522 The American Century: Literature since 1945Eisenhower years was more than just a useful weapon in the hands of certain
ambitious politicians, helping to generate policies of confrontation and containment.
It was a clear symptom of the uneasiness, the nightmarish fears that haunted
Americans at the time, despite their apparent satisfaction with themselves. There
was abundance and some complacency, certainly, but there was also a scarcely
repressed imagination of disaster fueled by the threat of nuclear war.
By the late 1950s this threat – and, more specifically, the bomb that embodied
it – had become a potent symbol for the destructive potential of the new society: the
dark side of those forces that had created apparently limitless wealth. Everywhere in
the culture there were signs of revolt, as the fears and phobias that had been lurking
just below the “tranquilized” surfaces of middle America began to bubble to the
surface. There was a renewed spirit of rebelliousness, opposition to a social and
economic order that had produced abundance, but had also produced the possibility
of global death. In music, the emergence of rock and roll, derived mainly from black
musical forms, signaled a reluctance to accept the consensual mores, and the
blandness, of white middle-class America: which is why, until they were absorbed
into the mainstream, performers like Elvis Presley were perceived by political
and religious leaders as such a potent threat, offering a gesture of defiance to
“civilized standards.” In the movies, similarly, new heroes appeared dramatizing an
oppositional stance to the dominant culture: James Dean, in films like Rebel Without
a Cause, and Marlon Brando in, say, The Wild One seemed living monuments to the
new spirit of alienation. And in literature, too, there were analogous developments.
Two key fictional texts of the period were The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Radically dissimilar as these two books were, they had
in common heroes at odds with modern urban–technological life: outsiders who
moved between fragile mysticism and outright disaffiliation in their search for an
alternative to the orthodox culture. They were willing, in effect, to say no, in thunder,
just as earlier American heroes had been. This was also true of many writers of the
period who bore witness to a gradual slipping away from the formalism and
abstraction – and, to some extent, the conformism – of the postwar years and toward
renewed feelings of freedom, individualism, and commitment. Recovering the
impulse toward the personal, sometimes to the point of the confessional, and the
urge toward an individual, perhaps even idiosyncratic beat, they gave voice to a
growing sense of resistance to the social norms. Reinventing the old American
allegiance to the rebellious self, and weaving together personal and historical
traumas, they sought in their line and language for a road to liberation: a way of
realizing their fundamental estrangement. No cultural development is seamless, and
it would wrong to suggest that the story of the first two decades after World War II
is one, simply, of abundance and anxiety merging into revolt and repudiation of
fixed forms. But, in terms of a general direction or tendency, this was the way that
many American writers moved, along with their fellow Americans, as they saw one
president, Eisenhower, who seemed “pretty much for mother, home, and heaven,”
succeeded by another, Kennedy, who preferred to talk in terms of “a new generation
of Americans” “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace” – “unwillingGGray_c05.indd 522ray_c 05 .indd 522 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM