Both Chandler and Steinbeck, in radically different idioms and voices, express a redemptive optimism. They believe in truth, and they are infused with an intuition of an untarnished human goodness that the shabbiness of the world cannot extinguish.

The 1930s were a period of intellectual and cultural ferment that have much to tell us about the times in which we live now. Like ours, the period of economic misery and social dislocation caused by the great depression fostered frustration, disillusionment, and ultimately undermined many assumptions underlying and supporting social stability. We are not living in the aftermath of such economic chaos and catastrophe, but are disturbed by equally cataclysmic forces, including long-developing and now fulsome intellectual decadence, the increasing power of social media, and the arrival of artificial intelligence. This whirlwind may ultimately prove to be more profoundly destabilizing than the economic forces that drove unrest in the 1930s.

One of the most distinctive features of the 1930s was deep cynicism about human motivation and the institutional corruption it caused. This was reflected in the arts and in popular culture, both directly (as in the popularity of gangster movies and the emergence of films noirs), and indirectly in escapist confections such as glitzy MGM musicals and radio shows such as Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour.

One writer who captured the mood perfectly was Raymond Chandler, whose everyman private eye, Philip Marlowe, embodied the jaded world-weariness that held such appeal at the time. Consider the opening of Chapter Eight of arguably his finest novel, The High Window, published in 1942. “Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets.” But even in these remaining structures, “their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid over generations of dirt.” As for the people who live there, they comprise “shifty tenants,” “old men with faces like lost battles,” “women who should be young but have faces like stale beer[,]” “worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank[,] “cokies and coke peddlers[,] “people who look like nothing in particular and know it,” and so on. Thus, both the physical and moral worlds are portrayed as wholly evanescent, gradually undergoing a process of disfigurement and inevitable decay. As readers, we are invited to draw the inference that Chandler is not just describing one particularly dilapidated district of Los Angeles, but that Bunker Hill is a metaphor for the world in general. Thus, The High Window expresses a deeply pessimistic and fatalistic view of life.

But Chandler’s pessimism is complex. On the one hand, it explains Marlowe’s “hard-boiled” cynicism about peoples’ motives, slip-shod, easy dishonesty, and weakness for vice. It also justifies Marlowe’s refusal to cooperate more than is absolutely necessary with the machinery of law enforcement, which is itself corrupt. The emblematic expression of Chandler’s vision is Marlowe’s description of the “Cassidy case,” which occurs almost exactly half way through the novel, thus serving as both thematic and actual apex of the story. It involves a case in which the police purposely solved a murder incorrectly to protect the reputation of a wealthy power-broker. Marlowe throws the “Cassidy case” in the face of his antagonist, Detective-Lieutenant Breeze, to explain his unwillingness to cooperate fully with Breeze’s investigation of another murder. He states: “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth…I have a right to listen to my conscience…” Marlowe shares in the prevalent mood of his time.

But Marlowe is more than that. He also remains an outsider, unwilling to suborn himself to conspire in the moral charade of a world that is far less than it seems or claims to be. And note that Marlowe speaks of ‘souls,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘conscience.’ Despite his cynicism, Marlowe is devoted to a principle that is unsullied by corruption. Thus, he is a Quixotic outsider with a moral compass. A friend in the novel aptly describes him as a “shop-worn Galahad,” and in fact the novel’s plot ultimately requires Marlowe to rescue an innocent young woman from the ruthless and self-serving manipulation of her supposed protectress and the banality of the woman’s feckless son. Chandler is saying that beneath the moral charade is a hard, bony skeleton of truth and righteousness. This is symbolized for Chandler by the game of chess, which Marlowe loves to puzzle over. Significantly, he doesn’t play opponents, but replays famous matches by himself, trying to understand the complexity of the moves. This is a metaphor for Marlowe’s struggle to understand and negotiate the true principles moral truth.

The same combination of pessimism and idealism suffuses the single most important novel of the 1930’s, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. With scathing irony, Steinbeck borrows the deepest and most powerful religious and cultural symbol in the American psyche, pilgrimage, to tell a heart-breaking story of the unspeakable mistreatment of refugees from the Oklahoma dust bowl as they migrate to California in search of a fresh start. They are abused, exploited, brutalized, and completely forsaken in a world that provides no solace, no City on the Hill for them. And yet they endure, and even weave a web of human connection and mutual sympathy. In a healing double irony, Steinbeck suggests that the pilgrimage that matters is not the one we make through the material world, but the one that takes place within the soul of each human being. And the soul is resilient, even indestructible in its quest for meaning and human connection. The thirsty soul will be provided for, even in a monstrous world.

All of this is foreshadowed in the famous, brief vignette of a disoriented but determined turtle that finds its way across a dusty and dangerous highway. And the novel ends with perhaps the most poignant moment in all of American fiction, when Rose of Sharon , who has lost her stillborn baby, suckles a starving vagrant in a wayside barn. This culminating event is both an obvious religious symbol of death and resurrection, as well as a symbol of universal human connection. Steinbeck is saying that there is a transcendent truth that claims us all and protects us all.

Thus, both Chandler and Steinbeck, in radically different idioms and voices, express a redemptive optimism. They believe in truth, they are infused with an intuition of an untarnished human goodness that the shabbiness of the world cannot extinguish.

What do these seemingly so dissimilar novels of the pre-war era have to say to us today? First and foremost, they bring to light the dire cultural collapse of our time. Ours is a world that overwhelmingly no longer subscribes to any of the transcendent values that survived the great depression and found expression in these two novels. Rejecting all institutions as hopelessly disfigured and corrupt, rejecting all foundational principles as merely disguised expressions of the will to power, our intellectual culture has become a brittle, crass, and nihilistic brew of competing, reductivist ideologies. If we pull back the curtain, we find behind such ideologies a complete vacuum.

Somehow we must as a culture find our way back to something foundational, something that supports the possibility of shared values, at least to the extent that we can speak to one another again, and perhaps even re-weave a web of human connection. This is most obviously the case in political life. The decade of the thirties produced more than its share of political conflict, and even violence. Nor should we underestimate the depth, sharpness, and extent of criticism levelled by Chandler and Steinbeck at the predations that a relatively unregulated free and capitalist society visited upon the unfortunate and unprotected in a time of extreme crisis. But there was also a certain can-do attitude, a problem-solving willingness to work together in the toughest circumstances for the common good. This attitude fed off of the same optimism that found voice in both Chandler and Steinbeck. Without this attitude, we could never have shifted gears so quickly and successfully to prepare for the even greater threat of inevitable world war.

In short, The High Window and The Grapes of Wrath show us both what we lack and what we are capable of. They identify and articulate the cultural optimism and commitment to universal truth we must rediscover in order to replenish our spiritual resources so that we can overcome our current malaise.

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The featured image combines an image of Raymond Chandler and an image of John Steinbeck. Both images are in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.