Beyond 1968 (or, 2 1/2 cheers for the 1950s)
In an essay in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio offered a useful corrective to the obsession with 1968 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of that fateful year. It really was fateful, but Donadio is right to point out that much that we associate with “the Sixties” really had its origin in the 1950s. She focuses on 1958–an important year, no doubt, though one could make a case for other years as well (1956, for example, saw the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s preposterous, though immensely influential, poem Howl). “Fifty years ago,” she writes, “Eisenhower was in the White House, the country was in a recession and the American intellectual scene was crackling with energy.” Quite right, though not often acknowledged by those partisans of the Sixties whose paeans to the Purple Decade always seem to begin by running down the 1950s as a culturally and intellectually era distinguished chiefly by sexual repression, Joseph McCarthy, and an unhealthy obsession with Communism. The list Donadio offers is not, to my mind, entirely edifying, but it certainly shows that the 1950s were alive and kicking. Nineteen Fifty-eight, she notes,
the advent of everything from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” Robert Frank captured the uncertain tenor of the time in his 1958 photography book, “The Americans,” as did Jasper Johns in his 1958 painting “Three Flags,” in which he superimposed three American flags, each smaller than the next, transforming the familiar into the abstract, the iconic into the unsettled.
The good, the bad, and the malevolent, but a far cry from the usual portrait of the 1950s as a braindead wasteland. You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how “creative,” “idealistic,” and “loving” it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the “herd of independent minds.” Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical clichés; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for “love” was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.
What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, “were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.”
Donadio is chiefly interested in reminding us of the febrile cultural animation of the late Fifties. What she doesn’t say is, but what we can no see clearly with the wisdom of hindsight, is that the ideas of the Beats contained in ovo nearly all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the na‹ve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.
Indeed, the chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Sixties established themselves, virtually all resistance had been broken down. It was then that the message of the Beats gained mass appeal. Reaction to the Vietnam War probably did more than anything else to enfranchise their antinomianism, though the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution, a prime item on the agenda of the Beats. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.
In a word, the establishment of the Beat “church” was significant as a chapter in the moral and cultural degradation of our society. Regarded as a literary phenomenon, however, what the Beats produced exists chiefly as a kind of artistic antimatter. It would not be quite right to say that its value is nil, for that might imply an innocuous neutrality. What the Beats have bequeathed us is actively bad, a corrupting as well as a corrupt phenomenon. To borrow an image from the Australian philosopher David Stove, the Beats created a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”
I doubt that Donadio would agree with this assessment, but her essay is a salutary reminder 1) that the Sixties did not burst full grown from the head of Timothy Leary in 1968 and 2) the the 1950s was in fact period of great intellectual and cultural ferment.
Howl wasn’t that bad,actaully it has its good parts, what gives?
Perhaps you are in love with perpetuating the grandeur of black and white morality from the 1950′s that is so colors your view of everything. In but a cursory glance of the New Criterion I find your analyses, “your” referring to the publication as a whole, to be as dogmatic as you accuse the Beat culture of being. The New Criterion, you say is to promote ideas of high culture, and honest criticism. It seems you seek to promote traditional values, by implication of your insipid analysis of the Beats as the moral degradation of your society. You seek to declare that the new art forms emerging in this time, such as those of the works of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William s. Burroughs (who I am shocked you did not mention given your zeal) which granted have had an impact on our society since the 1950′s and the 1960′s, are in fact those which have added to what you consider moral degradation. Yet, I ask of you, what you truly consider is moral degradation? Is reflecting a time of resistance, perhaps veiled during the 1950′s, all of what the literature of the Beats, as you say, in ovo,contained, degrading? The reflection in art of the problems of drug addiction, and sexual exploration, as in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), are reflected in grotesque, vile imagery, yes…and seems willfully and consciously so, but does this not reflect an insider’s analysis of what you would probably refer to as “moral degradation,” and thus a valuable source for guarding against moral degradation? Perhaps if Naked Lunch were written as though the problem of sexual identity was exciting,or drug use romanticized as an escape as in a novel of narrative cohesiveness,if we are to use Naked Lunch as the seminal example of Beat writing, you would be correct in stating that art forms like this would lead to degradation. But the novel was written in a manner that rejects such romantic forms of the novel, (which you, at the New Criterion would perhaps favor, being advocates of high culture, of course as the Beats did wish to reject old forms that they