This chapter considers the literary ramifications of Hollywood’s global presence during the brief epoch of World War II and its immediate aftermath. For the queer American poet and film critic Parker Tyler and the Anglo-Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry, Hollywood functioned like the ordering myths employed by the high modernists. Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly (1945) and Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), works of grand self-consciously modernist ambition, took shape as the war radically altered everyday life. When defending the form of Under the Volcano to his publisher Jonathan Cape, Lowry insisted that the “book is written on numerous planes with provision made, it was my fond hope, for almost every kind of reader.” This belief resonates with film theorist Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism thesis, which hold that Hollywood films achieved dominance by meaning different things to different people. For Tyler and especially Lowry, the myth of Hollywood functions as a means of exploring an implicit theoretical problem – can a work of literature be both meaningful (i.e., authored) and open to any interpretation? – and it provides scholars one way to observe how modernism found its limits.

Chapter 5 considers the implications of modernist efforts to rethink notions of gender and creative autonomy for our understanding of genius. Although some writers and artists imagined androgyny as something a man and woman could achieve together, the same does not appear to have been true of genius, which remains for the modernists a phenomenon exhibited or embodied by individuals. I contend that the modernists’ own practice of cross-sex collaboration challenges this conception, as evidenced by two examples: the play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the novel Under the Volcano, written by Malcolm Lowry with significant input from his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. Neither of these masterpieces could have been realized by just one of its coauthors alone, yet no member of either couple thought of that couple itself as “a genius.” This limitation on the conception of genius came with significant personal costs and misrepresents the true nature of the writers’ powerful displays of joint creativity. Genius, I conclude, is not solely the provenance of individuals but an invaluable human capacity that can draw strength from both male and female participation.