– Joseph W. Beach Lecture – Representing Evil In Modern Fiction – March 23, 1948 – WILL-AM – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Many things to consider in the course of this lecture. It’s delivered by Joseph W. Beach, himself a novelist as well as poet, educator and critic. The name may not ring any bells now (Beach died in 1957), but the sentiments, though quaint from the view of 2023, were potent and alarming in 1948.
1948 – we were just getting started with the Cold War, we were beginning to show concern over Communist influence in America – we hadn’t yet experienced The Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and certainly not Charles Bukowski. But we were just getting introduced to Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, whose The Naked And The Dead ushered in glimpses of modern American Fiction and the future of fiction writing. Capote hadn’t published his first novel but was gaining recognition for his short stories.
The Modern American fiction Beach talks about in the sense of questionable morals and rampant depravity is the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway at the time was probably the most visible writer, who had become a household name in 1940s America. His style was considered revolutionary at the time, and Beach cites him as the trouble maker, the one who got things rolling.
What’s probably tough to convey to the world of 2023, is that in our current climate of mass book banning – banning books was commonplace in 1948. We were shocked by considerably less in 1948 than we are now, even though we had been through two devastating wars and a horrific depression. We were tolerant of much less then, even though there were signs everywhere that the mood and the morals of the country were changing – there were some who still clung to ornate conveyances. Beach holds the work of Chaucer as one of the literary models of handling morals and motives – lacing those things in a blanket of shame and misplaced idealism, quickly recognized, dealt with and moved on.
It’s interesting to consider the climate Beach was warning everyone about was coming just around the corner. 1948, if you’re to look at the coming of Capote and Mailer, not to mention Science Fiction, as what the tip of the iceberg was going to be.
This lecture, given at the University of Illinois gives a glimpse of the world as it was in 1948 and how the mainstream would react throughout the 1950s. Further evidence change is never accepted overnight and those writers we consider tame by comparison were feared and derided at the time.
How we’ve changed. And why going back to that era isn’t a very good idea – we can’t anyway.
Here is Joseph W. Beach deliver a lecture: The Representation of Evil In Modern Literature as it was heard on March 23, 1948.
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