The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Chapter 52. The Ephemeral Art of the Dance. A stirring introduction by one of the leading American patrons of dance: Lincoln Kirstein, Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing (anniversary ed., intro. by Nancy Reynolds, 1987). A wider view: John Lawson, A History of Ballet and Its Makers (1964); on individual dancers and styles, Kenneth McLeish, Penguin Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century (1955), and the handy Dance Encyclopedia (Anatole Chujoy, ed., 1949). A lively introduction to Russian ballet in its setting: Suzanne Massie, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia (1980). For biography, begin with Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (1979), and find details in S. L. Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929 (1953). For the tantalizing Isadora Duncan, begin with Walter Terry, Isadora Duncan: Her Life, her Art, her Legacy (1984). Then Allan Ross Macdougall, Isadora: A Revolutionary in Art and Love (1960) on her sensational impact, and the more sober V. Seroff, The Real Isadora (1971). And enjoy Isadora Duncan’s own version in My Life (1927). For Martha Graham: Blood Memory: An Autobiography (1991); Don McDonagh, Martha Graham (1973); Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (1991), the passionate and breathless chronicle by Agnes de Mille, her friend for sixty years. To define modern dance and put it in context: the eloquent John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (1965), The Modern Dance (1965), American Dancing: the background and personalities of the modern dance (1968), illustrated.

  Chapter 53. The Music of Innovation The best introduction to Stravinsky is Eric Walter White’s comprehensive and readable Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (2d ed., 1979). The composer himself was articulate, voluble, affable, and sometimes venomous. See, for example: his Autobiography (1936; 1975); Poetics of Music (1947), his Norton Lectures at Harvard; and Themes and Conclusions (1972), a collection of his program notes, reviews, and interveiws. His friend and aide Robert Craft elicits a wide range of opinions in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959). Lillian Libman, a warm admirer, provides intimate details of Stravinsky (1959–1971) as composer, performer, and stirring conversationalist, in And Music at the Close: Stravinsky’s Last Years (1972). Few other modern composers have provided such a lively arena of personal aesthetic, and professional controversy. For the context see: Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: A Critical Survey (1979); the richly suggestive Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (ed. Leonard Stein, 1975), including his influential “Composition with Twelve Tones” (1941), explaining how “the method of composing with twelve tones grew out of necessity.” And for Schoenberg’s relation to Stravinsky, see Dika Newlin Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938–76) (1980).

  Part X. Conjuring with Time and Space

  For the relation of Western discovery and definition of time and space to thinking about the world, see Boorstin, The Discoverers, Books I and II. See also my Republic of Technology (1978), The Image (1961, 1987), and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973). On the role of the arts and technology in these perceptions, two of the most rewarding writers are the Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art (1962), The Beginnings of Architecture (1981), Mechanization Takes Command (1948), Space, Time, and Architecture (1949); and the American polymath Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones (1924) on American life interpreted through architecture, The Culture of Cities (1938), The City in History (1961), The Myth of the Machine (1970). For particular topics, consult the scholarly and readable A History of Technology (Charles Singer et al., eds., Vols. 4 and 5, 1958; Trevor Williams, ed., Vols. 6 and 7, 1978), and for persons, see the incomparable Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

  Chapter 54. The Painted Moment. We are fortunate in having the comprehensive and perceptive History of Impressionism (4th ed., 1987) by John Rewald to give us our bearings. Martin Kemp’s magisterial The Science of Art, Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (1990) relates the artists to the sciences. See also: Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (1967); Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (1968), selections from artists and critics; Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (1974), with intriguing detail, illustrated; Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (1984); Impressionism 1874–1886: The New Painting, catalog of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1986; Alan Bowness, Great Art and Artists of the World, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (n.d.). For an illuminating history of the materials and technology of the artist: W. G. Constable, The Painter’s Workshop (1954). And some stimulating speculation: Remi Clignet, The Structure of Artistic Revolutions (1985), testing hypotheses of historians of science in relation to the arts. To glimpse the surprising range of dominant theories: Vasco Ronchi, The Nature of Light: An Historical Survey (1970). Excellent illustrated biographies from various points of view: John House, Monet: Nature into Art (1986); Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (1983) with ample quotations from Monet; William C. Seitz, Claude Monet (1960); Stephen Shore, The Gardens at Giverny: A View of Monet’s World (1983), vividly illustrated.

