Quadrant, January-February 2007

Where are the sheiks of yesteryear, riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like “exposed meat” inviting rape.

Of course we all made a huge uproar. Unbelievable! Who asked his opinion anyway? The sheik calls himself a Mufti and thinks he represents Islam Down Under. But the man’s a brute who plainly hates western culture, who may have channelled funds to Hezbollah, and on top this he’s a security risk too. Go home sheik, go home!

This said, maybe he had a point all the same. It does seem nowadays that you can’t go to the newsagent to buy a paper, or the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread, without being surrounded by acres of glossy magazine erotica and exciting flesh. Not all of us would call it exposed meat, perhaps, but whatever it’s called it’s there—much of it little short of pornography.

To be honest, it seems to me that what the sheik was complaining about is a process that has gone on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from most normal human cultures in the past, where once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires, along with grossly exhibitionistic behaviour, are now increasingly treated as routine.

What has happened? Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the trash merchants at the bottom, to our most celebrated writers and artists at the top? Last December Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal how when “Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo,” this made her “the Internet smash of the season.” Hymowitz then underlined the naivete of the exhibitionism involved—the taken-for-granted security of the celebrity world where Britney Spears and Paris Hilton live:

They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age.”

The sheik and his followers live within that force field—as do we all. Recently too the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus, sometimes at high political levels. A cultural complaisance regarding men who like boys is not uncommon in the Middle East, particularly among the Bedouin, a fact that is doubtless well known to the sheik. But our subject today is not the comparatively innocent behavior of desert tribesmen; it is the more knowing depravity of modern decadence. What has made us this way?

Art and innocence

A hundred years ago the German author Thomas Mann made an interesting comment. Thinking about morality and its relation to the world of art, he wrote in his novella Tonio Kröger that “as the kingdom of art increases, that of health and innocence declines.” Many artists are estranged from life, he said, pursue goals hostile to life, and work continually to destroy the bourgeois world.

Destroying the bourgeoisie was on many people’s minds at the time. Thoughts of bloody revolution were in the air. Mann however suggested that this would be wasted effort. Given time, and left to itself, capitalism would be more easily debauched than overthrown—destroyed by the values of the artistic bohemia it admired.

Artists were exciting. Artists were sexually free. Above all art redeemed the bourgeoisie from the greedy sin of acquisitiveness. As Jacques Barzun has argued, it wasn’t long before art became a new religion, writers were revered as prophets, and as part of this understanding the bourgeoisie came to believe that the creators of fine literature and beautiful music also had beautiful souls.

This was nonsense. The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. “It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.” The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise:

…I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…”

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

The rise of the paederaesthetic

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau’s view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann’s view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming:

You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.

Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. “Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…” Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself.

Thomas Mann was a towering figure, intellectually in touch with the major currents of thought in his time, and to try and reduce him to his erotic interests would be ridiculous. His diaries for 1933 and 1934 reveal an observer whose understanding of European realities was second to none. Under the Nazis, he wrote, the Germans were becoming a “wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes.” In his entry for December 15, 1933, Mann reported Max Planck’s meeting with the Führer:

Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.

He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man’s low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.

Two worlds coming together as the result of the one’s rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that “Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century.”

Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that, and we should also note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored ‘Hermes’ (and their slighted and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread.

Vladimir Nabokov once joked that if Lolitahad been about a man and a boy he would have had no American publishing problems—and that this was considered a joking matter is almost as revealing as anything else to do with the book. It would of course be ludicrous to suggest a direct connection between the works of these authors and what is now going on in the media and the streets. The self-conscious complexities of literary style alone would exclude all but the most determined reader from the experiences Mann and Nabokov publicise.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20^th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call “paederaesthetics”—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader’s guide for college students from 1995 tells us that

Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos.

I’d have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with his antinomian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded.

Lionel Trilling discussed Lolita in Encounter in 1958. A critic of high moral seriousness, he made it clear that he wished to avoid a “correct enlightened attitude” or “to argue that censorship is always indefensible.” The stakes he said were high—too high for grandstanding about artistic values regardless of social costs. Detachedly considering Nabokov’s literary achievement, Trilling found that Lolitabelonged to a tradition of tales about hopeless erotic infatuations going back to medieval times.

Yet to know this literary fact was not enough. After every extenuating aesthetic argument had been considered, it remained the case that Lolita “makes a prolonged assault on one of our unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions, the sexual inviolability of girls of a certain age (and compounds the impiousness with what amounts to incest).” It might be true, he writes, that Juliet was fourteen when she gave herself to Romeo, and that we all now regard ourselves as sensibly clear-eyed about sex after the enlightenment of Coming of Age in Samoa.

But let an adult male seriously think about the girl as a sexual object and all our sensibility is revolted. The response is not reasoned but visceral. Within the range of possible heterosexual conduct, this is one of the few prohibitions which still seem to us to be confirmed by nature itself.

The sexualizing of everyday life

Not any more—or not in certain circles. Trilling’s is plainly a voice from the past. Today the debate is more likely to concern the acceptability of public copulation or pubic display. If it’s okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn’t Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

A mass-market color supplement to Sydney’s Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts “Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style”. The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life.

Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author “of a best-selling erotic novel”. This cites “a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet.” Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick in thigh-high leather who, we are told, is “mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard.” Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that “Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms” and that the young woman in question “usually obliges.”

Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay “In search of a cure for paradise syndrome” questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis’s thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there’s a full-color cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that’s the expression I need.

Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who “wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was ‘a bit of a legend’. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up.”

Civility and common sense

Now then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and appearance, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the sheik’s.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of “Wanna Fuck?” from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly is a boor and a pest. He undeniably has a wider political agenda. But if these are not examples of white western women calling for action, what exactly are they?

Thomas Mann’s premonitions have come about. With the expansion of media mimesis in every direction the numbers of those who write and film and act and transform reality in a thousand more-or-less artistic ways has steadily expanded, the boundary between life and theatre has blurred, and what were once the values of a picturesque social fringe have taken over. Many of the people in our Theatrical Industrial Complex are very sick people indeed.

Getting the balance right between the animal and the civil has been a problem since civilization began. It hasn’t been easy. There has been a perpetual strain between the puritan tendency and the libertine, in China, in Japan, in India, and in the West as well. Some cultures and some eras veered to the voluptuary; some to the ascetic. Alexander Pope saw this perplexity as part of Man’s condition. Created half to rise and half to fall,

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused…

For Europe’s educated classes the situation in the 18^th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and Madame du Chatelet—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish.

Be that as it may, the usual way of dealing with this matter involved a common sense separation of realms. You didn’t publish entertaining accounts of oral sex provided by female teachers for their male pupils in family magazines. You didn’t have leading novelists advertising the joys of paedophilia. Though one should expect, in a free country, that such matters may be discussed and argued about—the pros (few) and the cons (many)—it has usually also been assumed that this would be constrained by a thoughtful choice of time, place, and occasion.

That’s where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that’s what the outspoken sheik is—and he’s calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.

[This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Interest with the title “Over There, Then: John Gunther’s Inside Europe”]

The War had started and Churchill had lots on his mind. But even in September 1939 he still had time for John Gunther. The much-travelled American journalist was one of the few outsiders who had been in Moscow on August 24th, the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, and Churchill wanted to hear how this stunning maneuver was received on Moscow’s streets.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is unrecorded, but the words of the British leader were something Gunther remembered for years. “Russia,” Churchill murmured, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would become famous in a more polished form, “was a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

* * *

The wartime meeting with Churchill was no fluke. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther’s Inside Europe had made him the most famous American newsman of them all. A friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Gunther threw parties at his home in New York for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo.

He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and Toots Shor’s and 21. But his books anatomising different continents—Inside Latin America, Inside Asia, Inside Africa, Inside Russia—were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

Yet nothing else was as successful as his 1936 Inside Europe. It foreshadowed what the Nazis had in store. Much as Robert D. Kaplan today has been a Cassandra warning of the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, Gunther warned of the European forces leading inexorably to World War II.

Inside Europe

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a whopping 500-page hardback retailing at 30 shillings, or sixty times that price.

That didn’t slow sales one bit. In its first year, 1936, Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about 1,000 copies a week, and continued to sell through 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over through the Second World War. John Gunther was later told he was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success, and the first was timing. Appearing first in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper’s in the USA, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through numerous updated impressions and editions, it climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs “1938 was Hitler’s year”. It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of Inside Europe’s October 1938 edition were able to follow these developments almost as they happened.

Not only were they given brilliant thumb-nail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (and a matchless photograph of Goering at a reception, an enormous bull draped with braid and medals confronting a frail and exquisite lady from Japan) but there were also incisive studies of the whole tragi-comic gallery in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Balkans, in East Europe. Gunther also dealt ably with the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As a portrait gallery the photographs are outstanding—with one striking exception. The shot of Stalin is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes, and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing also extends to the text in the last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—something we shall come to in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on twelve years’ research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalistic colleagues Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H. R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer, and with literary acquaintances Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The high cost of Nazi hoodlums

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther grew up in Chicago, cut his journalistic teeth at the Chicago Daily News before going to Europe, and enjoyed colorful muckraking journalism. During a trip back to the Chicago at the end of the 1920s he collaborated on a News article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums” that appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It told how you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high a $1000. In Inside: the Biography of John Gunther (1992) Ken Cuthbertson wrote that:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929… It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

One way of looking at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” about the even larger number of hoodlums who were already terrorizing Germany and would soon menace the continent. BBC producer Brian Miller described in 2001 how the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931, Washington Merry Go Round, successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the US.

Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating climate of active censorship and intimidation (“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”) that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift to war.

In Vienna since 1930, Gunther had several things going for him. First, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Brian Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something.” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was a huge commercial success that sold half a million copies and gave him political entrée everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. Two years later in 1941 in Washington, after returning from Latin America, Sumner Welles called Gunther in to brief Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he’d found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

But Roosevelt appeared less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.”

With Walter Duranty in Moscow

When John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924 it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London he met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and life-long friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened doors for him in British literary circles. In London he also married his first wife Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944.

During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty—in those days it seems everybody who went to Moscow did. Visiting Duranty’s apartment he reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too…

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. But the mild irregularity of the arrangement Gunther witnessed in Moscow was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult.

Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex, and black magic. Even when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928 he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn’t care. Duranty, who had lost a foot in a railway accident and had a limp (the picture shows him not long after this event) was a famous raconteur and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990) Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later he and his wife visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. Duranty came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and according to Jane Gunther he was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until 4.00am, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp!”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism,” or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again.

It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anyone except the New York Times.”

Perhaps. Yet it’s inescapable that his immediate reward for doggedly covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting America’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something he quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

The literary culture of the time

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How could someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Paris bohemian demi-monde be hired by the New York Times as its resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did he become the best-read authority in the US on Stalin’s famous planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

Whatever the answers to those question, it’s plain that Walter Duranty rubbed off on John Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More I suspect than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué. Only fiction was considered truly prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns, or industrial production. Duranty periodically tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels—The Red Pavilion, The Golden Fleece, The Lost City. Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition.

When success came, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage, and dined with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

When in 1935 Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers approached him to write Inside Europe, Gunther turned him down—not once but twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the huge sum of $5000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. What’s interesting is that when he finally sat down to write, the approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe would be about their beliefs, motives, and charisma.

To get under way he agreed to produce three articles, and “The three articles”, wrote Gunther, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

* * *

Inside Europe is still riveting. No-one who reads Gunther’s description of Hitler and his friends will easily forget it, whatever they may have read since World War II:

He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine travelled with him, in the same aeroplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.

Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee, and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927 the program of the Iron Guard, he wrote, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

The portrayal of Stalin

So far so good. And it’s reasonably good for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told

“Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman’. When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivisation of the peasants had progressed too quickly.”

This is truly a gem. Stalin’s magnanimity is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivisation had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes. John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain and herded them without food or water onto railway wagons and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicise. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing US elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism that prevailed.

That such a perceptive journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about the Soviets had no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s strongest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or to even imagine) that however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly he had stood by his side during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

Hullo, what’s going on here? Is this an old movie set, or something carelessly lost in translation, or an Australian architectural joke?

Driving down from a rainy plateau where I’d been enjoying the country air, steering around fallen rocks until the winding road from the escarpment straightened out on the valley floor, this is what loomed in the mist: a bridge with battlemented towers of stone massive enough to frame a royal portcullis, two at one end, two at the other. (And believe it or not the place is called Kangaroo Valley.)

Had archers crouched behind those castellations or knights in armor clashed beside the creek? Most unlikely. When the Hampden Bridge was built in 1895 the district contained a bunch of dairy farmers, a butter factory, and a pub. Bridge design gives engineers plenty to think about—they have to reconcile money and time, materials and stability and strength. In Kangaroo Valley they must have decided that the local stone looked good, and since masons were available and towers were needed anyway for the suspension cables, why not add a bit of castellation too?

Yet historians tell us that within only a decade, in 1905 at Tavanasa on the Rhine, the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart built a reinforced concrete bridge very like the one at Salginatobel shown on the right. (For Maillart’s full and remarkable story see David P. Billington, Robert Maillart: Builder, Designer, Artist, Cambridge University Press 1997.)

