Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s , by Nick Bromell. The University of Chicago Press, 225 pages, $22.50.

For those of us now in our late 40's or our 50's-at least those of us who once lived with the anxiously exhilarating sense of a world in transformation-a reading of David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña is bound to elicit a very basic reaction. Nostalgia. Is there another word for it? Jiggle the facts how you will, things were better then, however much they may also have been worse. Indeed, beyond its immediate surface appeal as gossip popcorn for unregenerate folkies, Mr. Hajdu's book brings a whole new world, the long-gone look and feel of things, swarming up out of the memory hole.

The time is the early 60's. Toward the beginning of the book, the four principals-three of them just barely out of their teens, the fourth, Mimi Baez, still doing her high-school homework-are in that wonderfully raw and poignant state of first formation. We meet the shyly ambitious Joan Baez, ready to rev up her extraordinary pipes before any available gathering; the young Bob Dylan, just recently emerged from his small-town-Minnesota rock apprenticeship, already scrapping on his way to his first serious incarnation as the next Woody Guthrie; Richard Fariña, done being Thomas Pynchon's roommate at Cornell University, now dreaming his way toward literary stardom ….

Mr. Hajdu proceeds by marking the intersection of their various paths, assuming that when the cross-hatching becomes densest he will have found his way to the center of the Zeitgeist that was the folk scene. And he is right, for between them-in their friendships, romances, rivalries and betrayals, not to mention their separate and collective forging of musical style-these four players mapped the scene. Not all of it, of course. Dozens of others-including Mark Spoelstra, Dave Van Ronk, Carolyn Hester, "Spider" John Koerner, Eric von Schmidt, Jim Rooney-were right there with them. But Mr. Hajdu persuades us that this nexus of talents was defining, if not representative.

Positively 4th Street is, in the best sense, a book of gossip: gossip as the archaeology of interesting particulars, a compilation of anecdote and suggestive speculation that recreates the intricate contagion that was early-60's folk in New York City, Cambridge and elsewhere. Mr. Hajdu has the art of staging his moments without subjecting them to the embalming gaze of hindsight, and the result is a tonic freshness, the sense of a spirit recovered. The scenes are ragged with the raggedness of the times, and credible. As, for example, when Mr. Hajdu reports on an encounter between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez-they had spoken only twice before-at a party in Cambridge in 1963. Mr. Dylan, we learn, has been jamming with Jim Kweskin, of Jug Band fame. As Mark Spoelstra recalls, "They were sitting there with their noses three inches apart, proving to each other how many lyrics they knew to all these songs or something …. It wasn't fun. It was tense, and Joanie walked in on that."

Mr. Hajdu then unfolds the moment: "Catching Joan's eye as he leaned back in his chair, Bob said to her, 'Hey, how ya doin'? Is your sister here?' Joan said, 'No,' flatly and finished the sentence with a glare that expressed, in essence, and fuck you for asking. 'Wanna hear a song I wrote?' Bob responded. Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of 'With God on Our Side.' By the end of the song's nine verses, Joan Baez was no longer indifferent to Bob Dylan or irked by his crush on her sister Mimi."

And so it goes. The two singers of course were soon lovers, merging private and public selves as they traveled and performed together. The whole period became fodder for Ms. Baez's later nostalgic tour de force, "Diamonds and Rust"-"Speaking strictly for me / We both could have died then and there"-before the powerful warps of ambition, political involvement (Mr. Dylan was pulling away from protest as Ms. Baez was immersing herself ever more deeply) and musical taste (Mr. Dylan's sense of edge launched him past Ms. Baez almost instantly) pulled them bitterly apart.

Mr. Dylan's trajectory carried him straight to the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he sent folk loyalists reeling with his electrified closing set; in that same year came the epoch-making release of Highway 61 Revisited.