  Chapter 55. The Power of Light: “The Pencil of Nature.” This new popular art has invited a vast literature, with a history that is readily illustrated. The best up-to-date introduction is John Szarkowski, Photography until Now (1989). See also Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (rev. ed., 1982); Sarah Greenough et al., On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography (1989). catalog of an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. Renata W. Shaw, comp., A Century of Photographs, 1846–1946 (1980), from the collections of the Library of Congress. And for a scintillating essay on the history of illustration: William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (1953). And again: Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art (1990); Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (1974). For a comprehensive illustrated biography: Gail Buckland, Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography (1980). We gain insight into the early debates over the relation of photography to “art,” from Peter Henry Emerson., Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art: The Death of Naturalistic Photography (reprinted in Literature of Photography series, Arno Press, 1973). For an entertaining digression on an instrument of writer and artist: Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990). Much of the literature on Alfred Stieglitz is by his uncritical acolytes: Waldo Frank et al., eds., America and Alfred Stieglitz: Collective Portrait (1934); Alfred Stieglitz: Photographer (1965); Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: Introduction to an American Seer (1960). These can be corrected by the uncompromising dual biography: Benita Eisler, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance (1991), and by Georgia O’Keeffe’s autobiography (1976). André Malraux boldly and brilliantly describes the consequences of photographic reproduction for our experience of all the arts, finally creating a “museum without walls,” in Voices of Silence (1953), Part I. And for a stimulating essay on the effect of photography on our experience of the world, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), in Anchor paperback. See also my The Image (1961; 1987).

  Chapter 56. The Rise of the Skyscraper. The best introduction is Paul Goldberger’s well-illustrated The Skyscraper (1981). For the wider context, David P. Billington, The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering (1983). For the American context, see Earle Shultz and Walter Simmons, Offices in the Sky (1959), and the readable works of Carl W. Condit, American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (1960),… The Twentieth Century (1961), American Building (2d ed., 1982), a concise treatment of materials and techniques since Colonial times. Some distinctively American developments in architecture appear in my The Americans: The National Experience (1966), Chapters 18 and 19, and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), Chapters 39 and 40. Writings by architects and their critics: Don Gifford, ed., The Literature of Architecture … in Nineteenth-Century America (1966); Horatio Greenough, Form and Function (Harold A. Small, ed., 1957); Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture and Other Writings (1948), William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe, eds. Well-illustrated surveys: Carl W. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture … 1875–1025 (1952);
Chicago Architecture 1872–1022, Birth of a Metropolis (John Zukowsky, ed., 1987). On Sullivan, the basic Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (1935), and Sherman Paul, Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought (1962). However crisp were the members of the Chicago School in their architecture, they were wordy, repetitive, and emotive in their writing, for example Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (1924), Kindergarten Chats (1947). Sullivan’s “Tall Office Building” is reprinted in An American Primer (Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., Mentor paperback, 1968), at pp. 580ff. Brendan Gill has given us an engrossing life of Frank Lloyd Wright in Many Masks (1987). And see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Autobiography (1987). For the mythic and legendary meanings of the Chicago Fire: Ross Miller, American Apocalypse (1990).