Severe, elegant, and entirely original, Maillart’s designs changed bridge construction forever—or they did eventually, since he got little help from the conservative Swiss authorities that awarded civil engineering contracts in his day. Nevertheless during his lifetime (1872—1940) his bridges left an indelible aesthetic impression, and though he cared little for the arts, and never thought of himself as an artist, his work received an admiring chapter in Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture.

But the question is this: which design do we prefer and why? Which seems more natural? Which seems odd? I suppose one shouldn’t make too much of the principle that form should follow function, even if it’s true of surfboards; and we willingly concede that medieval revivalism might make sense in Europe in the form of cathedrals.

But what about turrets and battlements in the land of Terra Australis, where there’s nothing to “revive”, where all historical association is lacking, where the last several thousand years of human occupation have seen little but bough shelters and grass huts… In the land of the gumtree what in God’s name is the point?

Pugin, Ruskin, and pointed architecture

Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin would have argued that God’s name provided all the point that was needed. Europe’s cathedrals are the greatest architectural achievement of mankind—nothing else comes close—and the whole meaning of what was sometimes called “pointed architecture” was to glorify God with spires and pinnacles rising to the heavens—their ascent was aspirational.

He would have angrily rejected any parallel between sham battlements (whether English follies or Australian oddities) and his own religious work. Pugin would also have argued that in his own writings he regularly ridiculed merely decorative or fashionable Gothic: it was serious church architecture in the “pointed” style that really mattered.

* * *

From Rosemary Hill’s superb new book about Pugin, God’s Architect (Allen Lane 2007), it’s obvious that in the early 19th century the aesthetic rage of both Pugin and John Ruskin was turned against two things—the ugly factory world with its heedless aggrandisement and no-brow taste, and the mad electicism of upper classes with more money than sense, whose building projects enthusiastically mimicked everything from Hindu to Egyptian to Chinese. (See Ruskin’s parody prospectus below.)

Both Ruskin and Pugin looked backward; both were vehement in debate and wrote passionately on behalf of their ideals; both banged on relentlessly about truth and honesty in art; both had episodes of madness and both had difficulties with women—Ruskin alternating between aversion and nympholeptic delirium, Pugin being perhaps too uxorious for his own good (though dying young he outlived two wives, married a third, and fathered any number of children).

But beyond their shared commitment to a vision of Christian religious art they had little in common, numerous differences separating the rhapsodising cultural patrician and the rough-tongued part-time sailor. (Pugin once said “there is nothing worth living for but Christian architecture and a boat.”) Ruskin deprecated Doric because it allowed little scope for ornament; Pugin detested it because it was ‘pagan’. Ruskin was drawn to Amiens Cathedral because its exterior was alive with sculptures; Pugin loved cathedral interiors because the spellbinding godly atmosphere provided the right setting for Christian worship.

Pugin’s work

Architects need patrons, and Pugin was lucky to have the support of the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, a wealthy Catholic who had inherited property valued at £347,511. His predecessor, the 15th Earl, had filled his gardens with a deplorable confusion of Indian temples, Chinese pagodas, and a model of Stonehenge. The enlightened 16th Earl wanted none of that, and commissioned Pugin to improve and Gothicise a number of buildings he owned. At one point Shrewsbury wanted to extend a ruined castle he owned to include a hospital for elderly priests. Sham castellation would be needed to make the hospital blend in. Pugin was outraged:

I would sooner jump off the rocks than build a castellated residence for priests!

More significantly, Shrewsbury also funded what Rosemary Hill describes as “one of the most admired and visited of all Victorian buildings.” This was the church of St Giles in the little Staffordshire town of Cheadle. On a small scale it embodied the ideals displayed in his 1836 book Contrasts, which compared as invidiously as possible the bare unornamented nonconformist churches of the day (Evangelical chapels and Quaker meeting halls) with the visionary splendors of medieval cathedral naves that filled his imagination:

…what a burst of glory meets the eye, on entering a long majestic line of pillars rising into lofty and fretted vaulting!

The eye is lost in the intricacies of the aisles and lateral chapels; each window beams with sacred instructions, and sparkles with glowing and sacred tints…

* * *

The plates in God’s Architect show why Pugin’s church at Cheadle was so admired. No detail of ornament or fixture had been overlooked. Cardinal Newman described St Giles as “the most splendid building I ever saw… enough to convert a person. The chapel is on entering a blaze of light. I could not help saying to myself ‘Porta Coeli’.”

Among the visitors who came for the church’s consecration in 1846 was Sir Charles Barry, the architect appointed to design the new Houses of Parliament. Pugin made a huge but little-known ornamental contribution to this most famous example of Barry’s Gothic work. It was however little known because Pugin had converted to Catholicism, and in Sir Kenneth Clark’s words, “all parties were half-ashamed of this uncouth renegade.”

The issue was later muddied by a dispute between the two families, but the truth is roughly as follows: Without Pugin’s mastery of medieval detail the British Houses of Parliament and Big Ben itself would not look the way they do; without Barry’s direction and control they wouldn’t exist at all. In The Gothic Revival Sir Kenneth Clark wrote that

The silly question, ‘Who was the architect of the Houses of Parliament?’ is well forgotten; but it is worth remembering that every inch of the great building’s surface, inside and out, was designed by one man: every panel, every wall-paper, every chair sprang from Pugin’s brain, and his last days were spent in designing ink-pots and umbrella-stands.

The educational deficit

In his sketch of Pugin’s biography Clark wastes little time on childhood: “At this period of their lives, it seems, men of talent are all much alike—the same solitary school-time, the same violence of temper, the same omens of a brilliant future”. We know what he means. But Rosemary Hill properly gives Pugin’s early years more space. Only by understanding the deep impression left on him during his visits to Lincoln Cathedral and York Minster, planting “ideas and impressions that would last all his life”, can we understand both the passion of his vocation and its limitations.

At an age when men like Ruskin were at university, Pugin was still employed working for his father helping illustrate books about England’s cathedrals. Largely self-educated, he was never apprenticed to an architect, never studied architecture formally, never even understood that the Reformation he reviled for its destruction of so much religious art came after, not before, the Renaissance. His enthusiasm for medieval buildings was combined with a lofty contempt for neo-classical styles—including Michelangelo’s work at St. Peter’s. When in his teens he left his father’s studio, his first encounter with the outside world was at Covent Garden.

Stage-struck between the ages of 16 and 20, Pugin became a valued scene-painter and designer, Clark telling us that his greatest triumph came when “his correct and gorgeous scenery made a success of the opera Kenilworth”—an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s novel that made much of Kenilworth Castle. At Covent Garden Pugin befriended the workmen at the theatre, many of them sailors who “knew the ropes” both on deck and in the flies, bought himself a boat, and began the lifelong habit of wearing self-designed clothing on the lines of a seaman’s rig.

He had little money; at Covent Garden he sometimes slept in the boxes; and the friendly habits of the theatrical crowd meant that his nights were not always alone. Rosemary Hill intimates that it was probably at this stage of his life he contracted the syphilis from which, at the age of 40, he later died.

Pugin visits Rome

His dress was idiosyncratic. He was often dishevelled. He frequently swore like a sailor. But all this was combined with great good humor, and in the room where he worked—with nothing more than a rule and a rough pencil—there was “a continual rattle of marvellous stories and shouts of laughter.” He had tales to tell of the sea, of trips to Flanders to buy religious antiquities, and of being wrecked on the Scottish coast. In Kenneth Clark’s words, no-one could escape “his medieval vehemence and whole-heartedness.” He loved the exotic language of the ecclesiastical world:

The stoups are filled to the brim; the rood is raised on high; the lamps of the sanctuary burn bright; the albs hang in the oaken ambries and the cope chests are filled with orphreyed baudekins; and pix, and pax, and chrismatory are there, and thurible and cross.

Not originally Catholic, Pugin became convinced that it was only within the Roman Catholic Church that “the grand & sublime style of church architecture can ever be restored”. He converted in his early 20s, and about the same time moved to Salisbury where he built himself a second house. Friends found his enthusiasm and warmth irresistible. Cardinal Newman, however, though an admirer of the church of St Giles at Cheadle, was finally unable to bear its architect. He described Pugin as an “immense talker” who was “rough tongue-free unselfgoverned.” And unselfgoverned tongue-free talkers were something Newman couldn’t abide.

In 1847, recovering slowly from a bout of mental illness (he would die within five years), Pugin took himself off to Europe wearing his sailing clothes, carrying one spare shirt, and looking far from clean. In Rome he felt compelled to speak his mind. The city was “disgusting and depressing”, he loathed the “paganism” of both the Renaissance and the Baroque, and he told two prelates who were “in immediate attendance on the Pope” that he “expected St Peter’s to be rebuilt in the Gothic style.”

Should we take much notice of this? I don’t think so. In his final years he was under considerable strain, with declining health, and his mind was failing fast. More important is the fact that during his amazingly productive short life, this distinguished artist, in Rosemary Hill’s words, “inspired, transformed, and reinvigorated English architecture and design”, profoundly changing British thinking about religious architecture and the face of Britain itself.

The Hampden Bridge revisited

But what about that Australian bridge? Is there nothing more to be said about Kangaroo Valley’s unusual ornament? The first thing to remember is that the bridge is still standing and carrying a heavy load of main road traffic. It was plainly well-built. And the second thing is that perhaps we shouldn’t take it all too seriously. If you were brought up to revere Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, and bridges that look like Robert Maillart’s, it may look odd—and it certainly looks odd to me.

But there’s more to life than art, and there’s more to art than the canons of modernism. Aesthetic taste in 2008 is a commercial gallimaufry reinvented each day for a largely juvenile market. And children in a parental SUV coming down that mountain road and glimpsing the Hampden Bridge on a misty day would probably find it exciting—the gateway to a theme park maybe. Standing on a river boundary, it might seem to lure them into the enchantments of endless mock-medieval movies: avoid the troll in the brook, step quickly past the towers… And beyond lies Camelot.

Perhaps, too, those funny castellatory bits and pieces are more life enhancing than one might at first think. The birds of the air may appreciate them, including cockatoos. When Duncan comes to the rough battlements of Macbeth’s castle he comments favourably on the aspect, and Banquo adds a little natural history:

The temple-haunting martlet does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle…

Not too many accommodating jutties or coigns of vantage on Maillart’s bridges. Or on the Sydney Opera House for that matter. Though a really desperate martlet might just find room for a nest.

Reading

David P. Billington, Robert Maillart: builder, designer, artist, 1997

Michael W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, 1991

Kenneth Clark. The Gothic revival: an essay in the history of taste, 1996 (1928)

Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot, 1985

Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the building of romantic Britain, 2007

Bernhard Schütz, Great Cathedrals, 2002

Addenda

Eclecticism

It was the complaint of both Pugin and Ruskin that architects in the early 19th century would concoct anything for a price—Scotch Baronial, Old English, Italian Gothic. Ruskin parodied their eager acceptance of whatever their rich clients might suggest, writing that the architect

is requested, perhaps, by a man of great wealth, nay, of established taste in some points, to make a design for a villa in a lovely situation. The future proprietor carries him upstairs to his study, to give him what he calls his “ideas and materials,” and in all probability begins somewhat thus:

“This sir is a note I made on the spot. The approach to Villa Reale, near Pozzuoli. Dancing nymphs, you perceive, sir; elegant, graceful. Then, sir, this is a sketch made by an American friend of mine: Whee-shaw-Kantamaraw’s wigwam, King of the Cannibal Islands I think he said sir. You may observe a log, scalps, and boa constrictor skins: curious. Something like this would look neat, I think, for the front door, don’t you?

The lower windows I’ve not quite decided upon. But what would you say to Egyptian, with hieroglyphics, storks, and coffins, with appropriate mouldings above. I brought some from Fountains Abbey the other day…

Ruskin’s debt to Pugin

Rosemary Hill seems rather too accommodating in her response to Ruskin’s contemptuous dismissal of Pugin. She accepts Ruskin’s claim that he had neither read Pugin’s writings nor allowed them to influence him in any way (“Ruskin in fact owed nothing to Pugin, though they had much in common…” she writes on page 458.)

Regarding the claim that Ruskin “owed nothing” to Pugin, and had never even read what Pugin wrote, Michael W. Brooks in John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture says that this is simply not true: “It is known that he had read and made notes on Pugin’s The True Principles of Architecture. The notes survive.” Brooks goes on:

But perhaps the real point to be made is that Ruskin would have been indebted to Pugin even if he had read nothing at all by him. He would surely have seen reviews of Pugin’s books—including the very long one in the March 1837 issue of the Architectural Magazine.

He would have discussed Pugin’s ideas with fellow members of the Oxford Architectural Society. Above all, he would have been aware of the influence of Pugin on Scott’s design… (for a church in Camberwell).

