Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (41 page)

The most unsettling of the surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), the ‘painter of railway stations,’ as Picasso dubbed him. An Italian of Greek
descent, de Chirico was obsessed by the piazzas and arcades of north Italian towns: ‘I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness. I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent…. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time.’
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These landscapes, these townscapes, are always depicted in the same way by de Chirico. The light is always the same (it is afternoon light, coming from the right or left, rather than from above); there are long, forbidding shallows; darkness is not far away.
⁷²
Second, there are next to no people – these townscapes are deserted. Sometimes there is a tailor’s mannequin, or a sculpture, figures that resemble people but are blind, deaf, dumb, insensate, echoing, as Robert Hughes has said, the famous lines of Eliot: ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ There are often humanlike shallows just around the corner. De Chirico’s is a cold world; the mood is forbidding, with a feeling that this is perhaps the last day of all, that the universe is imploding, and the sun about to cease shining forever. Again something dreadful has either happened or is about to happen.
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At first sight, Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a much more cheerful, playful painter than the other two. He never joined the political wing of the surrealists: he didn’t get involved in manifestos or campaigns.
⁷⁴
But he did contribute to group shows, where his style contrasted strongly with the others. A Catalan by birth, he trained in Barcelona at a time when that city was a cosmopolitan capital, before it was cut off from the rest of Europe by the Spanish Civil War. He showed an early interest in cubism but turned against it; after a childhood spent on a farm, his interest in wildlife kept bubbling through.
⁷⁵
This gave his paintings their biological lyricism, increasingly abstract as time went by. In
The Farm
1921–2, he painted scores of animals in scientific detail, to produce a work that pleases both children and adults. (He carried dried grasses all the way from Barcelona to Paris to be sure he got the details right.) In his later Constellation series, the myriad forms echo earlier artists such as Hieronymus Bosch but are joyful, more and more abstract, set in a nebulous sky where the stars have biological rather than physico-chemical forms. Miró met the surrealists through the painter André Masson, who lived next door to him in Paris. He took part in the first surrealist group show in 1924. But he was less a painter of dread than of the survival of the childlike in adult life, the ‘uncensored self,’ another confused concept drawn from psychoanalysis.
⁷⁶

The wastelands of Salvador Dalí are famous. And they
are
wastelands: even where life appears, it corrupts and decays as soon as it blooms. After Picasso, Dalí is the most famous artist of the twentieth century, though this is not the same as saying he is the second best. It has more to do with his extraordinary technique, his profound fear of madness, and his personal appearance – his staring eyes and handlebar moustache, adapted from a Diego Velázquez portrait of Philip IV of Spain.
⁷⁷
Discovering his facility with paint, Dalí found he was able to render crystal-clear landscapes that, given the themes he pursued, played with reality, again in the way dreams are supposed to do. He had the lyricism
of Miró, the afternoon light of de Chirico, and Ernst’s sense of dread derived from subtly changing familiar things. His images – cracked eggs (‘Dalinian DNA’), soft watches, elongated breasts, dead trees in arid landscapes – are visually lubricious and disturbing to the mind.
⁷⁸
They convey a world pullulating with life, but uncoordinated, as if the guiding principles, the very laws, of nature have broken down, as if biology is coming to an end and the Darwinian struggle has gone mad.

René Magritte (1898–1967) was never part of the salon of surrealists – he spent all his life in Brussels – but he shared their obsession with dread, adding too an almost Wittgensteinian fascination with language and the hold it has on meaning. In his classic paintings, Magritte took ordinary subjects – a bowler hat, a pipe, an apple, an umbrella – and made extraordinary things happen to them (he himself often wore a bowler).
⁷⁹
For example, in
The Human Condition
(1934), a painting of a view through a window overlaps exactly with the same view, so that they fuse together and one cannot tell where the painting begins and ends. The world ‘out there,’ he is saying, is really a construction of the mind, an echo of Henri Bergson. In
The Rape,
also 1934, a naked female torso, framed in hair, forms a face, a prim yet at the same time wild face, casting doubt on the nature of primness itself, suggesting a raw sexuality that lies hidden. This image is seen against a flat, empty landscape, a purely psychoanalytic wasteland.
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The surrealists played with images – and the verb is pertinent; they were seriously suggesting that man could play himself out of trouble, for in play the unconscious was released. By the same token they brought eroticism to the surface, because repression of sexuality cut off man from his true nature. But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.

