The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Just as steel had made the skyscraper possible, now quite unpredictably the magic of glass incorporated sun and light and all surroundings into buildings in ways the Gothic acolytes could not have imagined, and added a new ambiguity to “structural honesty.” The walls of windows made buildings like the Lever House look as if they were made of glass by the deceptive use of spandrel glass to cover the external steel structure between the floors. Glass, this newly versatile ancient material, brought together indoors and outdoors, with new problems of heating and cooling and extravagant demands for energy. Ironic for those who preached that “form follows function,” glass varied the appearance of tall buildings without revealing their structure or function.

  In architecture of all the arts it would be most difficult to abandon the secure and familiar forms in which people had lived and worshiped and been governed. But in 1890, when the Congress of the United States authorized a World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of America, it might have been assumed that the exposition would display the wonders of this new American architecture in its birthplace. Left to themselves Chicagoans had been bold and original. The skyscraper had already made its dramatic appearance. But, facing the Old World art world, frontier Americans became insecure and apologetic. A commission of the city’s best architects and landscape designers produced a “white city” of 686 acres to be recovered from the swamps of the city’s south side, embellished with lagoons. Its buildings, though newly lit by electricity, were a grandiose array of classical and neo-Renaissance designs. With twenty-eight million visitors from May through October in 1893, it would be acclaimed as the most successful and influential of all world’s fairs in the United States.

  The Columbian Exposition set a new fashion in urban boosterism, for it “put Chicago on the map.” It was also part of the City Beautiful Movement that resulted in the invitation to Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), who was in charge of the construction in Chicago, to become a designer of the Mall in Washington, D.C., under the McMillan Plan, sponsored by Senator James McMillan of Michigan. This plan, which restored the almost forgotten L’Enfant plan of 1792, was adopted in 1901, and eventually made the capital a city of parks and vistas. So the skyscraper found its place as a separate facet of urban design alongside the “horizontal city” that preserved human scale and warmth in otherwise cold city environments.

  Burnham also was the Chicago champion of the classical revival. “The influence of the Exposition,” he prophesied, “will be to inspire a reversion toward the pure ideal of the ancients. We have been in an inventive period, and have had rather contempt for the classics.” In this competition between the Wild West and the Cultured East, the East won hands down. The White City of columns, temple fronts, arches, and domes showed little that was Chicago American. But the only building admired abroad was Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building, not in the classical mold. Burnham’s prediction was on the mark. The Exposition, displacing the fashionable Romanesque of H. H. Richardson, heralded a revival of classical forms.

  Louis Sullivan, prophet of an American architecture, deplored this triumph of “good taste” and academic pallor. He stigmatized as dangerously contagious “the virus of the World’s Fair.” Thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  … the architectural generation immediately succeeding the classic and Renaissance merchants are seeking to secure a special immunity from the inroads of common sense, through a process of vaccination with the lymph of every known European style, period, and accident.… There is now a dazzling display of merchandise, all imported.… We have Tudor for colleges and residences; Roman for banks, and railway stations and libraries—or Greek if you like—some customers prefer the Ionic to the Doric. We have French, English, and Italian Gothic, classic and Renaissance for churches. In fact we are prepared to satisfy, in any manner of taste. Residences we offer in Italian or Louis Quinze. We make a small charge for alterations and adaptations.

  Architects, Thorstein Veblen explained, were again playing their familiar role, for “the office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.”

  While Americans remained charmed by the obsolescent, Sullivan paid the prophet’s price. The spectacle of the World’s Columbian Exposition left him embittered, in a slough from which he never recovered. His remaining years were an undocumented nightmare, too frustrating to be recorded in his autobiography. The economic depression of 1893 made architectural commissions scarce. His longtime partner, Dankmar Adler, left him briefly in 1895 for a lucrative post with an elevator company. Then his assistant of many years left him. By 1909, desperate for lack of commissions, Sullivan had to sell his library and household effects, and then he migrated from one cheap hotel to another. In 1918 he had to give up his office in the Auditorium Tower, which had brought him fame, and move to a small office in the second floor. His marriage in 1899 had ended in separation and divorce. In 1918 he tried unsuccessfully to obtain work for the war. By 1920 he had no office, was living in one bedroom and depended on donations from friends. But he did collect his thoughts, published numerous articles, and in 1918 composed his Kindergarten Chats, a meandering Whitmanesque manifesto of American architecture, for which no publisher could be found at the time. Then he wrote his Autobiography of an Idea and collected a series of nineteen plates of his designs for ornaments, which a friend placed in his hands as he was dying in his lonely hotel room in 1924.

  BOOK THREE

  CREATING THE SELF

  We have stopped believing in God, but not in our own immortality.

