THE ECONOMIST on Leonard Bernstein: A Political Life

The Economist of May 28, 2009, has just published a review of my book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician.

The American Novel and American Politics II

Apropos of my last posting (and accompanying comments), is this from Susan Sontag, writing in 1968 in her "Preface" to the English translation of Roland Barthes' 1953 Writing Degree Zero, translated from the French by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang). Wrote Sontag:

"Barthes book is a late contribution to that vigorous debate that has engaged the European literary community since the decade before the war on the relation between politics and literature. No debate of similar quality on that topic ever took place here [the U.S.]. Despite all rumors that there once existed a generation of politically radical writers in England and America , the question of the political-ethical responsibility of writers was never posed here in anything better than an embryonic, intellectually crude form -- a lone exception being the brilliant books published in the late 1930's by the young Christopher Caudwell." (pp. ix-x)

Why this debate has not happened; why American writers rejected the political and chose instead to fasten on the alienated individual, the family, the neighborhood, or on absurdism, will be subjects for future discussion.

The American Novel and American Politics I

Walter Benn Michaels has written an article, "Going Boom," in BookForum 15, 5 (February - March 2009) deploring the failure of the last quarter century’s American novelists to deal with the social forces that have so victimized Americans. What history American novelists have recounted has not served as forceful and robust criticism; novelists such as Toni Morrison, Colin McCarthy and Philip Roth have only been “caretaking,” that is remembering event of yesteryear, not depicting those events as on-going and/or recurring phenomena. Writes Michaels, we have had novels of family endurance and of breakdown, but none about the institutions that govern American life and that have caused the havoc of this contemporary crisis. Novelists , he argues, have avoided looking into the underlying conditions that bring a society that lives within the institutions of the free market principles and practices into such hardship.

Strangely enough, writes Michaels, the novel that touches closest to these issues and that points to the contradictions in American life – hyper profit-making and hyper commodification – is Ellis’s American Psycho. We need more “novels of manners in which the hierarchy of the social order is always at stake,” or television shows like The Wire, which is “about institutions – unions, schools, political parties, gangs,” about “the world neoliberalism has produced, rather than he world our literature pretends it has.” Michaels concludes that “The Wire is like a reinvention of Zola or Dreiser for a world in which the market is going out rather than coming in.”

Bravo! Mr. Michaels. But let us note that Dreiser, and another author Michaels mentions, Edith Wharton, novelists of critical inquiry into the intersection of American manners and the market system, have been dead for sixty or more years, not just a quarter century. In fact, the American authors who did write of the destructiveness of the free market system, including Dos Passos and Steinbeck, wrote their great social novels in the thirties; such writing barely appeared after the forties! The writings critical of the economic power system (which is a proper name for the market system) end with a few pages of Norman Mailer’s 1947 Naked and the Dead and Arthur Miller’s 1947 All My Sons and his 1949 Death of a Salesman. Saul Bellow, for example, never took on any of these issues. His 1955 Augie Marsh deals with close up relations and metaphysical ruminations. Nor do Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift or any other of his works enter into the mise en scène where the plays of power condition American life. And before one rushes to Bellow to find evidence to the contrary, let me quote him from an interview in the Nouvel Observateur by Fritz Raddatz of March 7, 2002, which I translated from the French, where he stated that “I have one regret that I am able to formulate very precisely: in all my novels, I have avoided speaking about the great events of the century. I have never attempted, even timidly, to make place in my work for those feelings that were in the air. It is in this, that I disappoint myself.”