Ironically, the wasteland was a very fertile metaphor. What underlines all the works considered here is a sense of disenchantment with the world and with the joint forces of capitalism and science, which created the wasteland. These targets were well chosen. Capitalism and science were to prove the century’s most enduring modes of thought and behaviour. And by no means everyone would find them disenchanting.

In the 1920s the eugenicists and scientific racists were especially persistent in America. One of their main texts was a book by C.C. Brigham called
A Study of American Intelligence,
which was published in 1923. Brigham, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, was a disciple of Robert Yerkes, and in his book he relied on the material Yerkes had obtained during the war (Yerkes wrote the foreword for Brigham’s book). Despite evidence that the longer immigrants were in the United States, the better they performed on IQ tests, Brigham’s aim was to show that the southern and eastern peoples of Europe, and Negroes, were of inferior intelligence. In making his arguments he relied on the much earlier notions of such figures as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who thought that Europe was divided into three racial types, according to the shape of their skulls. Given this, Brigham’s conclusions were not surprising: ‘The decline in intelligence [in America] is due to two factors, the change in the races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of the sending of lower and lower representatives of each race…. Running parallel with the movements of these European peoples, we have the most sinister development in the history of this continent, the importation of the negro…. The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro.’
¹

In such a context, the idea for a return to segregation was never far below the surface. Cornelia Cannon, noting that 89 percent of blacks had tested as ‘morons,’ wrote in the American periodical
Atlantic Monthly,
‘Emphasis must necessarily be laid on the development of the primary schools, on the training in activities, habits, occupations which do not demand the more evolved faculties. In the South particularly … the education of the whites and colored in separate schools may have justification other than that created by race prejudice.’
²
Henry Fairfield Osborn, a trustee of Columbia University and president of the American Museum of Natural History, believed ‘those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice…. We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.’
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The battles over biology did not stop with the victory the eugenicists achieved in getting the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act passed. The following year biology was back in the public eye in the notorious Scopes trial. As early as 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly had drawn up a list of the ‘Five Fundamentals’ which they believed to be the basis of Christianity. These were: the miracles of Christ; the Virgin birth; the Resurrection; the Crucifixion, understood as atonement for mankind’s sins; and the Bible as the directly inspired word of God. It was the latter that was the focus of the Scopes trial. The facts of the case were not in dispute.
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John Scopes, of Dayton, Tennessee, had taught a biology class using as a textbook
Civic Biology
by George William Hunter, which had been adopted as a standard text by the State Textbook Commission in 1919. (It had actually been used in some schools since 1909, so it was in circulation for fifteen years before it was considered dangerous.)
⁵
The part of Hunter’s book which Scopes had used reported evolution as a fact. This, the prosecution argued, was contrary to Tennessee law. Evolution was a theory that contradicted the Bible, and it should not be asserted as bald fact. The trial turned into a circus. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential nominee, a former secretary of state, and a man who told Seventh Day Adventists before the trial that it would determine whether evolution or Christianity survived. He also said, ‘All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teachings of evolution. It would be better to destroy every book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.’
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The defence was led by a no less colourful person, Clarence Darrow, a skilled orator and a fabled criminal lawyer. While Bryan was determined to make the trial a contest of Darwin versus the Bible, Darrow’s technique was to tie his adversary in knots, aided by eminent scientists and theologians who had arrived in Dayton determined to see that Bryan did not have his fundamentalist way. At one point, when Bryan insisted on testifying as an expert in biblical science, he proved unwilling or unable to answer questions about the age of the earth or of well-known archaeological sites. He defended himself by saying, ‘I do not think about things I do not think about.’ Darrow replied drily, ‘Do you think about things you do think about?’ In fact, Bryan won the case, but on a technicality. The judge kept the focus of the trial not on whether Darwin was right or wrong but on whether or not Scopes had taught evolution. And since Scopes admitted what he had done, the result was a foregone conclusion. He was given a fine of $100, which was then successfully appealed because the judge rather than the jury had set the fine. But that technicality apart, Bryan lost heavily. He was humiliated and mocked in the press, not just in America but around the world. He died five days after the trial ended.
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religion, however, explained only part of the reaction to the Scopes trial. In his
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
, Richard Hofstadter argues that particularly in the American South and Midwest, people used the Christianity/evolution struggle as a cipher for revolting against modernity. The rigid defence of Prohibition, then in force, was another side to this. Hofstadter quotes with some sympathy Hiram W. Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan, who, he says, summed up the major issue of the time ‘as a struggle between “the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock” and the “intellectually mongrelised Liberals.”’ ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualised, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanised, average citizen of the old stock…. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it.’
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The words of the Klan wizard highlight the atmosphere in America at the time, so different from that in Europe, where in London and Paris modernism was flourishing.