  —ÉMILE ZOLA (1886)

  Creativity: a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

  —ARTHUR KOESTLER (1964)

  Man finally comes to himself as a rich raw material of creation. Not just the public notables whom Plutarch celebrated among the Greeks and Romans, but the idiosyncratic everyday person. Everyone is a subject, no act or feeling too intimate, too trivial, to be shaped into biography—or autobiography. Not only the soul, which has engaged saints and priests and prophets, but the self in all its vagrancy. The wilderness within is not only a jungle of hopes and frustrations, but a place of mystery and beauty, of epic memories, bitter struggles and exhilaration, where the whole history of the human race is reenacted. From this vantage point are vistas never seen or revealed before.

  PART ELEVEN

  THE

  VANGUARD

  WORD

  The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “THE POET” (1844)

  57

  Inventing the Essay

  CENTURIES passed in Western literature before authors let themselves be themselves in what they wrote. Dominated by classical conventions, the literati found no forms in which to describe themselves freely and randomly. We should not be shocked, then, by Oscar Wilde’s paradox “Being natural is only a pose.” Saintly epiphanies and confessions like Saint Augustine’s had recorded the search for salvation. A letter addressed to a particular person, usually not intended for publication, was governed by the candor and the good manners of the writer. But how could an author show himself naked, unboastful and unashamed?

  For literary self-portrait a new form was created by a French provincial landowner of the Renaissance. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) christened his creation “Essays.” From the French essayer, “to try,” the name itself revealed that the task Montaigne had set himself seemed difficult and uncertain. He dared claim only that he had made some “tries” in this new exercise of self-revelation. Montaigne’s preface to his 1580 Essays declared:

  This, reader, is an honest book.… I want to appear in my simple, natural, and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My imperfections may be read to the life, and my natural form will be here in so far as respect
for the public allows. Had my lot been cast among those people who are said still to live under the kindly liberty of nature’s primal laws, I should, I assure you, most gladly have painted myself complete and in all my nakedness.

  So, reader, I am myself the substance of my book, and there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject.

  (Translated by J. M. Cohen)

  Despite this uninviting invitation the book survived to become a model for our most popular, most influential, and most widely imitated form of non-fiction.

  Yet in contrast to the “forms” of rhetoricians, the essay was not really a form at all. Rather it was a way of literary freewheeling, a license to be random and personal. Aldous Huxley, himself a brilliant practitioner, explained: “By the time he had written his way into the Third Book he had reached the limits of his newly discovered art.… Free association artistically controlled—this is the paradoxical secret of Montaigne’s best essays. One damned thing after another—but in a sequence that in some almost miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience.” The “central theme” that held his Essays together, Montaigne repeatedly reminds his reader, was nothing but Montaigne himself.

  Personal reflections had previously been cast in certain recognized molds, tamed and domesticated into familiar paths. Some, like the Moralia of Plutarch (c.46–120), were treatises on moral conduct—“How to Discern Between a Flatterer and a Friend,” or “How to Restrain Anger.” Others, like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (121–180), offered aphorisms and moral precepts. Montaigne knew these works. And his focus, not on morality but on the elusive, ever-changing, contradictory self, was courageously new. Not as a prescription for the Good Life, but for the sheer joy of exploration and self-discovery. Offering not the Good, but the Unique. Here was a landmark in man’s movement from the complacency of divine certitude to the piquancy of experience and human variety.

  How did Montaigne, who boasted only of his ordinariness, become the creator of a momentous new form of literary freedom and literary creation? Montaigne’s ancestry and education were well designed to sharpen his sense of personal uniqueness. His father, Pierre Eyquem, sometime mayor and prosperous merchant of Bordeaux, bore the name “de Montaigne” because Pierre’s grandfather had bought the Montaigne château and feudal territory that came with it. His mother descended from a Spanish Jewish family, the Lopez de Villeneuva, who lived in Aragon at the height of the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century. Three members of the family, including Michel’s great-great-great-grandfather Micer Pablo (in 1491) were burned at the stake. They were prominent marranos, Spanish Jews who had gone through the motions of conversion to escape persecution, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly. The marrano memory could not have been lost on Michel. He frequently expressed his sense of the injustice done to the Jews, which confirmed his doubts of force as an effective agent of persuasion. “Some turned Christians,” he wrote, “of their faith, or of that of their descendants, even today, a hundred years later, few Portuguese are sure, though custom and length of time are far stronger counselors than any other compulsion.” The marranos remained suspect in both the Jewish and the Christian world.

