There was something dizzying about browsing through these old phone books and thinking that from now on, calls to those numbers would be unanswered. I would later be struck by the stanzas of a poem by Osip Mandelstam: Il y avait quelque chose de vertigineux à feuilleter ces anciens annuaires en pensant que désormais les numéros de téléphone ne répondraient pas. Plus tard, je devais être frappé par les vers d’un poème d’Ossip Mandelstam :
I returned to my city familiar to tears,
To my vessels and tonsils of childhood years,
Petersburg, [...]
While you're keeping my telephone numbers alive.
Petersburg, I still have the addresses at hand
That I’ll use to recover the voice of the dead.
(梁永安) ：斗膽越俎代庖，掰譯大意如下，是為充當敢死隊（也是必死隊）之意。
回到熟悉得快讓我哭的城市（這「詮釋」見google)
聖彼得堡--
我童年時代的血管與扁桃腺
你，聖彼得堡，仍讓我（舊日）的電話號碼打得通
我則仍保存著（已死親朋的）地址，將用它們
讓死人的聲音復活
----
Sometimes a name disappears from one year to the next. There was something dizzying about browsing through these old phone books and thinking that from now on, calls to those numbers would be unanswered. I would later be struck by the stanzas of a poem by Osip Mandelstam:
I returned to my city familiar to tears, To my vessels and tonsils of childhood years,
Petersburg, […] While you're keeping my telephone numbers alive.
Petersburg, I still have the addresses at hand That I’ll use to recover the voice of the dead.
So it seems to me that the desire to write my first books came to me while I was looking at those old Parisian phone books. All I had to do was underline in pencil the name, address and telephone number of some unknown person and imagine what his or her life was like, among the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of names.
Max Weber wrote these methodological essays in the closest intimacy with actual research and against a background of constant and intensive meditation on substantive problems in the theory and strategy of the social sciences. They were written between 1903 and 1917, the most productive of Max Weber's life, when he was working on his studies in the sociology of religion and Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
Weber had done important work in economic and legal history and had taught economic theory. On the basis of original investigations, he had acquired a specialist's knowledge of the details of German economic and social structure. His always vital concern for the political prosperity of Germany among the nations thrust him deeply into discussion of political ideals and programs.
Weber's methodology still holds interest for us. Some of its shortcomings, from the contemporary viewpoint, may be attributed to the fact that some of the methodological problems that he treated could not be satisfactorily resolved prior to certain actual developments in research technique. These few qualifications aside, the work remains a pioneering work in large scale social research, from one of the field's masters.
Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the founders of contemporary social science and arguably the greatest influence on the evolution of sociology—its theory and historical linkages. His work focused on the areas of the history and theology of religion, political systems, and organizational theory and behavior. He studied at the University of Heidelberg followed by the University of Berlin. After completing his advanced studies, he became professor of economics first at Freiburg University and then at the University of Heidelberg.
Edward Shils (1910-1995) was distinguished service professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His books include Tradition, The Intellectuals and the Powers, and Toward a General Theory of Action.
Robert J. Antonio is professor of sociology at the University of Kansas. He is the editor of A Marx-Weber Dialogueand Marx and Modernity. He has published essays about Weber, critical theory, and other topics in social theory in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and many other journals.
Alan Sica is professor of sociology and director of the Social Thought Program at Pennsylvania State University. Editor of the ASA Journal Sociological Theory from 1989 to 1994 and now of Contemporary Sociology, his books include Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order; Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought; Max Weber and the New Century; and Max Weber: A Comprehensive Bibliography.
Chrysa Leventi presents her work on a guaranteed minimum income in Greece & John Hills presents his study of UK austerity policy in the session on Microsimulation for better tax benefit design at a national level
Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings books.google.com.tw/books?isbn=0415478987 Hans Henrik Bruun, Sam Whimster - 2012 - HistoryWeber stresses repeatedly that acting rationally is acting (towards known or assumed ... psychology, as argued for by Wilhelm Wundt and Hugo Münsterberg.
**** 這 次徐教授回國.沒有機會就他今年的新書Information Systems做一整天的討論.甚遺憾. 他在該書的Preface末段說:The field of Information Systems has come of age. The author's academic career has also come of age. This book presents a tribute to both.
Information Systems: The Connection of People and Resources for Innovation - A Textbook [Hardcover]
Few titles sum up an era and a movement like Spare Rib. The magazine ran from 1972 – 1993 and was the debating chamber of feminism in the UK. Today, the complete run of Spare Rib is available online for the first time.
"Funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate, Spare Rib was a product of its time which is also somehow timeless." Why we digitised #SpareRib -http://bit.ly/1G2HcIm
For more than two decades it charted the grassroots feminist movement, its eye-catching covers railing against sexism and racism, promoting good orgasms or debating the tricky question of just what to do with unwanted body hair.
Spare Rib was radical, a magazine of its time. From the early 1970s through 21 years and 239 editions, it summed up an era still regarded as important for women’s liberation.
Now, thanks to an ambitious project by the British Library, the magazine is confined to the library shelf no more, but available online and for free to anyone after the digitisation of its entire run.
The project has been time-consuming, not least because of the very ethos of a publication which was run by a collective and accepted work from thousands of contributors. Copyright laws demanded that the British Library locate and gain permission from the majority of them, which was achieved after a callout to anyone who had ever had anything published in its pages and was highlighted in the Guardian.
Polly Russell, curator of politics and public life at the British Library, said: “Funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate, Spare Rib was a product of its time which is also somehow timeless. Detailed features of feminist issues such as domestic violence and abortion, and news stories about women from the UK and around the world sit side-by-side with articles about hair care [including the unwanted kind], how to put up a shelf and instructions on self-defence.
Marsha Rowe (left) and Rosie Boycott, founders of the magazine. Photograph: Getty
“Just as varied were the breadth of voices in the magazine; early editions of Spare Rib involved big-name contributors including Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Margaret Drabble and Alice Walker, but alongside these were the voices of ordinary women telling their own stories.
“By making this part of our intellectual heritage available online, we hope it will attract new and returning generations of readers to the magazine for research, inspiration and enjoyment.”
Until now, the magazines have been available only in paper form at the British Library’s reading rooms and a few other specialist libraries and archives.
Spare Rib was famous for its provocative covers. Photograph: Angela Phillips
The magazine sought to provide an alternative to traditional gender roles, tackling subjects such as “liberating orgasm”, “kitchen sink racism”, anorexia and the practice of “cliterectomy”, now called female genital mutilation. Cover headlines included “Doctor’s Needles not Knitting Needles” and “Cellulie – the slimming fraud” and articles featured women such as country and western singer Tammy Wynette and US political activist Angela Davis.
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With so many different threads of feminism being explored, the ensuing debates were often acrimonious, and the magazine reflected the sometimes “painful” discussions between the collective on how best to tackle issues such as sexuality and racism. It ran from 1972, with the final edition being published in 1993.
Marsha Rowe, co-founder of the magazine, said she was thrilled by the project: “It is as if the magazine has been given a new lease of life. By making the magazine freely available over the internet, it can encourage women round the world to act together to change and be a resource in support of their struggle for rights and freedoms.”
Sue O’Sullivan, a former member of the collective who worked at the magazine from 1979-84, said: “Spare Rib was a highly visible part of the Women’s Liberation movement, and a tool for reaching thousands of women every single month for over 20 years. The digitised magazines will be a wonderful resource for younger historians and feminist activists, researchers and all the women (and men) who wonder what their mothers, aunts, grannies and older friends got up to all those years ago.”
The digitisation was welcomed by Debra Ferreday, from Lancaster University’s centre of gender and women’s studies. “The importance of the Spare Rib archive can’t be overestimated. It’s a unique record of the Women’s Liberation movement which will be of huge value to feminist researchers, scholars, students and activists everywhere,” she said.
1960年代初期，許多黑人仍遭到不平等對待，也沒有投票權，許多白人學生志願為他們爭取權益，組成了「學生民主社會聯盟」（SDS），是當時最重要的學運組織。該組織的領袖，密執安大學研究生湯姆‧海登（Tom Hayden）於1962 年6月發表了《休倫港宣言：一個世代的議程》（Port Huron Statement: Agenda for a Generation）。
"The gift of the imagination is by no means an exclusive property of an artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy. The dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night – visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality of thought that makes the difference – not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking." -Leonard Bernstein, Commencement Speech at Johns Hopkins University, May 30, 1980
On this day in 1971, Leonard Bernstein conducted his one-thousandth New York Philharmonic concert--a historic milestone. For this occasion, Bernstein conducted #Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony No. 2.
Bernstein dedicated the concert “with affection and gratitude to all my Philharmonic colleagues, onstage and off, with whom I have shared three decades of joyful #music-making."
The New York Times critic James R. Oestreich wrote: "As the two timpanists whaled away in the clamor of the finale, the head of a timpani stick flew off and sailed into the audience. That added bit of fireworks seemed wholly of a piece with the choral and orchestral tumult conjured by a master, and this remains, of the many candidates, my favorite moment from the #Bernstein years."
We share this photo of Maestro Bernstein rehearsing the New York Philharmonic:
The definitive biography of one of the most influential, flamboyant, and multifaceted musical talents of the 20th century, a man whose concert hall performances ...
Leonard Bernstein, 72, Music's Monarch, Dies
By DONAL HENAHAN
Published: October 15, 1990
LEAD: Leonard Bernstein, one of the most prodigally talented and successful musicians in American history, died yesterday evening at his apartment at the Dakota on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 72 years old.
Leonard Bernstein, one of the most prodigally talented and successful musicians in American history, died yesterday evening at his apartment at the Dakota on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 72 years old.
Mr. Bernstein's spokeswoman, Margaret Carson, said he died of a heart attack caused by progressive lung failure.
His death followed by five days the announcement that Mr. Bernstein would retire from performing because of health problems. A heavy smoker for most of his life, he had been suffering from emphysema, pulmonary infections and a pleural tumor.
In recent months, Mr. Bernstein had canceled concerts in Japan and in Charleston, S.C., and a tour of Europe. He conducted his final performance at Tanglewood on Aug. 19, when he led the Boston Symphony in Britten's ''Four Sea Interludes'' and the Beethoven Seventh Symphony.
'Fated for Success'
Long before Mr. Bernstein became, at the age of 40, the youngest music director ever engaged by the New York Philharmonic, the drama critic Harold Clurman sized up the flamboyant musician's future: ''Lenny is hopelessly fated for success.''
It was Mr. Bernstein's fate to be far more than routinely successful, however. His fast-burning energies, his bewildering versatility and his profuse gifts for both music and theater coalesced to make him a high-profile figure in a dozen fields, among them symphonic music, Broadway musicals, the ballet, films and television.
Still, his hydra-headed success did not please all his critics. While he was music director of the Philharmonic from 1959 to 1969, some friends and critics urged him to quit and compose theater music full time. Many regarded him as potentially the savior of the American musical, to which he contributed scores for ''On the Town,''''Wonderful Town,''''Candide'' and ''West Side Story.''
Determining His Focus
At the same time, others were deploring his continued activity in such fields, contending that to be a successful leader of a major orchestra he would have to focus on conducting.
Still other observers of the Bernstein phenomenon wished he would concentrate on the ballet, for which he had shown an affinity (''Fancy Free,''''Facsimile''), or on opera and operetta (''Trouble in Tahiti,''''Candide'').
Or on musical education. His television programs on such subjects as conducting, symphonic music and jazz fascinated millions when he appeared on ''Omnibus,'' the cultural series, and later as star of the Philharmonic's televised Young People's Concerts.
And still others, a loyal few, counseled Mr. Bernstein to throw it all over and compose more serious symphonic scores. His gifts along this line were apparent in such works as his Symphony No. 1 (''Jeremiah'') of 1942, Symphony No. 2 (''The Age of Anxiety'') of 1949 and Symphony No. 3 (''Kaddish'') of 1963. He played the piano well enough to have made a separate career as a virtuoso. He was a facile poet. He wrote several books, including the popular ''The Joy of Music'' (1959). He was a teacher of rare communicative talent, as television audiences discovered.
But Mr. Bernstein resolutely resisted pressure to restrict his activities. During his decade as the Philharmonic's musical director, he grew steadily as an interpreter and as a technician.
His performances of Mahler's symphonies were almost universally conceded to be of the highest quality, and his recordings for Columbia Records of the complete set not only constituted the first such integral collection but also continue to be regarded as among the most idiomatic Mahler performances available. His obsession with that composer, in fact, has been credited with generating the Mahler boom in America.
His conducting of works by Classical composers like Mozart and Haydn, often derided in his earlier days, attracted more and more praise as his career unfolded and he could relax a little. ''There is nothing Lenny can't do supremely well,'' an acquaintance remarked several years ago, ''if he doesn't try too hard.''
The future Renaissance man of American music was born in Lawrence, Mass., on Aug. 25, 1918, the son of Samuel and Jennie Resnick Bernstein. His father, a beauty-supplies jobber who had come to the United States from Russia as a boy, wanted Leonard to take over the business when he grew up. For many years the father resisted his son's intention to be a musician.
The stories of how he discovered music became encrusted with legend over the years, but all sources agree he was a prodigy. Mr. Bernstein's own version was that when he was 10 years old his Aunt Clara, who was in the middle of divorce proceedings, sent her upright piano to the Bernstein home to be stored. The child looked at it, hit the keys and cried: ''Ma, I want lessons!''
Until he was 16, by his own testimony, he had never heard a live symphony orchestra, a late start for any musician, let alone a future musical director of the Philharmonic. Virgil Thomson, while music critic of The New York Herald Tribune in the 1940's, commented on this:
''Whether Bernstein will become in time a traditional conductor or a highly personal one is not easy to prophesy. He is a consecrated character, and his culture is considerable. It might just come about, though, that, having to learn the classic repertory the hard way, which is to say after 15, he would throw his cultural beginnings away and build toward success on a sheer talent for animation and personal projection. I must say he worries us all a little bit.'' These themes - the concern over Mr. Bernstein's ''talent for animation'' and over his penchant for ''personal projection'' - were to haunt the musician through much of his career.
Economy of Motion Not His Virtue
As for ''animation,'' that theme tended to dominate much of the criticism of Mr. Bernstein as a conductor, particularly in his youthful days. Although he studied conducting in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute with Fritz Reiner, whose precise but tiny beat was a trademark of his work, Mr. Bernstein's own exuberant podium style seemed modeled more on that of Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony's music director. The neophyte maestro churned his arms about in accordance with some inner message, largely ignoring the clear semaphoric techniques described in textbooks. Often, in moments of excitement, he would leave the podium entirely, rising like a rocket, arms flung aloft in indication of triumphal climax.
So animated, in fact, was Mr. Bernstein's conducting style at this point in his career that it could cause problems. At his first rehearsal for a guest appearance with the St. Louis Symphony, his initial downbeat so startled the musicians that they simply looked in amazement and made no sound.
Like another prodigally gifted American artist, George Gershwin, Mr. Bernstein divided his affections between the ''serious'' European tradition of concert music and the ''popular'' American brand. Like Gershwin, he was at home in jazz, boogie-woogie and the cliches of Tin Pan Alley, but he far outstripped his predecessor in general musical culture.
In many aspects of his life and career, Mr. Bernstein was an embracer of diversity. The son of Jewish immigrants, he retained a lifelong respect for Hebrew and Jewish culture. His ''Jeremiah'' and ''Kaddish'' symphonies and several other works were founded on the Old Testament. But he also acquired a deep respect for Roman Catholicism, which was reflected in his ''Mass,'' the 1971 work he wrote for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
A similar catholicity was reflected throughout his music. His choral compositions include not only songs in Hebrew but also ''Harvard Songs: Dedication and Lonely Men of Harvard.'' He was graduated in 1939 from Harvard, where he had studied composition with Walter Piston and Edward Burlingame Hill.
A sense of his origins, however, remained strong. Koussevitzky proclaimed him a genius and probable future musical director of the Boston Symphony - ''The boy is a new Koussevitzky, a reincarnation!'' - but the older conductor urged Mr. Bernstein to improve his chances for success by changing his name. The young musician replied: ''I'll do it as Bernstein or not at all!''
He pronounced the name in the German way, as BERN-stine, and could no more abide the pronounciation BERN-steen than he could enjoy being called ''Lenny'' by casual acquaintances.
In a sense, he was in lifelong flight from Lenny Bernstein, from being treated as the raffish ''ordinary guy'' that the nickname seemed to suggest. Although some elder members of the New York Philharmonic never stopped calling him Lenny, Mr. Bernstein lived down the nickname, and in his late years heard himself addressed almost reverentially as ''Maestro'' in the world's music capitals. The man who had been patronized in print for many years as ''Glamourpuss'' or ''Wunderkind of the Western World'' became a favorite of Vienna both as conductor and as accompanist for such lieder specialists as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Christa Ludwig.
Fame brought the usual honorary degrees, and honors far beyond the usual. He not only conducted at La Scala in Milan, at the Metropolitan Opera and at the Staatsoper in Vienna, but he was also invited by Harvard in 1973 to lecture, as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of History, on linguistics as applied to musical analysis. The distinction had previously been conferred on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith. Typically, Mr. Bernstein's Harvard performance was greeted with a mingling of critical raves and boos.
Harvard played an important part in Mr. Bernstein's rise, providing a pinch of Brahminism. The boy whose bar mitzvah was at Temple Mishkan Tefila had gone on to the elite Boston Latin School, and graduated cum laude from Harvard with a B.A.
During his last semester at Harvard, he organized and led a performance of Marc Blitzstein's ''Cradle Will Rock,'' a left-wing musical that had been banned in Massachusetts, but that could not be proscribed within the academic walls. It was not his first fling as a producer. At age 16 he had starred in his own production of ''Carmen'' at a summer camp, playing the title role alluringly in wig and black gown.
It was as a result of another schoolboy production, at Camp Onota in the Berkshires, that he met Adolph Green, with whom he later collaborated in several Broadway musicals. Mr. Bernstein was a camp counselor and theater director and Mr. Green was in ''The Pirates of Penzance.''
An Unlikely Start For a Conductor
Subsequently, when Mr. Bernstein was out of a job in New York City, he looked up Mr. Green, moved in with him in his East Ninth Street apartment in Greenwich Village, and began playing the piano at the Village Vanguard for a group called the Revuers. The ensemble included, besides Mr. Green, his musical comedy collaborator Betty Comden and the actress Judy Holliday.
Mr. Bernstein met Aaron Copland at Harvard in 1937, and through him came to know two other aspiring composers, Roy Harris and William Schuman. Admiring his intuitive grasp of modern music and his phenomenal skill at playing complex orchestral scores on the piano, the composers agreed that Mr. Bernstein should become a conductor. Dimitri Mitropoulos, the New York Philharmonic's music director, met Mr. Bernstein in 1938 and added to the consensus.
At that point, Mr. Bernstein ''didn't know a baton from a tree trunk,'' as he later put it.
Nevertheless, he had made up his mind. Because he had applied at the wrong time of the year and was turned down by the Juilliard School, he went to Philadelphia to audition for Reiner's conducting class at the Curtis Institute. The Hungarian maestro opened a score in the middle, put it on the piano and told Mr. Bernstein to play until he could recognize the piece.
The aspiring conductor, who was having difficulty seeing the music because he was suffering from an allergic reaction to Copland's cat, nevertheless discerned that the work was the ''Academic Festival'' Overture of Brahms. He was accepted.
At Curtis, he studied conducting with Reiner and piano with Isabella Vengerova. His earlier piano teachers included a neighbor, Freida Karp, Helen Coates and Heinrich Gebhard. In 1940 he went to Tanglewood, where he studied at the Berkshire Music Center with Koussevitzky, who quickly adopted Mr. Bernstein and called him Lenyushka.
In later years, Mr. Bernstein prided himself on having retained the respect and friendship of both Koussevitzky and Reiner, who held virtually opposing ideas about what a conductor should do and how he should do it. But the story as the famously irascible Reiner told it to acquaintances was different: ''He didn't leave me for Koussevitzky - I threw him out.''
In truth, not all of Mr. Bernstein's associations with elder colleagues were warm and collegial. In John Gruen's biographical ''The Private World of Leonard Bernstein,'' published in 1968, Mr. Bernstein asserted that Artur Rodzinski had once pinned him against the wall of a dressing room, trying to choke him because of jealousy over the young assistant's flair for publicity. But according to Mr. Bernstein, Rodzinski had by this time become somewhat peculiar: he always carried a gun in his back pocket, for instance, for psychological support when he faced the orchestra.
