Louis Menand
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
(2021)
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Totalitarianism, not Communism specifically, was the threat Truman identified in his speech, and Truman thought that all totalitarian systems are essentially police states and essentially the same. ... American anti-Communists were anti-totalitarian, and so were American anti-anti-Communists. The anxiety that the liberal democracies could be sliding toward totalitarianism was shared by people who otherwise shared little. ... ...
But what is totalitarianism? How does it arise? Why are people drawn to it? Most important: Could it happen here? People disagreed about how to answer the first three questions, and this made the last question an urgent one. Anything might potentially be a step in the wrong direction. Truman's dichotomy therefore had the same effect on art and thought as it did on government policy: it transformed intramural disputes into global ones. It made questions about value and taste, form and expression, theory and method into questions that bore on the choice between "alternative ways of life." It suggested that whatever did not conduce to liberal democracy might conduce to its opposite. Was consumerism the road to serfdom? Was higher education manufacturing soulless technocrats? Was commercial culture a mode of indoctrination? How could racial and gender inequities be compatible with democratic principles? Which was more important, liberty or equality? Freedom of expression or national security? Artistic form or political content? Was dissent a sign of strength or subversion? Was that a national liberation movement or was it Communist aggression?
...
...
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...
5.
Kennan was not in the habit of citing his contemporaries in his work. The impression he gave, that he was simply describing things the way they struck an intelligent and unsentimental observer, was one reason for his effectiveness as a writer. But Kennan did not form his views in an intellectual vacuum. He was an eloquent and exceptionally well-placed exponent of the theory of international relations known as realism.
A realist is someone who thinks that a nation's foreign policy should be guided by a cold consideration of its own interests, not by some set of legal or moral principles. This is because although in domestic politics conflicts can be adjudicated by a supreme law of the land, in international politics, no such law exists. When Germany invaded Poland, Poland could not take Germany to court. The essential condition of international politics is anarchy. There are just a lot of nations out there, each one attempting to secure and, if possible, extend its own power. That is what nations do. It's their nature. Establishing courts of international justice, or outlawing wars of aggression, or making pacts of collective security are simply attempts, dressed up in the language of human rights and self-determination, by the stronger powers to lock in the status quo. They instantiate winner's normativity.
...
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Does realism have moral content? Value relativism seems built into the theory. As Morgenthau put it, nations "meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed." Criticism of other nations' political behavior reflects only the contingent biases of the nation that criticizes. "German aggression and lawlessness were not morally obnoxious to France and Great Britain as long as they were directed against
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Russia," Morgenthau pointed out in 1946. He was writing about the Nuremberg Trials, where German aggression (natural state behavior) was made a crime (a violation of legal and moral principles). He considered the trials "a symptom of the moral and intellectual confusion of our times." The Second World War "was a war for survival, undertaken by individual nations in their own national interest, not the punitive war of a morally united humanity for the purpose of making eternal justice prevail." Kennan, too, regarded the Nuremberg Trials with "horror." He thought the United States had no moral standing to judge what Germany had done in the East. In the single allusion to the Holocaust in the two volumes of his Memoirs, he says that it was not America's business.
So is "the national interest" a morally empty category? Morgenthau was aware of this problem. In an otherwise admiring essay on Carr's work, he complained that The Twenty Years' Crisis "leads of necessity to a relativistic, instrumentalist conception of morality." With no transcendent position from which to judge politics among nations, "the political moralist transforms himself into a utopian of power." Still, Morgenthau was hard pressed to define the proper transcendent position. He worried that such a position would become the justification for a crusade. A moralist, he said, is someone who thinks that "[w]hat is good for the crusading country is by definition good for all mankind, and if the rest of mankind refuses to accept such claims to universal recognition, it must be converted with fire and sword." Wilson's mission to make the world safe for a democracy was such a crusade; Bolshevism's aspiration to world revolution was such a crusade. And so, Morgenthau implied, was a policy designed to free the world from Communism. This was always Kennan's worry, too—that the great danger for the United States in the Cold War was the temptation to combine power politics with a moral mission, to turn containment from a pragmatic foreign policy into an anti-Communist crusade backed by nuclear bombs.
The realist version of "the harmony of interests" is "the balance of power." Realism is a Great Power theory of international relations. Smaller states, what George Orwell called "comic opera states," don't matter. The goal is to keep the major powers happy enough with what they have and sufficiently intimidated by the other major powers that they don't start going after weaker states—not because that would violate the sovereignty of weaker states, but because it would upset the
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balance of power. Carr thought that Chamberlain did the right thing at Munich when he handed the Sudetenland over to Hitler. He was acting as a realist: he exchanged part of Czechoslovakia for what he called "peace for our time." Kennan thought, similarly, that the only way to have prevented the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe would have been for the American army to get there first. Great powers such as Germany and Russia have always had "spheres of influence." It is unrealistic to pretend that states within those spheres have an absolute right to self-determination, or that, if they do, it is the business of the United States to secure it.
"Power always thinks it has a great Soul," John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson. After Europe destroyed itself in the Second World War, the United States had power over other nations to a degree unprecedented in its history, possibly in the world's history, and it was natural for Americans to conclude that they deserved it—that their good fortune had moral validation. Kennan worried that such a belief could become a high-minded justification for interference in the affairs of other nations. He thought that Americans needed to be realists because they could not trust themselves to be moralists.
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Sartre never made false claims about his role in the Resistance himself, but he didn't go out of his way to correct misperceptions about it, either. To have scruples about those misperceptions, he explained, would be self-centered. He likely had two other reasons for acceding to the mistake. One is that he thought of writing —of any kind: novels, plays, philosophy— as a form of action, to be judged as such. This is not because he thought writing was a privileged activity , but because
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he thought it wasn't. The writer is the same as anyone—the soldier, the politician, the teacher, the lover, in some sense the person crossing the street. He or she is undertaking an action and is therefore making a choice. All we can ask (though for Sartre, this was everything) is that the choice be free , and that it be made in the name of freedom. That is what he meant by authenticité. And a free act made in the name of freedom, whatever the act is and whoever makes it, is by its nature an act of resistance. It is a refusal to be controlled by one's situation—in this case, by the occupier. As a free writer, he was in effect a résistant.
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It cannot be that all ethical systems are indeterminate regarding the dilemma the student faces. Sartre's point is that no choice dictated by a priori principles can be a free choice, but any choice made in the name of freedom is by definition the right choice. And—Sartre is explicit about this— the identical choice made unfreely is always the wrong choice . There is no credit for lucking out. One has to get out over the abyss before one can say that one has acted freely, and after one has acted, there is no longer a need to explain. "The heroes of Hemingway and Caldwell never explain themselves. They act only."
It is not known whether Sartre invented the student's dilemma, but it is recognizable as a version of the final scene in Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart chooses to join the Free French rather than fly off with Ingrid Bergman. (The Maltese Falcon, which Sartre might also have seen on his visit to Hollywood, ends the same way, when Bogart decides to turn Mary Astor over to the law.) It is a choice between love and duty; each time, duty wins. How do we know that duty is the right choice? Because Bogart might, with our approval, have chosen love instead. He weighs the merits of each option, but his decision is not made on the merits. The end of his analysis—the end of all analysis—is: Who knows? The thing is simply to jump into the cattle truck.
This does not seem to provide much sustenance for a politics, but for many people, that was precisely existentialism's appeal. At a time when the damage caused by commitment to ideology was everywhere visible, Sartrean existentialism was anti-ideological. It was a philosophy of engagement, but it did not dictate any particular engagement. In a Cold War context, this could be liberating. Confronted with the choice between East and West, existentialism said only: Choose; that is, invent. But take responsibility for your choice.*
"With despair, true optimism begins," Sartre had written in the article in Action. He meant that it is only when we realize that the world we want will not come into being simply by our hoping for it that we are ready to take responsibility for our actions—that we are ready to join the Free French (as, we assume, the hypothetical student does). But our
__________* This last part of the argument seems to be a way of grounding free choice in some realm of values that are not merely personal. What those values might be is a persistent problem in moral philosophy.
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commitment is always to the unrealized. We are faithful to an ideal that lies somewhere over the horizon of the present. The strange consequence of this is that, in the end, it is the vagaries of the present situation that dictate our choices. We have nothing else to orient us. No morality is implied by existentialism, Beauvoir told Dominique Aury in an interview a month after Sartre's lecture. "For my part," she said, "I am looking to identify one."
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The Jews were the prototypical stateless people. ... "If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings."
The breakdown of the nation-state and the class system also cut people loose from bonds of social obligation and produced "the masses." "The fall of protecting class walls," Arendt explained, "transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent." It was then that "the psychology of the European mass man developed."
Well...here's Arendt's contemporary, Ernest Becker, kickin' it with myriad forebears and contemporaries...
[47] In his [Radin's] view primitive society was from the very beginning a struggle by individuals and groups for special privileges...
The elders always tried to arrange these for their own benefit, and so did the shamans. On the simplest levels of culture they were already organizing themselves into an exclusive fraternity so as to get and keep maximum power. How does one get maximum power in a cosmology where ritual is the technics that manufactures life? Ob-
[48]
viously by getting control of the formulas for the technics.
...the religious systematizer built his symbolic interpretations around the crises of life,...
where everything had to go smoothly in order for a flowering out or birth into a new status to take place. And so the puberty and the death rituals came to be surrounded by the greatest importance, wherein lay the greatest possibilities of bungling. Radin makes the fascinating point that over and beyond the frankly religious and psychological nature of these passages, there is a social-economic purpose to them—or rather to the control of them by certain groups. Talking about puberty rites of the Australian aborigines he says:
. . . over and above all other reasons is the somewhat cynically expressed purpose of the old men of having novices supply them, for many years, with regular presents in the form of animal food, of reserving the choice dishes for themselves by the utilization of the numerous food taboos imposed on the younger people, and, finally, of keeping the young women for themselves.
...
Those who systematized the puberty, he concludes, weren't obeying some mystical, myth-making urge in the unconscious.
Rather . . . specific individuals banded together formally or informally, individuals who possess a marked capacity for articulating their ideas and for organizing them into coherent systems, which, naturally, would be of profit to them and to those with whom they are allied.
...Radin's views
...put closure on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive world had to break up because of man's burning ambition to improve himself to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection.
[49]
Ferguson's was a very straightforward and unburdened view of man. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change his position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the overwhelming world to one of absolute control and mastery of nature. Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate way to do this is in one's immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this isn't true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. But this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in the ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the world around it. Rousseau and Hobbes were right,
evil is "neutral" in origin
, it derives from organismic robustness—but
its consequences are real and painful.
What Radin did was to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. ...
Seen in this way,
social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others
.
...a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history
would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect
a "social contract" forged in
desire and fear
. The central question...
would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, and how does he keep it? We can see how naive the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it doesn't begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power is, as Brown says, sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power.
And so Brown could offer his own biting criticism of Rousseau:
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If the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from "primitive communism" to "private property" but in the transition
from ape
to man
.
That is,
from a type of animal that had no notion of the sacred
to one that did
. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a
psychological spell
, not by
physical coercion
. As Brown puts it, "Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment." Thus Brown could conclude—in the epigraph we have borrowed for this chapter—that the chains that bind men are self-imposed.
(Becker, Escape From Evil)
Seems to me a pretty good capsule account of precisely the basis for thinking
that all the powers that be
were not so much
evil
as they were
equally stupid and fraudulent
.
The emergence of European mass man just happens to coincide with a critical mass of information circulation which threatens to give the elders' game away; hence the broken clock just happened to show the correct time.
Anyway, Menand continues:
The breakdown of social classes produced a second group, which Arendt called "the mob." The mob was made up of the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were embodiments of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.
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Mass man can achieve a "sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, or from his membership in the party," Arendt said. Totalitarian movements are simply "mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals." Totalitarian ideology explains everything by means of a superhuman law—that is its appeal to the atomized individual. In Nazi Germany, this was a law of nature; in the Soviet Union, it was a law of history. And it was the superhuman laws that made the individual—even the totalitarian leader himself—superfluous. Those laws are the wind from the future. Nothing can resist the blast.
Absurd claims were made in the name of these laws because to the mob, everything is a lie anyway. It didn't matter that the charges to which the defendants in the Moscow Trials confessed were transparently bogus, or that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the documents used in the case against Alfred Dreyfus were forgeries. All that mattered was the movement, and the movement was locked onto an inexorable transhistorical force. Totalitarianism was the perverse union of the belief that there is a supreme and unappeasable law of historical development with the belief that nothing is true and therefore everything is possible. "Totalitarianism became this century's curse," Arendt warned, "only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems."
Arendt thought that the camps were what made totalitarianism a new thing in the world. And the key to the camps was the fact that the people sent to them had done nothing. "A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient," she wrote. "Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor."
Obviously Becker was firmly convinced by his wide reading in anthropology that this was hardly
a new thing in the world
; rather one of the very oldest. The
problems
thus
taken
care of
are timeless human problems.
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...
Arendt thought that politics and philosophy were separate activities. This was because philosophy—that is, thinking—is done in solitude, and politics is practiced with others. Politics concerns action. Philosophy concerns truth, and truth is an absolute. It is not a safe criterion to use to guide political choices. What modern politicians discovered, Arendt believed, was the use not of ideas, but of ideology. In an essay called "Ideology and Terror," published in 1953 and then included in the paperback edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1958, she defined ideology as (a little confusingly) "the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the 'idea' is applied." Ideology is what turns
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an idea into an instrument, into something that can be used to override human freedom.
There were always philosophers who brought their ideas into the public square. Plato was one. Heidegger was another. For Arendt, this was a category mistake. In an essay written on the occasion of Heidegger's eightieth birthday, she illustrated the point with a story about the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, who, out studying the stars one night, fell down a well. The horror of the Gleichschaltung for Arendt was watching thinkers like Heidegger fall down a well. Their ideas blinded them to what any ordinary person could plainly see. Her first reaction to the news about German academics' embrace of Nazism, she told an interviewer, was: "Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot . . . The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! . . . I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas."
Arendt preferred to call herself a political theorist, not a philosopher. Heidegger was a philosopher, and philosophy was the higher calling. This was why she was able, after the war, to forgive him. He had made a wrong turn and, she believed (or wanted to believe), he had realized his error. It is "striking and perhaps exasperating that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered into human affairs, turned to tyrants and Führers," she conceded in the essay written for Heidegger's birthday. But this was merely a déformation professionelle. "With these few it does not finally matter where the storms of their century may have driven them. For the wind that blows through Heidegger's thinking—like that which still sweeps toward us after thousands of years from the work of Plato—does not spring from the century he happens to live in. It comes from the primeval, and what it leaves behind is something perfect."* The belief that when ideas enter politics they can become ideologies, and that ideologies are the enemies of freedom and the public good, would have a lot of resonance in the United States in the next decade. That belief did not depend on Arendt's work, but her work helped to make it persuasive.
The second distinction is one that Arendt developed more fully in
__________* As Heidegger had taught: "Regarding the personality of a philosopher, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked, and that he died." (Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, lectures at Marburg, 1924.)
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her next book, The Human Condition, which came out in 1958. This was a distinction between the political and the social. The difference was extremely important to Arendt, which does not mean that she did a good job explaining it. What is distinctive about human beings is what Arendt called "plurality." Human beings share a species membership; in that sense, we are all alike. But a condition of membership in our species is that each human being is different from every other human being who has ever lived. Other animal species don't (so far as we can tell) have plurality in that sense. There are differences among nonhuman organisms, but those organisms cannot express those differences. People can express their differences, because they can express more than just what they have in common with everyone else, such as hunger and fear. To become "nothing but a human being," therefore, means to be reduced to the condition of a being that is identical to every other animal being: hungry and afraid. That was the purpose of the camps. That was the goal of totalitarianism.
Plurality, for Arendt, is the essential condition of freedom; it is what makes the human mode of being, Heidegger's Dasein, different from the being of a rutabaga or (hypothetically) an elephant. The "social," in her idiosyncratic definition, is where people suppress individual differences in order to meet the demands of others. Society is the realm of conformity. Arendt thought that society derived from the household, and that the household is a hierarchically organized micro-unit whose purpose is to do what every animal has to do: find the means to survive.
The political realm, the polis, is not hierarchical, it is not driven by necessity, and it is where human differences are displayed. Politics is a realm in which people engage as equals in discussion and debate and make value choices about their future together. The goal of politics is not survival, and it is certainly not a utilitarian principle like the greatest happiness of the greatest number, since that formula is merely a bargain with necessity. The goal of politics—the concept comes from Arendt's understanding of Machiavelli and the ancient Greeks—is glory (kleos). In the arena of life on this planet, the only things that become immortal are great deeds. There is nothing outside the realm of human existence to validate those deeds or to whose principles they must answer. They are ends in themselves.
The political realm was important for another reason, too, having to do with the stateless people. The leaders of the French Revolution
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had proclaimed the Universal Rights of Man. Arendt thought that the aftermath of First World War exposed the limitations of that concept. It became clear that the source of rights is not the universe or natural law. Rights are political goods acquired through citizenship in a nation. "Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity," Arendt wrote in 1949. "Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity."
Arendt believed that political participation was the single safeguard against the kind of disaster that happened in Europe after 1914. It was because the nineteenth-century British bourgeoisie, through the Reform Laws, which extended the franchise, participated in politics that Britain was preserved from totalitarianism. It was because the Central European bourgeoisie took no interest in political affairs that Nazism took hold there. And it was because European Jews lacked a political sense that they bore some responsibility for the fate that befell them. This was the view that, when Arendt published her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963, would make her, then and for many years after her death, a figure of controversy. But what she wrote there was, for her, a logical consequence of her theoretical position. If you do not engage in political life, you are vulnerable to bad actors.
a logical consequence
of
her theoretical position
Is this to suggest
obliquely
that Arendt also
was
trapped by
her
own ideas
?
Arendt's distinction between the social and the political was highly notional and unstable, and few readers did not have trouble with it. But it translated into a view that was embraced by many intellectuals after the war. This was the view that the American political system was a protector of liberty, but American society was a dangerous realm of conformity. Arendt adopted this view soon after she arrived in the United States. She was placed for several weeks with a family in Massachusetts in order to give her an opportunity to learn English. She considered the family to be small-town bourgeois, with provincial tastes and hopelessly uncosmopolitan. They were vegetarians; she was allowed to smoke only in her room; and so on. She was astonished, therefore, when these people responded to news of the removal of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to camps by writing to their own congressman. They had never laid eyes on a Japanese-American; the relocation order had no effect on them or anyone they knew. Yet they felt a responsibility to register their opinion.
"There is so much I could say about America," she wrote to Jaspers five years later, in one of the first letters she sent him when they renewed
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contact after the war. (American troops arrived in Heidelberg just two weeks before Jaspers and his Jewish wife were scheduled to be deported.) "There really is such a thing as freedom here and a strong feeling among many people that one cannot live without freedom," she told him. "... [P]eople here feel themselves responsible for public life to an extent I have never seen in any European country." American political life was healthy. But, she continued, there was also a great evil: the social pressure to be like everyone else. "The fundamental contradiction in this country," she told Jaspers, "is the coexistence of political freedom and social oppression."
Tocqueville, of course, had made the same observation a century before, and (apart from the Marxists in the Institute for Social Research) this was almost unanimously the view adopted by the émigrés who stayed in the United States after the war, as a large percentage of Central European refugees did. And it became a feature of American intellectual culture. American democracy preserves freedom; American society fosters conformity. The book that came to stand as the expression of that view, David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, was written while its author was reading the manuscript of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
...
...
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...
In 1915, [John] Erskine proposed a course in which students would read and discuss one "great book" a week. The course was intended to be a mechanism for assimilation, one based on the belief that the great books speak to everyone.* Opposition from the faculty and from [Frederick?] Keppel, followed by the American entry into the First World War, held the proposal up, but in 1920, Erskine launched a two-year course for selected juniors and seniors in which groups of twenty students met once a week with two instructors and discussed classic texts in the Western tradition. The initial syllabus listed fifty-one books, starting with Homer and ending with William James's Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. The course was called—not Erskine's choice: he thought the name was elitist—General Honors.
Trilling not only took General Honors; he took it over. In 1925, Erskine published a book called The Private Life of Helen of Troy, a somewhat droll novel about an unrepentant Helen after her return from Troy, in which Homer's characters talk in a twentieth-century idiom. The book became an enormous bestseller, ultimately selling over half a million copies, and Erskine resigned from Columbia. He went on to become the president of the Juilliard School.
In 1932, his course was revived by Jacques Barzun, a General
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Honors alumnus now an assistant professor in the history department. And, in 1934, Barzun invited Trilling, still a graduate student, to teach it with him. They renamed it the Colloquium on Important Books and ended up teaching it together, on and off, for more than thirty years, eventually replacing it with a similar course for graduate students. The course is the spine that runs through Trilling's criticism. His last book, Sincerity and Authenticity, published in 1972, is essentially a gloss on the reading list.
In the history of American higher education, General Honors belongs to a brief period of reaction against disciplinary specialization . Research faculty are specialists first, teachers second. That is why there was faculty opposition to the course, which persisted even when Barzun and Trilling were running it. A standard college course on, say, Dante would consist of lectures by a Dante scholar with the text studied in Italian. Trilling was not a Dante scholar and he didn't know Italian. Apart from some rather poor French, he didn't have any languages at all. The idea that he was teaching Dante's Inferno in translation and covering the whole text in a single discussion session was a scandal.
When colleagues accused Erskine of dilettantism, his response was that every great book was once read for the first time. What he meant was that those books were not written for scholars, and therefore no special knowledge should be required to understand them . That was the spirit in which General Honors was taught, and it was one of the reasons the English department decided that Trilling was not a good fit. He wasn't interested in conventional scholarly standards. Even when he was awarded his PhD, one professor at his dissertation defense told him that since he had consulted only published sources, what he had written was no doubt a good book, but it was by no means a good dissertation.
...
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...
4. Trilling was forty-four when The Liberal Imagination came out. The book was a publishing phenomenon. It sold seventy thousand copies in hardcover and a hundred thousand in paperback, and it did something that very few books have ever done: it made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics.
Although "liberalism" is characterized in various ways in The Liberal
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Imagimation, it is never really defined. And as a matter of political theory, there are very different types of liberalism. There is the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century (free markets and individual rights) and the left liberalism of democratic socialism (public ownership and economic equality). And although he never referred to them as such, Trilling clearly meant to include other types as well: socialists, fellow travelers, and Stalinists. So when, in his preface, he claimed that "in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition," Trilling was indicating that he was treating all liberals alike. How could that be? What did John Stuart Mill have in common with Karl Marx, or Leon Trotsky with John Dewey?
In Trilling's view, the faith that all liberals share is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight, or reasonably straight, road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, the right psychotherapy will do away with, or significantly mitigate, unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy.
Hmm. I thought that was "Progressivism?"
The argument of The Liberal Imagination is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature's special subject matter.
Literature and Liberalism Progressivism: not quite a match made in heaven? Stop the presses!
A classic example is money, a dominant topic in the literature of moral realism. Contrary to what classical liberalism presumes, human beings just do not behave rationally with respect to money. They hoard it, waste it, envy it, obsess over it, slave for it, marry for it, kill for it. A liberal, in Trilling's conception, is someone who thinks that money can be made not to matter more than it reasonably should. When people behave antisocially or self-destructively around money, or anything else, liberals are the people who ask whether the system is to blame.
Sure. But isn't that more a question of -ologies than -isms?
Literature, Trilling said, puts beliefs like these "under some degree of pressure." "To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance," he wrote in a sentence frequently quoted, "not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty."
A frankly absurd statement, this.
This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.
Trilling called liberalism "a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine." He was similarly vague in the first chapter of E. M. Forster,
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where he described it as "that loose body of middle class opinion which includes such ideas as progress, collectivism, and humanitarianism." The vagueness might seem a trick to avoid dealing with the prima facie philosophical differences among liberalisms. But a key perception of The Liberal Imagination is that most human beings have ideologies, just not in the form of distinct ideas. Trilling's notion of ideology bore some resemblance to Hannah Arendt's. "[I]deology is not acquired by thought," as he put it, "but by breathing the haunted air . . . [It] is a strange submerged life of habit and semihabit in which to ideas we attach strong passions but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of their consequences."
Trilling believed, in other words, that philosophical coherence is not a notable feature of most people's politics . Their political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mix of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness. People hold certain views because it feels good or right to hold them (which is why they have an answer for pollsters even when they have never given an issue serious thought). Trilling thought that this does not make those opinions any less potent. On the contrary, it is unexamined attitudes and assumptions—things people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions—that demand critical attention. "Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind," he wrote, "we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like."
The business of criticism is therefore a perilous one. Preferring one writer over another taps into more consequential differences. "Dreiser and James," Trilling warned: "with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet . . . The liberal judgment of Dreiser and James goes back of politics, goes back to the cultural assumptions that make politics." Why, for example, do liberals admire Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson and condescend to Henry James and William Dean Howells? Trilling suggested that it has something to do with their conception of reality. Why do they find the heroines of Austen's Mansfield Park and Dickens's Little Dorrit unappealing? The answer tells us something about their conception of the will. Why does enjoying Kipling make them feel guilty? It has something to do with changing attitudes toward loyalty and the nation.
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Trilling thought that people's literary preferences tell us something about the kind of human beings they wish to be and about the way they wish other human beings to be —that is, something about their morality and their politics. He summed up his methodology in an essay he published in Partisan Review in 1961 called "On the Modern Element in Modern Literature." (The title alludes to Arnold's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, "On the Modern Element in Literature.") "[M]y own interests," Trilling wrote, "lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen images of personal being, and images of personal being as having something to [sic] with literary style." This was Trilling's "sociology."
