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The Way We Were
Other than R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., no other regular contributor has written for our magazine as far back as John Coyne. His first piece for us was a nice cover piece on Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation in the May-June 1970 edition, which we repost below. He wrote for us consistently for a long time, until a few years ago. With John’s death, our longest-serving living writers are Ben Stein and RET, Jr. — Ed.
When Bob Tyrrell rather casually asked me to do a short piece on the differences between the Beats of the fifties and the New Leftists of the sixties, I rather casually said I would. And now that it’s time to produce, I wish I were in Mongolia, up the creek without a typewriter. For what I’m expected to do, I fear, is to sum up a couple of the most complex decades in American history, a task for which I may be even less suited — believe it or not — than someone like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
For one thing, I haven’t really sorted things out for myself yet. The fifties were special for me; the memories still have more to do with emotion and nostalgia than with reason and analysis. And I think that most of us who came of age in the fifties feel much the same way. Occasionally, some of us get together again, a little beefier now, the bellies beginning to push out, the hairlines retreating, the worry lines a little deeper. We stand at some obscure bar where no one remembers us, a bar where once we held court, and we gulp down draft beer and dago red and forget about those martinis most of us have — much against our better sense — graduated to, and we dust off our memories and dredge up forgotten names and adventures. “Remember the night Jack punched John, the bartender, just as he was coming over the bar to throw us out? John went flying into Kathleen’s lap and knocked her into the steam table. Good old Jack.” “Remember that night we got stranded outside Santa Rosa and finally hitched a ride with two escaped cons who’d stolen a Studebaker?” “Remember that night in Denver we sat up all night chewing that peyote Dick had brought back from Mexico? And the peyote turned out to be soft wood chips?” And we begin to stand a little straighter, one foot hooked up on the rail and we forget the wives and the kids and the cushy jobs we’re all just a little bit ashamed of. Some boob at the bar asks Bill Moylan what he’s up to now, and Bill, who spent four years in the fifties writing an immense novel about war and Christ and courage and patriotism and death, flushes and finally blurts out that he sells toys. But Mike comes to the rescue and tells the boob to bug off and we seal it up and forget it. And after we’ve drunk a few more gallons the years drop off and it’s 1950 again and we see the faces as they were, lean and tough and cynical and mean and absolutely compassionate. And we dream again of cross-country trips, sometimes hitching, sometimes on Greyhounds, trips begun at about three in the morning when we’d had too much of New York and New Yorkers. And those magnificent places we fled to — Tucson, Santa Fe, Denver, Rapid City, Waco — are ours again for just a while.
Like most important things, we didn’t know we had it until we lost it.
Like most important things, we didn’t know we had it until we lost it. It all began, I guess, in the late forties, when the first great wave of veterans hit the campuses, and universities became almost overnight the new centers of American society, a great chain of autonomous city-states stretching from coast to coast. And suddenly, the former inhabitants of the universities — the 4 Fers, the evaders, the young deferred instructors who had whiled away the war by ogling coeds and preaching received Marxian doctrine — all were washed away as the veterans remade the campuses in their own images. Years older than their classmates chronologically, and centuries older experientially, they were tenderly cynical, hard drinkers and womanizers, and they had learned in Europe, in the Pacific, in obscure Southern and Southwestern military bases pretty much all there was to know about the basics of manhood. They were men, real men, who’d tried everything at least once, and many of them had been through hell and come out the back door. And just when they began to thin out, the Korean veterans returned and the whole thing began again.
It was this suddenly imposed society, a man’s society, that nurtured the first crop of Beat writers. The Beats, for the most part, were an integral part of the new society, and in one way or another, they’d learned most of the same basic lessons. Unlike the New Leftists, they were absolutely unpolitical. As long as the machine ran, they were willing to leave it alone, and they had seen enough (unlike the new radicals, who had seen little more than college campuses and the irrelevant life lived there) to realize that as bad as the system might be, it was still the best system yet devised. They were willing to leave politics to the politicians, for whom they felt no great love but whose antics amused them mightily (and this explains a great deal about how most of us felt about Joe McCarthy. We never loved him, but we all got a great kick out of the way he used to scare the liberals).
I was never a Beat. By the time I came back from Korea, the movement had already pretty much fizzled. But many of them were still around and they were more like us than any of our non-veteran classmates. We knew the same things, we drank the same things, we hated the same things, and we shared, despite our contempt for the pin-headed bureaucrats who too often ran things, a deep and profound love for America. Our experiences had taught us to eschew frills, to look for what was basic. Thus, we believed strongly in those emotions, such as patriotism, which we had seen bring out the best in our comrades, and although cynical (albeit our cynicism now seems pretty superficial), we believed that the important things could be reduced to a very few essentials — kindness, honesty, bravery. Courage was the big thing for us, and if we had any single idol (outside of Kerouac, of course) it was Hemingway. Probably naive, but it seemed to us that Hemingway was one of the very few big American guns who understood anything at all of what manhood meant. Our girls, most of whom we picked off from young instructors, seemed to agree, and until 1960, there was always at least one girl acting out the Lady Brett bit.
We weren’t Beats, but we could talk to them and they could talk to us in a way we’ve never been able to communicate with the radicals. Our ideals can never be theirs, for our personalities, our style, our whole sense of humor is completely alien to them. Most of us understand the radicals, I think, for we were the last reading generation, and we know that each idea and goal which the New Left believes it has discovered was discovered by someone a few centuries ago. No, they’ll never understand us.