America had ended the war transformed: she alone was stronger, unravaged. The prevailing American mood was still pragmatic, practical, independent of the great isms of the Old World. ‘This is essentially a business country,’ said Warren Harding in 1920, and he was echoed by Calvin Coolidge’s even more famous words, uttered in 1922: ‘The business of America is business.’ All these different strands – anti-intellectualism, business, the suspicion of Europe, or at least her peoples – were brilliantly brought together in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, the best of which,
Babbitt,
appeared in that remarkable year, 1922.

It would be hard to imagine a character more different from Dedalus, or Tiresias, or Jacob or Swann, than George F. Babbitt. A realtor from Zenith, Ohio, a medium-size town in the American Midwest, Babbitt is hardworking, prosperous, and well liked by his fellow citizens. But Babbitt’s success and popularity are just the beginning of his problems. Lewis was a fierce critic of the materialistic, acquisitive society that Oswald Spengler, R. H. Tawney, and T. S. Eliot so loathed. Eliot and Joyce had stressed the force of ancient myth as a way to approach the modern world, but as the twenties passed, Lewis dissected a number of modern American myths. Babbitt, like the ‘heroes’ of Lewis’s other books, is, although he doesn’t know it, a victim.

Born in 1885, Harry Sinclair Lewis was raised in the small Minnesota town of Sauk Center, which, he was to say later, was ‘narrow-minded and socially provincial.’ One of Lewis’s central points in his books was that small-town America was nowhere near as friendly or as agreeable as popular mythology professed. For Lewis, small-town Americans were suspicious of anyone who did not share their views, or was different.
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Lewis’s own growing up was aided and eased by his stepmother, who came from Chicago – although not the most sophisticated place at the time, at least not a small town. His stepmother encouraged the young Harry to read ‘foreign’ books and to travel. He attended Oberlin Academy and then headed east to Yale. There he learned poetry and foreign languages and met people who had travelled even more than his stepmother. After Yale, he went to New York, where at the age of twenty-five he found work as a reader of manuscripts and as a press agent for a publisher. This introduced him to the reading tastes of the American public. He had a series of short stories published in the
Saturday Evening Post.
Each was slightly
subversive of the American self-image, but the stories’ length did not do full justice to what he wanted to say. It was only when he published his first novel,
Main Street,
which appeared in October 1920, that ‘a new voice was loosed on the American ear’.
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Published in late autumn, in time for the Christmas rush,
Main Street
was that rare phenomenon, a best-seller created by word of mouth. It was set in Gopher Prairie, a small town that, naturally enough, had a lot in common with Lewis’s own Sauk Center. The inhabitants of Gopher, their prejudices and peccadilloes, were brilliantly observed, their foibles and their fables about themselves cleverly caught, so that the book proved as popular in middle America as it was among more sophisticated types who would not have been seen dead in ‘the sticks.’ The book was so popular that at times the publisher could not find enough paper to issue reprints. It even managed to cause a scandal back east when it was revealed that the Pulitzer Prize jury had voted for
Main Street
as winner but, unusually, the Columbia University trustees who administered the prize had overturned their decision and given the prize instead to Edith Wharton, for
The Age of Innocence.
Lewis didn’t mind; or not much. He was a fan of Wharton and dedicated his next book,
Arrowsmith,
to her.
¹¹

