History and Music

I loved reading Kay Boyle’s “Testament for My Students, 1968-1969.” Not only did I find it amazing and wonderful that a teacher would “sympathize with her radical students and [go] to jail for demonstrating with them,” but also I enjoyed her use of the rhetoric of history—using historic literary references and drawing from her own memories of the past—and the rhetoric of music—the power and influence of music to simultaneously shape and reflect an entire generation.

It was interesting that Boyle dropped names such as Melville, Poe, Dickinson, and Stein, but then quoted only her own students. She seems to have been truly inspired by them, and, in reading the brief snippets of their prose and poetry that she included in her “Testament,” it’s not hard to see why. Protesting against the exclusive, establishment-oriented course that universities were taking at the time, one student proclaimed, “Poetry is for the people and it should represent the people,” while another wryly remarked, “Don’t make too much noise / You might wake up the middle class.” These messages seem difficult to understand, in a way, because universities have become so liberal in the last 40 years, but the underlying tone and sentiment still ring true for many aspects of our contemporary society.

Exploring her memories of her own days as a college student, in the middle of a generation of cold-war conformity, Boyle recreates a long-winded professor full of self-importance who speaks the rhetoric of change while obviously not intending to change a thing. His own discombobulated speech seems focused more on the avoidance of issues than on the confrontation of them: “There is no possibility of successfully inaugurating . . . any course unless that inauguration or initiation has been preceded by a long term study in depth of what it may be advisable to undertake at some future time.” Thus, the professor makes it clear that the process of change and growth he half-heartedly proposes will certainly be a long and drawn-out process—which, of course, it was and still is.

Here, Boyle makes her first reference to the power and influence of music: “That’s what rock and roll is for; . . . It’s the only thing loud enough to drown out the voices of the cautious of our day.” I highlighted that line when I first read this section, thinking it was funny. Later, when I read the section by Andrew Gordon (“Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir”), I found myself highlighting three more references to rock and roll as being the music of the times, and I realized it was more than just humorous—it was significant. This music was truly able to express what was happening, not only the facts, but also the mood, the emotions—anticipation, frustration, excitement, anger, energy, hope. One of Gordon’s music references was also a literary reference: “Kerouac was of the cool fifties; he wrote jazz fiction. But Pynchon was of the apocalyptic sixties; he wrote rock and roll.” The analogy is amazingly fitting.

And “apocalyptic” seems a fitting word to describe the decade of change and upheaval that was the Sixties. The mythos and mystique of this era is so strong, even today. Will we ever have a decade as turbulent and full of real change again? It doesn’t seem possible; all factors had colluded perfectly to create the setting for this one, single, incredible moment in time. As Gordon describes it, “If someone told you the history of the decade as a story, you wouldn’t believe it. . . . You wouldn’t know how to feel, to laugh or to cry.” This is true even now, looking back—so much good and so much evil happened all at once in that era: the Vietnam War, the war protests, the FSM, the Hippies, Haight-Ashbury, environmental awareness, Woodstock, the draft, the music, the drugs… 40 years later, it’s still overwhelming.