A Boycott Causes Stumble at the Start
It was Rodzinski, however, who gave Mr. Bernstein his chance at conducting the New York Philharmonic at a lean time when the young man was scraping along as a musician in New York. When he was 22, Mr. Bernstein had been offered a guest-conducting engagement with the Boston Symphony by Koussevitzky but had been forced to refuse. The American Federation of Musicians, to which Mr. Bernstein belonged, advised its members to boycott the Boston Symphony, the last of the major orchestras remaining unorganized. Mr. Bernstein tried to mark time by opening a teaching studio in Boston, he later recalled, but ''nobody came.''
That fall, he moved to New York, where he fared hardly better.
Eventually he got a $25-a-week job at Harms-Remick, a music-publishing house, where his duties included listening to Coleman Hawkins and Earl (Fatha) Hines, and getting their jazz down on paper. He also wrote popular arrangements under the name of Lenny Amber (Bernstein in English).
The Philharmonic offer by Rodzinski came without warning. Rodzinski had heard Mr. Bernstein conduct a rehearsal at Tanglewood, remembered the young man, and after an hour's discussion, had hired him as an assistant for the 1943-44 season.
Assistant conductors by tradition do a great deal of assisting, but not much conducting. Destiny had other plans for Leonard Bernstein, however, and when opportunity knocked one Sunday afternoon in 1943, he was ready to open the door. On Nov. 14, Bruno Walter fell ill and could not conduct the Philharmonic. The young assistant took over his program (works by Schumann, Rosza, Strauss and Wagner) and achieved a sensational success. Because the concert was broadcast over radio and a review appeared on page 1 of The New York Times the next day, the name of Leonard Bernstein suddenly became known throughout the country.
''Typical Lenny luck,'' some longtime Bernstein observers said. But Mr. Bernstein had given luck a hand: Knowing that Walter was not feeling well, he had studied the program's scores especially hard, just in case. At 25, he had become a somebody in the symphonic world.
After that break, though he was still more then a decade away from becoming music director of the Philharmonic, Mr. Bernstein began to consolidate his gains. He put in three exciting but financially unproductive seasons (1945-48) as conductor of the New York City Symphony. He received no fee, and neither did the soloists.
In 40's, Celebrity And Back Muscles
In the late 1940's Mr. Bernstein bloomed as a public figure. He came to be a familiar sight at the Russian Tea Room, at Lindy's and at Reuben's. Columnists reported that he liked boogie-woogie, the rumba and the conga, and that female admirers swooned when he stepped on the podium.
Tallulah Bankhead once watched Mr. Bernstein conduct a Tanglewood rehearsal and said to him in her husky baritone: ''Darling, I have gone mad over your back muscles. You must come and have dinner with me.''
Just about everyone in those years wanted Mr. Bernstein. The United States Chamber of Commerce named him as one of the outstanding men of the year, along with Nelson A. Rockefeller and John Hersey. His fans, it was reported, ripped at his clothes and attacked him in his car. Paramount tested him for the title part in a film about Tchaikovsky, but he was turned down, according to the conductor, because ''my ears were too big.''
Mr. Bernstein, in fact, looked the part of a pop idol with his strong profile and wavy black hair.
Musically, his career was on the upswing, too. In 1947 he conducted a complete Boston Symphony concert as a guest, the first time in Koussevitzky's 22-year reign that any other conductor had been permitted to do that in Carnegie Hall. He served as musical adviser of the Israel Philharmonic Symphonic Orchestra for the 1948-49 season. He was a member of the Berkshire Music Center from 1948 and head of its conducting department from 1951. He served as professor of music at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1956.
In 1953 Mr. Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to be engaged by La Scala in Milan, Italy's foremost opera house, leading a performance of Cherubini's ''Medea'' with Maria Callas in the title role.
During the six-year tenure of Mitropoulos as music director of the Philharmonic, beginning in the 1951-52 season, Mr. Bernstein was a frequent guest conductor. In 1957-58, the two worked jointly as principal conductors of the orchestra. A year later, Mr. Bernstein was named music director.
The New York appointment would have been a severe test of any conductor. The orchestra's quality had gone downhill, its repertory had stagnated and audiences had fallen off. Orchestra morale was low and still sinking. Mr. Bernstein leaped in with his customary brio and showmanship and his willingness to try new ideas.
He designated the Thursday evening concerts as ''Previews,'' at which he spoke informally to the audience about the music. He built his season around themes like ''Schumann and the Romantic Movement'' and ''Keys to the 20th Century.'' Strange-sounding works by avant-garde composers like Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gunther Schuller and John Cage began to infiltrate the Philharmonic's programs. He took the orchestra on tours to Latin America, Europe, Japan, Alaska and Canada.
It sometimes seemed that Mr. Bernstein could not possibly squeeze in one more engagement, one more social appearance. During one particularly busy stretch, he conducted 25 concerts in 28 days. His conducting style accurately reflected his breathless race through life. Although in later years he toned down his choreographic manner, he remained one of the more consistently elevating conductors of his time. That irrepressible buoyancy sometimes led to trouble: in 1982 he fell off the stand in Houston while conducting Tchaikovsky and two years later encored that frightening stunt while leading the Vienna Philharmonic in Chicago. The worst injury he suffered, however, was a bruise from a medallion he wore around his neck.
Throughout his Philharmonic years, he kept his ties with Broadway and the show-business friends he had made before he became an internationally adulated maestro. He had already written music for the musical version of ''Peter Pan'' (1950) and ''The Lark,'' a play starring Julie Harris (1955). For Hollywood, he wrote the score to ''On the Waterfront'' (1954). Musical successes on the stage followed: ''On the Town'' (1944), ''Wonderful Town'' (1953), ''Candide'' (1956) and ''West Side Story'' (1957). Several of the stage works continue to thrive: in 1985 Mr. Bernstein conducted a quasi-operatic version of ''West Side Story'' (the cast included Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras) that pleased him immensely and introduced the work to a new generation of listeners.
Then there were the ballets ''Fancy Free'' (1944) and ''Facsimile'' (1946); the song cycles ''I Hate Music'' and ''La Bonne Cuisine''; the ''Jeremiah'' and ''Age of Anxiety'' symphonies; the one-act opera ''Trouble in Tahiti''; Serenade for violin and string orchestra with percussion; the Symphony No. 3 (''Kaddish''), and the ''Chichester Psalms.''
In the years after he had left the music directorship of the Philharmonic to become the orchestra's laureate conductor, he returned to the theater. He created the ecumenical and controversial ''Mass'' and, with Jerome Robbins, the ballet ''Dybbuk,'' staged by the New York City Ballet in 1974.
Mr. Bernstein's life took a turn toward greater stability in 1951 when he married the actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn. Her American father had been head of the American Smelting and Refining Company in Chile and she had been sent to New York City to study the piano. After several years of off-and-on romance, they were married in Boston. They had three children: a daughter, Jamie, a son, Alexander Serge (named for Serge Koussevitzky) and a second daughter, Nina.
In addition to his children, who all live in New York City, and his mother, of Brookline, Mass., Mr. Bernstein is survived by a sister, Shirley Bernstein of New York City, and a brother, Burton, of Bridgewater, Conn.
Mr. Bernstein and his wife began a ''trial separation'' after 25 years of marriage. They continued, however, to appear together in concerts, one such occasion being a program in tribute to Alice Tully at Alice Tully Hall, where Mr. Bernstein conducted Sir William Walton's ''Facade'' with his wife as one of the two narrators. Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978 after a long illness.
After leaving the music director's post with the Philharmonic in 1969, Mr. Bernstein hardly curtailed his frantic activities. He continued to guest-conduct, to record for Columbia Records, to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera and to play the piano for lieder recitalists. His company, Amberson Productions, which he had formed with his friend Schuyler G. Chapin to handle his diverse interests, expanded into the new field of videocassettes.
Mr. Bernstein, a longtime Democrat and liberal, took a deep interest in politics and was a friend of the Kennedys. His ''Mass'' was dedicated to John F. Kennedy. Among guests at fund-raising parties in his apartment during the late 1960's, one could find some of the leading civil-rights advocates of the period, a form of hospitality that inspired the writer Tom Wolfe to coin the term ''radical chic.'' In his book ''Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,'' Mr. Wolfe described a fund-raising party that Mr. Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers.
During Mr. Bernstein's Philharmonic decade, the orchestra engaged its first black member, the violinist Sanford Allen.
He continued composing, if only in spurts. Late works included ''Jubilee Games,''''Arias and Barcarolles,''''Halil'' and a sequel to his opera ''Trouble in Tahiti'' entitled ''A Quiet Place.'' After its premiere in Houston in 1983, ''A Quiet Place'' was produced at the Vienna State Opera, La Scala and the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Almost to the time of his death, Mr. Bernstein carried on a bewildering variety of activities, rushing about the world with the same tireless abandon that had characterized his life in the days when he was churning out a hit a season on Broadway.
But Broadway had changed by the time Mr. Bernstein's final theatrical score reached the Mark Hellinger Theater in March 1976. The long-awaited work that he and Alan Jay Lerner had composed, ''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,'' closed after seven performances.
He turned up in Israel, where the Israel Philharmonic was putting on a Leonard Bernstein retrospective festival to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut on an Israeli podium. During a two-week period, his music was heard in concert halls, theaters, movie houses and other auditoriums all over the country. In 1988, when he was 70 years old, Mr. Bernstein was named laureate conductor of the Israeli orchestra. That birthday year brought honors from all directions, but none seemed to gratify him more than the celebration staged for him at the Tanglewood Festival, scene of so many triumphs early in his career. On Nov. 14, 1988, to mark the 45th anniversary of his Philharmonic conducting debut, he led the orchestra in an all-Bernstein concert.
Laurel wreaths continued to shower on him in his last decades. Elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982, he was awarded the Academy's Gold Medal three years later. The city of Milan, home of La Scala, also gave him its Gold Medal.
A discordant note sounded in 1989 when he refused to accept a medal from the Bush Administration, apparently as a protest against what he regarded as censorship of an AIDS exhibition by the National Endowment for the Arts. Like many other artists and public figures, he contributed his services at concerts to benefit the fight against AIDS.
Mr. Bernstein's private life, long the subject of rumors in the musical world, became an open book in 1987 when his homosexuality was brought to wide public attention by Joan Peyser's ''Bernstein: A Biography.''
As Age Advances, The Pace Does Too
Far from slowing down as age encroached, Mr. Bernstein seemed to accelerate. Last Christmas he led a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin to celebrate the crumbling of the wall between East and West Germany. With typical flair, he substituted the word ''Freiheit'' (''Freedom'') for the poet's ''Freude'' (''Joy'') in the choral finale. The East German Government bestowed on him its Star of People's Friendship Medal.
Although he had reportedly refused an offer to return to the New York Philharmonic as music director, he was scheduled to conduct six weeks of concerts for the next few seasons. Before collapsing from exhaustion this year in Japan, Mr. Bernstein had taken part in the Pacific Music Festival.
Late in his extraordinarily restless and fruitful life, Mr. Bernstein defended his early decision to spread himself over as many fields of endeavor as he could master. ''I don't want to spend my life, as Toscanini did, studying and restudying the same 50 pieces of music,'' he wrote in The Times.
''It would,'' he continued, ''bore me to death. I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all.''
Photos: Leonard Bernstein (Steve J. Sherman, 1988) (pg. A1); Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic during his farewell concert as he retired as music director in 1969. (Michael Evans/The New York Times); Mr. Bernstein at the keyboard in 1945. (Graphic House); Leonard Bernstein instructing singers from the cast of ''West Side Story'' in 1957. At the piano was Stephen Sondheim, who was co-lyricist. (Friedman-Abeles) (pg. B6)
Robert Bingham Downs (May 25, 1903– February 24, 1991) was a prolificAmerican author and librarian. Downs was an advocate for intellectual freedom as well.[2] Downs spent the majority of his career working against, and voicing opposition to, literary censorship. Downs authored many books and publications regarding the topics of censorship, and on the topics of responsible and efficient leadership in the library context.[2]
Library of Congress Announces Their Books That Changed America Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Books That Changed AmericaPaperback– January 1, 1971
Benjamin Franklin, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity" (1751) In 1751, Peter Collinson, president of the Royal Society, arranged for the publication of a series of letters from Benjamin Franklin, written between 1747 and 1750, describing his experiments with electricity. Through the publication of these experiments, Franklin became the first American to gain an international reputation for his scientific work. In 1753 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his contributions.
Benjamin Franklin, "Poor Richard Improved" (1758) and "The Way to Wealth" As a writer, Benjamin Franklin was best known for the wit and wisdom he shared with the readers of his popular almanac, "Poor Richard," under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders." In 1758, Franklin created a clever preface that repeated a number of his maxims, framed as an event in which Father Abraham advises that those seeking prosperity and virtue should diligently practice frugality, honesty and industry. It was reprinted as "Father Abraham’s Speech" and "The Way to Wealth."
Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" (1776) Published anonymously in Philadelphia in January 1776, "Common Sense" appeared at a time when both separation from Great Britain and reconciliation were being considered. Through simple rational arguments, Thomas Paine focused blame for Colonial America’s troubles on the British king and pointed out the advantages of independence. This popular pamphlet had more than a half-million copies in 25 editions appearing throughout the Colonies within its first year of printing.
Noah Webster, "A Grammatical Institute of the English Language" (1783) Believing that a distinctive American language was essential to creating cultural independence for the new nation, Noah Webster sought to standardize rules for spelling and pronunciation. His "Grammatical Institute" became the popular "blue-backed speller" used to teach a century of American children how to spell and pronounce words. Its royalties provided Webster with the economic independence to develop his American dictionary.
"The Federalist" (1787) Now considered to be the most significant American contribution to political thought, "The Federalist" essays supporting the ratification of the new Constitution first appeared in New York newspapers under the pseudonym "Publius." Although it was widely known that the 85 essays were the work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the initial curious speculation about authorship of specific essays gradually developed into heated controversy. Hamilton left an authorship list with his lawyer before his fatal duel. In his copy, Madison identified the author of each essay with their initials. Thomas Jefferson penned a similar authorship list in his copy. None of these attributions exactly match, and the authorship of several essays is still being debated by scholars.
"A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible" (1788) Hieroglyphic Bibles were popular in the late 18th century as an effective and entertaining way to teach children biblical passages. Isaiah Thomas, the printer of this 1788 edition, is widely acclaimed as America’s first enlightened printer of children’s books and is often compared to John Newbery of London, with whom he shared the motto "Instruction with delight."
Christopher Colles, "A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America" (1789) Irish-born engineer and surveyor Christopher Colles produced what is considered the first road map or guidebook of the United States. It uses a format familiar to modern travelers with each plate consisting of two to three strip maps arranged side by side, covering approximately 12 miles. Colles began this work in 1789 but ended the project in 1792 because few people purchased subscriptions. But he compiled an atlas covering approximately 1,000 miles from Albany, N.Y., to Williamsburg, Va.
Benjamin Franklin, "The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D." (1793) Benjamin Franklin was 65 when he wrote the first part of his autobiography, which focused on his early life to 1730. During the 1780s he added three briefer parts that advanced his story to his 50th year (1756) and revised the first part. The first book-length edition was published in Paris in 1791. The first English edition, a retranslation of this French edition, was published in London in 1793. Franklin’s autobiography still is considered one of the most influential memoirs in American literature.
Amelia Simmons, "American Cookery" (1796) This cornerstone in American cookery is the first cookbook of American authorship to be printed in the United States. Numerous recipes adapting traditional dishes by substituting native American ingredients, such as corn, squash and pumpkin, are printed here for the first time. Simmons’ "Pompkin Pudding," baked in a crust, is the basis for the classic American pumpkin pie. Recipes for cake-like gingerbread are the first known to recommend the use of pearl ash, the forerunner of baking powder.
"New England Primer" (1803) Learning the alphabet went hand in hand with learning Calvinist principles in early America. The phrase "in Adam’s fall, we sinned all," taught children the first letter of the alphabet and the concept of original sin at the same time. More than 6 million copies in 450 editions of the "New England Primer" were printed between 1681 and 1830 and were a part of nearly every child’s life.
Meriwether Lewis, "History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark" (1814) After Meriwether Lewis’s death in September 1809, William Clark engaged Nicholas Biddle to edit the expedition papers. Using the captains’ original journals and those of Sergeants Gass and Ordway, Biddle completed a narrative by July 1811. After delays with the publisher, a two-volume edition of the Corps of Discovery’s travels across the continent was finally available to the public in 1814. More than 20 editions appeared during the 19th century, including German, Dutch and several British editions.
Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820) One of the first works of fiction by an American author to become popular outside the United States, Washington Irving’s "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was first published as part of "The Sketchbook" in 1820. Irving’s vivid imagery involving the wild supernatural pursuit by the Headless Horseman has sustained interest in this popular folktale through many printed editions, as well as film, stage and musical adaptations.
William Holmes McGuffey, "McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer" (1836) William Holmes McGuffey was hired in the 1830s by Truman and Smith, a Cincinnati publishing firm, to write schoolbooks appropriate for children in the expanding nation. His eclectic readers were graded, meaning a student started with the primer and, as his reading abilities improved, moved from the first through the sixth reader. Religious instruction is not included, but a strong moral code is encouraged with stories in which hard work and virtue are rewarded and misdeeds and sloth are punished.
Samuel Goodrich, "Peter Parley’s Universal History" (1837) Samuel Goodrich, using the pseudonym Peter Parley, wrote children’s books with an informal and friendly style as he introduced his young readers to faraway people and places. Goodrich believed that fairy tales and fantasy were not useful and possibly dangerous to children. He entertained them instead with engaging tales from history and geography. His low regard for fiction is ironic in that his accounts of other places and cultures were often misleading and stereotypical, if not completely incorrect.
Frederick Douglass, "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" (1845) Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography is one of the best-written and most widely read slave narratives. It was boldly published less than seven years after Douglass had escaped and before his freedom was purchased. Prefaced by statements of support from his abolitionist friends, William Garrison and Wendell Phillips, Douglass’s book relates his experiences growing up a slave in Maryland and describes the strategies he used to learn to read and write. More than just a personal story of courage, Douglass’s account became a strong testament for the need to abolish slavery.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Scarlet Letter" (1850) "The Scarlet Letter" was the first important novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the leading authors of 19th-century romanticism in American literature. Like many of his works, the novel is set in Puritan New England and examines guilt, sin and evil as inherent human traits. The main character, Hester Prynne, is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" (for adultery) on her chest because of an affair that resulted in an illegitimate child. Meanwhile, her child’s father, a Puritan pastor who has kept their affair secret, holds a high place in the community.
Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick"; or, "The Whale" (1851) Herman Melville’s tale of the Great White Whale and the crazed Captain Ahab who declares he will chase him "round perdition’s flames before I give him up" has become an American myth. Even people who have never read Moby-Dick know the basic plot, and references to it are common in other works of American literature and in popular culture, such as the Star Trek film "The Wrath of Khan" (1982).
Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (1852) With the intention of awakening sympathy for oppressed slaves and encouraging Northerners to disobey the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing her vivid sketches of slave sufferings and family separations. The first version of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" appeared serially between June 1851 and April 1852 in the National Era, an antislavery paper published in Washington, D.C. The first book edition appeared in March 1852 and sold more than 300,000 copies in the first year. This novel was extremely influential in fueling antislavery sentiment during the decade preceding the Civil War.
Henry David Thoreau, "Walden;" or, "Life in the Woods" (1854) While living in solitude in a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., Henry David Thoreau wrote his most famous work, "Walden," a paean to the idea that it is foolish to spend a lifetime seeking material wealth. In his words, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thoreau’s love of nature and his advocacy of a simple life have had a large influence on modern conservation and environmentalist movements.
Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass" (1855) The publication of the first slim edition of Walt Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 was the debut of a masterpiece that shifted the course of American literary history. Refreshing and bold in both theme and style, the book underwent many revisions during Whitman’s lifetime. Over almost 40 years Whitman produced multiple editions of "Leaves of Grass," shaping the book into an ever-transforming kaleidoscope of poems. By his death in 1892, "Leaves" was a thick compendium that represented Whitman’s vision of America over nearly the entire last half of the 19th century. Among the collection’s best-known poems are "I Sing the Body Electric,""Song of Myself," and "O Captain! My Captain!," a metaphorical tribute to the slain Abraham Lincoln.
On this day in 1855 Walt Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, New York; the first edition was published seven weeks later. Over the next thirty-six years Whitman would add many more poems and publish seven more editions, all in an effort to "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"
Louisa May Alcott, "Little Women," or, "Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy" (1868) This first edition of Louisa May Alcott’s "Little Women" was published in 1868 when Louisa was 35 years old. Based on her own experiences growing up as a young woman with three sisters, and illustrated by her youngest sister, May, the novel was an instant success, selling more than 2,000 copies immediately. Several sequels were published, including "Little Men" (1871) and "Jo’s Boys" (1886). Although "Little Women" is set in a very particular place and time in American history, the characters and their relationships have touched generations of readers and still are beloved.
