The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  So big was Humphrey Bogart in his day that, Dinerstein reports, Albert Camus was pleased to be told he resembled the actor, not knowing apparently that Bogie wore a hairpiece and, according to Billy Wilder, emitted spittle when he spoke. (Jean-Paul Sartre, I was amused to learn from Dinerstein’s book, fantasized that he was Gary Cooper. A better example of what is known as “a stretch” is unavailable.) Camus, who as a member of the French Resistance to the Nazis was a genuine, and not merely a movie, hero, was frequently photographed in the standard film noir trench coat, a half-smoked cigarette pending from his mouth—pure Bogie à la française.

  Camus, Sartre, & Co. get a lengthy chapter in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, under the title “Albert Camus and the Birth of Existential Cool.” But how cool was existentialism, which had a vogue in the 1950s, a time when American intellectuals looked to France for their cultural enrichment? “Existentialism was a theory,” Dinerstein writes, lapsing into the abstraction to which he too often falls victim, “of individual response to both religious hypocrisy and the randomness of the universe, both the failures of European superiority and the collateral damage of corporate capitalism.”

  As a body of philosophy, if anything so muddled and vague could qualify as such, existentialism “found resonance in the United States with intellectuals, artists, rogue leftists, college students, theatergoers, and self-conscious rebels.” Existentialism, the philosophy of the absurdity of existence, provided grist for the darkness of Samuel Beckett’s plays, Richard Wright’s later novels (Ralph Ellison thought Wright “had lost himself, his art, and his culture by casting his lot with the alien philosophy of existentialism”), and much of the higher-falutin’ gibberish of Norman Mailer. Dinerstein labors, not entirely successfully, to connect what he calls “an organic American existentialism” to African-American blues, soul, later jazz, and rock ’n’ roll.

  Women get short shrift in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. But then, cool is not a standard female quality, nor a much desired (or for that matter needed) one. Dinerstein mentions, almost in passing, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne, and Anita O’Day as exemplars of female cool. He gives more attention to Billie Holiday—first called Lady Day by Lester Young—whose life, much sadder than it was cool, ended when she was 44, cirrhosis her killer.

  Simone de Beauvoir is the woman who gets more attention than any other. She and Jean-Paul Sartre were, of course, in Dinerstein’s phrase, “existentialism’s first couple.” But the closer the camera bears in on their lives, the less cool they seem. Dinerstein neglects to mention that Sartre was one of the world’s true savant-idiots: one of those brilliant minds that gets all the important things wrong, in his case the beneficence of the Soviet Union, the cure for anti-Semitism, and much else. He was also, in his spare time, an earnest lecher: five feet tall, with a bulging right eye and less than scrupulous about hygiene, with Beauvoir’s help Sartre lured various young women into his untidy bed; some first had lesbian affairs with her. Sartre and Beauvoir, though never married, were thought to have an open arrangement; but in later years her job was to lure young women, students, and others who had fallen under her influence into sexual relations with the troll-like Sartre. They would later recount these adventures in detailed letters to each other. Simone de Beauvoir, in fact, functioned as (in the cant phrase) Sartre’s “enabler.” More precisely, she was his pimp—not cool, not in the least; squalid, rather, sordid in the extreme.

  The Beats, for Dinerstein, are notably cool, with Jack Kerouac’s writing, a form of “blowing,” or jazz performance. Dinerstein is high, if such an adjective may be called into service on this subject, on Jack Kerouac. “Kerouac,” he writes, “brought together Zen concepts, jazz practice, blues poetics, and European modernist ideals into a new synthesis for American literature.” He holds that the literary success of the Beats was due in part to their calling out

  the West’s dysfunction: the distinction between its claimed religious precepts and its immoral actions, between its soapbox morality and pragmatic capitalism, between its abstract Enlightenment values and its seeming technological death wish.

