Post Cards from the Edge: Liberalism Before the Fall
A survey of the current ideological landscape is a bleak and dismal undertaking. Not a glimmer of hope is visible because optimism itself appears to have been banished from the public square. Positivity is taken as naivety. “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention!” It’s all doom-scrolling all the time. “In these dark times” has become the preface of every conversation. Victimization is the only narrative, and everyone is clamoring for top billing as the one who has had it the hardest. Every accomplishment must be a triumph over adversity or its no accomplishment at all.
There was a time in the mid-twentieth century, after America won the war and before intersectionality seized control of publishing and academia, when hope was still alive. We’d defeated totalitarian evil and were moving towards a more equal society. Shared wealth, shared values, and positive forward progress seemed possible. Yes, there were some very racist reactionary resistors, but they seemed to be on the back foot as the civil rights movement swept the country and people recognized the incongruity of defeating one genocidal movement while allowing dehumanizing oppression to continue at home.
Literature of this post-war belle epoch offers a refreshing glimpse of hope and optimism and reminds us that, before the shrieking harpies of wokeness descended to drive us all mad, a more cheerful and pleasant liberalism existed. A good example of this positive mid-century outlook can be found in the writings of Willard Marsh.
I first learned about Willard “Butch” Marsh after reading the excellent literary biography of his brother-in-law, John Williams (The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel), who is enjoying something of a moment with the rediscovery of his previously unacclaimed novel “Stoner.”
Marsh was born on March 5, 1922, in Oakland, California. As a young man, he excelled at trumpet playing and trombone. He married William’s sister George Rae Williams in 1948, a former actress with the Pasadena Playhouse. The couple maintained a close, but sometimes competitive relationship with John.
John Williams and Butch Marsh were writers of a certain vintage, both served in WWII, wore thick rimmed glasses and collared shirts, drank heavily, and chain-smoked cigarettes. Whereas Williams was inarguably the more “academic” or “serious” writer, both taught in universities, although it was Marsh’s preference not to.
Marsh and his wife spent most of their time in the writer’s colony of Ajijic, Mexico. He leaned more to the beatnik side of the 50’s and 60’s literary scene than his brother-in-law. Rather than write the perfect novel, Marsh’s approach was to spread his bets, and he sold many of his stories to magazines and pulp fiction journals.
His collection of stories, Beachhead in Bohemia, was written mostly in Mexico and published by Louisiana State University Press shortly before Marsh died of a heart attack in Guadalajara in 1970. It consists of 12 tightly-crafted stories featuring a diverse set of characters. He writes with a social conscious, addressing issues such as gentrification, inequality, and racism, but does so with the innocence of a liberal white-guy who’s never encountered the concept of intersectionality. Struggling for cash, selling one story to the next with never more than about 100 bucks in his pocket, Marsh would have been astonished to learn he was privileged.
The title story is a very humorous account of a straight-laced tax investigator who stumbles into a conceptual poet’s acid party and inadvertently wows the crowd with his own spontaneous free-verse. It pokes fun at the counter-culture in a friendly and funny manner. Drugs appear occasionally in the stories, marijuana and its effects feature prominently in the cleverly named Mexican Hayride in which an expat author turns to the “midnight crop” for chemical assistance with his writing. His treatment of drugs harkens back to a more innocent time before deviance became the societal norm. It suggests a middle path, something between draconian enforcement and the openair drug markets and corporate “Starbuds” dispensaries which emerged after decriminalization. Imagine a drug policy which allowed for tolerance without endorsement while still maintaining the moral high ground and the ability to disapprove of socially disruptive behavior.
Many of the stories are told from the point of view of Mexican paisanos, a practice which now days would expose one to claims of appropriation but feels boldly refreshing from a writer completely unaffected with such 21st century concerns. Blood Harvest, the longest story in the collection, concerns a village man who finds temporary employment with a western archeologist who is digging up an ancient temple. While doing so, they rub the local curandera the wrong way. The plot consists of interactions between the poor sharecropper, his pregnant wife who sees visions at night, the archeologist harbinger of modernity, and the curandera jealously defending her power which is threatened by the foreigner. The divergent interests of all involved collide with tragic results. If the story were written today, it could only be written by a Latinx author as a celebration of the colonizer getting what he deserved. This would be a much duller story than the interesting collision of different world views which Marsh is able to deliver by avoiding the chauvinism of the past and the anti-Western cultural Marxism which permeates contemporary arts.
Marsh enlisted in the army in 1942 and served in the Army Air Forces in the South Pacific. He was of the Greatest Generation, growing up during the Depression and witnessing the post war boom. Like many of his compatriot writers at the time, the value of duty and sacrifice comes across in his work, and the war and its aftermath receive a more positive framing than the Lost Generation’s disillusionment. His experience of war seems to have endowed him with a sense of grateful humility rather than resentful trauma. The story Darkling I Listen pulls from his experience as a radio operator stationed on an atoll, where a group of American soldiers huddle in the jungle awaiting a Japanese bombing mission while being taunted by a haunting voice on the airwaves. Marsh conveys the tense expectation of sudden violence at night on a tropical island to memorable effect. This tail of camaraderie amongst a troop of young American soldiers thrown together by momentous world events is a touching recollection of a moment where this country stepped up to change world history. His is a quiet patriotism, not boastful or defensive, but confident at a time when patriotism was normal and expected.
The book’s most politically charged story, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, relays a nocturnal confrontation between a Southern judge and a young black man who has come seeking revenge for the sentencing of his sister for civil disobedience. It is a stomach-turning appraisal of real racism during a turbulent storm of social upheaval. In an age of micro-aggressions and othering, this confrontation with true, systematic legally enforced segregation and racism puts this country’s residual racial tensions into stark perspective. In another story, a young white narrator is schooled in jazz by a black jazz musician. It is a sweet story about how racial divisions can be overcome through music. Again, a story which seems almost inconceivable today, where resentment and suspicion prevent any kind of productive racial dialogue and the only acceptable approach for white authors in the racial sphere is groveling and self-loathing.
A few of the stories describe the expat life in small-town Mexico and the relatively superficial drama which bubbles up between denizens of a writer’s community. It sounds like a pretty nice way to pass the time. Having served his country honorably, Marsh earned his Beachhead in Bohemia, smoking a little dope, drinking rum and lemonade, cautiously accepting the massive social changes erupting around him, and typing these stories which memorialize that era. It’s an entertaining collection which feels emblematic of the times. Times which were a little more hopeful and optimistic. Where one could be liberal without wanting to burn down America. Where one could be critical of our national failings and yet still patriotic. It’s an outlook which envisions a path to unity and acceptance, a path we seem to have entirely abandoned not too long ago.
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