The relevant novels of the sixties and seventies were largely concerned with the absurd, the feelings and sensibilities of persons affected by run-away technology and out-of-control technocracies, works written by Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller and Barry Malzerg, and the shell shock and benumbing induced by war by, among others, Kurt Vonnegut and David Rabe. Nor did John Updike’s much celebrated Rabbit series -- Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1970), Rabbit is Rich (1980) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) -- present a view of structure coming to bear upon the individual. The series traces Rabbit’s drift into despair over the course of his lifetime. The first novel was typical of the apolitical imagination of the American Biedermeier – the 1950s -- its protagonist living within his family and small town worlds, untouched by larger forces. In the second novel, Updike introduced the political into Rabbit’s life by having Rabbit listen to his fellow salesman speak against the war in Vietnam, and to a black radical to whom he listens with some growing comprehension – at least until white racists burn down his house and the black man moves on -- but in no way does Rabbit become radicalized himself. In the third novel Rabbit is one-third partner in his late father-in-law’s auto business, suffers through the oil crisis and now sells Toyotas, and is preoccupied with his son’s failures and his own love life. Nor does Rabbit come to grips with the larger social reality in the fourth and last book of the series. His life is virtually internal, reactive to family crises, to business, and to his lovers. Updike chronicles events, but for the greatest part they have no significance as regards Rabbit’s life. In short, the Rabbit series did not amount to the kind of imaginative literature developed by the older social novel writers who attempted coherent accounts of the social forces that shape the lives of representative types.

Think about Miller’s career. During the 1960s and beyond he wrote retrospectively, or about family breakdown. Or think of Mailer, whose 1964 American Dream seemed to make entrée into the place where deeper power and politics reside. Mailer was our best progressive novelist: think about his books on the moonshot and the CIA. But he never developed the themes regarding the supposed free market, monopoly power and neo-fascism that mark those few pages of The Naked and the Dead. Neo-fascism may be to the side in this era well past the McCarthy years, but the Patriot Act is still on the books. Today, a half –century later, the seeming contradictions between free market and monopoly power are not contradictions at all: managers of non-regulated mergers and financial packages that create new forms of wealth have wound us up on the present crisis. American Psycho may have lifted the lid on the psychosis below: how well we might have been served, indeed, must be served, by a relevant imaginative and contemplative literature! Any new social novelist out there?

Writing my book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician

Looking back to the post-war decades, one can understand why so many thought so highly of Leonard Bernstein as an artist and intellectual: music director of the New York Philharmonic and televised performer of Young People’s Concerts and the highbrow CBS show Omnibus; composer of symphonic works including one based on the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, an adaptation of Auden’s Age of Anxiety and a meditation on Plato’s Symposium; art song; an opera, Trouble in Tahiti with themes of suburban angst; musical score to the film On the Water Front with themes of urban angst; the works for dance, Fancy Free and – yet more angst -- Facsimile; and the Broadway shows On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide, and West Side Story. His Harvard inflections only enhanced his reputation as a man of great artistic and intellectual cultivation. Small wonder that he was a virtual mentor to my generation of Americans.

I had seen him in performance over the years, but what has remains in my mind took place – I think it was 1959 -- at the City College of New York when, one afternoon, I came out of class to hear music across the street in Lewisohn Stadium, the wonderful amphitheater where we held gym classes during the semester but where the Philharmonic performed each summer. I ran over to the stadium and stood with a few other students within yards of the podium to see the visiting conductor, Josef Krips, rehearsing (again, if memory serves) the Beethoven Triple Concerto, with Bernstein in shirt and tie at the piano. It was noon, and the orchestral players were asking Krips for a lunch break. “Not yet!” said a heavily perspiring Bernstein, but Krips replied something like “Ach! Lenny, let them have lunch,” a cue for the musicians to put down their instruments and thereby preempt Bernstein’s attempt at rejoinder. When a few students approached him with pens and open notebooks in hand, a clearly irritated Bernstein barked “No autographs!” And that was that.

Did I think him petty? Not at all! I admired him for his discipline, his dedication to his art.

Now I also admired Bernstein for his politics, or at least what was rumored about his politics, but never elaborated, that he was a man of the political Left. In those days, to be on the Left was for me a matter of great honor, maintaining the memory of the now mystical (and rather romanticized) Popular Front while the McCarthy inquisitions were victimizing left-wingers and the Eisenhower regime was cozying up to Franco and ex- (or not so ex-) Nazis. This was the era when the blacklist was in full force, and when American political debate between Democrats and Republicans was virtually bipartisan because no Democratic politician dared support, for example, full employment or universal medical care policies, for fear of being labeled a communist. (You hear shrill reminders of those illiberal debasements of discourse these days from those who would stop debate on Obama’s policy proposals by labeling them with the scare term “socialist.”)