Scott revised his plans in accordance with Pugin’s call for reality in construction, and it was precisely this demand that Ruskin later expressed so powerfully in ‘The Lamp of Truth’. There are significant differences between Ruskin’s view of Gothic and Pugin’s, but Ruskin’s denial of any debt can only be explained by the sectarian fervor that gripped much of England at mid-century. (Brooks, page 49)

The Oxford Museum

Among the weirder creations of the period is the Oxford Museum of Natural History. In the 1850s the question of an appropriate style for its design was fiercely debated: Should the façade be Gothic or Classical? Largely as a result of Ruskin’s campaigning Gothic was approved for the whole structure, inside and out, some of the decorative details being provided by Ruskin himself. Among other things it contained a chemistry lab in the shape of an abbot’s kitchen. In his 1949 biography of Ruskin Peter Quennell provides an entertaining account of the sad disappointment Ruskin felt at its final appearance:

Over the main entry of this shrine of learning, an angel displayed in his right hand the open Book of Nature, while in his left he supported a cluster of ‘three living cells,’ symbolic (it was understood) of Life’s mysterious origins. Within an imposing quadrangular hall, columns of cast iron soared up towards the glass roof, bursting, as they completed their ascent, into a wealth of wrought-iron foliage.

Organic Form again predominated; arching over the student’s head were spandrels twisted into the shape of interwoven forest-boughs; the angularity of brackets and girders was softened by the profusion of leaves and blossoms and fruit that had somehow curled among them. Here were the elm, the holly, the briar, the passion-flower and the water-lily.

In the main court, with its double arcade, polished shafts of stone had capitals and bases enwreathed with the forms of numerous plants and animals, disposed in a manner at once aesthetically pleasing and scientifically enlightening.

* * *

It was a notable task nobly performed. And yet—across the happiness that Ruskin felt, or that he should have felt, there crept a lengthening shadow. The intention had been good, the execution honest. He had been stimulated by the task on hand: now that it was finished and he could at last stand back, so sensitive a lover of the best in art must needs admit that the Oxford Museum, as it had risen, was not entirely beautiful.

He did not see it, let us piously suppose, even for a second of horrible illumination, in all its true ugliness. But he was obliged to confess—after Wordsworth’s early death of consumption in 1861—that the building had, from some points of view, “failed signally of being what he hoped.”

Somehow the plan had miscarried; a malicious spirit was abroad—the spirit of an age he hated and despised and feared—which came always between himself and the satisfaction that he coveted.

At its touch the flowers and fruit he had designed, losing their virginal freshness, shrivelled into curlicues of tormented cast-iron: a chemical laboratory in the shape of an abbot’s kitchen seemed unsuitable and awkward: his visionary fabric shed its lustrous antique patina and was revealed, beneath one of those lowering skies that often weigh on Oxford, as a mere pretentious accumulation of livid modern masonry.

Baden-Baden, 9 May 1863

Dear Countess,

I arrived here a week ago and have only just managed to settle in, find myself a flat, etc. I was just about to write to you—although not fourteen pages but my normal four—when your long letter suddenly appeared, and naturally, despite your pitiless severity on me, I hastened to carry out my intention. I will say a few words, not in justification, but by way of explanation.

You censure me both as a man (in the sense of a political animal, citizen) and as a writer. I think that with the first you are quite correct, but not with the second. You are right in saying that I am not a political animal and in affirming that the government has nothing to fear from me; my convictions haven’t changed since my youth.

But I have never engaged in political activity, nor shall I ever do so. Such matters are alien to me and uninteresting and I concern myself with them only insofar as I need to as a writer who deals with contemporary life. But you are wrong to demand of me literature which I cannot produce, fruits which, as it were, do not grow on my tree. I have never written for the ordinary people. I write for that class to which I belong, from A Sportsman’s Sketches to Fathers and Sons.

I do not know whether I’ve been of any use, but I do know that I have been unwavering in my aims and in this respect do not deserve your reproach. You suggest that it is merely out of laziness that I do not write, as you say, simple and moral stories for the people, but how do you know that I haven’t tried twenty times to do something along these lines and have not done so because I am convinced that it is not in my province, that I do not know how to?

This is precisely where you can see the weak side of the most intelligent people who are not artists: having grown accustomed to arrange their lives according to their own free will, they just cannot understand that a writer often has no control over his own offspring and are ready to accuse him of laziness, epicureanism, etc. Believe me when I say that every person does only what is given him to do, and to coerce him is both useless and fruitless. That is why I shall never write stories for the ordinary people. For that one needs a quite different cast of mind and character.

I can place my hand on my heart and say that I don’t think I live abroad simply to enjoy staying in hotels and so on. Circumstances have up until now determined that I spend only five months a year in Russia, and it’s now even less. I trust you will believe me when I say that I would particularly like to be in Russia now and to see at first hand what is happening there, for it is something I really feel for.

I still haven’t found a husband for my daughter; she’ll be writing to you herself. I am sorry that I didn’t thank you for the marvellous album which you sent for her, which arrived safe and sound and now graces her table. I would be very pleased if you were advised to go abroad; I would then have une chance to see you.

Look after your health and write me albeit indignant letters. You know that I love you sincerely and value your friendship. I firmly press your husband’s hand.

Yours, Iv. Turgenev.

Perhaps a footnote is appropriate here. Turgenev asserts an aversion to politics, defending himself on the grounds that it is futile for men who are not political animals to pretend they are. Yet his 1862 Fathers and Sons prophetically points towards Russia’s grim future down to the present day. The character of Bazarov notoriously prefigures cold revolutionary passion. He represents a nihilist prototype of the Bolshevik “New Man”—stripped of religion, blind to ordinary human failings, contemptuous of the arts, dedicated to science and materialism, obsessively hostile to Czarism, and determined to “make a clean sweep”.

It might be going too far to see in Bazarov the fearful lineaments of Comrade Pavlik, the Soviet boy hero who denounced his own father to the NKVD. But the heartlessness of this “son” to his own conventionally sentimental parents eerily prefigures a world in which only political values count—apart from survival. (See the recent book by Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero.) How then can Fathers and Sons be described as unpolitical? Turgenev also said rather alarmingly that aside from his attitude toward the arts, Bazarov’s character stood for much that he himself believed.

Nonetheless, as he claims, Turgenev is unpolitical. He belongs to no party. Despite his apparent sympathies he is not arguing for a cause. While he severely criticises the idle and directionless gentry to which he himself belongs, he has a detached and unsentimental view of the peasantry; and while agreeing that the abolition of serfdom was necessary (it took place in 1861; Fathers and Sons appeared in 1862) he was not optimistic about the future rise of millions of gross and brutish Furtsevas and Khrushchevs to supreme power. Turgenev is unpolitical also in his detachment. His aesthetic stance is strictly sub specie aeternitatis— it fatalistically embraces nature’s eternal indifference to man. In René Wellek’s words:

As early as A Sportsman’s Sketches he had said: “From the depths of the age-old forests, from the everlasting bosom of waters the same voice is heard: ‘You are no concern of mine’ says nature to man.” In the remarkable scene with Arkady on the haystack—the two friends almost come to blows—Bazarov had pronounced his disgust with “man’s pettiness and insignificance beside the eternity where he has not been and will not be.” There is no personal immortality, no God who cares for man; nature is indifferent, fate is blind and cruel, love is an affliction, even a disease beyond reason—this seems the message Turgenev wants to convey.

1798–1863

A great painting—but for Delacroix strictly a one-off. He hated crowds, feared revolutionary turmoil, loathed popular hysteria, and thought mobs did nothing but break and smash. Yet if you want an inspiring vision of freedom, then Liberty Leading the People is almost irresistible. “To be led into a cloudless future by a beautiful half-naked woman” one critic has written, “is a dream that never fails of its effect”; and the excited men panting behind her could only agree.

Kenneth Clark wrote that “it is one of the few programmatic pictures of revolution that has any claim to be a work of art”. Having enthusiastically endorsed the Paris uprising of 1830, however, Delacroix never painted this sort of thing again. He was very ambitious and sought recognition as one of his country’s leading artists. His relations with those on high were generally good. He did not wish to be known as a trouble maker. After contributing this lasting image to the annals of popular revolt he turned away from insurrection forever.

Besides having generally conservative instincts, the painter was also a classicist, a solitary, a talented writer and an altogether engaging man. In John Russell’s words, “Delacroix in his Journal is one of the most cogent arguments for the human race. That we are in the company of a great man is never in doubt. But whereas not every great man gains from proximity, or can usefully be studied in isolation from his work, Delacroix the diarist begins with our respect and ends, just on half a million words later, with our unbounded affection. Incomplete as they are, his diaries rank among the fragmenta aurea of European civilization. They are passionate but not scabrous, worldly but not heartless, intimate but not indiscreet, animated but not rackety, profound but not ponderous, discursive but not self-indulgent. Above all, they are truthful and direct.”

Below are selections from various writings (often condensed or elided) along with comments by friends, critics, and others. When not otherwise identified they are from the Journal or the letters of Delacroix.

Painting

The enemy of all painting is grey. To speak truly, there are neither lights nor shades. There is a color mass for each object, reflected differently on all sides. I discovered one day that linen has green reflections and violet shadows. I notice that it is the same with the sea… I expect this law applies to everything. The special charm of watercolor, beside which any painting in oil always appears rusty and yellowed, is due to the inherent transparency of the paper.

Without boldness, and extreme boldness, there are no beauties. One must dare to be oneself. One must be very bold. Thus one has to surpass oneself, in order to be everything one can be… There can be no rules for great souls; rules are only for those who have merely a talent that can be acquired—not for genius… The most sublime effects are often the result of pictorial license. For example, the unfinished appearance of Rembrandt’s works, and the exaggerations in Rubens. Mediocre men never have such daring, they never go beyond themselves. Method cannot supply a rule for everything, it can only lead everyone to a certain point.

Delacroix is the most suggestive of all painters. His works, even his secondary and inferior paintings, give one the most to think about. They recall to the memory poetic emotions and ideas already known but which one thought forever buried in the night of the past. Eugene Delacroix was not only an artist in love with his craft. He was also a man of broad general culture, in contrast to other modern artists, most of whom are little more than famous or obscure daubers, sad specialists, and pure craftsmen… Baudelaire

Delacroix’s imagination! It has never feared to scale the heights of religion. Heaven belongs to it as does hell, as do war, Olympus, and sensuality. He is indeed the type of the painter-poet! He is one of the chosen few, and the breadth of his mind includes religion in its domain. His imagination, glowing as a chapel ablaze with light, burns with every flame and every purple passion. All the sorrow there is in passion moves him. All the splendor there is in the Church illumines him. On his inspired canvases he pours in turn blood, light, and shadows. Baudelaire

What I have been saying about the power of painting now becomes clear. If it has to record but a single moment it is capable of concentrating the effect of that moment. The painter is far more master of what he wants to express than the poet or musician who are in the hands of interpreters; even though his memory may have a smaller range to work on, he produces an effect that is a perfect unity and one which is capable of giving complete satisfaction.

Moreover, the painter’s work does not suffer so much from variations in the manner in which it is understood in different periods. Fashions change, and the bias of the moment may cause a different value to be placed upon his work, but ultimately it is always the same, it remains what the artist intended it to be, whereas this cannot be said of the art of the theatre, which has to pass through the hands of interpreters.

When the artist’s mind is not there to guide the actors or singers the performance no longer corresponds to his original intention; the accent disappears, and with it, the most subtle part of the work is lost. Happy indeed is the author whose work is not mutilated, an insult to which he is exposed even during his lifetime. Even the change of an actor alters the whole character of a work.

Nature

Common men pass treasures by; they respond to the spectacle of nature as guests at a banquet who are neither hungry nor thirsty.

This morning, and yesterday evening as well, I went for a stroll in the deserted and overgrown garden of the poor gendarmes. Their neat little rows of cabbages, and the vines and fruit trees, which must have been a consolation to them and some small help in their poverty, have almost disappeared, ruined by passers-by, the wind, and other accidents of various kinds. Near the Hermitage I found an immense clearing where the trees had been cut down. Each year I feel heartbroken to find that part of the forest has disappeared, and always one of the loveliest, where the trees were thickest and most ancient. There used to be a charming little shady path just here.

Before nature itself it is our imagination that makes the picture; we see neither the blades of grass in a landscape, nor the blemishes of the skin in a pretty face.

The forms of a model, whether tree or man, are only a dictionary to which the artist goes in order to reinforce his fugitive impressions, or rather to confirm them… Novelty is in the mind that creates, not in the nature that is painted… You who know there is always something new, show them what they have failed to recognise. Make them believe that they have never before truly heard the nightingale or seen the ocean.

Eros

I saw Sidonia last Tuesday. What ravishing moments! How lovely she looked lying naked on the bed! It was mostly love-making and kisses.

Mme Conflans came in during the evening and was charming. Wretched slacker that I am! I must admit that my life is fairly full just now, but I am apt to get into a fever of excitement that makes me very vulnerable. I thought her most attractive in her round hat with the little feathers. She seems to like me. I must remember to send her the name of the parasol shop. Tomorrow if possible.

To the studio at nine o’clock. Laure came. We continued with the portrait. It’s an extraordinary thing, but although I wanted to make love to her all the time she was posing, as soon as she began to leave—rather hurriedly as a matter of fact—I did not feel like it at all; I suppose I needed time to collect myself.

I need a mistress to keep my flesh in subjection. I’m terribly worried about it, and struggle with my better self when I’m in the studio. Sometimes I long for any woman to come along. God grant that Laure comes tomorrow! Saw Cogniet, and the picture by Géricault, also the Constables. It was too much for one day. Came home about five o’clock. Spent two hours in the studio. Great want of sex. I am utterly abandoned.

