A few months ago I celebrated—if that's the word I want—my thirty-fifth birthday. I am now forever removed from even the most far-fetched reach of Gen. Lewis B. Hershey and eligible, I discover, for membership in the Nostalgia Book Club. You lose a little, you win a little.

But the fact is that you really don't have to be over thirty-five to enjoy nostalgia. Thanks to the good offices of the mass media, it is excessively available to one and all and it comes in every grade, ranging from the low-comedy variety of the disc jockies who offer “golden oldies” dating all the way back to 1965, up through those throbbingly narrated TV memorials to the movie stars of our childhood, and ending with the higher forms offered by such popular historians as Walter Lord.

We idle here, like the ten thousand Fords in Robert Lowell's “Concord” sonnet, “in search of a tradition.” And we believe, at least unconsciously, in Sinclair Lewis's earlier idea involving the same auto, that so “this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon-Ton store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.”

In the same poem Lowell speaks of “the lurch/ For forms to harness Heraclitus' stream,” and it seems to me that the prevalence of the nostalgic mode in our popular culture is just that. More: it is an out-of-control swerve. Nostalgia represents an attempt to keep alive the manifestly false belief that history repeats itself and that our present lunacies can be explained and justified by the life of the past. (Whitman: “All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me;/ Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”) But ethnocentricity of this kind is nowadays probably a less important source of nostalgia among us than the more and more widespread experience of uprootedness. No one, it seems, is where he is supposed to be any more. Negroes from the rural South crowd the urban ghettos, rubes from the Middle West dominate corporate board rooms, crazies from all over have turned California into the world's largest asylum—and so on and familiarly on. The dictionary defines nostalgia as “homesickness or strong desire for family and friends, in their severe forms producing derangement of mental and physical functions.” Sick of home, we left; sick for home, we languish.

But note: we have been an urban culture and a mass-media culture for a long time. The Western movie, the family situation comedy, the classic war and spy stories no longer remind us of the actual history that once inspired these fictions; they refer us instead to their earlier replications in the media. Rod Taylor's or Charlton Heston's prairie loner—how does he compare with Gary Cooper's? Paul Newman's private eye—juxtaposed with the memory of Bogart, who was himself trying to embody Hammett's and Chandler's prototypes—how does he do? And what about those television families? We do not rate them against real families but rather against our memories of Luci and Desi, Ozzie and Harriet, Fibber and Molly.

For the first time in history an art that pretends to seriousness, and is often deadly so—Pop—uses the junk of low culture as raw material and aspires to its transformation into high art, totally reversing the usual filter-down progression of forms and styles in art. We have, in addition, set up a Campground next to the garbage heap of old media styles, pilfering from it for the characteristic humor of this decade. Even those of us who profess abhorrence of or indifference to Camp and Pop can be inveigled into a fast game of Trivia, and will be delighted if we can come up with the names of the actors who played Roddy McDowell's parents in My Friend Flicka. (They were Preston Foster and Rita Johnson.)

No wonder, then, that a new breed of reference work has come into being to help us fix and check these memories: of old cars, World War I airplanes, antique toys and banks, steam trains and steamboats, fire engines, circuses, the silent film. Such books are to us what family genealogies were to older generations—the palpable record of the heritage that defines us, reassurance that we were marked and formed by history and therefore are logically rather than accidentally what we are. They transform and dignify into a “cultural tradition” what are, after all, merely outdated industrial products.

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George T. Simon's The Big Bands¹ is a recent example of the breed—at once an encyclopedia, a critical history, and a kind of memorial service for a style of music and a style of musical life now un-revivably dead. Mr. Simon, who used to review the big swing bands for Metronome in the mid-30's and 40's, draws heavily here on his files of old notices, and his book is thoroughly infused with the high spirit of the young enthusiast he then was. Thanks partly to this enthusiasm, no matter how sternly one regards the burgeoning of the nostalgia industry, and though by any ordinary standard Mr. Simon's style is execrable in the breezy-bright manner that show-biz trade publications seem compelled to affect, his book does succeed in, shall we say, “wafting” one back to a lost time. Moreover, like many books by and for “buffs,” it has a quality too often missing from more widely ranging, slicker social histories: it has passion, driving people like Mr. Simon to prodigies of scholarship and somehow carrying the reader through material he never dreamed could interest him. As a result, The Big Bands gave me, at least, something I always wanted and never got—the real inside story of the band business, a sort of super fan magazine between hard covers.

