Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (71 page)

Until Pearl Harbor (by which time Fry was home), the American public was largely indifferent to the plight of European refugees, and positively hostile to Jewish ones. The State Department was itself staffed by many anti-Semites in senior positions, not excluding the assistant secretary of state himself, Breckinridge Long, who hated what Fry was doing. Fry was constantly harassed by the U.S. Consul in Marseilles as a matter of departmental policy; almost certainly, the consul had a hand in Fry’s arrest in September 1941, and his brief imprisonment by the Vichy authorities.
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Despite this, between 1933 and 1941 several thousand scientists, mathematicians, writers, painters, and musicians crossed the Adantic, many of them to remain in America permanently. Alvin Johnson, at the New School for Social Research in New York, took ninety scholars to create a University in Exile, where the faculty included Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Otto Klemperer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Piscator, and Wilhelm Reich. Most of these scholars he had either met or corresponded with in editing the groundbreaking
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
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Later, after the fall of France, he also created another exilic institute, the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy recreated a New Bauhaus in Chicago, and other former colleagues initiated something similar in what became Black Mountain College. Located at 2,400 feet, in the wooded hills and streams of
North Carolina, this was a place where architecture, design, and painting were taught alongside biology, music, and psychoanalysis. At one time or another its faculty included Joseph Albers, Willem de Kooning, Ossip Zadkine, Lyonel Feininger, and Amédée Ozenfant. Although the college was in the South, Negroes were represented among both faculty and students. After the war the college was home to a prominent school of poets and it remained in existence until the 1950s.
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The Frankfurt Institute at Colombia University and Erwin Panofsky’s Institute of Fine Arts at New York University were also started and staffed by exiles. Hitler’s gift turned out to be incalculable.

The
Artists in Exile
exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1942, and others like it, introduced Americans to the work of important European artists. But it was only the beginning of a two-way process. Several painters who showed at Matisse never felt comfortable in America and returned to Europe as soon as they could; others adapted and stayed; none could fail to respond to the apocalyptic events they had been through.

Beckmann, Kandinsky, Schwitters, Kokoschka, and the surrealists hit back directly at fascism and the departure from liberalism, reason, and modernity that it represented. Chagall and Lipchitz interpreted events more personally, exploring the changing essence of Jewishness.
Fernand Léger
and
Piet Mondrian
looked forward, and around them, at their new country. Léger himself admitted that though he was struck by the great skyscraper canyons of cities like New York, what impressed him most about America, and helped account for its great vitality and ‘electric intensity,’ was the clash and complementarity of a huge country, with ‘vast natural resources and immense mechanical forces.’
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The colour in his paintings became bolder and brighter, yet simpler, whereas his black lines became starker, less part of the three-dimensional effect. Léger’s American paintings are like intimate, mysterious billboards. Piet Mondrian’s late paintings (he died in 1944, aged seventy-two) are probably the most accessible abstract paintings of all time. Electric, vivid, flickering lattices,
New York City; New York City 1, Victory Boogie-Woogie
and
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
shimmer with movement and excitement, Manhattan grids seen from the air or the tops of skyscrapers, capturing the angular, anonymous beauty of this new world, abstract and expressionistic at the same time, emphasising how, in the New World, the old categories break down.
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Other exhibitions were mounted during wartime, mainly in New York, showing the work of European artists living in America.
War and the Artist
was mounted in 1943, and
Salon de la Libération
in 1944. What counted here was less the way America affected the emigrés and more the way the emigrés affected a group of young American artists who were anxious to see everything the Europeans could produce. Their names were Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock.

One of Hitler’s greatest gifts to the new world was Arnold Schoenberg. Once the Nazis took power, there was never much doubt that the composer would have to leave. Although he had converted from Judaism to Christianity early in
life, that never made any impression with the authorities, and in 1933 he reverted to being a Jew. In the same year he was blacklisted as a ‘cultural Bolshevik’ and dismissed from his Berlin professorship. He moved first to Paris, where for a while he was penniless and stranded. Then, out of the blue, he received an invitation to teach at a small private conservatory in Boston, founded and directed by the cellist Joseph Malkin. Schoenberg accepted immediately, arriving in America in October.

America, however, was not quite ready for Schoenberg, and he found the early months hard going. The winter was harsh, his English was poor, there weren’t many students, and his work was too difficult for conductors. As soon as he could, he transferred to Los Angeles, where at least the weather was better. He remained in Los Angeles until his death in 1951, his reputation steadily spreading. A year or so after he moved to Los Angeles, Schoenberg was appointed professor of music at the University of Southern California; in 1936 he accepted a similar position at UCLA. He never lost sight of what he was trying to do in music, and he successfully resisted the blandishments of Hollywood: when MGM inquired if he would like to write for films, he put them off by quoting so high a price ($50,000) that they melted away as quickly as they had appeared.
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The first music he wrote in America was a light piece for a student orchestra, but then came the Violin Concerto (op. 36). Not only was this his American debut, it was also his first concerto. Rich and passionate, it was – for Schoenberg – fairly conventional in form, though it demanded phenomenally difficult finger work from the violinist. Schoenberg continued to think of himself as a conservative, in search of a new harmony, never quite (in his own mind) finding it.

