, is how much midcentury feeling remains, in different yet strangely familiar forms, alive today. As Seiler intriguingly suggests in her afterword, fiction of the twenty-first century has been returning to the midcentury, exploring and in a sense continuing its creative-critical work (Seiler mentions Michael Ondaatje’s 2018 novel Warlight, among others). It could be that suspension never stopped being felt between the 1940s and now, even if that feeling might have dropped below the surface of our cultural discourses. Or it could be that there is something particular about our time that gives special relevance to Seiler’s development of “suppler and more robust sense of the historicity of the midcentury” (227). Undoubtedly, this idea is fed by having read and reviewed the book in lockdown, with its feelings of suspensions that may well outlive the Covid-19 pandemic. In any case Seiler has added something crucial to Kermode’s midcentury argument about the sense of an ending. In Kermode’s account of modernity, the end is baked into the feeling of being in the middle. Seiler, as I read her book, suggests that after the Second World War, the end was past and yet the feeling of waiting persisted. It is hard to resist the force of this suggestion when things we might have thought to be over—authoritarianism, white nationalism, recession, and so on—are very much with us still. By making some sense of the midcentury’s suspended feelings, Seiler makes some sense of ours too.