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Saving the Fifties, Dumping the Times? |
The
Warren Adler E-Sheet 34
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Senior Moments and Hurray
for the Fifties
There are
moments, perhaps a single moment, when people
of a certain age discover their irrelevance to
the contemporary world throbbing around them.
It might come
sitting in your doctor's office, now that you
are a frequent visitor, picking up a copy of
People Magazine and discovering that
you don't recognize a single name. It might
come as you browse the radio dial only to
discover that you don't understand most of the
lyrics of today's popular music, hip-hop
particularly. And even if you understand the
words, you don't comprehend their meaning.
It might come
when you are discussing movies and discovering
that your under-forty or -fifty companion has
never heard of Eddie Cantor, Clark
Gable, Myrna Loy, Alice Faye,
and scores of others who were once icons of
the silver screen. When I was on the Warner
Bros. lot, I used to take my assistant with me
to the main office for a so-called pitch
meeting and point out the portraits of movie
stars of yesteryear, only to discover that my
under-thirty protégé hadn't a clue to their
identity.
It might come
when you discover that most of contemporary
television shows, fiction or reality, are
geared to people under forty as if anyone over
that age didn't exist, with the exception of
news shows. You can always tell who they are
pitched to if you see ads for incontinence or
the latest pills for cholesterol, high blood
pressure or arthritis.
It might come
when you discover that the historical context
which punctuated the life of a "senior", from
the depression, through World War II and Korea
is mostly a void to under-forties, with the
exception of the most hardy history buffs or
academics.
Perhaps this
is the major reason why "seniors" cluster
together in Sunbelt retirement communities or
in most social realms where their irrelevance
to the so-called mainstream culture is not
that apparent...at least to them.
Of course
there is a flip side to this attempt at wise
guy social comment. We are living longer.
Hopefully, the quality of our lives, we are
told, is a lot better than those of our
parents and grandparents and we are subjected
to an avalanche of advertising telling us all
about the glories of aging, and the
brainwashing mythology fed to "seniors" about
the so-called "golden years."
Has it always
been thus? Or are we seeing a deeper, more
profound, demographic divide opening between
generations? I suspect that before the age of
retirement when three generations lived
together in one household or close by, such a
divide and the irrelevancies cited above might
have been less apparent.
 All
this philosophical musing is by way of
introduction to a revelation inspired by a new
book by David Castronovo, a Professor
of Literature at Pace University, that almost
restores my faith in the academy. Professor
Castronovo contends in his marvelous book
Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit subtitled
Books from the 1950's that Made American
Culture that the fifties were a lot more
than the contemporary perception.
Long
relegated to the decade rubbish heap, the
fifties have been characterized by pundits and
assorted snobs as a time of conformity and
boredom with pictures of a bland Eisenhower
playing golf and endless photos of cookie
cutter housing projects. It has gotten a bad
rap characterized traditionally as that brain
dead time before the much ballyhooed dynamic
sixties which allegedly changed everything.
Not so, says
Professor Castronovo, who calls the fifties
(along with some overlap earlier post WWII
years) America's third flowering with books
that changed our culture.
By God, he's
right on. This was the time when books like
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and
Kerouac's On the Road were born.
This was the time when Ralph Ellison
published The Invisible Man and Saul
Bellow published The Adventures of
Augie March. This was the age when John
Cheever, Flannery O'Connor and
Philip Roth arrived on the scene with
their dissection of modern life.
Castronovo
also cites The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
which set the stage for what was to follow:
the rebellion against conformity and cant and
a refinement of what it meant to be a free man
and still achieve an alternate version of the
American dream.
The good
Professor cites other books as well, which he
dubs original, calling them stories of
"ruination, blindness and anguish" and
pressing us to "think about warped human
nature and scare us into some insights about
ourselves."
To make this
point, he cites such novels as Cornell
Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man,
Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me
and David Goodis's Shoot the Piano
Player.
Of course,
there are other works of that period that
offered similar inspiration. Death of a
Salesman, for example, which is arguably
the best play ever written by an American. It
is the gut-wrenching story of a man's decline,
everyman's decline, which connects with
relevance to what I tried to say at the
beginning of this essay.
The fifties
needed no validation for me. By the fifties, I
knew what I wanted to be and do...and did.
The Old Grey Lady Ain't
What She Used to Be
 As
a life-long reader of the New York Times,
I have viewed with alarm the steady slippage
of their coverage into a transparent political
bias that has now permeated its so-called
literary columns. Not that such coverage was
ever immune to its present bigoted mindset,
but the recent savaging of Tom Wolfe
and his new novel is so shameless that to
remain silent would irk me more than to speak
my mind.