Watching over the canon was therefore one of the critic's chief duties. The critic was a kind of public health inspector, and the job was not an easy one, since a book's politics might be quite different from its political effects .
Candidate for Understatement of the Year.
"[T]he contemporary authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their literary qualities," Trilling said, "demand of us a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals." The critic lets us know which angels are worth wrestling with.
Whatevs you guys. I think that if elevated/cultivated taste really is either of those things in any sense at all, it is indeed in the demands made by the work upon the reader; but that's not to say that self-styled "intellectuals," e.g., really are running uphill when they sit down to read a book; nor that anyone really has much of a "taste" for having such demands made on them. More likely they (we!) are running downhill just like all the other shit; ours comes with different tasting notes, but it smells just as bad. We're every bit as hedonistic as the plebes, even when we're reading Lionel Trilling or Louis Menand.
there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general "willpower" that can be applied in any situation. ...
(p. 167)
if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute.
(p. 168)
Just what kind of downhill running is this? I can't say much authoritatively about the specifically literary hedonism at issue here, since I apparently am constitutionally incapable of experiencing it for myself. I can say that the facile ascription of mass literary admiration remains subject to an equally facile rejoinder: on the basis of later laboratory psychology, at least, it's hard to take seriously anymore the idea that any reader, no matter how intellectual, is bound to get along at all with any work which is meaningfully antagonistic to their own ideals . There is no coping . It is quite improbable for things to get even that far.
Actually, this seems to be precisely the point vis-a-vis the cultural assumptions that make politics . Ditto re: those political opinions which merely float up . This is water (or shit) running downhill. But if so, where does the antagonism even come from?
5.Trilling's most famous student was Allen Ginsberg. This is almost as incongruous as it sounds. Ginsberg entered Columbia on a scholarship in the fall of 1943, when he was seventeen, and took the required literature survey class that descended from Erskine's General Honors, then called Humanities A. Trilling was his teacher. Ginsberg became infatuated with Trilling, and Trilling reciprocated not only by inviting Ginsberg over for tea and by commenting on his poems, but also by intervening twice on Ginsberg's behalf when Ginsberg was in trouble, the first time with the dean, the second with the police. Ginsberg later said he thought it was his Jewishness that made Trilling empathetic.
Boundaries meant nothing to Ginsberg. They meant a great deal to Trilling, and he eventually felt compelled to assert the status difference between them. Ginsberg adjusted—he rarely allowed a useful connection to lapse—and he and Trilling remained on friendly, though
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sometimes cool, terms for the rest of Trilling's life. But the Trillings always treated Ginsberg as essentially an undergraduate—an interesting, possibly gifted, not fully mature young man desperate for their attention and approval.
The literary movement of which Ginsberg was chief promoter and curator, the Beats, arose out of the intersection of two disparate social circles. Ginsberg and his friends were Ivy Leaguers, young men who had gone to Columbia and Harvard. They were bookish, serious, and, by virtue of their educations, socially advantaged. The people in the other circle were drifters, hustlers, petty criminals, drug users. Some had literary aspirations, but they were effectively outside the class system, persons without cultural capital, social dropouts. They were "beat," carny slang meaning beaten down, destitute, at the bottom of the world. The Ivy Leaguers did have cultural capital, and they troped the condition of beatness. They translated it into a literary concept.
Ginsberg was from Paterson, New Jersey, where his father, Louis, was a schoolteacher and a moderately successful poet. Louis was born in Newark, the child of Russian immigrants. He met Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, in high school. She had emigrated with her family from inside the Pale of Settlement. The Ginsbergs were left-wing—Ginsberg's older brother was named for Eugene Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party—and secular. English was the language at home. (The parents spoke Yiddish with relatives.) Allen did not learn Hebrew, and he was not bar mitzvahed. The family spent two summers at a Communist summer camp, Camp Nicht-Gedaiget (Camp Not-to-Worry), in upstate New York.
Naomi worked for the Communist Party. She was a paranoid schizophrenic, and she began a long and painful life passing in and out of mental institutions when Allen was still young. He was often obliged to be her caretaker and witnessed some potentially traumatizing scenes. But he was an exceptionally cheerful child and an excellent student. Sometime in high school, he realized that he was attracted to boys. It would be his somewhat unhappy fate, as an adult, to fall in love mostly with heterosexual men.
Ginsberg's infatuation with Trilling was not unusual. Ginsberg was frequently infatuated with men. He is supposed to have chosen Columbia because a boy he had a crush on, Paul Roch, was going there. And many students were attracted to Trilling. He was still an assistant
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professor when Ginsberg met him, but he had already established—by his distinguished appearance, his self-possessed manner, and his style of critical modulation—a mystique.*
In fact, Trilling was deeply neurotic about this persona. He knew its value and he never betrayed it. But he felt it was untrue to both the personality he actually had and the one he wished he had. Trilling's disgust with his public character and ambivalence about the kind of success he achieved was lifelong; after his death, his wife and his son both wrote at length about it. "I am ashamed of being in a university," Trilling wrote in his journal in 1948, the year he was promoted to full professor. "I have one of the great reputations in the academic world. This thought makes me retch." Several years later, he complained to his psychoanalyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, that his success with the Arnold book had coincided with sexual difficulties. The two of them decided, as Trilling put it, that, "superior at this point, I refused to be superior in all."
Ginsberg entered Columbia determined to become a labor lawyer, but he got turned around very quickly. In December of his freshman year, he became friends with another student in Trilling's class, Lucien Carr. Carr was from a well-off St. Louis family and had spent time at Phillips Andover (he was kicked out), Bowdoin (he either walked away or was forced to leave), and the University of Chicago before ending up at Columbia.
Carr was strikingly good-looking in an androgynous, almost exotic way. "[H]e moved like a cat," Jack Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker, who met him in a studio art class run by the émigré George Grosz, described him. "His movements were like mercury over rocks. His eyes were slanted, almost oriental, and pure green, so green they dazzled you." He cultivated European literary and musical tastes; his hero was Arthur Rimbaud, whom he associated with libertinage, intoxication, living on the edge. He considered Ginsberg pitifully naive and teased him. Ginsberg responded by becoming obsessed with Carr. Soon after they met, Carr took Ginsberg to the Village to meet his friend William Burroughs.
__________* Alfred Kazin on meeting Trilling for the furst time, in 1942: "With the deep-sunk colored pouches under his eyes, the cigarette always in hand like an intellectual gesture, an air that combined weariness, vanity, and immense caution, he was already a personage. He seemed intent on not diminishing his career by a single word." (New York Jew [New York: Knopf, 1978], 43.) The Trillings, for their part, found Kazin somewhat unrefined.
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Burroughs, too, was from a well-to-do St. Louis family. He was twelve years older than Ginsberg. After graduating from Harvard in 1936, he had studied medicine in Vienna, where he married a Jewish woman, Ilse Herzfeld, so she could emigrate, then returned to the United States to take courses, mostly in anthropology, at Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago. He had recently come to New York City mainly because Carr and a St. Louis friend of both, David Kammerer, had moved there. Burroughs was living on a two-hundred-dollar monthly allowance from his parents (this would continue for twenty-five years) and he had not decided what to do with his life. But he had already developed his signature manner as a sort of gentleman bomb-thrower. He loved guns, experimented with drugs, read advanced literature and social thought, and was a member of the University Club in midtown, where he took friends to lunch.
In May 1944, Carr introduced Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was four years older than Ginsberg. He was from a working-class family in the Little Canada section of Lowell, Massachusetts. His parents were French-Canadian immigrants, and the family spoke joual, a Quebec dialect, at home. He had entered Columbia on a football scholarship in 1940—he was a running back—but an injury, followed by a falling- out with the coach, led to his quitting the team and dropping out of Columbia in his sophomore year. After serving in the Merchant Marine and, briefly, the navy, he had returned to Morningside Heights and was living with Edie Parker. Kerouac was exceptionally handsome in a virile way, but shy and vulnerable. Like Carr, he liked to drink and carouse; unlike Carr, he was earnest and unpretentious. Ginsberg became obsessed with him, too.
Three months later, in the early morning of August 14, 1944, Carr stabbed Kammerer almost to death in Riverside Park. He tied rocks to Kammerer's body with strips of clothing and dumped him in the Hudson, where Kammerer drowned, and then sought out Burroughs and Kerouac. Burroughs advised him to get a lawyer and plead self-defense; Kerouac helped him dispose of the knife. Carr turned himself in, and the story ran on the front page of The New York Times, which also reported the arrests of Burroughs and Kerouac as material witnesses.
Kammerer was thirty-three, and he had known Carr for five years. The self-defense story that Carr's lawyers proposed was that Kammerer was a homosexual stalker who had made an aggressive advance.
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"Kammerer's personality steadily deteriorated during his year in this city, until he was little more than a derelict, barely keeping himself alive by his janitorial work," was the Times's account of Carr's story. Carr attracted the attention of the press by appearing indifferent to the proceedings and carrying a copy of William Butler Yeats's A Vision with him into court. This was almost certainly an act. The idea was that Kammerer's persistent attentions had made Carr deranged.
The district attorney's office bought the theory, and Carr was allowed to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter. He served two years in Elmira Reformatory. Burroughs and Kerouac both posted bond and their cases were dropped. After Carr got out of Elmira, he settled down and had a successful career as a writer and editor at United Press International. In public, he was careful ever after to keep his distance from Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, although they remained friends.
The story of the Kammerer murder got embedded in Beat legend. Carr's version became the official version, but although Kammerer was clearly obsessed with Carr, he was not a derelict. He, too, was from a well-off family, and he had a master's degree in English from Washington University. He wrote poetry, read (and possibly introduced Carr to) Rimbaud and other French writers, and was a good friend of Burroughs. Kammerer was stabbed twelve times. The real nature of the relationship is impossible to know.
Once Kammerer was dead, though, the first instinct of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg was to protect Carr. They were cautious when discussing Carr's sexuality, since his defense depended on his being traumatized by a homosexual advance. Their second instinct, though, was to turn Kammerer's murder into literature.
Ginsberg began his version, a novel called The Bloodsong," right after Carr's conviction in the fall of 1944. Word that he was working on the subject for a writing course reached one of the deans, and he was ordered to abandon the project. Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on their version, a novel they called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks—a title supposed to have derived from a news report about a fire at a zoo, though there is no record of such a fire—and they managed to work in many literary and cinematic allusions, including five references to Rimbaud." (The parallel between Carr's relationship with Kammerer and Rimbaud's relationship with his lover, Paul Verlaine, who shot him, was obvious to everyone, and irresistible.)
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After he and Burroughs were done, Kerouac wrote yet another novelization of the affair, which he called "I Wish I Were You," and sent it to an agent. The agent showed the manuscript to the editor in chief at Random House, Robert Linscott; Linscott found the subject repellent. Kerouac and Burroughs submitted And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks to several publishers without luck, until Carr asked them to stop.* But that novel was Burroughs's first adult piece of creative writing. He always credited Kerouac with launching his career." Those early attempts at fictionalization established a core principle of Beat writing, which is that you can make literature by writing about yourself and your friends. Ginsberg's "Howl," published in 1956, and Kerouac's On the Road, which came out in 1957, are basically group biographies.
"Allen, as classwork, is writing a novel whose hero is a fictionalized Lucien Carr, a twisted eccentric," Louis Ginsberg complained to one of his sisters in January 1945. In February, Louis wrote to Trilling expressing concern about his son's "undesirable friends." "[H]e is making clever but false verbal rationalizations that the immoralist way of life (à la Gide, I think) is a valid one," he told Trilling. "Allen holds you in high esteem and places great value on your dicta." Trilling seems to have ignored this, but a month later, he had cause to intervene.
As part of a feud with the maid who cleaned (or failed to clean) his dorm room and whom he suspected of being anti-Semitic, Ginsberg had written "Butler Has No Balls" and "Fuck the Jews" in the dust on his windowpane, along with a skull and crossbones and a drawing of a penis. He was duly reported to the same dean who had pulled the plug on "The Bloodsong." At Ginsberg's request, Trilling met with the dean to explain that "Fuck the Jews" was intended to make a political point, but the dean was not mollified, and Ginsberg was suspended for a year. That summer, he joined the U.S. Maritime Service, a training program for sailors joining the Merchant Marine, which counted, during the Second World War, as military service.
Ginsberg wrote to Trilling from shipboard in Sheepshead Bay, off Brooklyn, to ask whether he'd had a chance to read a long poem he had given him. In order to fit in with his shipmates, he reported, he had
__________* It remained unpublished until after Carr's death in 2005. Kerouac did write a lightly fictionalized version of the story in his last novel, Vanity of Duluoz (1968).
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purchased some Batman comic books—and "I brought here my beloved Rimbaud."
Trilling commented positively on the poem. "Your mention of Rimbaud," he added, "crystallized my impulse (a slow one) to know more about him and I am now the next name after yours on the library card of the Starkie biography [the Irish writer Enid Starkie's biography of Rimbaud came out in 1938] you so warmly recommended to me. I doubt he will ever be my 'beloved Rimbaud' as he is yours or that I will ever even understand how he can be yours; but if I cannot be affectionate to him I at least need not be ignorant!" He added, "What is Batman?"
Ginsberg was so excited by Trilling's response to his poem that he sent the letter to Kerouac, who was duly impressed. It "represents something I'd like to happen to me someday," he wrote to Ginsberg, "namely, to be liked and admired by someone like him." He asked to keep the letter for a while so he could show it around. Ginsberg composed a long reply to Trilling. "That you are unable to understand why I make so much of Rimbaud, dismays me somewhat," he wrote, and he set out to explain why Rimbaud was his "personal saint." (A good deal of the explanation was derived from Delmore Schwartz's introduction to his translation—notoriously inaccurate: Schwartz's French was not good—of Une Saison en enfer, published in 1939.)
Rimbaud did not believe in art for art's sake, Ginsberg told Trilling. He believed in experience for art's sake. Finding that civilization "offers no hope of personal salvation, no vital activity, no way of life within its accepted structure;" he broke off completely and went to Africa.
This was the exodus from society not into the futile exile of the artist, but into living salvation in the land of the primitive, unrestricted, uninhibited. . . . With Rimbaud as catalyst the problems that supposedly beset the sensitive youth of the day are crystallized realistically for the first time I think."Batman," Ginsberg also informed Trilling, "is second on the bestseller list of semiliterate America."Trilling wrote back quickly. He had read Starkie's book and conceded that "your interpretation is a just one." Still, he demurred. "You will have to understand about me that I am very largely an old-fashioned humanist, and although the humanist tradition sometimes exasperates
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me to the point of violence, I pretty much stay with it," he told Ginsberg. "Involved in Rimbaud's attitudes is an absolutism which is foreign to my nature, and which I combat." He thought that
***takes on to know one***
the ostentatious rejection of convention implied acceptance of its values : "establishment and 'success' and the power of success." "I know this is an easy way of attack," he added, "but . . . I think it is fair."This little exchange puts a frame around the difference between Trilling and Ginsberg. Trilling imagined culture—in the anthropological sense—as a Möbius strip. You can invert mainstream values, but it is mainstream values that give the inversion meaning. You're still on the strip. In the case of someone like Rimbaud, Trilling thought that a move to the underside was just another way of achieving the same set of socially constructed goals that everyone else was trying to achieve—only doing it in the name of iconoclasm and rebellion.
Poems like Rimbaud's, or like Ginsberg's in emulation of Rimbaud's, don't come from some place not on the strip. They do not represent an independent alternative to the way things are. They are among the things that are, even when they belong to what Trilling would later call "the adversary culture." The adversarial is part of the system; it helps to hold the other parts in place. This is why, in the sort of phenomenon that fascinated Trilling, responsible liberals feel better adjusted for having an appreciation of art and ideas that are contemptuous of the values of responsible liberals. It validates them in their place because it makes the world seem round. There is, in the end, no right or wrong side of the strip, just different ways of fooling yourself about where you are.
Ginsberg thought that there was a wrong side, or a false side. He was not very coherent, in his letter to Trilling about Rimbaud, about what the alternative looked like. He offered up a list of hard-boiled character types as examples of another way to be: "the Raymond Chandler hero, the sharp-eyed gambler, the dead-pan cardsharp . . . the psychopath who moves in his pattern unaffected by moral compunction." In 1948, though, while (as he told the story) reading William Blake's poetry and masturbating alone in his apartment in East Harlem, he had an experience he described as "a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I'd been existing in."
The visionary moment was fleeting, but it convinced him that ordinary consciousness is out of touch with the "real universe," and he dedicated himself to finding ways to expand the mind. This became the
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rainbow Ginsberg forever chased. He would spend much of the 1960s proselytizing with Timothy Leary on behalf of LSD. By then, though, he and Trilling had become each other's cautionary example.
...
...
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3.
Structuralism is anti-empiricist, anti-historicist, and anti-humanist. It rejects a priori almost everything most people believe indispensable to humanistic study: attending to the particularity of cultural objects, interpreting them in light of the circumstances in which they were produced and the intentions of their producers, evaluating their moral and political implications, and regarding them as irreducible to a scientific explanation. Structuralism is a science of culture.
Cool. But these are humanistic and historicist strawmen vis-a-vis the question of attending to any given particularity . "...Interpreting...," "...intentions...," "...implications..." Exponents of those critical activities have been quite willing to obliterate the "particularity" in everything they touch if that is the surest route to their already-Humanistic conclusions. e.g. Gary Tomlinson's admonition to "put the varieties of black life experience" first, ahead of "aestheticism," etc. The "black" particularity here is a narrow one only relative to Tomlinson's be^te noir isms, i.e. only because those are universalistic isms. But otherwise it remains very broad. There is "particularity" here only cosmically; on planet earth, meanwhile, it is not too kind to perform this telescoping upon the "life experience" of millions of people all at once. That is a flattening-out to rival the most hardheaded science of culture . (Or/also, perhaps this indicates the elevation of "black" itself to a universal category? I suppose there is a level of analysis, somewhere, where this elevation becomes valid...but is this the level on which Tomlinson's paper operates?)
When you look at all the languages, all the kinship systems, or all the poems in the world, what you see on the surface are snowflakes—sheer variety. Each language, kinship system, and poem is different from every other. You can study them by comparing them, or you can study them historically, by tracing their evolution over time. But comparative and historical studies only give you more data. In order to understand languages, kinship systems, and poems—none of which is required by biology, all of which are cultural—you can't just collect information about them. You have to understand why human beings create them, what their function is. Only then are you in a position to discover what Jakobson, in the very first lecture Lévi-Strauss heard him give, in 1942, called "les invariants à travers la variété"— "the invariants across the variety."
When Lévi-Strauss started attending the lectures, he was hoping to get some tips on devising a notation for transcribing the languages of the groups he was studying. Instead, he experienced what he called a "revelation." Jakobson's lectures, he later said, "were stunning . . . His dramatic gift was unequalled; he transported his audience, who had the justifiable impression that they were experiencing a key moment in the history of thought." After just two of the lectures, he reported to his parents on "the remarkable linguistic course of a colleague who provides me with knowledge essential to my work."
The revelatory insight was the concept of invariants. As data, the material Lévi-Strauss brought back from Brazil and the information he was gathering in the New York Public Library were inchoate, just a huge pile of facts. The science of phonetics, Jakobson explained in his lectures, was in the same condition. Phoneticists had accumulated massive amounts of information about the sounds that human beings make when they speak, but they had neglected to ask why human beings make those sounds.
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The answer is not difficult: in order to communicate. Those sounds mean something, and it follows that they must be organized in a way that enables them to do so. The apparent randomness on the surface implies a system underneath, and that system is the invariant. It underlies all individual speech acts. It is what makes the sounds people utter meaningful, and not just noise, to people in the same language group. Phonology is the study of these systems and was one of the areas the Prague Linguistic Circle worked on. Jakobson appears to have been the first person to call their approach "structuralist."
As Jakobson explained, the phonological theory he laid out in his lectures derived from his own work with Trubetzkoy and from earlier work by the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Structuralist analysis begins with the basic quantum of spoken language, the phoneme. A phoneme is a vocal sound that has significance. In some languages stress (as in Russian) and pitch (as in Mandarin) are phonemes, in others (as in English) generally not. In some languages /l/ and /r/ are different phonemes (as in French), in others (as in Japanese) generally not.
By definition, phonemes signify. But they don't refer to anything. In English, /b/ before -at signifies something different from /m/ before -at, but /b/ and /m/ mean nothing in themselves. The significant feature of /b/ is that it is not /m/, or any other phoneme that might be in that place. "A phoneme signifies something different from another phoneme in the same position," as Jakobson put it: "this is its sole value."
It's like a deck of playing cards. You can create a virtually limitless number of card games based on how you make rank, suit, and color signify. Rank, suit, and color have no content in themselves and they refer to nothing outside the deck of cards. They are signifiers without signifieds. Their meaning is entirely relational. Jakobson came to believe that there are just twelve binary oppositions in the world's languages—open versus closed, acute versus grave, and so on*—and that each language selects some set of these binaries from which to construct its phonological system.
Lévi-Strauss became convinced that with structural linguistics, the study of culture had become a science. In 1945, in the first issue of a
__________* 1) Vocalic/non-vocalic, 2) consonantal/non-consonantal, 3) interrupted/continuant, 4) checked/unchecked, 5) strident/mellow, 6) voiced/unvoiced, 7) compact/diffuse, 8) grave/acute, 9) flat/plain, 10) sharp/plain, 11) tense/lax, 12) nasal/oral.
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new journal, Word, that Jakobson helped launch in New York, Lévi-Strauss announced that a revolution had occurred. Structural linguists, he predicted, would "play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences."
The trick was to treat other subjects of social scientific inquiry on the model of language. "Although they belong to another order of reality," Lévi-Strauss wrote, "kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena." Like phonological systems, kinship systems are symbolic. That is, they are systems in which something always stands for something else. That is what makes them cultural. All sexually reproducing organisms have progenitors and offspring; only humans have uncles, aunts, in-laws, cousins, and so on, as part of a symbolic system. A maternal elephant can have a male sibling, but elephants (it is assumed) do not have a concept of the avuncular. And a human is an uncle, hence avuncular, only by virtue of his relation to the other categories in the kinship system.
Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems have three essential elements: consanguinity (brother/sister), affinity (relationship by marriage), and descent (parent/child). These are the invariants, the deck of cards, with which each culture operates. Since nature does not require kinship systems, the question about them is the same as the question phonologists ask about phonological systems: What is their function? Lévi-Strauss thought that the purpose of kinship systems is to enable men to exchange women with other men.* Kinship systems mark off available mates from unavailable ones. It's a binary system, like phonics. How do we know this is their purpose? Because of the incest prohibition. Lévi-Strauss thought that the prohibition against incest has nothing to do with an evolutionarily implanted fear that offspring of consanguineous mates may be genetically inferior, or with psychic conflict between filial and erotic emotions (or, as Freud proposed, with the fear of castration). The reason for the incest prohibition is to require people to seek or be assigned their mates from another family, because this strengthens social bonds.
The prohibition, therefore, is universal. It can be highly restricted—to
__________* He adapted the theory of societies as exchange economies, with acknowledgment, from a famous work by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (Essay on the Gift) (1924).
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only younger sisters, for example—but you can't have a society without one. "The primitive and irreducible character of the basic unit of kinship," as Lévi-Strauss put it, ". . . is actually a direct result of the universal presence of an incest taboo [prohibition de l'inceste]. This is really saying that in human society a man must obtain a woman from another man who gives him a daughter or a sister." Language exists so that words can be exchanged; kinship systems exist so that women can be exchanged. They are both, in effect, means of communication, or information exchange. They enable human beings, at some cost to autonomy, to form societies. "[L]inguists and sociologists do not merely apply the same methods," Lévi-Strauss later wrote, "but are studying the same thing."
This can seem an ingenious description of marriage practices, just as phonology can seem an ingenious description of speech sounds. And to the extent that language and kinship systems are thought of as the equivalents of playing cards, there is nothing scientific about structuralist analysis. It's just a clever way of making sense of the data. But Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson believed that they were onto something that was scientific. They thought they were making a discovery about the nature of the mind.
They began with the assumption that the human vocal apparatus evolved in concert with the brain. As humans became able to produce more subtly differentiated vocal sounds, their brains had to become better able to process those sounds, to pick out phonetic differences. If language-as-communication is the basic function that the mind evolved to perform, it follows that all other cultural outputs could be organized "like a language"—because that is the way the brain works. It has evolved, through natural selection, to treat binary pairs as related couples, and to manipulate those relationships. The most basic form of human cognition is the binary I/not-I. But all "natural" categories—kin/stranger, nature/culture, en-soi/pour-soi, avant-garde/kitsch, or, for that matter, "alternative ways of life"—seem to be perceived as binary oppositions. It's how we cognize the world.
Once we had language, on this theory, we had this capacity—or, once we had this capacity, we had language, and kinship systems, and all the rest of human culture. "[T]here is a direct relationship between what we may know of the structure of the brain and the way in which communication processes operate," Lévi-Strauss announced at a symposium in
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1952 at which Jakobson was present. "And, of course, communication is not only a field for linguistics, but it can be said that society is, by itself and as a whole, a very large machine for establishing communication on many different levels between human beings."