‘May I hope, loveliest of women, to see you on Thursday? And will you forgive my not having been to call on you? I flatter myself that you will not be as harsh as you threatened, and that you cannot be so cruel as to pass my yellow door without coming in. I expect it will be in the afternoon, as before. If it’s not presuming too far, may I ask you to give me a little more of your time?’

Now for the struggle! Shall I send it or not?

Politics

Eugene Delacroix was a curious mixture of scepticism, politeness, dandyism, violent will, cunning despotism, and finally a kind of special kindness and quiet tenderness that always goes hand in hand with genius. His father belonged to that breed of strong men, the last of whom we knew in our childhood—some, fervent followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, others, resolute disciples of Voltaire. All of them participated with equal obstinacy in the French Revolution, and the survivors, Jacobins or Cordeliers, rallied in perfect good faith (an important point to be noted) to the standard of Bonaparte. Baudelaire

‘Man is born free’ says Rousseau. Was there ever a more dismal piece of nonsense? In the whole of creation is there any being more of a slave than man? His weakness and his needs make him dependent on the elements and his fellow men. Yet external matters are the least of his troubles. The passions he finds within his own breast are the cruellest tyrants he has to fight, and one might add that to resist them is to go against his very nature. Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix always retained traces of his revolutionary origins. Of him, as of Stendhal, it may be said that he had a great fear of being duped. Skeptical and aristocratic, he knew passion and the supernatural only by forcing himself to frequent the world of dreams. Hating crowds, he looked upon them as little more than statue-breakers, and the wanton damage done to a few of his works in 1848 was not calculated to convert him to the political sentimentalism of our time. Baudelaire

Delacroix had the utmost contempt for the age in which he lived, for its crass materialism and complacent belief in progress; and his art is almost entirely an attempt to escape from it. He escaped into the subjects of romantic poetry, in particular that of Shakespeare, Byron and Walter Scott. Some of his greatest pictures were inspired by Byron, and he had a Byronic power of self-identification with the forces of the sublime—in particular ‘the roaring of lions and the destructive sword’. Kenneth Clark

True moralists and philosophers (Marcus Aurelius and Jesus Christ) never talked politics. Equal rights and other such vain imaginings were not their concern. All they enjoined on mankind was resignation to fate, not to the unknown fatum of the ancient world, but to the constant need to submit to the harsh decrees of nature—a need which no one can deny and no philanthropist can mitigate. They asked nothing more of the sage than that he play his part in his appointed place amidst a general harmony. Illness, death, poverty, spiritual suffering, these are with us always and will torment us under any form of government; democracy or monarchy, it makes no odds. Delacroix

Morocco

Visiting North Africa in 1832 as part of a diplomatic mission, his first response was wildly excited, pictorial, and romantic. The Moroccans in their flowing gowns and cloaks made him think he was in Ancient Rome. But the insults directed at him as a Christian, and the spectacle of Arab religious frenzies (seen in his painting above, ‘The Fanatics of Tangier’) brought him down to earth.

I’ve just arrived in Tangier. I have rushed through the town. I am quite bewildered by all that I’ve seen. But I can’t let the mail boat go—it’s leaving shortly for Gibraltar—without telling you something of my amazement. We landed in the midst of the strangest crowd of people. The Pasha of the city received us, surrounded by his soldiers. One would need to have twenty arms and forty-eight hours a day to give any tolerable impression of it all. The Jewesses are quite lovely. I’m afraid it will be difficult to do more than paint them: they are real pearls of Eden. We were given a superb reception, by local standards. They treated us to the most peculiar military music. At the moment I’m in a dream, seeing things I’m afraid will vanish too soon.

The picturesque is here in abundance At every step one sees ready-made pictures, which would bring fame and fortune to twenty generations of painters. You’d think yourself in Rome or in Athens, minus the Attic atmosphere; the cloaks and togas and a thousand details are quite typical of antiquity. A rascal who’ll mend the vamp of your shoe for a few coppers has the dress and bearing of Brutus or Cato of Utica.

I told you in my last letter that we had been granted an audience with the emperor. From that moment we were supposed to have permission to walk freely about the town; but I was the only member of our party to take advantage of this privilege, since these people have such a loathing for the dress and appearance of Christians that one must always be escorted by soldiers… Every time I go out I am escorted by a huge gang of curious onlookers, who lavish insults on me—dog, infidel, caracco, etc., and jostle one another to get near me and make contemptuous grimaces in my face… I have spent most of my time here in utter boredom, because it was impossible to draw anything from nature openly, even the meanest hovel; if you so much as go on to the terrace you run the risk of being stoned or shot at. The Moors are fantastically jealous, and it is on these terraces that their women usually take the air or visit one another.

Everything is ruled by custom and tradition. The Moor gives thanks to God for his bad food and wretched clothing; he thinks himself only too lucky to have them. It must be hard for them to understand the easy-going ways of Christians and the restlessness that sends us perpetually seeking after new ideas. We notice a thousand things in which they are lacking, but their ignorance is the foundation of their peace and happiness. Can it be that we have reached the end of what a more advanced civilization can produce?

Work and solitude

Man is a social animal who dislikes his fellow men. Explain this idiosyncrasy: the more intimately a man lives with another human being as foolish as himself, the more he seems to want to harm this unfortunate individual: domestic bliss. Two friends, who enjoy meeting once a week and miss one another when they are parted, conceive the strongest aversion for each other if circumstances, such as a voyage, compel them to live together for any length of time…

I must try to live austerely, as Plato did. How can one keep one’s enthusiasm concentrated on a subject when one is always at the mercy of other people and in constant need of their society? Dufresne is perfectly right; the things we experience for ourselves when we are alone are much stronger and much fresher. However pleasant it may be to communicate one’s emotion to a friend there are too many fine shades of feeling to be explained, and although each probably perceives them, he does so in his own way and thus the impression is weakened for both.

Everything tells me that I need a more solitary life. The loveliest and most precious moments are slipping away in amusements which, in truth, bring me nothing but boredom. The constant expectation of being interrupted is already beginning to weaken what little strength I have left after wasting my time for hours the night before. When memory has nothing important to feed on, it pines and dies. Countless valuable ideas miscarry because there is no continuity in my thoughts. They burn me up and lay my mind to waste. The enemy is within my gates, inside my very heart; I feel his hand everywhere.

Think of the blessings that await you, not of the emptiness that drives you to seek constant distraction. Think of having peace of mind and a reliable memory, of the self-control that a well-ordered life will bring, think of health not undermined by endless concessions to the passing excesses that other people’s society entails, think of uninterrupted work, and plenty of it. Nothing is better than having some task to perform each day.

The American Interest , November-December 2006

They called him the most distinguished public intellectual of his time. Malcolm Cowley said he was “the last of the great humanists”, while Leo Marx claimed “it’s hard to think of another 20th-century American, in or out of the academy, who has written as many books regarded by academic experts as signal contributions to as many scholarly fields. Except for Edmund Wilson . . . not one comes to mind.”

Though his works were often repetitive they were good enough to win the National Book Award in 1961, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the National Medal for Literature in 1972, the Smithsonian’s Hodgkins Gold Medal and the National Medal of the Arts in 1986. In 1975 the Queen made him an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire; he got the Prix Mondial del Duca in Paris in 1976 for lifetime contributions to letters; in Italy, after calling on Bernard Berenson, he was taken up by the Olivetti family and given a lavish reception at a handsome Roman villa, where 200 of Italy ‘s most famous writers, architects and painters were gathered.

For fifty years Lewis Mumford inveighed against capitalism, militarism, technology, our ungovernable appetite for energy and our deplorable weakness for highways and cars, predicting environmental disaster if Western economic growth and America ‘s thirst for petroleum were not brought under control. Middle Eastern wars and global warming seem to fulfil his darkest prophecies.

Yet who reads Mumford now? His incoherent politics might be one reason—endorsing Emerson’s radical individualism in one place and Henry Bellamy’s “basic communism” in another. But here I’m concerned with something else: the role of aesthetes in public affairs. Does American democracy have no place for cultural mandarins any more?

Concord and Walden Pond

Born in 1895 in New York , Lewis Mumford was the illegitimate issue of a brief liaison between his 30-year-old Protestant German-American mother and a young man in the Jewish household where she worked. His surname had been acquired by his mother a dozen years before during a short marriage to a man twice her age, Jack Mumford. About six months after their wedding, Elvina Conrida Mumford’s first and only husband seems to have got into some sort of “book-keeping trouble” and fled to Canada . The marriage was then annulled.

Lewis Mumford never met either the man from whom he took his second name—and whose only other legacy was a cheap edition of Dickens—or his much younger biological father, Lewis Mack. An Irish nurse provided whatever stability the household had. Mumford was kept in the dark about the whole parental story for many years, and though he vaguely understood that he was both illegitimate and half-Jewish, his mother raised a barrier against further inquiry. Only in 1942, when he was 47 years old, did she finally tell him the facts. According to his biographer, Mumford smilingly embraced her and said she shouldn’t worry, since both Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus were also illegitimate.

As a student at New York ‘s Stuyvesant High School , young Lewis boyishly played around with science, and at 15 had an article accepted by Modern Electrics . But when he flunked basic algebra and found English was his best subject the matter was settled: He would be a writer—specifically a playwright and man of letters. It might be a bit much to see failing algebra as a crucial turning point, but his lifelong hostility to mathematics and quantification did start early.

Growing up on Manhattan during the years of the First World War Mumford tried on different American identities. Nearest to hand was Walt Whitman, a poet who had already sung the city of New York . But there was an exuberance about Whitman that wasn’t quite what he wanted. Thoreau was better: withdrawn, self-contained and defiant, better with trees than people, the kind of man an unprepossessing acne-scarred youth could warm to. But it was Emerson who most appealed—austere, towering, exemplary. “Emerson was a sort of living essence”, Mumford wrote in his 1926 survey of American literature, The Golden Day : “The preacher, the farmer, the scholar, the sturdy New England freeholder, yes, and the shrewd Yankee peddler or mechanic, were all encompassed by him; but what they meant in actual life had fallen away from him: he represented what they stood for in eternity.”

Emerson became Mumford’s lifelong idol: Mumford’s wife recalled having to listen to regular readings from the Journals: “I used to live with Emerson”, she said. “It was Emerson, Lewis, and me.”

Walking, talking

Emerson liked walking and so did Mumford. In 1916 he strode all over Manhattan —“East Side, West Side , north and south.” Biographer Donald L. Miller tells us how the New York neighborhoods he visited were observed, sketched, rated, while any that didn’t measure up got marked down for potential demolition. In New York ‘s Jewish quarter “he encountered foul-smelling, clotted tenements he would later compare to those of Juvenal’s Rome .” All along the East Side, Mumford noted, “there was not a block after leaving Madison Avenue that was not dingy, grimy, dull and hopeless.”

Funny thing was, the inhabitants of these dull and hopeless blocks were enjoying a bright and hopeful existence. When he stopped to think about it, it was plain to Mumford that such a vital culture should be preserved, though to do this in accord with the latest principles he’d acquired at City College everything would have to be scrubbed and relocated first. A kind of Jewish Garden City formed in his mind—a Greek agora with a temple at one end, “an adjacent refreshment place, and many protected stalls” nearby, with “plenty of elbow room for gesticulation.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with a Jewish Garden City—quite the opposite. But did Mumford ask these lively gesticulating people if they wanted one? Did he talk to them at all? Like a Victorian traveller in Africa, the peripatetic visitor from the Upper West Side found the natives useful for stimulating moral reflections, pictorial fancies, and expansive civilizing plans, but conversation wasn’t part of the deal.

The contrast between his zeal for fixing New York City and his ignorance of its citizens exposed a persisting mental tendency. It was as noticeable in 1916, applied to life on the Lower East Side, as it was in the case of the International Garden City he proposed for the United Nations thirty years later, when he advised that 3,000 acres of Manhattan be forcefully requisitioned, screened by belts of grass and trees from the corruptions of commerce, and made into a leafy home for the benign world government to come.

Town planning as aesthetics

Lewis Mumford’s first book was his 1922 The Story of Utopias, a journalistic survey ranging from Plato to William Morris. Sympathetic judges say it showed commendable detachment and neither endorsed nor dismissed the utopian project as a whole. Yet the message Mumford distilled from Plato’s Republic went further than this. Here was a utopia that “pictured a community living a sane, continent, athletic, clear-eyed life; a community that would be always, so to say, within bounds”—and would be implicitly autarkic, too. It was a model he thought should be widely followed.

Mumford knew by the age of twenty that he really belonged in another time and place, writing that 6th-century B.C. Athens “would have been more to my liking than New York in the twentieth century after Christ.” And if ancient Greece would suit him better, why shouldn’t it suit the rest of New York ? Why not Athens on Hudson ? Parnassus on Palisades ?

To remake and reconstitute the garment district as a Garden City would be a good start—but in town planning one thing leads to another. New York was only a small part of the Hudson Valley . If the city were to be set to rights, there had to be a unified plan from the Adirondacks to the sea. In an essay on the “regional vision” John L. Thomas tells us that soon after discussing Plato’s polis, Mumford made the following comparison:

It is a mountainous region, this Greece , and within a short distance from mountain top to sea there was compressed as many different kinds of agricultural life as one could single out in going down the Hudson Valley from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Harbor . As the basis of his ideal city, whether Plato knew it or not, he had an ‘ideal’ section of land in his mind—what the geographer calls the ‘valley section.’

