Cool can be extremely negative. Cool can refuse to get involved or to take a stand. Cool may reject all feeling and become, as William S. Burroughs put it, an “Ugly Spirit.” Before Burroughs understood that he could use writing to exorcise his demons, he shot his wife, rejected his parents’ love, and would live to see his only son kill himself with alcohol and drugs. In the ’30s, American gangsters said “to cool” when they meant “to kill.” To say “he’s cool” of someone meant that he wasn’t a cop. In Naked Lunch, William Burroughs described a character called the Rube whose need for heroin was absolute. “The Mark Inside was coming up on him and that’s a rumble nobody can cool.”
The birth of the cool took place in the shadows, among marginal characters, in cold-water flats and furnished basement rooms. Most midcentury Americans were defined by their role in World War II, but cool wasn’t drafted; and cool didn’t serve. Cool was too young, too weird, too queer, too black, too strung out, too alien to take part. Cool wasn’t part of the victory celebration.
The history of cool is a history of a shiver in the human heart. In the face of the atomic bomb, everybody felt powerless. After 1945, the idea that history was a steady progression toward perfection began to seem naïve. Absolutes were shaken; relativity entered the world. As the World War victory euphoria gave way to the paranoia and conformity of the Cold War, artists were forced to turn inward and go underground in search of ways to express the powerful new realities. Before, there had been many individual acts of cool. Now Cool—a way, a stance, a knowledge—was born.
Cool could not remain at the culture’s cutting edge forever. In January 1945, as tanks from General George S. Patton’s Third Army sliced into the German heartland, Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher (Being and Nothingness), novelist (Nausea), playwright (No Exit and The Flies), hero of the intellectual underground and young France, was climbing out of an American military transport plane in New York after a twenty-hour flight from freshly liberated Paris. He brought with him an idea: existentialism. “God is dead,” the diminutive, pipe-smoking Sartre announced, therefore the universe is absurd. The only thing we know is that we exist. We alone are responsible for our destinies.
Wrapped in a battered sheepskin jacket and peering through Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses, Sartre lectured up and down the East Coast and was the subject of adoring articles in New York newspapers and magazines. “One is free to act,” he told reporters, “but one must act to be free.” Beboppers like trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk picked up on him, appropriating the Left Bank café-intellectual style—the black beret, the horn-rimmed glasses, the wee goatee. Gillespie claimed to wear berets because they were the only hats that he could stuff into his pocket, but there was more to it than that: the beret was his, and other musicians’, way to signify that they were no longer to be looked at as clowns and entertainers, but as artists. The jazzmen’s adoption of the philosopher’s trappings was a merger of two potent stances—bebop and existentialism.
In Paris, the existential crowd, or “les rats,” hung out in “caves” along the Boulevard St.-German-des-Pres near the Sorbonne. In those tiny cellar nightclubs like Le Tabou, Le Mephisto, and La Rose Rouge, the scene’s reigning young chanteuse was Juliette Greco. Wearing a beret atop straight black hair that hung down over the turned-up collar of her loosely tied raincoat, whispering the songs of the poet Boris Vian into a microphone with an air of studied indifference, she expressed the world-weariness of young people who had lived through a war. In 1949, Miles Davis made his first trip to Paris to play the inaugural post-Occupation jazz festival; he and Greco met and fell in love. As Davis would later tell his amanuensis, the poet Quincy Troupe, Juliette Greco was “probably the first woman that I loved as a human being.” The offspring of their three-year, long-distance liaison—of the marriage of bebop and existentialism—was the birth of the cool.
As the Cold War deepened, the seeds were planted for what Robert Thurman, in his book Inner Revolution, calls “a cool revolution.” In 1950, Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki arrived from Japan to teach at Columbia University. The composer John Cage was one of his first students. Cage spread zen teachings through classes and performances at the two most important schools of cool, the New School for Social Research on the uptown edge of Greenwich Village, where an eighteen-year-old bongo-playing, blue jean–wearing Midwestern rebel named Marlon Brando was kicked out of his first drama class, and at tiny Black Mountain College in North Carolina.