All culture is therefore amenable to structuralist analysis. "The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems," Lévi-Strauss later wrote. "I am of the opinion that the number of such systems is not unlimited and that . . . human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose a certain combination from an ideal repertoire that it should be possible to define"—as Jakobson had argued about languages. So he was always on the lookout for examples of basic binary oppositions in other fields. He was excited to learn from Meyer Schapiro, for example, that all of Renaissance architecture, painting, sculpture, and decoration could be analyzed using just five pairs of polar terms: linear versus picturesque, parallel versus diagonal, closed versus open, composite versus fused, and clear versus unclear. And he was fascinated by developments in genetics, cybernetics, and information theory because they seemed to him to corroborate the structuralist hypothesis about the nature of the mind.
4.
When the war ended, Lévi-Strauss was instrumental in disbanding the École Libre (which led to some hard feelings) and in negotiating with the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations the funding of a new social science division, known as Section VI, in the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. French academics returning from the École Libre formed the core of the new faculty; Lévi-Strauss would eventually teach there himself. (In 1975, Section VI became the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.) Jakobson, who could not go back to Czechoslovakia, took a position at Columbia. In 1949, he moved to Harvard, where, splitting his time with MIT, he spent the rest of his career.
Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in January 1945 and reunited with his parents, who had lived in the south of France during the war. The Germans had looted their Paris apartment, and they had lost everything. He quickly returned to New York to serve as cultural attaché in the French consulate, a position whose few responsibilities included
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chaperoning French visitors, like Albert Camus, around the city. He met Raymond de Saussure, the son of the linguist, who was a psychoanalyst, and, through him, Trilling's analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, and other émigré psychoanalysts. He had plenty of time left over for the New York Public Library.
In 1948, he turned down an offer from the University of Chicago, the first of several from American universities he declined, and returned to Paris, where, in June, he defended his dissertation, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). Virtually all of the dissertation was researched and written in the United States. It was published in 1949 and reviewed in prominent intellectual journals in France. In Les Temps Modernes, Beauvoir called it "a stunning revival" of French social science and ended her review with the words il faut le lire: it must be read.
In fact, the book was easy neither to read nor to obtain. Only a small number of copies were printed, and although it was appreciated by some British and American anthropologists, it remained untranslated for twenty years. Still, it secured Lévi-Strauss's academic reputation.
But in 1949 and again in 1950, he was defeated for election to the Collège de France, devastating disappointments. He later said he suspected "an element of anti-Semitism." His second marriage, to a woman he had known since childhood, Rose-Marie Ullmo, had broken up, and short of money, he temporarily moved to the Eleventh Arrondissement. Though he got an appointment at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he seems to have felt at an impasse personally and professionally, and it was in this period that he produced two uncharacteristic works: an intervention on a political issue and a memoir.
The intervention was a pamphlet called Race and History, part of a series commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The United Nations, which opened for business in October 1945, is the paradoxical face of postimperial international relations. On the one hand, the UN is a resurrected League of Nations and incorporates liberal internationalist principles. The UN protects sovereignty, and it instantiates the belief that world government can be a guarantor of peace. This is the image of the mission projected by one of its two governing bodies, the General Assembly.
The United Nations is also an organ of realism. It helps the great powers lock into place a world order that does not threaten their
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interests, a function institutionalized in the organization's other governing body, the Security Council. The Security Council gave France, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China (the Republic of China, not the Communist People's Republic) veto power. (Soviet objections to the scope of this power almost prevented the UN from coming into existence. Stalin's eventual concession may have been linked to recognition of the Lublin government in Poland. By 1952, the Soviet Union had used the veto forty-four times, the United States zero.) The Security Council serves to check ambitions to major-power status among the world's other nations. This institutional structure is a paradox and not a simple contradiction because it models a great-power world that is at the same time anti-colonial.
On the subject of colonies, the UN Charter is circumlocutionary. Old imperial terms are replaced by talk of "trusts" and "territories." But by organizational design, the major powers serve as protectors of the sovereignty of member states, and as decolonization got under way, these increased from 51 in 1945 to 99 in 1960 to 127 in 1970. The major powers were obliged to speak the language of equality and cooperation, even as they tried to control (or block efforts by others to control) international affairs.
The new rationale in international relations represented an overturning of the race-and-ethnicity-defined view of the world that had prevailed in the imperial powers at the time of the League of Nations. The intellectual challenge was therefore to unlink the human sciences from that old, hierarchical view and to associate them instead with the new, post-racial understanding. This is the project that Race and History was part of.
Lévi-Strauss tended to downplay his public activities. But he was involved with the United Nations for most of the 1950s, ultimately serving as secretary-general of the International Social Sciences Research Council of UNESCO. In 1949, he met with social scientists from seven other countries to draft a report on "race problems," which UNESCO published in 1950. The cause of differences among groups, these experts (as they were identified) explained, is not biology; it is culture. "For all practical social purposes, 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth," they wrote. ". . . The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoints is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man."
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Two years later, Lévi-Strauss published a pamphlet called Race and History. As Boas had forty years before, Lévi-Strauss attacked what he called "false evolutionism," the notion that the races are at different stages on the evolutionary path of the species. Much of his essay elaborates on points already made in the 1950 experts' declaration. But he also argued against a notion that might be thought implicit in a phrase like "the unity of mankind": the notion of a "world civilization." We don't want a global monoculture, he said, because cultures benefit from contact with cultures that are different.
They benefit, briefly, and then...they disappear into each other?
Seems like this could be theorized as a grand cycle of cultural (re)differentiation and (re)integration?
He compared civilization to a game of roulette. Social groups invent cultural systems—languages, marriage laws, cuisine, mythologies—that are, in effect, gambles on survival. The greater the diversity of available systems, the better the odds of winning. The pre-Columbian cultures he studied in Brazil, he said, were virtually destroyed in part because of insufficient cultural heterogeneity. They lacked resources for creating new means of adaptation. It is by "pooling . . . the wins which each culture has scored in the course of its historical development" that civilizations flourish, he said, and "the greater the diversity between the cultures concerned, the more fruitful such a coalition will be." At the end of the essay, he conceded that diversity is a finite resource. Cultures that exchange become more alike, which means that the cost of intercultural contact is an overall reduction in diversity. Three years later, in the memoir Tristes Tropiques (he resurrected the title from his abandoned novel), this reservation was amplified into a warning.
Tristes Tropiques was commissioned for a series called Terre Humaine, launched by an anthropologist and geographer, Jean Malaurie, who had recently returned from northern Greenland. "I wrote the book in a kind of rage and impatience; ," Lévi-Strauss later said. "I also felt some remorse. I thought I should have been writing something else." He believed he was "committing a sin against science." The writing took him a little over four months, October 1954 to March 1955. His method of composition was not unlike the one Jack Kerouac used for On the Road—a continuous typescript with no breaks (though on separate sheets of paper). Speed was possible in part because Lévi-Strauss simply pasted in excerpts of previously published scholarly work, of his and his first wife's field notes, and of the abandoned novel, from which he cannibalized the title and a bravura description of a sunset at sea. He claimed that he had not taken pains with the writing, but the book was received as (and is) a classic of French prose.
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A key feature of Tristes Tropiques is reflexivity. The author is always looking over his own shoulder. The book is a travelogue that begins: "I hate travelling and explorers." It is a memoir that asks: "Why.. should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings?" It is an ethnography that includes, alongside structuralist interpretations of Caduveo face paintings and Bororo housing patterns, first-person accounts of the ethnologist's mistakes and misadventures. And the book is designed to reach its climax with a reflection on the ethical and epistemological dilemmas of anthropology itself.
Tristes Tropiques came out in October 1955. After the publication of Race and History, Lévi-Strauss had been charged with being a cultural relativist and a West-basher. In Tristes Tropiques, he pled guilty. He did not deny that he was a cultural relativist , if that meant accepting "that each society has made a certain choice, within the range of existing human possibilities, and that the various choices cannot be compared with each other: they are all equally valid." The West, he said, placed its bet on "progress." To use "progress" as a way of judging cultures for whom the concept is meaningless is pure ethnocentrism.
And he did not deny that he was ashamed of Western civilization. "It has sometimes been said that European society is the only one which has produced anthropologists, and that therein lies its greatness," he wrote.* But the anthropologist's "very existence is incomprehensible except as an attempt at redemption: he is the symbol of atonement." Anthropology is not a sign of superiority. It is a sign that a civilization realizes that it has gone terribly off track. Europeans could take some solace, he suggested, in the recognition that there have been other wicked societies—for example, the Aztecs. The sin being atoned for by anthropology was colonialism. European civilization, Lévi-Strauss said, "for a widespread and innocent section of humanity, has amounted to a monstrous and incomprehensible cataclysm." And colonialism is just an extension of a culture that, in the name of progress and enlightenment, damages the lives of Europeans as well.
The writer Lévi-Strauss admired most was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he agreed with the argument of Rousseau's spectacular philosophical debut, the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, published in 1750:
__________* He was referring to an attack on him in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française by Roger Caillois, which, along with Lévi-Strauss's riposte, caused a commotion in intellectual Paris.
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advances in the arts and sciences that are believed to make life more "civilized" actually rob human beings of virtue. Lévi-Strauss thought that the more civilized, in Rousseau's sense, humans become, the more the species exhausts itself. The fact that we humans create cultures does not confer a privileged place on us.
"The world began without man and will end without him," he wrote in the final chapter of Tristes Tropiques. Human creations "will merge into the general chaos, as soon as the human mind has disappeared."
. . . [C]ivilization, taken as a whole, can be described as an extraordinarily complex mechanism, which we might be tempted to see as offering an opportunity of survival for the human world, if its function were not to produce what physicists call entropy, that is inertia. Every verbal exchange, every line printed, establishes communication between people, thus creating an evenness of level, where before there was an information gap and consequently a greater degree of organization. Anthropology could with advantage be changed into "entropology," as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of this process of disintegration.
Entropy has been used in contradictory ways ever since the term was invented by the German physicist Rudolph Clausius in the nineteenth century. Lévi-Strauss was thinking of the use of it made in information theory, a field he was introduced to by Jakobson. When Jakobson was at Harvard and Lévi-Strauss was back in Paris, Jakobson mailed him Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, published in 1948. Soon after, he sent along Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published in 1949. Even though they lived in the same building during the war, Lévi-Strauss had never met Shannon. He was thrilled by his book. "I literally devoured it," he wrote to Jakobson. "The immense interest of the book is precisely to give a theory of thought [théorie de la pensée] from the point of view of the machine- that is, for what seems to me to be the first time, considered as an object." A year later, Shannon coined the word "bit," short for "digital binary," and his idea that information and communications technology is based on binaries—1/0, yes/no, flip/flop—correlated beautifully with the structuralist and posthumanist understanding of the mind.
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Wiener, who was Shannon's teacher at MIT, is the inventor of cybernetics, which is a theory for all self-regulating systems—it grew in part out of Wiener's work on feedback mechanisms for anti-aircraft guns of which both human biology and society are examples. Wiener and Shannon used entropy differently, though. In Shannon's theory, entropy is a measure of the amount of information in a communication. The greater the number of possible messages, the more "information" and the higher the degree of entropy. Wiener interpreted entropy as a measure of the disorganization, or chaos, in a system, and this must have been the interpretation that Lévi-Strauss had in mind when he used the term in Tristes Tropiques. Lévi-Strauss's idea was that the better people understand one another, the more alike they become, but this means that cultural differences, and therefore cultural possibilities, disappear. Culture evens out, becomes homogeneous. It suffers the equivalent of heat death in thermodynamics. Order, which requires difference, gives way to chaos, where everything is on the same level—the same temperature, so to speak--and there are no distinctions.
This was the allegorical meaning of the sunset. Lévi-Strauss returned to that sunset in the final volume of his major scholarly enterprise, Mythologiques (literally: myth-logics) in 1971, where he described mythology as "that huge and complex edifice which also glows with a thousand iridescent colors as it builds up before the analyst's gaze, slowly expands to its full extent, then crumbles and fades away in the distance, as if it had never existed.") Cultures are created so that people can communicate: that's how and why societies come into being. But communication breaks down the very divisions it is designed to overcome. Monoculture, driven by Western expansion, turns out to be the direction humanity is headed. On this view of the future, politics are irrelevant. "Marxist, Communist, and Totalitarian ideology," Lévi-Strauss said, "is only a stratagem of history to promote the faster Westernization of peoples who until recent times have remained on the periphery." This is why the tropics are sad. They have been co-opted into a self-destructive organism.
Triste Tropiques was a popular book and it introduced many readers to structuralism. Tristes Tropiques was also a topical book. France was undergoing violent ruptures with two of its colonies. On May 7, 1954, French forces surrendered to the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. Three weeks later, on November 1, in Algeria, the Front
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de Libération Nationale (FLN) launched a series of revolts throughout the country—the start of the Algerian War, which would last for seven and a half years and which France would lose. In March 1956, Tunisia, a French protectorate since 1881, became an independent state and, in July, a member of the United Nations.
Decolonization had begun. The anxiety in the imperial states was no longer that nonwhite peoples could not govern themselves. It was that they might govern themselves all too well. For the first time in international affairs, majority-nonwhite states were demanding a vote. The British edition of the English translation of Tristes Tropiques came out in 1963, while Britain was in the process of (with varying degrees of willingness) granting independence to its African colonies. The title was World on the Wane, suggesting a nostalgia for empire that Lévi-Strauss certainly did not intend.
5.
The Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster photography exhibition The Family of Man, which opened in January 1955, was a visual expression of the central assertion of UNESCO's "Statement by Experts on Race Problems" that Lévi-Strauss signed in 1950: "The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoints is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man." The show was a collection of photographs of people from around the world, some by well-known photographers like Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, and Alfred Eisen- staedt, others by amateurs. The pictures were identified by country and photographer, and arranged thematically to illustrate birth, love, family, work, play, grief, war, faith, death, and, at the end, childhood again. They were intended to demonstrate, in the words of the catalogue, "the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world."7 The photographs were accompanied by tags from the Bible, folk adages, and sayings by well-known figures: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves ," Thomas Jefferson. "I still be- lieve that people are really good at heart, " Anne Frank. The show was a major international cultural event. The Family of Man was entirely the inspiration of its curator, Edward
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Steichen. He began imagining an exhibition on "Human Relations and Human Rights" in 1949, two years after his appointment as director of the museum's department of photography. Steichen was then sev- enty years old. He was born in Luxembourg and came to the United States when he was an infant, and he had had major achievements in virtually every genre of photography: art photography (he was a close associate of Alfred Stieglitz early in the century), advertising and fash- ion photography (he was the photographer for Condé Nast from 1923 to 1938; his 1925 portrait of Marion Morehouse, the wife of the poet E. E. Cummings, in a dress by Lucien Lelong is iconic), aerial photog- raphy (for the army during the First World War and the navy during the Second World War), even documentary film."2 His movie about life on an aircraft carrier, The Fighting Lady, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1945. He intended The Family of Man to be his crowning achievement. The story of the show is a story of numbers. That is how it was pro- moted and how its effect was measured. Steichen, his friend Dorothea Lange, and his assistant, Wayne Miller, spent three years in prepara- tion, and reviewed more than three million photographs. Steichen met with photographers in twenty cities in eleven European countries. The show contained 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 coun- tries. It broke attendance records at MoMA, where it was on display for 103 days and attracted a quarter of a million visitors. It traveled to six other American cities, and replicas toured the world for seven years. Attendance numbers were fantastic: 276,000 in Belgrade, 350,000 in Calcutta, 293,000 in Tokyo.73 In all, the exhibition was seen in eighty- eight venues in thirty-seven countries by nine million people. A cat- alogue was published in at least four separate formats. The paperback version alone is estimated to have sold more than four million copies.74 It was designed by Leo Lionni, a European émigré who would shortly afterward publish a popular children's book about racial discrimination, Little Blue and Little Yellow. The photographs ranged in size from eight by ten inches to ten by twenty feet and were mounted, in an installation designed by the architect Paul Rudolph (a student at Harvard of the founder of the Bau- haus, Walter Gropius), mostly on Masonite boards without frames, and were hung unconventionally-_-from wires or on poles--and grouped in specially designed areas. 75
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This method of exhibition was not new. A show of images two years earlier at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Parallel of Life and Art, was hung in the same manner. But The Family of Man was an installation: that is, the exhibition, not the individual photographs, was the artwork, Because they were not wall-mounted, it was possible for viewers to see photographs from different areas at the same time. People were rarely seeing just a single image. Visitors followed a path through the thematic sequence, ending in a room containing a six-by-eight- foot color transparency of a hydrogen bomb explosion. All the photo- graphs were intended to be observed in passing. A gruesome picture of a lynching, taken by an anonymous photographer in Mississippi in 1937, was removed early on because viewers stopped to stare at it, disturbing the fow. At the end, there was a smoky mirror in which people could see their own faces, and the space was designed so that those on the way out passed those on the way in and were forced to make eye contact.76 Formally, the exhibition was received as an assault on fine-art norms. The artwork was de-aestheticized, not isolated for contemplation; the viewer was de-individualized, made to function as part of a crowd; the art of composition was reduced to an act of selection. The idea that artis- tic merit could be expressed quantitatively-503 images, 273 photog- raphers, nine million viewers, and so on--was mildly scandalous. This was box-office art. For photographers whose careers had been devoted to securing fine-art status for photography, the show was a betrayal. Minor White, a disciple of Stieglitz and the editor of Aperture, complained that Steichen had appropriated the works of individual artists and subordi- nated them to a spectacle of his own."7 The Family of Man was received not only as a betrayal of art photogra- phy. It flouted the aesthetic principles laid down by Clement Greenberg, by then the most influential art critic in the country. Greenberg did not review Steichen's exhibition; he had Hilton Kramer do it. Kramer had made a name for himself in 1953, when he was twenty-five, with an attack in Partisan Review on Harold Rosenberg's essay "The Ameri- can Action Painters" -the essay in which he implicitly undercut Green- berg and disparaged Pollock. When Rosenberg described the canvas as "an arena in which to act," " Kramer argued, he was no longer talking about art; he was talking about theater." The article naturally caught the attention of Greenberg, who was then an editor at Commentary,
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and Greenberg and Kramer became friends. (It might have helped that Kramer, like Greenberg, was a graduate of Syracuse University.) And in 1955, Greenberg had Kramer write some pieces for the magazine. The Family of Man wasn't art, Kramer complained; it was journal- ism. "And as so often happens in our culture when art abandons itself to journalism, " he said, "its mode of articulation has a distinct ideological cast-in this instance, a cast which embodies all that is most facile, abstract, sentimental, and rhetorical in liberal ideology?"° By "liberal ideology, Kramer meant what Lionel Trilling meant: progressivism without irony, the fellow-traveling mentality. He was not wrong. The message of The Family of Man- peace and democracy through tolerance and understanding-was the Soviet line. And so it should not be surprising that no one loved The Family of Man more than the left-wing press. The American Communist Party's news- paper, The Daily Worker, called it "a stirring ode to all of the earth's peo- ple" and promoted the show and its catalogue repeatedly, The show received positive reviews in left-wing journals such as The New Republic and The Progressive,& The progressive (though anti-Communist) United Auto Workers devoted an entire issue of its bulletin, Ammunition, to the exhibition. The issue was entitled "UAW-CIO and The Family of Man"; it printed seventeen pages of photographs from the show followed by forty-one pages of photographs of UAW activities. 2 When the exhibition came to France, in 1956, three months after Tristes Tropiques came out, the review in the French Communist Party's newspaper I'Humanité was headlined "A Deeply Moving (bouleversante) Exhibition." "It is heart-warming to know that this unique collection, which is touring the world, comes to us from the United States, express- ing as it does the love of mankind, the brotherhood of this great family which inhabits the earth," wrote the paper's film critic, Samuel Lachize. He called it "a great exhibition that must be seen."* (The public affairs official in the American embassy was delighted to send a copy of this re- view to Washington.)* "Un Art qui crie la verité"- "an art that cries out the truth" -was the headline in the Communist-supported Les Lettres Françaises. The reviewer, Marcel Cornu, a member of the French Com- munist Party, called the show "an extraordinary exhibition." He deplored the texts- "a marmalade of sweet and bland words"-but he found the images "vivid and explosive." The exposition, he wrote, was "a marvel."3s The show reached Moscow in the summer of 1959 as part of the
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American National Exhibition, an enormous spectacle dedicated mainly to consumerism, with displays of American automobiles, color television sets, boats, sporting equipment, farm machinery, computers, food, fashion, books, newspapers, art, and a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller.* The art included works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, and also by Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, and many other realists. As was true of virtually every government-sponsored art exhibition since 1946, there were domestic complaints about the style of the art and the politics of the artists whose work was being sent to Moscow. President Eisenhower was asked by a reporter whether the art "truly rep- resents Americans to the Russians." His answer is a classic sample of his ad hoc verbal manner: "I am not going, I assure you, I am not going to be the censor myself for the art that has already gone there. Now I think I might have something to say if we have another exhibit, anywhere, to the responsible officials of the methods they produce, or get the juries and possibly there ought to be one or two people that, like most of us here, say we are not too certain exactly what art is but we know what we like and what America likes--what America likes is after all some of the things that ought to be shown."6 Twenty-seven paintings, mostly from the nineteenth century, were duly added to the exhibit. No paintings were withdrawn. The most popular painting was an Andrew Wyeth.»7 More than 2.7 million Russians, plus tens of thousands of gate-crashers, attended the exhibit, and they were invited to vote on their favorite attractions. Only a fraction did, but The Family of Man was No. 1.88 The Family of Man's world tour was run by the United States In- formation Agency (USIA), not the Museum of Modern Art, and, measured by eyeballs, it was probably the most successful venture in cultural diplomacy in the entire Cold War. The USIA was created by the Eisenhower administration, which explained, persistently, that the agency's mission was not propaganda, but information. It is unlikely that a single person was fooled by this. Eisenhower was a great believer * It was at this exhibition, in the model kitchen of a model ranch house (furnished by Macy's), that Vice President Richard Nixon and the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had the ex- change about living standards and leadership in technology that became known as the "kitchen debate." The subtext was Khrushchev's recently announced intention to cut off Western access to Berlin, an escalation of tensions.
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in propaganda; for one thing, it was a lot cheaper than maintaining a standing army.»' And cultural diplomacy just is propaganda. It puts a national brand on art and ideas. The Family of Man was sometimes edited according to the venue. In Japan, the transparency of the bomb explosion was replaced by im- ages of Japanese atomic bomb victims. In Moscow, an official Soviet request for the removal of a picture of a Chinese child begging was granted.? But the overall design required balance, and the fact that, apart from country and photographer, there was no identifying information about the pictures depoliticized most of the images. Every image was generic--which, of course, was the point. The original exhibition includes a photograph of young men throw- ing paving stones at tanks during the 1953 workers' uprising (quickly suppressed) in East Germany, but that is the only allusion to Commu- mism. Apart from the hydrogen bomb transparency and the removed lynching photograph, the major image of political violence is a photo- graph used at the Nuremberg Trials of Jews being marched out of the burning ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising was crushed in 1943. A photograph of Asian women screaming behind barbed wire is, despite appearances, actually a picture of young South Koreans protesting the signing of the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. Most of the photographs signifying poverty are of Americans. .The message of the exhibition was not anti-Communism. It was anti-colonialism. The exhibition was used by the American government to signal where the sympathies of the United States should be under- stood to lie in the coming struggles over decolonization. Since that happened to be the same place where the Soviets wanted their sympa- thies to be understood to lie, it was a message the Communist press was quick to embrace. 6. The Family of Man opened in Paris at the Musée National d'Art Mo- derne in an exhibition mounted by Steichen personally. Sixty thousand people went to see it. In its monthly magazine, UNESCO ran a fifteen- page spread of images from the show accompanied by an essay, by a British scientist, Cyril Bibby, on racist subtexts in ordinary speech.?2 One of the reviewers of the Paris show was Roland Barthes, and his
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hall that Jackson Pollock, Cage's contemporary, would visit that summer- he dropped out and hitchhiked to Galveston, where he got a boat to France. He was seventeen. Cage had some French (though he always spoke it with an undis- guised American accent), and he spent just six months in Paris, but he kept busy. He worked for an architect named Ernö Goldfinger, a Hungarian émigré (who would serve, much later, as the model for the character in the James Bond novel); he painted; he studied piano (that is, he took a few lessons) at the Paris Conservatoire. He also had his first gay relationships. One was a brief affair with John Goheen, the son of an American professor. The second was with another American, Don Sample, an artist twelve years older than Cage, who introduced him to current trends in art and literature. Cage and Sample traveled around Europe. They visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, where it was being run by Mies van der Rohe, and when they returned to the United States in the fall of 1931, they brought a collection of books and magazines about Bauhaus aesthetics with them.50 Back in Los Angeles, Cage and Sample lived on Kings Road in West Hollywood, where they met Galka Scheyer, a German émigré who was the American agent for the painters who called themselves Die Blauen Vier.* Scheyer took to Cage and introduced him to her Hollywood neighbor Walter Arensberg, a wealthy collector who was Marcel Du- champ's patron and friend. Arensberg had helped Duchamp pick out the urinal he used for Fountain, in 1917; he owned Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,51 Deciding that his prospects as a composer might be brighter than his prospects as a painter, Cage made contact with Henry Cowell, a leading American avant-garde composer. Cowell had spent time in Europe and had given a concert at the Bauhaus, and it was through Cowell's con- nections that Cage ended up studying with Arnold Schoenberg.?? Of the quarter of a million refugees admitted to the United States between 1933 and 1944, the Immigration and Naturalization Service classified more than twice as many as musicians (1,501) than as art- ists (702).53 Many of those musicians came from Germany and Austria, which meant that they arrived earlier and stayed longer than the painters * The Blue Four: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee (all Bauhauslers), and Alexej von Jawlensky. This was a successor group to Der Blaue Reiter, formed in Munich in 1911.
