I never liked hippies. For a year, I lived in Ithaca, NY, a town that had been built up by the hippies and their presence could be felt in everything. Ithaca is a place where you can see well-off parents in expensive business suits and dresses walk down the street smoking a joint after dropping their freshman off at the dorms. I would often get high just by walking down the Commons to my apartment building. Every eatery has endless vegan options, there is a big hemp store and a coffee shop that serves different kinds of mate, and the food co-op sells the strangest food I’d ever seen anywhere. The hippies were everywhere. I was quite wary of them. They were all so nice, welcoming, relaxed and good-natured that I knew there had to be something seriously wrong with them.
The American 1960s fascinate me. I obviously wasn’t around either chronologically or geographically but I figured out very soon after emigrating that something really huge happened in the US between 1965 and 1975 and that we were still both enjoying many of that era’s achievements and experiencing an enormous backlash against it. Sigrid Nunez’s brilliant novel The Last of Her Kind helped me understand the sixties in a way I never did before. The novel is very well-written and beautifully crafted (except from one section that is too heavily influenced by Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.“)
The novel has two female protagonists: Ann, who symbolizes everything that was good and hopeful about the era (the progressive social movements, the rejection of the bourgeois fallacies, the sensitivity to the world’s injustices), and Georgette, the symbol of the post-sixties backlash (the erosion of the rights of women, the return of women to the practice of housewifery, the loss of interest in politics and social justice.)
The relationship between Ann and Georgette is too complex to be addressed in one short review, of course, so I will just mention that it offers a very important insight into why the progressive social and political movements so often fail to connect with the very people for whose benefit they are militating. Ann comes from a rich family but she hates her race and class origins and wants to champion the rights of the downtrodden. Georgette, Ann’s college roommate, is precisely one of these downtrodden but the gulf of misunderstanding that separates the two women can never be bridged.
I’ve seen this happen too many times. During different stages of my life, I hung out with two different progressive crowds. All of the people in them came from very well-to-do (and to my immigrant eyes, impossibly rich) families, all felt the world’s injustices very deeply, and all militated for a variety of progressive causes. These were all good, sincere, wonderful people but I found it harder to be around them than around a bunch of rabid Republicans whose views on everything were the exact opposite of mine. These progressives were very compassionate towards the imaginary, idealized vision of the poor but the actual poor annoyed them. They had given up the material comforts and privileges offered them by their families, so why did we, the people they were trying to help, so obsessed with winning those very comforts and privileges for ourselves? Why did we dedicate so much of our energies to becoming part of the very class that they despised and renounced?
No matter how much you read about poverty, you will never really understand anything about it unless you grow up poor. The drudgery, the hopelessness, the fears, the knowledge that there is nothing and nobody to fall back on no matter what happens have an enormous impact. Unless you washed everything, including the bedsheets, by hand for years, stared into disgusting dirty toilets your entire life, heated buckets and buckets of water to wash yourself, lived in terror of a toothache, hoarded candles for when the electricity went out, slept in winter boots and coats to protect yourself from cold, you will not understand those who did. I was 28 when I first used a dry cleaner’s and 33 when I first saw a dishwasher. I still have dreams of disgusting hole-in-the-ground toilets and feel amazed that hot water comes from the faucet whenever I turn it.
A fellow union organizer from a rich family once came to me for help.
“There is this Hispanic woman I’m trying to get to join the union,” he said. “But she is terrified of losing her job to the point where she just starts to blabber incoherently whenever I mention it. I understand that she has four kids and her husband is disabled, but since you are a Spanish-speaker, could you talk to her in her language and explain that she is turning a blind eye to the urgent political necessities that will benefit her in the long run for the sake of her individualistic selfish needs of the moment?”
I never experienced such a burning desire to punch out another human human being before or since.
Nunez’s protagonist Ann is the very best among such progressive militants. She is completely sincere in her compassion towards the oppressed. But both the nature of her compassion and the way it manifests itself are perceived as a lot more oppressive than liberating by the very people she wants to help. The Last of Her Kind makes it clear that the backlash against the progressive movements of the 1960s was inevitable given that the existing chasm between the rich and the poor in itself guarantees that this state of affairs can never be changed.
Georgette discards everything that the 1960s gave to her. Her children have no interest whatsoever in this era. Nunez’s book is addressed precisely to the people who have forgotten (or never knew about) the beauty and the hopefulness of that moment. In what concerns me, the novel definitely reached that goal. Now I, at least, finally understand why the Ithaca hippies are so happy and relaxed and no longer feel scared of them.
Read the novel, people. You will see that it is so much more than what I have mentioned in this review.
P.S. The novel reminded me a lot of Juan Marse’s beautiful Ultimas tardes con Teresa, which, as I just discovered, has never been translated into English. It’s one of the best XXth century novels in the Spanish language, how come there is no translation?
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