  The fact is that the Beats formed no “synthesis for American literature,” and they achieved nothing like a literary success. Taken up by Time as gaudy good copy, they belong (as was said of the Sitwells) less to the history of literature than to the history of publicity. Surely no single figure was less cool than the boisterous, needy, publicity-hungry Allen Ginsberg humming Zen mantras in a soiled sheet.

  Joel Dinerstein has a regrettably strong taste for abstraction. Such a taste is needed to commit such sentences (and many similar ones pop up in his pages) as “With the temporary evisceration of economic uncertainty came a rejuvenation of national confidence and American triumphalism” and “Here we see the rise of a neoliberal ideology that combines or conflates technological rationalism with a neo-Christian ethos and telos.” He is big on Marxian “commodification” and seems to be much worried about “the consumer society,” as if in the modern world there were any other kind. The words “charisma” and “valorization” get a good workout in his pages, and if I had $10 for every time Dinerstein uses the word “iconic,” my great-grandchildren would never have to work.

  “Frank Sinatra,” he writes, “became the primary avatar of cool renewal for the wartime generation and shifted its cultural imagination from past to future with the onset of national prosperity.” Dinerstein has gathered much amusing material about Sinatra. The bandleader Harry James, for example, wanted him to change his name to “Frankie Satin.” Sinatra became the hero of “swingers”—not an entirely enviable, let alone cool, audience to have in thrall.

  “Dean Martin,” Dinerstein writes, “played an equal role in shifting a generation’s ideal from the solitary consciousness of Hemingway’s existential cool to the swinger’s playboy bacchanalia.” On the cool scale, Dean Martin weighs in more heavily than Sinatra: Utterly independent, he genuinely seemed not to have given a rat’s rump about anything. This would include his friend Frank Sinatra’s propensity to suck up to the powerful—the Mafia, the Kennedys, finally the Reagans—which Martin pointed out and claimed simply not to understand. But anyone with any knowledge of Sinatra’s life without a microphone in his hand will find it difficult to think well of him, for the stories of his bullying, his meanness, and cruelty, are manifold. “Frank saved my life one night in a parking lot in Las Vegas,” Don Rickles joked. “He said, ‘That’s enough, boys.’”

  The next wall in Dinerstein’s gallery of the cool consists of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis (last name available on request). Cool, in other words, is now to be found in jeans and leather jackets and often seated on motorcycles (varoom, varoom). Cool becomes openly, though not very precisely, rebellious. When in The Wild One (1953), the Brando character is asked what he is rebelling against, he answers, “Whaddya got?” James Dean’s great breakthrough was in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The problem, according to Dinerstein, now shifts to “the tensions of [the] inner life.” Cool suddenly has a psychotherapeutic side. Marlon Brando cries in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)—something, surely, Humphrey Bogart never would have done. Dinerstein refers to Brando as “therapeutic man,” noting that, among the cool, “neurosis was no longer suppressed but expressed, a sign of how deeply psychoanalysis had penetrated aesthetic and intellectual communities.”

  James Dean and Elvis apparently were in awe of Marlon Brando, as Bob Dylan and John Lennon would come to be of Elvis. Brando and Dean, Dinerstein reports, “were gay icons and had bisexual relationships.” Brando would in later years take on enough weight to pass as Orson Welles’s twin; Elvis ended his days a pillhead nearly too fat to squeeze into his glittering stage costumes. These new cool rebels did not grow old coolly. James Dean, after appearing in three dud movies (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Giant) made the savvy career move of dying at 24 by crashing his speeding Porsche, and thus allowing Dinerstein to
call him “postwar cool’s Keats or Rimbaud”—minus, he neglects to add, the talent. Cool would henceforth remain an option open exclusively to the young.

