For the youth of the sixties who remained outside the general reaches of a vibrating, rebellious youth culture, the decade meant death in Vietnam, mutilation, bad dreams, drug addiction, the bad faith of corrupted authority, and, at the least, a weird and agitating confusion of values. President Carter’s campaign made an effort to give voice to the youth who accommodated the sixties, those who agreed with the old values in peace and war, those who suffered; but it was disheartening to realize how little he could find to say, how vague and unreal were the consolations, the approbations. If sacrifice is not to be praised as a value based upon its objectives, the gratitude of authority is therefore bound to be mixed with shame and to come forth merely as rhetoric.
Casualties of every spiritual and personal nature lay about as the legacy of the sixties. Authorities experienced much of the decade as a form of insult and fell into a state of paranoia. It was only by accident that the paranoids were removed from the domination of the state and from the determination to corrupt many of its institutions.
On the other side, the agitated scrutiny directed in the sixties to the arrangements of society discovered many pieties and hypocrisies which had claimed the aspect of eternity but which were, in fact, mere prejudices and matters of unexamined convenience. Many benign and practical refusals and reversals marked the period—the questioning of unnecessary, self-serving authority in the home and in institutions, the pure hopes of the Civil Rights Movement. Informalities of all sorts, trivial and important, could, it turned out, be more or less painlessly accepted and removed from the domain of social oppression. Tolerance of deviation, acceptance of a pluralism long ago established by ocular evidence, concern for the integrity and endurance of nature, ridicule of the endless consumption of redundant goods, personal relations, masculine presumption, the old and the young—the mere listing of customs and tyrannies challenged in the sixties is, as Chaucer said, like “trying to catch the wind in a net.”
The children of the sixties had been brought up in the fifties and no doubt this earlier, seemingly plausible and hopeful, period floated about parent and child like an ectoplasmic memory. The fifties—they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy: a handsome young couple, with two or three children, a station wagon, a large dog, a house and a summer house, a great deal of picnicking and camping together.
For the middle class the fifties passed in a dream, a dream in which benevolent wishes for oneself were not thought of as always hostile to the enlarging possibilities of others. The treasured child would do well in school and the psychiatrist could be summoned for the troubled. The suburbs offered the space and grass that would bless family existence. The cars and the second cars were symbols of power over one’s life, as anyone can see who looks at the gleaming chariots that decorate the filthy, blasted streets of the ghettos.
The sixties seemed to grow, nationally and personally, upon the beguiling confidence of the decade just past. Wars to establish credibility are for the prosperous. Time was not slow, however, but speeded up, unreal, very much like time in the air; by the late sixties the happy child was scarcely to be distinguished as he went into his teens from the quarrelsome one. Complacent parents had, after all, expected more than they realized, more of their children and more of each other. And so a decade was only ten years. And a new year could be more like a tornado uprooting the grass than another period of growth.
But how real the sixties were, how dreadfully memorable the horrors, how haunting the alterations, everywhere, in feeling, in belief. Already the receding years have character, violently ambivalent, and beyond repeal. And how American, one is tempted to insist. In what way? Perhaps in the way destruction was created out of the pleasures of plentitude, assassinations out of the riveting excitements of leadership, diminishment out of a manic sense of expansiveness. What went down were people here, whole countries far away, and a few of the unnecessary follies that had been sitting in our lives like memorial plaques on the mantelpiece.
A strange decade indeed. How is one to set a value upon the sensible pleasures of “informality” and the limited liberation of maligned groups against the slaughter of people? And what is the historical connection, finally? The connection between the rights of personal style in dress and living arrangements, the right to homosexuality, to marihuana, and the present nightmare in Cambodia? It was a terrifying decade, anarchic, brutal—and fortunately for all of us, the saving energy of a profound protest, sustained by youth and a few older allies, a protest against dehumanization, military control, political lying, and power madness.
The 1970s have passed their zenith. Did they take place—this handful of years—somewhere else, in another land, inside the house, the head? Fatigue and recession, cold winters and expensive heat, resignations and disgrace. Quietism, inner peace, having their turn, as if history were a concert program, some long and some short selections, a few modern and the steady traditional. For young people, it is common to say that things have settled down. Down is the key: accommodation, docility, depression of spirit.
Many people are going to law school, searching, one supposes, for the little opening, the ray of sun at the mouth of the cave. It does not seem possible that what our world needs is a generation of new young lawyers. In certain respects what is being honored, at least by the approving adults, is not always the actual profession so much as the sign of a willingness to begin and to persevere to the end for a practical purpose, to memorize, to master a process without the demands for the gratifications of supreme interest at each moment along the way. Yet, out there at the end are the litigious anxieties of the corporate world to which whole young lives are to be prosperously dedicated and consumed.
Advanced studies in the humanities are another matter. They are felt to be impractical—and that means that society does not find them necessary. There are not only enough of you scholars, it says, there are too many. To go on in the study of literature, philosophy, or history can be a personal passion, but as a profession it depends upon someone out there to teach and a supply of teachers in a reasonable relation to the waiting learners. At the present time, the Ph.D.s remind one of the feverish, superfluous clerks in Russian literature, anxious persons floating in a menacing void, waving their supererogatory diplomas. It is not quite clear that to come to the end of one’s college years is to have arrived anywhere.