Horatio Alger Jr., "Mark, the Match Boy" (1869) The formulaic juvenile novels of Horatio Alger Jr., are best remembered for the "rags-to-riches" theme they championed. In these stories, poor city boys rose in social status by working hard and being honest. Alger preached respectability and integrity, while disdaining the idle rich and the growing chasm between the poor and the affluent. In fact, the villains in Alger’s stories were almost always rich bankers, lawyers or country squires.
Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The American Woman’s Home" (1869) This classic domestic guide by sisters Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe is dedicated to "the women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the Republic." It includes chapters on healthful cookery, home decoration, exercise, cleanliness, good air ventilation and heat, etiquette, sewing, gardening and care of children, the sick, the aged and domestic animals. Intended to elevate the "woman’s sphere" of household management to a respectable profession based on scientific principles, it became the standard domestic handbook.
Mark Twain, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884) Novelist Ernest Hemingway famously said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ... All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." During their trip down the Mississippi on a raft, Twain depicts in a satirical and humorous way Huck and Jim’s encounters with hypocrisy, racism, violence and other evils of American society. His use in serious literature of a lively, simple American language full of dialect and colloquial expressions paved the way for many later writers, including Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Emily Dickinson, "Poems"(1890) Very few of the nearly 1,800 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote were published during her lifetime and, even then, they were heavily edited to conform to the poetic conventions of their time. A complete edition of her unedited work was not published until 1955. Her idiosyncratic structure and rhyming schemes have inspired later poets.
Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives" (1890) An early example of photojournalism as vehicle for social change, Riis’s book demonstrated to the middle and upper classes of New York City the slum-like conditions of the tenements of the Lower East Side. Following the book’s publication (and the resulting public uproar), proper sewers, plumbing and trash collection eventually came to the Lower East Side.
Stephen Crane, "The Red Badge of Courage" (1895) One of the most influential works in American literature, Stephen Crane’s "The Red Badge of Courage" has been called the greatest novel about the American Civil War. The tale of a young recruit in the Civil War who learns the cruelty of war made Crane an international success. The work is notable for its vivid depiction of the internal conflict of its main character – most war novels until that time focused more on the battles than on their characters.
L. Frank Baum, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1900) "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," published in 1900, is the first fantasy written by an American to enjoy an immediate success upon publication. So powerful was its effect on the American imagination, so evocative its use of the forces of nature in its plots, so charming its invitation to children of all ages to look for the element of wonder in the world around them that author L. Frank Baum was forced by demand to create book after book about Dorothy and her friends – including the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and Glinda the Good Witch.
Sarah H. Bradford, "Harriet, the Moses of Her People" (1901) Harriet Tubman is celebrated for her courage and skill in guiding many escaping slave parties northward along the Underground Railroad to freedom. She also served as a scout and a nurse during the Civil War. In order to raise funds for Tubman’s support in 1869 and again in 1886, Sarah Hopkins Bradford published accounts of Tubman’s experiences as a young slave and her daring efforts to rescue family and friends from slavery.
Jack London, "The Call of the Wild" (1903) Jack London’s experiences during the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon were the inspiration for "The Call of the Wild." He saw the way dogsled teams behaved and how their owners treated (and mistreated) them. In the book, the dog Buck’s comfortable life is upended when gold is discovered in the Klondike. From then on, survival of the fittest becomes Buck’s mantra as he learns to confront and survive the harsh realities of his new life as a sled dog.
W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903) "Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The ‘Souls of Black Folk’ occupies this rare position," said Du Bois biographer Manning Marable. Du Bois’s work was so influential that it is impossible to consider the civil rights movement’s roots without first looking to this groundbreaking work.
Ida Tarbell, "The History of Standard Oil" (1904) Journalist Ida Tarbell wrote her exposé of the monopolistic practices of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company as a serialized work in McClure’s Magazine. The breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into 34 "baby Standards" can be attributed in large part to Tarbell’s masterly muckraking.
Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle" (1906) An early example of investigative journalism, this graphic exposé of the Chicago meat-packing industry presented as a novel was one of the first works of fiction to lead directly to national legislation. The federal meat-inspection law and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 established the agency that eventually became the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.
Henry Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams" (1907) The dawn of the 20th century and the changes it brought are the subjects of Henry Adams’ "education." Adams lived through the Civil War and died just before World War I. During that time, he witnessed cataclysmic transformations in technology, society and politics. Adams believed that his traditional education left him ill-prepared for these changes and that his life experiences provided a better education. One survey called it the greatest nonfiction English-language book of the last century.
William James, "Pragmatism" (1907) "Pragmatism" was America’s first major contribution to philosophy, and it is an ideal rooted in the American ethos of no-nonsense solutions to real problems. Although James did not originate the idea, he popularized the philosophy through his voluminous writings.
Zane Grey, "Riders of the Purple Sage" (1912) "Riders of the Purple Sage," Zane Grey’s best-known novel, was originally published in 1912. The Western genre had just evolved from the popular dime novels and penny dreadfuls of the late 19th century. This story of a gun-slinging avenger who saves a young and beautiful woman from marrying against her will played a significant role in shaping the formula of the popular Western genre begun by Owen Wister in "The Virginian" (1904).
Edgar Rice Burroughs, "Tarzan of the Apes" (1914) "Tarzan of the Apes" is the first in a series of books about the popular man who was raised by and lived among the apes. With its universal themes of honesty, heroism and bravery, the series has never lost popularity. Countless Tarzan adaptations have been filmed for television and the silver screen, including an animated version currently in production.
Margaret Sanger, "Family Limitation" (1914) While working as a nurse in the New York slums, Margaret Sanger witnessed the plight of poor women suffering from frequent pregnancies and self-induced abortion. Believing that these women had the right to control their reproductive health, Sanger published this pamphlet that simply explained how to prevent pregnancy. Distribution through the mails was blocked by enforcement of the Comstock Law, which banned mailing of materials judged to be obscene. However, several hundred thousand copies were distributed through the first family-planning and birth control clinic Sanger established in Brooklyn in 1916 and by networks of active women at rallies and political meetings.
William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All" (1923) A practicing physician for more than 40 years, William Carlos Williams became an experimenter, innovator and revolutionary figure in American poetry. In reaction against the rigid, rhyming format of 19th-century poets, Williams, his friend Ezra Pound and other early-20th-century poets formed the core of what became known as the "Imagist" movement. Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme.
Robert Frost, "New Hampshire" (1923) Frost received his first of four Pulitzer Prizes for this anthology, which contains some of his most famous poems, including "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Fire and Ice." One of the best-known American poets of his time, Frost became principally associated with the life and landscape of New England. Although he employed traditional verse forms and metrics and remained aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his day, poems featured language as it is actually spoken as well as psychological complexity and layers of ambiguity and irony.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby" (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the major American writers of the 20th century, is a figure whose life and works embody powerful myths about the American Dream of success. "The Great Gatsby," considered by many to be Fitzgerald’s finest work and the book for which he is best known, is a portrait of the Jazz Age (1920s) in all its decadence and excess. Exploring the themes of class, wealth and social status, Fitzgerald takes a cynical look at the pursuit of wealth among a group of people for whom pleasure is the chief goal. "The Great Gatsby" captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned a permanent place in American mythology.
Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues" (1925) Langston Hughes was one of the greatest poets of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s. His poem "The Weary Blues," also the title of this poetry collection, won first prize in a contest held by Opportunity magazine. After the awards ceremony, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten approached Hughes about putting together a book of verse and got him a contract with his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Van Vechten contributed an essay, "Introducing Langston Hughes," to the volume. The book laid the foundation for Hughes’s literary career, and several poems remain popular with his admirers.
William Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury" (1929) "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner’s fourth novel, was his own favorite, and many critics believe it is his masterpiece. Set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Miss., as are most of Faulkner’s novels, "The Sound and the Fury" uses the American South as a metaphor for a civilization in decline. Depicting the post-Civil War decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family, the novel is divided into four parts, each told by a different narrator. Much of the novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character’s thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way human minds actually work. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950 and France’s Legion of Honor in 1951.
Dashiell Hammett, "Red Harvest" (1929) Dashiell Hammett’s first novel introduced a wide audience to the so-called "hard-boiled" detective thriller with its depiction of crime and violence without any hint of sentimentality. The creator of classics such as "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man," shocked readers with such dialogue as "We bumped over dead Hank O’Meara’s legs and headed for home."
Irma Rombauer, "Joy of Cooking" (1931) Until Irma Rombauer published "Joy of Cooking," most American cookbooks were little more than a series of paragraphs that incorporated ingredient amounts (if they were provided at all) with some vague advice about how to put them all together to achieve the desired results. Rombauer changed all that by beginning her recipes with ingredient lists and offering precise directions along with her own personal and friendly anecdotes. A modest success initially, the book went on to sell nearly 18 million copies in its various editions.
Margaret Mitchell, "Gone With the Wind" (1936) The most popular romance novel of all time was the basis for the most popular movie of all time (in today’s dollars). Margaret Mitchell’s book, set in the South during the Civil War, won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and it remains popular, despite charges that its author had a blind eye regarding the horrors of slavery.
Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (1936) The progenitor of all self-help books, Dale Carnegie’s volume has sold 15 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" has also spawned hundreds of other books, many of them imitators, written to advise on everything from improving one’s relationships to beefing up one’s bank account. Carnegie acknowledged that he was inspired by Benjamin Franklin, a young man who proclaimed that "God helps them that helped themselves" as a way to get ahead in life.
Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937) Although it was published in 1937, it was not until the 1970s that "Their Eyes Were Watching God" became regarded as a masterwork. It had initially been rejected by African American critics as facile and simplistic, in part because its characters spoke in dialect. Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. magazine essay, "Looking for Zora," led to a critical reevaluation of the book, which is now considered to have paved the way for younger black writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.
Federal Writers’ Project, "Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures" (1937) "Idaho" was the first in the popular American Guide Series of the Federal Writers’ Project, which ended in 1943. The project employed more than 6,000 writers and was one of the many programs of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era federal government employment program. These travel guides cover the lower 48 states plus the Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Each volume details a state’s history, geography and culture and includes photographs, maps and drawings.
Thornton Wilder, "Our Town: A Play" (1938) Winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, "Our Town" is among the most-performed plays of the 20th century. Those who see it relate immediately to its universal themes of the importance of everyday occurrences, relationships among friends and family and an appreciation of the brevity of life.
"Alcoholics Anonymous" (1939) The famous 12-step program for stopping an addiction has sold more than 30 million copies. Millions of men and women worldwide have turned to the program co-founded by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith to recover from alcoholism. The "Big Book," as it is known, spawned similar programs for other forms of addiction.
John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) Few novels can claim that their message led to actual legislation, but "The Grapes of Wrath" did just that. Its story of the travails of Oklahoma migrants during the Great Depression ignited a movement in Congress to pass laws benefiting farmworkers. When Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962, the committee specifically cited this novel as one of the main reasons for the award.
Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940) Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) depicts war not as glorious but disillusioning. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the war as the background for his best-selling novel, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and became a literary triumph. Based on his achievement in this and other noted works, he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
Richard Wright, "Native Son" (1940) Among the first widely successful novels by an African American, "Native Son" boldly described a racist society that was unfamiliar to most Americans. As literary critic Irving Howe said in his 1963 essay "Black Boys and Native Sons,""The day ‘Native Son’ appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies."
Betty Smith, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1943) "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the account of a girl growing up in the tenements of turn-of-the-20th-century Brooklyn. An early socially conscious novel, the book examines poverty, alcoholism, gender roles, loss of innocence and the struggle to live the American Dream in an inner city neighborhood of Irish American immigrants. The book was enormously popular and became a film directed by Elia Kazan.
Benjamin A. Botkin, "A Treasury of American Folklore" (1944) Benjamin Botkin headed the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folksong (now the American Folklife Center) between 1943 and 1945 and previously served as national folklore editor of the Federal Writers’ Project (1938–39), a program of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Depression. Botkin was one of the New Deal folklorists who persuasively argued that folklore was relevant in the present and that it was not something that should be studied merely for its historical value. This book features illustrations by Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s foremost realist painters.
Gwendolyn Brooks, "A Street in Bronzeville" (1945) "A Street in Bronzeville" was Brooks’s first book of poetry. It details, in stark terms, the oppression of blacks in a Chicago neighborhood. Critics hailed the book, and in 1950 Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress in 1985.
Benjamin Spock, "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" (1946) Dr. Spock’s guidebook turned common wisdom about child-rearing on its head. Spock argued that babies did not have to be on a rigid schedule, that children should be treated with a great deal of affection, and that parents should use their own common sense when making child-rearing decisions. Millions of parents worldwide have followed his advice.
Eugene O’Neill, "The Iceman Cometh" (1946) Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill’s play about anarchism, socialism and pipe dreams is one of his most-admired but least-performed works, probably because of its more than four-and-a-half-hour running time. Set in 1912 in the seedy Last Chance Saloon in New York City, the play depicts the bar’s drunk and delusional patrons bickering while awaiting the arrival of Hickey, a traveling salesman whose visits are the highlight of their hopeless lives. However, Hickey’s arrival throws them into turmoil when he arrives sober, wanting them to face their delusions.
Margaret Wise Brown, "Goodnight Moon" (1947) This bedtime story has been a favorite of young people for generations, beloved as much for its rhyming story as for its carefully detailed illustrations by Clement Hurd. Millions have read it (and had it read to them). "Goodnight Moon" has been referred to as the perfect bedtime book.
Tennessee Williams, "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) A landmark work, which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, "A Streetcar Named Desire" thrilled and shocked audiences with its melodramatic look at a clash of cultures. These cultures are embodied in the two main characters – Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle whose genteel pretensions thinly mask alcoholism and delusions of grandeur, and Stanley Kowalski, a representative of the industrial, urban working class. Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the brutish and sensual Stanley in both the original stage production and the film adaptation has become an icon of American culture.
Alfred C. Kinsey, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) Alfred Kinsey created a firestorm when he published this volume on men in 1948 and a companion on women five years later. No one had ever reported on such taboo subjects before and no one had used scientific data in such detail to challenge the prevailing notions of sexual behavior. Kinsey’s openness regarding human sexuality was a harbinger of the 1960s sexual revolution in America.
J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) Since his debut in 1951 as the narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye," 16-year-old Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with adolescent alienation and angst. The influential story concerns three days after Holden has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, he wanders New York City searching for truth and rails against the phoniness of the adult world. Holden is the first great American antihero, and his attitudes influenced the Beat generation of the 1950s as well as the hippies of the 1960s. "The Catcher in the Rye" is one of the most translated, taught and reprinted books and has sold some 65 million copies.
Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man" (1952) Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" is told by an unnamed narrator who views himself as someone many in society do not see, much less pay attention to. Ellison addresses what it means to be an African-American in a world hostile to the rights of a minority, on the cusp of the emerging civil rights movement that was to change society irrevocably.
E.B. White, "Charlotte’s Web" (1952) According to Publishers Weekly, "Charlotte’s Web" is the best-selling paperback for children of all time. One reason may be that, although it was written for children, reading it is just as enjoyable for adults. The book is especially notable for the way it treats death as a natural and inevitable part of life in a way that is palatable for young people.
Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) "Fahrenheit 451" is Ray Bradbury’s disturbing vision of a future United States in which books are outlawed and burned. Even though interpretations of the novel have primarily focused on the historical role of book-burning as a means of censorship, Bradbury has said that the novel is about how television reduces knowledge to factoids and destroys interest in reading. The book inspired a 1966 film by Francois Truffaut and a subsequent BBC symphony. Its name comes from the minimum temperature at which paper catches fire by spontaneous combustion.
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"(1956) Allen Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" (first published as the title poem of a collection) established him as an important poet and the voice of the Beat Generation of the 1950s. Because of the boldness of the poem’s language and subject matter, it became the subject of an obscenity trial in San Francisco in which it was exonerated after witnesses testified to its redeeming social value. Ginsberg’s work had great influence on later generations of poets and on the youth culture of the 1960s.
Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) Although mainstream critics reacted poorly to "Atlas Shrugged," it was a popular success. Set in what novelist and philosopher Rand called "the day after tomorrow," the book depicts a United States caught up in a crisis caused by a corrupt establishment of government regulators and business interests. The book’s negative view of government and its support of unimpeded capitalism as the highest moral objective have influenced libertarians and those who advocate a smaller government.
Dr. Seuss, "The Cat in the Hat" (1957) Theodore Seuss Geisel was removed as editor of the campus humor magazine while a student at Dartmouth College after too much reveling with fellow students. In spite of this Prohibition-era setback to his writing career, he continued to contribute to the magazine pseudonymously, signing his work "Seuss." This is the first known use of his pseudonym, which became famous in children’s literature when it evolved into "Dr. Seuss.""The Cat in the Hat" is considered the most important book of his career. More than 200 million Dr. Seuss books have been sold around the world.
Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" (1957) The defining novel of the 1950s Beat Generation (which Kerouac named), "On the Road" is a semiautobiographical tale of a bohemian cross-country adventure, narrated by character Sal Paradise. Kerouac’s odyssey has influenced artists such as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Hunter S. Thompson and films such as "Easy Rider.""On the Road" has achieved a mythic status in part because it portrays the restless energy and desire for freedom that makes people take off to see the world.
Harper Lee, "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960) This 1960 Pulitzer Prize winner was an immediate critical and financial success for its author, with more than 30 million copies in print to date. Harper Lee created one of the most enduring and heroic characters in all of American literature in Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer who defended a wrongly accused black man. The book’s importance was recognized by the 1961 Washington Post reviewer: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’"
Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" (1961) Joseph’s Heller’s "Catch-22," an irreverent World War II novel and a satiric treatment of military bureaucracy, has had such a penetrating effect that its title has become synonymous with "no-win situation." Heller’s novel is a black comedy, filled with orders from above that make no sense and a main character, Yossarian, who just wants to stay alive. He pleads insanity but is caught in the famous catch: "Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy." The novel became a cult classic for its biting indictment of war.
Robert E. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) The first science fiction novel to become a bestseller, "Stranger in a Strange Land" is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised on Mars by Martians (his parents were on the first expedition to Mars and he was orphaned when the crew perished) who returns to Earth about 20 years later. Smith has psychic powers but complete ignorance of human mores. The book is considered a classic in its genre.
Ezra Jack Keats, "The Snowy Day" (1962) Ezra Jack Keats’s "The Snowy Day" was the first full-color picture book with an African-American as the main character. The book changed the field of children’s literature forever, and Keats was recognized by winning the 1963 Caldecott Medal (the most prestigious American award for children’s books) for his landmark effort.
Maurice Sendak, "Where the Wild Things Are" (1963) "It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood – the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of All Wild Things – that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have," Maurice Sendak said in his Caldecott Medal acceptance speech on June 30, 1964. Sendak called Max, the hero of "Where the Wild Things Are," his "bravest and therefore my dearest creation." Max, who is sent to his room with nothing to eat, sails to where the wild things are and becomes their king.
James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time" (1963) One of the most important books ever published on race relations, Baldwin’s two-essay work comprises a letter written to his nephew on the role of race in United States history and a discussion of how religion and race influence each other. Baldwin’s angry prose is balanced by his overall belief that love and understanding can overcome strife.
Betty Friedan, "The Feminine Mystique" (1963) By debunking the "feminine mystique" that middle-class women were happy and fulfilled as housewives and mothers, Betty Friedan inspired the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Friedan advocates that women need meaningful work and encourages them to avoid the trap of the "feminine mystique" by pursuing education and careers. By 2000 this touchstone of the women’s movement had sold 3 million copies and was translated into several languages.
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965) When "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (born Malcolm Little) was published, The New York Times called it a "brilliant, painful, important book," and it has become a classic American autobiography. Written in collaboration with Alex Haley (author of "Roots"), the book expressed for many African-Americans what the mainstream civil rights movement did not: their anger and frustration with the intractability of racial injustice.
Ralph Nader, "Unsafe at Any Speed" (1965) Nader’s book was a landmark in the field of auto safety and made him a household name. It detailed how automakers resisted putting safety features, such as seat belts, in their cars and resulted in the federal government’s taking a lead role in the area of auto safety.
Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring" (1962) A marine biologist and writer, Rachel Carson is considered a founder of the contemporary environmental protection movement. She drew attention to the adverse effects of pesticides, especially that of DDT on bird populations, in her book "Silent Spring," a 1963 National Book Association Nonfiction Finalist. At a time when technological solutions were the norm, she pointed out that man-made poisons introduced into natural systems can harm not only nature, but also humans. Her book met with great success and because of heightened public awareness, DDT was banned.
