Whether or not it is true that you can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe claimed—and the claim is just a special case of the more general observation of Heraclitus that you cannot step into the same river twice—it seems that when we find we can’t, nostalgia is the place we go instead. Nostalgia has a mixed reputation. Outfits like Time-Life happily sell, and many of us happily buy, compilations of old photos or music that allow us to escape the present moment and all its cares and return to a vision of a past whose cares are omitted or at least denatured. It is those words “escape” and “vision” that critics rightly fasten upon. So if the following remarks seem strained or just wrong, put it down to nostalgia run riot.

Right now I am listening to one of the great jazz recordings, “Stolen Moments,” from a 1961 album by the saxophonist Oliver Nelson, accompanied by Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on flute and alto, Bill Evans on piano, and others. It is a thoughtful, bluesy eight or nine minutes during which, it seems to me, as I drift into the music, that the group pretty well summarize an America at the tipping point of a deeply unsettling change. Yes, that probably overstates the case just a tad, but in nostalgia you can do that. You can remember visiting the Big Rock Candy Mountain if you want to.

What it seems to me that I am remembering is a time when we admired people who were cool. Some movie stars were cool, a few television personalities were cool, some writers were cool, even one or two politicians may secretly have been cool (there was certainly talk about Stu Symington). There were cool people we never heard of. Here I am using the term “cool” in an expansive sense. Narrower senses of cool mostly point to styles of behavior that are, in fact, distinctly not-cool. They are more like codes of conduct and appearance for wannabes: goatee, beret, and a sneer for poets; all black and a blank look for dancers or art students; full beard, rimless glasses, army jacket, and a defiant glare for revolutionaries or sociology grad students; and so on. We’ve all learned to decode the game.

It may simply be that some are born cool, or at least with the requisite quanta of intelligence and temperament, and the rest of us are not.

No, true cool is both easier to describe and far harder to achieve, if in fact it is achievable at all. It may simply be that some are born cool, or at least with the requisite quanta of intelligence and temperament, and the rest of us are not. (There is no record of anyone’s ever having had cool thrust upon them.) But that’s fine. We don’t all have to be cool. What is important is how the rest of us respond to the ones who are.

Who and what was cool? Cary Grant was cool, and of course Steve McQueen. Thelonious S. Monk (anybody remember when Time captioned a picture of him “Melodious Thunk”?) and Horace Silver, Fairfield Porter, E.E. Cummings (bear in mind that that “e.e.” business was the bright idea of his publisher), Bob Cousy, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip Marlowe, Gus Grissom … a list is pointless except to suggest the breadth of the concept. For contrast, here are some more or less parallel non-cool types: James Dean, Chet Baker, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Kobe Bryant, Norman Mailer, Howard Roark, Frank Borman.

Cool is not dependent on achievement, or vice versa. Cool is how you get there. Cool is just doing the job; not-cool is making sure, while you’re at it, that everyone sees just how tough the job is and thus how cool you are to be doing it. Cool is self-direction, self-possession, self-sufficiency, capability, discretion, and a bit of wit. Not-cool is angst, conspicuous display, disdain, tropisms toward bright lights, crowds, and media—in short, all those adolescent traits that so many people fail to grow out of.

Cool is self-direction, self-possession, self-sufficiency, capability, discretion, and a bit of wit. Not-cool is angst, conspicuous display, disdain, tropisms toward bright lights, crowds, and media.

I’m looking at my copy of the June 1959 issue of Playboy. Here’s an ad for a Lord West summer dinner jacket. Well, score one for the olden days to begin with. Our contemporary dress code, if there were one, would doubtless recommend for a summer dinner party a nice tee in preference to a muscle shirt, and might go so far as to plump for your newest pair of flipflops. Anyway, the illustration shows a tall, slim fellow who is entirely at home in his clothes—relaxed but not slouched, one hand casually in a pocket, and the smile on is face is one of genuine good cheer, no smirk, no leer, no vacuous stare back at the viewer. Easy, manly elegance is the theme, and more than a suggestion of cool.

