...the exuberance of uncertainty?

I am sometimes fascinated / curious about the years between the end of the Second World War and 1970.  I was alive for some of those years, but too young to know things or compare them to any other things.... 


Once in a while, now, I wonder if people were somehow happier in the late 1940s and in the 1950s and sort of maybe even in the '60s... and then since the topic is floating, I notice references to this era when I read them --


----------------- [Lucking Out, by James Wolcott] --------------------- Hard to believe now, but ballet once had an intellectual constituency, an arty swank.  The postwar exuberance of the mid-forties had carried all of the arts along on its dolphin crest, from painting to theater to music composing to fiction to poetry.  "Even in ballet,





previously hardly known, we were preeminent," observed Gore Vidal





...Although Vidal brackets this golden age in the brief span from VJ Day in 1945 to the commencement of the Korean War, its glamorous legs stretched longer than that, long enough to bask in the glow of Camelot.





Jacqueline Kennedy...hosted evenings at the White House where the invited guests included Stravinsky and Balanchine....








In his journal The Sixties, Edmund Wilson, the closest thing American literary criticism would ever have to Dr. Johnson in a Panama hat, records a gala evening in the mid-sixties: 


"Elena and I went to New York May 19 and attended the first night, on the 20th, of Nabokov's Don Quixote ballet.  Balanchine danced...the title role....  Everybody was there.  Nicholas had a section reserved for his friends in the middle of the first balcony..."




'Everybody was there,' a statement that affixes the royal seal of cachet, brilliant evening or no.  The cachet hadn't diminished in the seventies, but it had acquired a brow of canonical sobriety... -------------------------- [end, excerpt]







---------------------------- [Eric Bennett's review of The Brazen Age, by David Reid] -------------------------------- Between the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War, bracing uncertainty defined American lives.  Only time would answer the dire questions that loomed. 


Would the labor market absorb millions of demobilized soldiers as military production ground to a halt?... 


Would the fate of humankind after Hiroshima hang on world governance, as its strident advocates insisted?... 


Could Communists remain Communists?... 


How quickly and easily would things improve for African-Americans?... 


Might the feminist triumphs of Greenwich Village endure and spread?... 


Would Ernest Hemingway write another masterpiece?




Gore Vidal christened these five years of jittery open-endedness "not too brazen an age," and David Reid, with Vidal as muse, has written their history....The pages of "The Brazen Age" are sprawling, roving, panoramic and omnivorous....





------------------





A vast array of social and political possibilities exploded...between the 1890s and the late '30s.  It narrowed during the war years and collapsed after 1950....


Did the course of events in the United States, starting in the late '40s, have to run as it ran?  Even a year ago, before the rise of a social democratic candidate for president,





the question would have sounded fanciful....  In any case, the confusion of this campaign year lends particular interest to Reid's history.  People living in a time so clearly in search of a thesis should enjoy reading about another such time.... --------------------------------- [end, excerpt]


_________________________


{Lucking Out.  My Life Getting Down And Semi-Dirty In Seventies New York.  By James Wolcott.  Doubleday, 2011.}


{The New York Times Book Review.  May 1, 2016.  The Brazen Age.  New York City and the American Empire:  Politics, Art, and Bohemia, by David Reid.  Reviewed by Eric Bennett.}


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