Morris Dickstein
COLD WAR BLUES:
Notes on the Culture of the Fifties
I.
The recurrent flurries of nostalgia for the 1950s -- and
the hovering threat that we might yet
become
the 1950s -- have
not yet issued in any deep interest in what actually happened
then; I don't mean the names and dates but what life felt like to
those who were there. As the sixties recede and go out of fashion,
the fifties have become the blank screen on which many project
fantasies of an alternative, as the thirties were then to some who
cared about alternatives.
But such nostalgia works only by distortion and historical
invention, whose effect can be perverse and self-destructive.
If
rock music seems to have its innovative edge, if it seems to
founder in a decadent sophistication, we look back to the banal
but energetic simplicities of fifties rock 'n' roll.
If
our poetry has
gone too far toward free form and undisciplined subjectivity we
reach for a hair shirt, as Robert Lowell did in his immense sonnet
sequence
Notebook
(1970), which has gone through numberless
versions without ever becoming a poem.
If
our political life be–
comes too violent and problematic we grasp at something more
orderly, as a writer in
Commentary,
John Mander, did, when he
eulogized the fifties as "the happiest, most stable, most rational
period the Western world has known since 1914."
This is perhaps a more exact analogy than Mander would care
to acknowledge. The "long summer's day" of the Edwardian peace
was also the frozen smile of countless social and political hier–
archies. Nearly all of Europe welcomed the war with a sense of