* * *

“The geographer” was a Scot named Patrick Geddes whose writings Mumford discovered at City College . Mumford swallowed whole Geddes’ ideas on regional and city planning. What exactly Geddes meant by a “valley section” need not concern us, except to note that it implied having a place for everything and putting everything in its place over hundreds of square miles and millions of acres.

Only a humorless Scot—or perhaps a drunken Russian—could have come up such a dirigiste fantasy, the political and economic ramifications of which hardly bear serious reflection. But each of these men—Mumford, Geddes and Mumford’s close friend, the Appalachian-trailing conservationist Benton MacKaye—had overriding moral and aesthetic concerns. If you got the right colors and shapes in the right places, according to a socialist scale that set firm bounds and limits, then politics (and funding) would look after themselves. What was needed was a high lookout from which a city could be seen with every building and district displayed. After that a planner could decide who and what went where.

Geddes got his view of Edinburgh from the Outlook Tower , a still-visited pseudo-medieval structure built on a high point near Edinburgh Castle , with a camera obscura at the top. For those unacquainted with this device, it projects a 360-degree synoptic image of one’s surroundings onto a table in a darkened room. Suddenly a confusion of human dwellings and workplaces forms a picture to delight the artist’s eye: not homes, just patches of color; not factories, just rectangular forms to be more suitably disposed.

MacKaye’s equivalent of the Outlook Tower in New England was a 542-foot rocky outcrop called Hunting Hill just west of Boston . From here he could see the tributaries of the Nashua River running through country familiar to Thoreau, while to the north “lay the Whitman River , along its banks the railroad bringing lumber and staples east to Boston and carrying manufactures back to the Berkshires and beyond.” Describing his own education, MacKaye said: “I graduated from Longley’s barnyard in 1893 and from Harvard in 1900”—Melvin Longley being the dairyman next door.

Mumford’s own version of the Outlook Tower was on the Palisades on the west side of the Hudson . One of the sketches collected in the Lewis Mumford Papers in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania bears the title in his own hand, “ Manhattan from top of Palisades .” Made during a walking tour in the area, the city in the sketch consists of an irregular horizon of forms and makes up only about 10 percent of the total composition, the rest consisting of river, trees and grass. There are, of course, no people to be seen.

Romantic transfigurations: the rural scene

Mumford followed The Story of Utopias in 1924 with a historical study of American architecture, Sticks and Stones . Many titles of swelling portentousness would follow: Technics and Civilization , The Culture of Cities , The Condition of Man and The Conduct of Life , to name but four. Along with Oswald Spengler’s 1926 The Decline of the West , they prophesied the technological nemesis of Western Man. All of them turgidly elaborated a handful of simple ideas, the first of which was that small is beautiful, and big must therefore justify itself.

The second held that rural arcadia is man’s natural environment: although cities bring forth man’s highest powers, metropolis is often inimical to the human spirit. The third idea was that whatever is “organic” is always and everywhere superior to “the machine”—the latter being a metaphor for all technology since time immemorial. The conclusions he drew were that science is out of control; growth must be stopped; unregulated development must be banned; the reckless consumption of finite resources must end; the ideal state is a stationary state; and planning must be imposed as widely as possible.

To justify this critique Mumford looked back into history. If utopias were to serve as a measure and a guide, they should be combined with what he called a “usable past.” But how could one tell the usable past from the unusable? Despite Mumford’s seemingly encyclopaedic reading and his deep immersion in Thoreau, when he rhapsodised about medievalism or about 17th-century New England towns and farms, what practical understanding of rural life did he actually have?

True, for 36 years Mumford divided his time between Manhattan and the slow-moving upstate hamlet of Leedsville, where he occupied what is called a farmhouse. This was not a working farm where a working farmer and his family made a living off the land. It was a congenial rural retreat for an urban intellectual—the sort of house that comes onto the market when working farmers go broke or die. True, too, his biographer Miller tells us,

As a young boy, from the time he was eight years old to when he was thirteen, he would spend part of the summer on a farm near Bethel , Vermont . . . . It was a world such as Henry David Thoreau had known, rustic but not wilderness, with farms and fields and streams and woods . . . a world Mumford would reference in his book on the art and life of Thoreau’s time, The Golden Day . There young Lewis learnt how to hunt woodchucks and squirrels, and “gained his first glimpse of a simpler, more deeply satisfying life than he found in the world of his New York relatives.

Perhaps so. But did he actually see any work being done? “When he wasn’t reading, hunting, fishing, or walking around the farm”, writes Miller, “Lewis would spend hours lying in a hammock, suspended between two maples in front of the house, listening to the rustling of the leaves above him.” There was also, as it happened, a 300-book library in the house. What I myself remember of life on the farm (and I spent rather more of my boyhood in the country than Mumford did) is the screaming of pigs being slaughtered and a farmhand falling off a haystack and breaking his neck. What Mumford remembered was lying in a hammock cradling Ruskin’s Modern Painters in his arms.

Romantic transfigurations: medievalism

The contrast between dream and reality is just as striking in Mumford’s enthusiasm for the medieval world. This enthusiasm makes an early appearance in his survey of American architecture, Sticks and Stones , where the reader learns that the noblest American residential building was the “medieval” tradition found in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the 17th century. By no means coincidentally, communalism is seen as inseparable from the aesthetic effect: “The charm of an old New England house”—a charm reflected also in the uniform styles of farmhouse, mill and meeting house—“was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by men who had divided the land fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune together.” He added: “Would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England village?”

Apparently not—the only thing to compare with the old New England village was the even older medieval European town where, according to The Culture of Cities , the entire social order was an enormous collective source of well-being. One didn’t have to sit at a desk or bully customers or sordidly wheel and deal: “Economic life was devoted to the glorification of God . . . and to the construction of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools.” And the key to well-being was this: “Business and religion were in an organic relationship.” So there was no conflict between values and work. Organic relationships are best—and we are told there was also a healthy “organic” relationship between religion and the life of the mind. This flourished in the cloister, where medieval life was (somehow) constantly in blissful retreat: “One withdrew at night: one withdrew on Sundays and on fast days: so long as the medieval complex was intact, a constant stream of disillusioned worldly men turned from the market place and the battlefield to seek the quiet contemplative round of the monastery.”

Organic relations are good, but the overriding value is really aesthetic—in other words, how everything looks . In Sticks and Stones Mumford praised the John Ward House in Salem for purely external visual qualities. Every step one takes nearer the house “alters the relation of the planes formed by the gable ends . . . so the building seems in motion, as well as the spectator; and this quality delights the eye quite as much as formal decoration.” Writing in The Culture of Cities about the medieval German town of Dinkelsbühl , he finds the same thing:

Blocked vista and irregular, upward pointing silhouette: gabled roof, tower, and spire worked in aesthetic harmony. The tracery of ironwork in the standard and shield of the foreground was a fine feature of civic art, especially notable in South Germany .

Again:

Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber: another typical profile, irregular but harmonious, following the contour of the land, with the more significant buildings thrusting against the sky. Organic planning and building, not for show but for defense, civic association, the expression of common values.

Were the residents of ancient Dinkelsbühl happy in their blocked vista with its irregular, upward-pointing silhouette? Were the citizens of Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber content with their buildings “thrusting against the sky?” Never mind blocked vistas—what about blocked drains? Throughout his life Mumford was extraordinarily reluctant to see the obvious connection between the continual expansion of science and technology that he feared and routinely denounced, and the practical interests and needs that drove this expansion all the way from the privations of the 11 th century to the amenities we enjoy today.

* * *

Despite occasional throwaway lines about the Black Death—“which sometimes killed off half the population of a town, but caused only a temporary recession”—Mumford’s feudal Europe was a world without lice, rats, plague, lepers, violence and insecurity, without crippling superstitions and hideous punishments, without crop failures and starvation, without arrogant abbots, brutal lords and brutish serfs. There are no packs of savage dogs (hard to deal with before firearms, and a serious problem around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at one time), and no fiery conflagrations that might suddenly destroy 600 houses—as happened in London in 1091—because, alas, however pleasingly irregular their gables and silhouettes, they were mere structures of mud and straw.

As book followed book, Mumford’s wishful thinking about the medieval era got increasingly out of control, and the imagined glories of monastic life became an infatuation. By the age of 75 he seemed to have forgotten that at least nine-tenths of humanity—all normal families of men, women and children—were excluded from this celibate world: In one of his last works, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development , the single-sex monastic community is enthusiastically hailed as “an early model of the ‘welfare state’.”

The UN on Manhattan

Mumford’s comments on architecture were widely read and highly regarded. As recently as 1998 the Princeton Architectural Press published Sidewalk Critic , a collection of his New Yorker pieces from the 1930s, in which the anthologist describes him as “the most important architectural critic produced by the United States in the twentieth century.” Turning its pages we find him writing approvingly in 1932 of Frank Lloyd Wright, saying his “organic architecture” was “a matter of relating air, sunlight, space, gardens, outlook, social intercourse, economic activity, in such a fashion as to form a concrete whole.” In 1936 he likes the cork tiles on the kitchen floor of a Corbusier house, though he finds the bathroom window disappointingly small.

It has to be said that Mumford’s New Yorker columns contain much plain common sense, yet his architectural criticism overall left him spread-eagled between principles not easily reconciled—the “organic”; the modern view that “form should follow function”; something he finds in William Morris called “living form”; and along with all of this, the “usable past.” The result is that it’s never clear quite what he likes or why. He damns most historical styles as entirely unusable. Commenting on Corbusier in 1935 he condemns some barrel-vaulted ceilings as “stylistic atavisms” that remind him oddly of “Maine carriage houses of the eighteen-forties”, while in Sticks and Stones any attempt to revive colonial tradition is severely chastised: “What we call a revival is really a second burial.”

Yet elsewhere he finds revivalism legitimate. Because Mumford heartily approves of the English socialist and artist William Morris, The Culture of Cities introduces him as a man “who realized that society itself was the main source of architectural form, and that only in terms of living functions could living form be created.” In Morris’ “Red House” of 1852 “an attempt was made to discard ornamental tags and go back to essentials: honest materials, well-wrought: plain brick walls: a roof of heavy slates: every detail as straightforward and sensible as in a 17th-century English farmhouse.” So for Americans to revive 18th-century colonial architecture is wrong and foolish, but for a British socialist to revive a 17th-century English farmhouse is right and wise.

Archaism was hardly an issue when he came to consider the United Nations buildings—though form and function were. Mumford had been holding forth on this subject for years, in Sticks and Stones , for example, invoking Aristotle: “In the Aristotelian sense, every purpose contains an inherent form; and it is only natural that a factory or lunchroom or grain elevator, intelligently conceived, should become a structure quite different” from rectangular buildings traditionally conceived.

* * *

The doctrine that “form follows function” obviously applies to surfboards; why it should be expected to distinguish the premises of the butcher, the baker or the candlestick-maker is less clear. What architectural form would be appropriate for each? The plain fact is that for most functions, most of the time, 99 percent of humanity needs only four walls and a roof. For more abstract human purposes the doctrine that form follows function is a shaky guide. If, as Mumford assumed, the function of the United Nations complex in New York was to symbolize the “physical renewal of the whole city and the spiritual renewal of the whole world”, at the same time serving as a home for “the preservation of peace and a symbol of enduring harmony”, what form could it possibly take? An amiably sunlit stratospheric cloud?

His own proposals were grandiose, and in hindsight look as if he was already losing touch with reality. To be fair, other proposals were also very ambitious. The responsible UN committee was considering sites as large as forty square miles with the possibility of a “complete community” of 50,000 to be located in either Westchester or Fairfield counties. (Objections from local residents quickly put a stop to that.) But Mumford’s urban proposals were scarcely more modest. “This is no time for small plans or grudging half-measures”, he announced to the Royal Institute of British Architects in July 1946. He argued that an appropriate headquarters should occupy “between 1,000 and 3,000 acres within an existing world metropolis [ultimately New York] created by a large-scale process of slum clearance and replacement”; that the UN “should be a legally independent municipality”; and that it should comprise “a balanced urban community . . . capable of growing up to the point where it would hold a population between twenty-five and fifty thousand people in permanent residence.”

The gross area to be appropriated for this autonomous enclave comprised roughly all of Manhattan from east to west between about 34th Street and Canal. Mumford took pains to underline its essential anti-business ethos: “The city must be cut to the measure of a different kind of man from the powerful, domineering, semi-neurotic types who have left their marks so unmistakably on the great capitals of the past.”

* * *

The eventual site and building, designed by Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer , were of course a bitter disappointment to Mumford. He had argued that in a properly planned arrangement the new “world city” should be set off from “the visual clutter of New York”, and that it should be an inspiring symbol of world government and international cooperation, separated by a cordon sanitaire of trees and grass from midtown and Wall Street, standing in the sharpest possible contrast to the sordid money-grubbing world of capitalist enterprise overall. Lawrence Vale’s sardonic remark put it best: “How it is that a new mini city which turns its collective back upon New York may be construed as an example of world cooperation, Mumford did not say.”