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who escaped from France, and, as a consequence, they became more in- tegrated into American cultural life. They included conductors (Arturo Toscanini, Erich Leinsdorf, Otto Klemperer), composers (Igor Stra- vinsky, Darius Milhaud, Kurt Weil), performers (Lotte Lenya, Artur Rubinstein, Wanda Landowska), and musicologists. A number became successful composing for Hollywood movies: Hanns Eisler, Franz Wax- man, Friedrich Hollander, and Erich Korngold all received Academy Award nominations.54 The reaction of the American music world was the same as the reaction of the American art world to the arrival of the Surrealists: people concluded that the Nazis had closed down Vienna as the capital of Western music. "I]f music is to have a future, it lies in the United States," the composer and critic Roger Sessions wrote in 1938, six weeks after the Anschluss.55 Schoenberg arrived in the fall of 1933. He was fifty-nine and, along with Stravinsky, who emigrated from Paris in 1939, one of the most famous composers in Europe. He had been raised in modest circumstances his father was a shopkeeper--in a Jewish family in Vienna. Musically, he was almost entirely self-taught. His great breakthrough as a com- poser was what he called "die Emanzipation der Dissonan»" "the emancipation of dissonance 3356
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in his father's publishing business, Alfieri Edizioni d'Arte di Venezia. The house specialty was printing the catalogues of the Venice Biennale. Alfieri's early enthusiasm was for French art, but in 1950, he saw Pol- lock's work in an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Venetian villa. He was stunned, and wrote a piece explaining that although the paintings were chaotic and provided no critical point of entry, it was clear that Pollock had surpassed Picasso as the most advanced artist in the world. (This is the review Time mentioned but chose to quote only the "chaos" part from, ignoring what meant most to Pollock: the favorable compar- ison to Picasso.)214 Alfieri launched Metro in 1960. In January 1961, Castelli offered him a Rauschenberg work for two thousand dollars, "a very special price. Alfieri accepted ("Non è molto," he replied--it's not much). And a little more than two weeks later, Castelli wrote back with "sensational news." He had arranged for an essay about Rauschenberg for Metro, to be written by John Cage. It would be ready by February.21S A year after Cage's piece appeared, Alfieri published an article on Johns. That article, too, was engineered by Castelli. The author was Leo Steinberg. Steinberg was born in Moscow in 1920. His father was Le- nin's commissar of justice, but he and Lenin did not see eye to eye, and his tenure was short-lived. The family was forced into exile in Berlin. After Hitler came to power, they moved again, to England, where Leo studied art at the Slade School in London. The family came to New York after the war. Steinberg had many interests, but he settled on art history and enrolled in a doctoral program at New York University.76 Steinberg's modus operandi as a critic was bafflement. Why did the artist do that? He liked puzzles. He met Rauschenberg in 1954, and when he heard about the Erased de Kooning Drawing, he phoned him to ask him what the point of it was. Would he have erased a drawing by Wyeth or Rembrandt? Rauschenberg said he did not relate to Wyeth and that a Rembrandt would have been too easy-_-which Steinberg took to mean that it would just have produced a piece of anti-art. Steinberg found the conceptual aspects of the erased de Kooning intriguing.?7 Steinberg's essay on Johns was published in Metro in 1962, the first major critical analysis of Johns's work. Five years after it appeared, Stein- berg was accused of having done the piece on commission from Cas- telli. He responded indignantly. He had begun writing the article on his own, he said; Castelli had merely offered to help him get it published. 218
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It was only much later, he said, that he learned that Castelli had also helped pay his fee. Castelli told a different story. In his version, Alfieri approached him and said he wanted to publish an article about one of Castelli's paint- ers. Which artist would Castelli recommend? Castelli replied, Johns. And did Castelli know a good person to write the article? Castelli said he did. Castelli then approached Steinberg and asked him how much money he would need to do a piece. Steinberg said a thousand dollars. "Now, this turned out to be five times more than the magazine could afford to pay," Castelli explained. "So I agreed to put up the other 80 percent. "219 And Steinberg knew perfectly well who was paying his fee, because Castelli's eight-hundred-dollar supplement took the form of a discount on a work of Johns's called Shade, which Steinberg purchased. The sale was finalized in November, shortly after the Metro article appeared.220 No doubt Castelli didn't tell Steinberg what to write, but of course that wasn't necessary. As he had done with Alfieri in the case of the Cage es- say, Castelli had made sure that Steinberg had a stake in the reputation of his subject. Along with Steinberg's essay, abundantly illustrated, Alfieri ran a piece by an Italian art critic, Gillo Dorfles, who argued that Johns's paintings of commonplace objects rescued them from the "serial nature of the industrially produced object, the use of which, in becoming mass use, risks losing all its charm to be converted only into the uninter- rupted cycle of an economically directed and controlled production" - politically approved rationale for the use of commercial imagery in the fine arts.?21 The Biennale pump was being primed. Steinberg's essay is one of the most influential ever written about Johns's work, and it went right to the heart of the art-critical issue. The "liberating discovery" of Johns's art, Steinberg wrote, is that the man-made alone can be made, whereas whatever else that's to be seen in our environment is only imitable by make-believe. The po- sition of esthetic anti-illusionism finds here its logical resting place. The street and the sky--they can only be simulated on canvas; but a flag, a target, a 7-these can be made, and the completed paint- ing will represent no more than what actually is. For no likeness or image of a 7 is paintable, only the thing itself Johns eliminates
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a residue of double dealing in modern painting. Since his picture plane is to be flat, nothing is paintable without make-believe but what is flat by nature. And if for some reason he wants something 3-D, let the artist insert the thing, or a cast of it.222 Johns generally did not have much use for interpreters of his art, but he later said that he thought Steinberg was one critic who understood it. "He saw the work as something new, and then tried to change himself in relation to it," he said. "I admired that."323 The year the article came out, Steinberg married Dorothy Seiberling, the editor at Life behind the "Is He the Greatest Living Painter?" article on Pollock. The 1964 Venice Biennale displayed three thousand works by eighty invited artists exhibited in thirty national pavilions.?24 Since the end of the war, the American art at the Biennale had been sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, alternating with other arts organizations. After the 1962 exhibition, though, MoMA announced that it was not continuing, and the job fell to a government agency, the United States Information Agency (USIA). The director of the USIA was Edward R. Murrow, who took the position after he felt he was being pushed out of CBS News for programming that was too controversial, and who was therefore indisposed to impose political tests on the works the agency disseminated. The chief of the service's fine arts section was Lois Bing- ham, a graduate of Oberlin and the first woman ever admitted to the Yale School of Architecture. She had been at the USIA since 1955.225 Bingham asked Alan Solomon to curate the American pavilion, with the Jewish Museum acting as co-sponsor. Castelli could not have chosen better himself. He and Solomon not only had a professional commitment to the same artists; they also had become friends after Solomon moved to New York, got divorced, and undertook to make over his somewhat academic persona. From the mo- ment Solomon took the job, in November 1963, the plan was clear: it was to produce an American prizewinner. He few immediately not to Italy but to Paris, to huddle with the Sonnabends. He was in the airport when he learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. "What will happen to all our schemes now?" he wrote to Castelli. But, he re- ported, he had met the Sonnabends: "I have brought them up to date."26 Solomon organized the American exhibition around two pairs of artists: Rauschenberg and Johns, whose work he mounted, because
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of space problems, in the United States Consulate, and Kenneth No- land and Morris Louis, whom he exhibited in the American pavilion on festival grounds. It was, symbolically, Castelli versus Greenberg, since Greenberg had let it be known that he considered Johns's work "easy, and had named Noland and Louis as the cutting edge after Pol- lock,.227 In the context of the European artistic debate, this meant that Rauschenberg and Johns would, as nongestural post-abstractionists, be contrast-gainers. Solomon was perfectly straightforward about his intention. "At the present moment Europeans are very much aware of American ascen- dancy in the arts," , he wrote in the catalogue that accompanied the American exhibition. "... The fact that the world art center has shifted from Paris to New York is acknowledged on every hand. "228 This kind of bravado was not Castelli's style, and the Sonnabends were horrified.229 But Solomon had read the situation correctly. French artists had dominated the Grand Prize for Painting at the Biennale since 1948, and this did not sit well with the Italians. And Italian art- ists were familiar with American art: more American artists were work- ing in Rome in the 1950s than in Paris. Twombly had moved there in 1957 and had married an Italian, Tatiana Franchetti, a painter, whose brother, Giorgio, was an art collector. (Castelli was Twombly's dealer.)?30 To the extent that the Biennale was a nationalist competition, the Ital- ians were not competing with the Americans. They were competing with the French. Solomon gave Italy a chance to break with abstraction and the School of Paris. It helped that Rauschenberg was in town. He was still designing sets, costumes, and lighting for Cunningham, and when it was an- nounced that the company would be touring Europe that summer, Sol- omon requested that it be allowed to perform at the opening gala of the Biennale, arguing that that would increase attendance,?31 Officials were unmoved, but Cunningham was able to reserve Venice's famous Teatro La Fenice, where, on June 18, two days before the prizes were scheduled to be announced, the company performed before a crowd unusually raucous even for them. Rauschenberg had gone all out with the set, with trap doors opening and closing, stage levels rising and fall- ing, bars of light coming and going, and stagehands "working" in the background. People were dazzled. The jury took note. The jury had been divided. It included one American member, Sam
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Hunter, who was not partial to Castelli's artists; the others were from Switzerland, Brazil, Poland, and the Netherlands, plus two Italians, Giu- seppe Marchiori and Marco Valsecchi, both art critics. The fact that Rauschenberg's paintings were not on the grounds of the Biennale be- came an issue. A compromise was proposed: give the Grand Prize to Noland. When he learned of this, Solomon announced that he would withdraw all the American artists if Rauschenberg was disqualified on a technicality. To meet the objections about siting, however, he agreed to transport three Rauschenberg combines by gondola from the con- sulate to the American pavilion. And on June 20, Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting. 232 The award was immediately perceived as a scandal--not only in the French and Italian press but in the United States as well.233 There were insinuations in Italy that the prize had been "comprato"-bought.234 But the main accusation was colonialism. "Venice Colonized by Amer- ica," was the headline in the French journal Arts. Solomon's assertion that the center of the art world had moved to New York was described as "a declaration of war." "Europe Explodes as American Takes the Prize" was the headline in Life,?35 Hilton Kramer told people that Rauschenberg's victory was an act of "cultural imperialism" by Castelli, 236 Castelli, naturally, preferred a more genteel explanation. "Alan Solomon is an independent man," he said; "our tastes just happened to coincide. Of course, I didn't talk to the judges ... [I]t was the most natural thing in the world to win." But Solomon not only knew what he was about; he also knew more than he should have known. "I told him [Alfred Barr] what ac- tally happened," he informed Castelli after the Biennale was over- "leaving out, of course, the more intimate details."237 "We might have one (sic] it anyway (apart from the question of merit)," he told Lois Bingham, "but we really engineered it."238 "Marchiori and Santomaso, working together, really swung it; " he confided to Calvin Tomkins, who was covering the Biennale for Harper's. "Don't say this, tho!"23) Tomkins did not. But Giuseppe Santomaso, a prominent Venetian painter who taught in the art college, was not on the jury, so lobbying almost certainly oc- curred. Although Castelli later insisted, "Of course, I didn't talk to the judges," one of the first things he did after arriving in Venice was to call on Marchiori and Santomaso.240 On the other hand, lobbying seems to
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have been a long-standing practice at the Biennale, much as it is in the Academy Awards.* Some of the "shock " about the award was the Casa- blanca variety.241 In September following the Biennale, Daniel Cordier, who had given Rauschenberg his first solo show in Paris in 1961, announced that he was closing his gallery. "Americans have taste, curiosity and the means to satisfy them,; " he explained, "and this is why New York, once merely a market, will soon become a predominant cultural center. We may be headed toward a period in which artistic centers scattered all over the world will reject the supremacy of any single one... Be that as it may, Paris's role in this area is now a thing of the past."242 "There's no 'art world' any more, no capital, here or there," Marcel Duchamp said two years later. "Still, the Americans persist in wanting to smash the Paris hegemony. They are idiots, because there is no hegemony, in Paris or in New York."243 When the prize was announced, Santomaso arranged a celebration in the Piazza San Marco, where Rauschenberg was hoisted onto the shoulders of young Italian painters, thrilled to identify with the United States at the expense of France. But Rauschenberg was shocked by the hostility of the French reaction. He had been personally as well as ar- tistically popular in Paris. Soon after, he was seen weeping on the street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.244 But Rauschenberg also knew that, over- night, he had become the leading artist in a world now bristling with museums eager to display new art and collectors eager to buy it. His success began to erode his relationship with Cunningham and Johns. For, even after the prize, Rauschenberg was obliged to continue to work with them every day. He had signed on for a world tour and it had just begun. Cunningham and Cage's initial plan was to travel only as far as India, where they had been invited by Cage's old friend Gita Sarabhai, and Japan. The Japanese invitation had come from Toshi Ichi- yanagi on behalf of the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Ichiyanagi was an avant-garde composer and married to Yoko Ono. He had enrolled in, and she had audited, one of Cage's classes at the New School, and they had already hosted a Cage visit to Japan, with Tudor, in 1962, a thirty- day tour.245 * Castelli's method of persuasion seems to have been purely rhetorical. There is no evidence in the gallery's records of sales to anyone related to the Biennale.
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Cage and Cunningham decided to see whether they could drum up European dates as well (and some money to fund the trip). They did, and the result was a tour lasting six months involving a company of sixteen (ten dancers, two musicians, two stage technicians, and two managers) and seventy performances. It began on June 6, 1964, in Strasbourg and traveled to (among other cities) Paris (where they were pelted with eggs and tomatoes), Bourges, Vienna, Cologne, London (where they were an enormous hit and extended their stay), Stockholm (where Pontus Hultén was their host), Helsinki, Prague, Warsaw, Poznan, Brussels, Antwerp, The Hague, Bombay, Ahmedabad (home of the Sarabhais), Delhi, Bangkok, and, from November 6 to 28, Tokyo. In some venues, the company was luxuriously treated by its hosts (American officials were cautious about associating with them); in some, they lived hand-to- mouth. There was never quite enough money, and the quality of the performance facilities varied enormously, as did the audiences. Audi ences in Prague were boisterously divided; audiences in India and Bangkok were difficult to read. After his success in Venice, Rauschenberg attracted attention every- where, and Cage and Cunningham began to feel that he considered himself one of the company's stars. As it had always been, Rauschen- berg's method was to forage, in every venue, for props, and to provide new ideas at every performance. The Cunningham dance called Story, for example, required an "object" to be onstage during the performance. In Vienna, Rauschenberg came on himself as the object, covered in bur- lap, tree branches, and wooden slats; in Devon, he and his assistant, Alex Hay, spent the performance onstage ironing shirts.24 He seemed to be making the work about himself. Cunningham was not happy. By the time the company reached Tokyo, everyone was just waiting for the trip to be over. Much of the problem was exhaustion, but part of it was that, in the tacit rift between Rauschenberg and Cunningham, the dancers tended to side with Rauschenberg. He was affable; Cun- ningham was aloof. On the last night in Tokyo, Rauschenberg performed a piece on his own with the Japanese critic Yoshiaki Tono, who had met Johns and Rauschenberg in New York, through Castelli, back in 1959, and had done a great deal to promote their art in Japan. The event was planned as a public interview with the title "Twenty Questions for Bob Rauschen- berg, and was staged before a full house at the Sogetsu Art Center.
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rates), and produced and distributed by people who were born before 1940, many of them before 1930.* In 1969, the year of Woodstock and of the Stonewall riots that launched the Gay Liberation movement, the median age of Americans born between 1946 and 1964 was fourteen. The oldest had just gradu- ated from college; the youngest was five." "Young people" in the 1960s were not that young. On the witness stand at his trial on charges stem- ming from protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Ab- bie Hoffman was asked when he was born. "Psychologically, 1960," he said. Hoffman was born in 1936. He went to college at Brandeis, where he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. A second feature of this history is that although they tended to get written out of the social history of the period, a large proportion of the consumers of youth culture were girls. Seventeen is a magazine for girls, and most of the press stories in the 1950s about the teenage market focused on the spending habits of girls. About 25 percent of teenage spending in the 1950s was on clothes and cosmetics. Cars, the principal non-entertainment commodity coveted by boys, were beyond the price range of most teenagers, and the automobile industry largely ignored them.? The gender imbalance was by no means restricted to shopping. The audiences at Frank Sinatra's concerts in the 1940s and Elvis Pres- ley's in the 1950s were overwhelmingly female.S Many teenage boys wanted to be Elvis Presley; millions of teenage girls wanted to touch him. The latter helps to explain the former. As Parsons recognized, for a youth culture -in fact, for the category of "teenager itself- to exist, a socioeconomic space between childhood (dependency) and adulthood (parenting and/or full-time employment) had to open up. As he also recognized, that space was high school. Be- tween 1910 and 1930, high school enrollment in the United States in- creased by more than 400 percent: those were the people Parsons was writing about. In 1900, just 10.2 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-year- olds were in school; in 1910, 14.5 percent; in 1930, 51.1 percent. Despite * The so-called baby boom began (informally) in July 1946, eleven months after the Japanese surrender, when live births jumped to 286,000, and ended in December 1964, when 331,000 babies were born. That's approximately 76 million people. Generalizations about this demo- graphic are obviously meaningless. Birth rates for non-white people were significantly higher than birth rates for white people, but the baby-boom narrative is almost entirely a middle-class white person's narrative.
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the Depression, the trend continued. By 1940, 73 percent of Americans between fourteen and seventeen attended high school.' This growth was the result of a loosely coordinated national move- ment to get people to stay in school longer, but it also tracked changes in the workforce. '° In 1910, 21 percent of workers had white-collar jobs; in 1940, 31 percent did. That was a significant change, but a much more dramatic one involved agriculture. In 1900, 38 percent of employed Americans were farm workers; in 1950, 12 percent were. By 1960, it was a little over 6 percent." The statistic that captures these shifts most precisely is the education level of sixteen- and seventeen-year olds, ages when people are, skill sets aside, old enough for full-time employment and no longer legally required to attend school. In 1920, 51 percent of American sixteen-year-olds were in school; in 1950, it was 81 percent. Among seventeen-year-olds, 35 percent were in school in 1920; 68 per- cent in 1950.12 This rate of growth in secondary education was unique to the United States. 3 In 1955, when 84 percent of high-school-age Americans were in school, the figure for Western Europe was 16 percent. In Italy in 1951, only 10 percent of all people had more than an elementary school education; in 1961, the figure was 15 percent. '4 In the United Kingdom, a nation with an economic profile roughly comparable to the United States, approximately 17 percent of fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds were full-time students in 1955. In 1957, just 9 percent of British seventeen- year-olds were still in school.15 So it is unsurprising that global youth culture in the twentieth cen- tury was preponderantly American. The United States had a big head start, and the sectors of American industry that capitalized on it- notably fashion and music--enjoyed a competitive advantage interna- tionally. Already formidable in 1945, this advantage was enhanced a decade later by rapid growth in another sector of the educational sys- tem, college. Between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States increased from 2.9 million to more than 8 million. I6 That increase was partly propelled by the baby boom (although the oldest boomer did not turn eighteen until 1964), but there were other factors, including increased state investment in education in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957 and the Selective Service's policy of grant- ing draft deferments to college students, making college increasingly ...
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Presley came in to make a record for his mother.* He paid $3.99 plus tax to record two songs, "My Happiness," which had been a hit for several artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, and "That's When Your Heart- aches Begin, )) an Ink Spots song. Whether Phillips was in the booth that day or not later became a matter of dispute (he insisted that he was), but someone wrote next to Presley's name, "Good ballad singer. Hold." A year later, Phillips invited Presley back to try out a ballad he'd come across. The song didn't seem to work, and, per his standard op- eating procedure, Phillips had Presley run through all the material he knew, any song he could remember. After three hours, they gave up. Phillips decided to pursue the experiment, though, and he put Presley together with a couple of country musicians, Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played stand-up bass, and invited them to come into the studio, which, on July 5, 1954, they did. They began the session with a Bing Crosby song, "Harbor Lights," then tried a ballad, then a country song. They did multiple takes; noth- ing seemed to click. Everyone was ready to quit for the night when, as Elvis told the story later, "this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago and I started kidding around." The song was "That's All Right, Mama, an R&B number written and recorded by Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup. "Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them, Moore said. Phil- lips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start again from the beginning. After multiple takes, they had a record. Phillips was friendly with a white disk jockey, Dewey Phillips (not related), who played some R&B on his show on WHBQ in Memphis. Sam gave the acetate to Dewey and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It Was an overnight sensation. To have a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. So Presley, Moore, and Black recorded an up-tempo cover of a bluegrass song, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," and in July 1954, Elvis Presley's first single came on the market. In his promotional campaign, Phillips em- phasized the record's appeal to all listeners, pop, country, and rhythm and blues. "Operators have placed ["That's All Right"] on nearly all * At least, that's the legend; according to a friend, the Presleys did not own a phonograph.
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locations (white and colored) and are reporting plays seldom encoun- tered on a record in recent years," he wrote in the press release. "Accord- ing to local sales analysis, the apparent reason for its tremendous sales is because of its appeal to all classes of record buyers.?" The trade press picked this up, for, three months after the Billboard article about R&B and white teenagers, it was exactly what the industry was primed to hear. "Presley is the potent new chanter who can sock a tune for either the country or the r. & b. markets, " Billboard noted. . A strong new talent."51 (Crudup never got a dime from Presley or Sun, but as it happened, Crudup had borrowed much of the lyrics and music for "That's All Right, Mama" from a Big Joe Turner boogie- woogie number called "That's All Right, Baby," recorded in 1939 with Pete Johnson on piano.)52 Phillips was reported to have said, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dol- lars." He denied it.33 But it is clear that if he was looking for such a per- son, he did not pick Elvis Presley to be the one. Phillips called Presley in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley believed he essentially was. Presley's favorite among his own songs was "It's Now or Never," which is neither bluesy nor rock 'n' roll, but Neapolitan." Musically, "It's Now or Never" is a cover of "O Sole Mio." "That's All Right, Mama" started as a joke. Moore and Black thought it was a joke, too. It worked, but it was completely unpremed- itated. Presley later admitted that he had never sung like that before in his life.' It is interesting, though, that he remembered the song and that Moore and Black knew how to play it. They just never assumed it was a song that white artists performed. Rock 'n' roll was not "manufactured" by Phillips, Moore, Black, and Presley in Memphis any more (or any less) than the drip paintings were "manufactured" by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Clement Greenberg on Long Island. They tried some- thing out, and then they tried to figure out why it worked. "That's All Right, Mama' !" was only a regional hit, and not even No. 1, in Memphis. "Blue Moon of Kentucky was equally popular. Presley didn't make it onto the national charts for another year; by then, many white performers had stopped refurbishing R&B songs in a pop style and had started imitating them. In 1954, WDIA became a 50,000-watt station reaching the entire mid-South, and by 1955, more than six hundred stations in thirty-nine states programmed for Black ...
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The speed and scale of the Beatles' impact in the United States can be partly explained by demographics. When they arrived, 40 percent of the population--78 million people--was under twenty. The infrastruc- ture for youth culture that had been built up after the war was firmly in place: American business knew how to sell to teenagers. As in the case of Elvis Presley, the Beatles first became famous not because of their music but because of their fans. And as with Presley, those fans were virtually all female. There were 11 million teenage girls in the United States in 1964, and they bought more than half of all records sold. The Beatles had had male fans when they played clubs in Hamburg and Liverpool, but Beatlemania was a girl phenomenon. It was not until 1965 that boys began showing up at Beatles concerts in significant numbers. The band's longevity can be ascribed to sheer songwriting talent, which appeared to evolve as its fan base aged. The Beatles composed in an unusually wide range of styles. The White Album (officially The Beatles), which was released in November 1968 and was the work the band regarded as its last complete group effort, is a pastiche of nearly a dozen genres, from folk rock to blues, surf music, heavy metal, and ska. But the Beatles managed to make every song they played sound like a Beatles song. Other factors were important, and one was the Beatles' skill at dis- arming the press. The press conference held after they landed at Ken- nedy Airport was an impromptu tour de force. Three thousand fans had turned out (before the visit, Capitol, the Beatles' American label, had put an unprecedented amount of money, probably around fifty thousand dollars, into promotion). There was screaming and mayhem as the Beatles were rushed off the plane and into an airport lounge, where they were confronted by two hundred reporters irritated by the harassed conditions of the assignment and armed with the customary professional cynicism." Every question from the press was topped by a Beatle one-liner. Q: Would you please sing something? The Beatles (in unison): No! Ringo: Sorry. Q: There's some doubt that you can sing. John: No. We need money first. ...