Bob Dylan is, understandably, the enigmatic core of Mr. Hajdu's book, but for a few chapters Richard Fariña gives him a run for his money. Strutting, charismatic, one of life's great improvisers, Fariña-via his involvement with young Mimi Baez-steps with a blackguard's charm right into the heart of the folk scene, more or less inventing a musical career for himself from scratch, putting the ever-watchful Mr. Dylan on his guard as he turned his hard-driving-that is, basic-dulcimer style into a trademark and his verbal knack into a songwriting gift. He was, of course, no Bob Dylan, but then who was? One of the tragedies of the era was Fariña's death in 1966 in a motorcycle accident on his way home from a book-signing party for his novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Of his friend and rival's death, Mr. Dylan reportedly said to his widow, Mimi, many years later, referring to his own well-known motorcycle accident: "Hey, that was a drag about Dick …. It happened right around my thing, you know. Made me think." Mr. Dylan has never led with his tact.

Mr. Hajdu does a marvelous job of getting the stories-the encounters and interchanges-on the page. He has clearly talked to everyone. No less importantly, he is able to channel the energies of that era convincingly. His weave of cultural history and dish creates a most poignant sense of coalescence and dissolution, both on the personal level, as relationships change and fray, and the larger cultural level, where-how to put it?-a whole larger feeling about things, the essence of 60's folk, emerges, flourishes and fades. Diamonds and rust.

We find a similar sense of immersion, but a somewhat differently angled view, in Nick Bromell's Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s, a book which, interestingly, catches some part of Mr. Hajdu's story but situates it in a larger but also more generationally specific cultural frame. Writing as an insider, Mr. Bromell opens by acknowledging that his own life was in the deepest ways shaped by the counterculture of the late 1960's. Less anecdotal, a bit more insistently reflective, he fends off the corrective perspectives supplied by hindsight and tries to get back to what the world felt like then, coming at us, back when music was not a market commodity (not in the same way), not a lifestyle preference, but an environment, a concentration of signals about what it meant to be alive-how one should proceed in the face of apparent cultural apocalypse. Writes Mr. Bromell: "I want to get at: in exalted terms, the existential and visionary side of the 1960s; more mundanely, the inside of the experience of listening to rock, hearing it as a spontaneous epic poem produced miraculously by your peers for immediate use." Beginning with the Beatles, but taking in Elvis, the blues, Mr. Dylan, Hendrix and a host of lesser avatars, he identifies a period, between 1963 and 1972-the period, too, of Mr. Hajdu's account-when "[f]or a short time, just nine years at the most, it became imaginable that one could stay 'forever young,' and that it was legitimate to do so because youth had a vision, a peculiar insight into modernity, a way of seeing and being in the world that was just as true as the perspective of their parents."

Wasn't it pretty to think so? How odd, too, that as that belief has all but completely vaporized, the music, its strange and supple vessel, has remained. Both David Hajdu and Nick Bromell restore to us some feeling of what lay behind-just enough to remind us that in the heart, where it counts, passionate illusion trumps hard truth every time.

Sven Birkerts is the author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber and Faber). He will publish a memoir early next year.

And so, though we want very much to hear about it, we mainly desist, respecting as we must almost any desire so strenuously asserted. Which is not to say that there have not been a few opportunistic violations, including Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography, In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988), which the subject's lawyers fought mightily to counter; Joyce Maynard's 1999 memoir, At Home in the World , detailing her relationship decades past with the writer; and now–each presentation striking closer to the epicenter of that famous silence–daughter Margaret Salinger's Dream Catcher: A Memoir .

Though authored in some secrecy–to forestall preventive legal interventions– Dream Catcher is not a particularly scandalous or even revealing work. That Mr. Salinger is eccentric, self-involved, often unsupportive and insensitive–this we have heard. That he is Yankee-tight with a buck, an evangelist of homeopathy; that he has been drawn to various kinds of cultic devotion over the years, including Buddhism, Christian Science and Dianetics–also no great news.

The most useful part of Ms. Salinger's memoir sets out more fully than anyone has before certain key facets of Mr. Salinger's early history–his confusion and ambivalence at discovering, in his youth, that his mother had only pretended to be Jewish for his father's family, that she was in fact Catholic; that his time as a soldier (he was part of the landing at Utah Beach on D-Day) was deeply and lastingly traumatic to him; that his cultic and ascetic relation to sexuality made his first marriage–to Claire, Margaret's mother–stressful. Ms. Salinger puts together a convincingly detailed background picture of the early years of family life.

