THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA

By * Gerald Clarke

HOW much more nostalgia can America take? The compulsion to paw and moon over the good old days extends far beyond Broadway; without question, the most popular pastime of the year is looking back. Sometimes it seems as if half the country would like to be dancing cheek to cheek with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in a great ballroom of the '30s. The other half yearns to join Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on a back-lot Casablanca of the '40s to whisper: "Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By." We seem to be not so much entering the new decade as backing away from it full steam astern.

After the first moon landings, it might have been expected that the lords of fashion would try to dress us in shiny vinyl astronaut suits. Instead, today's with-it woman often looks as if she is dashing off to the U.S.O. or to wrap bundles for Britain. The well-dressed man, newly attired in his double-breasted suit, could be off to vote for Roosevelt or Landon. Back in style are shoulder bags, wedgies, wrap-around fox scarves, and curly hairdos--all part of what Designer Bill Blass terms "the sexy vulgarity" of the '40s. Hot pants? You might have been arrested for calling them that, but there they were 30 years ago. "Most of the styles you see today I've worn already," remarks Rita Hayworth, who once helped make famous a garment called "shorts."

The sense of dejd vu is everywhere. Chelsea House has sold 50,000 copies of the adventures of Buck Rogers and 27,000 copies of the famous cases of Dick Tracy. Twenty First Century Communications has revived Liberty, which died in 1950, as "the nostalgia magazine." Columbia and Decca report exuberant sales of their re-releases of rare old recordings, from Bessie Smith to Alice Faye. More than 300 radio stations have brought back the serials of the '30s and '40s, morality plays for two generations of American children. Once again Lament Cranston, the Shadow, knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, and once again the Green Hornet, accompanied by his faithful Filipino valet Kato, buzzes off in the Black Beauty to "hunt the biggest of all game: public enemies who try to destroy our America!" -

Clearly, nostalgia means money. But does it mean anything else? No, says Writer Gore Vidal, one of the many skeptics. "It's all made up by the media. It's this year's thing to write about."

Without too much exaggeration, a historian could sum up 2,000 years of Western culture as A History of Nostalgia. The Romans regarded the Greeks as paradigms, the Renaissance looked back to the grandeur that was Rome, the PreRaphaelites discovered their ideal in the Middle Ages. Like everything else, however, the cycle of revivals has quickened in the 20th century. The '40s seem far away and romantic to people growing up in the '70s, while the '20s and '30s are already shrouded in the mists of legend. Viewing them, those who are under 30 might as well be with Petrarch or Leonardo, peering through the murk of a millennium at the wonders of the Caesars.

At a certain distance, vision fades and imagination takes over. Try as they might, imitators never succeed in exactly reproducing the past. The eye of memory takes in 1936 and the elegance of an Astaire dance or the froth of a Lubitsch comedy; it is blind to Depression breadlines. It catches the shapely legs of Rita Hayworth in 1944's hot pants but neglects the 500,000 U.S. war casualties of that year. It is amused by the crew cuts and slang of 1953 but forgets the anti-Communist hysteria and the fear that followed detonation of Russia's first hydrogen bomb.

In time, nostalgia will dim or even erase memories of assassinations, wars, racial hatred and student riots from its vision of the '60s, just as it has long since done away with the slime, the stench and the wanton slaughter of that noblest of human conflicts, World War I. Nostalgia is like Marie Antoinette, who commissioned the finest artists and architects of France to build eight picturesque peasant farms beside her Petit Trianon. They were perfect--right down to porcelain vases from Sevres used for milking the cows. Nostalgia selects only what is agreeable, and even that it distorts or turns into myth.

"I dreamed there was an Emperor Antony," Shakespeare's Cleopatra soliloquizes after his death. "His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm crested the world; his voice was propertied ... as all the tuned spheres. Think you there was, or might be, such a man as this I dream'd of?"

"Gentle madam, no." -

The original definition of nostalgia, which few recognize today, is "homesickness." Illogical though it may be, many people in their 20s and 30s do feel a longing very much like homesickness for a time they never knew. Indeed, there seem to be two kinds of nostalgia, one for youth and one for middle age and beyond. Most often, those who were adults in the ancient days before 1960 glance back with either fondness or sadness, but rarely with bitter regret. They look at the past with the secret sense of triumph that comes to all survivors. Besides, nostalgia gives them a spurious sense of sophistication; it enables them to feel superior by laughing at simpler times.

It is their children, members of a supposedly radical generation, who genuinely hunger for unexperienced past, as if they were hearing some melancholy autumnal horn summoning them through an undiscovered hallway to a place they can search for but can never find. It is as if they felt cheated for being given their maturity in the sad and sinister world of the '70s. For them, as for Wordsworth, there truly "hath passed away a glory from the earth."

No one in his right mind would argue that 1971--with its recession and its exhausting and hateful war--is the best year this country has ever seen. Given a choice, many Americans would put on a blindfold and pick out of a hat another year in which to live--any one of the past 500. But as Marie Twain, Lord Byron and countless other writers suggest, they would soon repent upon discovering that there is no such thing as a golden age. The past is an illusion just as much as the future; it is Utopia in reverse.

The cult of the past may have developed as an antidote to the cult of the future, as a protection against future shock. Ts there such a thing as "past shock," and is America beginning to suffer from it? Perhaps. Yet the fantasy of homesickness, which is the meaning of today's nostalgia craze, cannot be dispelled with churlish facts and disagreeable reasons. If it gives a little pleasure in an otherwise unpleasurable year, why even try? So play it again, Sam --and again and again and again. Next year, with a little luck, we may not need you.

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