Morris Dickstein is a curious case. Trained as a scholar of British Romanticism, he has made his name as a cultural critic and historian with books like Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977) and Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009). While most academic literary critics of his generation have applied themselves to high theory and various refinements of close reading, he has set himself up as a generalist, a successor to the eminent New York Intellectuals of yore: Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and so on.
Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education
By Morris Dickstein (Liveright)
There is much to admire about Dickstein’s torch carrying, but it also sets an uncomfortably high bar. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to read his new memoir, Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education, outside of the shadow of other New York Intellectual memoirists, most notably Kazin, one of the great autobiographers of the 20th century. The first half of Dickstein’s book includes reminiscences of what he calls “the last act of the rich drama of Jewish life on the Lower East Side” in the 1940s, with loving attention to such institutions as the yeshiva, the Catskills resort, and Zionist summer camp. If none of this measures up to the gold standard of Kazin’s A Walker in the City, it’s still heartfelt and evocative, and should appeal to readers interested in the American Jewish experience.
As a record of midcentury intellectual life, however, Why Not Say What Happened is less satisfying. Though there are cameos by the illustrious likes of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and E.M. Forster, Dickstein never seems all that interested in them as people. (Compare the smorgasbord of anecdotes in Kazin’s New York Jew.) A sharply etched portrait of F.R. Leavis, whom Dickstein got to know while on fellowship at Cambridge, is one of the rare exceptions to this rule: “His collar was always open, not a Byronic affectation … but because he had been gassed during the Great War and could not abide a tie. Though he was in his 69th year, he could often be seen running with a rucksack along Queen’s Road, not exercising but hurrying off impatiently to his next destination.” More often, though, Dickstein’s character sketches are disappointing, especially when it comes to female intellectuals: He criticizes both Susan Sontag and Q.D. Leavis for their rudeness, and when he meets Hannah Arendt he is struck only by her resemblance to his “imperious” mother-in-law. Surely there’s more to say about one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers.
On the other hand, we get pages upon pages of Dickstein’s stomach troubles, his therapy sessions, the logistical difficulties of keeping kosher when traveling abroad, and his gripes about the rigors of graduate education. He has little good to say about his time at Yale in the late 1950s and early 60s, at the height of the influence of the New Criticism: For a critic of Dickstein’s disposition, “it constituted the slow death of the soul, bleeding from a hundred nicks and cuts.” Though Dickstein loathed graduate school, he recognizes that he was lucky to pass through it when he did. Those were fat years for the job market, in which “department chairs came calling at Yale like major-league scouts checking out the talent.” (That sound you hear now is a thousand graduate students grinding their teeth in frustration.)
By contrast, Dickstein’s passion for Columbia, where he matriculated as an undergraduate and received his first academic job, is intense. It’s easy to see the mark that the university’s midcentury faculty, especially Trilling, left on him. “The Columbia ethos exalted brilliance over everything,” Dickstein writes, and he found this emphasis congenial, putting the bulk of his energy not into revising his dissertation but into long, ambitious review essays on literature, film, and culture for little magazines like Commentary and Partisan Review.
Columbia was changing dramatically during the years Dickstein taught there, and he was directly involved in one of the most controversial periods in the institution’s history. In April of 1968, two activist groups—the Student Afro-American Society and Students for a Democratic Society—led a weeklong occupation of campus buildings to protest the university’s construction of an athletics facility near Harlem with a separate entrance for the nonuniversity community (critics called it “Gym Crow”), as well as Columbia’s connection to research into weapons technology being used by the U.S. government in the Vietnam War. Dickstein served on an ad hoc committee of liberal professors who were broadly in support of the students, and he is unsparing in his criticisms of President Grayson Kirk’s decision to call in the police to clear Low Library, an action that resulted in the brutalization of students and professors.
Yet it’s not hard to detect an underlying ambivalence toward the occupations in sentences like “I saw the campus I loved turned into a war zone.” Indeed, Dickstein’s account of these events often seems conveniently vague, as if he’s trying to have it both ways, scoring points off heartless administrators one moment and mindless students the next. Toward the white radicals of SDS, especially, he is paternalistic and condescending: “With a cheeky insouciance typical of the times, they seemed engaged less in politics than in thumbing their noses at authority.” This is no doubt true, to an extent—go read James Simon Kunen’s The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary if you want to savor some vintage insouciance—but it also minimizes the real political stakes of the occupations, which went beyond adolescent posturing to strike at issues of institutional complicity and responsibility that are still relevant today.
Whatever their legacy, in the short term the 1968 uprisings were the source of much dissension among the Columbia faculty. Dickstein implies, in passing, that his solidarity with the radicals, limited though it was, may have cost him his job. In any case, he was refused tenure by the English department in 1971, a rejection he experienced, unsurprisingly, as a personal trauma. Yet Dickstein is also galvanized by this slight: “I can vividly recall the surge of feeling … I’ll prove how wrong they were.” What doesn’t tenure him makes him stronger.
It’s here that Why Not Say What Happened cuts off, somewhat arbitrarily, at the end of the 1960s. There may well be a sequel in the works, as Dickstein’s cliffhangerish final paragraph suggests, and it will be interesting to see what he makes of the culture wars of the 70s and 80s, those equally contentious but less endlessly rehashed decades in American intellectual life. This would also help address another fundamental problem with Dickstein’s memoir: The familiar climacteric of the 60s is now, in the wake of hundreds of representations both fictional and historical, a lot less effective as a narrative frame than it was in 1977 when Gates of Eden was published (a new edition is out this year, coinciding with the memoir). There are only so many times one can hear that 60s litany—the Cuban missile crisis! the JFK assassination! Pop Art! Bob Dylan and the Beatles! Yippies levitating the Pentagon!—and still feel the force of what Dickstein calls “the world … awakening as if from a long paralytic trance.”
These events are still interesting, of course, and not only to those who happened to live through them. But without a concerted attempt to connect them to the state of our contemporary world, their enumeration comes off as pious and nostalgic, as rote as the Orthodox “punctilio of ritual” the young Dickstein detested in his yeshiva training. With this book, Dickstein has consolidated his claim to the 60s; we understand what those years represented and meant to him. Why not say what happened next?
