Modernism in the Streets -- Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay

Modernism in the Streets
By Marshall Berman
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
by Peter Gay
W.W. Norton, 2007 640 pp $35


PETER GAY has had a remarkable career as a scholar. He has gone through many metamorphoses and left a great paper trail. Well into his eighties, he shows no signs of slowing down. He has written about many different things, and he has always been smart and serious, vivid and nuanced. He has a flair for telling stories, and he believes in narrative. He knows a lot, but wears it lightly. Modernism is his twenty-sixth book.

Disclosure number one: I’ve written a big book on modernism myself titled All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. There are many accounts of modernism available today. Sometimes they complement each other, sometimes they clash. But they all accept the core idea that art and thought are shaped by the artist’s or thinker’s perspective. In that light, it would be perverse if I left out mine.

Disclosure number two: Gay was my teacher at Columbia half a century ago—can it really be, half a century ago? My first book, The Politics of Authenticity (1971), on Montesquieu and Rousseau, cites him as a prime influence.

Gay hasn’t taught at Columbia for forty years or so. But although he left a long time ago, it left a mark on him. Modernism is very much a “Columbia book,” a recognizable product of the ambience that pervaded the university in the years when he and I were there. What was special about Columbia then wasn’t just the brilliance of the faculty; American universities were flourishing then, and there were many brilliant faculties. What was special was the shared obsession of many of its best minds with modernity.

Old heads like Lionel Trilling, Margaret Mead, Meyer Schapiro, Karl Polanyi and younger ones like C. Wright Mills, Steven Marcus, Daniel Bell, Jacob Taubes, Susan Sontag were all expending their best energy on the question, What does it mean to be modern? Their visions of modernity were different, but all rich and complex. They were expansive and cosmopolitan, they brushed aside both disciplinary and national barriers. Their politics were ambiguous, but all to be found along a liberal/left spectrum. They agreed that America, along with the world’s other advanced capitalist societies, had serious human problems, and none believed that communism could solve these problems. But they all thought that modern men and women had the potential to work it out. It was a thrill to absorb the enormity and audacity of their visions. They opened up a horizon that was a whole world.

GAY ENRICHED this discourse. In a long series of works on the Enlightenment, he argued that any attempt to live decently in modern times had to start from Enlightenment ideas of Humanity and human rights. His short 1968 study, Weimar Culture, portrayed the disastrous trajectory of two very strong currents in interwar German life—“hunger for wholeness” and “fear of modernity.” Much of the strength of this portrait sprang from Gay’s clear love for Berlin, the place where he was born in 1923. But for many of his late-1960s readers who were born in the United States, his vision of “a precarious glory, a dance on the edge of a volcano,” echoed ominously close to home.

The second phase of Gay’s career, situated at Yale, centers on Freud; it includes a biography, Freud: A Life for Our Times (1985), several short studies, and a terrific anthology, The Freud Reader (1989). Gay taught in Yale’s history department for two decades and retired in 1993. While in New Haven, he entered a training course at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute and graduated as a Research Scholar in Psychoanalysis in 1983. For the last decade or so Gay has been back in New York, where for several years he has supervised the new Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Gay doesn’t say if he ever worked as a therapist—or did I miss something?—but, in his next series of books, we could say his third phase, he entered into a kind of psychoanalytic intimacy with a very wide range of “ordinary people” from the modern past. These five books, part of a series titled The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, appeared between 1984 and 1998. (My favorites are The Education of the Senses [1984] and The Naked Heart [1995].) Their genre can be loosely called “psychohistory.” Gay draws on old letters and private diaries (floods of these are now on deposit in university libraries and archives), doctors’ and teachers’ manuals, legislative debates and court decisions, newspaper stories, photographs, and engravings, in order to imagine how all of Freud’s primal forces—sex and aggression, but also displacement, projection, re-enactment, repression and the return of the repressed—might have been embodied in ordinary people’s everyday lives. These books are part of the ongoing study of “everyday life” that in the last forty years has enveloped the history profession. But the life that most fascinates Gay here is private life, intimate life, secret life—including life that is secret to the people living it—life that is lived in the dark.

The current wave of psychohistory can be said to have begun half a century ago, with Erik Erikson’s study of Martin Luther. A.S. Byatt’s fine 1990 novel Possession portrays psychohistory as both an adventure and a spiritual mission, a way to get close not only to our ancestors but to ourselves. Gay’s Bourgeois Experience displays great gifts of psychoanalytic empathy, but also a novelist’s flair for exuberantly thick description (including plenty of hot sex), and a knack for grasping the story of people’s lives, even when the story is invisible to the people themselves.

These books are satisfying in another way that Gay’s Enlightenment studies are not. He was generally right about what the Enlightenment meant, yet he couldn’t show what it looked like, how it felt; he never learned to bring to life the prerevolutionary salon and café and court scenes where the Enlightenment took place. On the other hand, he has a perfect stage designer’s feeling for what nineteenth- and twentieth-century households looked like—both middle-class and working-class households—for what they showed the world, for what they kept in the dark, for where the bodies were buried.

One of the thrills of doing intellectual history, as Gay did in his youth, is a feeling of intimacy with brilliant and creative people. Spending years working with the Enlightenment philosophes, and more years with Freud, Gay got used to being with the very best. Then he left that road and spent years with ordinary people. Those years produced a harvest of exciting and original books, which anyone could be proud of. But as the series unfolds, a reader can sense a certain strain and impatience. Maybe Gay was tired of these people; maybe he felt nostalgia for the company of “the best,” and wanted a chance to be with them again, to connect with the most creative spirits in many countries, in many disciplines, over a span of more than a century. Maybe, too, he felt nostalgic for his years at Columbia, where modernity was a central organizing idea. It’s easy to see how the idea of a big book on modernism could sound like an alluring dream.