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Land." The refrain "T'd love to turn you on," Poirier suggested, "has as much propriety to the fragmented life that precedes it in the song and in the whole work as does the 'Shantih, Shantih, Shantih' to the fragments of Eliot's poem."136 The motive for linking the Beatles to Poulenc and Eliot was to make them more interesting, but the association actually made them less interesting, because it detached them from the cultural stratum to which they belonged. The Beatles were not artists and never thought of themselves in those terms. They were entertainers; their product met a different appetite. It required a kind of critical attention that literature professors and art-music composers, however well disposed, were not equipped for. The Beatles' music needed the attention of someone who was as inward with the cultural realm it occupied as Poirier was with poetry and Rorem was with classical music. It needed, in other words, a fan. And one emerged. By the circumstances of his birth, Jann Wenner could have been scripted to be the force behind the critical reception of rock 'n' roll. Wenner was born in New York City in the predawn of the postwar population explosion, January 7, 1946. The family moved to North- ern California when Jann was an infant, and his father started a com- pany that manufactured baby formula--a business with much room for growth in the ensuing decades. Wenner went to Berkeley. While there, he became a protégé of Ralph Gleason, a columnist who wrote about jazz and pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle (one of the few newspapers in the country with a pop music reviewer). In 1966, Wen- ner dropped out of college; a year later, he and Gleason started Rolling Stone. The first issue was dated November 9, 1967. John Lennon was on the cover. 137 Wenner saw the magazine as something closer to a trade publication- "Were gonna be better than Billboard," he exhorted his staff- than an organ of traditional journalism.138 That many of the writers and editors who worked for him felt differently worked to the magazine's advantage. Rolling Stone attracted readers who wanted a fan magazine; it also at- tracted readers who wanted a countercultural take on contemporary life. Wenner is supposed to have said that he started the magazine in order to meet Lennon 13 Whether this is true or not, Wenner loved the stars, and he believed that stars are what people want to read about. For him, the stars were the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger. The name ...
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concluded.38 The phrase is Talleyrand's- "Above all, gentlemen, no zeal" -and though Berlin dismissed the criticism, he liked the phrase so much that he added it to his essay when he reprinted it, and "surtout, pas trop de zèle" became, for the rest of his life, his motto,39 A friendlier reader was Kennan. Totalitarianism, he wrote to Ber- lin, takes advantage of people's weakness; it manipulates "the irrational sides of their nature. ? What preserves us from being manipulated is the recognition that although we are imperfect, our problems are "suscepti- ble to solution by rational processes, and should be so approached and solved."40 This was a telling misprision. Berlin agreed that people are imperfect--that was a constant theme in his work- but he did not think that rationality was the solution. He thought that rationality- trying to iron out the imperfections-_was the problem. He began work- ing out this theory in the spring of 1952, when he delivered six lectures at Bryn Mawr on "Political Ideas in the Romantic Age." That fall, he broadcast a version of them on the BBC as "Freedom and Its Betrayal." For several years, he struggled to make the talks into a book. He failed, but they served as the foundation for his writings for the next decade.#l The most widely known of those writings is "Two Concepts of Lib- erty, ," Berlin's inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Po- litical Theory at Oxford, delivered on October 31, 1958, and published in an expanded version the same year. One reason for the essay's in- fluence is that it presents four linked but distinct philosophical ideas, each of which had political resonance in 1958. The first is the contrast between negative freedom and positive freedom- the "two concepts." Negative freedom is "freedom from" external forces of coercion, such as the state; positive freedom is "freedom to" reach particular ends, such as self-realization. The central argument of the essay is that all "freedoms 93 to, no matter how appealing the ends in view, can become rationales for coercion.* Take self-realization. Either we are realizing ourselves all the time, having no alternative, in which case we don't require freedom to do it, or else it is possible for us to realize a false self or an inferior self--say, our instinctual self rather than our rational self-_in which case, we may * The from/to distinction is, of course, not original with Berlin. Erich Fromm used it, for exam- ple, in Escape from Freedom (1941).
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need an external force to guide us toward genuine self-realization. We may need someone who knows better than we do what is best for us. "This monstrous impersonation, » Berlin wrote, "which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization."42 Self-realization may be a good thing (Berlin obviously considered the notion rather empty), but it is not the same as liberty. Liberty is "freedom from, " and the danger arises when people are persuaded that it is something else. "Everything is what it is, " as Berlin put it in a later edition of the essay: "liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience."3 "Every thing is what it is" is a famous phrase in British philosophy, and the essence of the empirical view.44 The "two concepts" idea is connected to a second idea, which might be called the doctrine of the incommensurability of ultimate ends. The things we want in life are not perfectly compatible. If we want beauty, we may have to sacrifice truth, for example (despite what Keats's Grecian urn tells us). In the geopolitical context, the relevant choice in 1958, the choice everyone would have understood that Berlin was referring to, was liberty and equality. Liberal democracies might argue that what makes liberty true liberty is that everyone has an equal chance; socialist and Communist nations might argue that no one is free as long as there is inequality, such that one person's liberty rests on the exploitation of another. But the doctrine of incommensurability tells us that both ar- guments muddle concepts. To get more of one of those goods, we must give up some of the other. A world in which everyone is free and equal is a utopia. '"The world that we encounter in ordinary experience," " Berlin said, "is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others,"S Any other way of for- mulating the choice--as when Hegel argued that freedom consists in understanding one's place in the historical process--is metaphysics. This leads to the third idea, pluralism. Given that different people value different ends, and given that those ends are not commensurable, and given that we do not want to coerce people into seeking ends they have not chosen, then pluralism is the social formation best suited to the * Ludwig Wittgenstein considered using it as an epigraph for Philosophical Investigations (1953).
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species. Pluralism, for Berlin, was the heart of liberalism. "I think that what I am pleading for is really what used to be called Liberalism, " he had written six years earlier in a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, Herbert Elliston, "i.e. a society in which the largest number of persons are allowed to pursue the largest number of ends as freely as possible, in which these ends are themselves criticised as little as possible and the fervour with which such ends are held is not required to be bolstered up by some bogus rational or supernatural argument to prove the universal validity of the end."46 As a practical matter, pluralism describes a society not of individuals, but of groups, and this is addressed by the fourth idea, recognition. What groups want, Berlin argued, is not liberty. It is acknowledgment--as a "class or nation, or colour or race."» "Although I may not get 'negative liberty at the hands of the members of my own society," as he explained it, "yet they are members of my own group; they understand me, as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me the sense of being somebody in the world." The impetus for this statement may have been Berlin's Zionism, a lifelong commitment. But the argument about the human need for recognition was taken to be broadly relevant to decolonization and possibly a warning to the former imperial powers. Recognition might be more important than democracy.* The four ideas are all propositions in political philosophy and can be debated as such. But Berlin placed them in a historical narrative. The narrative began with Socrates and the teaching that rational self- knowledge is a virtue. This doctrine, Berlin claimed, led to the belief that all rational ends are commensurable, that unhappiness is caused by the irrational or insufficiently rational, and that when everyone be- comes rational and obeys rational laws, human beings will be free. Ber- lin called this view "the metaphysical heart of rationalism." "Socialized forms of it," he said, "widely disparate and opposed to each other as they are, are at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, au- thoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day." And yet not one of that view's assumptions, he said, "is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true." This was a (rather spectacular) amplification of what Berlin had said about Marx. Berlin was now arguing that the authoritarian ten- * Recognition was also the theme of the seminar on Hegel run by Alexandre Kojève that Han- nah Arendt attended in Paris before fleeing to the United States.
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denies of the faith in rationalism were not restricted to Marxism. "[A]l1 forms of liberalism founded on a rationalist metaphysics; • he said, "are less or more watered-down versions of this creed."S He saw totalitarianism not as anti-humanism but as humanism in extremis. Its seeds were everywhere. "Two Concepts of Liberty" belongs on the same shelf as The Liberal Imagination and George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language?" Berlin did with ideas what Orwell did with words and Trilling did with novels. He thought that philosophical ideas insinuate themselves into everyday discourse, and that we internalize them without examining them critically. Neglected for too long, these ideas may "acquire an un- checked momentum and an irresistible power over great multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism." Berlin's account of the origins of totalitarianism was exactly the kind of teleological narrative in which the protagonists are concepts that Hannah Arendt had deliberately avoided. Berlin met Arendt in 1942, not long after both arrived in the United States. He found her Zionism fanatical, and later on he developed a persistent distaste for her work. She "indulges in a kind of metaphysical free association which I am un- able to follow except that the premises seem to me to be inaccurate and the conclusions unswallowable," he complained to William Phillips in 1963.52 She was not a British empiricist. She was a Continental thinker. The limitations of Berlin's method of historical explanation became evident in his attempt to answer the question, If the whole Western philosophical tradition is responsible for the rationalist metaphysics that underlies totalitarianism, where did pluralism come from? Berlin gave his answer in the A. W. Mellon lectures, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1965 and broadcast on BBC radio the following year. As usual, he spoke extemporaneously, and as usual, his effort to turn the talks into a book failed. He had hoped it would be his major work; in the end, the book on Marx was his only monograph.53 What broke up the Enlightenment faith in reason, Berlin argued in the Mellon lectures, was the European Romanticism of the late eigh- teenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism put an end to "the jigsaw-puzzle conception of life," the assumption that all questions can be answered, and the answers fitted together into a harmonious whole. It taught us "that there are many values, and that they are incompatible;
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the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle be perfect or true."S4 Romanticism rejected the end of self- understanding and replaced it with the end of self-creation. Science, reason, and universalism, the values of Enlightenment thinkers, were re- placed by a new set of values: sincerity, authenticity, toleration, variety. It is from this tradition, not the Socratic tradition, that liberal pluralism derives. But, Berlin went on, it is also from this tradition that fascism derives. "The hysterical self-assertion and the nihilistic destruction of existing institutions because they confine the unlimited will. . are a direct inheritance" from the Romanticist movement, he said.' It seems that same lineage produced completely disparate outcomes-_-liberal plural- ism and fascism--which might suggest that intellectual genealogy is not the most reliable form of historical explanation. There is no evidence that Trilling heard Berlin's lectures on Roman- ticism. He visited Oxford as Eastman Professor in 1964-1965 (his first trip to England; he was fifty-nine), but Berlin's lectures were not broad- cast there until 1966 and were not published until after his death. Still, Berlin's theory that "a radical shift of values occurred in the latter half of the eighteenth century is the thesis of Trilling's last book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), also a collection of talks, the Charles Eliot Nor- ton lectures at Harvard, and also a book about books talking to books.*6 Berlin's affinities with Trilling would seem natural, and they had a cordial relationship. Berlin was often in New York, and Trilling taught at Oxford twice during his career. Still, despite the similarity of their methods and outlooks, Berlin did not warm to Trilling. He found Tril- ling cautious, neurotic, and altogether not fun.' "Diana goes screeching on about the iniquities of the Left," he complained to a friend, the so- ciologist Jean Floud, during a visit to New York in 1971: "Lionel sits there in a thin silvery light, smiling sadly at the irrationality and insen- sitiveness of friends, colleagues, mankind."57 By then, though, it was a long way from 1950. A criticism of Berlin might be that he embraced the position of pas de zèle with trop de zèle. Still, his reputation only grew after 1959. He came to stand for the principle of tolerance: allowing people to choose their own tastes and values and to pursue their own ends. But as an
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absolute, tolerance is no different from liberty or equality or the classless society. It is only another end, and it, too, needs values that cut against it. Should we be tolerant of intolerant people? That was the question people such as Hook and Trilling asked about Communists and fellow travelers (answering no). Should we be tolerant of expressions that many find hurtful or offensive? That question was at the heart of the obscenity cases that were about to change the legal and financial environment for the culture industries. 5. Politically, a liberty is the Alp side of a prohibition. It permits some- one to do something by making it illegal for others to interfere. In the American system, liberties are constitutionally instantiated in the form of enumerated rights. These rights are anti-majoritarian: they are trump cards individuals can play when every other hand is against them. But they are not anti-democratic, because the Bill of Rights, and subsequent amendments to the Constitution, were enacted to strengthen, not com- promise, democratic practices. The right most symbolic of the geopolitical stakes in the decades after the war was the right denied to Anna Akhmatova and other victims of Zhdanovshchina, the right of free expression. The democratic rationale for that right is clear: unless all views are heard, the will of the majority will not have legitimacy. Narrowly interpreted, this can mean that the First Amendment applies only to political speech. But if you define "de- mocracy" more expansively, or more existentially, as the name for a kind of society in which people feel that they are free to adopt and express beliefs and tastes and styles of life without fear of persecution, then the application of the First Amendment expands accordingly.» Something like this happened in the United States and Britain after 1956. On October 2, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower used a recess appointment to make Earl Warren chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed it in March. The politics of Ei- senhower's choice- specifically, whether he had promised the position to Warren before a vacancy occurred--are debated; but it is agreed that Warren was considered a centrist in 1953.5 He had been the Republi- can governor of California since 1943, and he had run for vice president on the ticket with Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.
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Warren made his judicial debut on May 17, 1954, as the author of the Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. Before Warren ar- rived, the Supreme Court had been almost dysfunctionally divided on that case, and six of the justices could be categorized as judicially con- servative. But the decision in Brown overturned a fifty-eight-year-old precedent, Plessy v. Ferguson, and declared laws segregating education unconstitutional. And it was unanimous. The only opinion was War- ren's; there were no concurrences. There was a new sheriff in town. A year and a half later, Warren published an article called "Law and the Future" in Fortune. He began by calling the "struggle between Communism and freedom" the central political fact of the times. "Our legal system, " he wrote, "is woven around the freedom and dignity of the individual. A Communist state ignores these values. Ours is the dif- ficult task of defending and strengthening these values while also pursu- ing a goal that sometimes appears to be in conflict with them--namely, the physical security of our nation." But what might be constitution- ally acceptable in one era, he went on, might not in another. Conditions change and law evolves. He ended with a warning: "In the present strug- gle between our world and Communism, the temptation to imitate to- talitarian security methods is a subtle temptation that must be resisted day by day, for it will be with us as long as totalitarianism itself." This could have been taken as a hint that the Court was prepared to rebalance the trade-off between civil liberties and national security established during the Truman administration. And, soon after, it did. On June 17, 1957, the Court issued rulings in four cases: Yates v. United States, throwing out convictions under the Smith Act of members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA); Watkins v. United States, limiting the power of Congress to inquire about personal beliefs and associations; Sweezy v. New Hampshire, holding an investigation into the alleged subversive activities of a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire a violation the Fourteenth Amendment; and Service v. Dulles, reversing the dismissal of a State Department employee for dis- loyalty as a violation of procedural requirements. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, called June 17 "Red Mon- day." There was an effort in Congress to retaliate against the Court. But that failed, and the rulings slowed dramatically the official harassment and persecution of Communists and people suspected of Communist sympathies that had been under way, largely unchecked by the courts,
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for ten years. Government agencies continued surveillance of suspected Communists and subversives; those investigations were now mostly undercover.61 The Court was doing what Warren had predicted: it was acknowl- edging that conditions had changed. In the eighteen months before it issued those rulings, Nikita Khrushchev had denounced the crimes of Stalin in his so-called secret speech before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; the Red Army's violent suppression of a revolt against the Communist government in Hun- gary had turned political opinion in Western Europe against the Soviet Union and had essentially ended the influence of the CPUSA; and Jo- seph McCarthy was dead. The threat of Communism did not disap- pear as a political issue--it was the issue that Kennedy ran on and that he devoted virtually his entire inaugural address to-but it no longer played a major role in domestic politics. Communism became a foreign- policy problem. With the specter of a domestic threat more or less officially lifted, it was natural to imagine continuing to extend First Amendment protec- tion to more "existential" freedoms--to literary and artistic freedom, for example. It took the Court several years to see its way to taking this step, and it finally did so not because of political pressure but because of changes inside the culture industries. Those industries found that they had created a market that they could not satisfactorily exploit. 6. The so-called paperback revolution is misnamed. Paper book covers are almost as old as print. They date to the sixteenth century, and paper- backing has been the ordinary mode of book production in France, for instance, for centuries. The first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, pub- lished in Paris in 1922, is a paperback. In the United States, paperback publishing was tried successfully on a major scale at least twice during the nineteenth century--in the 1830s, with an enterprise called the Li- brary of Useful Knowledge, and after the Civil War, when, unfettered by international copyright agreements and, therefore, royalty obliga- tons, American publishers brought out cheap paperbound editions of popular European novels,62 The twentieth-century paperback revolution was not a revolution in ...
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primarily a sculptor, and Banham, who was an architectural historian, Richard Hamilton and John McHale (visual artists), Nigel Henderson (photographer), Alison and Peter Smithson (architects), Lawrence Allo- way (art critic), Frank Cordell (composer), and Toni del Renzio (writer and designer). These were bristly people. Discussions were described as "fiery. 2»63 Peter Smithson disliked Hamilton; Henderson was once Paolozzi's great friend but turned on him; Cordell's wife, Magda, left him for McHale; Hamilton and McHale had a falling-out whose after- effects persisted for decades.* Female spouses-_besides Magda Cor- dell (a Hungarian refugee) and Alison Smithson, these included Mary Banham, Freda Paolozzi, and Terry Hamilton--were active as discus- sants, as art-making participants, and as artists themselves, but apart from Alison Smithson, they were almost entirely written out of the IG story.' A documentary about the IG created and narrated by Banham and produced in 1979 was entitled Fathers of Pop. There was a fee to join the IG, and most events were by invita- tion; there seem to have been around fifty people on the mailing list, and twenty was a good turnout. The group hosted talks on helicopter design, Victorian and Edwardian decorative arts, microbiology, proba- bility and information theory, advertising, Italian product design, fashion magazines, and the popular song business." A. J. Ayer gave a lecture en- titled "The Principle of Verification"; the ARTnews editor Thomas Hess gave a speech, "New Abstract Painters in America." A series of talks by IG members, "Aesthetic Problems of Contemporary Art," was open to the public. What the talks had in common was subject matter and techniques then considered to be at best peripheral to the fine arts in Britain. In effect, the IG built up an alternative aesthetic and critical basis for arts practice. Much later, writers would argue that the IG was a retrospec- tively created myth, a back-formation from subsequent artistic develop- ments."? It is certainly true that in the beginning, no one knew where discussions were headed. "We were just about stunned" by Paolozzi's Bunk images, Banham claimed in Fathers of Pop. Which is an exam- ple of ex post facto myth-making, since it is not what Banham felt at the time. "The I.C.A. last night was a Aop," Alloway wrote to the artist Syl- via Sleigh (they would later marry) the day after Paolozzi's presentation. "Eduardo Paolozzi showed a collection of material--marine biology,
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early aeroplanes, and what have you--but the discussion never even got started. Reyner Banham spent most of the evening sniggering at Paolozzi's scrap book as it was flashed on the screen!")* (Banham had not even been invited; he crashed the event.) Alloway's account is backed up by the recollections of others, including Paolozzi himself. "(T]he re- action to my 'BUNK' lecture was one of disbelief and some hilarity," he wrote years later. "Material treated by all of us as interesting 'sources' of ideas was still regarded as banal." He remembered Banham giggling." Still, it there was a common starting point for the IG, it was a fasci- nation, framed as un-British if not anti-British, with American culture, and that fascination was not ambivalent. The IG members were "bound together by our enthusiasm for the iconography of the New World," Paolozzi wrote. "The American magazine represented a catalogue of an exotic society; bountiful and generous, where the event of selling tinned pears was transformed into multi-coloured dreams, where sensuality and virility combined to form, in our view, an art form more subtle and fulfilling than the orthodox choice of either the Tate Gallery or the Royal Academy.'72 "It is important to realize," Banham wrote, how salutary a corrective to the sloppy provincialism of most London art of ten years ago US design could be. The gusto and professionalism of widescreen movies or Detroit car-styling was a constant reproach to the Moore-ish yokelry of British sculpture or the affected Piperish gloom of British painting. To anyone with a scrap of sensibility or an eye for technique, the average Playtex or Maidenform ad in American Vogue was an instant deflater of the reputations of most artists then in Arts Council vogue.73 The effect of the IG's programming was to shape this enthusiasm into an aesthetic, and one indication of the value of the IG discussions is that the manifesto-like publications its members produced were all written after the group disbanded. Those writings represented the out- come, not the premises, of IG activities. The IG was the hinge on which postwar British aesthetics turned. The key IG writers were Banham, who served as the group's convener * All the secondary literature on the IG dates Paolozzi's lecture to April 1952. The IG was formed in January 1952; Alloway's letter makes it clear that Paolozzi spoke on February 12. about a month later- which suggests that the organizers had him in mind from the start.
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from 1952 to 1954, and Alloway, who, with McHale, replaced Banham in 1954. The last IG event, Frank Cordell on the popular music busi- ness, was held on July 15, 1955.74 All three IG conveners later moved to the United States: Alloway in 1961, McHale in 1962, and Banham in 1976. Banham was born in Norwich in 1922. His father was a gas-works engineer and the family was not well off. In 1939, he began training to become an engineer at the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and he worked there through the war. In 1949, he enrolled at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and he was a doctoral student there when he became involved with the IG. His dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, a classic text, was published in 1960. Banham was drawn to commercial imagery even before the IG came into existence. One of his first journalistic pieces, published in 1951, was on packaging, which he described as the all-intrusive agent of the western way of life, the transmit- ter of our visual vocabulary to the simple peasants of the world, who adorn their walls with the pretty labels of Dole pineapples, the bold fertility-symbol of Shell Oil, the august features of King C. Gillette. These are the symbols by which we are known, and of which the artists whom we most honour have contributed so little.75 Alloway was born in 1926 in the London suburb of Wimbledon, where his father ran a used-book store. He contracted tuberculosis when he was eleven, and missed two years of school. He then bounced around various educational institutions, but found success as a book reviewer. In 1943, he began taking extension courses at the University of Lon- don, and by this somewhat unorthodox means he learned art history and began a life of frenetic lecturing and reviewing. In 1955, he achieved some career stability by being appointed an assistant director of the ICA. The IG aesthetic was, above all, nonhierarchical. There was a lot of stuff out there possessing aesthetic properties about which there was no way of talking critically. "We eagerly consume noisy ephemeridae, here with a bang today, gone without a whimper tomorrow--movies, beach-wear, pulp magazines, this morning's headlines and tomorrow's TV programmes," Banham wrote, 66 yet we insist on aesthetic and
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moral standards hitched to permanency, durability, and perennity."6 Alloway's term for nonhierarchical aesthetics was "the long front of cul- ture." He argued that "unique oil paintings and highly personal poems as well as mass-distributed films and group-aimed magazines can be placed within a continuum rather than frozen layers in a pyramid."»7 This position was to a large extent generational. Priestley was born in 1894; people born in the 1920s did not think of "admass" as an alien invasion. "We grew up with the mass media, " as Alloway explained. .. The mass media were established as a natural environment by the time we could see them."7% He thought that intellectuals from an older generation were trapped behind "the iron curtain of traditional aesthetics," what Banham called "the laws of Platonic aesthetics" "objective, absolute, universal and eternally valid."79 Those are not the laws of consumerism, where products are designed to meet a contempo- rary demand and then to become obsolete. To Alloway, Clement Greenberg' "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" looked like a classic case of iron-curtain aesthetics. He thought that Green- berg could not grasp that avant-garde art and kitsch are just different areas of a single visual field. Greenberg's aesthetics, Alloway said, are "'static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness to the variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time- binding values."'® In fact, of course, Greenberg's essay analyzes artistic form precisely as something that changes in terms of social conditions. But Alloway's argument was successful because it was made in the name of all the new cultural stimuli to which younger artists wanted access- the goods on the other side of the iron curtain. Banham put it this way: "To find the junior avant-garde admiring with equal fervour peasant houses on Santorini, and the chrome-work on Detroit cars; the Cutty Sark, Chiswick House, Camels cigarette packs, and Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp; Pollock, Paolozzi and Volkswagens--all this sounds like the complete abandonment of standards. In fact it is nothing of the sort- it is the abandonment of stylistic prejudice."8] But the argument for the new aesthetic was not solely generational. There were class politics as well. The new aesthetic presented itself as democratic, a people's art. "[T]he élite," Alloway wrote, "accustomed to set aesthetics standards, has found that it no longer possesses the power to dominate all aspects of art. It is in this situation that we need to
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consider the arts of the mass media. It is impossible to see them clearly within a code of aesthetics associated with minorities with pastoral and upper-class ideas because mass art is urban and democratic."82 The reason mass-produced culture is democratic is because it gives consumers freedom of choice: "It is not the hand-craft culture which of. fers a wide choice of goods and services to everybody ... but the industri- alised one. As the market gets bigger consumer choice increases: shopping in London is more diverse than in Rome; shopping in New York more diverse than in London. General Motors mass-produces cars according to individual selections of extras and colours."3 The "long front" conception of culture is not simply anthropological. The anthropological concep- tion of culture does not have an aesthetic dimension, and the IG was all about understanding the aesthetic dimension of consumer culture. The core of the difficulty lay in the term "aesthetics' "itself. Al- though the word derives from ancient Greek, it originated as a critical term in the eighteenth century. Modern aesthetic theory begins with Shaftesbury's definition of the experience of beauty as disinterested pleasure.°* There are multiple explanations for the rise of this way of conceiving of beauty: it was an answer to the strictures on art made by Plato in the Republic; it was needed to distinguish fine art from mass- produced and mass-circulated art after the emergence of print and other technologies of reproduction; it allowed writers and artists in Protestant countries, like Britain and Prussia, to appreciate religious art produced in Catholic countries, like Italy, by divorcing form from content. The classic formulation of the aesthetic was Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment), published in 1790. He defined art as "purposiveness without purpose." In the nineteenth century, this concept was used precisely for the purpose of establishing a hierarchy of art types, and it informed British art theory from Walter Pater's The Renaissance (1873) to Clive Bell's Art (1914), Roger Fry's Vision and Design (1920), and Herbert Read's Art and Industry (1934). (Read was a founder of the ICA.) The aesthetic was accompanied by the coinage of other terms designed to distinguish the pleasing and edifying from the mass of cultural products. "High art' was first used in Britain in 1817, "highbrow" in 1884, "lowbrow" (1906), "avant-garde" (1910), "middlebrow (1924), and "kitsch" (1926).85 The distinctions those terms represented were baked into the way the British talked about art. In 1952, this was a big ship to turn around.