In
Babbitt,
Lewis moved on, from small-town America to the medium-size midwestern city. This was in many ways a more typical target; Zenith, the city where the story is set, exhibited not only America’s advantages but also its problems. By 1922 there had already been a number of novels about businessmen in America – for example, Dean Howells’s
Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s
Financier
(1912). But none of them had the tragic structure of
Babbitt.
Lewis, with his passion for ‘foreign’ literature, took a leaf out of Emile Zola’s book. The Frenchman had ridden the railways on the footplate and descended into the mines to research his great series of Rougon-Macquart novels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Lewis travelled by train to visit several midwestern towns, lunching in the Rotary associations with realtors, mayors, chairmen of the chambers of commerce. Like Zola, he took copious notes, recording in his grey notebooks typical phrases and figures of speech, collecting suitable names for people and places. All this produced Babbitt, a man who lies ‘at the very heart’ of American materialist culture.
¹²
The central quality that Lewis gives Babbitt is his success, which for him entails three things: material comfort; popularity with his fellow citizens, who think like he does; and a sense of superiority over the less successful. Complacent without recognising his complacency, Babbitt lives by a code of Efficiency, Merchandising, and ‘Goods’ – things, material possessions. For Lewis, paralleling Eliot, these are false gods; in Babbitt’s world, art and religion have been perverted, in the service, always, of business. The point at which Lewis makes this most clear is when one of the characters, called Chum Frink, delivers a speech to the ‘Booster’s Club,’ a sort of Rotary association. The theme of Chum’s speech concerns why Zenith should have its own symphony orchestra: ‘Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city to-day as pavements or bank-clearances. It’s Culture, in theaters and art galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors…. [So] I call on you brothers to
whoop it up for Culture and A World-beating Symphony Orchestra!’
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The self-satisfaction is all but unbearable, and Lewis doesn’t let it last. A shallow begins to form in this perfect world when Babbitt’s closest friend kills his wife. There is no mystery about the death; and it is manslaughter, not murder. Even so, the friend is sent to prison. This set of events is thoroughly dislocating for Babbitt and provokes in him a number of changes. To the reader these are small changes, insignificant rebellions, but each time Babbitt tries to rebel, to lead what he thinks of as a more ‘bohemian’ life, he realises that he cannot do it: the life he has made is dominated by, depends on, conformity. There is a price to pay for success in America, and Lewis presents it as a kind of Faustian bargain where, for Babbitt and his kind, heaven and hell are the same place.

Lewis’s indictment of materialism and the acquisitive society is no less effective than Tawney’s, but his creation, certainly more memorable, is much less savage.
¹⁴
He made Babbitt’s son Ted somewhat more reflective than his father, a hint, perhaps, that middle America might evolve. This slight optimism on Lewis’s part may have been a clever move to aid the book’s success. Upon its publication, on 14 September 1922, the word
Babbitt,
or
Babbittry,
immediately entered the vocabulary in America as shorthand for
conformism.
Even more strongly,
boosterism
came into widespread use to describe an ad-too-familiar form of American self-promotion. Upton Sinclair thought the book ‘a genuine American masterpiece,’ while Virginia Woolf judged it ‘the equal of any novel written in English in the present century.’
¹⁵
What sets Babbitt apart from the European literary figures being created at the same time is that he doesn’t realise he is a tragic figure; he lacks the insight of classic figures in tragedy. For Lewis, this complacency, this incapacity for being saved, was middle America’s besetting sin.
¹⁶