The first distinction required in treating Joel Dinerstein’s exhaustive—and slightly exhausting—book is that between hip and cool. To be cool is, in Dinerstein’s words, “associated with detached composure as well as artistic achievement,” while to be hip “is to be knowledgeable and resourceful,” above all about those who are cool. Something there is a touch uncool about being hip, a camp follower or chronicler of cool. Joel Dinerstein is the hippest of the hip. To paraphrase Dave Frishberg, he was doubtless “hep when it was hip to be hep.”
The Origins of Cool in Postwar America is a lengthy work, 25 years in the making. Its author was curator of a 2014 Smithsonian exhibition called “American Cool” (see “Strike a Pose: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool,” July 28, 2014) and has written Coach: A Story of New York Cool (2016), which is not a book about the New York Knicks under Red Holzman but about the luxury brand of purses and leather goods. During the past 15 years he has taught a course on the history of cool at Tulane, and is interested in (as he puts it) “the intersections of modernity and popular culture, race and American music, and literature and ethnicity.” How cool is that? I’ll leave it for you to decide.
A larger, more complex question that Dinerstein’s book raises is: How cool is cool itself? Is the phenomenon of cool at all significant in our day? Was it ever? For Joel Dinerstein, cool is an apotheosis, elevating those who possess it to the secular equivalent of near-divine status. The major figures in his cool pantheon are the jazz musicians Lester Young, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker; the film noir actors Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Robert Mitchum; the writers Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, and Ralph Ellison; the existentialist thinkers Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir; the singers and actors Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and Elvis Presley; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose career, for Dinerstein, in some ways marks the end of postwar cool.
In its origin, cool was a creation of African-American jazz musicians to face the pressure of Jim Crow arrangements during a time when the United States was an unembarrassedly racialist white society. At various points in its history, cool was, in Dinerstein’s language, “the aestheticizing of detachment,” “an emotional mask, a strategy of masking emotion,” “a public mode of covert resistance,” “a walking indictment of society,” “relaxed intensity” played out through the jazz musician, who was “global culture’s first non-white rebel.”
The first figure of cool Dinerstein takes up is Lester Young, the great tenor saxophonist. Born in Mississippi, Young met with Jim Crow at its most intense. He later moved on to Kansas City, where he played in Count Basie’s orchestra. Drafted during World War II, he was caught with marijuana and booze in his possession and clapped into a brutal Army jail in Alabama, from which, after a year, he was dishonorably discharged.
Lester Young is the first to have invoked the word “cool” to mean “relaxed and under control.” Young also used it to apply to a musical aesthetic that Dinerstein describes as combining “flow and understatement, minimalism and relaxed phrasing, deep tone and nonverbal narration.” The guitarist B. B. King, greatly influenced by the playing and personal style of Lester Young, called him the “King of Cool.” The blues singer Billie Holiday referred to him as “Prez.” Dinerstein provides a telling anecdote about Young remarking to the young drummer Willie Jones III: “You have good technique, Lady Jones, but what’s your story?” What he meant, Jones recounted, is that the jazz musician uses music “to project the particular philosophy he subscribes to.” Whitney Balliett, that most lyrical of writers on jazz, wrote of Lester Young in performance that “his relation to the band in a solo was that of a migrating bird to a tree: he circled, perched briefly, preened, and moved on; he enhanced the band, but it did not alter him.” Every jazz solo, as Dinerstein puts it, “is an artistic transmutation of personal experience processed into sound.” Lester Young died at 49, of liver disease and malnutrition brought on by alcoholism.
The incarnation of cool Dinerstein considers after jazz is film noir, those stark movies, some about Western outlaws and urban gangsters, most of them detective stories—many made from Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novels—whose representative actor was Humphrey Bogart. Cool is of course not a word that the Bogart—or the Alan Ladd or the Robert Mitchum—character in film noir would ever use, let alone call himself; but cool he indubitably was, though in a distinctly different way from the jazz musician’s notions of cool.
In his film noir roles, Bogart was usually a private detective, with a dreary office, a furnished room, a single suit, and, of course, his ubiquitous fedora, kept on even during fist fights. His form of cool had nothing to do with adapting a mask to confront an unjust society but everything to do with retaining his integrity in a society that was thought to work against integrity itself. The noir films are distinctly short on happy endings: “Well, I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over [to the police],” the Bogart/Sam Spade character says to the Mary Astor/Brigid O’Shaughnessy character at the conclusion of The Maltese Falcon (1941), “but that’ll pass.” And we are confident that it will. What will remain intact, though, will be Bogie’s iron-clad integrity. Cool.
