Terrible Honesty (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

In THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, published in 1977, Ann Douglas examined the textures and tensions of Victorian life, documenting the matriarchal ethos operating in the areas of reform, theology, literature, and the definition of gender in the nineteenth century. She continues this exploration in TERRIBLE HONESTY, locating her study, not in New England this time, but in New York. As in her first work, this sequel examines the ways in which Americans tried to free themselves from what Douglas calls “the Titaness, the Mother God of the Victorian era.”

The title and subtitle of this massive study of the Big Apple in the 1920’s indicate the cultural context of the work. Alluding to the planned (though never written) autobiography of writer and wit Dorothy Parker, Douglas notes that the title of that book—MONGREL—could refer not only to Parker’s mixed Jewish and WASP heritage but also to the racially and ethnically mixed “mongrel” Manhattan. In another allusion, Douglas notes that detective writer Raymond Chandler said that “all writers are a little crazy but if they are any good they have a kind of terrible honesty.” Thus Douglas’ book is about a New York City in which artists of various kinds—from Louis Armstrong to Harry Houdini to Eugene O’Neill—exerted their influence to expose unpleasant truths, to focus on the facts to speak and act and perform and create with a “terrible honesty.”

The hundreds of creators included in this book are not simply united in an effort to design a new American culture, freed from the restrictions of their historical predecessors. They are also united in their relationship to New York City, the world’s most powerful city during this time period. In the 1920’s, America was for the first time in its history an urban nation, and New York was the largest city in that urban nation. Reading the stories of significant New Yorkers and the thousands of anecdotes about them, one sees the dual purpose of this book: to describe the larger American emancipation from Europe and the nineteenth century and to examine the African American liberation movement within that larger context.

Sources for Further Study

American Heritage. XLVI, April, 1995, p. 133.

Booklist. XCI, February 15, 1995, p. 1055.

Library Journal. CXX, February 15, 1995, p. 166.

The New York Review of Books. XLII, April 20, 1995, p. 50.

The New York Times Book Review. C, February 12, 1995, p. 1.

The New Yorker. LXXI, March 27, 1995, p. 102.

Newsweek. CXXV, March 13, 1995, p. 68.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLI, December 5, 1994, p. 59.

San Francisco Review of Books. XX, May, 1995, p. 42.

Time. CXLV, March 27, 1995, p. 76.

The Washington Post Book World. XXV, February 5, 1995, p. 3.