The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Long Day’s Journey is O’Neill’s most autobiographical work, a ‘play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.’110 The action takes place in one room, in four acts, at four times of the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime, when the members of the Tyrone family gather together. There are no great action scenes, but there are two events: Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction, and Edmund Tyrone (Edmund, remember, was O’Neill’s brother who died) discovers he has TB. As the day wears on, the weather turns darker and foggier outside, and the house seems more and more isolated.111 Various episodes are returned to time and again in the conversation, as characters reveal more about themselves and give their version of events recounted earlier by others. At the centre of the play is O’Neill’s pessimistic view of life’s ‘strange determinism.’ ‘None of us can help the things life has done to us,’ says Mary Tyrone. ‘They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.’112 Elsewhere, one brother says to the other, ‘I love you much more than I hate you.’ And then, right at the end, the three Tyrone men, Mary’s husband and two sons, watch her enter the room in a deep dream, her own fog.113 The men watch as she laments, ‘That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’ These are the last lines of the play and, as Normand Berlin has written, it is those three final words, ‘for a time,’ that are so heartbreaking (O’Neill’s relatives hated the play).114 For O’Neill, it was a mystery how one can be in love, and then not in love, and then be trapped for ever. In such devastating ways, O’Neill is saying, the past lives on in the present, and this is nothing science can say anything about.115

  It is arguable whether the works of Orwell, Auden, or O’Neill best encapsulate the 1930s. The period was far from being the disaster, ‘the low dishonest decade,’ that Auden called it. Yet there is no escaping the fact that it was a journey toward the night, with the iceman waiting at the end. Whatever happened in the 1930s – and a lot did – it was cold comfort.

  ‘Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours?’ One kind of epitaph was set on the period by Alfred Kazin, the critic, who uses this quote from Abigail Adams to John Adams to open the last chapter of his On Native Grounds, published in New York in 1942. It was an apt enough sentence, for his argument in the book was that, between the Civil War and World War II, American literature had come of age, explained America to itself, and now, with Europe bent on self-destruction, it fell to America to maintain and evolve the Western tradition.116

  But the book’s other main message lay in its use of material, which was itself peculiarly American. Kazin’s subtitle was ‘An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature.’ This meant of course that he left out poetry and drama (and therefore figures like Wallace Stevens and Eugene O’Neid) but did not mean that he confined himself, as a European critic might well have done, to fiction only. Instead Kazin included as literature: criticism, muckraking journalism, philosophy, and even photojournalism. His argument here was that American fiction was firmly rooted in pragmatic realism (unlike Virginia Woolf, say, or Kafka, or Thomas Mann or Aldous Huxley), and that its chief battle, its big theme, within this overall context, was with business and materialism. Discussing the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, E Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe alongside the writings of Thorsten Veblen, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson, Kazin first identified the various influential segments of the American psyche – pioneers, scholars, journalists/muckrakers, businessmen, and the leftovers of the feudal South. These competed, he said, to produce a literature that sometimes ‘touches greatness’ but is often ‘half-sentimental, half-commercial.’ His own analysis, as this comment reveals, was wholly unsentimental. He identified as peculiarly American the theme of ‘perpetual salesmanship’ highlighted by Sinclair Lewis, Van Wyck Brooks’s complaint that the most energetic talents in America went into business and politics and not the arts or humanities, that several writers, like John Dos Passos in USA, ‘feel that the victory of business in America has been a defeat for the spirit, and that this had all achieved a tragicomic climax’ in the late 1930s, where education was ‘only a training for a business civilisation, in politics only the good life of materialism.’117 At the same time, Kazin noted the development of criticism, from liberal criticism in the 1920s to Marxist criticism to ‘scientific criticism’ in the early 1930s, with such books as Max Eastman’s The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science (1931), in which the author argued that science would soon have the answer to ‘every problem that arises’ and that literature in effect ‘had no place in such a world’.118 Kazin also recorded the early rise of ‘semiosis,’ the understanding of language as a system of signs.

  But Kazin, as that quote at the beginning of his last chapter showed, felt that since 1933 Europe had been closed and that now, in 1942, American literature, for all its faults and its love-hate affair with business, was ‘the repository of Western culture in a world overrun by fascism.’119 This, he felt, was a profound shift, coinciding with a reawakening of America’s own tradition. The stock market crash and the rise of fascism, which led many in Europe to question capitalism and to gravitate to Russia, had the effect in the United States of driving Americans back on themselves, to a moral transformation realised through nationalism as a coalescing force that, at the same time, would counteract the excesses of business, industrialisation, and science. For Kazin, this nationalism was not blind or parochial: it was a kind of conscience, which gave America dignity. Literature was only part of this society-wide trend, but Kazin thought that its role could only grow in the future. That was cold comfort too.

  A parallel with Kazin’s main thesis, albeit in a very different medium, can be found in what for some people is the greatest film ever made, released not long before On Native Grounds appeared. This was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Welles, born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was a prodigy, an innovative man of the theatre and radio by his mid-twenties, during which time he had staged a successful Macbeth with black actors, and startled the entire nation with his version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, presented as a news program, which many people were panicked into believing was a real invasion from Mars. He was brought to Hollywood while he was still in his early twenties and given a virtually unique contract in which he was to write, direct, and star in his own movies.