Ethereal hot-air balloons

As he aged, the etherealizing trajectory of Mumford’s writing, moving always from the particular to the abstract, the visible to the invisible, exhortation to cosmic prophecy, grew more pronounced. This can be seen at the level of sentences as well as books. In The City in History he wrote “We must conceive of the city not primarily as a place of business or government but as an essential organ for expressing and actualizing a new personality.” Note the logical structure: Starting from an asserted but unargued imperative, he moves from the bricks and mortar of buildings, through the mystification of “expression” and “actualization”, to the goal of a new collective personality—the idealized psyche of reformed and reconstituted urban man.

Most of his books do the same. The first half of The Culture of Cities is a mine of miscellaneous information. Whether writing about Versailles , St. Petersburg , Bath , Carlsbad or Saratoga Springs , he usually has something interesting to say. But after the inevitable romanticizing of the medieval town, things slip ever more out of focus, and his claims become ever more extravagant. In the last chapter we learn that architecture is symbolic; that it has a peculiar part to play in the modern world—and we are also told rather alarmingly that it is not only “the essential commanding art” but that “the very notion of planning owes more to this art than to any other.”

Much of the rest, however, consists of banality. Between Mumford’s prefaces and his endings, vast regions of time and space are surveyed; a thousand names are dropped; and the mighty Zeppelin comes in to its mooring at last. But his closing peroration always resembles the expiring wheeze of a punctured hot-air balloon. Thus the conclusion to The Condition of Man (1944):

The inner crisis of our civilization must be resolved if the outer crisis is to be effectively met. Our first duty is to revamp our ideas and values and to reorganize the human personality around its highest and most central needs. . . . There is no wealth, as Ruskin said, but life; and there is no consummation of life except in the perpetual growth and renewal of the human person.

Utopia and paranoia

Charlatan or seer? Sage or simpleton? Hayek thought him pretty simple-minded, holding him up as an example of the “synoptic delusion.” Mumford had written in 1937 that we still have to develop “the art of simultaneous thinking: the ability to deal with a multitude of related phenomena at the same time, and of composing, in a single picture, both the qualitative and the quantitative attributes of these phenomena.” This, wrote Hayek in Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973), showed “a touching naïveté.” The synoptic delusion is “the fiction that all the relevant economic facts are known to some one mind”—and it enabled the enthusiasts for a deliberately planned society, of which Mumford was one of the more conspicuous, to “disregard all the facts he does not know.” The notion that if enough men practiced “the art of simultaneous thinking”, the problem of economic knowledge could be solved, Hayek thought downright hilarious.

But the direction in which Mumford was moving after World War II was no laughing matter. Utopian thinking suffers from the inevitable abyss between ends and means—in his case between the dream of perfect “organic relationships” and the crooked timber of humanity. Added to this was an economic delusion: For years following the Great Depression, Mumford anticipated a new collapse. As late as 1971 a bibliographic note of his accompanying Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation tells us to expect “the end of the market economy” within a generation.

A man who believed that could believe anything. And if one’s idées fixes include a still wider range of unattainable goals—about universal peace and world government and organic wholeness in human affairs—one is virtually bound to end up cross. Not only will you grow angry, your writing will sound increasingly paranoid as year after year, in book after book, grimly repeated warnings about “the machine” taking over the world, are, to all appearances, totally ignored. How can this be? Is there a conspiracy uniting business, industry, all political parties, the academy, the media, advertising interests, Hollywood, everything from Playboy to the Wall Street Journal —the lot?

* * *

Discussing these matters in The Paranoid Style in American Politics Richard Hofstadter noted that the paranoiac “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.” Hofstadter added:

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of a working politician.

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. The demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.

Much of Hofstadter’s insight fits the mind revealed in Mumford’s two last major books, Technics and Human Development (1967) and The Pentagon of Power (1970), both of them appearing under the joint title of The Myth of the Machine . In the first place, Mumford’s attitudes certainly had little to do with those of a working politician. A “holistic” thinker, he felt deeply that the whole world needed to be changed, but that it was not his business to consider how this might actually be done.

There was something very Germanic about his Spenglerian contempt for parliamentary process, and an interesting aside on this question is supplied by his biographer. Miller says that in his youth Mumford was influenced by the “aristocratic ideal” of his German uncle, James Schleicher, who held that public life should be the preserve “of a right-thinking and knowing minority.” We are told that both Uncle James and his wife hoped their nephew would become a writer, though not one seeking “the approbation of the masses and majorities.” Mumford was faithful to this Nietzschean pair in his own way: Although he found it convenient to speak on behalf of “the people”, he never consulted them, sought their approval, or showed the least interest in their views.

The paranoid style makes much play with invisible processes that have been going on secretly for years and are far more serious than anyone could have imagined. It also points to deliberately concealed motives that the author—lucky for us—has successfully exposed. Mumford steadily insinuates that the “cult” of technology was one such hidden process. Even in the long-ago days of the Sumerians, oracles were revealing “the might of an invisible machine” (Technics and Human Development). By the end of the medieval period, he claims, “a new religion had in fact secretly come into existence: so secretly that its most devout worshippers still do not recognize that it is in fact a religion” (The Pentagon of Power).

Technics and Human Development also includes an illustration of an 18th-century automaton. This enchanting doll-like figure, with velvet jacket, lace cuffs, and knee-length satin trousers, looks exactly like Mozart at a writing desk. But Mumford is not deceived: “Behind this playful automaton was a deeper motive, only now visible: the desire to create life by purely mechanical means—or at least to place every living function under mechanical direction and control.”

Bureaucracy and the megamachine

Mumford’s theory of the “megamachine” combines two ideas. The first concerns social structure. He regards state organization in pharaonic times as a “power system” organized along mechanically hierarchical lines, with each human unit, from slaves to overseers to divine kings, having a specific place and function. The second idea notes that colossal state engineering projects were born in pharaonic times too. Images of pyramidal structures dominate his closing polemics against modernity: The political pyramid, crowned by the divine god-king, and the architectural pyramid, serving as his tomb, become fused in a single metaphor for all that is least desirable and most woefully persistent in our collective life—the “megamachine.”

Thus it is that the political structure of the bureaucratic state and monumental, prestige-generating governmental projects—whether pyramids of stone or voyages to Mars—are historically coeval. In sociological terms, this twin birth was the moral equivalent of the Fall of Man. From the days of the pharaohs all the way to the now-defunct Soviet system on the one hand and American society on the other, it has been downhill all the way.

To see the evolution of large-scale social organization in this light may not be wholly absurd. We speak without embarrassment of “military machines”, although we know perfectly well that this is a metaphoric extension from the world of the metallic, the determined and the unconscious to the organic world of conscious human agency. The blind spot in Mumford’s use of the metaphor is that he invariably combines a remorseless critique of large-scale “power systems” with the enthusiastic conviction that everything will be for the best if only it is planned.

Totalitarian bureaucracy, however, with its deformation of means and ends and its highly disagreeable consequences, was the proven outcome of his view that societies can be deliberately designed, of his indifference to individual liberty, and of his insistence on taking decision-making out of the hands of the people and on doing things for them. He never faced up to this truth in his writings, and there is little evidence he ever understood it, even though serious thinkers had been discussing it from the very moment Mumford first put pen to paper.

Even as he was writing The Story of Utopias , Ludwig von Mises published an essay entitled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth ” that, as Raymond Cubeddu put it, “set the scene for the scientific discussion of the problem of socialization. . . . Just when the hopes of socialism seemed to be about to come true Mises voiced the thoughts uppermost in the minds of many who lacked courage to speak out.” On the one hand, Mises argued that “socialism could not work or keep its promises . . . because under such a system economic calculations in terms of value were rendered impossible.” On the other, he asserted that the centralized organization of the economy inevitably “becomes transformed into a totalitarian regime.”

Mumford seems to have known nothing of this. Nor did he know, apparently, about the arguments regarding scientific research and freedom of inquiry set out by Michael Polanyi in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor did he ever understand what Hayek was on about. To be sure, The Road to Serfdom (1944) appeared in the bibliography of Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power , as did Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), but they were conceitedly taken to illustrate Mumford’s own views on “scientism”, while their economic and political implications were either misunderstood or ignored.

* * *

Yearnings for the Arcadian world of Walden Pond have grown ever stronger over the past fifty years, and romantic utopianism is alive and well. So why has Mumford’s message had so little effect? Two things stand out. The first is the powerful influence of Oswald Spengler—a German authoritarian hard to combine with his early commitment to Emerson and Thoreau. Biographer Donald Miller describes Mumford as what we might call an “optimistic Spengler”, but trying to Americanise the Great Doomsayer with a positive utopian spin is downright impossible. All you get are moralistic demands to reverse direction, frantic admonition, increasingly unreadable jeremiads directed at a citizenry that declines to listen.

This combined with a fundamentally aesthetic view of the world. Aesthetics justified power and promised control. It vanquished ambiguities and the messiness of political debate. It joined the repose of a cloistered life with the insistence that others be ruled from the cloister. Architecture was the queen of the arts—the “commanding art” he said—one that required order and control, and that inevitably meant pushing people around until things looked the way they should. It is not entirely coincidental that a well-known Austrian was a frustrated fine-arts student who developed an abiding passion for architecture as a form of politico-mythic demonstration, or that in their youthful discontent both he and Mumford walked incessantly (the one in Linz, the other in New York), redesigning cities as they went.

“If there is anything that can be called a specific German ideology, it consists in playing off romanticism against the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages against the modern world, culture against civilization, and Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft”, writes Wolf Lepenies in his recent The Seduction of Culture in German History . Under Spengler’s influence Lewis Mumford bought this whole package. A few pages later Lepenies quotes Thomas Mann to the effect that the democratic spirit “was totally alien to the Germans, who were morally, but not politically, inclined.”

Again the description fits. It is curious that a man who was so quintessentially American in many ways was so Germanic in others. Not speeches and moralistic harangues, just plain conversation with ordinary citizens was needed if he was to get his message across. Nitty gritty political talk. But as an exhibitionistic cultural mandarin he found this too hard. Writing 500-page books was easier.

Hidden is the work of a gifted film director, Michael Haneke. The plot is deliberately shifty, with false trails and loose ends that never get tidied up, but basically it’s a variation of Rosebud and Citizen Kane. Boy is deprived of parental love. Boy never forgets. Boy seeks vengeance many years later—Spengler getting into the story because of all the colonial connections, a revenge theme involving Algeria, and the peculiar form of incendiary barbarism now common in metropolitan France. Being a view from the Left, it also features the usual mordant portrayal of French middle-class life as cold, alienating, and pointless.

But it’s very well done. As a youngster, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) was the villain who long ago did the wicked childhood deed, cruelly expelling an Algerian boy from his adopted home into an orphanage. Maybe that’s enough to severely twist one’s mind: anyway director Michael Haneke seems to think so, and thirty years later it’s payback time for the Algerian, a poor and rumpled banlieu inhabitant named Majid. He has videotapes of Georges’ house delivered anonymously to Georges, to his wife (Juliette Binoche), to his son at school, tapes accompanied by ugly drawings of a face vomiting blood, the whole thing menacing and ambiguous in the extreme. And before long the lives of TV chat-show host Georges, his cool wife (Juliette Binoche), and his son, begin to unravel.

But maybe Majid didn’t make the anonymous tapes or draw their gory accompanying pictures. Maybe his son did. Maybe nobody did—it’s that sort of plot, and though the nervous inquiry into what is actually going on keeps you on the edge of your seat, some would say it’s too clever by half. When Georges tracks down Majid to a squalid and untidy flat, and accuses him of attempted extortion, Majid cuts his own throat in Georges’ presence—it makes a bloody mess all over the wall—an act incomprehensible as anything other than desperate, suicidal, spite.

Though of course the intended political implications are all about France’s colonial sins. According to the story told by director Haneke there was a demonstration of Algerians in Paris in October 1961 when Majid’s parents died, allegedly thrown into in the Seine. The drowned mother and father had been immigrant farmhands on Georges’ parents’ estate: that’s why the latter felt obliged to adopt Majid. But the trail of guilt goes on and on and on. Much earlier there’d been the occupation of Algeria by the French in the 19^th century. So step by historical step, invisible but implied, is a moral tale of colonial oppression, of Algerian innocence, and of unmistakable French culpability, leading all the way from General Clausel’s bombardment of Algiers in 1830 to the riots in the banlieux today.

The French-language paper El Moudjahid, published in Tunis at the time by the Algerian Provisional Government, reports October demonstrations three times however, once on November 1^st, and twice on November 22^nd. The November 1st report is in an article “The October Days”. This describes 80,000 demonstrators being attacked by police and gendarmes, unprovoked police firing at 20.45 hours, and dead bodies on sidewalks. It makes no mention of drownings or the number of casualties.

On November 22 the first report criticizes “The Silence of the Left” and while it describes police violence, again makes no reference to either drownings or the number of casualties. The second November 22 report in El Moudjahid is by a participant in the demonstration and has the title “Escaped from Drowning”. A 20-year-old Algerian tells how he was arrested; how he saw a fellow-demonstrator beaten up and thrown into a river; and how he escaped the same fate.