For the rest, however, when she is not discoursing windily on American anti-Semitism or the documented personality profiles of cult adherents, she is telling us the story of her own sometimes tormented coming-of-age, disclosing everything from her summer camp friendships and private school angst to her ups and downs with boyfriends. As this Salinger is no Salinger, much of the book is tedious reading. Nothing about the famous father takes us much past his own succinct observation in the story "Teddy": "[I]t's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to."

Still, the publication of Dream Catcher affords us an occasion–there are so many of these occasions–to page through the primer of issues relevant to the production of memoirs.

The first of these involves the delicate business of children writing about their parents, which is not unrelated to the business of ex-lovers writing about one another. It seems to me that these are relationships that are private not merely in popular designation, but in their ontological essence as well. Which is to say that they constitute, emotionally and psychologically, worlds of their own. They are profoundly contextual. Wrest them into the public glare and they often collapse into near unrecognizability or become caricature. This does not mean that personal memoirs of this sort ought not to be written, simply that they should be viewed by readers as intrinsically suspect. Only where a writer is skillful enough to recreate the complex atmosphere of interactions is there a chance that the figures will live. Ms. Salinger is not a writer of this caliber.

Second, I would invoke–or propose–the worthiness law: that the memoirist ought to be, in some core perceptual way, the equal of her subject. It seems evident that the lesser cannot comprehend the greater. This holds true especially where the subject is a creative artist. Contrary to what many believe, the writer does not just spill his bejeweled phrases on command. To put a world onto the page–vivid, compelling, self-sustaining–the writer must find and perpetuate a very delicate alignment with the forces in his life, a kind of interior feng shui . Finding that alignment can be all-consuming, and it must be respected, even if the process can make the artist personally difficult.

I have sympathy for this daughter's pain. But at the same time I want to assert that there is a trans-therapeutic perspective. William Faulkner captured the terms most winningly in his Paris Review interview: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

Finally, we confront again the basic issue of privacy. I can't speak for those individuals who seek out and willingly accept life in the public eye–they sign over title to certain parts of their non-public lives. But for the rest, including the artist who, like J.D. Salinger, used his public platform to declare his desire to be left alone, and who with every honest gesture has made clear his need for isolation, there should be no question. We should no more think to invade that artist's creative sanctum–no matter who we are–than impose physical duress on a pregnant woman. And for the same reason: The person is carrying something that has its own inalienable rights, that must be allowed a chance at unhampered development. Though in all of her 400-plus pages Ms. Salinger gives no hint as to whether or not her father is still producing, we should assume that he is. More honorably still, we should acknowledge the work he already did and extend the respect that is the mark of our gratitude, receiver to giver.

In one passage fairly early in the book, Ms. Salinger remembers how, when she was quite young, she and her best friend one day knocked on the door of the little shack in the woods where Mr. Salinger wrote:

"Daddy opened the door, surprised, but happy to see us. We came in and sat on the army cot that took up almost the entire wall. There were bookshelves above the cot with cool things on them like tins of salty corn parchies, and glass honeyjars full of silver coins or peppermints. Lots of my drawings were taped up on the wall.… At the far end, way up in the air where I couldn't reach it, was an old, brown leather car bench seat that my father used for a desk chair.… He showed me how he sat, lotus position, legs crossed beneath him.… On the plain slab of wood he used for a desk was an old manual typewriter, which he used in his self-taught, two-fingers-only style.

"Light shone onto his desk from a milky skylight above, a thing that positively delighted my father. Lots of small yellow pieces of paper with notes written in dark, soft-lead pencil were taped, here and there, to almost every surface within reach of the desk–the wall, the lampshade and so on."

A perception like this, a memory like this, is the best argument I can muster for why Ms. Salinger should have let matters be. The stillness she broke in on is–for better and worse–apart from all the considerations of dailiness. Whatever goes on at that plain slab of wood holds the key to everything else. Ignore that, or get it wrong, and none of the rest makes any sense–or any difference.

Sven Birkerts is the author, most recently, of Readings, a collection of essays.