  Destined by his bulky frame to play ‘big’ characters (as he himself put it), he sought a subject for his first, much-publicised and much-awaited movie and hit on Kane, it seems, because his first wife, Virginia Nicholson, had married the nephew of Marion Davies, the film star who lived with William Randolph Hearst.120 Citizen Kane was filmed in great secrecy, partly for publicity purposes and partly to prevent Hearst finding out, and some effort was made for legal reasons to distance the main character from the newspaper baron. But the fact remains that the film is about a media mogul who uses his power to help the theatrical career of his consort, while living in a palatial mansion peopled by an esoteric mix of friends and hangers-on. There was really no disguising who Kane was, and for a time, when filming had been completed, there was doubt as to whether the film would be released, RKO fearing a massive libel and invasion-of-privacy suit from Hearst. In the event Hearst did not sue, but some cinema chains did not carry or show the film for fear of him. Partly for that reason (and partly because, as impresario Sol Hurok said of the punters, ‘If they don’t want to come, nothing will stop them’), Citizen Kane was not a commercial success.

  It was, however, a massive critical and artistic success. To begin with, it introduced technical innovations on a wide scale. This was partly the work of the cameraman, Gregg Toland, and of Linwood Dunn, in the special effects de
partment.121 In those days, special effects did not mean creating beings from outer space, but filming scenes more than once, so that, for example, all that greets the eye is in focus, thus providing an experience more akin to theatre – quite new in cinema. Welles also played scenes from beginning to end without intercuts and with the camera following the action. He himself, in the role of Kane, aged some fifty years – the makeup on the film was another major special effect. Other technical innovations were the introduction of a ‘newsreel’ into the film, to tell the life story of Kane. The film had its corny elements: at the beginning a reporter is set off on an ‘investigation’ to find the meaning of Kane’s dying word, ‘Rosebud.’ But people were impressed.

  When the film finally premiered, in three separate cities, the reviews were ecstatic: ‘sensational’ (New York Times); ‘magnificent’ (New York Herald Tribune); ‘masterpiece’ (New York World-Telegram); ‘unfettered intelligence’ (New York Post); ‘Something new has come to the movie world at last’ (the New Yorker).122 The more partisan right-wing press accused Welles of mounting a Communist attack on Hearst, and this is where the link to Kazin’s thesis comes in. For Kane was an attack on big business, but not so much a political attack, such as a regular Communist might have made, but a psychological attack. Kane shows that, for all a man’s possessions, for all his power, his vast acres and thousands of sculptures that populate those acres, he may lack – as does Kane – an emotional core, and remain lonely and unloved. This was scarcely a new message, as Kazin had shown, but in America at the end of the 1930s, it was no less powerful for all that, especially in the way that Welles told it. The enigma that has remained (Jorge Luis Borges called Kane a labyrinth without a centre) is whether Welles meant the film to have a cold centre too.123 He once said that personality was unknowable (‘Throw away all biographies’), and it is at least possible that another aim of the film was to show this unknowability in Kane. In general, though, the verdict of his critics is that this aspect of the film was a failure, rather than an intentional device.

  Riches, for Welles, as for Kane – as indeed for Hearst – were cold comfort. The rest of Welles’s career was really a coda to his early flowering and the magnificence of Kane. The film had closed everywhere by the end of the year, before Kazin’s book appeared. After that, it was for Welles – albeit very slowly – downhill all the way.

  19

  HITLER’S GIFT

  A famous photograph exists, taken on the occasion of an exhibition, Artists in Exile, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in March 1942. Pierre Matisse, the son of the painter, Henri Matisse, had been a successful dealer in Manhattan since the early 1930s, but there had been no show like this one. Pictured in the photograph, all dressed ‘respectably’ in suits or tweed jackets, are: (front row) Matta, Ossip Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger; (back row) André Breton, Piet Mondrian, André Masson, Amédée Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Pavel Tchelitchev, Kurt Seligmann, and Eugene Berman. Such a range and quality of artistic talent can seldom, if ever, have been gathered together in one room, and critics felt the same about the art on display. American Mercury headlined its review of the show ‘Hitler’s Gift to America.1

  Between January 1933 and December 1941, 104,098 German and Austrian refugees arrived in America, of whom 7,622 were academics and another 1,500 were artists, journalists specialising in cultural matters, or other intellectuals. The trickle that began in 1933 swelled after Kristallnacht in 1938, but it never reached a flood. By then it had been made difficult for many to leave, and anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant feeling generally in America, meant that many were turned away. The United States had operated a quota system since 1924, limiting immigration to 165,000, with each Caucasian nation represented in the 1890 census restricted to 2 percent of their numbers at that time. The quotas for Austrian and German immigrants actually remained unfilled throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a little-known statistic of shame for the United States among its many acts of humanitarianism.