My highly reliable source for this information informs me that “El Moudjahid, a monthly, was full of reports both of Algerian demos and of French repression. From Tunis they were in constant telephonic contact with France. Had there been a mass drowning, or massacre on October 17, this would have been given enormous prominence.” Instead what we find in its pages is mention of one man thrown into a river, and someone else escaping. In other words the “200 drowned demonstrators” would seem to be a largely hearsay episode serving the propagandist purposes of director Haneke.

But that the French, for all their artistic gifts, should now be governed by a directionless élite incapable of dealing with the marching armies of exotic enragés they and their ancestors blindly conjured into being; that their leaders should find themselves taking refuge in the gilded Parisian redoubts of the Gallic state… Well, the impending decline and fall of Jacques Chirac and Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin does seem fitting enough.

Schadenfreude however is not an attractive sentiment. And I’d be sorry if Haneke (an Austrian by the way) got his own throat cut one day. If Juliette Binoche got hers cut it would be downright sad. We need them around making films—however politically misconceived.

It’s a shame really. Paris Hilton could easily give sluttishness a bad name. I don’t mean just the video that’s available—I mean the chilling vacuity: it’s enough to give Casanova the wilts.

But that’s by the way. My darker purpose here is to see how the ethical world of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic, with its moral Puritanism and devotion to hard work, could be adapted and parodied for TV trash starring rich party girls and poor dumb animals in the year 2003.

Can we read something about the direction of modern America in this transmogrification? The original painting (below) shows a man, a woman, a fork, and a house. The woman looks aversively away. The man stares out with primitive religious force, and one might easily think that as long as the beliefs behind his eyes endure, as long as he has moral convictions, America will endure.

One might also think that when those beliefs are replaced by a bland and directionless amorality, by the world of a Bill Clinton on the one hand or a Paris Hilton on the other—by decadent hedonism pure and simple—in brief, when the fire behind those eyes goes out and all religious belief is lost… But here conjecture falters and for the time being had best stay mute.

Genesis

The basic facts about the painting are straightforward. In 1930, in the town of Eldon, Iowa, Grant Wood painted his sister Nan and his dentist Byron McKeeby standing in front of a wooden house with a Gothic window. McKeeby was asked to hold a three-tined hayfork in his hand.

Wood had wondered who to use as the woman in the painting (Nan’s face was too fat, he thought at first, before deciding to slim her features down), and he had trouble persuading the dentist to pose (McKeeby finally agreed to stand in his dental rooms while the artist painted), but when it was done he entered the work in the 1930 Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture held at the Art Institute of Chicago. It won him a bronze medal and $300.

In Steven Biel’s wonderfully detailed history of the painting and its place in the American psyche (American Gothic: a Life of America’s Most Famous Painting, Norton 2005) he tells how it was originally rejected. But an Art Institute trustee found it on the discard pile and insisted that it be included in the Exhibition. Thus it was, as Biel writes, that “an image familiar to almost everyone might have been seen by almost nobody. A painting that became a national icon nearly got sent back, barely noticed, to Iowa.”

Three years later, in 1933-34, the Chicago World’s Fair celebrated “A Century of Progress” with its own art exhibition. One and a half million people trooped in to see the show. The strongest attraction seems to have been “Whistler’s Mother”, but American Gothic ran it close, and prints of Wood’s painting outsold everything else. By then it was becoming known nationwide, and the Des Moines Register later joined various art critics in decreeing American Gothic the most popular canvas on exhibit at the World’s Fair.

Caricature?

Which isn’t to say everyone liked it—Iowa’s farmwives assuredly did not. They thought they were being caricatured. The couple were too “grim-visaged”, too sad and serious. Mrs Inez Keck of Washta said they looked “inordinately solemncholy” and might have been to a funeral. Mrs Earl Robinson, from the Iowa town of Collins, declared that being true to life wasn’t good enough and that next time around the painter should “choose something wholesome to look at and not such oddities. I advise him to hang this portrait in one of our fine Iowa cheese factories. That woman’s face would sour milk.”

This however is the normal verdict of people who find that artists don’t always see them as they see themselves. Like the rest of us they are distressed by an unflattering portrait. More embarrassing than this reaction—and more to the point of our discussion—was its initial succès d’estime with critics—the enthusiastic embrace of all those who wanted to see mid-western Puritanism and philistinism (if not religion itself) both ridiculed and destroyed.

“No less an authority on modern art than Gertrude Stein”, writes Steven Biel, “whose opinions the American Press eagerly reported in the 1930s, praised Wood as ‘the foremost American painter’ and declared, ‘We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.”

The critic Walter Prichard Eaton was also sure of Wood’s satirical intentions, and though he admittedly knew nothing about the artist or his history, wrote in 1930 that when he looked at the couple in American Gothic

We cannot help believing that as a youth he suffered tortures from these people, who could not understand the joy of art within him and tried to crush his soul with their sheet iron brand of salvation. They are rather terrible. The longer you look at them, the more you realize they might come from many parts of this country—but from no other.

The notorious hostility between Art and Main Street led Saturday Review of Literature critic Christopher Morley in 1931 to speculate about the couple’s “sad yet fanatical faces”—faces revealing a deep animosity toward creativity and culture. Some fifteen years later H. W. Janson, later to become known as author of the widely used History of Art (1962), would write that American Gothic “had been intended as a satire on small-town American life”; another critic would claim in 1974 that its figures “exude a generalized, barely repressed animosity that borders on venom” and symbolize “the malevolent spirits that inhabited this region”; while in 1997 Robert Hughes announced that it was both satirical and nervously oblique. Biel writes that according to Hughes

“Wood was a timid and deeply closeted homosexual”, and American Gothic, rather than offering up a forceful, unambiguous, straight, or uncloseted satire, was “an exercise in sly camp, the expression of a gay sensibility so cautious that it can hardly bring itself to mock its objects openly.”

Open and unambiguous mockery of philistinism and Puritanism in the manner of Mencken—for whom Puritans and philistines were the “twin blights of American civilization”—being needed if the world were to be set to rights.

Wood’s intentions

Yet the notion that a painting of two ordinary Iowa citizens must either celebrate them or damn them doesn’t make much sense. Wood’s intentions must have been a good deal more complicated than either his hometown critics or his bohemian admirers understood. But they are not obscure. They are in fact perfectly clear to anyone who comes from a conventionally respectable home; who takes up art, travels abroad, and explores bohemia; and who then returns sadder and wiser to the world he knows. Such an artist sees more deeply, and his affection is refracted through experiences that partly distance and disenchant—but he respects what he knows and sees and does not plan to destroy it.

This seems to have been the case with Grant Wood. He was born in Iowa, in 1891, in Jones County near Anamosa. Steven Biel tells us his people were Quakers, and when a neighbor lent them Grimm’s Fairy Tales his father returned it unopened because, he said, “We Quakers can read only true things.” In 1901 his father died and the family moved to Cedar Rapids. There “he milked neighborhood cows, sold vegetables from his mother’s garden, and delivered drinking water to help support the family.” At school he developed an interest in arts and crafts, and drew for the yearbook and the school magazine.

There was an artist’s colony in Cedar Rapids—Wood himself is said to have once described it as “the Greenwich Village of the Corn Belt… the only truly Bohemian atmosphere west of Hoboken”—and after joining it for a while he made a number of visits to Europe in the 1920s. Biel says that in France in 1923 and 1926 he produced a lot of “derivative Impressionist paintings that sold poorly at an exhibition at the Galerie Carmine”, and that about the only thing that endured from “his exposure to late nineteenth-century French painting was the influence of Georges Seurat’s pointillism.”

But a 1928 encounter with Weimar and its “disgust, cynicism, and social criticism” was too much. “I’m going home for good,” he told William Shirer, another sometime resident of Cedar Rapids who was living in Paris at the time, “and I’m going to paint those damn cows and barns and barnyards and cornfields and little red school-houses and all those pinched faces and the women in their aprons and the men in the overalls and store suits and the look of a field or a street in the heat of summer or when it’s ten below and the snow piled six feet high. Damn it, isn’t that what Sinclair Lewis has done in his writing—in Main Street andBabbitt? Damn it, you can do it in painting too!”

That anyway is what Shirer remembered in his book 20^th Century Journey. But deep down Wood respected the very things Sinclair Lewis and Mencken before him had held up to scorn. The artist had come to resent the fact that “Mencken belaboured my people as ‘corn-fed boobs and peasants’ in the Smart Set and the American Mercury.” A magazine article profiling Wood around 1935 quotes him saying that after his third trip to France he returned home “to see, like a revelation, my neighbours in Cedar Rapids, their clothes, their homes, the patterns on their tablecloths and curtains, the tools they use. I suddenly saw all this commonplace stuff as material for art. Wonderful material!”

As for the painting that made him famous, here are two responses he gave to speculation as to whether it was a caricature, and whether the couple were to be seen as man and wife, or father and daughter, or farmers or just small-town folks:

These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life. They had their bad points, and I did not paint these under, but to me they were basically good and solid people. I had no intention of holding them up to ridicule.

All of this criticism would be good fun if it was made from some other angle. I do not claim the two people painted are farmers. All that I attempted to do was to paint a picture of a Gothic house and to depict the kind of people I fancied should live in that house. I hate to be misunderstood as I am a loyal Iowan and love my native state.

Rejecting bohemia

Wood was in good company when he said that to characterize his good and solid people he wanted to make them “more like themselves than they were in actual life”. Aristotle himself said something similar long ago. Greek drama was truer than written history, he claimed, because it represented general truths about history and humanity in a crystallized and clarified form. And it was exactly this condensed and crystallized presentation of general truths that soon made American Gothic a national icon.

But what was the art establishment to make of it all? Of a man who in 1935 defiantly produced a work with the title “Return from Bohemia” to emphasize his break with that squalid world? Not an alienated artist seeking to overthrow the family gods—and Puritanism especially—but a happy craftsman seeking to honor his ancestors. Not a revolutionary hoping to subvert “the system” but a man generally satisfied with the way things were. Not someone keen to spew political bile in all directions, but a man who loved his state and its people and the life he knew.

And all this at a time when every artist worth his salt was supposed to be moved more strongly by the emotion of hate than of love, to be driven by a compulsion to destroy the bourgeoisie and capitalism together, to overturn all settled values, and—not unreasonably on the eve of World War II—to show political militancy in the looming fight against fascism.

Unsurprisingly, the benignly populist character of Wood’s work in the 1930s (Biel describes some 1932 panels in a Cedar Rapids hotel as featuring “extraordinarily robust farmers, cows, chickens, pigs, geese, corn, melons” etc) drew fire from the Left for being inspired by the suspect sentiments of patriotism, nativism, and chauvinism. In 1935 Lewis Mumford detected in the work of Wood’s friend and regionalist ally Thomas Hart Benton “a reactionary aesthetics and politics that veered dangerously close to fascism”. Biel then writes that

However unfair his judgment of Wood’s work, Mumford astutely observed that in standing ‘for the corn-fed Middle West against the anemic East’ Wood had ‘become a National Symbol for the patrioteers.’ His regionalism, Mumford charged, posed no genuine alternative to nationalism, provincialism, and corporate capitalism.

But why on earth should it? Mumford’s list of evils included much that Wood admired, respected, and believed in—his native land, his home state of Iowa, and the thousands of farmers and small businessmen who despite the hardships of the Depression were battling on. In contrast, Mumford’s was a hate list of things to be destroyed by ideologically driven intellectuals who had lost belief.

The subjects Wood painted after he turned his back on Bohemia were the social types and traditions he most revered. The conflict between the destructive goals of a radicalised art establishment and the life-enhancing ideals of the artist was deep, and it may not be inappropriate to quote here from Jacques Barzun’s chapter “Art in the Vacuum of Belief” from his 1974 The Use and Abuse of Art. His text was originally a lecture given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

We who make up the contemporary world are not lively—at times, one is tempted to say: not life-like. We are certainly not in love with life. We do not think life can be noble or even good. We take human life and our present view of mankind as equivalents and are not pleased.

When we speak of the human condition we mean something execrable, a prison sentence we must endure. We seldom find among men individuals to revere, and we have nothing but scorn for social types, which we now call roles, as if to emphasize their falseness.

The very word reverence has come to connote a benighted, ‘unrealistic’ frame of mind. The hero has disappeared from fiction, from history, and from life. Art is largely devoted to showing the contemptibility of the human animal or, by pointedly neglecting him, his irrelevance and superfluity.

From parody to nihilism

The contemptibility of a particular human animal—or if that’s too strong, then the comic irrelevance and superfluity of the rube, the bumpkin, the overalled workmen and pinafored farmwives of the “corn-fed Middle West”—would be universally assumed in the cultural role played by Wood’s painting after 1960. From that time on it would be continually exploited for both comic and commercial effect: one way or another the man with the fork and the sideways looking woman would be parodied to advertise food products and publicise television shows—most notably the Beverley Hillbillies—and it is this parodistic use we find once more in Fox Broadcasting’s 2005 poster for The Simple Life.

