Writing a few days ago about old buildings reminded me of something I read recently. It’s yet another passage from the book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair:

Now I’ve always been fascinated with the world my parents grew up in, I mean the actual look & feel of it, because the change between that time and this seems so uncannily large, as if five centuries had passed and not five decades… I have always wanted so badly to feel what that time was like — because of a strange belief I suppose I was born with — that if, somehow, I could feel an era before I was born, the scales would fall from my eyes & and I would then be able to feel my own life, grasp what it is really like, the way you can grasp time after the fact, when it is all over…

–author David Gelernter, speaking through a fictional character’s diary in 1939

That quote doesn’t entirely capture my own reasons for being fascinated by the artifacts of the past — a big part of the appeal for me is simple aesthetics; I just plain like all that old stuff — but it does begin to get at the yearning I seem to feel when I’m around those artifacts. I really would like to experience what the world was like for my parents and grandparents, to know not just how things looked, but how they smelled and sounded, how mundane daily tasks were accomplished. I’ve always enjoyed historical stories, and stories about time travel and immortal characters, and I think that yearning to have first-hand experience of another time might be partly why.

Shifting gears a bit, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the book I quoted above. I meant to do a proper review when I finished it a few weeks ago, but as with so many of the entries I plan to do for for this silly blog, the time slipped away from me and I never got around to it.

1939 is a curious hybrid of fact and fiction in which the author, David Gelernter, uses a time-honored literary device — a character’s personal diary — as a means of exploring the famous New York World’s Fair of 1939 and, more generally, the culture of that time.

The ’39 World’s Fair is considered a sort of watershed event in the cultural history of the United States. Falling between the worst years of the Depression and America’s entry into World War II, the Fair was a showcase for new and experimental technologies, designs, and products (among other things, the Fair was the first place where many Americans saw an amazing new gadget called television). More importantly, though, it was an expression of optimism in the face of darkness. At a time when the world teetered on the brink of utter despair, the Fair predicted a bright future in which the problems of the current moment would have been solved and the children and grandchildren of the Fair generation would live in peace. In that respect, the appeal of the Fair was very much like that of a certain type of science fiction, particularly of Star Trek, which came along at a similarly dark time and carried a similarly encouraging message.

Gelernter develops a number of themes as he leads us on a tour of the Fair, all of them connected, in some fashion, to the differences he perceives between the American culture of what he calls the “high Thirties” and our current era (or at least the era of the mid-90s, when this book was published). In short, he believes the people of 1939 were motivated more by what they felt they ought to do than what they wanted to do, an attitude that largely vanished during the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s. Running hand in hand with that lost attitude (Gelernter says) was a respect for and deference to authority that seems utterly alien to our modern perspective. He doesn’t mean power, necessarily, although that’s definitely a companion to authority; rather, the people of 1939 accepted that some individuals were experts on certain subjects and that they were to be believed, and that there were rules which should be followed for the benefit of all. He stresses that people of this time weren’t naive; they simply operated from a different set of expectations.

Lastly, Gelernter thinks the generation that saw the Fair was more optimistic than we are today. He sees in the fair a culture that believed in the future — in a future — and that this future would be a vast improvement over the present. He ponders at length why we no longer seem to have the same faith that progress is good and that tomorrow will inevitably be better than today, and his conclusion is intriguing: basically, he says, we are living in the future that the Fair promised. Our world is one of suburbs and superhighways, personal automobiles and household gadgets that do our work for us, a world of advanced medicine, rapid transportation, and instantaneous communication, all exactly what the Fair promised the weary visitors of 1939. And if we find this present lacking, Gelernter suggests, it isn’t so much because there turned out to be clouds in the silver lining — although there most definitely are — as it is that we have arrived at the destination our grandparents and parents imagined and we just don’t know where to go next.

As provocative as these ideas are, however, 1939 was disappointing overall, a failure as both a history and a novel. The non-fiction portions of the book are meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness, and frequently held hostage to Gelernter’s tendency to climb up on his soap box. (He’s unabashed about his belief that high-Thirties culture was superior to our own; while I don’t disagree with the general line of his arguments, the book sometimes feels like you’re trapped in a car with Grampa Simpson as he yammers on about how much better it was in his day. The funny thing is that Gelernter isn’t that old; I think I read somewhere that he was only in his forties when he wrote this book.) Meanwhile, the fictional narrative in 1939 — which consists of a young woman’s day at the Fair with the man who will become her fiance, and a few notes on what happens to them later — is banal and uninvolving. The characters never came to life for me, and they’re prone to the same kinds of talky digressions that Gelernter himself is during the non-fiction parts.

In the end, although the book provided me with a number of interesting quotes and plenty of food for thought, I really can’t recommend it. If you’re interested in this subject, E.L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair is a much better fictional treatment of the Fair; I still haven’t found a good popular history volume about it.