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4. The United States was not, of course, the only country in which product design played a role in the postwar economy. Design is about sales, but it is also about product differentiation. In the brute mechanical sense, all passenger cars are more or less identical--engines on wheels. What differentiates automobile brands (after price) for most buyers is the look of the cabin. It was therefore desirable for that look to have a name. One of the features of postwar economic renewal in Europe was the rise of branding by nationality: Danish furniture, German cars, Bel- gian chocolates.* Countries became identified with a product line and a look. This was especially true for Italy. Unlike France and Germany, which were recovering their prewar status as major economic powers after 1945, Italy was moving from the second tier of producers up to the first. Economic growth rates in Italy were higher than in most of Europe. Between 1951 and 1958, the domestic growth rate in Italy averaged 5.5 percent; between 1958 and 1963, 6.3 percent--the boom economico. Certain Italian products became internationally recognized brands: Fiat, Olivetti, Vespa. But the area where Italy built predomi nance was domestic appliances- - "white goods, in particular, refriger- ators and washing machines. (Demand for dishwashers was not high: middle-class Italians still employed kitchen help.)87 Before 1958, the market for these products was largely domestic, but after 1958, helped by the establishment of the Common Market (EEC), Italy became a major exporter. By the mid-1960s, Italy was the third- largest producer of refrigerators and washing machines in the world, behind the United States and Japan. Italian refrigerators were lower in cost, in part because they were smaller than American refrigerators. (A society in which people shop daily has different refrigeration needs from a society in which people shop once a week and consume large quanti- ties of frozen food.) But those products also had- like the Vespa, the Lamborghini, and the Pavoni espresso machine--an Italian "look." B Italian artists recognized the opportunity that industrial transfor- mation and economic growth presented- new firms were hiring archi- tects to design appliances such as clocks and radios--and a new design rationale was articulated at the X Triennale di Milano in 1954, an ar- chitectural and design exhibition.» The new idea was that industrial
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design is applied art. It brings art into everyday life and thereby gives artists a civic and social function. "The object created by the machine is an integral part of the whole panorama of modern art," as Gillo Dor- fles put it in a special congress held at the close of the Triennale? Dorfles was an artist as well as a critic, and one of the most prolific figures in postwar Italian culture. (He would write the essay on Jasper Johns that accompanied Leo Steinberg's in the art magazine Metro in 1962.) In the spring of 1955, the IG learned that Dorfles would be in London, accompanying an exhibition called Modern Italian Design at the Italian Institute, and that July, he came to the ICA to participate in an IG-sponsored conversation with Banham, "Aesthetics and Italian Product Design."2 According to McHale's notes, Dorfles argued for "an external standard of taste by which both objects of fine art and objects of good 'non-art' could be judged."3 Afterward, Banham responded in an article, "Industrial Design e arte popolare, " in the Italian journal Civiltà delle Macchine. Banham agreed with Dorfles to a point. Dorfes was taking a "long front" view of culture. But Banham thought that you cannot talk about product design and fine art using the same stan- dards. Popular arts such as cars, movies, and comic books require their own aesthetic orientation. Traditional aesthetics had no relevance to what he called "throw-away" culture and McHale called "the expendable ikon."*94 Consumerist culture is not disinterested, as Kant said aesthetic experience must be. Consumerist culture is trying to sell you something. The question, Banham said, is always: "What will sell?'95 You can't bracket that question for the purposes of aesthetic appreciation. It is the aesthetic. This is why IG writers thought that communications theory was more relevant than Kant for understanding contemporary visual cul- ture. Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings, on cybernet- is, published in 1950, and Wilbur Schramm's The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, an edited volume published in 1954, were dis- cussed at IG meetings and were influences on Alloway in particular.° "Now when I write about art (published) and movies (unpublished), all kinds of messages are transmitted to every kind of audience along a * The term may allude to William K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954). Wimsatt taught in the English Department at Yale, where McHale spent the academic year 1955-1956.
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multitude of channels, ," he wrote in 1959. "Art is one part of the field; another is advertising."7 Dorfles actually agreed with this. "There can be no art without the purpose of establishing some kind of intersubjective communication," he wrote in an English-language art journal in 195728 Understanding art as communication is also why the particular obsession of the IG group was magazine advertisements, the source of most of the images in Paolozzi's "Bunk" collages. For advertisements are pure signaling sys- tems. There is no form for form's sake in an advertisement: everything is subordinate to the message, and the viewer "replies" by either purchas- ing the product or not. "The new role of the spectator or consumer, free to move in a society defined by symbols, is what I want to write about, 99 Alloway said.? One model for this kind of criticism was Marshall McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, published in 1951. The book consists of fifty-nine mini-essays on commercial-culture images--comics, mass-market paperback book covers, and advertise- ments. In 1951, McLuhan was an obscure English professor in Canada specializing in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. The Mechanical Bride did not sell many copies. ' But McHale admired it, probably because he had spent a year in the United States and saw it there, and it was dis- cussed at IG meetings, 101 But McLuhan was anti-admass. He considered advertising a mode of brainwashing. "To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object, 3) he said. " To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike."102 (Later on, he would change his tune.) h Roland Barthes's Mythologies is a French version of The Mechanical Bride- fifty-three essays pegged to everyday cultural material, mostly iconographic. Like McLuhan, Barthes was out to uncover an implicit ideology. But that is not what the IG writers were doing. McHale noted that The Mechanical Bride's "strong moral overtones render many con- clusions outmoded. "03 For IG members, removing moral, class, and political presuppositions was essential to being able to get access to the world of consumerism. The Smithsons met as architecture students at the University of Durham, in the northeast of England. They married in 194), and set
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up their practice a year later. They, too, found advertising a creative stimulus. Walter Gropius wrote a book on grain silos, they announced in 1956; "today we collect ads."04 And they did: their kitchen wall was covered with advertisements clipped from magazines such as Esquire and Ladies' Home Journal. 'OS They wanted to bring advertising's excite- ment and sense of immediacy into their work as architects. They wanted their buildings to function like an advertisement in the same sense that Gropius wanted his to function like a grain solo. The Smithsons saw themselves fighting the same class war that Allo- way was fighting. "We cannot ignore the fact that one of the traditional functions of fine art, the definition of what is fine and desirable for the ruling class was therefore ultimately that which is desired by all society, now had been taken over by the ad man; „" they wrote. LA]ds are packed with information-_data of a way of life and a standard of living which they are simultaneously inventing and documenting. Mass production advertising is establishing our whole pattern of life- principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standard of living. We must somehow get the measure of this in- tervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own.106 For some members of the IG, the most stimulating advertisements were the ones for American cars. 5. Cars themselves had symbolic import in the postwar democracies. They stood for freedom, even if it was "driving a car" freedom. "Social and physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one of the things that keep our society together," the Smithsons wrote in 1958, "and the symbol of this freedom is the individually owned motor-car."I07 But Detroit cars in the 1950s were not just engines on wheels, like the Model T. They were metallic sculptures, stylized extravaganzas, loaded symbolic systems. It was the era of the tail fin. In car design, streamlining (a style of product design associated with Raymond Loewy) came first. Automobiles are naturally amenable to
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streamlining, since streamlining is above all an aerodynamic look. A streamlined car looks fast, powerful, efficient. The tail fin, on the other hand, was a postwar phenomenon. The tail fin alludes to aerodynamics, too, but it also has the look, which streamlining does not, of excess. It does not make the car go faster. It's ornamental, a message without a function, "purposiveness without purpose" (except to sell cars). The tail fin was invented by a designer at General Motors named Harley Earl, who was inspired by the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a fighter plane that he saw in an airfield near Detroit in the spring of 1941. Nine months later, the United States was at war, and by govern- ment decree, the automobile industry shut down. From February 1942 to October 1945, no passenger cars were manufactured in the United States. The industry was converted to the production of matériel, from ammunition to tanks and planes. General Motors alone manufactured 2,300 products for the military, $12 billion worth.108 When the war ended, Earl introduced his new look. The first car with tail fins was the 1948 Cadillac (a General Motors brand). It en- tered a booming car market, the result of replacement demand and the needs of returning GIs. By the middle of 1953, though, those demands had been met and car sales plateaued. What now sold were new designs and annual model changes--goods people don't need, but can be per- suaded to want.I0) An arms race ensued. The industry term for tail fins, hood ornaments, oversized bumpers, protruding tailpipes, chrome detailing -nonfunctional design elements on cars--Was "borax" (adjective: "borageous"). By 1955, cars had be- come so overloaded with borax that even Loewy objected. He called the new cars "jukeboxes on wheels," and thought they were damaging to the national interest. "Nothing about the appearance of the 1955 automobiles offsets the impression that Americans must be wasteful, swaggering, insensitive people, » he warned. "Automotive borax offers gratuitous evidence to people everywhere that much of what they sus- pect about us may be true." 10 But people like borax. And if the standard for design is "form fol- lows function, then streamlining is borax, too. The streamlined toaster does not make better toast faster. It just looks like it does. Streamlining adheres to principles of classical sculpture and architecture, though: for- mally integrated, without excess. Tail-fin design, on the other hand, is
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all about ornament and appliqué. Some car models, for example, had faux air-intake vents on the sides.* Banham was fascinated by borax. He gave a talk, "Borax, or the Thousand Horse-Power Mink," at the ICA in March 1955, before Dor- fles's visit, and he followed it up with two articles, "Machine Aesthetic" and "Vehicles of Desire."Ill Banham called the Detroit automobile thick ripe stream of loaded symbols--that are apt to go off in the face of those who don't know how to handle them." The designer's "creative thumb-prints-_-finish, fantasy, punch, professionalism, swagger"-are signs of artistry. As the Smithsons said about ads, cars serve a func- tion that art traditionally performed: they tell us something about life. As Banham put it: "Arbiter and interpreter between the industry and the consumer, the body stylist deploys, not a farrage of meaningless ornament, as fine-art critics insist, but a means of saying something of breathless, but unverbalisable, consequence to the live culture of the Technological Century." 12 A few months after Banham's "Vehicles of Desire," Barthes pub- lished a very similar "reading" of the new Citroen model, the DS 19, an exaggeratedly streamlined car. "I believe that the automobile is, today, the almost exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals, "he wrote. «[T]he dashboard looks more like the worktable of a modern kitchen than a factory control room: the slender panes of matte rippled metal, the little levers with their white ball finials, the simplified dials, the very discreteness of the chromium, everything indicates a sort of control ex- erted over movement, henceforth conceived as comfort rather than per- formance." "DS," he pointed out, is pronounced Déesse--Goddess.113 The person who turned this way of thinking about advertisements and new-model cars into works of art was Richard Hamilton. 6. Hamilton was born in London in 1922. His father drove a delivery van, and the family lived in council houses--public housing. His artistic tal- ent got him admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. During the war, he worked as an engineering draftsman at EMI; in 1948, he was admitted * The tail-fin era came to an abrupt end with the failure of Ford's Edsel in 1957-1958 (the year of a recession), followed by the first, and highly successful, American ad campaign for the Volks- wagen Beetle, which has almost the opposite design look, in 1959. ...
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I3 THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi (Shig) Murao at the Howl trial. Photograph by Robert Lackenbach. (LIFE Images Collection | Getty Images)
1.
American higher education had two periods of explosive growth.' The first was between 1880 and 1920, when the modern research univer- sity came into being in the United States. Student enrollment in those years increased by 500 percent and the number of faculty increased by 400 percent.? The second period was between 1945 and 1975, when the number of institutions doubled, the number of undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent, and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.° In the 1960s alone, undergraduate en- rollments more than doubled; the number of doctorates awarded every year tripled; and more faculty positions were created than had been cre- ated in the entire 325-year history of American higher education prior to 1960.4 THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND| 453 Both growth spurts were fueled by federal spending. The Morrill Acts, passed in 1862 and 1890, granted land to colleges and universities to enable them to provide education in "agriculture and the mechanic arts." The University of California was one of many public universi- ties made possible by the first Morrill Act. It was created in 1868 by amalgamating the existing College of California with an institution en- dowed by land-grant revenues. After 1945, there were three major financial injections. The first was the G.I. Bill, which, among many provisions, paid tuition and living expenses for veterans attending institutions of higher education. By 1947, to almost everyone's surprise, almost half the students in Amer- can colleges and universities--1.15 million people- were on the G.I. Bill. It was a windfall for higher education. All colleges and universities had to do was add classroom seats and some dormitory beds, and the government paid full freight. In the end, 7.8 million veterans took ad- vantage of the Act's benefits, 2 million of them enrolling in institutions of higher education.* The second stimulus was government funding for research, launched by a report organized by an MIT engineer and administrator with a long career in government, Vannevar Bush. The report, Science- The Endless Frontier (1945), became the standard argument for government subvention of basic science in peacetime. Key funding sources after 1945 included the National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1949, and the National Science Foundation, founded in 1950. There was also funding from the Defense Department, NASA (later on), and other government agencies. Bush is the godfather of the system known as contract overhead--the practice of billing granting agencies for indirect costs, which allowed uni- verities to spread the wealth across all of their activities.? And the third stimulus was the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA), a response to Sputnik and the panic it induced about a "technology gap." The NDEA put the federal government for the first time in the business of subsidizing education directly rather than through contracts for research. The Act singled out certain areas for public investment: science, mathematics, and foreign languages. But * Not every university welcomed the policy. The president of the University of Chicago, Rob, ert Maynard Hutchins, predicted it would turn universities into "educational hobo jungles." James Conant, the president of Harvard, had similar concerns. In fact, G.I. Bill students were frequently at the top of their classes. 454 | THE FREE WORLD the NDEA, too, was a tide that lifted all boats. In 1946, federal grants to higher education amounted to $197 million; in 1970, it was $2.682 billion.° There was also substantial research support from private foun- dations, such as Rockefeller, Ford, Sloan, Pew, and Mellon. The NDEA was passed just as the effects of the higher birth rate kicked in. Between 1955 and 1970, the number of eighteen-to-twenty- four-year-olds in the United States grew from 15 million to 24 million.? In 1955, there were 670,000 freshmen in American colleges; in 1970, there were more than 2 million.' Between 1954 and 1965, the Univer- sity of California created four new campuses: Riverside, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and San Diego." The main idea, if not completely the reality, behind this second wave of expansion was meritocracy, the opening of opportunities to talent--or, in the language of the time, identifying aptitude in order to develop human capital. The Educational Testing Service was founded in 1948 for the purpose of administering the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is essentially an IQ test designed to pick out the brightest members of each high school cohort, whatever their backgrounds and wherever they live, and funnel them into college.'2 Meritocracy is a sorting mechanism, and it had an explicit national security rationale. In the words of the NDEA: "The security of the Na- ton requires the fullest development of the mental resources and tech- nical skills of its young men and women . . . We must increase our efforts to identify and educate more of the talent of our Nation."13 This was an echo of the report Harry S. Truman's Commission on Higher Education issued in 1947, which called for an end to barriers to educa- tional opportunity based on race, religion, and class. (The commission seemed to feel that the situation for women was fine.)'* If the purpose of education is to get the most out of a nation's human resources, it is irrational to exclude persons on the basis of attributes extraneous to aptitude, such as family income, religion, and skin color. The concept of meritocracy extended to faculty--to a point. Before 1950, the professoriate was more than 70 percent Protestant; after 1950, the proportion of Catholic and Jewish professors increased significantly. On the other hand, the number of female and nonwhite faculty re- mained tiny. As late as 1969, 96 percent of professors were white and 81 percent were men.IS Expansion on that scale and involving those sums was bound to have THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 455 an effect on cultural and intellectual life. In some areas, the university supplemented or replaced "Bohemia"-communities like Greenwich Village, Provincetown, and North Beach--as a space for independent art and thought. There was a boom in creative writing programs, for example, when universities realized that many G.I. Bill students wanted to write, and after the war it became a common practice for writers to be trained (and credentialed) in universities after taking courses taught by other writers who had been trained (and credentialed) in universities. 16 The university also largely replaced the prewar world of little mag- zines and ad hoc political organizations, some of which had thrived because they supported people, Jews, for example, or political radicals, who faced obstacles to academic careers. If Clement Greenberg had been born ten years later, he would probably have become an art his- tory professor." Little magazines are hand-to-mouth affairs. Academic positions were attractive to the next generation of Greenbergs because of the institutional support they provided. Intellectuals did not have to work to create networks of like-minded people; they walked into fields already fully networked and with subsidized journals and presses. What is striking about this spongelike development--absorption plus expansion--is that everything that got taken up into the academy ended up adopting a single discourse: the discourse of disinterestedness. Both periods of rapid growth in American higher education were periods of professionalization, and disinterestedness is a core value of profession- alism. The professional does not pursue the work from self-interest--to promote a nonscholarly agenda or to make money. The professional ac- ademic's dedication is to knowledge, and knowledge production is what the institution rewards.18 Academic freedom is designed to insulate scholars and researchers from political interference, and the standard of disinterestedness is, in effect, the pledge of the nonpolitical nature of academic inquiry. Many academics in the postwar years, particularly in the social sciences, cast themselves as post-ideological. One reason may have been a desire not to alienate their granting agencies." But it was also the persona that their commitment to the profession required. Scholars in the 1950s who looked back on their prewar educations tended to be appalled by what they regarded as a lack of rigor and focus.20 And yet the American university did not become a factory for man- ufacturing experts. The distinctive feature of American education, the liberal arts and sciences college, was preserved and even flourished. In 456 THE FREE WORLD liberal educational systems, students do not "track" vocationally or pro- fessionally until they graduate. They pursue knowledge "for its own sake" across a range of fields. This is another meaning of " disinterested- ness": an open mind, the freedom to think independent of "real-world" (familial, political, financial) constraints. It is the idea of Bildung, and it was part of Matthew Arnold's definition of culture. "And how is crit- icism to show disinterestedness?" he wrote in 1865. By keeping aloof from practice; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all sub- jects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them.? From 1955 to 1970, the proportion of liberal arts and sciences de- grees among all bachelor's degrees awarded annually rose significantly for the first time in the century. And the evidence suggests that the stu- dents understood the mission. In 1967, 85.8 percent of freshmen listed "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" as a "very important" or "essential" personal goal. After 1970, as the proportion of degrees in the liberal arts and sciences began going down again, so did the percentage of freshmen giving high priority to developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2003, that number was 39.3 percent. 22 In order to secure institutional legitimacy, though, even faculty in the liberal arts needed to present themselves as engaged in rigorous in- quiry producing verifiable results. There had to be something there to investigate, and the investigation had to yield knowledge, not opinions. It was not immediately clear how literary criticism was going to quality. 2. The Modern Language Association (MIA), the professional organi zation for scholars of language and literature, was founded in 1883, during the first phase of academic professionalization. But it was not until 1951 that the MLA added "criticism 1 to its constitutional state- ment of purpose.?* Before that, literary scholarship meant research: phi- lology, bibliography, literary history, textual editing. "Criticism" meant appreciation, interpretation, and evaluation- subjective responses, not THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 457 scholarship. Criticism is what magazines were for. To become an ac- cepted academic practice, criticism needed to acquire some equivalent of the standard for scientific inquiry: verifiability. This could not mean that interpretations of poems had to be re- producible, like the results of scientific experiments. It was impossible to require everyone to have the same understanding of Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal." What it did mean was that everyone had to have the same understanding of the protocols of interpretation, of what counted as a valid reading and what did not. A fence had to be built around the ballpark. The fence was erected by the New Crit- icism, the American name for an approach to literature that arose in two places in the 1920s: Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the University of Cambridge in England. It was the first method of liter- ary criticism to jump the gap between journalism and academia. The New Criticism was a powerful and elegant paradigm. The power and elegance derived from the fact that it rules out of bounds many things people naturally think about when they read literature: the work as a reflection of the life of the author or the times in which it was written, the meanings the writer intended and the ideas they expressed, the way it makes us feel. The New Criticism set these often elusive and speculative questions aside and concentrated on the meanings generated by the words on the page. There was something bracing about this. But can't anyone read the words on the page? The key claim of the New Criticism was that most people cannot. Literary language is figu- rative and polysemous, but people tend to read literature literally. They assume that the "I in a text is the author, and that the work's meaning can be paraphrased. They think that the aesthetic or emotional effect on them is important to its worthiness as a poem or novel. The New Critics argued that these notions all lead to misreading. That it is hard for the untrained reader to abandon them was an excellent rationale for having English departments. The figure behind the New Criticism in both its American and Brit- ish instantiations was T. S. Eliot. Eliot belonged to a distinctive cultural type that flourished in the pre-academic era: he was a man of letters.2 His influence is hugely disproportionate to both his position and his output. The poems and plays he published in his lifetime fill a single volume; his prose works are collections of talks and occasional jour- nalism. He was dismissive of theories of literature, and he never held a 458 THE FREE WORLD regular academic appointment. During his most productive years as a writer, from 1917 to 1925, he worked in a bank. Yet he was a true avant-gardist and he made a revolution. He changed the way poetry in English is written; he reset the paradigm for literary criticism; and (although this was never his intention) his work laid down the principles on which the modern English department is built. He is the most important figure in twentieth-century English- language literary culture. He arrived in England in 1914, just after the war broke out, on a fel- lowship from the Harvard Philosophy Department, where he was a grad- uate student. Less than a year later, he had decided not to return to Cambridge. He had either come to England with a project in mind or devised one after meeting Ezra Pound, which happened about a month after he arrived. (Pound, a University of Pennsylvania graduate school dropout, had been in London since 1908.) The project was the profes- sionalization of English letters. Eliot and Pound argued, in the pages of little magazines in London, that the British confused literature with moral philosophy, social crit- icism, and religion. They were unprofessional, and "professionalism in art, as Eliot wrote in 1918, "is hard work on style with singleness of purpose. »25 The business of the poet is to make poems. Eliot's standard example of the poetry of mixed motives was the English Romantics- principally Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley--and their Victori- ans heirs, principally Robert Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne. Eliot's principle was that "when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing."26 What does that mean? It means seeing poems in the context of other poems. This is the argument of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," published in the little magazine The Egoist in 1919 (alongside excerpts from Joyce's 29 Ulysses). "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone, Eliot wrote. "His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."7 Only consciousness of the tradition makes it possible for a poet to produce something genuinely new. Reading a poem as the expression of the writer's personality- or be- liefs, or life history--is therefore uncritical. Poets may write poems un- der the stress of an emotion, he said, and poems may express emotions, THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 459 but the two kinds of emotion are distinct. We are not interested in the poet. We are interested in the poem. Eliot used this critical criterion to redefine the tradition. He intro- duced his first collection of critical essays, The Sacred Wood, in 1920, with an attack on the poetry and criticism of the nineteenth century, when, he thought, poets and critics had lost sight of what poetry should be. It was the seventeenth-century poets, in particular, the metaphys- ical poets--John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert--who were "in the direct current of English poetry, and they (along with the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets) led to the modernist poetry that Eliot and Pound were writing.? Eliot's "tradition" required leaving out a lot of poetry. Sales of Eliot's books at first were not robust. But he was taken up almost immediately by young British academics. The most influential of these was Ivor Armstrong Richards, who taught at Cambridge. Rich- ards was excited by Eliot's second collection of poems, Ara Vos Prec, and he arranged to meet Eliot at Lloyds Bank in London, where Eliot was employed. "[A] figure stooping, very like a dark bird in a feeder," was Richards's first impression of Eliot standing at his workable. He tried to talk Eliot into teaching at Cambridge; Eliot displayed no interest.? But Richards kept in touch, and they became friends. Richards's field as an undergraduate had been moral science, a Can- tabrigian combination of psychology and ethics, and he saw literature as an interesting problem in cognitive and affective reception. Richards thought that for most of us, poetry belongs in a "sphere of random be- liefs and hopeful guesses," with similarly elusive subjects such as ethics, religion, justice, truth- subjects that are nevertheless "everything about which civilised man cares most.'3 He set out to get a handle on it. In 1925, he published Principles of Literary Criticism, a dense and abstract analysis of the aesthetic experience. In the same year, he began an ex- periment that would eventually produce a much more influential book, published in 1929, Practical Criticism. The experiment involved handing students poems (in the end, Rich- ards used thirteen) of varying quality, without titles, author names, or dates. Students were given time to study the poems--most read them four or more times--and then they submitted what Richards called "protocols; written evaluations. He collected around a thousand protocols. 