I was just barely old enough to join the teen-agers down at the old Riverside Theater in Milwaukee to hear Tommy Dorsey or Harry James or Benny Goodman when they came through with their bands, and I was definitely not old enough to head for The Eagle's Ballroom to dance to their tunes. Yet, desperately anxious to be as sophisticated as the adolescents on the block, I learned to appreciate “In the Mood,” “Stompin' at the Savoy,” and all the rest. I went to see Orchestra Wives, Sun Valley Serenade, The Big Street, and admired the footloose camaraderie of the bands, imagined the fun, and did not denigrate the much-discussed hardships of one-night stands linked by overnight bus trips—indeed, they were an ingredient of hardship necessary to make any dream viable in America. The whole mystique—the after-hours clubs where you got to play the music you really wanted to play; the integrity-ridden leader, fighting to play his kind of music and being turned down by cigar-chomping managers; the girl singer who sticks by him; the Bunny Berrigan type drowning his talent in a bottle; the ultimate triumph, setting the house record at the Paramount or playing Carnegie Hall: life seen as a B-movie plot. And yet, here I sit reading this foolish book and it all comes back—more richly evocative, somehow, than some of my truer romances.

Media fads, no less than powerful fictions, have their real consequences. Item: unmusical, unable to carry a tune, I studied the drums for three or four years, was indulged in an expensive set of them and assiduously, and without a shard of talent, accompanied records on them, played marches in a conservatory and a school orchestra and, exactly like those movie characters, dreamed of playing “my” kind of music somewhere else (except that I really hated to practice and didn't know what my kind of music was). Item: making up a gift package for a cousin serving in the navy, I carefully tucked in a copy of a fan magazine—Band Leaders—because we shared an enthusiasm for, I think, Tommy Dorsey. Item: Another, more distant cousin, named Ken Harvey, was widely believed to be the second greatest banjo player in the “world” (a five-state area known to Col. McCormick as “Chicagoland,” in which everybody knew Eddie Peabody was the very greatest). I was taken, one lunch-time, to the Schroeder Hotel ballroom to hear Harvey's band play, and he dedicated a song to our table and at a break joined us, jut-jawed and wavy-haired and falsely charming. At the time, meeting a real band leader was so important an experience that I can to this day feel a bit let down at finding that his band was apparently so irredeemably Mickey Mouse—to use a term generic to outfits playing sweet and styleless in the midlands—that he does not rate so much as a mention in Mr. Simon's compendium.

Still, virtually everything else anyone could conceivably want to know about the decade called the Age of Swing is here, and I have only admiration for the way Mr. Simon keeps track of the personnel changes that often led to the rise and decline of the bands' relative fortunes; they split and recreated. themselves with amoeba-like regularity and the scholarship it takes to follow the comings and goings of those all-important anonymities, the sidemen, is as difficult as the effort it requires to trace the intermarryings of European royal houses. Mr. Simon is occasionally—but not often enough—good on other kinds of interrelations, too: the one between the personality of a leader and the style and quality of the music the band played, for instance (surprisingly, the most memorable orchestras were those led not by mere front men or businessmen, but by top musicians). Nor does he ignore the most important interrelationship of all, the one between the economics of show business and the kind of music the bands played.