So big was Humphrey Bogart in his day that, Dinerstein reports, Albert Camus was pleased to be told he resembled the actor, not knowing apparently that Bogie wore a hairpiece and, according to Billy Wilder, emitted spittle when he spoke. (Jean-Paul Sartre, I was amused to learn from Dinerstein’s book, fantasized that he was Gary Cooper. A better example of what is known as “a stretch” is unavailable.) Camus, who as a member of the French Resistance to the Nazis was a genuine, and not merely a movie, hero, was frequently photographed in the standard film noir trench coat, a half-smoked cigarette pending from his mouth—pure Bogie à la française.
Camus, Sartre, & Co. get a lengthy chapter in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, under the title “Albert Camus and the Birth of Existential Cool.” But how cool was existentialism, which had a vogue in the 1950s, a time when American intellectuals looked to France for their cultural enrichment? “Existentialism was a theory,” Dinerstein writes, lapsing into the abstraction to which he too often falls victim, “of individual response to both religious hypocrisy and the randomness of the universe, both the failures of European superiority and the collateral damage of corporate capitalism.”
As a body of philosophy, if anything so muddled and vague could qualify as such, existentialism “found resonance in the United States with intellectuals, artists, rogue leftists, college students, theatergoers, and self-conscious rebels.” Existentialism, the philosophy of the absurdity of existence, provided grist for the darkness of Samuel Beckett’s plays, Richard Wright’s later novels (Ralph Ellison thought Wright “had lost himself, his art, and his culture by casting his lot with the alien philosophy of existentialism”), and much of the higher-falutin’ gibberish of Norman Mailer. Dinerstein labors, not entirely successfully, to connect what he calls “an organic American existentialism” to African-American blues, soul, later jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll.
Women get short shrift in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. But then, cool is not a standard female quality, nor a much desired (or for that matter needed) one. Dinerstein mentions, almost in passing, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne, and Anita O’Day as exemplars of female cool. He gives more attention to Billie Holiday—first called Lady Day by Lester Young—whose life, much sadder than it was cool, ended when she was 44, cirrhosis her killer.
Simone de Beauvoir is the woman who gets more attention than any other. She and Jean-Paul Sartre were, of course, in Dinerstein’s phrase, “existentialism’s first couple.” But the closer the camera bears in on their lives, the less cool they seem. Dinerstein neglects to mention that Sartre was one of the world’s true savant-idiots: one of those brilliant minds that gets all the important things wrong, in his case the beneficence of the Soviet Union, the cure for anti-Semitism, and much else. He was also, in his spare time, an earnest lecher: 5 feet tall, with a bulging right eye and less than scrupulous about hygiene, with Beauvoir’s help Sartre lured various young women into his untidy bed; some first had lesbian affairs with her. Sartre and Beauvoir, though never married, were thought to have an open arrangement; but in later years her job was to lure young women, students, and others who had fallen under her influence into sexual relations with the troll-like Sartre. They would later recount these adventures in detailed letters to each other. Simone de Beauvoir, in fact, functioned as (in the cant phrase) Sartre’s “enabler.” More precisely, she was his pimp—not cool, not in the least; squalid, rather, sordid in the extreme.
The Beats, for Dinerstein, are notably cool, with Jack Kerouac’s writing, a form of “blowing,” or jazz performance. Dinerstein is high, if such an adjective may be called into service on this subject, on Jack Kerouac. “Kerouac,” he writes, “brought together Zen concepts, jazz practice, blues poetics, and European modernist ideals into a new synthesis for American literature.” He holds that the literary success of the Beats was due in part to their calling out “the West’s dysfunction: the distinction between its claimed religious precepts and its immoral actions, between its soapbox morality and pragmatic capitalism, between its abstract Enlightenment values and its seeming technological death wish.”
The fact is that the Beats formed no “synthesis for American literature,” and they achieved nothing like a literary success. Taken up by Time as gaudy good copy, they belong (as was said of the Sitwells) less to the history of literature than to the history of publicity. Surely no single figure was less cool than the boisterous, needy, publicity-hungry Allen Ginsberg humming Zen mantras in a soiled sheet.
Joel Dinerstein has a regrettably strong taste for abstraction. Such a taste is needed to commit such sentences (and many similar ones pop up in his pages) as “With the temporary evisceration of economic uncertainty came a rejuvenation of national confidence and American triumphalism” and “Here we see the rise of a neoliberal ideology that combines or conflates technological rationalism with a neo-Christian ethos and telos.” He is big on Marxian “commodification” and seems to be much worried about “the consumer society,” as if in the modern world there were any other kind. The words “charisma” and “valorization” get a good workout in his pages, and if I had $10 for every time Dinerstein uses the word “iconic,” my great-grandchildren would never have to work.
“Frank Sinatra,” he writes, “became the primary avatar of cool renewal for the wartime generation and shifted its cultural imagination from past to future with the onset of national prosperity.” Dinerstein has gathered much amusing material about Sinatra. The bandleader Harry James, for example, wanted him to change his name to “Frankie Satin.” Sinatra became the hero of “swingers”—not an entirely enviable, let alone cool, audience to have in thrall.