But the reason to have the magazine, as we all understand, is the articles. On page 31 begins a piece by Jack Kerouac on the origins of the Beat Generation. “Beat,” for Kerouac, was a deep and rather elusive concept, but he insisted upon its spiritual content against those who saw in it only an attitude to strike and a style to be bought at the Salvation Army store. He begins by writing about a publicity photo taken of him wearing a crucifix on a chain around his neck. He is dismayed that it was reproduced in several publications with the crucifix airbrushed out; only the New York Times left it alone.

“Therefore the New York Times is as beat as I am, and I’m glad I’ve got a friend. I mean it sincerely. God bless the New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as though it was something distasteful … I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am beat, that is, I believe in beatitude … So you people don’t believe in God. So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels?”

Cool outlasted beat as a word but devolved into a general term of approbation that your clergyman uses as easily as your drug dealer.

Of course it was some big smart know-it-alls who took over the job of deciding who was truly beat, and it turned out to be the big smart know-it-alls who enjoyed playing at hipster, plus Maynard G. Krebs for the rest of us.

I do not mean to suggest that cool and beat are synonyms. But they are complementary, hence their frequent confusion. Nor do I claim that cool is a virtue. Styles change, but virtue abides. I only point out that the sort of cool I am talking about was once associated with such virtues as reticence, savoir-faire, and irony, none of which is much practiced or regarded these days. Cool outlasted beat as a word but devolved into a general term of approbation that your clergyman uses as easily as your drug dealer. As a term denoting a certain admirable way of being in the world, not so much.

The problem was that admiration bred imitation, and imitation lives on exaggeration. Thus reticence was exaggerated, transformed from a quality of character into a mere tic, that produced, among others, Clint Eastwood’s “thousand-yard stare” characters; savoir-faire became the faux sophistication of a James “shaken, not stirred” Bond; irony became the mugging knowingness of Dave Letterman.

What replaced cool? Nothing did, not in the sense of a one-for-one substitution. But what we seem to have been left with instead is sour. Sour is what you get when irony gets into the hands of poseurs, the professionally not-cool. Instead of the needle-sharp barbs of Mort Sahl—“Are there any groups I haven’t offended yet?”—you get the ramblings of a Lenny Bruce throwing cow pies blindly until someone tells him the set is over and he can stumble off. Instead of Sid Caesar you get “Laugh-In.” Over Clark Gable’s wry worldliness, paint in George Clooney’s slightly imbecile simper.

What replaced cool? Nothing did, not in the sense of a one-for-one substitution. Instead of Sid Caesar you get ‘Laugh-In.’ Over Clark Gable’s wry worldliness, paint in George Clooney’s slightly imbecile simper.

The thing is, not-cool is so much easier to get than cool. The masses get it; agents seek it out and hone their protégés to empty perfection; cultural entrepreneurs publish it like so much salt pork in barrels. And so it becomes the national standard.

Where literature once gave us models to emulate in creating lives for ourselves, media now give us merely images to ape. Of one of his characters Raymond Chandler wrote, “his voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.” That was in 1939.

And media have taught us a self-subverting double consciousness about achievement. Not more than three or four years after Roger Bannister’s sublime conquest of the four-minute mile in England in 1954, a cartoon by the acute Giles, late of the Daily Express, showed an obviously American press photographer shouting to a runner straining across the finish line: “Let’s have it again, Bud; not enough agony for a winner.”

Oliver Nelson must have been a seer. “Stolen Moments” is a blue celebration of true cool, and at the same time it is an elegy anticipating a wake that won’t get under way in earnest for another couple of years. It’s one of those pieces I’m careful not to play too often. Nostalgia can really hang you up the most.

Robert McHenry is the former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica.

FURTHER READING: McHenry’s articles for The American include “What’s in a Name?,” on technology and anonymity, “When an Epoch Began,” on how IBM, the census, and Emily Dickinson define an epoch, and “About That Message to Garcia...,” on a signature American homily that offers lessons on initiative, loyalty, hard work, and enterprise. Most recently, he wrote “Marx, Hubbard, and the Totalitarian Impulse,” comparing the overweening philosopher and the scam artist—each man proposed a total explanation for human life. 

Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group.