Midcentury Suspension Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler

 Midcentury Suspension

Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler is an interesting book published by Columbia University Press about the meaning of the midcentury in the USA and how writers mainly lived it. 

The first fifty years of the XX century hasn't been simple at all: Two World Wars, a pandemic flu, the Spanish one, between the First and Second World War, Holocaust. Yes, a particular tribulated world, that  first 50 years  of the century. 

What to wait next? That was the main problem and obsessions, analyzed by politicians like Churchill in meetings organized for speaking of this thematic, for making a point of the first fifty years, trying to see...the next future.

In general universities tried to give an answer like journalists, writers. Yes because that years were made by sensations, mainly. 

Appeared more than clear that the rights of black people would have been taken in great consideration, but it was also a time of suspension this one, because everyone had big fear of nuclear weapons and of the following uncertainty left behind by the war. Everyone would have wanted to re-start without pressures but no one knew what the second part, the second 50 years of that century would have meant to them.

Suspension, waiting, but also the certainty that this second part could be plenty of surprises, and not just negative ones. McKenzie wrote: "I feel in the 1950 as if I were on the edge of my seat, standing on tiptoe, peering around the corner." Williams synthetized his feelings writing about an "Immediate World."

Suspension: this word suggests several meanings or better, interpretations: "A freezing or delay of action or progress, a deferral of decisions, or a temporary revocation of a normal state of affairs." The XX century can be defined as the Modernist Century.

Suspension can be very well seen in two beloved masterpieces written by Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett. The first book is The Heat of the Day and the second Waiting for Godot, where in both cases there is suspension not maybe of the time but of a lack of action of the various protagonists. 

In Godot the protagonists continues to wait for the arrival of Godot. they continue to wait without trying to search for some other "escapism" regarding the entire situation, but living with ironically passivity the existence. Written after the last world war, sure it was a work influenced by what happened in the middle, and we can traces lines indicating it. Estragon at a certain point will say: "...Yes i now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That's been going on now for half a century."

The book by Bowen had a long gestation and was re-written after the war, set anyway in the middle of the second world war; there is historical, rethorical suspension. The story, the one of Stella Rodney; she accompanies her lover on a trip to his suburban family home.

Once arrived she perceives the inadequacy of class and nationality. 

The protagonists live suspended because of the war. A senseless war, presenting to all of them the fixity of the moment, but at the same time, the perception that time  goes by. The "sense of the now" become one of the most crucial and important theme of the book.

Frank O'Hara was a poet who had written "Memorial Day 1950." Frank studied at Harvard and completed his studies at 24 years. 

In this first poem, sometimes not too taken too much in consideration there is a paternal elegy because of the damages caused by the oldest generations to the newest ones. 

Not only: this poem symbolizes what it meant to be a poet who distrusts the world built after the war.

In " A Byzantine Place: 50 Places and aNoh Play" and later in Try! Try!  several kind of meditations. In the second play the return home of a soldier, John from the war, for then discovering, it was a classic, his wife in the arms of someone else, seeing in funny terms after all. 

The stress left behind by war couldn't be avoided and if under many ways writers didn't write after all massively about Spanish flu, differently has been with for a war who marked not just a century but also the conception of level of horror that the humanity can reach for destroying the world with nuclear bombs or annientating the existences of million of people. 

Beautiful, erudite book!

Highly recommended!

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori