Easy Grace: Writing and Class in the 30s and Today

I’m fascinated by class and how it defines, shapes, and categorizes/segregates artists and their art. I think more than anything, class in general fascinates me because most Americans living in its upper and middle places would like to believe it no longer exists; or that if it does exist, it no longer defines or limits us.

Writing about proletarian authors in his must-read tome on Socialism and Communism in the 1930s, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, Murray Kempton discusses the ways in which their writing is often hard-won, their style blunt and graceless by necessity, their youth left behind in the struggle to leave the poverty they were born into–and the fact that they will never entirely belong to the upper echelons of literary society. He writes of James T. Farrell:

There were ways in which he was the best-educated young writer of his time. He had read philosophers well outside the realm of discourse of conventional critics; he was a deep, though perhaps narrow, student of history; he had great resources in the European tradition. He was a perceptive enough critic to argue for William Faulker in the early thirties, when Faulkner was at the peak of his creation and his nadir of reputation. He was certainly better educated than Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who in many areas were not educated at all.

Yet he was, and always would be, received as a barbarian in the genteel world of the literary supplements…because poverty had blunted his fingertips and left his work heavy with passion and deficient of charm.

And later, Kempton goes on:

Farrell’s world, like [Theodore] Dreiser’s was one whose inhabitants understood the price the artist pays. They looked at the New York literary world and thought it commercial, supercilious, log-rolling, and absolutely alien. The plebian writer had to talk about the world in which he grew up; he had to write about a drab and barren existence; he did not after all feel qualified to write about any other kind. He could not write romance, because there was so little romance in his life; he could not write with easy grace because there was so little grace in his life.

I hear the term “easy grace,” and I think instantly of Fitzgerald, whose writing exudes nothing so much as easy grace, indeed whose early life was nothing but a kind of easy grace. (Squandered opportunity and talent is another story, and one by the way almost unheard of in the rank of the working-class artist. Not by easy grace, but by blood and sweat does the working-class writer attain a measure of success in the arts, and once obtained, it’s not casually thrown away.)

I think Kempton was right about his generation. And I wonder if the same can be said of mine. With the growing divide–chasm, really–between the rich and poor in this America today, is the writer from a less-than-middle-class background still at such a pronounced disadvantage? Does their style still belong to another world entirely? Part of me says, no, of course not, because it’s much easier now to go to college, to study any field, to have access to great literature no matter how much or how little money you have.

But another part of me says, yes, yes, the divide is still there. Only now it’s more pronounced, because I believe few people who grow up poor but have the opportunity to go to college would even go into the arts at all. In the thirties, art could be seen as weapon, and the working class writer could wield it in the service of unionism, or Communism, or Socialism, or equality. But today, art as blunt instrument, art as pure purpose, is looked upon with distaste–and I don’t necessarily disagree that it should be looked upon in exactly that way. After all, art with blunt purpose seems to lose its art entirely, and becomes merely another tool. But regardless, with art seen today as largely a hobby, or a job that will never pay, I can’t imagine that many people given the opportunity to climb out of poverty with a higher education would choose to “waste” the chance by majoring in art, creative writing, music, etc.

And if a working-class student never even gets the chance to acquire a style–blunt or graceful–then isn’t the gap even greater than it was in the thirties?