460 THE FREE WORLD He judged only thirty to be sound. All the rest-27 percent- displayed various types of misprision, and Practical Criticism, which quotes from 387 of the protocols, is essentially a taxonomy of the ways people misread poems: they make irrelevant associations, they have stock responses, they rely on "technical presuppositions, and so on. "The most disturbing and impressive fact brought out by this experi- ment, Richards wrote, "is that a large proportion of average-to-good (and in some cases, certainly, devoted) readers of poetry frequently and repeatedly fail to understand it."31 The book was received as an empirical justification for teaching people how to read. Richards was a charismatic lecturer, not because of his delivery, which was distinctly unhistrionic, but because he approached literature in a completely unbelletristic way. He treated it as a problem in psy- chology. "[He revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World," one undergraduate, Christopher Isherwood, remembered. ... Poetry wasn't a holy flame, a fire-bird from the moon; it was a group of interrelated stimuli acting upon the ocular nerves, the semi- circular canals, the brain, the solar-plexus, the digestive and sexual organs ... In our conversation, we substituted the word "emo- tive" for the word beautiful; we learnt to condemn inferior work as a "failure in communication," or more crushing still, as "a private poem." We talked excitedly about "the phantom aesthetic state." 32 Richards scientized the study of poetry. He made it a proper academic subject.* Many people besides undergraduates showed up at Richards's lec- tures. Eliot himself filled out some protocols,33 Marshall McLuhan studied with Richards when he was at Cambridge on a scholarship in the 1930s and learned from him techniques of close reading that he would apply to advertising copy in The Mechanical Bride,34 Two Cam- bridge academics who would be leading figures in postwar literary * Richards was not unique. Other literature professors were also treating the classroom as a place for experimentation--for example, Edith Rickert, at the University of Chicago. See Ra- chel Sagner Burma and Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 66-106. THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND 46I studies, F. R. Leavis and William Empson, were transformed by Rich- ards's teaching. One critic who was inspired by hearing Richards's lecture was an American. 3. Cleanth Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky, in 1906. His father and grandfather were Methodist ministers and there was something self- consciously churchy about Brooks's approach to literature. The critical principle for which he is best known he called " the heresy of paraphrase." He did not mean the phrase ironically. In 1924, he entered Vanderbilt, in Nashville. The university had re- cently severed ties with the Methodist Church and it did not have a strong national reputation, but it was probably the best university in the South and it attracted people who would become leading poets and critics: John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn War- ren. Ransom (also the son of a Methodist minister) and Davidson were from Tennessee; Tate and Warren, like Brooks, were from Kentucky. These writers were modernists, but they were also men of letters in the nineteenth-century sense. Their poetry was dense and allusive but pro- sodically formal; they were not avant-gardists or vers-librists. They held a dual attitude toward the South. They were loyalists and critics, regional- ists and cosmopolitans at the same time. The South may have been the backward place that Northern writers like H. L. Mencken described, but it stood for something, a traditional way of life, an alternative to industrial capitalism, and that was worth standing up for. They believed in some- thing that Eliot, in "The Dry Salvages, a poem about his childhood in St. Louis and Cape Ann, in Massachusetts, called "the life of significant soil."35 Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren published their poetry in a little magazine called The Fugitive, and they became known as the Fugitives.* The magazine lasted about three years, from 1922 to 1925, so by the time Brooks got to Nashville, the movement was near its end. Brooks wrote poetry, too. He took classes taught by Ransom, and he admired David- son's criticism. His most important contact, though, was with Warren.36 * The origin and significance of the term are obscure; an association with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, one of the causes of the Civil War, was presumably unintended. 462 THE FREE WORLD Warren, called Red, was a prodigy with a remarkable memory for literature. He entered Vanderbilt in 1921, when he was sixteen, intend- ing to major in chemical engineering, but he got converted to poetry after taking classes with Ransom and Davidson. In the fall of his soph omore year, "The Waste Land" was published in the literary magazine The Dial, and Davidson loaned Warren a copy,37 Warren and his friends memorized the poem and went around quoting from it; he drew a mural with crayons of scenes from the poem on the wall of a campus dormitory.38 Warren and Brooks became acquainted. After Brooks graduated from Vanderbilt, as class poet, he went to Tulane, in New Orleans, for graduate work. In 1929, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Warren was already there, at New College--he had won a Rhodes, too, after graduate work at Berkeley and Yale--and they began seeing each other nearly every day.3° (Ransom had also had a Rhodes, in 1910-1913.) During Brooks's first year at Oxford, Richards came to speak at his college, Exeter. Brooks had read Principles of Literary Criticism more than once, and although he was unpersuaded by the psychology, he was drawn by the attempt to think rigorously about the way poetry works. Richards's talk, he wrote later, was the first time I saw him and heard his voice. I had insisted that sev- eral of my friends attend the lecture with me, and to my surprise I found that, while I could follow clearly the argument, to my friends it was almost incomprehensible. They lacked the necessary preparation for what was a pioneering effort that broke with the literary training of the time--with the traditional British training as well as the American. .. [T]he practical effect of Richards's dis- cussion of his thirteen selected poems was almost overpowering. to While Brooks was at Oxford, Davidson began putting together a collection of essays. Ransom, Tate, and Warren agreed to contribute. There was a debate about what to call it. Tate and Warren wanted the title to be Tracts Against Communism.# Ransom and Davidson disagreed, and the book came out in 1930 as I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners. The use of a phrase from a song that had been popularized by blackface performers THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 463 and served as the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy raised an issue the editors had actually hoped to finesse, the issue of Southern racism. I'll Take My Stand is an all-out attack on the "North," by which the writers mean industrial capitalism, secularism, and social engineering things that Warren and Tate apparently considered Communistic. "Agrarianism" was the authors' name for the alternative: a community- based, traditional society rooted in the land ("significant soil"). Warren's essay, "The Briar Patch, " endorsed Booker T. Washington's agenda about race relations: "raising up the African American race but maintaining racial separation. "[T]he Southern negro has always been a creature of the small town and farm, Warren explained. "That is where he chiefly belongs, by temperament and capacity; there he.. is likely to find in agricultural and domestic pursuits the happiness that his good nature and easy ways incline him to as an ordinary function of his being. Even in the South, I'll Take My Stand was not well received. 13 Brooks, still in England, read it carefully, then sent a twelve-page letter to Davidson. On the "negro question, " he wrote, "I don't think that we can afford to take a less liberal stand than Red Warren's. ." The real problem, though, was religious. What the regional question came down to was "maintaining or rebuilding a feudal society," ' and "a medieval- ism without religion is Hamlet played solely by hopelessly inadequate Rosencrantz's and Guildensterns' [sic]."44 In 1932, Eliot made his first visit to the United States since 1915 to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard. He stayed almost a year, and in April 1933, he gave the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. He began the lectures by expressing his interest in I'll Take My Stand. Although he had just arrived in the South, he said, his impres- sins had "strengthened my feeling of sympathy with [the book's] au- thors." (He did not mention that he was from Missouri, another border state with a history of slavery, like Tennessee and Kentucky.) He then proceeded to give a description of the ideal society that made the nature of his sympathy clear. Its population, he said, "should be homogeneous. [W]here two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adul- terate. What is still more important is unity of religious back- ground; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any 464| THE FREE WORLD large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.. [E]xcessive tolerance is to be deprecated, 15 Eliot published the lectures in 1934 as After Strange Gods. The subtitle was A Primer of Modern Heresy. In 1936, a follow-up to I'U Take My Stand was published, edited by Tate and Herbert Agar, a journalist. This time, Brooks did contribute. His essay was "A Plea to the Protestant Churches." Liberal Protestant- ism, Brooks said, was in danger of becoming "merely a socio-political program. " It placed its faith in science, and science can never be a source of values. Protestantism was "secularizing itself out of existence."6 In short, American New Criticism was founded by writers associated with a reactionary political and religious program, and under the aegis of a poet and critic, Eliot, who believed that modern society was, in his words, "worm-eaten with Liberalism."7 They regarded the Enlight- enment and the scientific revolution as misreadings of human nature. Eliot was a royalist. Tate was an anti-Semite who thought that liberal- ism and Marxism were Jewish.48 Davidson was a white supremacist who would later lead an extralegal effort to prevent the integration of public schools in Tennessee." The puzzle is obvious: How did the way these writers thought about literature became dominant in the postwar uni- versity, an institution that is the incarnation of the values of the modern liberal state? Meritocracy is precisely an attempt to counteract the un- dertow of region, tradition, and "orthodoxy. Part of the answer is that, Davidson excepted, after 1936, they de- tached themselves from politics. Warren eventually changed his views on segregation, but there is not much evidence that the others changed theirs on anything. They just abstained from political associations. In this respect, the New Critics were following the pattern of Marxist in- tellectuals who, after 1936, began separating themselves from the Soviet Union, and by 1948 had largely shed or buried their political pasts. "Literature and society" remained those intellectuals' rubric, with obvi- ous links to Marxist thought, but the politics had disappeared. Did re- actionary politics remain a subtext of the New Criticism?5 Or was that politics translated into a posture of anti-modernity acceptable to critics with liberal or progressive views? Was there a point at which, with enough detail erased or ignored on both sides, the Southern critique of industrial capitalism intersected with, say, C. Wright Mills's or Allen Ginsberg's? 478 | THE FREE WORLD acknowledging that the phrase was Kerouac', whom Holmes duly credited- appeared on November 16, 1952. (Millstein's very brief re- view of Go had appeared a week before and was a pan. He explained to Holmes's agent that the positive bits had been cut by an editor when he was out of town. He was not the last reviewer to use that excuse.)26 Holmes's essay is not about a literary movement. It's about the post- war generation. Young people, Holmes explained, are obsessed with the question of how life should be lived. Some may seem like nihilists and hedonists, but they are really optimists, risk-takers, seekers. «U]nlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith," he wrote, "the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it.")7 The piece was taken by some readers as a defense of what Time mag- azine, a year earlier, had referred to as "the Silent Generation" (a term later adopted to characterize the entire decade, even though Time was referring only to the immediate postwar years), and it became a mi- nor sensation.? Holmes got calls from publishers; he went on television; his picture appeared in Glamour with the caption reading in part: controversial new spokesman for today's youth. A veteran of World War I [Holmes was discharged from the navy for chronic migraines] his meteoric literary rise began with Scribner's publication of his first book, Go..."? As it happened, This Is the Beat Generation' WaS the zenith of the Holmes meteor, but he had put Kerouac's phrase into play. When On the Road came out, five years later, the idea of the Beat generation was well established in the journalistic world. The composition of On the Road is encrusted with myth, much of it created and curated by Kerouac himself. The story is that he typed the whole novel on a continuous roll of teletype paper in three weeks in April 1951 with the assistance of a lot of Benzedrine, after being inspired by a letter from Neal Cassady.' In fact, Kerouac began writing On the Road in 1947, before he had ever ridden in a car with Cassady. His whole purpose in befriending Cassady and making those cross-country trips (Kerouac was a bad driver and didn't like to drive) was to generate mate- rial for a book. Everything in Kerouac's life was material for a book. He kept journals on those trips, and these were the basis for On the Road. By the time he typed the scroll, his novel had already gone through sev- eral drafts and multiple titles. (One was "'The Beat Generation"; another THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 479 waS "Shades of the Prison House, " a line from Wordsworth's Immortal- ity Ode, the subject of a major essay of Trilling's.) Kerouac first tried writing a conventional novel, inventing fictional characters with backstories, but he became frustrated. The letter from Cassady credited for his breakthrough arrived in December 1950 and is known as the "Joan letter," " because its ostensible subject is a girlfriend of Cassady's named Joan Anderson. It is nineteen single-spaced pages- sixteen thousand words. It took Cassady three days to write it. The Joan letter is a manic, comic, uninhibited account of sexual mis- adventures, culminating in the writer's arrest for molesting a minor. It is written in Cassady's jokey faux-literary style. (This was how he talked, too. It also gives an idea of his approach to the subject of women.) Let me tell you, boy, there is nothing like a fine old mountain ballad, but when Mary Lou got drunk (nightly) and began "The Maple on the Hill' in yodeling screech, as her frosty blue eyes wept buckets, my cringing belly would curl into a genuine Gor- dion Knot. Not that she wasn't a lovely; blonde hair well bleached, smooth facial features, altho pancake madeup skin was much too dry, 5'2' figure, but the too-small breasts were more than compen- sated by the oversize ass so her weight, I judge, while just outside 123 3/4 lbs. did not yet, I suspect, approach 125 lbs., unless, of course, my hasty estimate is inaccurate, then, naturally, I allow, nay urge, that you draw your own conclusions about her avoir du pois. Amen, and may god rest ye merry gentlemen. Speaking of Miss Berle's behind I must say here that the one quality of it, in- deed, the sole property by which I remember her whole body, was an exquisite overfleshiness that is not too often found. The tempt- ing jelly of her physical self paralleled her entire spiritual being in that the excessive soft mass made for too much matter thru which to wade, and this adequate defense defeated my most wonderfully casual attack; since I was not a perfect fool. We became buddies with our guard up, 101 Kerouac was knocked out. "I thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America," he wrote to Cassady. 102 The letter had the vernacular directness and narrative propulsion he was looking for, and the diegetic mode- - "I did this, I did that"-became the mode of 480| THE FREE WORLD On the Road. But Cassady's letter had been inspired in turn by a let- ter he had received a month earlier, in November 1950, from Holmes, which gave a similarly shaggy-dog account of sexual experiences. Cas- sady was attempting to imitate that model. Two months after Cassady's letter arrived, in February 1951, Holmes finished Go, In March, he showed the final chapter to Kerouac. Ker- ouac must have felt a spur, possibly a competitive urge, from Holmes's manuscript, with its straightforward incorporation of incidents involv- ing many of the people on whom the characters in On the Road are based. Meanwhile, Holmes was encouraging Kerouac to write without premeditation, and Kerouac's wife, Joan Haverty, was encouraging him to write his novel as though he was writing a letter. All this advice and inspiration led Kerouac to undertake his three-week typing binge. He did not use teletype paper; he typed on ten twelve-foot rolls of drawing paper, the kind architects use, that he found in the apartment he was staying in.* Kerouac was not on speed, only coffee. (Cassady was on speed when he wrote the Joan letter.) In short, Kerouac was not making the novel up at the keyboard. He was basically copying from drafts and journals that sat next to his type- writer, adding riffs as he went along. And after he finished the scroll, he retyped the whole thing on single sheets and spent three weeks doing revisions. (He seems to have done these at Lucien Carr's apartment; soon after finishing the scroll, he and Joan broke up when she told him she was pregnant.) He would continue to make changes to the manu- script over the next six years. Still, despite the exaggerations and elisions about its circumstances, there is a scroll. Because Kerouac and Ginsberg talked about sponta- neity as a compositional principle, they fed the misperception that they wrote whatever came into their heads, that what they were doing was easy. As Truman Capote put it, in a phrase often quoted: 'That's not writing. That's only typewriting." ost It's true that they had bursts of creativity, as all writers do, but they revised their bursts. The "Howl' manuscript shows that Ginsberg, too, made many changes. * The apartment had belonged to a friend, Bill Cannastra, who was killed by sticking his head out of the window of a moving subway train, an incident that is the basis for the final chapter of Go. It is assumed that Cannastra was gay; Joan Haverty was his girlfriend at the time. + Capote first used this phrase before On the Road came out in a Paris Review interview, where he was speaking generally about style. THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 481 More important, it is not easy to write a novel on a continuous roll of paper, just as it is not easy to make a painting by placing the canvas on the floor and throwing paint on it (and the Beats were often grouped with the "action painters"), '4 The results may read as "spontaneous," » but working that way is hard. Kerouac was forcing the narrative forward by preventing himself from going backward, as Pollock was forcing himself to respond to wherever the paint fell. In religious terms (and Kerouac was, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), the scroll was a collar. He did, after he finished, make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline. The Beat moment was created by the intersection of the fortunes of On the Road with the fortunes of "Howl," and a key player in that mo- ment was the most mainstream news organ in the United States, The New York Times. Perhaps this made Trilling's point that the adversarial is a place the mainstream culture sees its own values reflected upside down in the exciting but essentially harmless guise of "rebellion." The Beats were the kind of rebels the straight world (or most of it) was comfortable with. Howl and Other Poems was published by City Lights Books in Oc- tober 1956, a year after Ginsberg debuted the poem at the Six Gallery. William Carlos Williams, although not in good health, contributed an introduction that ended with one of the great blurbs: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." os City Lights was a tiny press and Ginsberg did a lot of the promotion himself (such as sending the mimeographed copies around). But the book got some breaks. The first was when The New York Times Book Review published a piece on the West Coast poetry scene by Richard Eberhart, an older poet and professor at Dartmouth who would shortly be named Poet Laureate. The idea for the piece had been given to Eber- hart by Kenneth Rexroth, who, by virtue of his age and renown, was the dean of the San Francisco school of poetry and had been master of ceremonies at the Six Gallery reading. The editors at the Book Re- view regarded the piece as a "stunt."06 When Eberhart was on the West Coast, "How!" had not yet been published. He must have heard about the poem through Rexroth, and he contacted Ginsberg directly, who happily provided him not only with a copy of the poem but also with a twenty-page letter about his work. "The West Coast is the liveliest spot in the country in poetry today; Eberhart wrote in his piece for the Times. He gave credit to Ruth Witt- Diamant, a professor who founded the Poetry Center at San Francisco 496 | THE FREE WORLD The New Poets of England and America sold, too. Its Second Selection, edited by Hall and Pack and containing poets much like those in the first, came out in 1962. Its editors did not back down. "The problem of an audience... is inseparable from the question of the vitality of any art, Pack wrote in a rather polemical introduction. "In our time, the university, rather than the literary cliques, the poetry societies, the in- cestuous pages of little magazines, is capable of nurturing and support- ing such an audience."4) The New Poets of England and America: Second Selection went through six printings in its first year. Hall ventured a compromise with another anthology, published by Penguin, called Con- temporary American Poetry. It came out in 1962 and contained a num- ber of Allen's poets, including Duncan, Creeley, Snyder, Ashbery, and Denise Levertov, but pointedly excluded the Beats. By the end of the decade, Hall's anthology had been reprinted six times. By then, the poetry anthology market had become irresistible to publishers. In three years, ten new anthologies came on the market.* Finally, in 1974, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Rich- ard Ellmann, appeared. It included virtually every poet from both The New Poets and The New American Poetry -a catholicity enabled by the expediency of making the volume 1,454 pages long and by the fact that there was now room for everyone. The university could accom- modate everything. 9. The notion that there is literature and then there is something that pro- fessors do with literature called "theory" is not really coherent. Literary theory dates from Aristotle, the first person we know who isolated liter- ature as a field of inquiry. If you believe (as Aristotle did) that literature is different from other kinds of writing (such as philosophy and self-help Butterick. Over all editions, the New American Poets and New Poets anthologies had only one poet in common. Poems of Our Moment (1968), edited by Hollander; The Young American Poets (1968), edited by Paul Carroll; The Contemporary American Poets (1969), edited by Mark Strand; Twentieth- Century Poetry: American and British (1969), edited by John Malcolm Brinnin; Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1969), edited by Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey; The Poets of the New York School (1969), edited by John Bernard Myers; 31 New American Poets (1969), edited by Ron Schreiber; Black Poets: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets (1969), edited by Dudley Randall; Today's Negro Voices (1970), edited by Beatrice Murphy; and The Major Young Poets (1971), edited by Al Lee. THE FREE PLAY OF THE MIND | 497 books), and if you have ideas about what is relevant and what isn't for understanding it (biography or social history or just other poems), and if you have standards for judging whether a work is great or not so great (a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. As Richards tried to show in Practical Criticism, everyone who reads literature operates from a set of assumptions about what it is, how it is supposed to work, and what makes it good or bad, even if those assump. tions are unformulated and inchoate. The New Criticism arose as a way of making readers assumptions explicit and consistent, and although it presents itself as just the natural way to read, it is a thoroughly theorized approach. Theorizing is not academicism. It's part of an inquiry into the role of art in human life. Works of art and literature are make-believe; "theory" is an effort to figure out why we create such things, what they mean, and why we care so much about them. "Theory" in the post-1960 sense refers to a period when some of the influences on Anglo-American literary studies were coming from writers who were neither Anglo-American nor students of literature: principally, Jacques Derrida, a philosopher; Michel Foucault, a historian; and Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst. The relevance of what these writers were saying to literary criticism was obvious enough, but they were, so to speak, jumping the fence, and their academic training had no counterpart in American universities, which is one reason why some people felt their influence to be subversive or an assault on academic norms. Deconstruction, the method of reading devised by Derrida, is a cri- tique of structuralism. It does not displace or reject structuralism; it changes the structuralist model from within. Derrida was not a polit- ical radical; like most academics, he was a liberal with egalitarian so- cial views. And deconstruction is not an attack on literature or literary studies or liberal education or academic knowledge production. On the contrary, it is a defense of literature based on a method of close reading, and it teaches students a way of grasping the contingency of present assumptions. It is therefore completely consistent with the paradigms of literary studies and the philosophy of liberal education. There is no better evidence that deconstruction was doing its pedagogical job than the fact that many people regarded it as a scandal to the way things are. Deconstruction did not take English departments by storm. Institu- tionally, its progress outside of departments of French and Comparative SIO | THE FREE WORLD to write the sentence in the first place. Poetic writing is the most advanced and refined mode of deconstruction.'7) For some people, this kind of criticism might be narrow or uninterest- ing, but it is hard to see anything scandalous about it. Yale-school criticism of the 1970s had the same appeal and shortcom- ings as the New Criticism. It generated intellectual power by bracketing off most of what might be called the real-life aspects of literature--that literature is written by people, that it affects people, that it is a report on experience. Asked what deconstruction might have to say to readers looking for those things, one of de Man's former students, Barbara Johnson, who later taught at Harvard, said: "[Iff it is indeed the case that people approach literature with the desire to learn something about the world, and if it is indeed the case that the literary medium is not transparent, then a study of its non-transparency is crucial in order to deal with the desire one has to know something about the world by reading literature." SO That might not quite satisfy the skeptic. Still, it was exciting to get inside the atom. "[W]e knew we were at the center of intellectual life," Alice Kaplan, another former student of de Man's, wrote. "We were sharpening our minds like razors, because we were the carriers of a new way of reading: the most advanced, thorough- going, questioning reading that had ever been done on a text."I8] It was a fantastically limited approach, she admitted, but everything that hap- pened since seemed to her unworthy by comparison. Deconstruction is a via negativa. It's good for getting down to what de Man called the mechanical level of language. But it can't bring any- thing substantive back, because anything substantive is subject to the rigors of deconstruction all over again. Deconstruction started to run into the sands when it got used to interpret texts in conformance with the political views of the interpreter (a type of self-fulfilling prophecy that afflicts many schools of criticism). Deconstruction is not a train you can get off at the most convenient station. That this anti-foundationalism did not have much effect outside university literature departments (with the exception of some kinds of arts practice) contributed to, though it was hardly the cause of, a rift between academic and journalistic criticism after the 1960s. In many respects, deconstruction realized the dream of Ransom and Richards of a purely professional mode of literary analysis. It was something only COMMONISM519 gesture ... Andy's paintings are really a documentation or comment on the tradition of art."* Which is what Clement Greenberg said avant- garde art should be. 2. It took the Abstract Expressionists almost ten years to achieve both crit- cal and commercial success. It took the American Pop artists about ten months. This is because by 1962, the year Pop burst on the scene, an art-world infrastructure was finally in place--the galleries, dealers, collectors, curators, museum officials and trustees, critics, and a public audience for contemporary art. The idea that Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world either domestically or internationally is a myth produced by a Cold-War- within-the-Cold-War argument about American cultural imperialism. When the Abstract Expressionists came onto the scene around 1950, the Museum of Modern Art was still committed to European modernism and was wary of contemporary American art. It demonstrated no spe- cial interest in Abstract Expressionism.' Even after Jackson Pollock's breakthrough show in 1949, MoMA turned down a chance to buy Au- tumn Rhythm for ten thousand dollars. Its reluctance to purchase art by the American Abstract Expressionists was so well known that in 1952 seven of them wrote a letter to the museum accusing it of having no appreciation for avant-garde painting. l The Abstract Expressionists themselves did not think of their art as "American." They were perfectly aware of its European roots, and pre- ferred to think of themselves in cosmopolitan, not parochial, terms. "7 Nor was Abstract Expressionism a very visible presence in Europe. Pollock had shows in 1950 in Venice and Milan of works from Peggy Guggenheim's collection, all of them pre-drip. His abstract work was featured in two gallery shows in Paris-Véhémences confrontées (1951) and Un Art autre (1952)- organized by the critic Michel Tapié with the idea of setting up a conversation between European and American painting.18 Véhémences confrontées traveled (as Opposing Forces) to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1953-the first time a Pollock had been seen in Britain. His work was important for the Inde- pendent Group artists, but popular response was hostile. No American museum, dealer, or government agency sponsored those shows: Tapié 520 THE FREE WORLD borrowed the canvases from Pollock's friend Alfonso Ossorio." He told Pollock he hoped to get European collectors interested in buying a paint- ing, and it seems that a few did.20 Except for work by American artists living in Paris and Rome, almost all the contemporary American art seen by Europeans in the 1950s was on loan to a museum. And although European museums dis- played American art, they did not buy it. In 1958, there was not a single painting by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, or Mark Rothko in a European museum. There were two Pollocks; both were in the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, a museum that, under the direction of Willem Sandberg, was dedicated to avant-garde art, and both were gifts of Peggy Guggenheim.