Truman Capote, "In Cold Blood" (1966) A 300-word article in The New York Times about a murder led Truman Capote to travel with his childhood friend Harper Lee to Holcomb, Kan., to research his nonfiction novel, which is considered one of the greatest true-crime books ever written. Capote said the novel was an attempt to establish a serious new literary form, the "nonfiction novel," a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless entirely factual. The book was an instant success and was made into a film.
James D. Watson, "The Double Helix" (1968) James D. Watson’s personal account of the discovery of DNA changed the way Americans regarded the genre of the scientific memoir and set a new standard for first-person accounts. Dealing with personalities, controversies and conflicts, the book also changed the way the public thought about how science and scientists work, showing that scientific enterprise can at times be a messy and cutthroat business.
Dee Brown, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" (1970) Until librarian Dee Brown wrote his history of Native Americans in the West, few Americans knew the details of the unjust treatment of Indians. Brown scoured both well-known and little-known sources for his documentary on the massacres, broken promises and other atrocities suffered by Indians. The book has never gone out of print and has sold more than 4 million copies.
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, "Our Bodies, Ourselves" (1971) In the early 1970s a dozen Boston feminists collaborated in this groundbreaking publication that presented accurate information on women’s health and sexuality based on their own experiences. Advocating improved doctor-patient communication and shared decision-making, "Our Bodies, Ourselves" explored ways for women to take charge of their own health issues and to work for political and cultural change that would ameliorate women’s lives.
Carl Sagan, "Cosmos" (1980) Carl Sagan’s classic, bestselling science book accompanied his avidly followed television series, "Cosmos." In an accessible way, Sagan covered a broad range of scientific topics and made the history and excitement of science understandable and enjoyable for Americans and then for an international audience. The book offers a glimpse of Sagan’s personal vision of what it means to be human.
Toni Morrison, "Beloved" (1987) Toni Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her post-Civil War novel based on the true story of an escaped slave and the tragic consequences when a posse comes to reclaim her. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, and in 2006 The New York Times named "Beloved""the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years."
Randy Shilts, "And the Band Played On" (1987) "And the Band Played On" is the story of how the AIDS epidemic spread and how the government’s initial indifference to the disease allowed its spread and gave urgency to devoting government resources to fighting the virus. Shilts’s investigation has been compared to other works that led to increased efforts toward public safety, such as Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle."
César Chávez, "The Words of César Chávez" (2002) César Chávez, founder of the United Farm Workers, was as impassioned as he was undeterred in his quest for better working conditions for farm workers. He was a natural communicator whose speeches and writings led to many improvements in wages and working conditions.
《啟蒙運動：一種解讀：現代異教精神的掘起》The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism , 1966 《啟蒙運動：一種解讀：自由之科學》The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom , 1969 .
Photographs, clockwise from left: Keystone/Corbis; Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Stapleton Collection/Corbis
Clockwise from above: Le Corbusier brought a modernist sensibility to architecture, Flaubert to the novel and Baudelaire to poetry.
By LEE SIEGEL
Published: December 30, 2007
Thomas Mann was an archmodernist, and this was his favorite story: One day, Gustave Flaubert was out walking with his sister. Ferociously antibourgeois, Flaubert lived alone, unconsoled and unencumbered by marriage or family. His novels mocked and maligned the French middle class, ironizing it into oblivion. He was a great frequenter of brothels and had fornicated his way through Paris and Cairo. And yet here he was out for a stroll, suddenly stopping in his tracks before a small house surrounded by a white picket fence.
MODERNISM
The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond.
In the yard, a solid middle-class father played with his typical middle-class children while wife and mother looked lovingly on. The enemy! Yet instead of holding his nose, Flaubert gestured toward the house and exclaimed, without irony: “Ils sont dans le vrai!” (“They are in the truth!”) For Mann, the delightful incident illustrated the tension between the outrage at conventional life and the yearning to be part of it that tore at modernist psyches. There is more to aesthetic rebellion than offends the eye. Surprisingly, the anecdote doesn’t appear in Peter Gay’s “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,” a massive history of the movement in all its artistic forms — painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, architecture, design, film (though, bafflingly, not photography, one of the chief catalysts of the modernist revolution). It’s all the more surprising because I once heard Gay cite Flaubert’s droll little stroll in a lecture, after which he brilliantly analyzed the episode’s every paradoxical nuance. If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay. He is the country’s pre-eminent cultural historian and the author of masterpieces of social and intellectual reimagining including “The Enlightenment,” “Weimar Culture,” “Freud” and the towering multi-volume study “The Bourgeois Experience.” Such achievements make it all the more dismaying to find that in this rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study, Gay’s formidable syntheses often run aground on lapses of knowledge and judgment. Gay’s new book is the only one I’m aware of that tries to make sense of modernism in all its incarnations. Gay takes up his subject from the outset of the movement in the late 19th century to what he considers its continued vitality after World War II and its eventual death and possible resurrection in our own time. This comprehensiveness makes “Modernism” essential, especially for the general reader who wants to get a handle on Western culture’s most enigmatic phase. (A gift of this book and “The Rest Is Noise,” Alex Ross’s magisterial history of modern music, would equal about three years of college.) But unlike Henry Moore’s giant sculptures, in which negative space plays a positive role, Gay’s omissions and miscomprehensions cry out to be filled in and corrected. And yet, at times, the book is so nimbly erudite that its stubborn flaws make it all the more richly challenging. For example, Gay knows that the image of the modernist as committed subverter of custom and convention is hackneyed. He writes in his introductory chapter that the idea of modernists as “scofflaws or mavericks massed against the solid verities of time-honored high culture and, usually, Christian faith” is one of the avant-garde’s “cherished fairy tales.” The Impressionists, for instance, didn’t care a whit about outraging official culture, or Christianity. But because Gay needs the “lure of heresy” to thematically structure his book, he often ends up not just reinforcing the caricature of modernists as unhappy outsiders and elitist malcontents, but inflating it. It is almost as if Gay were perversely determined to undermine his own profound awareness of modernism’s multifaceted and contradictory nature. On the one hand he astutely writes, “The sources of the modernist rebellion in the arts rose from all quarters of the political, intellectual and emotional world.” On the other he speaks of “two essentially distinct areas of art, high art and low, which modernists had thought it crucial to keep apart.” But it was the modernists who brought the energy of everyday life into high art! Think of the scraps of newspapers and advertisements in the collages ofPicasso and Braque; of the parodic newspaper headlines and the music hall ditties in Joyce’s “Ulysses”; of Leopold Bloom wiping himself with a newspaper in the notorious book that appalled Virginia Woolf (and delighted T. S. Eliot); or of the Dadaists’ total collapse of serious art into the quotidian, or Mahler’s quotations of nursery rhymes or Stravinsky’s saxophones — the list of the modernists’ elitist democratizations is interminable. What a relief it is to read Gay debunking the myth of Kafka the grim depressive with a description of friends who “laughed heartily” when Kafka read drafts to them. Kafka’s fiction is about the comedy of sexual frustration and the humor of competitive paranoia, among other things. What really broke up Kafka’s friends was the first sentence of “The Trial”: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Neurotic guilt was their collective métier. Yet although Gay writes beautifully about Kafka, about Proust on grief, about authentic middle-class hunger for modernist liberations and about the final scene of recognition and unspeakable shame in Chaplin’s “City Lights” — to take just four examples among many — he seems to find it more useful to traffic in cardboard simplicities. There are a disconcerting number of these. Gauguin did not, for example, abruptly quit his job as a stockbroker in Paris, as both popular legend and Gay would have it. He was fired by his firm, which had just gone under. You might say it was respectable society that had sacrificed Gauguin to the bottom line running just underneath bourgeois rhetoric about compassion and decency. No wonder the artist took off for what seemed to be the primitive explicitness of Tahiti. Nor did the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch pay, as Gay writes, “the usual price” for his unsettling innovations. Munch was not doomed to “being misunderstood, neglected, rejected,” or to enjoying only “occasional appreciation.” He sold his first paintings at age 18 and three years later was invited to exhibit in the Norwegian section of the World’s Fair in Antwerp. At 26 he had his first one-man show, hailed by prominent art critics; two years later, Norway’s National Gallery, the country’s most prestigious art museum, purchased one of Munch’s works. By the time he was 40, Munch enjoyed international renown and the largesse of several wealthy patrons. And it’s right for Gay to refer to Munch’s countryman, the odd, fierce peasant novelist Knut Hamsun, as a public admirer of the Nazis who wrote enthusiastically about them even as the Germans were occupying Norway. But it is wrong for Gay not to add that during his one meeting with Hitler, Hamsun so aggressively pressed the Führer to stop executing Norwegian resistance fighters and to loosen his repressive hold on the country that Hitler loathed Hamsun for his insolent disrespect. As for Gay’s Parisian modernist “outsiders,” if the French provided the most extreme assaults on Western rationality — Rimbaud’s “disorientation of the senses,” André Breton’s celebration of primal instincts stored in the unconscious, André Gide’s enthusiasm for the “motiveless” crime, Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” Maurice Blanchot’s declaration of the death of the author — the reason was simple. It was not that French conditions kept creating figures resembling Baudelaire, about whom Gay histrionically writes that he was “an outcast aware of his loneliness” — though, as Gay admits, Baudelaire lived at the center of Parisian cultural energy. In France, civilization is invincible and eternal. Its immutable stability makes opposition to it all the more cheerfully ferocious. You can hurl the most incredible rhetorical and intellectual violence against French custom and convention and still have time for some conversation in the cafe, un peu de vin, a delicious dinner and, of course, l’amour. And in the morning, you extricate yourself from such sophisticated coddling — the result of centuries of art and artifice — and rush back to the theoretical barricades. But Gay, in thrall to Freud, prefers to root the modernists’ adventures in family trauma. Baudelaire, he writes, suffered a “revolution at home” after his father died and his mother married a “dashing” military officer. The poet and essayist, Gay simplistically tells us, “never quite worked through his expulsion from paradise.” Yet you would think that the author of the culture-shifting “Fleurs du Mal,” and of the equally seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” had worked his way through everything that required working through. In Charles Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” a shrewd entrepreneur constantly condescends to his inventor friend by stressing what it pleases him to see as his friend’s pathetically impractical maladaptation to life. In fact, the inventor is fundamentally nothing of the kind. In a similar way, Gay falsely stresses the “cherished fairy tale” of modernist darkness, depression and miserable discontent. But Dada, for instance, was not “wholly negative,” as Gay describes it, any more than Munch or Kafka was wholly negative. Hannah Höch’s and Sophie Tauber’s dolls and puppets, Duchamp’s optical illusions in the form of whimsical machines and especially the cool, broken harmonies of Kurt Schwitters’s collages and fantastical life-size constructions were all imbued with the positive spirit of humor and play. Even more radical are Gay’s misperceptions of modernism’s fundamental nature. It is not accurate to say, as Gay does, that in modernist fiction, “modernist mirrors reflected mainly the author.” Joyce, Proust, Mann, Lawrence, Woolf, Gide all wrote great realist novels that were as concerned with minutely noting the external world as with projecting intensely personal visions of the world. Elsewhere, Gay seems to acknowledge this, too. About Baudelaire, he writes, “Like the modernists who came after him, he was a realist with a difference.” Perhaps Gay simply wants to say that Baudelaire is a symbolist poet, and that surreal or highly subjective images coexist in his poetry alongside “realist” evocations of mental states and physical reality. In any case, it would have been helpful for Gay to explain his nice phrase “realist with a difference” and then go on to apply it to his other modernists. But he never elaborates on the distinction and never returns to it. On the disheartening conundrum of modernists and politics, Gay is at his most bewildering. He writes of “liberalism, that fundamental principle of modernism.” He seems to have momentarily forgotten that Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Céline on the right, and Picasso, Gide, Breton and the Russian modernists (barely alluded to by Gay) on the left, were about as far from liberalism as a Cubist painting is from an iPod — not to mention the toxically snobbish Woolf, who was neither right nor too much left. For Gay, reactionaries like Eliot and Hamsun were “anti-modern modernists.” But he does not try to account for the fact that reactionaries like the Italian Futurists worshipped modernity’s speed and power. Nor does he grapple with what you might call hypermodernists: the utopian Russian avant-garde, who, far from being political reactionaries, threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. The question of why so many modernists were drawn to regimes that were sick parodies of the modernist quest for transcendence and absolutes is unanswerable. But perhaps here is where some psychologizing could be useful. Perhaps beleaguered by the mental burden of their intensely personal visions, the modernists looked at a totalitarian regime’s real-life version of their fanaticism and perfectionism and wearily exclaimed, “They are in the truth!” Thus they contrived the delusion that actual power made a home somewhere in the world for their solitary ideals. It could have been a mental trick that protected their egos from mortal wounds. Gay traces the modernist impulse through the post-World War II period to our own time, where he finds it in the work of Frank Gehry and Gabriel García Márquez. Yet he doesn’t have much admiration for the postwar epoch. “There was much talent and little genius,” he writes about the decades after 1945. Is it so, however, that T. S. Eliot andWallace Stevens “produced no creditable heirs”? Not even W. H. Auden, who is not discussed by Gay? (“Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm” — in one stroke, Auden could invoke modernist despair and affirm human hope.) But then, Gay never discusses Brecht’s dramas, either, though those quintessentially modernist works changed theater forever, especially in the ’60s. Conversely, Gay’s survey of postwar American art almost exclusively refers to the intensely biased and partisan — toward his own dubious theories, that is — Clement Greenberg, which is like quoting a Jesuit on the character and history of Protestantism. Indeed, Gay’s inclusion of postwar art in a history of modernism makes little sense. Modernism was modernism only when the rising foundations, beams and struts of modernity were still visible. Once modernity became an enveloping condition, artists who were part of that condition — from Pollock to Warhol, from Robbe-Grillet to Grass, from Artaud to Pinter — rebelled as much against modernist Prometheanism as against the modern inadequacies that provoked it. The Abstract Expressionists’ pure formalism was the end of the road for painting, not the exciting beginning of a new frontier. Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian all thought they had embodied a universal spiritual language in aesthetic form. Rothko wanted only that his canvases make people cry. DeKooning painted his scary women to make viewers laugh when they recalled Western art’s idealizations of women. And Pollock wanted nothing specific at all — Greenberg stuffed his theories into Pollock’s mouth. After modernity’s catastrophic climaxes — the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki — postwar art aimed both to lower the boom on modernist euphoria and to ridicule modernism’s earnest despondency. Mann may not have been right when he wrote in his novel “Doctor Faustus” that modernism could only produce works of art that parodied earlier epochs. But in our own time, we seem mostly to be surrounded by art that parodies the various strains of modernism. For all that, it’s painful to list the inadequacies in “Modernism.” Despite its failings, Gay’s book touches on so many relevant ideas and issues, subjects and themes, that it rouses us to a keen awareness of our own condition. Consider the second part of his thesis. Gay argues that along with the “lure of heresy,” what characterized the modernist rebellion was its “celebration of subjectivity.” If there’s anything that speaks to us now, it is the question of the “I,” that barbell of a pronoun that is so hard to lift in just the right expressive way. It is often provocative to watch Gay pursue modernist representations of the self. Yet you wish that in Gay’s countless references to what he regards as the modernists’ cultivation of inwardness, he had made an important distinction between the modernists and the Romantics. It was the Romantics who stressed subjectivity. By contrast, the modernists emphasized the idiosyncrasy of personal vision as a way to flee from subjectivity. Knut Hamsun called this an “unselfish inwardness.” Gay means the same thing when he writes of “disinterested subjectivity” in his discussion of “Ulysses.” But he never returns to the idea. The single reference Gay does make to Romantic inwardness occurs in the chapter on Baudelaire. It’s anybody’s guess as to what Gay means when he writes that the most sophisticated Romantics rejected “unchecked subjectivity.” Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Goethe in “Werther” — all these “sophisticated” Romantic authors were, by the standards of their age, “unchecked” in their subjective outpourings. But Gay seems to think it was the Romantics, not the modernists, who restrained their introspections. On the contrary. Every modern revolution finds its point of resistance in the personal experience of those in revolt — that is, in a heightened subjectivity. The Romantics substituted genius and unique personality for aristocratic birthright and class, thus giving birth to the bourgeoisie. As Rousseau famously wrote, “I feel my heart, and therefore I know humankind.” But by the time the modernists came along, the bourgeoisie had conventionalized Romantic individualism into the petty assertions of ego. And so the modernists sought to replace personality. They dissolved it in an impersonal creative vision that was nevertheless uniquely individual. Unselfish inwardness. When Eliot wrote that poetry was “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” he was thinking along Hamsun’s lines. “The Wasteland” doesn’t tell us anything specific about Eliot’s personality, but it could have been produced only by Eliot’s personality. To put it another way, the Romantics exalted the self, but the modernists exalted the idiosyncratic — the intensely individualistic — escape from self. Perhaps the bourgeoisie’s origins as the revolutionary class account for its facile assimilations of cultural subversions. Throughout his book, Gay marvels at the middle class’s capacity to absorb its adversaries. It’s an old story. But there is a difference between Artaud and HBO. We have exhausted Romantic individualism, and we have twisted the uniquely individual, modernist escape from the self into “self-expression.” Expression is everywhere nowadays, but true art has grown indistinct and indefinable. We seem now to be living in a world where everyone has an artistic temperament — emotive and touchy, cold and self-obsessed — yet few people have the artistic gift. We are all outsiders, and we are all living in our own truth.
Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” will be published next month.
Ruth Gay, a writer known for her nonfiction books documenting Jewish life in the Old World and the New, died on Tuesday in the Bronx. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan. She had been suffering from leukemia, and died at Calvary Hospital, her family said. Ms. Gay's books include "Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II" (Yale University, 2002), which dealt with a little-studied subject: the more than 250,000 Jews who returned to Allied-occupied Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. She also wrote "The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait" (Yale University, 1992), which chronicled Jewish life in Germany from the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 to the rise of Hitler in 1933. Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Peter Filkins called it "moving and lively." "What emerges is the portrait of a culture very much alive and aware of its own rich heritage," he wrote. In 1997, Ms. Gay received the National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction for "Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America" (W. W. Norton, 1996). In that book, she examined the immigrant experience through the lens of her own girlhood in the Bronx. Ruth Slotkin was born in the Bronx on Oct. 19, 1922; her father was a milkman who later opened a delicatessen. She earned a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1943 and a master's in library science from Columbia in 1969. Her first marriage, to the sociologist Nathan Glazer, ended in divorce. She is survived by her second husband, the historian Peter Gay; three daughters, Sarah Glazer Khedouri of Larchmont, N.Y.; Sophie Glazer of Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Elizabeth Glazer of Manhattan; two sisters, Shirley Gorenstein of Manhattan and Caroll Boltin of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.; and seven grandchildren. Ms. Gay's book "The Jewish King Lear Comes to America," written with her daughter Sophie, is to be published next year by Yale.
Ruth Gay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruth Gay (née Slotkin; October 19, 1922 – May 9, 2006) was a Jewish writer who wrote about Jewish life and won the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction for Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (1996).[1]
AVAILABLE - Schwarzman Building (42nd Street & 5th Avenue) - Art - JQE 08-643 - USE IN LIBRARY
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More Details
Edition
1st ed.
Description
xxii, 610 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. [511]-563) and index.
Contents
A climate for modernism -- Professional outsiders -- Irreconcilables and impresarios -- Painting and sculpture : the madness of the unexpected -- Prose and poetry : intermittences of the heart -- Music and dance : the liberation of sound -- Architecture and design : machinery, a new factor in human affairs -- Drama and movies : the human element -- Eccentrics and barbarians -- Life after death? -- Coda : And Gehry at Bilbao.
Summary
Historian Gay explores the modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. This book presents a pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffith; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years.--From publisher description.
Spoiler alert: The hero dies at the end, but shed no tears. Modernism, the artistic revolution that began with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the 1840s and quietly expired in the 1960s with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, enjoyed “a good long run.” So Peter Gay concludes in the final sentence of “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond,” his sweeping survey of the poets, playwrights, painters and architects who set out to rewrite the rules of art, transform consciousness and, wherever and whenever possible, shock the complacent middle class.
