580
JAMES GILBERT
AMERICAN DREAMS
TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE: FOURTEEN PIECES OF REPORTING
&
CRITICISM. By Renata Adler. Random House. $7.95.
THE END OF THE AMERICAN ERA. By Andrew Hacker. Atheneum. $6.50.
THE MAKING OF AN UN-AMERICAN : A DIALOGUE WITH EXPERI–
ENCE. By Paul Cowan. Viking. $6.95.
One of the problems with writing about the immediate past
is its seeming clarity and the way it acquires a single meaning. The real
past, beyond memory, is far more complex, and crisscrossed with the
arguments of historians, with old paths retrod by literary, political and
scientific revivals. Looking back, now, to the sixties, a number of as–
sumptions about our experience are very firm, while the meaning of
that experience may still escape us. But the need to know <is compelling,
hence the growing literature of "decade" evaluation.
There is no reason to believe that the sixties are any more a seminal
period in Ameri can history, as Andrew Hacker argues in his new book,
The End of the American Era,
than that those ten years contain the
whole of an experience. One could argue just as well that the current
political and cultural mood began with J ames Dean in the fifties, or
Brown
v.
Board of Education,
or with Joe McCarthy, who made intel–
lectual suicide an occupational hazard of American liberalism. But de–
spite these objections to talking about the meaning of those years in a
way we know to be subjective and perhaps even wrong, there is a nec–
essity to do it anyway.
The last ten or fifteen years have been marked by two prominent
notions among intellectuals. Many writers have felt that the essence of
the period has been the eruption of hot issues through the fissures and
seams of American political compromises. Current political language
often sounds like a new geometry developed to measure gaps and dis–
tances between groups of people. Without a climate of compromise,
politically conscious writers are more often than not' compelled to take
a position and hold ground as if under attack. Thus, Renata Adler,
entitles her book of reportage
Toward a Radical Middle,
which says very
little about her work in the sixties but quite a bit about the need to
locate on the generational battlefield.