Years later, with my academic career well established, I was searching for a topic to sink my teeth into. I had done some writing on matters of civil liberties and cultural politics when, in 1995, I learned that the Southern California Civil Liberties Union had obtained Bernstein’s FBI dossier, a file of hundreds of pages apparently loaded with information about his political life. A week or so and thirty five dollars later – to cover costs of Xeroxing and mailing – I received a copy of those hundreds of pages of dossier material and discovered that the FBI had been collecting data on Bernstein’s multifarious political activities since the early 1940s. I learned from other sources that the Truman administration blacklisted him and that the Eisenhower administration had withheld his passport but, back to the FBI documents, then released it only after he signed an affidavit that he was not nor had been a member of the Communist Party. In that affidavit, which has never been published and which until now has been buried within the FBI documents, Bernstein repented his sins, claiming they were only the product of his youthful naiveté, testified that he had voted only for Democrats or Republicans, and that he was religiously observant – all the benchmarks of the loyal American citizen as defined by the witch hunters. As I would learn from Bernstein’s correspondence – more of which in a moment -- the affidavit was kept secret save for its circulation by Bernstein’s attorney amongst the vigilante groups that had the power to give or withhold clearance necessary for him to work in the film industry. Even with that clearance, however, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was convinced that Bernstein had lied about his communist party membership, and now charged his agents to find the evidence to get Bernstein indicted for perjury. Hoover also listed Bernstein for incarceration in a detention camp in the event of a national emergency.

All of this FBI material had not yet seen the light of day. And I was lucky in another way: the Bernstein family had made available to researchers the hundreds of boxes of correspondence and other materials at the Library of Congress. Between this archive and the FBI dossier was a goldmine of materials; interpreting these together now permitted me to understand Bernstein’s intellectual and political preoccupations; his life under blacklist; to form a good hunch about why he was away from the podium of the Philharmonic from 1951 to 1956; his terror of having to appear before the Committee on Un-American Activities; how he came off the CBS blacklist; how his career was helped by those enlisted in the so-called cultural cold war. I was also able to understand his choice of texts to set to music, and his political philosophy as he expressed it in his 1973 Norton lectures, in fact, too see these all of a piece, rather than so many disparate elements as presented by, ignored by, omitted by, or unknown to, previous biographers. In this fashion I came to see Bernstein not simply as the exuberant and larger than life individual and celebrity, but a man deeply committed to a progressive political position which found expression not only in his public addresses, but in his compositions: he even went so far as to far as to visit the anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan in Danbury (Connecticut) Penitentiary as he prepared to compose his 1971 Mass – an act that Hoover jumped on to link Bernstein to a supposed Berrigan-led terrorist conspiracy, and that, along with Bernstein’s well-known support for the Black Panther Defense Fund, led Nixon to put Bernstein’s name on his enemies list.

As I noted above, much of Bernstein’s life comes into focus with the reporting and interpretation of the materials heretofore secreted in the FBI dossier and the Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress. So too did I come to understand Bernstein’s championing of the works of Gustav Mahler; so too his greatest frustration, his self-proclaimed failure to compose a work of the highest significance, a matter very much on his mind when he was dying in 1990. What I write in the book is that Bernstein was, in the end, seeking to find a compose a tragic work, but searched in vain for a libretto or other text to inspire such a work. That he was unable to compose that highly significant American operatic or a multi-genre work lies, I speculate, less in his supposed failure to concentrate – an explanation offered by a number of critics and even his friends -- than in the flux of social forces that configured American political life. I suspected that the fault lay not so much with Bernstein as with the progressive imagination. I worked up a method to understand his predicament. It turned out that Bernstein was not alone in this particular frustration: Neither Arthur Miller nor Norman Mailer, men of very different temperaments but men whose political outlook was similar to Bernstein’s, was able to find a way to address the American population’s decades-long departure from American progressive ideals through the Cold War and its march to the right from the seventies and into the Reagan-Bush years. In earlier decades, progressive writers such as Dreiser, Dos Passos and Steinbeck had studied the effects of economic forces and deeply embedded political power on social classes. Mailer very briefly, and Miller in two works, continued in this vein up to, but not beyond the late 1940s. But by the 1950s, and though the decades into the 1980s, progressive writers turned away from these issues to explore instead erotic themes, family tensions and breakup; absurdism, e.g., how runaway technology rules life; or the benumbing effects of war. Touching on those earlier themes had become virtually taboo, considered naïve by the liberal but aesthetic modernists who set the tone for the creative imaginative work in the post-war and Cold War years, and who thereby abetted the McCarthyite blacklisters. What resulted was a political language that assumed every American to be a member of a vast middle class America, thereby classless, and therefore no longer needing discussion of those older progressive themes. These were now repressed, their reality rendered inexpressible. I think that Bernstein was trying to find a way back those repressed themes. These would provide him with that long sought libretto, but he never found it. In short, Bernstein’s frustration was due, not to personal idiosyncrasy but to the lasting power of those forces that inhibited the progressive imagination.