Yet I’m flailing, and I fear that you still have no idea of what we were like. So let me try it this way. I wrote a story, sometime around ’56, which was published in a small, obscure, now-defunct periodical. The story became, for a year or so, famous at Columbia, and whenever I bump into survivors from those years they talk about it. The story, I think, can tell you more about how we were — what our humor was like — than pages of exposition. It’s called “A Manhattan Love Story,” and it goes like this (please read to the end):
Artie Shaw’s clarinet cut momentarily through the smoke and babble of the small downtown bar. An old waiter with tired eyes approached the couple in the dim back booth.
“Arv annuver?”
“Please.”
The man dissolved into the smoke.
“It’s good, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Us. You and I. The beer. The music. Even the waiter with the cleft palate. It’s all good.”
“Funny. I’ve been here before.”
“Me too. But it’s not like before, is it?”
“Not at all.”
“It’ll be this way from now on.”
“Yes.”
The drinks came and the man melted again.
“I love you.”
“I know.”
“Say it.”
“All right. I love you too.”
“That’s right. I like the way you say that. No practice.”
“No.”
“Cigarette?”
“Yes.”
“No one smokes the way you do.”
“Everyone smokes the same way.”
“Nonsense, you little idiot. You smoke beautifully. Wait. There’s some tobacco on your lip. I just wanted to touch you.”
“Do you really think I’m beautiful?”
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world. I’m beautiful too. We’re both beautiful.”
“We are, aren’t we?”
“You’re so damned young it hurts sometimes.”
“There’ve been others, haven’t there?”
“Yes, but none like you. Look, let’s go away. Europe. Maybe Greece.”
“I’d love that. I can leave college tomorrow. No one cares. Only my aunts. And they’re too old to care much.”
“By God, we’ll do it. We’ll go on a liner. A big one.”
“Oh Lord, I’m so happy.”
“Another drink?”
“Let’s not.”
“Good, we’ll go to my place.”
“My dearest.”
“You do love me don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Please. You say it first.”
“I love you, Anne.”
“I love you too, Helen.”
Silly, I know, and perhaps even embarrassingly innocent. But they loved it in the fifties. Even Kerouac. And wouldn’t they hate it now?
We didn’t really see them coming. Toward the end of the fifties something had begun to stir around, something which made us vaguely uneasy, its shape not quite apprehensible. The beast was awakening, and, at first, it seemed an innocuous beast.
It was a period of transition. The Korean veterans were finishing up their G.I. bills and were being replaced, in small trickles at first, by a new breed of very young (experientially) and very intense activists. They believed themselves born to free the Negro, to bring social justice to the world, and they took grim civil-right sabbaticals down South. Later they discovered abuses on the campuses and realized that there was no need to travel all the way to Mississippi to right wrongs. The civil rights movement became the anti-war movement which became the anti-America movement.
They seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of those true believers … touched — like all true believers — with a strong streak of uneducated fascism.
To us dinosaurs from the deep fifties, these were puzzling types, and we contented ourselves with drinking our Coors and baiting them. There was some sympathy, of course, for we as much as they held no brief for the condition of universities or for racial bigotry. And we didn’t really too much mind their intensity, for although the code of the mid-fifties, like the code of all neo-classical periods, called for us to eschew enthusiasm, something way down there in us responded to it (after all, our older mentors, the Beats, had been romantics). But these kids were humorless, and we didn’t like this at all. Then there was that other thing — a great deal of worldly innocence, although not innocence in the pristine sense. (One of the things that we hated was that almost overnight it became impossible to seduce girls in the great old roundabout way. You just slapped the New Breed girls on the rump and they cooperated willingly and immediately, like earnest young female missionaries accepting vaccination. No fun at all.) Worldly innocence all mixed up with a dogmatic conviction that they’d seen it all. And it made us uneasy, for they seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of those true believers Eric Hoffer had warned us about, touched — like all true believers — with a strong streak of uneducated fascism. And it wasn’t until much later, when the Berkeley riots first erupted, that we understood how right we were to be uneasy.
I was never, as I mentioned earlier, a Beat. But my contemporaries and I shared a great deal in common with them, and our lifestyle — wandering, drinking, brawling, womanizing — was in great part based on theirs. We liked one another, we members of those two generations, and we shared an undiscussed but profound love for our country. My friends and I, I think, are the last survivors of a distinct era, running pretty much consistently from the twenties through the fifties. After us there is a great discontinuity, a chasm across which we’ve watched something entirely new — frighteningly European — grow up, something completely alien to the American experience. And the surviving Beats (with the exception of freak-outs like Allen Ginsberg, of course, who has had to adapt to ensure a continuing supply of young men) share our view of the New Breed. Kerouac died hating them. And Kerouac was almost exactly the same man in 1969 that he was in the mid-fifties. Fatter, less mobile, sick. But the same good man.
But let me stop here. As I look back over this I realize that I haven’t at all done what Bob Tyrrell had asked me to do. So many things — professors, panty-raids, fights, trips, poetry, novels, bureaucrats, a little bar in Idaho, a waitress in Montana, boilermakers, jails, Fairbanks, Gallo, sweet lucy, sneaky pete, the Midnight Mission in L.A., truck drivers, Iron City beer, Tiajuana, wisecracks — all of which just have to be talked about if you’re to understand the fifties and the Beats and those of us who for a few quick years tried to carry on for them. Too much, and it all begs for a dozen more articles. But maybe this is at least a beginning.
(Mr. Coyne’s bioline with this article read as follows: “John R. Coyne Jr. is an associate editor of National Review and chief of McSorley’s Anti-Feminist Patrol. His first book on the student movement will be published this fall, and he has assured us it will be his last book on trivia.”)
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