Devolution

The ‘50s: serious, orderly, responsible, smug, blind--the decade some look nostalgically back upon as the last sane time, and many others as a matter of: If you are rational, you don’t understand the problem; or, if you remain levelheaded, your neck will go into spasm because the ground is tilting 45 degrees.

The sentence suggests the wrought-up jumble of George Trow’s prose as he jousts with Then and Now; it does not begin to approach the ingenuity of the jumble. There have been several useful books about the ‘50s; David Halberstam did one, Nora Sayre another. They were written with a judicious mix of warm and cool, and with shrewdness and perception. Quite reasonably, they were written as cultural histories; that is, they stabilized the past in order to write about it, as a lepidopterist or Nabokov would stabilize a butterfly in order to describe it.

Quite unreasonably, Trow hurls the present upon the past and the past upon the present. His book is an uproar. He confronts the ‘50s with the ‘80s and ‘90s; two eras, as he sees it, that understood and wielded social power, though of vastly opposite kinds; whereas the incandescent decades in between, for all their cultural energy, never managed or cared to use it to fashion a society. “Psychotic” is a word he uses repeatedly, regretfully, for the intermediate cultural legions that ended by burning themselves out or selling themselves off.

He himself writes as a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but unstably placed. He co-founded the irreverent National Lampoon, then went on to a 30-year stint at the sedate New Yorker. He had rebelled against his heritage, a culturally conservative but politically left circle of Hudson River gentry passionately attached to the New Deal. Today, he finds himself circling back, not in a closed circle but in a spiral whose turns never meet or reconcile.

Trow looks out at a time of rootless political and cultural values, manipulated by money and the media, and lacking both the grounding of the ‘50s and the fire of the decades that followed. In “My Pilgrim’s Progress,” he broods on the decline. It makes him question his rebellion. It makes him both question and affirm the order he rebelled against. Nothing could be as bad, he feels, as the floaty apathy that has replaced both.

He sports a shattered sensibility (dandyism is part of his intellectual style) and refuses to use a narrative voice, either Olympian or polemic. His method for describing an explosion is to set one off; both the argument and the rhetoric of his book are fragments of his grenade.

Often maddening and ruinously self-indulgent, Trow manages to keep continuously alive and lit up a theme that has all too often oscillated between abstraction and complacency. His method, alternately followed and forgotten, is to go through a month of the New York Times--February 1950--alternately reading and commenting into a tape recorder. As a result, “Progress” often sounds like sozzled brilliance at the next bar stool. It is a tangle of anecdotes promised and withheld, ex abruptos, flashes of insight deliberately extinguished, lines of thought advanced and abandoned.

Out of the tangle, though, he evokes a planet turning and perhaps cooling. For instance, he identifies three big 1950s front-page stories, imbued with urgency and significance: the postwar political fortunes of Churchill, exemplar of the great man; the debate over building the hydrogen bomb; and the coal strike that threatened a national winter shutdown. Buried in the back pages were the meager television listings of the time.

Today there are no more great men, the hydrogen bomb barely impinges on the nation’s consciousness and few of us worry about coal. Television, on the other hand, along with other forms of marketed entertainment, has become one of the formidable political and cultural forces of our time.

Trow uses two figures to epitomize the America that existed up into the ‘50s. One was Eisenhower, whom the author writes of with a respect that gradually heats up, as the book goes along, into adulation and something just short of adoration. The passion (it is treated with a measure of self-irony; arguing his hero’s dignified gracefulness, Trow goes so far as to mention Balanchine) is less for what Eisenhower was than for what contemporary America isn’t.

Trow’s Eisenhower lived a long, measured progression from rural America at the beginning of the century up through a series of achievements: to come out of Kansas and make West Point, to rise in the competitive military world to become a star officer, to manage the vast enterprise of the World War II landings, to serve as a successful two-term president. Trow admires the steadiness that Eisenhower embodied, the network of national connection and a detachment and style that allowed him, at the end of his presidency, to warn of the military-industrial complex that he himself had risen in.

Until the television age, Trow writes, Americans had tended to achieve prominence through a series of step-by-step experiences and tests. Today the machineries of celebrity and publicity elevate its stars almost instantly: Contrast Eisenhower’s steady 40-year ascent with the all-but-overnight rise of Clinton.

Now, Trow continues, we have validation without initiation, as if college students were to get degrees without attending courses. One of the costs is the weakening of solidity, assurance and, in the deepest sense, character among those elevated.

Eisenhower represented an authentic moderate conservative strain of America, unmediated by imagemakers. Roosevelt represented another strain, a version of populism. Trow takes a Tory-like pleasure in his family’s distant connections to the Roosevelt world--and the ability of one segment of that world to adopt a patrician radicalism. He recalls his father’s fanatic New Deal loyalties and his pride in his lineage and cousinage; although, in fact, he made his living as a tabloid journalist.

There was a different kind of authenticity in the cultural explosions of the two decades that followed the ‘50s, Trow writes. His charge against his contemporaries is their failure to have done the hard, unglamorous work of social construction and transmission.

The result in the ‘80s and ‘90s is an inert society whose popular culture simply commercializes and softens the achievements of its predecessors. We got a “Love Story” that sentimentalized the ferment going on at Harvard in the ‘60s, a Bette Midler confection based on the incandescent Janis Joplin, a Garth Brooks succeeding a Merle Haggard.

Part memoir and part social commentary, part rant and part insight, part brilliance and part self-indulgent morass, Trow has written a difficult and exasperating work. Its stronger and more inspired moments, though, are as good as anything written about our journey out of the ‘50s. With more melancholy than rancor, it measures our lives against them; with less nostalgia than melancholy, it measures them against our lives.