  BOOK THREE: CREATING THE SELF

  Part XL The Vanguard Word

  To grasp the novelty of the modern biography as a literary form we need only glance at the writers of “lives” before Boswell. Sample, at least, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (often referred to as the Parallel Lives) in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 14, or in any of many handy reprints—for example, in Penguin Books. The best-known examples of “lives” in earlier English literature are those by Izaak Walton (1593–1683), who wrote pious life stories to sanctify John Donne (1640), Richard Hooker (1665), George Herbert (1670), and other Anglican worthies, and the writings of Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), whose lives of local notables were appropriately titled (after his death) The History of the Worthies of England (1662). Such bloodless adulatory chronicles are a far cry from the creators of our Chapters 57–60. See John A. Garraty, The Nature of Biography (1957) and André Maurois, Aspects of Biography (1929), by a master of popular lives. On the history of the genre in England we have a delightful essay by Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (1928). And see Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700 (1930), The Art of Biography in Eighteenth-Century England (1944); Leon Edel, Literary Biography (1957). For autobiography: Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960); James Olney, Metaphors of Self: the Meaning of Autobiography (1981); John N. Morris, Versions of the Self (1966), English autobiography from Bunyan to Mill; Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own (1984), an introduction to the history of diaries and diarists. For a lively survey of works after Boswell: Richard Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (1965). Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983), offers an engaging combination of the techniques of Plutarch and Boswell in her account of eminent authors and their spouses. And, for a suggestive contrast, Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature (1985). An entertaining anthology: Edgar Johnson, A Treasury of Biography (1941). As usual, André Malraux makes something tantalizingly new with his Anti-Memoirs (1968).

  Chapter 57. Inventing the Essay. A brief introduction to Montaigne is “Montaigne, or the Art of Being Truthful,” the essay by Herbert Luthy, in The Proper Study (Quentin Anderson and Joseph A. Mazzo, eds., 1962). We can enjoy the lively and scholarly biography, Montaigne (1984), by Donald M. Frame. The Essays are in Great Books of the Western World (1952), Vol. 25 (Charles Cotton, trans.) and in many reprints, of which my favorite is the lively J. M. Cohen translation in Penguin Classics (1958). Essays are commonly distinguished into the “formal,” which fill current magazines on all topics; and the “informal” or “familiar,” which are now the mainstay of The New Yorker, chronicled in W. F. Bryan and R. S. Crane, eds., The English Familiar Essay (1916).

  Chapter 58. The Art of Being Truthful: Confessions. A history of meanings of the word “confessions” from theology to psychology would be a microcosm of Western thinking about the self. A clue to the transformations is the contrast between the private searchings of Saint Augustine and the sensational “revelations” in an American True Confessions magazine. Rousseau alone has inspired literatures both of psychoanalytic dissection and of philosophic debate on his political theories, for example in Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919). For a copious biography, see Jean Guehenno, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2 vols., 1966, John and Doreen Weightman, trans.); and a shorter C. E. Vulliamy, Rousseau (1972). And do not miss the searching and readable Maurice Cranston, Jean Jacques … The Early Life and Works … 1712–1754 (1982), in paperback, and The Noble Savage: Jean Jacques … 1754–1762 (1991). For Rousseau’s works: The Confessions is in Everyman’s Library (2 vols., 1941) and in the vivid translation by J. M. Cohen (Penguin Classics, 1953), Émile (Barbara Foxley, trans.) in Everyman’s Library; The Social Contract (in many reprints), A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and Discourse on Political Economy are in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 38.

  Chapter 59. The Arts of Seeming Truthful: Autobiography. The best biography is the scholarly and readable Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (1986), with bibliography. A perceptive short introduction is Carl L. Becker’s article in the Dictionary of American Biography (1931); and for reference, the massive Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (1938). Franklin’s Autobiography and his other writings are widely available, for example, in Penguin Books (1987). The definitive scholarly edition of Franklin’s Papers is edited by Leonard W. Labaree (15 vols., 1959–71). For a “classic” depreciation of Franklin, see D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1953). And for the American context of Franklin’s thought, see my Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948; 1981). Some tantalizing questions are raised by Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960).

  Chapter 60. Intimate Biography. Boswell’s private papers, which had been believed to have been destroyed, were recovered at Malahide Castle, near Dublin, in the 1920s and 1930s, and sold to an American collector by Boswell’s great-great-grandson. The papers, acquired by Yale University, have been published in eighteen volumes (Geoffrey Scott and F. A. Pottle, eds., 1928–37). These, Boswell’s journals, even if only sampled, give us the best access to the man. The first biography of Boswell to draw on these papers was F. A. Pottle, James Boswell, The Earlier Years, 1760–1769 (1966). An attractive short life is by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, James Boswell (1980). See also Chauncey B. Tinker, Young Boswell (1922). Boswell’s Life of Johnson is unabridged in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 44, and is available in many other reprints, for example, in the World’s Classics (R. W. Chapman, ed.), and in a useful abridgment, with a helpful introduction, by Christopher Hibbert in Penguin Classics (1987). We should read both T. B. Macaulay’s and Thomas Carlyle’s vigorous essays on biography and on Boswell’s Life of Johnson in those writers’ collected essays. For twentieth-century interpretations, see James L. Clifford, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1970), and Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady, eds., James Boswell, The Great Biographer, 1740–1795 (1988).