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Janet Malcolm/W. W. Norton
Peter Gay
MODERNISM
The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond
By Peter Gay
Illustrated. 610 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
Actually, Mr. Gay points out, that complacency has been greatly exaggerated. All revolutions require an enemy. The Modernists found theirs in the bourgeoisie, a fat, convenient target but also a source of support and encouragement. Enlightened curators, like Alfred Lichtwark at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, and art dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris, helped prepare the ground for the eventual victory of Modernism’s disorganized troops. “Businessmen of culture offered and sold artistic products, whether dramas, drawings or volumes of poetry, and with the same gesture advanced the aesthetic cultivation of the buying public,” Mr. Gay writes. The road was long and difficult, but never quite as lonely as the artists themselves often saw it. Their isolation, was, in part, a self- created myth. “If my work is accepted,” John Cage once said, “I must move on to the point where it is not.” Mr. Gay, the eminent historian of the European Enlightenment, Weimar culture and Sigmund Freud, has spent the greater part of the 1980s and ’90s chronicling the sensibility and cultural life of the Victorian middle class in his five-volume series, “The Bourgeois Experience.” It makes some sense, then, that he should now turn to the artistic avant-garde dedicated to pulling the rug from under the oppressive father figures of the 19th century. Otherwise it is hard to locate the motivation for yet another general work on a movement whose every breath and gesture has been subjected to minute study by legions of historians. Mr. Gay adds little new in what amounts to a college survey course. A graceful writer, he leads the reader on a pleasant ramble through a well-traveled landscape, pointing right and left to the prominent features along the way and, like a superbly informed guide, offers his thoughts and comments. From seminal figures like Baudelaire and Flaubert, he moves right along to the Impressionists and then, taking the various art forms in turn, advances chronologically through the great debacle wrought by fascism and World War II before wrapping up with such postwar phenomena as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. He has a thesis. Modernism, he argues, was propelled by two main impulses: the urge to overturn established hierarchies and break rules — this is what he means by “the lure of heresy” — and a compulsion to explore the artist’s interior world. These primal drives produced “a single aesthetic mind-set,” a “climate of thought, feeling and opinion,” unifying what might appear to be a scattering of disconnected artistic revolts. Armed with this pair of organizing principles, Mr. Gay sets forth down his well-traveled highway. Prodigiously well informed, he covers a broad expanse of ground quickly, touching on most of the major figures but also bringing in lesser names, like the German playwright Georg Kaiser, who make the great galaxy of Modernism twinkle a little more brightly. Smart bits of description (the Guggenheim Museum as a fat white oyster) and well-chosen anecdotes speed the narrative merrily along, but rarely does Mr. Gay heed the greatest Modernist injunction, attributed to Sergei Diaghilev: “Astonish me!” Mr. Gay’s enthusiasms and his insights are unevenly distributed. On painting, especially 19th-century painting, he rarely rises above banality. Edvard Munch, a second-rater by most estimations, gets promoted to the first rank, largely because his psychological obsessions dovetail with Mr. Gay’s Freudianism. Literature, music and architecture, especially the pioneering architectural and design work of the Bauhaus movement, bring out his most insightful writing. Mr. Gay, in the chapter “Eccentrics and Barbarians,” takes a bit of a detour to profile wayward figures like Charles Ives and Knut Hamsun, the “anti-modern modernists.” These are the most engaging pages in the book, offering shrewd analyses that reveal how easily Modernism could embrace retrograde political thinkers and the seeming paradox, in the case of Ives, of an artistic revolutionary and small-town philistine inhabiting the same man. The Freudian tinge lends a distinctive coloration to familiar material. Mr. Gay does have the odd habit of checking in from time to time to see what Freud thought of this or that Modernist, to no particular purpose. But he also delivers a splendid Freudian interpretation of Kafka’s work as embodying displaced conflict with his father. He also calls T. S. Eliot sharply to account, rejecting Eliot’s assertion that the poet hovers, detached, above the poem, an impersonal artificer. As implicated in Modernism’s interior voyage as any other poet, “Eliot was wrong.” After World War II, Mr. Gay finds “much talent and little genius.” Pop Art’s erasure of distinctions between high and low art, crucial in his mind to the Modernist project, spelled the end of the great human adventure that began a century or more earlier. But Mr. Gay is not quite ready to sign the death certificate, especially after a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry. A twitch here, a jerk there, and who knows? There may indeed be life after death.
***
The Blush of the New
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Photographs, clockwise from left: Keystone/Corbis; Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Stapleton Collection/Corbis
Clockwise from above: Le Corbusier brought a modernist sensibility to architecture, Flaubert to the novel and Baudelaire to poetry.
By LEE SIEGEL
Published: December 30, 2007
Thomas Mann was an archmodernist, and this was his favorite story: One day, Gustave Flaubert was out walking with his sister. Ferociously antibourgeois, Flaubert lived alone, unconsoled and unencumbered by marriage or family. His novels mocked and maligned the French middle class, ironizing it into oblivion. He was a great frequenter of brothels and had fornicated his way through Paris and Cairo. And yet here he was out for a stroll, suddenly stopping in his tracks before a small house surrounded by a white picket fence.
In the yard, a solid middle-class father played with his typical middle-class children while wife and mother looked lovingly on. The enemy! Yet instead of holding his nose, Flaubert gestured toward the house and exclaimed, without irony: “Ils sont dans le vrai!” (“They are in the truth!”) For Mann, the delightful incident illustrated the tension between the outrage at conventional life and the yearning to be part of it that tore at modernist psyches. There is more to aesthetic rebellion than offends the eye. Surprisingly, the anecdote doesn’t appear in Peter Gay’s “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,” a massive history of the movement in all its artistic forms — painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, architecture, design, film (though, bafflingly, not photography, one of the chief catalysts of the modernist revolution). It’s all the more surprising because I once heard Gay cite Flaubert’s droll little stroll in a lecture, after which he brilliantly analyzed the episode’s every paradoxical nuance. If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay. He is the country’s pre-eminent cultural historian and the author of masterpieces of social and intellectual reimagining including “The Enlightenment,” “Weimar Culture,” “Freud” and the towering multi-volume study “The Bourgeois Experience.” Such achievements make it all the more dismaying to find that in this rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study, Gay’s formidable syntheses often run aground on lapses of knowledge and judgment. Gay’s new book is the only one I’m aware of that tries to make sense of modernism in all its incarnations. Gay takes up his subject from the outset of the movement in the late 19th century to what he considers its continued vitality after World War II and its eventual death and possible resurrection in our own time. This comprehensiveness makes “Modernism” essential, especially for the general reader who wants to get a handle on Western culture’s most enigmatic phase. (A gift of this book and “The Rest Is Noise,” Alex Ross’s magisterial history of modern music, would equal about three years of college.) But unlike Henry Moore’s giant sculptures, in which negative space plays a positive role, Gay’s omissions and miscomprehensions cry out to be filled in and corrected. And yet, at times, the book is so nimbly erudite that its stubborn flaws make it all the more richly challenging. For example, Gay knows that the image of the modernist as committed subverter of custom and convention is hackneyed. He writes in his introductory chapter that the idea of modernists as “scofflaws or mavericks massed against the solid verities of time-honored high culture and, usually, Christian faith” is one of the avant-garde’s “cherished fairy tales.” The Impressionists, for instance, didn’t care a whit about outraging official culture, or Christianity. But because Gay needs the “lure of heresy” to thematically structure his book, he often ends up not just reinforcing the caricature of modernists as unhappy outsiders and elitist malcontents, but inflating it. It is almost as if Gay were perversely determined to undermine his own profound awareness of modernism’s multifaceted and contradictory nature. On the one hand he astutely writes, “The sources of the modernist rebellion in the arts rose from all quarters of the political, intellectual and emotional world.” On the other he speaks of “two essentially distinct areas of art, high art and low, which modernists had thought it crucial to keep apart.” But it was the modernists who brought the energy of everyday life into high art! Think of the scraps of newspapers and advertisements in the collages of Picasso and Braque; of the parodic newspaper headlines and the music hall ditties in Joyce’s “Ulysses”; of Leopold Bloom wiping himself with a newspaper in the notorious book that appalled Virginia Woolf (and delighted T. S. Eliot); or of the Dadaists’ total collapse of serious art into the quotidian, or Mahler’s quotations of nursery rhymes or Stravinsky’s saxophones — the list of the modernists’ elitist democratizations is interminable. What a relief it is to read Gay debunking the myth of Kafka the grim depressive with a description of friends who “laughed heartily” when Kafka read drafts to them. Kafka’s fiction is about the comedy of sexual frustration and the humor of competitive paranoia, among other things. What really broke up Kafka’s friends was the first sentence of “The Trial”: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Neurotic guilt was their collective métier. Yet although Gay writes beautifully about Kafka, about Proust on grief, about authentic middle-class hunger for modernist liberations and about the final scene of recognition and unspeakable shame in Chaplin’s “City Lights” — to take just four examples among many — he seems to find it more useful to traffic in cardboard simplicities. There are a disconcerting number of these. Gauguin did not, for example, abruptly quit his job as a stockbroker in Paris, as both popular legend and Gay would have it. He was fired by his firm, which had just gone under. You might say it was respectable society that had sacrificed Gauguin to the bottom line running just underneath bourgeois rhetoric about compassion and decency. No wonder the artist took off for what seemed to be the primitive explicitness of Tahiti. Nor did the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch pay, as Gay writes, “the usual price” for his unsettling innovations. Munch was not doomed to “being misunderstood, neglected, rejected,” or to enjoying only “occasional appreciation.” He sold his first paintings at age 18 and three years later was invited to exhibit in the Norwegian section of the World’s Fair in Antwerp. At 26 he had his first one-man show, hailed by prominent art critics; two years later, Norway’s National Gallery, the country’s most prestigious art museum, purchased one of Munch’s works. By the time he was 40, Munch enjoyed international renown and the largesse of several wealthy patrons. And it’s right for Gay to refer to Munch’s countryman, the odd, fierce peasant novelist Knut Hamsun, as a public admirer of the Nazis who wrote enthusiastically about them even as the Germans were occupying Norway. But it is wrong for Gay not to add that during his one meeting with Hitler, Hamsun so aggressively pressed the Führer to stop executing Norwegian resistance fighters and to loosen his repressive hold on the country that Hitler loathed Hamsun for his insolent disrespect. As for Gay’s Parisian modernist “outsiders,” if the French provided the most extreme assaults on Western rationality — Rimbaud’s “disorientation of the senses,” André Breton’s celebration of primal instincts stored in the unconscious, André Gide’s enthusiasm for the “motiveless” crime, Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” Maurice Blanchot’s declaration of the death of the author — the reason was simple. It was not that French conditions kept creating figures resembling Baudelaire, about whom Gay histrionically writes that he was “an outcast aware of his loneliness” — though, as Gay admits, Baudelaire lived at the center of Parisian cultural energy. In France, civilization is invincible and eternal. Its immutable stability makes opposition to it all the more cheerfully ferocious. You can hurl the most incredible rhetorical and intellectual violence against French custom and convention and still have time for some conversation in the cafe, un peu de vin, a delicious dinner and, of course, l’amour. And in the morning, you extricate yourself from such sophisticated coddling — the result of centuries of art and artifice — and rush back to the theoretical barricades. But Gay, in thrall to Freud, prefers to root the modernists’ adventures in family trauma. Baudelaire, he writes, suffered a “revolution at home” after his father died and his mother married a “dashing” military officer. The poet and essayist, Gay simplistically tells us, “never quite worked through his expulsion from paradise.” Yet you would think that the author of the culture-shifting “Fleurs du Mal,” and of the equally seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” had worked his way through everything that required working through. In Charles Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” a shrewd entrepreneur constantly condescends to his inventor friend by stressing what it pleases him to see as his friend’s pathetically impractical maladaptation to life. In fact, the inventor is fundamentally nothing of the kind. In a similar way, Gay falsely stresses the “cherished fairy tale” of modernist darkness, depression and miserable discontent. But Dada, for instance, was not “wholly negative,” as Gay describes it, any more than Munch or Kafka was wholly negative. Hannah Höch’s and Sophie Tauber’s dolls and puppets, Duchamp’s optical illusions in the form of whimsical machines and especially the cool, broken harmonies of Kurt Schwitters’s collages and fantastical life-size constructions were all imbued with the positive spirit of humor and play. Even more radical are Gay’s misperceptions of modernism’s fundamental nature. It is not accurate to say, as Gay does, that in modernist fiction, “modernist mirrors reflected mainly the author.” Joyce, Proust, Mann, Lawrence, Woolf, Gide all wrote great realist novels that were as concerned with minutely noting the external world as with projecting intensely personal visions of the world. Elsewhere, Gay seems to acknowledge this, too. About Baudelaire, he writes, “Like the modernists who came after him, he was a realist with a difference.” Perhaps Gay simply wants to say that Baudelaire is a symbolist poet, and that surreal or highly subjective images coexist in his poetry alongside “realist” evocations of mental states and physical reality. In any case, it would have been helpful for Gay to explain his nice phrase “realist with a difference” and then go on to apply it to his other modernists. But he never elaborates on the distinction and never returns to it. On the disheartening conundrum of modernists and politics, Gay is at his most bewildering. He writes of “liberalism, that fundamental principle of modernism.” He seems to have momentarily forgotten that Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Céline on the right, and Picasso, Gide, Breton and the Russian modernists (barely alluded to by Gay) on the left, were about as far from liberalism as a Cubist painting is from an iPod — not to mention the toxically snobbish Woolf, who was neither right nor too much left. For Gay, reactionaries like Eliot and Hamsun were “anti-modern modernists.” But he does not try to account for the fact that reactionaries like the Italian Futurists worshipped modernity’s speed and power. Nor does he grapple with what you might call hypermodernists: the utopian Russian avant-garde, who, far from being political reactionaries, threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. The question of why so many modernists were drawn to regimes that were sick parodies of the modernist quest for transcendence and absolutes is unanswerable. But perhaps here is where some psychologizing could be useful. Perhaps beleaguered by the mental burden of their intensely personal visions, the modernists looked at a totalitarian regime’s real-life version of their fanaticism and perfectionism and wearily exclaimed, “They are in the truth!” Thus they contrived the delusion that actual power made a home somewhere in the world for their solitary ideals. It could have been a mental trick that protected their egos from mortal wounds. Gay traces the modernist impulse through the post-World War II period to our own time, where he finds it in the work of Frank Gehry and Gabriel García Márquez. Yet he doesn’t have much admiration for the postwar epoch. “There was much talent and little genius,” he writes about the decades after 1945. Is it so, however, that T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens“produced no creditable heirs”? Not even W. H. Auden, who is not discussed by Gay? (“Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm” — in one stroke, Auden could invoke modernist despair and affirm human hope.) But then, Gay never discusses Brecht’s dramas, either, though those quintessentially modernist works changed theater forever, especially in the ’60s. Conversely, Gay’s survey of postwar American art almost exclusively refers to the intensely biased and partisan — toward his own dubious theories, that is — Clement Greenberg, which is like quoting a Jesuit on the character and history of Protestantism. Indeed, Gay’s inclusion of postwar art in a history of modernism makes little sense. Modernism was modernism only when the rising foundations, beams and struts of modernity were still visible. Once modernity became an enveloping condition, artists who were part of that condition — from Pollock to Warhol, from Robbe-Grillet to Grass, from Artaud to Pinter — rebelled as much against modernist Prometheanism as against the modern inadequacies that provoked it. The Abstract Expressionists’ pure formalism was the end of the road for painting, not the exciting beginning of a new frontier. Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian all thought they had embodied a universal spiritual language in aesthetic form. Rothko wanted only that his canvases make people cry. DeKooning painted his scary women to make viewers laugh when they recalled Western art’s idealizations of women. And Pollock wanted nothing specific at all — Greenberg stuffed his theories into Pollock’s mouth. After modernity’s catastrophic climaxes — the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki — postwar art aimed both to lower the boom on modernist euphoria and to ridicule modernism’s earnest despondency. Mann may not have been right when he wrote in his novel “Doctor Faustus” that modernism could only produce works of art that parodied earlier epochs. But in our own time, we seem mostly to be surrounded by art that parodies the various strains of modernism. For all that, it’s painful to list the inadequacies in “Modernism.” Despite its failings, Gay’s book touches on so many relevant ideas and issues, subjects and themes, that it rouses us to a keen awareness of our own condition. Consider the second part of his thesis. Gay argues that along with the “lure of heresy,” what characterized the modernist rebellion was its “celebration of subjectivity.” If there’s anything that speaks to us now, it is the question of the “I,” that barbell of a pronoun that is so hard to lift in just the right expressive way. It is often provocative to watch Gay pursue modernist representations of the self. Yet you wish that in Gay’s countless references to what he regards as the modernists’ cultivation of inwardness, he had made an important distinction between the modernists and the Romantics. It was the Romantics who stressed subjectivity. By contrast, the modernists emphasized the idiosyncrasy of personal vision as a way to flee from subjectivity. Knut Hamsun called this an “unselfish inwardness.” Gay means the same thing when he writes of “disinterested subjectivity” in his discussion of “Ulysses.” But he never returns to the idea. The single reference Gay does make to Romantic inwardness occurs in the chapter on Baudelaire. It’s anybody’s guess as to what Gay means when he writes that the most sophisticated Romantics rejected “unchecked subjectivity.” Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Goethe in “Werther” — all these “sophisticated” Romantic authors were, by the standards of their age, “unchecked” in their subjective outpourings. But Gay seems to think it was the Romantics, not the modernists, who restrained their introspections. On the contrary. Every modern revolution finds its point of resistance in the personal experience of those in revolt — that is, in a heightened subjectivity. The Romantics substituted genius and unique personality for aristocratic birthright and class, thus giving birth to the bourgeoisie. As Rousseau famously wrote, “I feel my heart, and therefore I know humankind.” But by the time the modernists came along, the bourgeoisie had conventionalized Romantic individualism into the petty assertions of ego. And so the modernists sought to replace personality. They dissolved it in an impersonal creative vision that was nevertheless uniquely individual. Unselfish inwardness. When Eliot wrote that poetry was “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” he was thinking along Hamsun’s lines. “The Wasteland” doesn’t tell us anything specific about Eliot’s personality, but it could have been produced only by Eliot’s personality. To put it another way, the Romantics exalted the self, but the modernists exalted the idiosyncratic — the intensely individualistic — escape from self. Perhaps the bourgeoisie’s origins as the revolutionary class account for its facile assimilations of cultural subversions. Throughout his book, Gay marvels at the middle class’s capacity to absorb its adversaries. It’s an old story. But there is a difference between Artaud and HBO. We have exhausted Romantic individualism, and we have twisted the uniquely individual, modernist escape from the self into “self-expression.” Expression is everywhere nowadays, but true art has grown indistinct and indefinable. We seem now to be living in a world where everyone has an artistic temperament — emotive and touchy, cold and self-obsessed — yet few people have the artistic gift. We are all outsiders, and we are all living in our own truth.
Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” will be published next month.
In a breathtakingly conceived series of five books published over some 15 years and called, collectively, ''The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,'' Peter Gay established that at least some members of the European, American and British bourgeoisie enjoyed sex, had successful marriages, channeled aggression, cultivated self-awareness and supported the arts. Who said they didn't? You have to reach back to the historical platitudes of the 1950's and early 60's, in which the term ''Victorian'' is equivalent to prudish, philistine and materialistic, to find the picture Gay has worked so long, so inventively and so successfully to correct. Few students of the 19th century have read as widely and as imaginatively as Gay. Few deploy erudition as elegantly as he does. His research has added new ''data'' to the historic record: William Gladstone's massages of his wife's breasts so she could nurse, suggesting Victorians were not so prudish as we may have thought; Mrs. Beeton's instructions to Victorian housewives on how to kill a turtle, suggesting they were not so squeamish. Familiar to readers of Gay's earlier volumes, the stories are reprised in ''Schnitzler's Century,'' which Gay calls a ''synthesis.''
In a gesture meant to be as witty and naughty as assuredly it is tin-eared, Gay dedicates the century he has so long studied to a relatively obscure Austrian writer of plays, short stories and novels. Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) has consistently found a small but appreciative audience for his sophisticated stories of sexual intrigue. An early trifle called ''Reigen,'' 10 linked dialogues between a man and a woman, each a prelude to sex, inspired Max Ophuls's 1950 film, ''La Ronde,'' and David Hare's 1998 play, ''The Blue Room.'' Schnitzler's ''Dream Novella'' inspired Stanley Kubrick's last film, ''Eyes Wide Shut.''
