Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America

318 Pages·2010·3.59 MB·English

by  Abigail Cheever

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: “Individuality in Name Only” 1
1 Postwar Teenagers and the Attitude of
Authenticity 23
2 From Madness to the Prozac Americans 56
3 “They Didn’t Do It for Thrills”: Serial Killing and
the Problem of Motive 105
4 Assimilation, Authenticity, and “Natural
Jewishness” 141
5 “The Man He Almost Is”: Performativity and
the Corporate Narrative 191
Conclusion: “Collage Is the Art Form of the
Twentieth Century” 239
Notes 249
Works Consulted 281
Index 297
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Acknowledgments
this book began when Walter Benn Michaels challenged me to come
up with something interesting to say about The Catcher in the Rye. I have
benefited from the generosity of many people since that early attempt to
work through some of the ideas under consideration here. Laura Browder,
Christy Burns, Daniel S. Cheever Jr., Beth Crawford, Theo Davis, Frances
Dickey, Lucinda Havenhand, Kathleen Hewett-Smith, Amy Hungerford,
Oren Izenberg, John Marx, John D. Rockefeller V, Matthew Sewell,
Gretchen Soderlund, Carol Summers, Sydney Watts, and Janet Winston
all read and commented on these chapters at various points. Their care-
ful attention substantially improved the manuscript, and I am grateful for
their contributions. In particular, I am indebted to Jerome Christensen and
Walter Benn Michaels for asking demanding questions and providing cru-
cial guidance; to Deak Nabers for his willingness to read and discuss this
manuscript at great length; and to Abby Aldrich Record, whose research
assistance and support were fundamental to its completion.
I did much of the work on this volume at the University of Richmond,
where numerous conversations with Thomas Allen, Joanna Drell, Elisabeth
Gruner, Raymond Hilliard, Suzanne Jones, Edward Larkin, Peter Lurie,
Ilka Saal, Louis Schwartz, Louis Tremaine, and Hugh West improved both
my thinking and my days in the office. My students have actively engaged
with these ideas in numerous contexts and provided a continual source of
revelation and encouragement. I hope they realize how much they con-
tributed to this project. I am also grateful to the participants in the annual
Post-45 conference, who are rigorous and exacting in their study of this
period. I have profited from their questions, their suggestions, and their
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viii acknowledgments
scholarly example. Most recently, the anonymous readers for the University
of Georgia Press were generous in their recommendations and unstinting
with their advice.
Portions of chapter 2 and chapter 5 were published in Twentieth-Century
Literature and Arizona Quarterly. I am grateful to those editors for letting
me republish this material here.
My greatest thanks go to my parents, to whom I dedicate this book.
Real Phonies
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Introduction:
“Individuality in Name Only”
when holden caulfield, the adolescent narrator of J. D. Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye (1951), searches for a scathing insult, he inevitably comes
up with “phony”: this is how the reader knows that Holden thinks the ob-
ject of his scorn is ethically reprehensible, rather than just “a nasty guy”
like his classmate Robert or “a touchy guy” like his cab driver. In a repre-
sentative instance, Holden identifies his former headmaster at Elkton Hills
as “the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life,” who
went around shaking hands with everybody’s parents when they drove up
to school. He’d be charming as hell and all. Except if some boy had little old
funny looking parents . . . then old Haas would just shake hands with them
and give them a phony smile and then he’d go talk, for maybe half an hour,
with somebody else’s parents. (13–14)1
Haas does two things here to warrant Holden’s disdain, but only one
might be accurately described as phony. First, he dislikes a student’s par-
ents for superficial reasons — because they are “little old funny looking”
people — and second, he pretends to like them — “gives them a phony
smile” — so as to conform to social standards of behavior. Would he still be
a phony if he made explicit his preference for attractive parents? Probably
not: in Holden’s taxonomy such behavior would make Haas a jerk, not a
phony. Liking or disliking people solely on the basis of appearance may be
shallow, but it is not necessarily an ethical failing of the type Holden cen-
sors. For Holden, Haas’s judgment is far less offensive than his social cam-
ouflage. As Holden views the situation, Haas knows enough about himself
to recognize that he dislikes “funny looking” parents and enough about
1
2 INtROduC tION
his situation to appreciate that such dislikes are not acceptable in a school
headmaster. His interest in other people’s appearance is thus secondary to
his investment in his own. For Haas, it is more important to act properly
than to be honest. The “phony smile” — his attempt to conceal his dislike
behind a pretense of liking, to represent socially acceptable behavior when
his judgments are not socially acceptable — is what Holden deplores. If the
added insult lies in Haas’s superficial judgments of persons, the original
and far more serious injury is his hypocrisy.
As Holden Caulfield’s use of the term exemplifies, the epithet “phony”
was omnipresent during the postwar period in the United States. It was
an easy appellation for individuals who appeared cynically to conform to
codes of behavior for social approbation or advancement and appeared as
a common label for a certain type of person in the writing, literature, and
film of mid-twentieth-century America. An interest in the possibility of
social pretense has been a part of American ideology since at least the mid-
nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau are only
the most obvious of American writers and philosophers who celebrated
a particularly American individuality that was conceived in opposition to
the expectations of a social world. And their roots might potentially stem
back as far as Rousseau’s theories of natural man and the Enlightenment
birth of the idea of a unique and individuated self. But such concerns took