  Chapter 61. The Heroic Self. The Goethe literature is as vast and as international as that on Shakespeare, amplified by the fact that Goethe’s own writings, which came to 133 volumes in the Weimar Edition (1887–1919), have since been many times reedited. Goethe societies around the world add to the literature. The most interesting life is still The Life and Works of Goethe (2 vols., 1855; new ed. 1965) by George Henry Lewes, the “husband” of George Eliot, who helped his researches in Weimar and Berlin. See also Georg Brandes, Wolfgang Goethe (2 vols., 1924) and the suggestive essay by Erich Heller, “Goethe and the Avoidance of Tragedy,” in The Proper Study (1962). Goethe biographies in this century are a panorama of the world of letters, with notable lives in English by Benedetto Croce (1970), Ludwig Lewisohn (1949), Albert Schweitzer (1949), Karl Vietor (1970), and Thomas Mann (in Three Essays, 1932), among others. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1989), Elective Affinities (1987), and selected Verse (1987) are in Penguin Books. Goethe’s Autobiography, a translation of his Dichtung und Wahrheit by John Oxenford (2 vols., 1974), is available in an attractive University of Chicago Press paperback with an illuminating introduction by Karl Weintraub. Goethe’s Faust, many times translated, is in Grea
t Books of the Western World (George Madison Priest, trans.), Vol. 47, in Everyman’s Library (Albert G. Latham, trans.), and Modern Library (Bayard Taylor, trans.). My favorite is the Anchor paperback (1963, new translation by Walter Kaufman, with the German text on the facing pages). Few episodes are more revealing of Goethe than the journals (1962) of his Italian Journey (1786–88) with the perceptive comments of W. H. Auden. For Goethe the scientist: Charles Sherrington, Goethe on Nature and on Science (2d ed., 1949); the excellent article by George A. Wells in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1972), Vol. 5. Thomas Mann has cast into a novel his view of Goethe as genius creator, with his view of how contemporaries saw Goethe: The Beloved Returns: Lotte in Weimar (1940; 1990 with introduction by Hayden White).

  Chapter 62. Songs of the Self. Convenient access to the prose and poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge with helpful notes is in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 (M. H. Abrams, ed. 4th ed., 1979), in addition to numerous reprint editions of their separate works. The standard edition of Wordsworth’s poetical works is in 5 vols. (1940–49), E. de Selincourt and R. Darbishire, eds.; an edition of The Prelude by de Selincourt (rev. ed., 1970) offers the versions of 1805 and 1850 for comparison. Do not overlook Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (William Knight, ed., 1930). For perceptive biography: the comprehensive Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth (2 vols., 1957–65), and the shorter Hunter Davies, William Wordsworth (1980). To put Wordsworth in context: Jonathan Wordsworth et al., William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism (1987), The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 (1979) relating the poem to the poet’s life and times. For Coleridge’s writings: the attractive and well-chosen Selected Prose and Poetry of Coleridge (Stephen Potter, ed., 1933); The Poetical Works of Coleridge (James Dykes Campbell, ed., 1924). For a scholarly and readable short life: Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1973), or Basil Willey, Coleridge (1972); and for detail E. K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1938, 1973). John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927), offers an intriguing study of the making of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” For the wider background of Romanticism in philosophy and psychology: the brilliant M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953; Oxford University Press paperback, 1971), Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971); S. Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (1970). To seek how literary dogmatists have blamed romanticism as the source of modern evils—relativism in morals and “enthusiasm” in politics—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1935), The New Laökoon (1934), an essay on the confusion of the arts. Suggestive clues on how the rise of romantic individualism has stimulated pride and property in authorship: Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words … the Origins of Plagiarism (1989); The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (Denis Dutton, ed., 1983).