MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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our newness to the world of ideas-we who knew their vocabulary
but had never seen it used with such animating directness-and to
our late adolescence, for we knew that at bottom their gospel was a
sexual one, that sex was their wedge for reorienting all human rela–
tions. And for us at that moment the sexual hunger was paramount,
for all our self-conscious intellectuality.
It
was our breakthrough they
were talking about, enacting-our worldlessness and coming-into–
being, our absurd growing up .
It
mattered little that Mailer stressed
the macho and violent side of the hipster figure while Goodman–
perhaps in line with his own sexual struggle-stressed the anxiety and
displacement, the lack of any experience that felt real . To us they
were two sides of the same coin, and spoke equally to our own lust
for deep experience and for transfiguring sex-for which transfigur–
ing ideas were a not quite adequate substitute-though they were a
passionately intense sublimation. The rationality and intellectuality
of the fifties had helped to form us , but when Mailer wrote of love as
"the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which
preceded it," I was enthralled, while the qualified homage to vio–
lence a few lines earlier, which has angered moralists like Irving Howe,
made no such impact. I had no need of it, and took no notice.
If a certain wryness has crept into my tone it's because I'm S'lr–
prised by the distance between the person I was and the person I am.
Rereading' 'The White Negro,"
Eros and Civtiization,
LIfe
Against
Death
and other utopian works of that period, I'm impressed anew
at the intelligence and style, the prescience and passion, of all this
literature of cultural change, yet I find that it's lost much of its power
to animate me . Partly this is because the sixties are long over. So
much of what these men advocated has either been obscenely,
obstinately frustrated or, worse still, has come to pass, with the mixed
results we have come to expect in all human affairs. Communal life,
the death of the family, open marriage, the politics of confrontation,
educational reform, participatory democracy, mind-changing chem–
icals: all these promises have been simultaneously fulfilled and
undermined. In some respects our society will never be the same; in
other ways it never really changed .
Sexual liberation was surely one of these promises, and nowhere
have our public values-and perhaps even our private conduct–
changed more noticeably than here , but the sexual apocalypse at the