  The strongest chapter in The Origins of Postwar Cool is that on Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun (1959), who sounded the buzzer signifying the end of cool. She attacked the Beats, saying “they have made a crummy revolt, a revolt that has not added up to a hill of beans.” She wrote a play, Les Blancs, mocking Jean Genet’s The Blacks for its ultimate emptiness. And while she was at it, she claimed that Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and Albert Camus, with their literary existentialism, were artistic failures. She felt that the angst about the specter of nuclear war, which supposedly affected entire generations, was a fraud: “As a playwright, civil rights activist, and feminist,” Dinerstein writes, “Lorraine Hansberry represents the end of existential cool and the onset of a period of participatory social change often just called the ’60s.” Perhaps only a black, bisexual woman married to a Jewish husband could have brought all this off.

  If one didn’t look too closely at the squalor behind the scenes during his White House days, John F. Kennedy would seem to have qualified as cool. In a famous-in-its-day Esquire article, Norman Mailer, who perhaps wrote and said more stupid things than any writer in the past century, styled Kennedy “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Dinerstein calls Kennedy’s death “the most transformative” of all in the postwar era. It now begins to look as if all that John F. Kennedy (who preferred to go hatless) transformed was the sale of men’s fedoras.

  The hippie revolution was implacably youthful—“Never trust anyone over 30” was one of its shibboleths—and the heir of the coarser remnants of cool. “In the mid-1960s,” Dinerstein writes,

  the mask of cool exploded out of its black and Beat phases [and] the inflection of rebellion moved away from African-American culture towards a new counterculture and its emphasis on drugs, a value on personal authenticity, and an earthier lifestyle.

  Yet the leaders of the counterculture—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis—were not cool in any way that Lester Young, the phenomenon’s inventor, would have recognized.

  Dinerstein’s final definition of cool is the muzzy one of “a subconscious method for negotiating identity in modernity through popular culture.” Yet in the realm of popular culture, perhaps the last figures to qualify as cool were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Brad Pitt, with his sloppy marriages, certainly isn’t cool, nor is George Clooney. No rapper I know of qualifies as cool, including the fellow who calls himself LL Cool J. Yet, Dinerstein holds,

  Cool has not faded, but its meanings have morphed with every generation . . . and to consider or call someone cool remains the supreme compliment of American and global culture—even as it has been nearly emptied of generational and ideological conflict, of artistic risk and vision, of old transgressions and social change.

  The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, though written to vaunt the richness of the concept of cool and its possessors, has had, at least on this reader, quite the opposite effect. Apart from those early black jazz musicians who required the mask of cool to face a cruelly hostile world, cool turns out to have been the preoccupation, chiefly, of less-than-first-rate writers, shoddy thinkers, and poseurs generally. Undreamt of in the philosophy of those who have ardently strained after the appearance of cool, courage, kindness, generosity, and natural refinement are the things that are, and always have been, truly cool.

  The Sixties

  (2017)

  It’s a Rorschach test: Say what you think of the 1960s and you reveal a great deal about yourself.

  For some, the sixties were a time of splendid creative disorder, in which a rigid cultural and impossible political life underwent critical and long-needed change. The Establishment, that congeries of social, economic, and political power connections, was everywhere under attack. During these years civil rights were expanded, especially for blacks in the segregated south. Women’s rights beyond the suffrage were beginning to be recognized. Sexuality (with the important aid of the birth-control pill) was freed from its old middle-class constraints and straitjacketed morality. Windows were everywhere flung open. People could at last breathe in the fullness of life.

  For others, the sixties were hell on earth. Disruptive protest was endemic. Drug experiments often brought permanent derangement or death by overdose to the young. In the sexual realm, orgiastic squalor was deemed normal and sex itself became a trivial act. Authority was everywhere undermined, as tradition was spat upon under the banner of glib shibboleths: do your own thing, change the paradigm, don’t trust anyone over 30. All this in the name of . . . what—anarchy, a misguided notion of democratic values, revolution itself? The sixties, in this view, put an end to dignity, seriousness, a middle-class way of life that made the United States the splendid country it only recently was.