Schnitzler's Vienna is a world of sexual adventure and artistic ambition; much of the talent was Jewish and much of the political passion anti-Semitic. Of his many extraordinary novels and novellas, I recommend ''The Road Into the Open'' (1908), in which Georg, a gifted but dilettantish composer, begins a love affair with a gentle, lovely singing teacher, Anna Rosner. Georg is a minor aristocrat; Anna is bourgeois. She becomes pregnant. Georg never seriously entertains marriage, though he knows he should. He dithers until the moment of the baby's birth, as he has dithered about his music, putting more emotional energy into avoiding commitment than he has ever devoted to accomplishment. Anna never reproaches him and accepts the end of her personal hopes with dignity and calm. The reader is struck by the total absence of humbug in their portraits, and by the emotional clarity with which Schnitzler treats autobiographical material, for the callous, philandering Georg is an aristocratic, de-Semiticized version of himself.
Although much of Schnitzler's writing concerns philanderers, and he himself comes across in Gay's account as an unlikable roué, his three novellas about women, ''Beatrice,''+ ''Fr* ulein Else'' and ''Thérèse,'' show him going out of his way to depict women sympathetically and their mental states, especially in extreme erotic circumstances, with complexity. Beatrice is tempted by a lover her son's age, and Else, a teenager, is forced to beg for a loan on her father's behalf from an older man who asks a sexual favor in return. These tight stories remind us both in scope and in the protagonists' socioeconomic background of Freud's case studies. It's not hard to see why Gay, who prides himself on writing ''cultural history informed by psychoanalysis,'' would be interested in Schnitzler, a writer whom Freud himself considered his literary double. Unfortunately, there isn't very much about Schnitzler here, and few readers will be led to associate the bourgeois ascendancy with his name.
Gay focuses on one episode, which took place when Schnitzler was 16. His father read the young man's diary, including an account of visits to a prostitute. The father, a well-known physician, hauled his son into his consulting room and showed an illustrated treatise on sexually transmitted diseases. The two were furious at each other, the young man at the invasion of his privacy, the father at the son's stupidity. Gay tries to turn this incident into the kind of emblematic episode that has served some of the new historicists so well. He opens with it and comes back to it at the start of succeeding chapters, as evidence variously of Victorian sexuality, anxiety, aggression and expectations of privacy. But the unmemorable vignette is not so much rich as it is forced to yield up meaning.
In the past, Gay has been a master at treading the ground between the particular and the abstract, finding new particulars and revising prized abstractions. He is a skilled biographer (of Freud) and memoirist, who nonetheless understands the danger of reducing all truth to the truths of the individual life. He wrote this book in the conviction, he says, ''that while it may be hard to live with generalizations, it is inconceivable to live without them.'' But while he is still bashing the bourgeoisophobes with unabated energy and playfulness, some of his favorite facts have gotten shopworn. The whole book takes too much for granted, reminding me of the convicts in the joke who know each other's stories so well they can merely call out, ''No. 14,'' to produce tears, and ''32'' to produce laughter.
As goalie defending the bourgeois enterprise, Gay fends off corner kicks even from Freud, who, in presenting neurosis as a product of sexual repression, criticizes the bourgeoisie too much for Gay's taste. Perhaps he has begun to mistake his own puckish corrections and saves for well-proven theoretical positions, and in the process come full circle back to something resembling the silliest of the old generalizations about Victorian culture, which his scholarship helped do away with. Or perhaps there is an Olympian kind of wisdom here I do not follow.
So we get: ''Everyone but a fanatical devotee of the new somewhere got off the train racing toward modernism.'' And in conclusion: ''It almost seems as though the Victorians left all that was best about them to the ungrateful generations that followed them, and that the evils of our times are our own invention.''
Generalizations like this will send many of us back to biographies and novels, and if some of the novels now are Schnitzler's, we should be grateful to Peter Gay .
Phyllis Rose, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author, among other books, of ''Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages.''
By DINITIA SMITH (NYT) (COMPILED BY ANTHONY RAMIREZ)
Jean Strouse is named director of Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library; succeeds founder Peter Gay
David S Reynolds reviews book Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks by Peter Gay
August 4, 2002
Don't Get Mad, Write Novels
By David S. Reynolds
Published: August 4, 2002
SAVAGE REPRISALS
Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks.
By Peter Gay.
192 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Peter Gay, the prominent cultural historian, here does a skillful turn as a literary critic. Highlighting three landmark novels of the 1850-1910 period -- ''Bleak House,''''Madame Bovary'' and ''Buddenbrooks'' -- Gay explores fiction as ''a mirror held up to its world,'' albeit a mirror that throws ''imperfect reflections.'' This broad premise gives him plenty of room to ruminate about literature in relation to history and biography. Reading ''Savage Reprisals,'' one of the Norton Lecture Series books, is like sitting in a college lecture hall and listening to a seasoned professor perform scintillating riffs on masterworks and their contexts.
The book's title refers to the vindictiveness that drives these novels. Some of Gay's most provocative insights relate to the revenge motif. He points out that Charles Dickens, infuriated by a botched lawsuit that wasted his time in 1844, gets ''reprisal for injuries suffered -- and injuries imagined'' in ''Bleak House'' (1853), where he satirizes the British court system as vicious and stupid. Gay shows that Dickens's flawless heroines, like Esther Summerson in ''Bleak House'' or Agnes Wickfield in ''David Copperfield,'' are not to be dismissed as cloying paragons. Instead, they can be viewed as the imaginative creations of an author who had ''problematic relationships with women, starting with his mother.'' Dickens was scarred in childhood when his mother refused to allow him to quit a warehouse job and resume his education, a refusal, he later said, ''I never can forget.'' Devastated also by the death of his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, Dickens assuaged his grief by fashioning idealized mother figures in his fiction.
Gustave Flaubert, too, used the novel to exorcise social and personal demons. The self-appointed scourge of middle-class mediocrity, he lamented to a friend, ''I feel against the stupidity of my epoch waves of hatred that choke me.'' His most memorable attack on bourgeois culture came in ''Madame Bovary'' (1857), his classic portrait of a bored housewife whose failure to find happiness in two adulterous affairs leads to her suicide. Here Gay navigates adroitly between history, biography and close reading. He notes that since divorce was banned in France during the period ''Madame Bovary'' was written, adultery was a ''perhaps necessary recourse for a restless husband or a neglected wife.'' He analyzes Emma Bovary with admirable subtlety. On the one hand, she embodies the provincial culture Flaubert detested. She is, in Gay's words, ''an instructive instance of the general inauthenticity, a small replica of her society at large.'' Still, as Gay shows, Flaubert deeply sympathized with her. Fleshing out the novelist's famous statement ''Madame Bovary, c'est moi,'' Gay informs us that Flaubert felt so close to his tortured heroine that he wept when writing and that he suffered two attacks of indigestion as he composed the scene in which she poisons herself.
Also hostile to bourgeois society, according to Gay, was Thomas Mann. Describing ''Buddenbrooks'' (1901), his novel about a family's decline over four generations, Mann spoke of ''the artist's sublime revenge on his experience.'' Gay demonstrates that in the novel Mann wreaks revenge on his well-heeled father, a senator and grain merchant, by excoriating capitalism. On a deeper level, Gay suggests, Mann in his fiction sought reprisal against repressive sexual conventions. Although married and the father of six, Mann wrestled with homosexual yearnings that surfaced most notably in ''Death in Venice,'' in which he portrays an aging man taken with a beautiful Polish boy. ''Buddenbrooks,'' Gay points out, is short on heterosexual love scenes and rife with homoerotic suggestions. For instance, the piano playing of the 8-year-old Hanno Buddenbrook is an orgy of sensual sound. Mann seems captivated not only by the music, which Gay calls the novel's ''harbinger and . . . agent of Eros,'' but also by the young musician, swept to orgasmic heights by his own playing.
Gay frames his readings with provocative theorizing about literature in its relation to human life and society. Well armed with solid biographical and historical facts, he is in a strong position to challenge the recently fashionable critical approach known as deconstruction or postmodernism. Assaulting the postmodern notion that ''there is no such thing as truth to begin with,'' that ''everything, a work of history as much as a novel, is only a text with its subtexts,'' he insists that novels reflect reality, though sometimes obliquely, and history represents a collective search for truth on the part of scholars who, despite disagreements, hope to establish ''a thoroughly well-informed accord on the past'': ''To put it bluntly, there may be history in fiction, but there should be no fiction in history.''
This argument is sound, though one has to consider the entire range of Gay's other books -- not just this slim one -- to find full support for it. In particular, his work on the Enlightenment and his multivolume study of the bourgeois experience stand as monuments of scrupulous scholarship. They lend credence to the notion that history, far from being merely a text or a subjective fabrication, is, at its best, a credible record of past people and events.
Because ''Savage Reprisals'' is literary criticism rather than history, it treads on more ambiguous territory than does Gay's previous work. Although Gay convincingly argues that his three authors ''have much to say to historians'' since they anchor their fiction in actual people and events, he also acknowledges that that they distort facts according to their passions and beliefs. His past books have revealed that bourgeois society was in many ways cultured and progressive. He balks, therefore, at his novelists' savage portraits of the bourgeois experience. For instance, he says ''Madame Bovary'' does ''a considerable injustice'' by caricaturing the French middle class as stupidly philistine; the novel is ''not a disinterested presentation of the evidence,'' and so its ''uses to the historian as historian are severely limited.'' Simultaneously fascinated and repelled by his authors' efforts as social commentators, he coins notably ambivalent epithets for them -- Dickens is an ''Angry Anarchist,'' Flaubert a ''Phobic Anatomist'' and Mann a ''Mutinous Patrician.''
A tapestry of contrasting shades, ''Savage Reprisals'' shares the complexity of its subjects. It reminds us that novels are written by real people with real feelings in real time, often about real events. To some, this may seem obvious. To those appalled by trendy dismissals of historical scholarship, it is a bracing return to common sense.cts. It reminds us that novels are written by real people with real feelings in r
David S. Reynolds is distinguished professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Phyllis Rose reviews book Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914 by Peter Gay
November 11, 2001
Victoria's Secret
By Phyllis Rose
Published: November 11, 2001
SCHNITZLER'S CENTURY
The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914.
By Peter Gay.
Illustrated. 334 pp. New York:
W. W.+Norton & Company. $27.95.
In a breathtakingly conceived series of five books published over some 15 years and called, collectively, ''The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,'' Peter Gay established that at least some members of the European, American and British bourgeoisie enjoyed sex, had successful marriages, channeled aggression, cultivated self-awareness and supported the arts. Who said they didn't? You have to reach back to the historical platitudes of the 1950's and early 60's, in which the term ''Victorian'' is equivalent to prudish, philistine and materialistic, to find the picture Gay has worked so long, so inventively and so successfully to correct. Few students of the 19th century have read as widely and as imaginatively as Gay. Few deploy erudition as elegantly as he does. His research has added new ''data'' to the historic record: William Gladstone's massages of his wife's breasts so she could nurse, suggesting Victorians were not so prudish as we may have thought; Mrs. Beeton's instructions to Victorian housewives on how to kill a turtle, suggesting they were not so squeamish. Familiar to readers of Gay's earlier volumes, the stories are reprised in ''Schnitzler's Century,'' which Gay calls a ''synthesis.''
In a gesture meant to be as witty and naughty as assuredly it is tin-eared, Gay dedicates the century he has so long studied to a relatively obscure Austrian writer of plays, short stories and novels. Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) has consistently found a small but appreciative audience for his sophisticated stories of sexual intrigue. An early trifle called ''Reigen,'' 10 linked dialogues between a man and a woman, each a prelude to sex, inspired Max Ophuls's 1950 film, ''La Ronde,'' and David Hare's 1998 play, ''The Blue Room.'' Schnitzler's ''Dream Novella'' inspired Stanley Kubrick's last film, ''Eyes Wide Shut.''
Schnitzler's Vienna is a world of sexual adventure and artistic ambition; much of the talent was Jewish and much of the political passion anti-Semitic. Of his many extraordinary novels and novellas, I recommend ''The Road Into the Open'' (1908), in which Georg, a gifted but dilettantish composer, begins a love affair with a gentle, lovely singing teacher, Anna Rosner. Georg is a minor aristocrat; Anna is bourgeois. She becomes pregnant. Georg never seriously entertains marriage, though he knows he should. He dithers until the moment of the baby's birth, as he has dithered about his music, putting more emotional energy into avoiding commitment than he has ever devoted to accomplishment. Anna never reproaches him and accepts the end of her personal hopes with dignity and calm. The reader is struck by the total absence of humbug in their portraits, and by the emotional clarity with which Schnitzler treats autobiographical material, for the callous, philandering Georg is an aristocratic, de-Semiticized version of himself.
Although much of Schnitzler's writing concerns philanderers, and he himself comes across in Gay's account as an unlikable roué, his three novellas about women, ''Beatrice,''+ ''Fr* ulein Else'' and ''Thérèse,'' show him going out of his way to depict women sympathetically and their mental states, especially in extreme erotic circumstances, with complexity. Beatrice is tempted by a lover her son's age, and Else, a teenager, is forced to beg for a loan on her father's behalf from an older man who asks a sexual favor in return. These tight stories remind us both in scope and in the protagonists' socioeconomic background of Freud's case studies. It's not hard to see why Gay, who prides himself on writing ''cultural history informed by psychoanalysis,'' would be interested in Schnitzler, a writer whom Freud himself considered his literary double. Unfortunately, there isn't very much about Schnitzler here, and few readers will be led to associate the bourgeois ascendancy with his name.
Gay focuses on one episode, which took place when Schnitzler was 16. His father read the young man's diary, including an account of visits to a prostitute. The father, a well-known physician, hauled his son into his consulting room and showed an illustrated treatise on sexually transmitted diseases. The two were furious at each other, the young man at the invasion of his privacy, the father at the son's stupidity. Gay tries to turn this incident into the kind of emblematic episode that has served some of the new historicists so well. He opens with it and comes back to it at the start of succeeding chapters, as evidence variously of Victorian sexuality, anxiety, aggression and expectations of privacy. But the unmemorable vignette is not so much rich as it is forced to yield up meaning.
In the past, Gay has been a master at treading the ground between the particular and the abstract, finding new particulars and revising prized abstractions. He is a skilled biographer (of Freud) and memoirist, who nonetheless understands the danger of reducing all truth to the truths of the individual life. He wrote this book in the conviction, he says, ''that while it may be hard to live with generalizations, it is inconceivable to live without them.'' But while he is still bashing the bourgeoisophobes with unabated energy and playfulness, some of his favorite facts have gotten shopworn. The whole book takes too much for granted, reminding me of the convicts in the joke who know each other's stories so well they can merely call out, ''No. 14,'' to produce tears, and ''32'' to produce laughter.
As goalie defending the bourgeois enterprise, Gay fends off corner kicks even from Freud, who, in presenting neurosis as a product of sexual repression, criticizes the bourgeoisie too much for Gay's taste. Perhaps he has begun to mistake his own puckish corrections and saves for well-proven theoretical positions, and in the process come full circle back to something resembling the silliest of the old generalizations about Victorian culture, which his scholarship helped do away with. Or perhaps there is an Olympian kind of wisdom here I do not follow.
So we get: ''Everyone but a fanatical devotee of the new somewhere got off the train racing toward modernism.'' And in conclusion: ''It almost seems as though the Victorians left all that was best about them to the ungrateful generations that followed them, and that the evils of our times are our own invention.''
Generalizations like this will send many of us back to biographies and novels, and if some of the novels now are Schnitzler's, we should be grateful to Peter Gay .
Phyllis Rose, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author, among other books, of ''Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages.''
Peter Gay, emeritus professor of histor at Yale, discusses latest book, Schnitzler's Century, which examines sexual mores and anxieties of Victorian era as seen through life and work of Arthur Schnitzler; photos
Richard Bernstein comments on Penguin Lives, new series of short biographies created by James Atlas; focuses on Peter Gay's Mozart and Garrry Wills's St Augustine; photo; drawing
New York Public Library appoints historian Peter J Gay as founding director of $15-million humanities center that is being established to foster 'innovative thinking about society'; his photo; library hopes that Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, in renovated space at main library, will be hub of humanities scholarship and discourse; library president Paul LeClerc discusses plans
To the Editor: With all due respect to Caryn James ("Amy Had Golden Curls; Jo Had a Rat. Who Would You Rather Be?" Dec. 25) and Peter Gay ("The 'Legless Angel' of 'David Copperfield': There's More to Her Than Victorian Piety," Jan. 22), the most misunderstood figure in literature is neither Amy March nor Agnes Wickfield. That honor goes, of course, to Sid Sawyer.
To the Editor: As a psychotherapist who is also deeply connected to literature, I was delighted to read Peter Gay's insightful essay. His understanding of Agnes Wickfield gives due credit to a wrongly maligned young woman. I have always found Agnes pretty wonderful myself, and understood her "monitory gesture" to have very specific meanings.
To the Editor: I appreciated Peter Gay's essay on Agnes Wickfield, as it brought back and validated memories of my own love affair with her.
February 19, 1995
By EDWIN MCDOWELL
LEAD: Peter Gay, Don DeLillo and J. F. Powers are among the 10 authors nominated for the 1988 National Book Awards. The nominations were announced yesterday by Barbara Prete, the executive director of the sponsoring organization, National Book Awards Inc.
LEAD: Freud A Life for Our Time By Peter Gay 810 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.
April 20, 1988
Books of The Times; Biography Relates Freud's Theories to His Life By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: April 20, 1988
Freud A Life for Our Time By Peter Gay 810 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.
It has been nearly 50 years since Freud's death, nearly a century since he began to formulate the underpinnings of psychoanalysis, and it is clear, in retrospect, just how accurately he predicted his fate - as he once put it, to ''agitate the sleep of mankind.'' The picture of man that Freud bequeathed to the 20th century, after all, was a peculiarly modern and disturbing one, a picture of man as a conflicted creature, torn by his dual yearnings for love and death and besieged by unconscious impulses only barely held in check by the blandishments of civilization.
The Freud who emerges from Peter Gay's intelligent and wholly absorbing new biography is himself a contradictory figure: ''an unreconstructed nineteenth-century gentleman in his social, ethical, and sartorial style'' whose revelations about sexuality would shock his contemporaries and indelibly shape the next century's intellectual discourse; ''the nemesis of self-deception and illusions'' who fearlessly used himself as a guinea pig yet fiercely guarded his own privacy; a map maker of the mind who redefined the limits of reason and yet made his own life a model of self-control.
Thanks to his own writings and a vast body of secondary literature, Freud already boasts a minutely annotated life. Mr. Gay, a cultural historian who has written several shorter studies of Freud, has obviously drawn on earlier sources (as well as such new material as Freud's highly revealing correspondence with his friend Wilhelm Fliess, which was published in its entirety for the first time in 1985), but he has produced a judicious, original biography, scrupulously grounded in close readings of his subject's work.
The book is neither reverential, like Ernest Jones's famous life of his mentor, nor as judgmental as other more recent studies. Instead, Mr. Gay situates Freud's theories within a cultural and historical context while tracing their relationship to the psychoanalyst's own life. As a result, we become privy to the fascinating dialogue Freud maintained in his mind between ''private feelings and scientific generalizations,'' and we are made to see that ''beneath the surface of his rational argumentation, there lurks Freud the disappointed father, the concerned mentor, the anxious son.''
Like such biographers as Paul Roazen, Mr. Gay contends that Freud's controversial views of women (as a kind of castrated man, lacking a strong superego, etc.) grew out of his ''larger cultural loyalties, his Victorian style'' and his reluctance to come to terms fully with his own mother. Mr. Gay also argues that Freud's frustrating four-year-long engagement to Martha Bernays left its mark on his theories about the sexual nature of neurosis, and he notes that the death of Freud's daughter Sophie in 1920 (combined with several other losses) could have contributed to the development of ''his late psychoanalytic system, with its stress on aggression and death.''
After sketching in Freud's family background (the weak father, the strong-willed mother, the proliferation of siblings), Mr. Gay quickly moves on to look at just how Freud assembled the rudiments of psychoanalytic theory and how the fledging psychoanalytic movement slowly accrued international recognition even as it was riven by internal dissent. Some of these scenes, drawn with novelistic care by Mr. Gay, verge on low comedy, what with the psychoanalysts wildly coining self-serving analyses of one another. Freud dubbed Alfred Adler's actions ''the revolt of an abnormal individual driven mad by ambition''; he described Jung as ''all out of his wits,'' and he characterized Otto Rank as ''an impostor by nature.''
In describing these battles, Mr. Gay is careful not only to delineate the Oedipal clash of personalities that was exacerbated by Freud's need for enemies as well as friends but also to communicate the underlying conflict of ideas. He characterizes ''Totem and Taboo'' as Freud's attempt ''to anticipate, and to outdo, his 'heir' and rival'' Jung and ''Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety'' as a response of sorts to Rank's defection.
