SISTEMA DE CONSUMO DE AIRE

Besides Petry’s druggist’s conviction of his own normalcy in A Country Place, he is incidentally also “in a better position to write the record of what took place here than almost anyone else” because of his point of view as the country place’s medium white male

pharmacist; indeed, he is confident that he “can tell you with a fair degree of accuracy what [Glory Roane] thinks about when she wakes up in the morning” (4, 6). As reviewers repeatedly pointed out, however, his explanation for the preeminence of his perspective on the story of Johnnie and Glory Roane in Lennox is weak and unsatisfying. The moments in which the narrator asserts himself are jarring: one description of Mrs. Gramby and Mrs. Roane’s catching Glory cheating on Johnnie , in which the narrator discloses Mrs. Gramby’s personal secret thoughts for upwards of two pages, hums along smoothly if one imagines an omniscient narrator; but, by the druggist’s own account of his conversation with The Weasel, who

supposedly informed him about the event, he had no reason to suppose that Mrs. Gramby was ruminating silently about Johnnie’s “harlot for a wife,” her late husband, her son, or the

depression of aging (89). One common interpretation of Petry’s choice of the druggist as her narrator is that she meant to use him as a stand-in for some sort of universality. Reader and critical resistance to her book then stems from white indignance at a black woman writing about

white people and black disinterest in “literary passing,” as Laura Dubek put it (56).

As Emily Bernard argued in her essay “‘Raceless’ Narratives,” authority was a point of anxiety for Petry: Simon and Schuster, of the 1920s generation of publishing houses, took great pains to include several blurbs from various sources which detailed Petry’s qualifications to write a novel about white people in a white New England town, giving brief accounts of her similar birth and upbringing. And almost every review of A Country Place, as well as her headnote in the anthology of essays she contributed to that same year, includes a seeming non-sequitur about Petry’s novel taking shape while her husband was overseas fighting in the war.

Though Country’s plot hinges on Johnnie’s deployment and return from fighting in World War II, Petry doesn’t claim any autobiographical connection to his cheating wife on the homefront.

Petry reflects on her authorial authority in an essay for an anthology edited by Helen Hunt, itself put out by the Literary Guild as a self-reflexive guide to midcentury American literature by some of its most prominent contributors. Petry’s status as the best-selling author of The Street meant that her opinion of what constitutes quality fiction was valued, despite the disappointing numbers for A Country Place and The Narrows; the former was still a British Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and both were still reviewed in all the major outlets.

Yet Petry’s essay, “The Novel as Social Criticism” isn’t so much a prescription for midcentury fiction as an articulation of the virtues and pitfalls of protest through fiction. Petry was uncomfortable with the extent to which people assumed she was an expert on the Harlem neighborhoods she wrote about in The Street, that they seemed to treat her novel as sociological research instead of a work of art. After writing it, Petry was surprised that she would be presumed to be an expert on the novel’s topic, beyond the characters she created in her story.

In the case of A Country Place, however, Petry’s qualifications as a worthy observant of small-town New England life required continual affirmation; as Bernard puts it, by preemptively

“addressing readers’ possible anxieties . . . Petry’s publishers effectively construct those anxieties and legitimize them” (98). Houghton Mifflin’s efforts to cultivate an audience for the book through its advertising copy and paratextual cues, such as its dust jacket littered with praise and instructions for appreciating A Country Place, failed to do justice to the book’s context, and to its argument: as Bernard figures it, they tried to present the book as “raceless”—

a designation for white literature written by black authors which Bernard persuasively demonstrates is impossible. Thus, no audience was found for A Country Place.

Yet I don’t think anxiety over Petry’s authority tells the whole story about A Country Place: Dubek, for example, asserts that the black and other nonwhite characters in A Country Place are “completely devoid of black cultural politics and practical lived experience” (57), yet

Neola, Mrs. Gramby’s black maid and an eventual principal beneficiary of her will, has a robust inner life, and the novel’s conclusion rests on a recognition of the systemic inequalities that have kept her in domestic servitude. Mrs. Gramby leaves her house not to her son and scheming daughter-in-law, but to Neola, Portulacca, and Cook, to whom it rightfully belongs as the people who maintained and cared for it. Rather, I think the struggle for readers was a combination of Houghton’s failure to competently market the book to black audiences the Bernard outlined and Petry’s unwillingness to reassure bourgeois readers of their competence in consuming and telling stories.

Five years before A Country Place’s release, Mary McCarthy had published the much-praised The Company She Keeps—a novel also about an adulterous wife, and also with constantly

shifting points of view. But the key difference between the shifts in point of view in The

Company She Keeps versus A Country Place is that, no matter how many times McCarthy changes

the narrator’s point of view, readers are continually guided through, let into the story by her humor, which Carol Batker thoroughly examines in Playing Smart. Chapter titles like “A Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man,” which follows the coming of age of a pretentious, quasi-celebrity culture critic, serve as a clear signal to the well-read among McCarthy’s audience who might be familiar with James Joyce’s autobiographical work. According to Batker, such antimodernist asides and the “wit” with which she deployed them folded her into midcentury middlebrow culture (146). In The Company She Keeps, McCarthy skewers the

pretensions of the American intelligentsia through her characters’ droll, semi-ironic

conversations about communism, poetry, and war, and the reader is always in on the joke.

Sarcastic capitalization in passages such as “She and the Young Man began to tell each other in breathless and literary style that The Situation Was Impossible, and Things Couldn’t Go On This Way Any Longer” (7) lets readers in, inviting them to laugh at the expense of the characters.

Petry’s novel, by contrast, keeps readers out. The obvious unreliability of the semi-omniscient first-person narrator creates distance rather than closeness; it puts readers in the uneasy position of not knowing who the fool is. What reviewers interpreted as “illogic” in Petry’s novel may actually have been a direct challenge to readers’ perceptions of the neutrality of whiteness and maleness. Despite his confidence in himself as a dispassionate observer, readers see that he doesn’t have the insight—or authority—that he claims his “average”-ness gives him, where “average” is further broken down into white, male, and “having a prejudice

against women” (1). By contrast, the antiracism in McCarthy’s novel affirms racially privileged perceptions of how race and racism work; scenes depict white elitists casually tossing out racial slurs, and the jaded white protagonist is herself prone to uncharitable ruminations on nonwhite people as monolithic groups, but their bigotry is presented as yet another iteration of their foolish arrogance by a winking omniscient narrator sharing an eyeroll with readers, as if the nonsense of systemic racism has been well-mastered by the intelligent general interest reader who bought McCarthy’s books. Petry forecloses the possibility for white—for any—readers to align themselves with her through her anti-narrator. But prompting skepticism of an obviously weak narrator who cites only his constituent identity markers as his qualifications in A Country Place has implications for the proliferation of other, similar narrators—say, a narrator like Nick

Carraway and his opening treatise on his credentials as an objective observer of the intrigue that plagued the supposedly less-average people around him. Though A Country Place could be considered a failure of middlebrowism, the conditions and process of its failure reveal much about what postwar middlebrow audiences found important—for what Petry got wrong was that ever-important balance between criticism and affirmation of the American middle class.