Those of us
who take the Times on a daily basis and
are very aware of their predictable stand on
most issues, read the newspaper with a keen
awareness of their various biases. We know
they despise George W. Bush, viscerally and
consistently, and never miss an opportunity to
slip in the proverbial sword even when they
offer backhanded compliments, a case in point
being the election in Iraq.
We know the
certified rants of their regular columnists
and their now single token conservative. We
understand their cleverly skewed so-called
analysis pieces, their often obvious slanted
headlines and cunning placement of stories to
fit their biased agenda. Whatever one's
political leanings, one expects
even-handedness and objectivity, especially by
a newspaper that brags about it being the
standard of journalistic integrity.
Let us
connect the dots in the case of Tom Wolfe's
latest book
I Am Charlotte Simmons. On publication it
was savaged, really savaged by staff reviewer
Michiko Kakutani, whose level of nastiness,
slavish bias and intellectual pretensions are
disgustingly mean-minded and irritating.
The review
set the bar of hatred for the Wolfe book and
it must have irritated the hell out of the
Times to have, by their own formula, be
forced to put his novel on their best seller
list. As anyone with a brain knows the best
seller list is not a reflection of literary
excellence or durability, it is rather a
snapshot of popularity, based on sales and
hype, publisher commitment, bookstore
placement and PR.
Worse, the
recent hype of the book by their favorite
whipping boy, George W., who thought
the book a pretty fair account of college life
in modern times and said so, must have
exasperated the lit snobs and Bushbashers who
hew the paper's line on this issue and, even
now, still tout their not-so-subtle contention
that the President is an illiterate moron.
Still worse,
Wolfe has been quoted as being a supporter of
the President and a decrier of those who are
infuriated by his re-election.
So now comes
the piece de resistance of their bias against
Wolfe, a kind of payback, for the President's
good tidings of Wolfe's tome and his political
leanings. On the front page of the Arts
section on Wednesday, February 9th under the
headline "Analyzing Sales of Wolfe's New
Book," the Times writer gleefully
reports that sales of Wolfe's new book are
not, although denied by the publisher, up to
the publisher's expectations. Not satisfied
with hitting him on publication, they now kick
him in the kishkes and, once again, dismiss
the book, screaming out their bias and, by
inference, discouraging its sales, which is
the subtext of all this mean mindedness
parading as reporting.
As for the
book, I read it and thought it was terrific
and, although I am long absent from college
life, I have in recent days read in the press
about increasing alcohol and sexual abuse,
cruel pranks and sadistic initiation hazing in
the restrictive houses of elite fraternities
and sororities. Indeed, such behavior
disgusted me in my own college days and I have
no reason to doubt Wolfe's impeccable research
and conclusions about such contemporary
activity.
Okay so
probably half the ruling ivy league elite of
America, like Bush himself, were once
fraternity or sorority geeks. Let us assume,
hopefully, that most of them have undergone
some kind of epiphany and look back upon those
days with both nostalgia and embarrassment. As
a working class subway college kid outsider, I
am still irritated by the memories of their
behavior and snobbery.
Wolfe's
novels tells the story of a sensitive,
virginal young woman, with great potential and
ambition. He takes her from her rural "old
values" North Carolina environment to a
sophisticated top University (Duke or
Stanford) where she is a scholarship student.
Wolfe traces her fears, anxieties and eventual
corruption as she descends into the tainted
cultural maelstrom of contemporary college
life where the traditional verities of her
upbringing are chipped away by the reality of
this alien sports worshiping, drugs, alcohol
and sex saturated universe.
Of course,
others who have read the book might not agree
with my, or the President's, assessment and
are free to dismiss it. But that is very
different from deliberate attempts to trash it
and its author through a blatant guilt by
association tactic. The President, I may add,
also liked the brilliant book of a friend of
mine Ron Chernow, whose
Alexander Hamilton is destined to become a
classic. Will Ron be next to feel the Times'
biased wrath?
This said,
the New York Times is still the best
newspaper on the planet, but, if it keeps up
this drumbeat of provincial narrow-mindedness,
and transparently slanted insularity, it will
foul its own nest and injure its credibility.
As a Times
addict, I will stick to it to the end, however
addled it gets in its dotage.
Sunshine. Palm trees.
Romance.
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Get
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of short stories by Warren Adler that
celebrate life, love and lust in a Florida
condominium community. Enjoy the "whole gang"
or sample a single short story as a download
from our retail partners at
Fictionwise.com. Next month, selected
stories from The Sunset Gang debut as
spoken-word audio as well. |
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