For the lay reader, in fact, one of the virtues of this biography is Mr. Gay's lucid and succinct analysis of Freud's essential texts and his assessment of their relationship to one another: from ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (1899) and ''Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'' (1905), which articulated the basic principles of psychoanalysis, through the reformulations laid out, after the war, in ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'' (1920) and ''The Ego and the Id'' (1923) - works that helped define, as Mr. Gay puts it, ''a general psychology'' that reached beyond the world of neuroses to that of ''normal mental activity.''
With such subsequent books as ''The Future of an Illusion'' (1927) and ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' (1929), we see Freud moving even further into the realm of speculation as he formulates a psychoanalytic theory of religion, politics and culture. Although there had always been a dark streak of determinism in his work, these two late works were to be his most somber and pessimistic. ''Life, as it is imposed upon us,'' he wrote, ''is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, insoluble tasks.'' It is as though, he added, ''the intention that man should be 'happy' is not contained in the plan of 'Creation.'''
No doubt these sentiments mirrored Freud's own fears of aging and death as well as his growing anxiety about the events overtaking Europe. In March 1938, the Nazis marched into Austria; in June, Freud and his family left Vienna for London. The following year, suffering from terminal cancer, he died after asking his doctor for a fatal dose of morphine .
By PAUL ROBINSON; PAUL ROBINSON IS A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK IS ''OPERA and IDEAS: FROM MOZART TO STRAUSS.''
THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE Victoria to Freud. Volume Two: The Tender Passion. By Peter Gay. Illustrated. 490 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $24.95. THE second volume of Peter Gay's projected five-volume survey of middle-class culture in the 19th century is a less tidy affair than its predecessor. In ''The Education of the Senses,'' (1984), the first volume of ''The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,'' Mr. Gay took issue with received wisdom about Victorian sexuality. Despite their e...
THE TENDER PASSION: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud. By Peter Gay. 490 pages. Oxford University Press. $24.95. In the first volume of his massive examination of bourgeois life during the 19th century, the historian Peter Gay took it upon himself to re-examine the sexual behavior and attitudes of the Victorians, both here and in Western Europe. ''Education of the Senses'' (1984), as that volume was called, proved to be a witty, erudite and controversial study that challenged many of ...
March 1, 1986
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; VICTORIANS IN LOVE
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: March 1, 1986
THE TENDER PASSION: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud. By Peter Gay. 490 pages. Oxford University Press. $24.95. In the first volume of his massive examination of bourgeois life during the 19th century, the historian Peter Gay took it upon himself to re-examine the sexual behavior and attitudes of the Victorians, both here and in Western Europe. ''Education of the Senses'' (1984), as that volume was called, proved to be a witty, erudite and controversial study that challenged many of the stereotypes commonly held about that not so distant era - besides arguing that the middle classes of that period were considerably more interested in sex than its genteel manners suggested, the book presented a thoroughgoing reassessment of the role and nature of Victorian women, persuasively arguing that the old image of them as repressed, frigid, anesthetic creatures was as inadequate as it was demeaning.
Now, in ''The Tender Passion,'' a sequel of sorts to that earlier volume, Mr. Gay proposes to take a detailed look at Victorian notions of love -love as an ideal of bourgeois life and love as a day-to-day reality, realized by actual couples. Almost immediately, however, Mr. Gay runs into problems. For one thing, given the contiguous nature of love and sex, he often has difficulty confining himself to a discussion of the issue at hand and hence strays into material familiar from ''Education of the Senses'' (i.e. repression and its consequences) or material more appropriately discussed in that previous work (i.e. prostitution and homosexuality).
Secondly, he has an irritating tendency to impose strict Freudian interpretations on all his subject matter (trains are always taken as erotic symbols, as are gardens, banquets and department stores), combined with a tendency to manipulate his data - even the most obdurate - to serve his own didactic ends. For example, in arguing that love was the ''governing preoccupation'' of 19th-century novelists, he writes that even ''a novelist like Gogol who, from desperate psychological conflicts of his own, sought to excise any intimations of deep erotic involvements in his fictions, paid indirect tribute to love by his energetic exertions to evade it.''
To make matters worse, many of the points Mr. Gay seems to want to make in this book end up striking the reader as obvious: his observation, for instance, that Victorian marriages were ''not just the source of conflicts, but also a means for their resolution''; or for that matter, his assertion that generalizations are difficult to make, that ''idiosyncratic intimate histories and the divergent pressures exerted by religious allegiances, social distinctions, and national habits must make any description of characteristic middle-class styles in love and sex richly polychromatic.'' Of course, the reader's inclined to say, who was ever foolish enough to suggest that Victorian couples were all unhappy, or that a single sweeping generalization could sum up the temper of the times?
Largely as a result of these problems, ''The Tender Passion'' reads less as a spirited, original inquiry into social history, than as a fluently written compendium of Victorian love stories, anecdotes and quotes. As such, however, the book is informative, occasionally illuminating and often entertaining, offering the reader a variety of Victorian definitions of love, ranging from Novalis' romantic conception of love as a kind of applied religion (''love is the final purpose of world history - the amen of the universe'') to Diderot's cyncial assessment of love as no more than ''the voluptuous rubbing of two intestines'' to Freud's dictum that love requires the uniting of ''two currents,''''the tender and the sensual.'' The volume's discussion of love as portrayed in the fiction of Trollope, James, George Eliot, Proust, Dickens and Flaubert attests to both an enormous amount of reading and a mind well versed in the use of psychoanalysis as an interpretative technique. And the chapter titled ''Stratagems of Sensuality'' provides the reader with a lively, if somewhat arbitrary, sampling of the ways in which Victorians found ''displacements'' for their erotic desire. Wagner's operas, Mr. Gay observes, ''manifestly embodied, and boldly staged, sexual longings and fulfillments that ordinary mortals keep to themselves''; while the 19th-century ''love of nature'' cult ''held the most profitable possibilities for the sensual,'' locating all manner of erotic metaphors and analogies in such natural phenomenon as ''the delicious shiver'' of aspen leaves and the rhythmic waves of the ''fiery sea.''
As in ''Education of the Senses,'' Mr. Gay has culled an enormous amount of material from diaries, letters, novels, medical texts and philosophical treatises, and he again attempts to extrapolate readings about society and class from individual case studies. His overall conclusions, too, echo those of his earlier book -namely that the Victorian era was essentially a century of transition, a time of change, during which those two contradictory impulses - toward freedom and toward control - came clashing noisily together, creating in their wake nervousness and confusion.
In the arena of love and sex, this meant that fiercely felt passions were often cloaked beneath decorous facades; that privacy and reticence -those twin gods of the good bourgeois household - frequently concealed a high measure of tolerance and liberality. ''Their defensiveness was a tribute to passion,'' Mr. Gay writes, ''displaying a wry respect for its powers. It invites the paradoxical speculation that the century of Victoria was at heart more profoundly erotic than ages more casual about their carnal desires and consummations.''
As Mr. Gay adds, that very guardedness on the part of the Victorians also creates difficulties for the historian intent on deciphering their lives. And that, in the end, may in part, explain the sketchiness of ''The Tender Passion.''
THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE Victoria to Freud. Volume One: Education of the Senses. By Peter Gay. Illustrated. 534 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25. THIS is the first volume in what promises to be an immensely ambitious work. (It will, we are told, ''eventually comprise at least five volumes.'') Peter Gay proposes to investigate and explain the inner world of the European and American middle classes from the 1820's to the outbreak of World War I. His work, he says, is ''history informed ...
To the Editor: In response to Peter Gay's essay "The 'Legless Angel' of 'David Copperfield': There's More to Her Than Victorian Piety" (Jan. 22), there is further evidence of Agnes Wickfield's sexuality when we remember her as Uriah Heep's anticipated prize. While David Copperfield, temporarily distracted (and sexually attracted) by the childish Dora's curls and giggles, might have seen Agnes as a domestic sister-friend-guardian angel, "pointing upward," Uriah gloats over Agnes with lip-smackin...
THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume 3. By Peter Gay. Illustrated. 685 pp: New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $30.
LEAD: Reading Freud Explorations and Entertainments By Peter Gay 204 pages. Yale University Press. $24.95.
March 23, 1990
Books of The Times; Of Freud and His Obsession With the Enigmatic
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: March 23, 1990
Reading Freud
Explorations and Entertainments
By Peter Gay
204 pages. Yale University Press. $24.95.
In his monumental biography of Freud that appeared in 1988, the historian Peter Gay created a rich and compelling portrait of the father of psychoanalysis - a portrait that situated Freud's theories within a cultural and historical context and that explored the relationship of those theories to his own life. The reader came to know Freud ''the disappointed father, the concerned mentor, the anxious son,'' as well as Freud the fearless researcher - a man shaped by 19th-century values and ideals, and yet at the same time committed to the articulation of theories that would indelibly transform the 20th century.
Though the very thoroughness and erudition of that volume would seem to preclude any immediate follow-ups, Mr. Gay points out that ''as Freud has taught us, there is always more to know about people, even fully documented ones.'' He has accordingly produced this fascinating new collection of essays, which attempts to ''reduce the blank spots'' remaining on the map of Freud's mind - to ''appproach, and partly resolve, the mystery that is Freud.''
In the opening essay of this book, Mr. Gay notes that Freud himself was obsessed with unsolved mysteries and riddles: ''They troubled him as an unresolved chord troubles a musician. Conundrums did not just fascinate him; they tortured him.'' This ''compulsion to tackle engimas'' led him, toward the end, into two of the ''most eccentric commitments of his life, both revisionist in the extreme'' - his identification of Moses as an Egyptian and Shakespeare as the Earl of Oxford.
Why would Freud develop such an ardent interest in J. Thomas Looney's controversial book ''Shakespeare Identified'' (which laid out a detailed argument for Shakespeare's identity as the 17th Earl of Oxford)? In raising this question, Mr. Gay discounts Ernest Jones's well-known view that ''something in Freud's mentality led him to take a special interest in people not being what they seemed to be'' - that the idea of Shakespeare not being Shakespeare meshed with his childhood wish that he might have been the son of someone other than his impecunious father.
Instead, Mr. Gay identifies shared attitudes that would have made Freud receptive to Looney's ideas; and he discusses how Freud's preoccupation with the ''Shakespeare problem'' reflected his insatiable ''greed for knowledge'' - an ''urge to know'' that was, at least in part, erotic. As Mr. Gay sees it, this urge developed early on in Freud's life: in a large family (five sisters and two brothers), intellectual achievement was a means for young Sigmund to obtain his parents' attention. Figuring out the answers to important riddles -like the question of Shakespeare's identity - was an exercise ''through which he could reiterate his claim to paternal and, even more, maternal love.''
Similar applications of Freudian theory to Freud's own life are made in the essay titled ''Six Names in Search of an Interpretation,'' in which Mr. Gay attempts to analyze the signficance of Freud's choice of names for his children. Pointing out that Freud changed his own name from Sigismund to Sigmund, Mr. Gay argues that ''the bestowal of a name is an exercise of power.''
He goes on to note that Freud named his children after significant individuals in his own life. Mathilde was named after the wife of the Viennese internist Josef Breuer, who had assisted a young and poverty-stricken Freud. Jean Martin was named after the French neuropathologist Jean-Martin Charcot, whom Freud worked closely with in the 1880's. Oliver was named after his boyhood hero, Oliver Cromwell. Ernst was named after Ernst Brucke, in whose laboratory Freud worked for six happy years. Sophie was named after the niece of his former teacher and friend Samuel Hammerschlag, and Anna after one of Hammerschlag's daughters.
As Mr. Gay notes, these choices indicated a deviation from the Jewish tradition, popular in Central Europe, of naming children after deceased relatives: in this respect, he argues, they reflected Freud's irreligiosity, his tendency to see himself as a Jew within ''a larger mental world: that of the European scientific, most specifically the materialist, positivist mind.'' In addition, Mr. Gay suggests, Freud's decision to name so many of his children after father figures or members of their families underscored Freud's continuing struggle to come to terms with his own father; they served as a record of his own ''heroic and historic bid for inner freedom, a freedom that was the essential condition for his discoveries.''
The other essays in this book tend to be less detailed and somewhat less provocative than the two just mentioned. ''Freud and Freedom'' rehashes the idea of determinism in Freud's work - a subject previously addressed by Mr. Gay's biography, as well as other scholarly works, while ''Serious Jests'' rehashes many of Freud's thoughts on humor laid down by the master himself in ''Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.''
The essay on Freud's relationship with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays comes to the hedged conclusion that they probably did not have an affair; and the one on Freud's reading habits comes to the hardly earth-shattering conclusion that the psychoanalyst had a penchant for seemingly conservative works with ''an undertone of rebelliousness'' (asked to assemble a list of 10 ''good'' books, he listed such volumes as Mark Twain's ''Sketches,'' Kipling's ''Jungle Book'' and Macaulay's ''Essays'').
As usual, Mr. Gay combines his authoritative knowledge of Freud's life and works with crisp, engaging prose. If some of the essays in this volume seem somewhat familiar, that is only because we already know so much about Freud from Mr. Gay's own previous biography. All in all, this is a delightful coda to that volume, and a lively and entertaining book on its own.
LEAD: In a case more reminiscent of Pirandello than of Freud, scholars of psychoanalysis are in a furor over an article by an eminent historian.
January 22, 1989
A Freudian Spoof Is Slipped Past Many Scholars
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: January 22, 1989
In a case more reminiscent of Pirandello than of Freud, scholars of psychoanalysis are in a furor over an article by an eminent historian.
Some say the historian, perhaps in league with a magazine editor, perpetrated a scholarly fraud. Others say a group of scholars mistook a spoof for an authentic historical document.
The article, by Peter Gay, a historian at Yale University who is the author of a recent biography of Freud, was published in Harper's magazine in 1981. It was ostensibly a review of Freud's book ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' by an anonymous contemporary of Freud. And it was written by Dr. Gay rather than translated by him, as the introductory remarks misleadingly stated.
In those remarks, Dr. Gay wrote that the article was a recent discovery from an obscure Austrian medical journal, adding, ''As far as I can discover, it has been wholly overlooked in the voluminous literature on Freud and appears here in English, in my translation and with my annotations, for the first time.'' The Scholars Jump In
Some Freud scholars seized upon the article as a new discovery. Since 1981 it has been cited in at least one scholarly article and photocopies have been pored over by the circle of scholars who specialize in Freud.
''A false document is like a computer virus - it gets into the literature and replicates,'' said Frank Sulloway, an intellectual historian who is author of a biography of Freud. ''If someone published a false review of Newton's Principia that sounded like it had been written by Leibnitz, it would be an outrage.''
The article was considered important because it appeared to reveal that a peer had given Freud's major opus a sympathetic reading at a time when the psychoanalyst himself was complaining that his book was being ignored. The Importance of Silence
Dr. Gay drew fire for not trying to set the record straight once he knew his article was being misread. ''The most important thing is his silence,'' said Peter Swales, a Freud historian who is Dr. Gay's chief accuser. ''When he realized scholars were taking it seriously, he should have made a pubic statement at once.''
''It never occurred to me to make a public statement about the article,'' Dr. Gay said. ''The whole thing was lighthearted - nothing but a joke.''
Some scholars disagree. ''A spoof is immediately recognizable as such,'' said Frederick Crews, a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. ''It abounds in signals allowing the reader to perceive it as a joke. A hoax contains no such signals; it becomes identifiable after the fact, when the perpetrator gets his laugh.
''This incident lacks an essential ingredient for a hoax, making it an apparent fraud. Nearly seven and a half years have passed since the ostensible review was published, and Gay has yet to make a public statement about it.'' Not Meant Seriously, He Says
Mr. Swales may be the only scholar who has actually cited the Harper's article in a scholarly work. Dr. Gay said he was aware that Mr. Swales had done so, but at the time ''it didn't occur to me to be a big thing.'' He also said that when he wrote the article ''it never occurred to me that anyone would take it seriously.''
Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, invited Dr. Gay to write the article for the magazine's ''Revisions'' series, in which modern writers reconsidered classics.
''One was I. F. Stone reviewing Plato as though it had just come out,'' said Mr. Lapham. ''But Gay took it a step further. He took on the persona of an earnest contemporary critic at the time - but it was just an elaboration of a device we had used before.''
Because Dr. Gay's article followed all the conventions of the scholarly translation it purported to be, the only direct clue to its true status was ''Revisions'' at the top of the page. That clue seems to have been missed or disregarded by the scholars who took the article seriously.
''It was written as a spoof, accepted as a spoof, and published as one,'' said Dr. Gay. ''But if you do parodies, you have to make it a little obvious it's a parody so people know, which I didn't do. But the context - it being in the series - makes it perfectly clear that I didn't discover the article.'' Hints? Winks? A New Debate
There was nothing in the article telling the reader that it was not the translation it purported to be. ''There are absolutely no winks to the reader that let you know this is a spoof, which seems recklessness or sheer imprudence on Harper's part,'' said Mr. Swales. ''Not everyone knows the subtleties of the magazine.''
Professor Crews said: ''Harper's as well as Professor Gay has some explaining to do. If he was having a bit of fun, the question is why Gay did not feel the most elementary obligation of a scholar to help his readers distinguish between truth and pretense.''
Mr. Lapham said no further signs had been necessary. ''Harper's has traditionally been more literary than scholarly,'' he said. ''We deal in irony and many other literary devices, and experiment with literary forms. Had this been in a magazine not geared to a literary audience accustomed to such devices, we would have been obliged to make it more obvious.''
Besides, he said, there were hints in the article itself that it was not authentic: ''For instance, the reviewer calls Freud 'the last romantic.' That would never have been said in a medical journal, and certainly not at the time. There are many anachronisms like that one, and an unbelievable prescience.'' Inspired to Look Closer
It was just those anachronisms and that prescience that finally made Mr. Swales question the article. He looked for the original article only within the last year when he felt a need to check the accuracy of part of the supposed translation. He wrote to Dr. Gay last October and received no reply.
Dr. Gay and Mr. Swales acknowledge that ''we are not exctly pen pals,'' as Dr. Gay put it. He said Mr. Swales' letter to him was ''nasty'' in tone and undeserving of a reply.
Dr. Gay said he had received only one or two other letters from scholars asking for a copy of the original article. He wrote them explaining that the article was a fabrication.
One who wrote Dr. Gay soon after the article was published was David James Fischer, a psychoanalyst who was then a historian at the University of Southern California. He congratulated Dr. Gay on his discovery and asked if he would send him a copy of the German original.
''He wrote back saying it was a joke and that I should have known better,'' Mr. Fischer said. ''But as a psychoanalyst, I know jokes have meanings. I have to ask, what's the meaning of the joke? That's something only Gay -and maybe his psychoanalyst -knows.''
Melvyn Bragg examines the spread of religious doubt over the last three centuries. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was Dead in 1882, Hegel in fact beat him to it apprising his Berlin students of Gods demise as early as 1827. By the end of the 19th century echoes of the death of God can be heard everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Lenin, in the poetry of Tennyson and the psychoanalysis of Freud. The march of Science seemed to challenge the authority of the Bible at every turn and by the twentieth century almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned the certainty of their belief in God.So who or what was responsible for this sudden spread of religious doubt? If God could truly be said to be dead then who fired the first shot? Have we educated ourselves out of Christ only to embrace the bleaker creed of Mamon? Is God a human construct or did God construct us? Is there an argument from design, or was the Big Bang morally pointless, without what we could call a mind at all? Did Darwin and natural selection rebut the idea of a divine purpose? With A N Wilson, novelist, biographer, journalist and author of Gods Funeral; Victoria Glendinning, author, journalist and biographer of Anthony Trollope and Jonathan Swift.
Anthony Trollope, by the way, had a sister named Cecilia. She wrote a novel about a man tormented by Anglican angst. It's discussed in this episode of In Our Time about 300 years of religious doubt - Tennyson, Freud, Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Lenin; they're all here. Your experts are A.N. Wilson and Victoria Glendinning. Fascinating - and entertaining - stuff.