The seventies have not been free of definition; even drift has its direction. Intimacy, the validation of the self in a narrow, intense relation with a few others, or one other, is seen by many thinkers as a definition of our period. Very few of those who do the naming are pleased with the turn of the wheel. It is not the activism of the sixties that is mourned by conventional commentators but rather a wish for a more aggressive, outward-looking intrusion of the individual ego into the realities of power, into concern for a material grasp of self-interest rather than the vaporous transcendence of self-absorption.
The past reclaimed as an image, the opacity of life lightened by dichotomies, the fall and the rise. Our own time: “It is the localizing of human experience, so that what is close to the immediate circumstances of life is paramount.” The quotation is from Richard Sennett’s ambitious book called The Fall of Public Man, a fall which led naturally to the elevation of private man, ourselves, and “The Tyrannies of Intimacy.”
The public life, as Sennett somewhat vaguely reconstructs its lost shape, was lived out of a rich variety of experiences and acceptances largely impersonal. The life of the city was possible then; intimacy, however, lives out of a fear of the unknown and the different and allows the self to retreat, nervously, into absorption in the private. Finally, one cannot in present history know others unless one knows them in a fearful closeness, accepts them as part of the returning reassurance of looking into a mirror. It is the nature of intimacy to be unattainable, a mood trembling with anxieties and insecurities because the self is insatiable. The
city, along with many other things, dies, frozen by the retreat from the public domain.
Sennett’s book is an abstruse effort in cultural history, designed to reach its destination—contemporary “narcissism.” Narcissism, awareness, intimacy, new consciousness—these terms appear again and again in theoretical and autobiographical descriptions of the seventies. The words are strikingly varied in quality and seriousness—the least “serious” usually being revelations and transcendencies achieved in a few balmy autobiographies, the very process of “success” providing the despairing material of the more distant and critical theoreticians.
The self’s unanchored demand for security and relief from psychological unease dominates the inhabitants of Christopher Lasch’s brilliant essays on the “narcissist society.” (It is part of the puzzle of current writing on the elusive present that Sennett’s reign of private man is in many respects another way of describing Lasch’s “The Waning of Private Life.” “Private life” in Lasch’s work appears to represent roughly what has been called “family life.”) About the ubiquitous drift to narcissism, Lasch writes, “Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to ‘relate,’ overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure.’ ”
The cultural analyst, Philip Rieff, has assumed the present under the notion of the “triumph of the therapeutic”—the hunger for personal satisfaction that imposes upon the will the privilege or the burden of escaping painful feelings. The “therapeutic” (strangely, at times Rieff speaks of it, or to it, as “him”), in the writing of the often-hectoring Rieff, means many things, among them that ideas, emotions, experiences take their moral and social value from how they make you feel. The contemporary soul escapes from anxiety, duty, orderly thought by means of therapy and by therapeutic assaults upon intellectual and social authority. All of these writers, naming the not-quite-measurable sense of the present, are different in tone and in the atmosphere of recommendation, warning, regret that is the surrounding mist of the intellectual, political, and temperamental inclination of the individual writer at his desk. There is not doubt that they all prefigure (in Rieff’s case) and describe one phenomenon of the seventies—the demonic acceleration of investments in gurus, encounters, magical healings, diets, transcendencies and transformations that compete, like varieties of aspirin, for the remission of aches of the mind and psyche.
Life at home, domestic drama, sexual warfare are part of history, and the matter of fiction. Divorce statistics are little figures of decline that reveal more than mere legal possibility and fact. The numbers are rich in attitudes, assumptions, hopes and lost hopes. It is not necessary to seek a divorce in order to live out personally the deepest skepticisms about the future of marriage. Irony about romantic love is the inescapable soil of existence upon which both marriage and divorce grow simultaneously, shooting up in the same season like plants in the garden.
Irony represents the recognition of the shortened life of the feelings. It says that the attachment to a particular person, even the legal attachment, defines the moment or the years but is far from being the key to the future. Disruption may represent failure, but it also represents the sweet boundaries of new hopes. If we can trust fiction and film, our period is, like that of Restoration drama, comic.
An abundance of cynical wit and coarseness are the necessary conditions for verisimilitude about prevailing manners. In speaking of the cynical and coarse one is not investing the words with moral outrage; they are instead descriptive. With the appearance of a large number of licentious works by women, even the cuckold has returned as a familiar figure in literature. Certain types return and certain are lost forever, figures such as the awkward, trusting ingénue or country girl of the Restoration period. Don Giovanni’s “mille e tre,” the once singular arithmetic of the frenzied aristocrat, appears as a natural accumulation of the normal sexual exuberance of men and women freed, instructed, and determined.