  Michel was born in the Château de Montaigne, thirty miles east of Bordeaux. The oldest of eight surviving children, he yet enjoyed close attention from “the best father there ever was.” To widen the noble child’s sympathies, he “had me held over the baptismal font by people of the lowest class, to bind and attach me to them.” And Montaigne recalls in his Essays that, instead of bringing in a nurse, as many noble families did, his father sent Michel

  from the cradle to be brought up in a poor village of his, and kept me there as long as I was nursing, and even longer, training me to the humblest and commonest way of life.… His notion aimed … to ally me with the people and that class of men that needs our help; and he considered that I was duty bound to look rather to the man who extends his arms to me than to the one who turns his back on me.… His plan has succeeded not at all badly. I am prone to devote myself to the little people, whether because there is more vainglory in it, or through natural compassion, which has infinite power over me.

  (Translated by Donald M. Frame)

  Believing that the “tender brains” of children were shocked by being rudely awakened from sleep, “he had me suddenly awakened by the sound of some instrument’ and I was never without a man to do this for me.” As a painless way of teaching the boy Latin, still the language of European learning, his father hired a German tutor who spoke good Latin but no French, and decreed that no one should speak anything but Latin in Michel’s presence.

  “Altogether we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side, where there still remain several Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage.” He was six before he knew French, his mother tongue and the language of the neighborhood. He was taught Greek “artificially, but in a new way in the form of amusement and exercise. We volleyed our conjugations back and forth, like those who learn arithmetic and geometry by such games as checkers and chess.” In this domestic Athenaeum, it is remarkable that Michel grew up to be even as normal as he was.

  Sent off to school in Bordeaux, he completed the twelve-year course in seven. His teachers feared he would show up their imperfect Latin, and he declared himself lucky that at least they did not teach him the “hatred of books” that they somehow instilled in other noblemen. His own philosophy of education would be shaped by seeing the brutal discipline that made the school “a jail of captive youth. They make them slack, by punishing them for slackness before they show it. Go in at lesson time; you hear nothing but cries, both from tortured boys and from masters drunk with rage.”

  After studying law at the university, Michel through family connections became a magistrate. For the next dozen years (1554–70) he experienced the world of affairs, the venality and injustices of the law. He saw one fellow judge tear a scrap from the paper on which he had sentenced an adulterer, to write a love note to the wife of a colleague on the same bench. Lawless France, he complained, had “more laws than all the rest of the world together.”

  One crucial experience, not the kind that could be prescribed generally for the preparation of an author, marked Montaigne’s path to become an essayist. In 1559, soon after he had joined the Bordeaux Parlement, he met a brilliant fellow magistrate two years his elder whose person would inspire and haunt him for the rest of his life. This was Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563).

  Some inexplicable power of destiny … brought about our union. We were looking for each other before we met, by reason of the reports we had heard of each other, which made a greater impression on our emotions than mere reports reasonably should. I believe that this was brought about by some decree of Heaven. We embraced one another by name. And at our first meeting, which happened by chance at a great feast and gathering in the city, we found ourselves so familiar, so bound to one another, that from that time nothing was closer to either than each was to the other.

  (Translated by J. M. Cohen)

  This friendship lasted till La Boétie’s death from dysentery in 1563. Since 1554 La Boétie had been happily married to an older woman of an eminent local family, the widowed mother of two children. She had no children with La Boétie.

  Again and again, Montaigne described his intense relationship with La Boétie. But he does not detail the erotic element. Unlike the Greeks, he writes, “our morality rightly abhors” a homosexual relationship. Still, in the chapter “On Friendship” and elsewhere in his Essays he discloses feelings not usual in accounts of friendship between men. Taking his relationship with La Boétie as his prototype of friendship, Montaigne contrasts marriage. “Not only is it a bargain to which only the entrance is free, continuance in it being constrained and compulsory, and depending upon other things than our will, but it is a bargain commonly made for other ends.” Ac
quaintanceship can be enjoyed with many. “But that friendship which possesses the soul and rules over it with complete sovereignty cannot possibly be divided in two.…” For nearly five years, he tells us, communications with this alter ego satisfied his need to reveal himself.

  The death of La Boétie, who was only thirty-three, hit him hard. On the wall of the entrance to the study he recorded his debt to “the tenderest, sweetest, and closest companion, than whom our age has seen no one better, more learned, more charming, or indeed more perfect, Michel de Montaigne, miserably bereft of so dear a support of his life … has dedicated this excellent apparatus for the mind.” He recalled with satisfaction “not having forgotten to tell anything” to his friend. The sudden deprivation of this uninhibited friendship and its opportunities for self-revelation left a vacuum. “Hungry to make myself known,” Montaigne sought a way to replace his conversations with his best friend. And later generations must be grateful for this premature death of La Boétie, for Montaigne himself suggests that if La Boétie had lived, instead of the essays he might only have written letters.