* In an exhibition of more than a hundred works by American artists that toured Europe in 1956, Modern Art in the United States, by far the most popular painting was Andrew Wyeth's hyperrealist Christina's World (purchased by MoMA in 1949). Although the Pollocks made a big impression on London audiences, much of it was negative.21 No European museum purchased a Pollock until 1961, when the Tate bought Number 23 (1948). By contrast, in 1960, American muse- ums owned thirteen works by the Russian-born French painter Nicolas de Staël, Pollock's contemporary,22 Mark Rothko did not have a solo exhibition in Europe until 1961. Willem de Kooning did not have one until 1967. By then, Warhol had had ten European exhibitions and Rauschenberg had had fifteen.? And it is not the case that Pollock's work, or Abstract Expressionism generally, received special support from the government or American museums.24 The "message of art exhibitions sent abroad was that there was not one American style of painting; on the contrary, the United States was a place where a diversity of styles could flourish. So, for ex- ample, although Pollock had four works in a show called Twelve Con- temporary American Painters and Sculptors, which was organized by MoM and traveled to Paris, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo in 1953-1954, the emphasis was on diversity: the other artists included Ben Shahn, Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, John Marin, and Stuart Davis.25 * Only one, Reflection of the Big Dipper (1947), was a drip painting; the other was a pre-drip abstraction, The Water Bull (1945). COMMONISM | 521 An exhibition devoted exclusively to Abstract Expressionism did fi- nally come to Europe in 1958. This was The New American Painting, as- sembled by Dorothy Miller at the request of European museums for the Museum of Modern Art. It contained works by sixteen artists, includ- ing Pollock, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Grace Harti- gan, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still. 'The exhibition was produced by MoM's International Program of Circulating Exhibitions, but the idea came from Arnold Rüdlinger, the director of the Kunsthalle in Basel.2* A Pollock retrospective, also organized by MoMA, toured Europe at same time on a somewhat different itinerary. Reaction to The New American Painting was mixed. Newspaper crit- is were mostly hostile. "It is not new. It is not painting. It is not Amer- ican, wrote a reviewer in Milan.?* European artists were impressed by Pollock, whose paintings contradicted his reputation as a wild man. But they were not shocked. They had been making abstract art since the 1910s, and abstract expressionist art since the 1940s,28 The New Ameri- can Painting was no longer new in the United States, either. Johns and Rauschenberg had already had their shows at the Castelli Gallery. Pollock was dead. The Abstract Expressionist moment was over. In the United States in those years, there were few places to buy con- temporary American art of any kind. In 1945, by a conservative calcula- tion, there were seventy-three art galleries in New York City.? (Art was also sold by dealers unaffiliated with a gallery.) Only a handful showed contemporary American art. Annual sales of European and American painting and sculpture in New York was about $6 million in 1945, less than half the average annual art sales in Paris before the war (about $15 million), and Paris sales were much higher after the war. Half of the * It is not the case (as claimed in Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War [New York: New Press, 2001], 267) that MoMA's founding director, Alfred Barr, ever referred to Abstract Expressionism as "benevolent propaganda for foreign intelligentsia." That phrase was used many years later by a critic of the museum's policies, Max Kozloff ("American Painting During the Cold War," Artforum 11 [May 1973], 44). Nor did Barr refer to it, in the letter to Henry Luce about TimelLife's coverage in 194), as "artistic free enterprise" (Saunders, 267). Those words were inserted into the letter by Nelson Rockefeller--a capitalist speaking to a capitalist. There is no evidence that Barr ever thought of art in those terms. (See "Nelson's draft," Microfilm roll 1271, 175, Alfred Barr Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives.) † The museum had connections to government agencies within the State Department, notably the United States Information Agency. Evidence of a connection to the CIA is thin. Founda- tons (such as the Farfield) that operated as CIA cutouts for other purposes also helped subvent exhibitions like these, but the catalogues for the touring exhibitions emphasized Abstract Ex- pressionism's European roots. The goal was to promote European unification. It was not to establish a cultural imperium. ‡ A Rome paper, Avanti!, did call Pollock "Il Presley della pittura." VERS LA LIBÉRATION | $43 entrenched ideology of gender difference. They saw an underside of the postwar artistic and intellectual regime that was largely invisible to white men. Why that ideology was so powerful and its effects so widespread, why men of every political view and in every walk of life seem to have subscribed to it, is one of the enigmas of postwar American history. One explanation is that the relegation of women to the domestic sphere was a response to threats like Communism and nuclear war. The home was figured as a kind of haven requiring someone's full-time commitment.' But a Cold War explanation doesn't make complete sense. The doctrine of containment specifically prescribed building up the strength of the democracies, and from that point of view, discrimination that keeps half the population from full participation in the workforce and public life is irrational. Yet by many measures, American women were worse off in 1963 than they had been in 1945 or even in 1920. In 1920, 20 percent of PhDs were awarded to women; in 1963, it was 11 percent. Forty-seven percent of college students were women in 1920; in 1963, 38 percent. The median age at first marriage was dropping; almost half of all women who got married in 1963 were teenagers. Between 1940 and 1960, the birth rate for fourth children tripled.2* Demographically, it looked like a snowball effect. When 16 million veterans, 98 percent of whom were men, came home in 1945, two pre- dictable things happened. The proportion of men in the workforce in- creased as men returned to, or were given, jobs that had been done by women during the war. By early 1946, 2.25 million women had quit their jobs and 1 million had been laid off." And there was a spike in the birth rate. But what should have been a correction became a trend. Fifteen years later, the birth rate was still high--families didn't stop having children after one or two--and although millions of women returned to the workforce in the 1950s and the military draft drew men out of the workforce, gender discrimination in employment was even more perva- sive than racial discrimination. By the late 1950s, 75 percent of women * The rise of the divorce rate in the 1970s, sometimes interpreted as an index of national de- cline, was possibly in part the result of too-early marriages made during a period of economic prosperity. VERS LA LIBÉRATION | 391 over 'morality." 83 This implied that there remained a content-centered kind of art. But in "Against Interpretation," she collapsed that distinc- tion. Now all critical response should be a response to form. She made this the message of her book. In "Notes on Camp," the formalist aesthetic is still in the "yaca- tion from seriousness" mode. But when formalism was expanded into a principle of all criticism, it resulted in claims like the one Sontag made about Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Those movies, she wrote, "transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage . . . Through Riefenstahl's genius as a filmmaker, the 'content' has--let us even assume, against her intentions- -come to play a purely formal role."184 The final essay in Against Interpretation, "One Culture and the New Sensibility," first appeared in Mademoiselle. (Mademoiselle had given Sontag a "merit award" in 1963, which gives us an idea of the nature of Sontag's celebrity.) She argued that contemporary artists--she mentions, among others, Morton Feldman, Frank Stella, and Merce Cunningham- make work that is technically complex and that requires as much train- ing to understand as science does. But she then went on to describe a "new sensibility." The "Matthew Arnold idea of culture" is no longer tenable, she says. From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a ma- chine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Lue Godard, and of the person- alities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible.Iss This, too, was not news in New York City in 1965. As usual, the fashion magazines were way ahead of the academy. The April 1965 is- sue of Harper's Bazaar, edited by Richard Avedon, mixed photographic portraits of Johns and Rauschenberg with pictures of Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, and fashion models, all rendered in the same playful style. But it was the final sentence in Against Interpretation, and it branded Sontag as popular culture enthusiast and critical relativist. Howe complained that she "employs the dialectical skills and accumulated knowledge of intellectual life in order to bless the new sensibility as a dispensation of pleasure, beyond the grubby reach of interpretation and thereby, it would seem, beyond the tight voice of judgment.' I& Sontag 592 THE FREE WORLD came to stand for permissiveness, for leveling, for an art of "anything goes." "One of the mid-sixties free-swinging ladies, The New York Times called her 187 In The New Republic, she was "the Camp girl, who burns for 'style' and 'sensibility' while consigning content and ethical involvement to the fire."188 But Sontag was not a permissivist or a leveler. She was not saying that the Beatles are as good as Thomas Mann. She was saying that the fine arts can be approached with the same openness and lack of preten- sion that people bring to pop songs and Hollywood movies. And she wasn't thinking of the kind of critic she wanted Irving Howe to be. She was thinking of the kind of critic she wanted to be. 7. Sontag's promotion of the aesthetic may have seemed dangerous to writers like Howe who saw literature as a site of moral instruction, but there was nothing radical about it. She was using the term as it was used when it was first applied to the arts in the eighteenth century. An aesthetic appreciation precisely allows you to bracket content. In eighteenth-century Britain, this might be Catholic iconography; for Sontag, it turned out to be Nazi ideology. How radical was this? It's true that there were Freudian and Marx- ist interpreters around in 1964, and the myth-and-archetype school of literary criticism that descended from Northrop Frye included symbol hunters of the kind Sontag ridiculed.* But no sophisticated student of literature and the arts would have found her attack on moralizing and hidden meanings exceptionable. Sontag's strictures on paraphrase repeat what the New Critics had been saying since the 1940s. Her remarks about Riefenstahl duplicate the argument for awarding Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize for his elegy for fascism, the Pisan Cantos, in 1948. Greenberg's art criticism is pure formalism. Meyer Shapiro, in his arti- de "Nature of Abstract Art" in 1937 (the article he thought Greenberg had cribbed from), had argued that with abstraction, "the pure form once masked by an extraneous content was liberated."18) In fact, Sontag * Psychoanalytic criticism as an academic school does not really begin until 1966, the year of Frederick Crews's The Sins of the Father: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes and Norman Hol- land's Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. VERS LA LIBÉRATION | $93 had made a point of looking up Schapiro's article when she was writing "Against Interpretation. "0 And what was replacing the New Criticism was equally anti- interpretative. Finding meanings is the practice that free play subverts. When Sontag was putting her book together in France in 1965, she met Jacques Derrida, and after Against Interpretation came out, she sent him a copy. Derrida read it, he told her, "with rapture, and he promised to send her his own essay "against interpretation." This was the two-part article in Critique, "De la grammatologie". -the article that introduced deconstruction to the world,191 What was new in Sontag's essay, and what was responsive to her cultural moment, was not the attack on interpretation. It was the phrase "an erotics of art." It is not completely obvious what this means. Son- tag's only gloss is: "The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."I)2 Whatever this is, it does not sound like an "erotics." Sontag seems to have been picking up on two things. One had to do with the censorship situation. The standard legal defense of works of art and literature charged with obscenity was that the artist or writer needed to use taboo words or images to achieve a truer representation or a more pointed social commentary. At Mekas's trial, for example, his lawyer told the court that Flaming Creatures was a "satire on our general culture's use of sex to the point that it is an anti-sex film."'3 A spokes- man for Mekas's Film-Makers' Cooperative explained that the movie was a "fantastic lampoon of commercialized sex and sexual mores." instructor from the New School testified that it was "full of symbolic motifs."94 These people were all interpreting, and they were using inter, pretation as a signal that they were being serious. If you can interpret something, it must have value. But this was all a distraction from the simple fact that Flaming Crea- tures is, mildly but ineluctably, sexually arousing. That is why some peo- ple wanted to see it and why other people wanted to prevent them from seeing it. Arousal has always been something that art and literature trig- ger and feed. There are genitalia in the cave paintings. But arousal was not a legal defense. It took someone to say that the erotic is a legitimate feature of art, independent of the demands of representation or social commentary. It is strange that Sontag was the person to say this, but she was. 6IO THE FREE WORLD It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act--even by the logic of the psychopath- is not likely to prove very therapeutic for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort is nec- essary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one's life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act it is not altogether cowardly,3 The Dissent editorial board had no problem accepting "The White Ne- gro" for publication. Howe wrote to Mailer to tell him that Meyer Scha- piro "with gleaming eyes grabbed me at the end of the meeting to say: Hipsterism is Hasidism Without God." The essay was a coup for Howe's little magazine. The issue sold 14,000 copies, triple the normal circulation. The essay was published as a pamphlet by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in 1959, and that edition that went through five printings.4 Even taken as a conceit, Mailer's central claim is incomprehensible. Are male orgasms, which typically last less than ten seconds, really qual- itatively distinguishable? Or even interesting?* "One squirt and done, as Ruth says to Harry Angstrom in John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), a novel that has a satire of Beat philosophy as a subtext.42 Still, "The White Negro' did manage to make a prescriptive statement out of a variety of preoccupations that were, by 1957, commonplace: nuclear an- nihilation, juvenile delinquency, social conformity, and sexual norms. The fascination of white American men with Blackness, the compli- cated desire to "be Black" or "act Black," dates back to the abolitionists and the blackface minstrels of the antebellum period.43 And entertain- ment was usually the sphere in which white-to-Black race-crossing was enacted, since entertainment is where most white Americans take their image of Blackness from, and since entertainment just is acting. Offstage, the skin can be removed. You can ride home in the front of the bus. * As were a number of men in his circles, from Jack Kerouac to Dwight Macdonald, Mailer was influenced by the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's The Function of the Orgasm, published in English in 1942. It "was like a Pandora's box to me," he later said. (Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011], 429 [in- terview with Mailer].) FREEDOM IS THE FIRE | 611 The main entertainment-world examples to hand in 1957 were rock 'n' roll and jazz, quasi-integrated popular sounds, a few of whose white performers even considered themselves to be "voluntarily" Black.44 Mailer had no interest in rock 'n' roll, but white people like Mailer took jazz--the music, the fashion, the argot--extremely seriously. They con- sidered it to be authentically Black because it is improvised and spon- taneous, a corollary to the idea that jazz and the blues are untutored musical expressions descended from the field holler. A jazz style was adapted by white performers in several forms. Poets in neighborhoods like the Village and North Beach read their work to live jazz accompaniment. And the cutting-edge stand-ups of the period, like Lenny Bruce, performed in a cool, riffy, "spontaneous" " mode.45 In the case of Richard Buckley, a white comic from California who outfit- ted himself like an English aristocrat (he sometimes wore a pith helmet) and performed as Lord Buckley, much of the act consisted of talking jive. His famous schtick "The Nazz" is a jive retelling of the Christ story: "Tm gonna put a cat on you, was the sweetest, gonest, wailin'est cat that ever stomped on this sweet swingin' sphere. And they called dis here cat . . . Da Nazz!"* Buckley's album Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies Knock Me Your Lobes was released in 1955.* The title is a jive rendition of Marc Antony's speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Hip was very much part of the scene. The pushback argument was that although jazz is a genuine expres- sion of Black experience, the only part of that experience that white people wanted to adopt was the hedonic part. They didn't want to actu- ally live like Black Americans. Three months after "The White Negro" came out, the Village writer Seymour Krim informed Voice readers that they were ignoring the real life of Black people, which he described as a life of debt, drink, and wife-beating. "The next time we act hip and dig the joys of jazz expression, musical or verbal," he warned, "we could do worse than pause and ask ourselves if we are prepared to accept the price and implications of this way of life."7 From the Black American perspective, this was all a colossal misreading. Jazz musicians knew that soulfulness and spontaneity are the product of discipline and responsibility. Their social values were * Buckley died of a stroke in 1960 shortly after his "cabaret card," needed to perform in New York City, was lifted. Lenny Bruce died of an overdose in 1966 after being essentially black- balled in the entertainment industry. FREEDOM IS THE FIRE| 627 of Alabama--the "stand in the schoolhouse door"-and that evening, President Kennedy delivered a televised address from the Oval Office on civil rights. "It is not enough to pin the blame on others," Kennedy said, "to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face . .. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality." The president was now on the record. That night, Medgar Evers, the NAACP's field secretary for Missis- sippi, was shot and killed by a member of the White Citizens Council, Byron De La Beckwith, in Evers's own driveway. His wife and their three little children, who had stayed up to watch Kennedy's speech, saw him die. Baldwin had met Evers, and they were friends. The following week, Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and the ad- ministration sent a civil rights bill to Congress. In August, Kennedy welcomed the leaders of the March on Washington to the White House. Three months later, he would be dead. Kennedy was not a martyr for racial equality. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jackie Kennedy is supposed to have said. "It had to be some silly little Communist."8 But his televised White House speech made it politically possible for his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to get the Civil Rights Bill passed. Baldwin's name was prominent in all the stories about the Kennedy meeting. Baldwin had insisted on the meeting; he had invited the par- ticipants; they were Baldwin's friends, his "clan." Right after the meeting, Baldwin and Clark, both rattled by the encounter, went off to tape a television interview on the public station WNDT. When it aired, a few days later, the Times reviewed it. "Challenge on Racism: James Baldwin Puts Problem Squarely in the Laps of All Americans" was the headline.? In becoming a spokesman, Baldwin must now have realized that he had also made himself a target. Civil rights leaders were not happy with reports of the Kennedy meeting. They felt the same way Baldwin and his friends did--that the administration was not exercising leadership. King had made that complaint himself.?? But they could not see the benefit of having a group of people they regarded as unrepresentative of the movement and of Black people in general pissing off the attorney general and his brother the president. Whitney Young, the executive sec- retary of the National Urban League, told a reporter, "It would have 628 THE FREE WORLD been more appropriate for those present to have discussed the questions of race discrimination in the entertainment and literary world. These people themselves make no claims of expertness in the large areas of deep and complex racial problems ... It's like asking Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra to go to Washington to discuss foreign policy,"3 Baldwin found himself attacked not by segregationists but by North- ern liberals. The reaction had already started with the New Yorker piece. "Dear Mr. Baldwin," Hannah Arendt wrote to him just a few days after "Letter from a Region in My Mind" came out: What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypoc- risy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the [sic] private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.94 Arendt had already weighed in on the question of integration in a piece that Howe solicited for Dissent after it had been turned down by Commentary. Her essay was a response to the Little Rock school integra- tion crisis in September 1957, when nine Black students tried to enroll in Central High School and were blocked by a mob of white people.* President Eisenhower, who had commanded segregated armed forces in the Second World War and was no friend to school integration, had had to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in the 101st Air- borne Division. The governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, responded by closing the public high schools in Little Rock for a year. Arendt chose this occasion to cash out her theory of the social. Equality, she explained, is a political right. It cannot be made a social right. "[Without discrimination of some sort, she said, "society would * The "Little Rock Nine" were Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo Beals. 678 THE FREE WORLD By 1965, Macdonald had written himself into a difficult place. He had become the scourge of the middlebrow. He had helped Clement Greenberg produce "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," back in 1939, and he adopted Greenberg's high-low scheme. "Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little kitchen-garden," Macdonald wrote in 1953, shortly after he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a de- based form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of po- litical domination." A more insidious development, however, was what he called l'avant-garde pompier, phony avant-gardism. "There is nothing more vulgar," " he declared, "than sophisticated kitsch."'S This "indeterminate specimen" " Macdonald would name Midcult, the culture of middlebrow aspiration. Mass culture could be left to the masses; the real enemy was the literature, music, theater, art, and crit- icism of middle-class high-mindedness. And over the next ten years, Macdonald devoted much of his critical zeal to the job of identifying Midcult, exposing its calculated banalities, and persuading readers of its meretriciousness. One of his first long pieces for The New Yorker was a demolition job on the Encyclopedia Britannia's fifty-four-volume edition, with Syntopicon (a two-volume index of topics), of the Great Books, and on the enterprise's Aristotle, Mortimer J. Adler.* Shawn was pleased with the piece, and he encouraged Macdonald to find more monuments to de- molish. Macdonald was happy to do so. He took on the Revised Stan- dard Version of the King James Bible (in 1953), the young British writer Colin Wilson's work of popular philosophy, The Outsider (1956), and Webster' Third International Dictionary (1962). It is not hard to guess why Shawn was pleased with Macdonald's takedowns of middlebrow enterprises like Adler's Great Books. The sub- jects made for witty, intelligent journalism; readers loved the pieces and Wrote letters saying so; and they attracted attention. But there might have been another reason lurking in the shadows. Shawn was an enig- matic figure. It's impossible to know (as it's impossible to know in the case of most successful magazine editors) how much of his editorial * Adler had taught in John Erskine's General Honors, the course Trilling would take over, before going to the University of Chicago. HOLLYWOOD-PARIS-HOLLYWOOD|679 policy was calculation based on a canny insight into his magazine's readership and how much was simply a reflection of what he unaffect- edly liked and didn't like. But he must have seen that Macdonald's pieces put just the inch and a half of distance he needed between his glossy and carefully crafted product and the genteel fakery of wannabes and rivals. Macdonald's attacks on middlebrowism inoculated The New Yorker against the charge of being middlebrow. Those attacks on middlebrow were directed as much at the cultural establishment as they were at buyers and readers. Macdonald thought that people were being tricked into purchasing these goods by being told that they ought to like them, or that the stuff was good for them. Just like kitsch, Midcult was a marketing phenomenon. It was culture manufactured for the aspiring sophisticate. In the case of kitsch, no one was being fooled. What alarmed Macdonald was that in the case of Midcult, everyone seemed to be fooled- not only the readers but also the writers, the editors, the publishers, and the reviewers. They had all become convinced of their own high-mindedness. They believed that they were engaged in an uplifting enterprise of human betterment- even as they raked in the profits. "No promotion" was their means of promotion, and readers who aspired to something superior to simple pleasure and diversion fell for it. It was funny that he could not see that the magazine he wrote his pieces for had perfected this formula to a point where it had become nearly invisible. But this is exactly what Kael was calling Macdonald out on in the case of Hiroshima Mon Amour. He had fallen for a sales pitch. The movie is arty, it's European, it's about love and death. It can even be hard to sit through, a real test of seriousness. Kael thought that Macdonald was being forced to pretend to like something he could not possibly have really liked. But since he had written off mass culture entertainment, and now had written off Broadway theater and literary fiction, he had browed himself into a corner. Kael didn't persuade New Yorker readers to go to Hollywood mov- ies; they were already going. That wasn't the problem. The problem was teaching them how to think intelligently about them. One way to think intelligently is to have a theory, and Kael hated theories. "[M]ovies are a medium in which it's possible to respond in an infinity of ways to an infinity of material without forming precise or definite attitudes, or THIS IS THE END 689 American presidents who pursued a policy of engagement in Viet- nam were not imperialists. They genuinely wanted a free and inde- pendent South Vietnam, and the gap between that aspiration and the reality of the military and political situation in-country turned out to be unbridgeable. Political terms are short, and so politics is short-term. The main consideration that seems to have presented itself to those pres- idents, from Truman to Nixon, who insisted on staying the course was domestic politics--the fear of being blamed by voters for losing South- east Asia to Communism. If Southeast Asia was going to be lost, they preferred that it be on some other president's head. Vietnam was obviously a crisis in foreign policy. Did it affect electoral politics? Voters wanted the United States out of Vietnam, but many also wanted the United States to win first. In 1968, when Vietnam was the central issue in Democratic presidential politics, 20 percent of North- ern Democrats favored withdrawal and 35 percent favored escalation. There was a bolus of discontent, in other words, but it did not translate into clear-cut political realignment. Vietnam had a smaller effect on the fortunes of the Democratic Party than the 1964 Civil Rights Act did. Race relations reconfigured American politics, not foreign policy.* But Vietnam was a huge cultural inflection point. Much as the First World War did for European modernism, the War in Vietnam disrupted the artistic and critical avant-garde of its time. Preoccupations changed from formal and aesthetic questions to political questions. Susan Son- tag's transformation is emblematic. She went from political indifference to the barricades almost overnight. Against Interpretation, a book as non- political as Understanding Poetry, came out in January 1966; a month later, on February 20, Sontag joined Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, and other writers in an antiwar "Read-In" at Town Hall. It was the first political protest of her life. The next winter, she was calling the United States "the arch-imperium of the planet, holding man's biological as well as his historical future in its King Kong paws... American power is indecent in its scale." The United States, she said, was "founded on a genocide", it is "the culmination of Western white civilization," and "the white race is the cancer of human history."'I * Crudely: the Democratic Party lost white voters. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey got 38 percent of the white vote. George McGovern got 32 percent in 1972; Jimmy Carter, a Southerner, got 36 percent running against Ronald Reagan in 1980; Hillary Clinton got 37 percent in 2016 run- ning against a man almost no one thought could win. Race was a subtext in all those elections. 716 | THE FREE WORLD An effort to curry the allegiance of foreign elites ended up alienating them almost completely. After 1967, every official and unofficial venture in American cultural diplomacy became suspect. One reaction of writ- ers who were surprised to learn that the CIA had been subventing their work was: No one ever told us what to write. But that was exactly the point. They did not need to be told. They were already saying the things the CIA--that is, the U.S. government--wanted the world to hear. After The New York Times outed the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a creature of the Agency, an august group of citizens--the former am- bassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith; the physicist J. Robert Op- penheimer; the Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and George Kennan- wrote a letter to the editor. "An examination of the record of the congress," they explained, "its magazines and other activities will, we believe, convince the most skeptical that the congress has had no loyalty except an unwavering commitment to cultural freedom-and that in terms of this standard it has freely criticized actions and policies of all nations, including the United States."84 It was not true that no negative opinions about the United States were ever censored, but the important point is that of course the CIA sponsored writers critical of U.S. policies. The Agency believed, not unreasonably, that the fact that dissent was tolerated in the United States was a major Cold War selling point. "American artists and writers are not pawns of the state" was the message in these state-sponsored publications and exhibi- tions. The CIA's belief in the propaganda value of dissent called the bluff on American intellectuals. It meant that writers who imagined themselves as having a critical distance from American policy, or a skeptical relation to capitalism or consumerism or militarism or vulgar anti-Communism, were actually talking the party line. They did not need to be bought out because they had been on board all along. "Both as symptom and as source, the campaign for cultural freedom' revealed the degree to which the values held by intellectuals had become indistinguishable from the interests of the modern state- interests which the intellectuals now served even while they maintained the illusion of detachment," wrote Christopher Lasch, then a young historian at the University of Iowa, after the Ramparts story broke. "... The American Daniel Bell, David Riesman, and Irving Howe. Among British writers: Reyner Banham, J. B. Priestley, Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams.