NOSTALGIA, TECHNICAL VIRGINS, THE TENNESSEE WALTZ
Patti Page
The aging Patti Page was singing her 1950 hit The Tennessee Waltz on one of those nostalgia programs that Public Television broadcasts when trying to raise money. A man in the audience, who looked to be in his late middle age, could not control his tears. Likewise a woman I took to be his wife. Then another man, several men and women, all of a certain age. To my surprise, I. too, felt tears in my eyes, though I’d never been a great fan of popular music. of the time. For good reason:
With few exceptions, my generation, which came of age in the 50’s, had the most saccharine, boring, and downright stupid popular songs. like Sh-boom, Sh-boom; Perry Como’s Hoop-Dee-Do Doo, one Eileen Barton’s If I Knew You Were Coming/I’d have Baked a Cake. . ./ Of course there was some decent jazz, the Third Man Theme on that haunting zither, Pete Seeger and The Weavers (later banned from the airwaves because the group was allegedly “pink”) and early rock to liven things up. but the song I most remember was The Tennessee Waltz. I even recall associating it with a boy on whom I had a crush, though I’ve no idea why. Probably because my crush and the popularity of the song took place at the same time. (As illogical as any ad hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: I am wearing a white shirt; it is snowing today. Yet I wept. And for a mini-second imagined I was back in the 50’s with my friends from high school and college, most of them now drifted away. many no longer alive. As the key line from the Tennessee Waltz goes I know just how much I have lost…
Nostalgia
Nostalgia: that sentimental hankering for the past, literally the ache to go back to an always idealized time or space, the blessed isles of fantasy, a golden place lacquered to shine more brightly than it ever did in its day. Actually, this deeply conservative urge is more concerned with time than space, though the two are sometimes interchangeable, like the idealized wish to return to the womb noted in Freudian theory. Yes, the womb, where all mammals once romped and frolicked in a warm sea, a state of being that demanded neither thought nor action –not unlike fantasized abodes of the dead.
It is the opposite of both irony and skepticism, a bastardized version of Golden Age myths, In its most extreme form, nostalgia fed the delusion that led to the suicide of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. At its core nostalgia is the impossible craving to reverse time and return to one’s youth—or to some idealized civilization in the presumed dawn of civilization, which varies between cultures. As Linda Hutcheon claims, nostalgia “exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near.” [italics added] [1] The closer the past, the more distant the future, particularly one’s inevitable death.
As architectural history and studies of interior design reveal, nostalgia for earlier styles is rampant: why else the fondness for colonial American furniture (or imitations thereof) and a recent resurgence of the French bidet: a must for the upscale American bathroom even though far removed from its original purpose. Prominent arbiters of style like Ralph Lauren and Estee Lauder decorate their private offices with Empire and Belle Epoque furniture; computers, fax machines, and file cabinets relegated to the main or public offices. Fads of all sorts glut the nostalgia marketplace: what consumer can resist the inevitable revival of suspenders or the micro-miniskirts of the 60’s? As Witold Ryczynski claims, “…acute awareness of tradition is a modern phenomenon that reflects a desire for custom and routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation. “ [2] Even if the nostalgic objects and styles have to be invented.
Yet nostalgia is the sine qua non of much poetry, especially of the romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats. Often they and their contemporaries craved a return to nature as the antidote to the rising Industrial Revolution as well as to earlier aesthetic traditions—e.g. the creator of the classical Grecian Urn in Keats’s famous Ode or the Florence of Boccaccio in Coleridge’s poem of that name. Baudelaire links nostalgia with the search for the unknown, but insists he will resist its call: “I will not whine like Ovid/Driven out of Latin paradise” (Horreur Sympathetique), Contemporaries like Billy Collins address the subject sardonically at times: “Even this morning would be improvement over the present,” but the prominent American poet Philip Levine devotes the vast majority of his many poems to evocations of his Detroit childhood. More than I first realized, I myself have my stock of nostalgic references from childhood: the creek, kitchen pump and ice-box of my grandparents’ summer house, the splendor of skipping through the grass that has long ago been paved over, et al.
The 50’s
The 50’s? While Pat Boone and Eddie Fisher were crooning banalities, sexual mores, at least in middle-class white America, were as strict as any Victorian headmaster could preach. Pre-marital sex? Verboten, especially for women, some of whom protected their reputations by calling themselves technical virgins—heavy petting but no penetration. To say nothing of severe limits to the ambitions of all but a few ambitious women. To say nothing of rampant racism. Of intense fears of communism that led to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the inquisition of suspect “reds” led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his minions. Of the Korean War and the lead-up to Vietnam. Rarely did anyone protest; such protest that took place was mainly aesthetic and social (remember Hootenannies and Coffee Houses?) No wonder that at my college graduation in 1956, the speaker, poet Archibald McLeish, called us “the marshmallow generation.”
