Dan Wakefield on "The Silent Generation"

Dan Wakefield (b. 1932) is an unlikely candidate for his rôle as chronicler of the cultural elite—middle class kid from Indianapolis, and an Eagle Scout, his style is modest, almost circumspect, with not a hint of rage or rancor, and not much by way of irony. What seems to have transformed him was his time at Columbia University in the golden age where he studied under Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, and became an acolyte of C. Wright Mills. What stamped him was his ten years in Greenwich Village, where he scratched out a living as a writer and exhibited a Boswellian knack for friendship (Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Norman Podhoretz, Murray Kempton--Wakefield drops good names). He’s not as discerning a critic as his model Malcolm Cowley (of Exile’s Return), but he’s got a sharp eye and a concern for getting things right—and in the long run is judgments on, say, Jack Kerouac or Dorothy Day, or Freudian psychoanalysis, appear to hold up pretty well.

No wonder, then, that Wakefield’s New York in the 50s appears to have established itself as the definitive account of the city between, as it were, Fiorello LaGuardia and John V. Lindsay—not quite a forgotten decade, but one whose memory can be swept up in the deluge of what came after. One of its many names is “the silent generation.” Wakefield believes the label is misunderstood:

If my generation was “silent,” it was not in failure to speak out with our work, but in the sense of adopting a style that was not given to splash and spotlights. Max Frankel says, “We set out essentially to be spectators and reflectors in life. A dogged kind of centrism came out of this, and it was later confused with unfeelingness in the sixties, as if we didn’t care enough for issues like the environment.”

We had no desire to shout political slogans or march with banners, because we had seen thee idealism of the radical thirties degenerate into the disillusionment of Stalinism and the backlash reaction of name-calling anticommunism. The naïve hope of salvation by politics seemed to have burned itself out in the thirties, replaced in the fifties too often by an equally naïve belief in salvation through psychoanalysis. … Ours was not the silence of timidity or apathy, but the kind James Joyce meant, in Portrait of the Artist, when he spoke of the young writer’s vow as “silence,exile, and cunning.” The “silence” of Joyce was not surrender; it simply meant not to blab or brag about your work. The “cunning” was finding a way to make a living and then doing it. The “exile” was the place far enough from the censure of home and middle-class convention to feel free enough to create.

Fn: Wakefield is another guy who needs a Wiki.