Now Fred Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and columnist at Slate and an occasional contributor to The New York Times, has tried to further whittle down the decisive period to a single year in his new book, “1959: The Year Everything Changed.” Citing Lunik I, the Soviet spacecraft that plowed through the Earth’s atmosphere, and the strategist Herman Kahn’s frank talk about how to win a nuclear war, Mr. Kaplan writes, “It was this twin precipice — the prospect of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation, both teetering on the edge of a new decade — that gave 1959 its distinctive swoon and ignited its creative energy.”
However well — or poorly — young rebels in the heady ’60s may have amplified and executed the promised shifts in race relations, music, politics and sexual mores, Mr. Kaplan maintains, “These cataclysms spring not from the impulses or ideals of the baby-boom generation but rather from the revolts and revelations of 1959.”
To make his case, Mr. Kaplan offers readable, pocket-sized portraits of the most famous innovators from the ’50s — like Miles Davis, Norman Mailer and Gregory Pincus, co-inventor of the birth-control pill — as well as its less familiar ones, including George Russell, a theorist of jazz improvisation; John St. Clair Kilby, the microchip’s inventor; and Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press who sued to publish “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” after the United States Post Office confiscated copies of the uncensored version of the book for violating obscenity laws.
What becomes increasingly clear with every chapter, however, is that nearly any one of that decade’s other years could serve equally well, if not better, as a turning point. History rarely adheres to the Gregorian calendar, and the need to squish everything into the self-imposed 365-day timeline causes Mr. Kaplan at times to treat his argument like a gerrymandered district, stretching it beyond its natural shape.
Yes, 1959 can justifiably boast that it hosted Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba, Motown’s creation, the sale of the first practical business computer and the premiere of John Cassavetes’s independent film “Shadows.” Let’s even throw in the microchip: although that invention came in 1958, Texas Instruments didn’t announce it until 1959.
But critiques of conformity and materialism from David Riesman, William H. Whyte and John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as emblems of the generation gap, like “Rebel Without a Cause,” appeared earlier. Why choose Lunik as signifying the start of the space race and not Sputnik I’s trip around the globe in 1957, which led to the creation of NASA? Why pick Kahn’s lectures over the events of 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile and a presidential commission in the United States urged the adoption of a strategy to fight and win a nuclear war?
The development of the birth-control pill took years, so why choose the request for approval from the Food and Drug Administration and not the successful clinical trials in 1956, or its actual approval and sale in 1960? What’s the argument for singling out a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University over his recitation of “Howl” in San Francisco in 1955 or the publication in 1957 of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and Mailer’s essay “The White Negro”? And does anyone really believe that the first report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights says more about the coming racial unrest and civil rights laws than the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 or the federal troops who had to protect the nine black students trying to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957?
In these cases and several others, the answer seems to be merely because it happened during the chosen year. That is unfortunate, because the irritating neon flash of 1959 distracts from the more insightful discussion of how musicians, writers, painters, comedians and others shared the same preoccupations.
Mr. Kaplan astutely focuses on jazz rather than on the much more familiar terrain of rock ’n’ roll, and he writes about it with particular feeling and fluency, tracing the impulse behind the music to other arenas. Ginsberg called the rhythm in his poem “Howl” “a spontaneous bop prosody.” Mr. Russell discerned links between the laws of music and those of the universe.Ornette Coleman described his compositions as “something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.”
Others made larger leaps. Ralph Ellison wrote that jazz was the musical equivalent of America’s political system; the soloist, like the citizen, could do whatever he wanted as long as he respected the overall framework. Later, during the Black Power movement, jazz musicians offered a different analogy and saw Mr. Coleman’s innovations as “a political statement — breaking down chords and rhythms as a symbol for breaking down white authority and power.”
It would have been interesting to hear more on the relationship between formal structure in art and in politics. At one point Mr. Kaplan notes that Lionel Trilling, Ginsberg’s former professor at Columbia, believed form had a moral dimension. He understood how poets were seduced by the idea of discarding traditional structure because it promised freer and more genuine expression. But Trilling “found this notion illusory — and, more than that, dangerous, because unshackling formal structure could unravel the underlying social thread.” In art and society the impulse was similar: to throw off conventions, rules and traditions. That urge, minus the discipline that guided art, helped propel the events of the ’60s.
This book’s compact history showcases some of the significant, though lesser-known events on which the coming revolution was built. It doesn’t really matter if they can all be telescoped into a single year. In general, if you begin a sentence with “The
year ...” you should end it by noting the team that won the World Series or when you first fell in love.
No comments:
Post a Comment