Janice
The story of my former college roommate, Janice, could only have taken place in the 1950s. I remember visiting her at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers on Staten Island, NY, one late summer day in 1955. I had recently returned from a year of study abroad. In mid-April she had written me a letter about her secret pregnancy: I must contact her at the Home soon as I returned. She also said she had secretly married her boyfriend, Bill, a graduate student at Yale, over Thanksgiving break. So the pregnancy was not illegitimate. In fact she and Bill had only had sex two or three times, as I later learned. Her last sentence was underlined in purple ink:
God forbid if the baby comes late and I can’t arrive on time for the beginning of our senior year. I could say I have mono, but they might suspect something else, even contact my parents. I’ve never told them about the elopement, let alone about the baby.
I must backtrack. Unbelievable as it might seem today, in the 1950s it was strictly against the rules for a student in our fancy women’s college to marry without the permission of the Warden, one Miss Withee, whose eyes were the color and size of raisins. Pregnancy from an unreported marriage would be a major sin, equivalent with an out of wedlock conception. Unless one could prove she was beyond doubt a virgin, a real rather than a “technical virgin”—i.e. everything but penetration. Abortion, of course, was illegal, the pill didn’t come along until 1960, diaphragms and condoms were hard to find in Massachusetts.
“I did what I could,” Janice said, averting her eyes as if to study the cracks
in the building’s brick porch. “Nothing worked.”
“What about Bill? Didn’t he try to help?”
“Oh, he looked for a doctor who would take care of the problem. But they all wanted lots of money. So I planned to get rid of it myself until one of the girls here almost died from trying it with a coat hanger.”
Someone was playing a radio, The Ballad of Davy Crockett booming through an open window, loud enough to drown out our voices.
“But you were married. Why couldn’t you have the kid and finish college later?
“Shh. The Home doesn’t know that. It’s supposed to serve only unwed mothers.”
Before I left, Janice pleaded with me to protect her, lie, if necessary, if the college officials suspected anything if she had to show up late for fall registration.
“There’s something else that must remain secret,” she whispered. “I lied on the adoption agency’s health form and mentioned nothing about Bill’s epilepsy.
I started to walk towards the ferry. And refrained from saying how all her secrets and lies put me in a risky position.
I guess that on one level I enjoyed being the custodian of her secrets. After all, Janice had “gone all the way” as we used to say.
CODA: She gave birth to a boy in late August and managed to return to school on time. as if it was part of a script. We rarely talked about the baby, who had adopted by a nameless couple (that’s how things worked back then) Many years later I visited her in Chicago, where, now divorced from Bill, she lived alone and had become devoutly religious. We chatted a bit about old times. Finally I got up the courage to ask her about that summer of 1955.
“1955. That was the summer I worked as a waitress in Wisconsin.”
Genuine or feigned amnesia? The latter would be the opposite of nostalgia, an act of forgetting, even if not deliberate.
The Grandfather Paradox
Shortly after that PBS program on music of the 50’s I found myself singing The Tennessee Waltz; an audio-tic or, more expressively, an earworm, as some psychologists call it. Maybe I was far more nostalgic than I thought. I began to read about The Grandfather Paradox: in fantasy one could travel back to the past and prevent his or her own birth by killing a grandfather or maybe a great-great—great grandfather. That one missing piece from the genealogical chain would have a far greater effect: not only would I not have been born, but my great-greats, etc. Mind-boggling. And even abstractly possible argue physicists who study wormholes and cosmic strings. Maybe even infinite regress: knock that apple out of the tree before Eve could pick it. Voila! No original sin..
In earthier terms, I but the imagined effect on history of a single seemingly trivial moment, like when Tristram Shandy’s mother distracts his father just prior to the height of intercourse by asking if the man had remembered to wind the clock. A different sperm might well have won the race to her waiting ovum. If Hitler’s mother had a headache that night, or, for that matter, Albert Einstein’s. What if, what if . . .
Come to think of it, The Tennessee Waltz had banal lyrics even for the 50’s, when it was number one on pop, country, and R&B charts. Better to go back to the music of the 1930’s when despite the Depression and beginning of World War 11 swing and jazz flourished along with such tear-jerkers as Melancholy Baby. (YouTube is replete with musical nostalgia channels.)
So much for Patti Page: now I really know just how much I have lost. Not that much after all.
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1. Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, ” Comparative Literature 30 (2000), 189-207.
2. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (Penguin: 1987), p. 9