Ultimately, however, The Big Bands is a book for buffs, written for the already convinced, and addressing itself not at all to any question involving the value or quality of swing. Consider, for example, what Mr. Simon does not say about swing. It was, from the evidence he spreads erratically before us, a mode more compromised from the start than he can bring himself to admit. It sought to inject into popular music—gone sweet, slushy, and cute in the Whiteman era—the precise attack, the solid driving beat of traditional jazz without sacrificing the attractive choral effects a large orchestra could make. It also attempted to make room within this carefully arranged music for riffs, those highly individualized improvisations that also lay deep in the heart of dixie. The combination worked for a while, especially in the most musicianly bands, and the sound of such a group in full cry today seems the most characteristic sound of the depression decade. After all, the whole society was trying to preserve the opportunity for rifling—otherwise known as private initiative. Extending the analogy, it could be said that swing in its own way suffered from some of the inner defects of the New Deal: it tried to be too many things to too many people. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Freddy Martin at various times in various ways attempted to move up into the concert halls, a few of them even trying companionate marriages with the symphonic forms. By contrast, some of the other leaders, notably Tommy Dorsey with his Clambake Seven and Bob Crosby with his whole group, emphasized the old, low Dixieland heritage. The sweet bands, which in truth outnumbered all the others, clung to the soft-edged dance styles, while the entertainment bands (Sammy Kaye, Horace Heidt, Kay Kaiser, Ozzie Nelson) had no style at all, merely providing forgettable background music and occasionally personnel (remember Ish Kabibble?) for the shows that went on in front of them. Musical invention was confined to a very few bands and even that, as Mr. Simon does tell us, could choke off a band's growth; one hit record and the band was forced to imitate it forever.

Mr. Simon never really comes to grips with the implications of what he is saying. He is, of course—more than most of us—entitled to his nostalgia since swing was truly central to the formation of his sensibility, central to the character of the obviously nice young man he was in the 1930's. Clearly, there is a part of me that agrees with this uncritical approach—else why would I have felt compelled to unburden my much more trivial memories here.

Finally, however, the adult in us must rebel. There is something too soft, too blurry, about the nostalgic mode. Could he not at least have tried selective sentiment?

Swing, Mr. Simon tells us, was killed by the war, which siphoned off many of the best sidemen into the armed forces, and by the strike James C. Petrillo called against the recording companies in 1942. Unable to use bands, the latter turned to the singers, who were not on strike, and for a year the bands simply could not reach the mass audience. And so swing died. It is a neatly rational explanation, but I don't think it suffices. If swing's hold on the public had become so feeble by 1942 that it could be loosened in a short year, other factors must have contributed to its quick demise. Possibly, the singers suited the mood of a nation tired of over-orchestrated group efforts, ready for a lonelier, less intrusive, more insinuating sort of music. (The solo singer has, similarly, been replaced in our time by the small group, the sound of which is usually electronically augmented or at least amplifed, and which is clearly analogous to our preferred social and even political forms.) There is, in short, more here than meets the nostalgia-blurred eye—more room for speculation, more room for theorizing, more room for critical judgments: in other words, for the kind of thinking the historical approach to a subject would demand.

History dignifies and nostalgia degrades, and it is the act of evaluating, of passing judgments both detailed and general, that separates the former from the latter. In asking that popular culture be approached historically, one is not asking the impossible, only the improbable. One thinks of Robert Warshow cheerfully admitting that “in some way I take all that nonsense seriously” and within the framework of affection going about the critical-historical task with unsurpassed firmness and coming out with a series of essays on the media indispensible to understanding the main currents of recent American unconsciousness. More recently, Pauline Kael has given us an emotionally true film history by using the formation of her own sensibility as a means of examining—shrewdly, with unsentimental sentiment—the formation of a whole generation's sensibility in the absurd theaters of our communal adolescence. As a result, she is the critic least often fooled by new fads and fashions.

Nostalgia is such a fragile thing, so difficult to transfer unbroken from one psyche to another. My wife, for example, is three years younger than I am, just young enough, as it happens, to have missed the excitement swing originally generated. For her, it has no emotional overtones and for understanding she must depend on her ears alone. Listening with her, I began to think she was right in her feeling that swing is dull and boring, and so I personally carried my collection of swing records to the trash pile, with scarcely a murmur of protest, reason being to nostalgia as wind is to fog. The records, like Mr. Simon's book, gave me mild pleasure, but in the end, the styles of the past are only historically interesting. Which is the one thing the committed nostalgist rarely is.

¹ Macmillan, 537 pp., $9.95.