Back to the Sixties
by our literary editor, St. Clair Carr
The 1960s have become a legendary decade, like the 1920s and the 1890s. Those of us who came of age in the Sixties are often struck by the contradiction between what we know of the era and what younger people think they know.
I recently reminded myself of the real spirit of the Sixties when I reacquainted myself with Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Mr. Wolfe has had a distinguished career in American letters, especially the way he tells it, and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, published in 1965, was his first successful book. It is a collection of articles about cultural phenomena Mr. Wolfe thought were novel. In the Sixties people thought a lot of things were novel.
I was reminded of the Sixties as soon as I took the book off the shelf. My copy is a Pocket Book edition of 1967, and the back-cover blurb starts with this assessment by Terry Southern: "Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas." Far out, man.
Inside the book is the typical Sixties geewhizzery about how a New Age was dawning. Proles were determining style! High society was imitating low! Teenagers had their own culture! Stock car racing was replacing baseball in the South!
To Mr. Wolfe these were manifestations of democratic culture in a time of prosperity. For example, his idea was that when Southerners got their hands on some money they decided to race stock cars rather than play baseball.
The argument doesn't seem very persuasive now. In historical perspective stock car racing seems more like a natural modernization of harness racing. Teenagers had their own culture before the Sixties, ever since large numbers of them no longer had to work for a living, and the prole style Mr. Wolfe wrote about was not as novel as he thought – for example, the Las Vegas casino signs that he found so refreshing were obviously descendants of the music hall marquees of the nineteenth century.
In fact, Mr. Wolfe ignored the truly groundbreaking change which occurred in 1960s America – the extension of civil rights to black people. Perhaps he had concluded that there was less competition in the field he had chosen to investigate, or simply that the readers of the upper-middle-class magazines and newspapers in which he published (the Springfield, Massachusetts Sunday Republican among them) might find articles about social change among white people more accessible.
In fact, the contemporary legend of the Sixties is biased in much the same way. It depicts the Sixties as a time of hippies and peace demonstrations, and is quiet about how the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts of this decade came about. At least Mr. Wolfe's interest in the white population extended beyond the hippies.
In the end, though, Mr. Wolfe was chiefly interested in rich people. He was interested in prole culture because he thought rich people were adopting it. These days, the upper class infatuation with prole culture over, he is interested in other aspects of bourgeois life. When he has shown an interest in the proletariat, it seems to have been as something he could explain to the upper classes.
So Mr. Wolfe may have missed the boat deliberately. Nevertheless, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is engaging, and engagingly written. Mr. Wolfe's style is lively and his descriptions vivid. Above all, he did not pander to his readers as so many writers in similar publications do today. In the end that characteristic is what redeems Mr. Wolfe. No matter what reservations one has about his analysis, he presents it forthrightly and honestly. That's not particularly a characteristic of the Sixties, but it is a characteristic we could do with more of these days.
Back to the Sixties © John FitzGerald, 2001
Click the banner or click here for ACTUAL ANALYSIS
More reviews | Home