AND YET, like many dreams, it’s hard to realize in the morning light. Modernism comes out sounding like a modernism without people. In the book’s personal preface, Gay tells us he is going to present “painters and playwrights, architects and novelists, composers and sculptors, as exemplars of indispensable elements in the modernist period.” What’s wrong with this? Nothing, if artists and works of art are all you know. Plenty, if you have written masterpieces about the adventures and traumas and intimacies and disappointments of ordinary men and women thrown into modern life. Part of this book’s backstory, which is not mentioned in the personal preface, is that, at some point, Gay made a decision to drastically narrow his scope. Modernism in Modernism is an exclusive artists’ ball, and the rest of us aren’t invited; like the peasants in Madame Bovary, we press our noses against the glass and wonder why we got left out. Alas, Gay’s exclusive guest list may spoil the party.

The best parts of Modernism are Gay’s readings of works and the creators of works he loves. The stars are familiar: Baudelaire, James Joyce—especially Ulysses and the world of Leopold Bloom—Schoenberg, the architects and artists of the Bauhaus, Picasso, Eliot, Chaplin, Orson Welles, Virginia Woolf, Frank Lloyd Wright. Some readers have complained that we all know these guys already. I don’t think that’s a problem. The point of a book like this is to put the author’s mark on the people and works we already know, to relate them to each other, and to situate them in a larger historical context. When Gay writes about what he loves, his historical understanding nourishes his empathy, and it’s a delight to be there.

Some of Modernism’s best moments revolve around Chaplin and Leopold Bloom. Gay stresses Chaplin’s emotional complexity: “His mobile, expressive face . . . was masterly in registering ambivalence, the coexistence of contradictory feelings that makes up so much of mental life.” Bloom is “son, father, lover, friend, warrior, man at arms, and a good man into the bargain”—an entirely ordinary man, yet also “the complete human being”; Bloom contains both Everyman and Faust within himself. These homages generate some of Modernism’s emotional climaxes. Ironically, these objects of Gay’s love are incarnations of the very “ordinary people” he has dismissed from his modernist world. For him, they may represent a return of the repressed.

The last third of the book, the world after the Second World War, is a problem. After some lively pages on Beckett, Sartre, and French existentialism, Gay seems to tire. Once the 1960s begin, he just doesn’t like what’s out there. He translates his distaste into an adamant insistence that nothing is out there, and nothing ever was. Thus the existence of Pop Art is said to “signal . . . the death knell of modernism.” I was startled to see this theological metaphor carrying so much weight in the diction of a man who has always prided himself on his critical secularism. The next sentence is equally startling, featuring another odd metaphor appropriated from biology: modernism seems to have reached the end of its “life cycle.”

But is biology an appropriate model for human history and culture? How long are these cycles supposed to be? Who decides? And how do they know?

Gay the longtime teacher of historiography would have alerted his students to sound instant alarms when giant metaphors are wheeled into the foreground like great siege cannons—not to mention when theology and biology appear as sudden allies. And Gay the partisan of Enlightenment would have been enraged at diction shaped to convince us that there’s nothing humans can do to halt this cultural decline. In Modernism’s last chapters, fatalistic metaphors substitute for direct engagement with culture. Gay’s wonderful empathy and curiosity abruptly shut down. His voice sounds increasingly like a book I would never have picked as one of his favorites: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

ANYONE WHO lived through the 1960s will remember this voice of doom. (I could even say it makes me feel young!) But there were other voices in other rooms. One afternoon in the spring of 1968, I dropped in on Lionel Trilling. It was a lovely day, Columbia’s Low Plaza was overflowing with people, flowers, and banners, and it was an adventure just to get across. “So,” I asked him, “what do you think?” His answer was one of the great one-liners of the decade: he said, “It’s ‘modernism in the streets.’ ” He didn’t say he approved or disapproved of what anyone was doing or trying to do. But he was saying it as a teacher who had devoted his whole career to modernism, to me, a student who he knew loved modernism in my own way. I think he was saying, in his typically ambiguous and oracular way, that whether or not he approved of what the students were doing (he probably didn’t), he affirmed it. It made some ultimate sense for modernism to be alive in the streets; engaging with one’s time, putting oneself on the line, was where a modernist should be. He didn’t mean that the streets were the only place, or that being in the street took the place of art—as the Futurists and Dadaists had said (they are in Gay’s book, you can look them up); he meant that modernism could be there and live.

If this is true, then we can see modernism thriving in the work of Bob Dylan, Cindy Sherman, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Jean-Michel Basquiat. We can see it in Roger Waters (formerly of Pink Floyd), rocking at the Berlin Wall in 1990 as the people celebrated the wall’s having come down; in the Czech “Velvet Revolution,” and in its star Vaclav Havel, who said it couldn’t have happened without Rock and Roll; in Lou Reed and Frank Zappa, President Havel’s first honored guests. All of these figures have not only kept modernism alive, but kept it alive in the streets. And the streets of 1989 aren’t so different from the streets we live in now.

Gay has some fine pages on the architect Frank Gehry, and on Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Alas, Gay imagines Gehry as a solitary light in an overpowering darkness. Gehry could have told him that he doesn’t work alone, that he is part of a vital and thriving culture. Modernism is still an inspiration for all sorts of people whom neither Gay nor I have heard of, and who weren’t even born when Gay thinks modernism died. In reality, instead of being too long, as some reviewers complained, Modernism isn’t long enough. Will publishers ever invent a format in which books won’t have to end, in which we can keep them open to ongoing life? That would be a modernist reward that a book like Modernism deserves.


Marshall Berman’s latest work, co-edited with Brian Berger, is New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. A shorter version of this review appeared in Columbia Magazine, Spring 2008.


© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.