I recently gobbled up S. C. Gwynne's dashing history of the Comanche tribe, Empire of the Summer Moon. It had been rapturously reviewed, was a bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Only after lauding it to friends did I find the essays by specialists questioning its veracity, and, most damagingly, one by queer critic Susan Stryker pointing out how incredibly racist it was. Carried away by the book's novelistic sweep of history, how was little me, or the many unknowing reviewers who lauded the book, to know?
So you'll have to accept my taking at face value the 27 brief biographies of the prominent movers and shakers that George Cotkin provides in Feast of Excess – A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, $35). I'm not familiar with Cotkin's previous books, but in Bookforum he was called "the great cultural and intellectual historian." So I'm recommending the book as an enlightening and accessible way to glean not just the pertinent facts of these artists' lives, but the meaning and impact of their work, and how they changed the tone and course of American culture.
These are the transgressive artists who during the last half of the 20th century defined an artistic phenomenon known as the "New Sensibility." The phrase was coined by Susan Sontag and Thomas Wolfe to cover the movement of artists in many fields away from the staid prevailing culture. They pushed the limit on personal liberation, sexuality, self-expression. Cotkin shows how this disparate group made permissible new avenues of behavior and expression, influenced our cultural history, and the effect they're still having on us today. The range Cotkin covers is great: John Cage, Diane Arbus, Hunter S. Thompson, Lenny Bruce, Marlon Brando, Judith Malina, even John Coltrane and Jerry Lee Lewis.
I honed in at first pass on the bios of the not surprisingly large number of gay and lesbian artists that Cotkin profiles. After Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, we find Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Sontag, and Gore Vidal. Greatly to his credit, Cotkin frequently and understandingly correlates an artist's sexuality with its effect on their worldview and work.
Brando could challenge traditional ideas of heterosexual masculinity because he had nothing to hide (although it seems he'd actually been around the block at least once, with a photo as proof). But while the work of many of the gay creators was artistically explosive, homophobia and self-repression rendered it politically impotent, as in the silence of Cage's music, the erasure of self in Rauschenberg's painting. As gay men, Cotkin notes, they were "exiled to a sort of expressive closet." Following these men, Highsmith's novels were seditious, and Ginsburg's poems were a blow-out.
Because irony and camp, still an underground phenomenon in the 1950s, were taken during the Cold War years as signs of political weakness and homosexuality, they bloomed only with the 60s second wave of the New Sensibility, as embodied by Sontag and Warhol. It's not lost on Cotkin that the gay liberation movement was gathering strength simultaneously with the questioning of the New Sensibility, voicing itself in the 1950s and exploding in the 60s.
Finally, here's how Feast of Excess represents the newest New Sensibility: it discusses gay and lesbian sexuality as easily and knowledgeably as it does heterosexuality. No hiding, no coding. Feast of Excess is a useful book, as it leads the bourgeoisie to better understand, and perhaps partake of, the cognoscenti. For its encompassing overview, inclusion of queer sensibilities, and apprehensible writing, I think you may find Feast of Excess rewarding.