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back even beyond that,
to
the impact of Wilhelm Reich on literary
intellectuals in the 1940s. A close look at the sexual and political
implications of "The White Negro" and
Growing
Up
Absurd
would
tell us a good deal about the cultural radicalism that emerged at the
end of the ftfties.
IV
Earlier I noted how prophetic it was for Mailer and Goodman
to draw serious attention
to
the new bohemian subculture of the late
ftfties and to the upsurge of youthful delinquency and rebelliousness.
In retrospect, those things foreshadowed a great deal of the com–
munal utopianism, urban restlessness, and street violence of the six–
ties, but at the time they were treated with no such seriousness.
The media played up both the Beats and the juvenile hoodlums as
isolated spectacles of inarticulate exhibitionism. Mailer and Good–
man undertook to become spokesmen for this discontent, interpreters
of all the' 'acting out," who could read in withdrawal and youthful
anomie a complex critique of the system and its values. For some of
us who were in college then, these men instantly became heroes, as
did Norman O. Brown. I can recall no public event more inspiring
and electrifying at that time than Brown's vatic, impassioned Phi
Beta Kappa oration at Columbia in 1960 (later published under the
title "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind").
Because these men were intellectuals, because we were budding
intellectuals, they had made a startling conjunction for us, a con–
junction which they themselves embodied, between the world of
ideas and a new mode of experience-a new consciousness. We
recognized that none of them had been minutely faithful
to
his
subject, that they had seized on the hipsters or on psychoanalysis
as the occasion for a personal breakthrough rather than a problem of
interpretation. But in doing so they had discovered not only new
and transftguring ideas but a new intellectual style: impassioned,
prophetic, and rich with the promise of salvation and the dream of a
new world. Unlike ordinary academics these intellectuals spoke
to
the
ultimate issues of culture and personal destiny.
I think it's fair to say that they spoke with special urgency
to