The curious thing about this subtle but hugely consequential shift is how seldom it's negotiated. Usually it just comes about in the complex course of things. And when it does, the father tends to be the last to know. Denial is operative, sure, but often the son will feel compelled to carry on the pretense. He is loyal, wants to be decent; he is also mindful that one day, it will be his turn.

This whole business-what might be called the succession question-has been on my mind a good deal lately. Not because I'm thinking about my own father (though God knows I am), but because it suddenly no longer seems possible to ignore what is happening with our literary fathers.

How to say this? How to be tactful and properly grateful for everything they have given us-we have scarcely had time to reckon the gift yet-but also how to say what needs saying and preserve one's sense of honor as a reader and critic. I mean- out with it! -that our giants, our arts-bemedaled senior male novelists (and this will only deal with males) are not connecting. Not the way they did. Once they seemed to shape the very cultural ectoplasm with the force and daring of their presentations. Their books had, in any publishing season, the status of events . Now they don't. They have been writing manifestly second-rate novels in recent years and they are not- much-getting called onto the carpet for it.

I'm talking now about Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer and, to a degree, Saul Bellow, though one wouldn't need a shoehorn to get a few others on to the list. There have been other changes, granted. The publishing world has been ravaged by corporate greed and has, in recent years, suffered a deep crisis of confidence. But that can't account for the books. The latest novels- American Pastoral, Toward the End of Time, The Gospel According to the Son and The Actual -are weak, makeshift and gravely disappointing to all who believed that these novelists had a special line on the truth(s) of late modernity. Not one of the books can stand in the vicinity of their author's finest work.

Specific failing can, and ought to be, itemized, but not here. Oddly (or not, depending on how jaundiced is your view of the backstage machinations of the literary world), with the exception of Mr. Updike's newest, which has been K.O.'d right at the starting bell, the critical community has been kind to the grandees. All of us, I suppose, carry the burden of our gratitude for past performances. Maybe that's why Mr. Roth could walk his tedious scissors-and-paste job past most of the gatekeepers; why Mr. Mailer took only a few pokes; why no one quite dared suggest that Mr. Bellow's latest novella chewed serenely on not much cud.

But when this body of recent work is viewed alongside the writing of the younger brothers-Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Robert Stone and John Edgar Wideman, to name several-the contrast is striking. These authors seem to be looking at the larger world, assessing the twin claims of politics and spirit. We feel in their books, certainly in Mason & Dixon and Underworld , some of the pressure of seriousness that we were once so sparked by in their elders. But these elders are no longer spinning the stuff of our times into lasting art. The once-thrilling researches into the self have proved exhaustible. No less important, they are not holding themselves to the literary standards they did so much to establish.

The generational perspective is, I realize, slightly misleading. Mr. Bellow (b. 1915) and Mr. Mailer (b. 1923) broke into print in the mid- and late-1940's, while Mr. Updike (b. 1932) and Mr. Roth (b. 1933) arrived in the late 50's. They do all share one big thing: They were all together on the great ride. They were there when fiction mattered, and fiction mattered, in part, because they were there. They drove, all four, like high-finned gas-guzzlers across the unfurling decades. They siphoned the postwar life-boom right into their novels. Think of the exuberance, the forward pitch of early Mailer, the spritz of Bellow circa The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog ; think of Mr. Roth's flaming portraits of renegade Jews, and Mr. Updike's entitled suburban sinners.

On they rode-and for so long. Through the convulsions of the late 60's, shedding wives like inhibitions, trying to unscramble generational war and write the new codes of liberated sexuality. Indeed, much of their writing was about sex, eros standing as a kind of shorthand for unhampered living. There was very great wanting in all those early books. The writers were drawing their material up out of themselves by the bucketful. The novels were an elevated and electric sort of navel-gazing, but that was what the period was about. We can't think back on that liberation period without thinking of them.

They continued-solid in the 70's, ensconced in the 80's. And still they fed on the reservoirs of self. Messrs. Updike, Roth and Bellow all depended on proxy narrators, men of their own age and time-period weathering society upheaval and experiencing the agony of the gender wars. Henderson, Herzog, Portnoy, Piet Hanema, Harry Angstrom … Only Mr. Mailer strayed a bit, turned to documentary, Egyptology and quasi-biographical impersonations. But what astonishing engines under those hoods! Consider that Mr. Bellow has been publishing books since 1944. Mr. Roth, the youngest of the bunch, has been at it for nearly 40 years.