面對這樣的大哉問，或許僅能以「只有上帝曉得」（God knows）一語回答，但是當人們這麼回答問題時，是指他們認為該問題無人能回答。意即：假設如果上帝存在（If a god existed），祂就會知道任何人都不知道的事情。這樣的用法並不是針對一個非人格神而發。正相反，這樣的修辭力量皆是仰仗一個虛擬的人格神。
美國著名法理學家、公共知識份子代表，曾任教於耶魯大學、牛津大學、紐約大學和倫敦大學，為當代新自然法學派代表人物。二○一三年二月十四日因病逝世，英國《衛報》在訃聞中將其與十九世紀世界上最重要的思想家之一斯圖爾特．密爾相提並論。著作包括《認真對待權利》（Taking Rights Seriously）、《法律帝國》（Law`s Empire）、《生命的自主權》（Life’s Dominion）、《民主是可能的嗎？》（Is Democracy Possible Here?）、《刺蝟的正義》（Justice for Hedgehogs）等。
譯者簡介
梁永安
台灣大學文化人類學學士、哲學碩士，東海大學哲學博士班肄業。目前為專業翻譯者，共完成約近百本譯著，包括《文化與抵抗》（Culture and Resistance / Edward W. Said）、《啟蒙運動》（The Enlightenment / Peter Gay）、《現代主義》（Modernism：The Lure of Heresy / Peter Gay）等。
Arnold J. Toynbee Writing Styles in A Study of History
Style
Simile and Analogy
Toynbee frequently makes use of similes and analogies in which two apparently dissimilar things are compared. The purpose of these similes is to enable the reader to visualize the concept that is being presented and make it easier to grasp. One extended simile recurs at several points in the book, and that is Toynbee's comparison of civilizations to humans climbing a mountain. Primitive civilizations are like people lying asleep on a ledge with a precipice below and a precipice above. No further progress is possible for them. Arrested civilizations are like climbers who have reached a certain height but now find themselves blocked; they can go neither forward nor backward. Civilizations that are ready to grow, however, are like climbers who have just risen to their feet and are beginning to climb the face of the cliff. They cannot stop until they either fall back...
湯恩比 (Arnold Toynbee 1889-1975)
讓我們借用阿諾德湯恩比著名的攀岩者形像來說，在啟蒙運動時代，西方文明的確開始不牢靠地向上摸索一個新的立足點，而今天它仍在那裡。 --- Peter Gay《啟蒙時代》前言 (克蘭 布林頓)，1966，
[Arnold J. Toynbee, G. R. Urban著] 王少如,沈晓红譯 湯恩比 (Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-1975) row for fieldtag=p 1989
In classical antiquity, the river was known as the Ōxus in Latin and Ὦξος Oxos in Greek—a clear derivative of Vakhsh — the name of the largest tributary of the ...
This ceremony is a development from the official welcome accorded to the examiners from New College on their arrival for the annual visit to elect Scholars to our sister foundation in Oxford. In 1615 Mrs Letitia Williams, a lady with strong Wiccamical connections (her brother was First on the Roll in 1605) and Royalist sympathies, had instituted a payment of 13s 4d to the Scholar who delivered the speech. Members of the Royal Family and the Bishops of Winchester had also been greeted over the centuries with formal speeches 'at the gates' and the practice of honouring the Monarch and senior members of the Royal Family continues today, in addition to honouring exceptional Old Wykehamists.
In 1873 the welcome to the New College examiners came to an end. Nevertheless, in the same year the Lord Chancellor, Lord Selborne, was received in similar style. In 1881 the practice of Ad Portas was formally revised, and that is the pattern we use today. It became from that time the highest honour that the College bestows. A significant feature of the revision was the inclusion of the 'Oratio ad Portas' by the Aulae Prae i.e. the Prefect of Hall (Senior Scholar).
A ceremony that has enjoyed such a curious history of necessity, formality and contrivance inevitably has at times given honorands pause for thought, particularly when they were expected to reply to the Prefect of Hall's speech in Latin! There have been forty-nine Receptions Ad Portas since 1873: in the course of these there have been eighteen responses in Latin, one in Latin and Greek, twenty in English, one in Marathi and ten in English and Latin.
The ceremony takes place in Chamber Court and the whole community attends.
The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation, with a speech delivered by Lord Bryce in the House of Lords (Hodder & Stoughton 1915)
Nationality and the War (Dent 1915)
The New Europe: Some Essays in Reconstruction, with an Introduction by the Earl of Cromer (Dent 1915)
Contributor, Greece, in The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1915)
Editor, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce (Hodder & Stoughton and His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1916)
The Destruction of Poland: A Study in German Efficiency (1916)
The Belgian Deportations, with a statement by Viscount Bryce (T. Fisher Unwin 1917)
The German Terror in Belgium: An Historical Record (Hodder & Stoughton 1917)
The German Terror in France: An Historical Record (Hodder & Stoughton 1917)
Turkey: A Past and a Future (Hodder & Stoughton 1917)
The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations (Constable 1922)
Introduction and translations, Greek Civilization and Character: The Self-Revelation of Ancient Greek Society (Dent 1924)
Introduction and translations, Greek Historical Thought from Homer to the Age of Heraclius, with two pieces newly translated by Gilbert Murray (Dent 1924)
Contributor, The Non-Arab Territories of the Ottoman Empire since the Armistice of the 30th October, 1918, in H. W. V. Temperley (editor), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Vol. VI (Oxford University Press under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs 1924)
The World after the Peace Conference, Being an Epilogue to the “History of the Peace Conference of Paris” and a Prologue to the “Survey of International Affairs, 1920-1923” (Oxford University Press under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs 1925). Published on its own, but Toynbee writes that it was “originally written as an introduction to the Survey of International Affairs in 1920-1923, and was intended for publication as part of the same volume”.
With Kenneth P. Kirkwood, Turkey (Benn 1926, in Modern Nations series edited by H. A. L. Fisher)
The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement (Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 1928)
A Journey to China, or Things Which Are Seen (Constable 1931)
Editor, British Commonwealth Relations, Proceedings of the First Unofficial Conference at Toronto, 11-21 September 1933, with a foreword by Robert L. Borden (Oxford University Press under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs 1934)
Civilization on Trial (Oxford University Press 1948)
文明經受著考驗 [英]湯因比(A.J.Toynbee)著 沉輝,趙一飛,尹煒譯 Wen ming ching shou che k'ao yen
1988
The Prospects of Western Civilization (New York, Columbia University Press 1949). Lectures delivered at Columbia University on themes from a then-unpublished part of A Study of History. Published “by arrangement with Oxford University Press in an edition limited to 400 copies and not to be reissued”.
Albert Vann Fowler (editor), War and Civilization, Selections from A Study of History, with a preface by Toynbee (New York, Oxford University Press 1950)
Introduction and translations, Twelve Men of Action in Greco-Roman History (Boston, Beacon Press 1952). Extracts from Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch and Polybius.
The World and the West (Oxford University Press 1953). Reith Lectures for 1952.
現代世界與宗教 湯恩比(Toynbee, Arnold Joseph 1889-1976)撰 項退結編譯 Hsien tai shih chieh yü tsung chiao
1975
D. C. Somervell, A Study of History: Abridgement of Vols VII-X, with a preface by Toynbee (Oxford University Press 1957)
Christianity among the Religions of the World (New York, Scribner 1957; London, Oxford University Press 1958). Hewett Lectures, delivered in 1956.
世界諸宗教中的基督教 湯恩比 (Arnold Joseph Toynbee 1889-1975)著 陳明福,鄭志岳合譯 Shih chieh chu tsung chiao chung te chi tu chiao
1976
Democracy in the Atomic Age (Melbourne, Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Australian Institute of International Affairs 1957). Dyason Lectures, delivered in 1956.
East to West: A Journey round the World (Oxford University Press 1958)
Hellenism: The History of a Civilization (Oxford University Press 1959, in Home University Library)
D. C. Somervell, A Study of History: Abridgement of Vols I-X in one volume, with a new preface by Toynbee and new tables (Oxford University Press 1960)
Between Oxus and Jumna (Oxford University Press 1961)
America and the World Revolution (Oxford University Press 1962). Public lectures delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, spring 1961.
The Economy of the Western Hemisphere (Oxford University Press 1962). Weatherhead Foundation Lectures delivered at the University of Puerto Rico, February 1962.
The Present-Day Experiment in Western Civilization (Oxford University Press 1962). Beatty Memorial Lectures delivered at McGill University, Montreal, 1961.
The three sets of lectures published separately in the UK in 1962 appeared in New York in the same year in one volume under the title America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures, Oxford University Press.
Universal States (New York, Oxford University Press 1963). Separate publication of part of Vol VII of A Study of History.
With Philip Toynbee, Comparing Notes: A Dialogue across a Generation (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1963). "Conversations between Arnold Toynbee and his son, Philip … as they were recorded on tape."
Between Niger and Nile (Oxford University Press 1965)
Hannibal's Legacy: The Hannibalic War's Effects on Roman Life
Vol I: Rome and Her Neighbours before Hannibal's Entry
Vol II: Rome and Her Neighbours after Hannibal's Exit
(Oxford University Press 1965)
Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Time (Oxford University Press 1966). Partly based on lectures given at University of Denver in the last quarter of 1964, and at New College, Sarasota, Florida and the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee in the first quarter of 1965.
Acquaintances (Oxford University Press 1967)
Between Maule and Amazon (Oxford University Press 1967)
Editor, Cities of Destiny (Thames & Hudson 1967)
Editor and principal contributor, Man's Concern with Death (Hodder & Stoughton 1968)
Editor, The Crucible of Christianity: Judaism, Hellenism and the Historical Background to the Christian Faith (Thames & Hudson 1969)
Experiences (Oxford University Press 1969)
Some Problems of Greek History (Oxford University Press 1969)
Cities on the Move (Oxford University Press 1970). Sponsored by the Institute of Urban Environment of the School of Architecture, Columbia University.
Surviving the Future (Oxford University Press 1971). Rewritten version of a dialogue between Toynbee and Professor Kei Wakaizumi of Kyoto Sangyo University: essays preceded by questions by Wakaizumi.
With Jane Caplan, A Study of History, new one-volume abridgement, with new material and revisions and, for the first time, illustrations (Thames & Hudson 1972)
Richard L. Gage (editor), The Toynbee-Ikeda Dialogue: Man Himself Must Choose (Oxford University Press 1976), posthumous. The record of a conversation lasting several days.
E. W. F. Tomlin (editor), Arnold Toynbee: A Selection from His Works, with an introduction by Tomlin (Oxford University Press 1978), posthumous. Includes advance extracts from The Greeks and Their Heritages.
The Greeks and Their Heritages (Oxford University Press 1981), posthumous
Christian B. Peper (editor), An Historian's Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, with a foreword by Lawrence L. Toynbee (Oxford University Press by arrangement with Beacon Press, Boston 1987), posthumous
The Survey of International Affairs was published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs between 1925 and 1977 and covered the years 1920-1963. Toynbee wrote, with assistants, the Pre-War Series (covering the years 1920-1938) and the War-Time Series (1938-1946), and contributed introductions to the first two volumes of the Post-War Series (1947-1948 and 1949-1950). His actual contributions varied in extent from year to year.
A complementary series, Documents on International Affairs, covering the years 1928-1963, was published by Oxford University Press between 1929 and 1973. Toynbee supervised the compilation of the first of the 1939-1946 volumes, and wrote a preface for both that and the 1947-1948 volume.
Great Ages of Man series from Time-Life Books, this volume featuring The Age of Enlightenment.
Arnold J. Toynbee Writing Styles in A Study of History
Style
Simile and Analogy
Toynbee frequently makes use of similes and analogies in which two apparently dissimilar things are compared. The purpose of these similes is to enable the reader to visualize the concept that is being presented and make it easier to grasp. One extended simile recurs at several points in the book, and that is Toynbee's comparison of civilizations to humans climbing a mountain. Primitive civilizations are like people lying asleep on a ledge with a precipice below and a precipice above. No further progress is possible for them. Arrested civilizations are like climbers who have reached a certain height but now find themselves blocked; they can go neither forward nor backward. Civilizations that are ready to grow, however, are like climbers who have just risen to their feet and are beginning to climb the face of the cliff. They cannot stop until they either fall back...
湯恩比 (Arnold Toynbee 1889-1975)
讓我們借用阿諾德湯恩比著名的攀岩者形像來說，在啟蒙運動時代，西方文明的確開始不牢靠地向上摸索一個新的立足點，而今天它仍在那裡。 --- Peter Gay《啟蒙時代》前言 (克蘭 布林頓)，1966，
[Arnold J. Toynbee, G. R. Urban著] 王少如,沈晓红譯 湯恩比 (Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-1975) row for fieldtag=p 1989
明目讀書會：江老師、賴先生、中時副刊主編、洪老師。 台大圖書館英文本： 主要作者Musil, Robert, 1880-1942 劃一題名Mann ohne Eigenschaften. English 書名/作者The man without qualities / Robert Musil ; translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins ; editorial consultant, Burton Pike 出版項New York : AA Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1995 版本項1st American ed I. A sort of introduction and Pseudo reality prevails -- II. Into the millenium
China’s Publishers Court America as Its Authors Scorn Censorship
ByALEXANDRA ALTERMay 29, 2015
Protesters, including some Chinese writers, at the New York Public Library this week while a Chinese publishing delegation attended BookExpo only blocks away.
A few years ago, the Chinese writer Murong Xuecun had the kind of career most novelists dream about. His eight books had sold two million copies in China, and he had amassed more than eight million social media followers.
But in 2011, he decided to stop publishing. He was afraid of running afoul of Chinese censors, and was even more concerned about the self-censorship that had crept into his work. Now he wishes he had never published some of his earlier books, which tiptoed around political issues.
Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, at BookExpo in Manhattan, to which China sent 500 delegates from publishing houses and 26 authors.
“When I look back on them, I feel ashamed of myself,” said Mr. Murong, 41, who lives in Beijing and whose real name is Hao Qun.
Mr. Murong was among a handful of writers who gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library on Wednesday night to protest the limits on free speech and expression in China. The gathering, organized by thePEN American Center, was prompted by the presence of a large delegation of Chinese publishers at BookExpo America, a major publishing trade event taking place in Manhattan this week.
The juxtaposition was striking. This week, thousands of booksellers, librarians, publishers and authors mingled at BookExpo, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where Chinese publishers were being feted as international guests of honor. To mark the event, the Chinese government sent a 500-person delegation from 100 publishing houses, and 26 of its top authors. Chinese publishers claimed close to 25,000 square feet of floor space at the hall and planned 50 events around the city, including poetry readings, film screenings, author panels and presentations from its largest publishers.
Not many blocks away, Mr. Murong stood on the library steps and read aloud from an open letter he had written to Chinese censors in 2013, after his social media account was blocked and its contents deleted. “You treat literature as poison and free speech as a crime,” he said.
He was joined by prominent American writers like Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, Francine Prose and A. M. Homes, and by the China-born novelists Ha Jin and Xiaolu Guo. They took turns reading works by Chinese authors who are in prison or under house arrest for their writing, including the Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser, the writer Liu Xia and her husband, the poet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion.
“There are all of these writers in China who are in jeopardy for expressing themselves, and if you have a government-sanctioned delegation, you’re only getting part of the story,” said Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American Center, an organization that promotes free speech.
BookExpo’s organizers called China’s featured role at the expo an unprecedented and historic meeting between the world’s two largest publishing industries.
“We’re going to remember this for a generation, because it’s going to be the beginning of opening some doors,” said Steve Rosato, the event director for BookExpo. He said the event was not an appropriate forum to address censorship.
“We’re not in the position to do anything around that,” he said when asked about PEN America’s objections. “China is a significant market and they represent a significant trade opportunity.”
China’s prominence at this year’s BookExpo highlights both the growing interplay between Chinese publishers and the international literary community, and the difficulties of doing business when standards for freedom of expression differ significantly.
China has accelerated its effort to export books and authors as part of a broader strategy to exert “soft power” by raising its cultural profile internationally. Chinese publishers have heavily promoted their catalogs at the London and Frankfurt book fairs in recent years.
Major deals are taking place between American and Chinese content companies. Earlier this year, the American e-book distributor Trajectory signed a deal with a Chinese digital company, Tencent, to distribute Tencent’s catalog of 200,000 Chinese e-books in North and South America.
“Western publishers are interested in getting access to the Chinese market, and the Chinese government is interested in getting more authors known in the West,” said Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “China in the 21st Century.”
Some American publishers say that their business is booming in China and that they have not faced significant government interference.
“The Chinese appetite for Western books is really impressive,” said Niko Pfund, president of Oxford University Press. “I’ve been amazed and pleasantly surprised by how smooth and uncomplicated it has been.”
The Chinese book business has ballooned into an $8 billion industry, the second largest after the United States. Chinese publishers released 444,000 titles in 2013, up from around 328,000 in 2010. The country is adding around 20 million new English speakers a year.
Chinese publishers have been eagerly acquiring Western titles, especially by British and American authors. In 2013, they bought the rights to more than 16,000 foreign books, including nearly 5,500 from America, more than double the number purchased a decade earlier. HarperCollins exported around 9,700 English-language titles to China in 2014, and cites China as one of its fastest growing international markets. Business books and children’s books are among the most popular categories, it says.
Penguin Random House said that it exported more than 50,000 of its English-language print and e-book editions to China annually.
“Chinese people are very curious about culture in other countries,” Wu Xiaoping, president of Phoenix International Publishing Group, said in an interview through a translator after appearing on a panel at BookExpo. “There will be more and better relationships between Chinese and U.S. publishers.”
When asked whether certain topics were off limits for writers and if his publishing house adhered to government guidelines, he replied, “No comment.”
In China, censorship — and, more commonly, self-censorship — has long been a feature of the publishing industry, which is controlled by the ruling Communist Party. The government’s roughly 580 state-run publishing houses ensure that domestic fare does not broach so-called sensitive topics: gay rights, the discontent of China’s ethnic minorities, and the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests of 1989.
“Chinese censorship works before the writer even starts writing,” said Bao Pu, publisher of the New Century Press in Hong Kong, who participated in the PEN event. “Why write a piece that you know will never get published?”
Western writers who publish their work in China are not immune to the country’s more rigid standards. Some, like the scholar Ezra F. Vogel, have reluctantly cooperated with publishing house censors. The mainland Chinese version of his biography on Deng Xiaoping omitted a number of adjectives about Mao Zedong and entire passages about Deng, but Mr. Vogel has said that the deletions were necessary to reach an audience hungry for mostly unexpurgated history about their country.
In a few cases, writers have backed out of publishing deals rather than submit to censorship. Evan Osnos, the author of “Age of Ambition,” a book about economic and social change in China, decided not to publish a translation in mainland China after editors there told him they would delete references to the artist Ai Weiwei and Mr. Liu, the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner. “To me, making those cuts wouldn’t be engaging Chinese readers, it would be isolating them,” he said in an email.
Other writers were never consulted about changes made to their work, and learned only after publication. The writer Andrew Solomon was infuriated to learn that “The Noonday Demon,” his book about depression, had been altered without his approval, omitting his references to being gay.
“I think there’s a suggestion that because China is an enormous market, we have to defer to the Chinese internal standards of censorship,” Mr. Solomon said. “It’s somewhere between naïve and hypocritical to engage with China and not acknowledge the severity of this problem.”
周三晚間，數名作家聚集在紐約公共圖書館(New York Public Library)的台階上，抗議中國限制言論自由和表達的舉措，慕容雪村也在其中。龐大的中國出版商代表團來到曼哈頓，參加於本周舉辦的重要出版業活動美國書展(BookExpo America)。中國代表團的到來，促使美國筆會中心(PEN American Center)組織作家參加這次集會。
兩種活動的並置產生了鮮明的反差。本周，數以千計的書商、圖書館負責人、出版商和作家匯聚在雅各布·K·賈維茨會議中心(Jacob K. Javits Convention Center)參加書展，中國出版商作為國際貴賓受到盛情招待。為了慶祝這一活動，中國政府派出了由100家出版公司的500名人員及26名頂級作家組成的代表團參展。中國出版商在展廳中佔據了大約2.5萬平方英尺（約合2300平方米）的展位，還計劃在全市各地舉辦50場活動，包括詩歌朗誦、電影放映、作家座談及大型出版商的展示活動。
在中國出版作品的西方作者也無法逃脫中國更為嚴苛的標準所帶來的影響。例如，學者傅高義(Ezra F. Vogel)就不情願地與出版社的審查者進行了合作。他寫了一本鄧小平傳記，但這本書的大陸版省略了一些關於毛澤東的形容詞，還刪節了一整段關於鄧小平的內容。但傅高義表示，為了讓那些對本國基本完整的歷史如饑似渴的讀者讀到這本書，這些刪節是必要的。
少數情況下，作者沒有向審查屈服，而是選擇了放棄出版交易。《野心時代》(Age of Ambition)的作者歐逸文(Evan Osnos)決定不在中國出版此書的譯本，因為編輯此前告訴他，他們要刪去關於藝術家艾未未和仍處於監禁之中的諾貝爾和平獎得主劉曉波的內容。這本書講的是中國在經濟和社會方面的變化。他在一封電子郵件中說，「在我看來，刪除這些內容並不是在與中國讀者交流，而是會把他們孤立起來。」