  The first problem confronting anyone contemplating the sixties is that the decade shows up the thinness of accounting for history by the all-too-tidy decennial category. An argument can be made that the sixties really began in 1965, with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. One can just as easily maintain that it began in the late 1950s with the black student sit-ins at lunch counters in the south in protest of immoral segregationist accommodations. Some would set the beginning of the sixties with the election in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, who ushered in a new spirit of youthfulness; for others his assassination marked the start of the sixties. The journalist Christopher Hitchens, despite his later political change, always identified himself as a soixante huitard, or man formed by 1968, the apex of sixties agitation and excitement. Many would hold that the great watershed event of the sixties was the Vietnam War, though that war was not fully engaged until 1969 and not officially ended until 1973.

  The motives behind the “student unrest”—my favorite of all euphemisms—that set its seal on the sixties are also in contention. Some argue that moral revulsion was behind the protest movements of the decade: genuine hatred of injustice in nearly all realms of American life, culminating in the deadly injustice of asking young men to die in a needless war in Southeast Asia. Others claim this is tosh, that the anti-Vietnam protests were about little more than prosperous college students protesting to save their own bottoms, perfectly willing to let working-class whites and poor blacks die in their place. As proof of their argument they note that, once the draft was abolished, the protests immediately simmered down, then ceased. Isaiah Berlin thought that the student protests in America and Europe, were chiefly the product of ennui:

  The Welfare State, prosperity, security, increasing efficiency, etc. do not attract those young who feel the need to sacrifice themselves for some worthy ideal, if possible in company with other like-minded persons, and that they are desperately searching for some form of self-expression which will cause them to swim against some sort of stream and not simply drift in a harmless way, too comfortably with it.

  At one point Berlin refers to these young as “barbarians.”

  Some say the sixties haven’t ended yet, and that the overall cultural effect of the sixties far exceeds that of the thirties, the other crucial twentieth-century decade in American life. They point to the fact that many of those who had a good sixties are now in power: in the universities, in politics, in the bureaucracy, the media, throughout the culture generally, exerting a strong sixties influence on current events. Identity politics, the prominence of victim groups (blacks, LGTBQ, et alia), the rise of multiculturalism, the democratization of the university, the ready turn to street protest, the radical change in both the constituencies and the nature of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and so much more—all of it, without great difficulty, can be accounted for as a direct legacy of the sixties.

  The key figures of the sixties are now either dead or easing into old age. Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Stokely Carmichael, Norman Mailer, Timo
thy Leary, Jane Fonda, Bob Dylan, Tom Hayden, Joan Baez, Gloria Steinem, James Baldwin—figures of protest all. Joseph Heller’s antinomian novel Catch-22, the hippie musical Hair, the movie Easy Rider, the druggier songs of the Beatles and of the Rolling Stones, all these, the most famous artistic products of the sixties, were in the main in opposition to mainstream culture. Art, though, was never the leading motif of the sixties; the politics of protest was, together with the undermining of middle-class values.

  One’s reaction to the sixties is likely to have been conditioned by one’s own personal situation during the time. Perhaps the best time to have been going through the period was in one’s twenties and the best place in one or another graduate school; to be, in other words, of an age that put one fully in the stream of life, open to physical—sexual, pharmaceutical, political—freedom and experiment, with little or nothing at stake in taking radical positions. Best, surely, during the sixties to have been unmarried and without children.

  I was myself married and with four children. I was 23 when the 1960s began and 28 in 1965, with two stepsons and two sons of my own. My stepsons were in adolescence as the decades proceeded. Lots of talk about various drugs bruited about among them and their friends; on occasion, listening in on their conversation, one might have thought them passionate chemistry majors. One of the boys living in our apartment building died from drug overdose. Pot was standard fare, the Hershey bars of the sixties generation. Schoolwork wasn’t where the action was, nor athletics. Adulthood could be put off, apparently endlessly. As a parent, responsible for bringing children safely into harbor, it was a frightening time, or so to me it seemed. I remember often thinking I was glad not to have had daughters.