In the end, I understanding Bernstein as a man who lived in what Bertold Brecht and Hannah Arendt called, dark times. If he were unable to express in musical-theatrical composition his deep brooding over the crisis of his times, he did find another way to express himself, and that was at the podium, bringing to life and championing the music of Gustav Mahler. To Bernstein, Mahler’s music sounded deep areas of crisis and tragedy. Bernstein found in Mahler a man at the dark crossroads of politics and culture. But in this case Mahler was Bernstein's predecessor. Of course this was the case in terms of both as composers and former music directors of the New York Philharmonic. But Bernstein saw in Mahler a prophet of catastrophe; as surveys of Bernstein's essays and lectures will reveal, so Bernstein was himself.

West Side Story in revival

West Side Story is back on Broadway, and is getting an extraordinary review by the New Yorker critic John Lahr.

The Art of the Void at the Pompidou

Opening at The Pompidou Centre in Paris is an extraordinary show that is all about .... nothing! Is this a Cagean (as in John Cage) program, a show fit for family membership with those works that Susan Sontag wrote of in her essay of 1967, "The Aesthetics of Silence" ? Or is this project a curator's inspiration in the face of budgetary collapse? The answers to these questions, or at least a clue to them, may reside in the cost of admission. Will the Pompidou folks charge less because there's nothing to see in nine rooms? Or will they charge the usual rates, arguing that vacuity is artwork? Minimalists have promoted the disappearance of content. Others, and I think that Artaud was in the foreground, argued for the virtual nullification of the work of art. Has Paris thus taken back the lead in modern art that it had apparently surrendered to New York after W.W.II? That was the time when representation gave way to abstraction, and the center of gravity of the art world came to reside in New York's art galleries and the Museum of Modern Art. But we now live in crisis times. Is it now, then, that as goes Wall Street, so goes 53rd Street?

(Of course it can be argued that the real center of painterly activity over the last decades has been in Germany, but that's another story.)

Homo Neanderthal in the US Congress

That cultural neanderthalism still abides in certain quarters of the US government was evident this week during the Senate debate over inclusion of arts funding in the new stimulus bill. As reported by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times of Monday, February 16, 2009, in attacking the stimulus bill "Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, had grouped museums, theaters and arts centers with implied frivolities like casinos and golf courses."

Another representative of contemporary atavism, Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, stated that "'I just think putting people to work is more important than putting more art on the wall of some New York City gallery frequented by the elite art community.'" Kingston went on to suggest that the arts are "the favorite of the left," and added as justification for his opposition to funding the arts a populist-demogogic "Call me a sucker for the working man."

Countering Kingston was Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, who noted that "Arts workers ... have 12.5 percent unemployment" and asked his Republican colleagues if they were "suggesting that somehow if you work in that field, it isn't real when you lose your job, your mortgage or your health insurance?"

I'm happy to report that the arts survived Republican hand wringing and made it into newly passed stimulus plan.

On the down side: the article noted that even as the arts were untied from casinos and golf courses these two latter institutions, along with zoos, aquariums and swimming pools, were excluded from the stimulus program. Don't casino, golf course, zoo, aquarium and swimming pool workers have rent and health insurance costs? Don't zoos and aquariums have high values within our educational and cultural lives? And as for their inmates, are we not alive to the fact that animals have rights, and, moreover, that at the least we have an obligation to those we hold captive?