Book Review Essay: Spokesman of Cool

Abstract

What was postwar cool? For Joel Dinerstein, professor of English at Tulane University, the time frame is 1943–1963, and the emblematic figures are from jazz (Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins), noir (Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart), existentialism (Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir), and the standard 1950s cool pantheon (Marlon Brando, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac). Dinerstein defines cool as “synonymous with authenticity, independence, integrity, and nonconformity; to be cool meant you carried personal authority through a stylish mask of stoicism.” Cool achieved an “aestheticization of detachment ... a resonant tension between felt emotion and performed nonchalance.” Cool was masculine, projecting “toughness and self-mastery through a blank facial expression and a corresponding economy of motion,” yet “with one’s vulnerability just visible enough to show the emotional costs of the stance.” Straddling our dark and noble sides, cool was “a post-Christian concept, a devaluation of the virtuous (or good) man as an unrealistic ideal.” The book’s opening photograph, from Paris in 1949, depicts a young Miles Davis and Juliette Gréco, not any cool character on a street corner. The goal is to unmask the “cultural work” such icons perform, consciously or otherwise: “Cool is clarified through its icons ... In effect, popular culture represents society – or a generation – thinking out loud.” The title promises a bit more than it can deliver, as Dinerstein is more interested in “reading” movies, literature and celebrities as projections of popular desire than tracing cultural norms systematically. Still, he determines that cool “emanated out of African-American jazz culture to become an umbrella term for the alienated attitude of American rebels.” Lester Young was “the primogenitor of cool” who “disseminated the modern usage of the term.” West African cool, a “force of community” associated with “smoothness, balance, silence,” shifted in postwar America to a “new valuation of public composure and the disparaging of the outward emotional display long associated with stereotypes of blacks.” Dinerstein also draws in the English upper class and its “stiff upper lip” – and even the Greek Stoics – to sketch a “convergence of Angloand AfricanAmerican masculine ideals.” In the 1930s, proto-cool took form in “shadow selves of Anglo-American positivism: the ethnic gangster, the jazz musician, the devil-may-care song-and-dance man, the hard-boiled detective, and later on, the spy.” Its art form was film noir, “a working-