Twenty years younger than Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith was not Jewish – in fact, he was of ‘pure’ German stock. But he was also devoid of any nationalistic or ethnic feelings, and the string trio he helped to make famous contained a Jew, a tie he saw no reason to break. That was one black mark against him. Another was that as a teacher at the Berlin Hochschule from 1927 to 1934 he had become known as a high-profile German composer. He had a fervent following at the time, not least among music critics at certain influential newspapers and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. But Goebbels was unimpressed, and Hindemith too was branded a ‘cultural Bolshevik.’ After a stint in Turkey, he went to America in 1937. Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky all followed to the United States. Many of the virtuoso performers, being frequent travellers as a matter of course, were already familiar with America, and America with them. Artur Rubinstein, Hans von Bülow, Fritz Kreisler, Efrem Zimbalist and Mischa Elman all settled in America in the late 1930s.
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The only rival to New York as a base for exiles in wartime was, as Schoenberg found out, Los Angeles, where the roster of famous names living in close proximity (close in Los Angeles terms) was remarkable. Apart from Schoenberg, it included Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodor
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Lang, Artur Rubinstein, Franz and Alma Werfel, Bruno Walter, Peter Lorre, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Heinrich Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Man Ray, and Jean Renoir.
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The historian Lawrence Weschler has gone so far as to prepare an ‘alternative’ Hollywood map, displaying the addresses of intellectuals and scholars, as opposed to the more conventional map showing the homes of movie stars – worth doing, but in today’s world it could never have the same appeal.
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Arnold Schoenberg’s widow used to amuse her guests by taking them outside when the tour bus came round. It would stop outside the Schoenberg house, from where the voice of the tour guide could be clearly heard, over the loudspeaker. As the tourists peered across the garden and into the house, the guide would say: ‘And on the left you can see the house where Shirley Temple lived in the days when she was filming.’
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When he was at Harvard, Varian Fry had edited an undergraduate literary magazine with a friend and classmate named
Lincoln
Kirstein. Like Fry, Kirstein later in life went to Europe and helped bring a piece of Old World culture to America. In Kirstein’s case, however, the emigration had nothing to do with the war, anti-Semitism, or Hitler. In addition to his literary interests, Kirstein was a balletomane: he thought America needed a boost in the realm of modern dance, and that only one man could fit the bill.

Kirstein was very tall, very wealthy, and very precocious. Born into a Jewish family in Rochester, New York, he started collecting art when he was ten, saw his first ballet (Pavlova) when he was twelve published a play – set in Tibet – when he was barely fourteen, and in that same year summered in London, where he met the Bloomsbury set, encountering Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and the Sitwells. But it was ballet that was to make the difference in Kirstein’s life.
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He had been fascinated by the dance ever since he was nine, when his parents had refused to allow him to see Diaghilev’s company perform
Scheherezade
in Boston. Then, as a young man of twenty-two, visiting Venice, he had chanced on a funeral in an Orthodox church. An exotic barge of black and gold was moored to the church steps, waiting to take the body to Sant’ Erasmus, the Isle of the Dead on the lagoon. Inside the church, beyond the mourners, Kirstein saw a bier, ‘blanketed with heaped-up flowers, below a great iconostasis of burnished bronze.’
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Some of the faces that came out into the sunlight after the service was over he thought he recognised, though he couldn’t be sure. Three days later, according to Bernard Taper, his biographer, he chanced upon a copy of the London
Times,
and discovered that the church he had slipped into was San Giorgio dei Greci, and that the funeral was that of none other than Serge Diaghilev.

The following year Kirstein graduated from Harvard, at which point his father took him to one side and said, ‘Look here, I’m going to leave you a lot of money. Do you want it now or when I die?’ Kirstein took it there and then: he was still in his early twenties, but his early passion for ballet had matured into a specific ambition. Ballet in America should not have to rely on ‘itinerant Russians,’ or itinerants of any kind. Kirstein’s mission in life was to bring ballet
to America, to make it an indigenous art form.
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The musicals of the early 1930s, newly transferred to film, were showing all America that its people could dance, but dance in a certain way. For Kirstein, ballet was the highest form of dance, and he instinctively felt that this was an area where, given the chance, America would shine.

Kirstein had tried ballet himself, taking lessons in New York from Mikhail Fokine, the great Russian choreographer.
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He helped Romola Nijinska with her biography of her husband, and he studied ballet history. None of this satisfied him; but his study of the history of the dance showed him that ballet had only been successfully transplanted into new countries three or four times in the three hundred years since the first company had been chartered by the king of France. That made Kirstein determined, and in 1933, when many artistic refugees were beginning to stream to America, he travelled to Europe. He started in Paris, where, he later said, he behaved ‘like a groupie.’
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That was where George Balanchine was, and Balanchine, Kirstein knew, was the best choreographer alive. Everyone he met agreed on Balanchine’s stature – but their enthusiasm went little further than that. One problem was Balanchine’s ill health; Romola Nijinsky told Kirstein she thought the choreographer ‘would be dead within three years’; apparently a clairvoyant had even named the exact date. Then there was his temperamental nature and his legendary lack of taste in certain areas, like clothes (he wore a string tie). Kirstein refused to be put off. Ad genuinely creative people were difficult, he himself had enough taste for two people, and as to Balanchine’s health … well, as he confided to his diary, ‘Much can be accomplished in three years.’
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But with all this to-ing and fro-ing he didn’t meet the choreographer himself in Paris, and he was forced to follow him to London, where the company was playing next. When they finally met in Kirstein’s hotel, Kirstein, speaking in French, broached the reason why he had come to Europe.
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It made for an incongruous encounter. Kirstein was tall, rich, and earnest; Balanchine was slight, penniless, and congenitally distrustful of solemnity (he liked to say ‘badet is like coffee, it smells better than it tastes’).
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Kirstein had prepared his speech and was as articulate as he was passionate, praising Balanchine’s choreography, extolling the spirit of America, promising that the Russian could, in the not-too-distant future, have his own company and his own theatre. When he had the chance, Balanchine remarked that he would dearly love to go to a country that had produced Ginger Rogers. It took Kirstein a moment to realise that this was the choreographer’s way of saying yes.
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