The comic destinations of romantic love are shown in Saul Bellow’s last novel. In Humboldt’s Gift, the most engaging of the novel’s female characters, Renata, leaves the intellectual, Citrine, to marry a mortician. In Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, the hero sighs and says it sometimes occurs to him that he got married so that he could then be divorced.
Ennui is an attendant of irony. Andy Warhol, the painter, said about his decision to abandon his emotional and sexual life: “I was happy to see it go.” Love with its ancient distresses cannot be removed from the landscape by fashion. It cannot be separated from power, for one thing. Nevertheless, the pains of rejection and loss, representing as they do interferences encountered by the individual will, are not sympathetically understood as sufferings to be endured. And in no way does such suffering take on any of the sweetness of fidelity injured, loyalty degraded.
Improvisation, moving on, substitution, defiance, inner healing—characteristics of the strategies by which a sexually relaxed society copes with regret and denial—have a moral dominance in matters of painful love. A broken heart, caressed too long, is a dishonor often seen as a weapon of revenge, manipulation. “Anger” is the word psychiatrists give to assertions of the anguish of love.
Sex, sex—what good does it do anyone to “study” more and better orgasms, to open forbidden orifices, to experiment, to put himself into the satisfaction laboratory, the intensive care ward of “fulfillment.” The body is a poor vessel for transcendence. Satiety, in life, is quick and inevitable. The return of anxiety, debts, bad luck, age, work, thought, interest in the passing scene, ambition, anger cannot be deferred by lovemaking. The consolations of sex are fixed and just what they have always been.
In the seventies sex has become information, about yourself, about others, about yourself in relation to others. The practices of “polling”—one manner of invading or pretending to invade the public mind—works here in the interest of sexual technique and attitude, giving a quasi-consensus, often to nothing more than the mere practice of polling itself. Questionnaires, reports, new studies, “probing surveys” (sic), the “real” truth about women, homosexuality, premarital and postmarital intercourse, about changing views and changing positions. These dubious statistics are an industry, and like the manufacture of other products there is little worry about repetition, need, accuracy, or significance. The title of each new book is very much like a new brand name for an old offering.
The most depressing part of the sexual information business is that, in the way of commerce, it is offered for our health and reassurance. Pessimism, naturally, does not sell, nor does skepticism—that, one assumes, the poor consumer can provide for himself, from his own experience. In the books and articles conclusions never fail to liberate, and if there is nothing new, whatever exists takes value from its mere occurrence, that is, if one believes the surveys give any true picture of contemporary sexual life. Piety, exploitation, complacency, triviality, and spurious objectivity deface these scrofulous enterprises.
Sexual Behavior in the 1970s is a study exposed to the public by Morton Hunt on behalf of the Playboy Foundation. The pastoral note on which the study ends is typical of this kind of work. “The changes that are taking place are none the less important and profound for taking place within the culture rather than breaking away from it; indeed, they may be more valuable than total sexual radicalism would be. For while they are bringing so much that is pleasurable, healthful and enriching into American life, they are doing so without destroying emotional values we have rightly prized, and without demolishing institutions necessary to the stability of society itself.” More valuable, pleasurable, healthful, emotional values, stability of society. The sadness, the corruption, the meaninglessness of all this is one aspect of the 1970s.
To think of the family today is bewildering because
the classes are so far apart in the scenery in which daily life takes place. For those in the light the uncertainties have to do with hanging on, imagining the future, imagining if possible the meaning of the generations, of youth and old age, money, and the menace of reduction. In the darkness below, within the family there are joblessness, crime, madness, cruelty, and despair. It is not easy to remember that these scenes are part of the same play.
When the politicians, the candidates, speak of the “poor” and the unemployed, of those on welfare, they are being no more empty than the rest of us in being unable to convey any sense of the experience of the condition, the misery and horror. There is still an inclination to see the poor in previous images, perhaps the more consoling ones of the 1930s: a wrinkled face, battered but benign; a worn body in which Christian doctrine still circulates in the veins; young families in decaying bungalows with an unpaid-for car in the drive. The sharecropper, the Okie, the miner, the laid-off factory force, memories from one’s own family. Television, magical as it is for certain events in real life, cannot fully picture on its small frame the slums of the city, the menacing breakdown, the insanity, the brutality, the isolation. What has become unimaginable exists in images of fear, hatred, and withdrawal. Fear is sanctioned just now because there is much to be afraid of.
One thing that distorts our comprehension of the life of the poor is that on the street, in the supermarket, the marvelous disguise of the mass-produced American clothes gives a plausible surface, almost a shine, to what is really implausible and dark. On the evening news, the young thief or killer in his sneakers, his jacket, his jeans; his family in turtlenecks, jerseys. Together they appear in a state of health, often beautiful, well provided for, their clear and startling contemporaneity like a miraculous mask.
In the city slums it is the houses, the rooms, the halls, the very walls that define the actual life. It is here that everything necessary and hospitable to a decent life is lacking. This is home and family and relationship. It is here, inside, that deformations are so pervasive and inescapable, here that the devastations of character and purpose grow. Society is never asked to experience directly the misery and its attendant, hidden rages and abusive idleness.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 31