These writers have each had, in other words, at least two score years to be rendering the dramas of their lives and times-first as precocious boy wonders, then as triumphant alpha males, makers of our postwar literature, and then-now-as senior eminences. They own a Nobel and more Pulitzers than you could fit into a henhouse. Is it any mystery that these novelists might along the way have begun to believe themselves the elect, the infallibles?

I'm talking about narcissism now, the male variety, with its attendant exalted belief that one is in some way co-terminous with the world, steering it with will and desire. The pathology that, in one version at least, needs over and over to gain the admiring (as in ad mirare : "to reflect back") love of women, that struts pridefully forth holding sexuality-the penis-aloft as its talisman.

But the story does not end here with the male eternally rampant. Youth declines into maturity, maturity sinks toward dreaded old age. The lion paces a weary circle and lies down. No one would reasonably expect the artist to carry on in his former style. Opportunities for quiet recusal, for edging from the race, abound. But-Mr. Bellow excepted-these writers have kept on drilling out roughly a book a year-each, for as long as anyone can remember, holding the spotlight on himself by main force. Surely they are no longer striving to keep the wolf from the door. What gives?

We are back to the question of narcissism-to the monomaniacal absorption in self fostered at every turn by a media culture. Narcissism, it would appear, does not slacken with the years, it only grows. Only there is a problem. The very thing that made these artists avatars of the self-seeking liberation culture is now their unmaking. Not because we, as a culture, have ceased to focus upon ourselves, but because they, as writers, have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. The self, however grandiose, is finite; the wells do dry up.

There's more. The narcissist is no more immune to time-to aging and death-than anyone else. As my wife, my therapist, formulates it for me: "Aging is a narcissistic injury." When the narcissist faces the loss of the self and its reflected glory, he reacts with rage. And indeed, checking in on some of the works of later years by our masters, we are overwhelmed by dissonant music from the downside of the artists: Mr. Bellow's Dean Corde in The Dean's December snarling at the underclass; the cataracting vituperations of Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath's Theater ; Ben Turnbull in Toward the End of Time venting himself in every direction … We see anger at promises not kept, at prerogatives usurped, and deep bitterness about an America that has betrayed its youthful innocent promise. But also, with scorching vindictiveness at times-especially in Messrs. Updike and Roth-comes the lashing out at women. Women, the supposed adoring ones, whose job it was to keep the illusion of perpetual youth and power intact. Dare we tie this, as Mr. Updike seems to in his new book, to the failure in age of the sexual fix? Could the whole business really have been driven by the say-so of an upstanding phallus? A frightening thought.

Everything I've ventured here is rash and general, but I fear that if I split too many hairs, the big point will get qualified away. The fact is that for whatever host of reasons-cultural, personal/psychological-our great seers are not seeing so well, nor crafting as intently as they once did. To be sure, literature is not a big-tent act anymore, not the way it was more than 20 years ago, but this is more reason, not less, for trying to honor the art. The struggle is to stem the tide, to create again a serious public through prodigious exertions of imagination and skill. And thinking now of Mr. DeLillo, Mr. Pynchon and others, to turn the gaze of the reader back upon the larger world.

What frustrates and saddens more than anything is the relinquishing of care. The books flow forth yearly, whether they need to or not. There is a sense of haste, of slackness, of the draft deemed sufficient; hanging over everything we sniff out the cordite whiff of arrogance. Is it that the times no longer propose faith in a recognizable posterity? Is the arrogance in fact despair? This is hard to answer. What is clear is that each of these recent books lacks that core impersonality, that transpersonal sense of necessity, that will to deeper meaning without which any effort must be judged ephemeral.

Ephemeral work ultimately holds the idea of art in contempt. Cynical, desperate, it furthers the erosion of the larger continuity. The challenge is there for the younger talents: to write in such a way, at such a level, that our much decorated masters get the idea and either bestir themselves or gracefully yield to the sons.