No doubt we shouldn’t be too solemn about it. Perhaps parody is the fate of all national icons. And no doubt the real-life persons who posed for Wood—his sister Nan and his dentist Byron McKeeby—should have learned to let go and not worry about the use or abuse of their personal images in his painting. Nor should we fail to recognise the ambiguity often displayed. Biel writes that “Instead of disparaging the ‘original’, American Gothic parodies frequently use it as a standard for evaluating contemporary society and politics. Sometimes the contemporary doesn’t measure up to what TV Guide called the ‘American Gothic hard core’ of national character.”

Yet there’s a remorseless destructiveness about the parodistic impulse that never knows when to stop. The more innocuous spoofs showed a couple like Bill and Hillary Clinton. But soon a libertine ‘let’s make it naked’ motive took over as the crux of the joke; nihilism beckoned; and after that it was downhill all the way. In 1966 Playboy grafted playmate Dolly Read’s shapely equipment onto a composite with Nan’s head. In 1967 a Johnny Carson routine showed Nan Wood stripped down with barely covered sagging breasts. Nan sued Carson and Look and Playboy magazines for nine million dollars, but got only a small settlement in the end. What she might have thought of a parody which replaced her with the image of a rich party girl best known for a video of herself copulating with a friend is anyone’s guess.

Nan Wood died in 1990. Steven Biel concludes his discussion of parody, and of the “desecration” of American Gothic in the poster for The Simple Life, with an observation that seems to me too complacent by half. After suggesting that in 2005 “Nan might have taken comfort in learning that fans of her brother’s painting again complained that the ads debased it”, he says that however wild or obscene they might be, “parodies fortify the ‘original’ as the embodiment of traditional American values. If it can be profaned, it must be sacred.”

If only! Professor Biel directs the History and Literature Program at Harvard and this statement smacks all too obviously of the ivory tower. His argument parallels Rochefoucauld’s observation that “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue”, Biel’s variation being that “parody is the homage vice pays to moral conduct and sincere belief.” But when virtue loses all her loveliness and sincere belief is thin on the ground, what then?

Is it really so trivial a matter, so meaningless, when Priapic Bill and Porno Paris are chosen to replace the austere quasi-religious iconic images of Nan Wood and Byron McKeeby? Or should we see in this displacement a symptom of more general trends, of a pervasive moral shift echoing Jacques Barzun’s gloomy assessment of how we live now—the scorn for traditional social types, the inclination to see reverence as a benighted and ‘unrealistic’ frame of mind, the ridicule of the heroic in a world given over to showing the contemptibility of the human animal?

Nemesis

If the human animal is contemptible then of course anything may be done to it—violation, mutilation, torture. In New York Magazine the film critic David Edelstein was meditating recently about some of the movies on show at the local multiplex. He described “not a bad little thriller” called Hostel “which spent a week as America’s top moneymaker.” According to Edelstein it shows a Slovakian village “where life appears to be a non-stop naked sauna party” and where the main thrills come from scenes showing an old man being eviscerated without anaesthetic.

A connoisseur of hack-‘em-ups who describes himself as a “horror maven”, Edelstein glances at Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (in which a woman is run down by a semi and turned into heaps of innards), Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (where a serial killer severs the heroine’s spinal cord and tells her “Now you’re just a head on a stick”), and closes with Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. In this last film—which Edelstein tells us “many critics regard as deeply moral”—a pregnant woman is subjected to nine minutes of anal rape.

But the intriguing thing to me, in addition to the fact that all the victims are women, is that a New York reviewer for a well-known cultural publication should not only seek out this kind of show but enjoy it. At the end he confesses his own complicity, and signs off with what he regards as a joke: “I’ve described all this freak-show sensationalism with relish, enjoying—like these filmmakers—the prospect of titillating and shocking. Was it good for you too?”

By then the war against Puritan morals that had preoccupied American artists and writers and intellectuals from 1900 until 1960 was well and truly won. Playboy’s role was not insignificant: in the decades after 1960, the Hefnerization of much of middle America would be carried to a point where Las Vegas, not Cedar Rapids or Gopher Prairie, decisively sets the nation’s moral tone.

But anyone who may have thought that the war against Puritanism itself was over should now be having second thoughts. It was only the long and protracted internal conflict that had ended—the domestic war for the moral soul of America. Outside America, Puritanism—which might be better described as the whole religious universe of ethical conduct involving taboos, proscriptions, sexual scruples, and constraints on our more animal nature—was and is arming itself for a long and bitter fight.

The people in this outside world—including the Middle East—have seen and considered what the West has to offer, and they are unimpressed by a civilization that talks big about freedom, democracy, and living standards, but puts close-ups of Paris Hilton’s vagina on their children’s computers, and would like to put movies showing sadistic episodes of anal rape in their cinemas.

There is of course much more to be said about American Gothic, about the destruction of the moral world it represents, about the moral condition of western elites, and about the various motives driving Islamic fundamentalism. But until these simple facts about our own civilization’s dire moral condition are faced up to, it is pointless to imagine that Islam—or any other self-respecting religious culture—will be embracing “western values” any time soon.

Hitler was an artist. Stalin took a close interest in what Soviet film directors and composers did. Mao lived with an actress, and her ruthlessness is a byword for the cruel power of despotic courts. All artists have to have things their way—or else. And if you think the fact that Hitler was only an indifferent watercolorist weakens the argument, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is much more likely that it was the gap between his ideals and his achievement—so painfully symbolising the gap between aesthetic ideals and reality on a cosmic scale—which produced the homicidal madness that drove him on. Peoples or cultures or things that didn’t look right had to be destroyed. Nazism was an aesthetic philosophy through and through.

* * *

But aren’t artists usually liberals? Don’t they value freedom of expression? Isn’t liberty the very center of an artist’s being? Not at all. An artist’s primary commitment is egoistic: he is committed  to his own freedom to do what he likes. All too seldom is this combined with a democratic vision of the myriad compromises that enable millions of people to live and let live and rub along together—people whose taste is often deplorable, and whose aesthetic sense artists regard with contempt.

“I never pay any heed. I do what I like and not what others like” says Oscar Niemeyer, designer of many of Brasilia’s buildings, and the most famous Brazilian in the world. Now 97, and interviewed by LA Times staff writer Henry Chu a month ago, he went on to add that “Architecture is invention. If you go to Brasilia, you may not like the buildings, but you won’t be able to say you’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mind you, Niemeyer himself lives in a penthouse in busy Rio gazing down on Copacabana Beach. He does not live in Brasilia. And with good reason. For this uncompromising artist Brasilia is where there’s a place for everyone, and everyone has been put in their place by Niemeyer himself—usually around the margins of vast sterile spaces as empty as the moon. His “you’ve never seen anything like it” buildings are the towering symbols of a towering ego. An extrapolation from a drawing-board, Latin monumentalism at its worst, Brasilia’s buildings have wildernesses between them so enormous that prudent pedestrians are well advised to carry food and water in case they get lost on their journeys from one edifice to the next. Marginalised workers of the kind the Brazilian government would like to keep out of sight, ill-dressed, barefoot, and poor, are banished to the outskirts of this utopian city. Indeed, wits have called it “the Final Solution”.

This is unfair. For Niemeyer is very far from being a Nazi or right-winger of any kind, and has always had the interests of the proletariat at heart. According to Mr Chu, he “remains an unreconstructed Marxist, quotes Lenin, laments the fall of the Soviet Union, likes Fidel Castro and detests George W. Bush.” And if membership of the Communist Party is not enough to demonstrate a lively concern for the world’s oppressed, the walls of his Rio office are adorned with rousing slogans: “When misery multiplies and hope flies from the hearts of men, there is only revolution”; “The screwed don’t have a chance.”

At the age of 97 his eyesight is failing, and what Henry Chu calls “his cherished books” are now only available to him on tape. This must be a great privation. For he has always emphasized that architects should read and keep in touch with the world around them. He himself has kept abreast of events for many years, his shelves being “jammed with books on philosophy (Sartre) and politics (Stalin, in French).”

* * *

Brasilia married the architectural arrogance of Oscar Niemeyer to the nationalist zeal and developmental ambitions of President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira. The president was determined that Brazil should have a new capital and “leap 50 years in five”; the architect was determined to “do what I like and not what others like” and be remembered for it. For those who would have to live in this nightmarish product of political and artistic fantasy, a true folie à deux, here was a marriage made in hell. The location—the geographical center of Brazil—could not have been worse chosen by throwing a dart at a map on the wall. Probably a dart would have done better.

It will stand as perhaps the greatest white elephant in the long and mysterious history of building symbolic cities in strange places to satisfy the egos of artists and the longing of political leaders to be memorialised. There is only one other that seems even whiter, more elephantine, more wasteful, and more contemptuous of the citizenry at large: Yamoussoukro, the capital of the Ivory Coast. In this one-time jungle village stands a full-size replica of St Peters’ basilica built by the dictator of the day, Félix Houphouët-Boigny.

I made no resistance. In retrospect it was smart to be wearing the badge, since as an apparent norteamericano I had an ambiguous status in this assembly. Sure, I didn’t have a US passport, which is why I could travel to Cuba in 1960, but you wouldn’t want to rely too heavily on that if things turned nasty. And I was only there out of curiosity on my way back from Mexico. I dislike to the point of loathing all mobs and mob behavior, and a cool and distancing Anglo reserve might have been rather provocative when the cheering began.

But nothing happened. Castro never appeared. Hiring a cab I visited huge mansions commandeered as orphanages, with workman making alterations inside, noticed the big ESSO signs torn down at gas stations, and when the stopover ended I went out to the airport and boarded my Cubana Airlines flight for New York. Popular euphoria was still palpably in the air after Batista’s overthrow. It was something inescapable, unique. It was also something I was lucky to experience, and which those who have not personally felt it at a time of revolution, but have only read about it, will never quite understand. But the Cuban plane was something else. The US had embargoed maintenance for the airline; one engine failed over Miami; then the air-conditioning stopped and the cabin temperature soared. We were exhausted by the time we got to La Guardia.

* * *

Then I pretty much forgot about Cuba. I left the US, made some films, and it was only some years later that I ran into a cinematographer in Paris who brought me up to date. He had seen one of my documentaries at a festival and wanted to talk. Born and raised in Barcelona, he himself had worked as a documentary director in Cuba from 1959 to 1961, but propaganda was not his forte, and only those prepared to push the party line were wanted.

He knew he would have to get out. So he left Havana, moved to Paris, and made a distinguished name for himself working for Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut: My Night at Maude’s, Claire’s Knee, The Wild Child, and many other notable French features were all his work. Yet the grim reports that kept coming out of Cuba about political prisoners haunted him—reports of state executions and unending terms in jail—and in the early 1980s he helped produce two short films about Cuba’s dismal record on civil rights. It seemed like something a filmmaker who knew Cuba should do.

* * *

Which brings us to Oliver Stone. Stone of course is a filmmaker too, though hardly a man of honor, and he got very snakey when HBO pulled the broadcast of his admiring portrayal of Castro, Comandante, in April 2003. In a notably thoughtless gesture Castro had just shot three men for hijacking, and had had another 75 dissidents thrown into jail for long periods, all this at the very moment Stone was trying to polish up the dictator’s image on TV. Later he went back to Cuba and made another supposedly more objective documentary, Looking for Fidel. Slate’s Ann Louise Bardach interviewed him in April 2004 about his Cuban publicity efforts and here are some of the things Stone said:

OS: You know, the advantage I have is to be a filmmaker. Castro seemed to love my movies. Apparently he liked my presence, and he trusted that I wouldn’t edit him in a way that would be negative from the outset…

[One scene has Castro in front of eight men charged with hi-jacking. The dictator says to them, “I want you to speak frankly and freely.” They look well-scrubbed and their shirts are well ironed, and Stone thinks this is all fine and dandy.]

ALB: But Cuba’s leader for life is sitting in front of these guys who are facing life in prison, and you’re asking them, “Are you well-treated in prison?” Did you think they could honestly answer that?

[Stone makes no clear answer in the Slate transcript, or none that makes any sense, so the interviewer tries again.]

ALB: So you think they thought this was their best shot to air grievances? Rather than that if they did speak candidly, there’d be hell to pay when they got back to prison?

OS: I must say you’re picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn’t feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.

ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba?

OS: No, I didn’t.

* * *

Picture this. Stone is not allowed to talk to the accused in the absence of Castro. And they are not allowed to speak without Castro or his agents being present. So our radical filmmaker accepts a controlled governmental set-up in which men over whom the dictator has powers of life or death, three of whom he has already shot, are lined up before Stone, before Castro, and before the camera, while being grilled. Back in the days of Stalin this was common. Scenes like this were presented as “evidence” in Stalinist trials.

The same thought must have occurred to Ann Louise Bardach, because she then suggests to Stone that the prisoners had no choice but to appear when ordered, “and that in some ways it was a bit of a mini-show-trial…”

OS: It does have that aura, absolutely. But I do maintain that if it were a Stalinist state… they certainly do a great job of concealing it.

ALB: To me, one of the most interesting exchanges in the film is when you ask “Why did you decide to shoot these three hijackers on the eighth day?” And he (Castro) bristles and says, “I didn’t shoot anyone, personally.” You then respond, “Well, OK, the state shot these three guys on the eighth day.” And he then says, “Of course, I take my share of responsibility.”

So el lider máximo takes responsibility for the murders. Or rather, he takes his ‘share’ of responsibility. Which is nice to know, and must be a great comfort to the families of the dead.