“Dean Martin,” Dinerstein writes, “played an equal role in shifting a generation’s ideal from the solitary consciousness of Hemingway’s existential cool to the swinger’s playboy bacchanalia.” On the cool scale, Dean Martin weighs in more heavily than Sinatra: Utterly independent, he genuinely seemed not to have given a rat’s rump about anything. This would include his friend Frank Sinatra’s propensity to suck up to the powerful—the Mafia, the Kennedys, finally the Reagans—which Martin pointed out and claimed simply not to understand. But anyone with any knowledge of Sinatra’s life without a microphone in his hand will find it difficult to think well of him, for the stories of his bullying, his meanness and cruelty, are manifold. “Frank saved my life one night in a parking lot in Las Vegas,” Don Rickles joked. “He said, ‘That’s enough, boys.’ ”
The next wall in Dinerstein’s gallery of the cool consists of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis (last name available on request). Cool, in other words, is now to be found in jeans and leather jackets and often seated on motorcycles (varoom, varoom). Cool becomes openly, though not very precisely, rebellious. When in The Wild One (1953), the Brando character is asked what he is rebelling against, he answers, “Whaddya got?” James Dean’s great breakthrough was in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The problem, according to Dinerstein, now shifts to “the tensions of [the] inner life.” Cool suddenly has a psychotherapeutic side. Marlon Brando cries in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)—something, surely, Humphrey Bogart never would have done. Dinerstein refers to Brando as “therapeutic man,” noting that, among the cool, “neurosis was no longer suppressed but expressed, a sign of how deeply psychoanalysis had penetrated aesthetic and intellectual communities.”
James Dean and Elvis apparently were in awe of Marlon Brando, as Bob Dylan and John Lennon would come to be of Elvis. Brando and Dean, Dinerstein reports, “were gay icons and had bisexual relationships.” Brando would in later years take on enough weight to pass as Orson Welles’s twin; Elvis ended his days a pillhead nearly too fat to squeeze into his glittering stage costumes. These new cool rebels did not grow old coolly. James Dean, after appearing in three dud movies (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Giant) made the savvy career move of dying at 24 by crashing his speeding Porsche, and thus allowing Dinerstein to call him “postwar cool’s Keats or Rimbaud”—minus, he neglects to add, the talent. Cool would henceforth remain an option open exclusively to the young.
The strongest chapter in The Origins of Postwar Cool is that on Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun (1959), who sounded the buzzer signifying the end of cool. She attacked the Beats, saying “they have made a crummy revolt, a revolt that has not added up to a hill of beans.” She wrote a play, Les Blancs, mocking Jean Genet’s The Blacks for its ultimate emptiness. And while she was at it, she claimed that Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and Albert Camus, with their literary existentialism, were artistic failures. She felt that the angst about the specter of nuclear war, which supposedly affected entire generations, was a fraud: “As a playwright, civil rights activist, and feminist,” Dinerstein writes, “Lorraine Hansberry represents the end of existential cool and the onset of a period of participatory social change often just called the ’60s.” Perhaps only a black, bisexual woman married to a Jewish husband could have brought all this off.
If one didn’t look too closely at the squalor behind the scenes during his White House days, John F. Kennedy would seem to have qualified as cool. In a famous-in-its-day Esquire article, Norman Mailer, who perhaps wrote and said more stupid things than any writer in the past century, styled Kennedy “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Dinerstein calls Kennedy’s death “the most transformative” of all in the postwar era. It now begins to look as if all that John F. Kennedy (who preferred to go hatless) transformed was the sale of men’s fedoras.
The hippie revolution was implacably youthful—”Never trust anyone over 30″ was one of its shibboleths—and the heir of the coarser remnants of cool. “In the mid-1960s,” Dinerstein writes,
Yet the leaders of the counterculture—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis—were not cool in any way that Lester Young, the phenomenon’s inventor, would have recognized.
Dinerstein’s final definition of cool is the muzzy one of “a subconscious method for negotiating identity in modernity through popular culture.” Yet in the realm of popular culture, perhaps the last figures to qualify as cool were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Brad Pitt, with his sloppy marriages, certainly isn’t cool, nor is George Clooney. No rapper I know of qualifies as cool, including the fellow who calls himself LL Cool J. Yet, Dinerstein holds,
The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, though written to vaunt the richness of the concept of cool and its possessors, has had, at least on this reader, quite the opposite effect. Apart from those early black jazz musicians who required the mask of cool to face a cruelly hostile world, cool turns out to have been the preoccupation, chiefly, of less-than-first-rate writers, shoddy thinkers, and poseurs generally. Undreamt of in the philosophy of those who have ardently strained after the appearance of cool, courage, kindness, generosity, and natural refinement are the things that are, and always have been, truly cool. ¨
Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Wind Sprints: Essays.