  Other artists and academics fled to Amsterdam, London, or Paris. In the French capital Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich, and Gert Wollheim formed the Collective of German Artists, and then later the Free League of Artists, which held a counter-exhibition to the Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show in Munich. In Amsterdam Max Beckmann, Eugen Spiro, Heinrich Campendonck, and the Bauhaus architect Hajo Rose formed a close-knit group, for which Paul Citroën’s private art school served as a focus. In London such artists as John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Meidner, and Oskar Kokoschka were the most well known in an intellectual community of exiles that was about two hundred strong, organised into the Free German League of Culture by the Artists’ Refugee Committee, the New English Arts Club, and the Royal Academy. The league’s most potent gesture was its Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art held in the New Burlington Galleries in 1938. The tide was deliberately bland, so as not to offend the government, then embarked on its policy of appeasing Hitler. When war broke out, Heartfield and Schwitters were interned as enemy aliens.2 In Germany itself, artists such as Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, and Oskar Schlemmer retreated into what they called ‘inner exile.’ Dix hid away at Lake Constance, where he painted landscapes; that, he said, was ‘tantamount to emigration.’3 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel removed themselves to obscure hamlets, hoping to escape attention. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was so depressed by the whole business that he took his life.

  But it was the emigration to the United States that was most important and significant, and not only because of the numbers involved. As a result of that intellectual migration, the landscape of twentieth-century thought was changed dramatically. It was probably the greatest transfer of its kind ever seen.

  After Hitler’s inquisition had become plain for all to see, emergency committees were set up in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Sweden, and Switzerland, of which two may be singled out. In Britain the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) was formed by the heads of British universities, under Sir William Beveridge of the LSE. By November 1938 it had placed 524 persons in academic positions in 36 countries, 161 in the United States. Many members of British universities taxed their own salaries between 2 and 3 percent to raise money, and there were American academics who, hearing of this, sent equivalent proportions across the Atlantic. In this way the AAC raised some £30,000. (It was not finally disbanded until 1966, continuing to support academics in other countries who were persecuted for political or racial reasons.) A group of refugee German scholars established the Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad. This sought to place colleagues in employment where it could, but it also produced a detailed list of 1,500 names of Germans dismissed from their academic posts, which proved very useful for other societies as the years passed. The Emergency Society also took advantage of the fact that in Turkey, in spring 1933, Ataturk reorganised the University of Istanbul, as part of his drive to Westernise the country. German scholars (among them Paul Hindemith) were taken on under this scheme and a similar one, in 1935, when the Istanbul law school was upgraded to a university. These scholars even established their own academic journal, since it was so difficult for them to publish either back home or in Britain or in the United States. The journal carried papers on anything from dermatology to Sanskrit. Its issues are collectors’ items now.4

  The German journal in Turkey only lasted for eighteen issues. A more enduring gift from Hitler was a very different periodical, Mathematical Reviews. The first issue of this new journal went largely unremarked when it appeared – most people had other things on their minds in 1939. But, in its own quiet way, the appearance of MR, as mathematicians soon began calling it, was both dramatic and significant. Until that time, the most important mathematical periodical, which abstracted articles from all over the world, in dozens of languages, was the Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete, launched in 1931, by Springer Verlag in Berlin. Thanks partly to the golden age of physics, but also to the work of Gottl
ob Frege, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, and Kurt Gödel, mathematics was proliferating, and a comprehensive abstracting journal helped people keep in touch.5 In 1933—4, however, a problem loomed: the journal’s editor, Otto Neugebauer, a faculty member in Richard Courant’s famous department at Göttingen, was politically suspect. In 1934, he escaped to Denmark. He remained a board member of the Zentralblatt until 1938, but then the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, who was a fellow board member and Jewish, was dismissed. Neugebauer resigned in sympathy, together with several members of the international advisory board. At the end of the year the Russian involvement on the board was also terminated, and refugee mathematicians were even banned as reviewers. An article in Science reported that articles by Jews now went unabstracted in the Zentralblatt.

  American mathematicians watched the situation with dismay and alarm. At first they considered buying the title, but the Berlin company wouldn’t sell. Springer did, however, make a counter-suggestion, offering two editorial boards, which would have produced different versions of the journal, one for the United States, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Soviet Union, the other for Germany and nearby countries. American mathematicians were so incensed by this insult that in May 1939 they voted to establish their own journal.6

  As early as April 1933 officials at the Rockefeller Foundation began to consider how they might help individual scholars. Funds were found for an emergency committee, which started work in May. This committee had to move carefully, for the depression was still hurting, and jobs were scarce. The first task was to assess the size of the problem. In October 1933, Edward R. Murrow, vice chairman of the emergency committee, calculated that upward of 2,000 scholars, out of a total of 27,000, had been dropped from 240 institutions. That was a lot of people, and wholesale immigration not only risked displacing American scholars but might trigger anti-Semitism. A form of words was needed that would confine the numbers who were encouraged to cross the Atlantic and in the end the emergency committee decided that its policy would be ‘to help scholarship, rather than relieve suffering.’ Thus they concentrated on older scholars, whose achievements were already acknowledged. The most well known beneficiary was Richard Courant from Göttingen.7