on a renewed urgency in the years immediately following World War II.
Too close a symbiosis between the individual and the various social con-
texts with which he or she negotiated was, at best, a sign of insincerity and,
at worst, of outright fraud. In its contemporary variations such as “poser”
or “wannabe,” contemporary Americans might maintain the same position
of smug superiority in relation to others that buoyed Holden Caulfield in
the early 1950s.
Yet the apparent transparency of the categorization — everyone imag-
ines she or he knows what a phony is — obscures the complicated models
of authenticity and selfhood that must be in place for charges of phoniness
to make sense. Most simply, for phoniness to be possible, the self needs to
have two components that are generally understood through metaphors of
depth: an inner core and an outer façade. The former must be able to em-
ploy the latter for its own purposes, and that interior core must be consid-
ered authentic even as the exterior presentation must be mutable — at times
INtROduC tION 3
an authentic representation, and at times a misleading pretense. Further,
the phony is inevitably imagined as a social creature; an audience, or at
least some sort of social or cultural context, motivates his performances.
Finally, as Holden’s discussion of Haas suggests, phoniness requires some
degree of self-knowledge. It imagines that each individual operates as a
self-cognizant agent who can differentiate quickly between his or her im-
mediate inclinations and the behavioral expectations of a larger group. To
deploy the term “phony” is therefore to tangle with the inevitably related
concepts of authenticity, selfhood, and self-knowledge, and their interac-
tions with social and cultural contexts.
Accordingly, the phony’s literary, intellectual, and popular deployment
serves a profound analytical index, a means to access the mid-century’s
conception of authenticity as it relates to persons. To discover who is a
phony, and why, is likewise to deduce what constitutes a real or genuine
person in mid-twentieth-century American culture. This book is thus cen-
trally concerned with explicating the phenomenon of phoniness as it is
imagined in the writing and films from the middle of the twentieth century
to its end — from adolescents like Holden Caulfield to sports agents like
Jerry Maguire. It utilizes the concept of the phony — and its equally prob-
lematic fellow traveler, the real phony (defined below) — to explore a fun-
damental evolution in the concept of the authentic self. By reading closely
in a range of literary, nonfictional, and filmic genres, this volume follows
a central development during the second half of the twentieth century:
the movement from an existential emphasis on self-constitution to a more
postmodern view of the self as an embodiment of culture. Authenticity in
the postwar period is imagined as that which separates the individual from
the social world, as what might be uniquely one’s own rather than a conse-
quence of social influence. By the end of the century, authenticity emerges
as an acknowledgment of one’s construction within cultural contexts and a
sign of one’s involvement with that cultural milieu. Furthermore, in chart-
ing the contours of this transformation, this text rewrites the critically ac-
cepted account of the period which imagines that, during the later twenti-
eth century, authenticity was of declining concern for American social and
cultural critics, writers, and filmmakers.
This account begins in the years after World War II, during which time
authenticity operated as an index to one’s profound uniqueness, the means
4 INtROduC tION
by which an individual’s separation and independence from his cultural
contexts was judged. As Lionel Trilling observed of this period, “the word
authenticity [came] so readily to the tongue” and its deployment suggested
a “strenuous moral experience . . . a more exigent conception of the self
and what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and
man’s place in it” (11). That place, furthermore, was thought to be funda-
mentally oppositional; authenticity required defining oneself against the
expectations of society and culture. Yet by the end of the century, authen-
ticity had evolved into a standard of belonging, a means to register the ex-
tent to which one successfully embodied an identity — be it racial, cultural,
or any other type. If, in the 1950s, intellectuals and writers debated authen-
tic versus phony selves, by the end of the century their questions addressed
the authenticity of cultures — and whether or not the self or subject was
embodying those cultures faithfully. In this book, I examine this evolution
in authenticity from the vogue for French existentialism in the immediate
postwar period (as explored in works by J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Truman
Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Elia Kazan, Jim Thompson, Sloan Wilson, and
Richard Yates), in which authenticity and its opposites are explicitly ad-
dressed, to texts from the later part of the twentieth century (Don DeLillo,
Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, John Guare, and Elizabeth Wurtzel), whose
interest in the idea of authenticity is potentially less explicit yet no less fun-
damental. Despite this significant transition, and despite the widely shared
assumption that recent culturalist views of the self represent a sharp de-
parture from earlier models of self and identity, what emerges is the over-
whelming persistence of a common, profound engagement with the ideal
of authenticity over the past half century.
Understanding both this engagement and its persistence foremost re-
quires a reexamination of the concepts of phoniness and authenticity
during the immediate postwar period. This concern has typically been
understood by historians and cultural critics in terms of an omnipresent
interest in middle-class conformity. A phony like Haas, for example, would
appear to be a textbook conformist, a character who allows his apprehen-
sion about the opinion of others to dictate his self-presentation. Yet the
novelists, social critics, and filmmakers of the 1950s and early 1960s were
not, as has long been assumed, fundamentally worried about the ways in
which individuals might be coerced or seduced into surrendering their