found constrictive. Was this immediately truly accepted, were people lured in to blindingly accepting this all? As you say, there was some resistance in the 1950′s to the work of the Beats,and in the early sixties, obscenity charges against Naked Lunch and even the “critical Left’s” dismissal of the book on the same grounds. Perhaps more and more people began to gradually accept the new art forms, but to call this a chapter in the moral degradation of society seems erroneous. Of course, if nay new idea is introduced, dozens of dilletantes will attempt to echo the same views, resulting in perhaps some of the same literary techniques by Burroughs’, a resistance to war by virtue of the artist’s resistance to war, etc. But how is the social reactionary, citing the times of moral clarity, the subscriber to the ideas of maintaining the original novel form, art in the original sense, a purveyor of black and white morality any different. How is it more morally degrading to stand behind someone like Burroughs than J. Edgar Hoover? Both were men with distinguished qualities and intensely interesting sociological theories, and my bias lies with Burroughs admittedly, but is it not the evil of any cultural movement taken out of context applied to the masses in a sheep like mentality that you are truly lamenting? To call the Beats actively bad simply because they reflected a certain feeling about the country at the time is to impose cultural elitism beyond its use. Yes, mediocrity is to be avoided in the arts and culture, the constant celebrity focus in our new post-postmodern culture where everything seems to be a reflection of everything else within an enclosed spectrum. But your cultural elitism extends far beyond that. Are the Beats actively bad and mediocre because they reflected a time abstractly, with what you call the romanticization of art over life? If you define mediocrity based on the art form’s focus and its content alone, and impose that on a national level, you and you newspaper are nothing short of what Orson Welles would define as a tastemaker, (and perhaps you unabashedly admit so). There is no doubt that the 1950′s was a ferment of culture, but you yourself seem to mention the Beats as a prime example. It seems you do two things here: argue that the 1960′s was a far more conformist time than the 1950′s simply because there was not, as you claim, such a clamoring for new and different ideals, and the opposition to the Vietnam War, and also argue that the Beats, who facilitated that ferment of culture, left us with a culture that is actively bad. It seems like you’re obsession with the 1950′s leaves out the 2 and 1/2 cheers you mention, and only the witheld 1/2 cheer, (which I assume is the cheer witheld for the the Beats)shines through. The Beats are therefore not artistic antimatter,as they are given enough value to be mentioned in a textual form in your “criticism” of an article that is far more of a grandstanding for your own agenda and that of your publication than anything else. You cannot deny then that what you believe to be their destructive force must also be a creative force. You admit to this on another level, as you admit the Beats created what you call the “Beat church.” What concerns me is not artistic antimatter as you call it, the intentionally destructive, powerful work of the Beats, which you admit to by default of giving them so much attention. What concerns me is critical antimatter, forces created in a “church” of their own by social reactionaries such as yourself to demean movements of the past that do not fit your political or social beliefs, while clinging to the black and white morality of that past as a soapbox. This is not criticism, but rather self advertisement of a belief. This is far more dangerous than a work of art that you designate as antimatter. The antimatter work of art is subjective and therefore can be denied at its form level. Your analysis is your opinion offered in essay form, with your picture indicating by your horrendous yellow bow tie and large glasses that you must be taken seriously. You offer the image of an academic, present an image of credulity that I can deny based on your ludicrous analysis, but that creates a wave of New Criterion “churchgoers” who view your analysis based on your vigilance of the news and the art world, that you must know what you are talking about. I offer the claim that the Beat writers wished to further an art form, be it by offering artistic antimatter, reflecting the reality as they saw it. You simply further yourself and an unhealthy nostalgia with your horde of yellow bow tie disciples trailing behind you off a cliff into clear waters in which you will drown in an attempt to escape murky reality.
awaiting moderation…I see, even responses must be dealt with to ensure the creative perfect. This level of pretense is impressive.
I like the New Criterion. I even agree with its stance on the pathologies of the 60′s. Yet some of the music of the 60′s is a part of my nervous system. I grew up with it and have good memories associated with it. To ask me and others like me who grew up in the 60′s to ditch the music and all those memories is like asking us to cut off our right arm. No matter what the New Criterion says I’m going to get out those CD’s every now and then and take a stroll down memory lane.
the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution
Yes, because in the “good old days” in the Fifties, men, but not women, could screw around with impunity. Then the men would marry a “nice girl”.
Many men, and an astonishing number of women think that this double standard was a Good Thing.
It’s absurd to idealise the Fifties, a time when women did not have equal pay or equal rights to jobs, or over their own bodies. In fact it’s absurd to idealise any decade. But I certainly would not idealise the Sixties, though some good came out of it. Those who came to power in the Sixties have an iron grip over the minds of young people to rival anything their predecessors had. “Herd of independent minds” is spot on.