What is Modern? Part I

 

Burliuk

 

 

And now for that confession I was referring to in my last Post. What I'd gotten in over my head about was Russian Futurism and Formalism. I had been discussing modernism with a friend who is quite knowledgeable in that broad subject and wanted to call her attention to someone that I thought could turn the discussion in a certain way; that someone, that artist was David Burliuk.* But in bringing up Burliuk I realized he and his group, at one time called the Russian Futurists, were more important than I'd realized in their early influence on modernism, which brought me to the conclusion that I needed to know more about the origins of modernism. For what or for whom you might ask? But we've been over that before. It goes to my new autobiographical theme, 'I have all the Time in the World'; which theme I hope may be more understandable by the end of this post.

There's a buzzword going around; maybe it's even a one-word meme, if that's possible; the word is influencer. It seems there are people around today who have, earned or not, been given that nomenclature. But of course we know; the activity of influencing has always existed. I've heard about it among the artists and the writers I've known back as far as I can remember, ie; so and so was influenced by Cezanne, (or Joseph Conrad). I have no idea how old it is as an expression, though I tend to think it must be Post-Rennaissance.*

But in the Russian Futurism era, roughly the 1900s up to the First World War, there was an 'influencer' ferment abroad that was steeped in something that incorporated spiritualism and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. (For the most part, by the way, the Russians I'll be referring to here were believing Russian Orthodox Christians.)

*David Davidovich Burliuk (Russian: Давид Давидович Бурлюк; 21 July 1882 – 15 January 1967) was a Russian-language poet, artist, publicist and book illustrator associated with the Futurist, Neo-Primitivist and Futurism movements. Burliuk is often described as "the father of Russian Futurism".

While I haven't come across any sign of a Futurist, Formalist, Surrealist, et. al. saying anything in print about being influenced by Henri Bergson, (I haven't scoured the earth, so I haven't yet lost hope about that), his book Creative Evolution was a huge hit throughout Europe when it came out in France in 1907.  French after all was the second mother tongue for aristocrats and the upper-classes in Russia and the rest of Europe, up until the end the First World War. If there was buzz in 1907, it was likely about Bergson. He was a philosophical super-star.  

But getting back to Burliuk and his group, without I hope losing the thread of the 'influence' idea, I learned quite a bit by reading the rather long and very thorough introduction by Christopher Pike, to a collection of translated Russian articles, Russian Formalism and Futurism; also edited by Pike: 

 Born in 1882 in the Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, from a well-off family, Burliuk studied at the Kazan and Odessa art schools, and at the Royal Academy in Munich. Teaming up, in 1907, with his brother Wladimir Burliuk, the artist Mikhail Larionov and several other similarly unknown painters, they put on an exhibition, which was not a success, after which the Burliuk brothers [including at one point another brother, Nikolai] and Larionov, retreated to the Burliuk Estate near Kershon, known as Hylea. There they experimented with avant-garde ideas that they had picked up along the way, and the following Fall they put together a street exhibition which brought them enough money to go to Moscow. Since there were other futurist groups around, they called their literary efforts the Hylea Futurist group. In Moscow they were joined by Vasily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Roman Jacobson, Livshits, Matyushin, Natalia Goncharova and, eventually, Aleksey Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky. 

 In a limited way these poet-artists were influenced by the Italian Futurists, which was to an extent a one-man operation in the person of Filippo Marinetti, but he was a Fascist and a zealot, and after he made a poorly received appearance in Moscow they were quick to distinguish themselves from him. 

Roman Jacobson soon left the Futurists to co-found a Formalist group that developed a Russian brand of Linguistics. He later was a founder of The Prague Linguistics Circle, and eventually found his way to the U.S. where he taught at Harvard and MIT.  

 

Along with the Pike translation, while scrolling through Amazon's used books I found and read a small book, The World Backwards, Russian Futurist Books 1912-1916, by Susan P. Compton, about a group of picture and poetry books, some little more than booklets, that the futurists put out. The Compton book, though, didn't go into the quality of the materials used in these books, something that has become more important to me recently having read Janet Wolff's The Social Production of Art, New York University Press, 1993. Very interesting book, that one, which seems to hug closely to the shores of Marxist critical theory while also managing to differ in some degree from each of its highly noted scholars. With Wolff in mind, and to put the Futurist books into more focus, I found the following online; 

From the Getty Center Website:

"For a few short years in the second decade of the twentieth century, a group of artists in Russia created a new art form: books meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Artists had long made books as art, but these were different—handmade, hand-sized, serial, interactive. Combining sound poetry with lithography and rubber stamping, the books were collaborative in their making and in their relationship with the reader. 

Russian Futurist books are small, some no larger than postcards. Their paper and design are deliberately coarse; each page of the book differs slightly in size and is bound with ordinary staples. The books incorporate found papers, such as wallpaper and imitation gold leaf, and feature collages and childlike stamping. Titles exist in small editions of 50 to over 200, and often involve subtle variations from book to book.
 Art historian Nancy Perloff, curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute, has spent the last 15 years studying the Russian avant-garde, and her recent book Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art is the first work of scholarship to offer a close reading of these books as “verbivocovisual” objects, whose meaning derives from the interplay of image, text, and sound. She bases her study on the remarkable collection of Russian modernist books held in the library of the Getty Research Institute. An online companion to her publication features full-screen reproductions of pages from the Getty’s Futurist books and invites you to listen to the poems and watch how they come alive on the page."

 

Being for the most part members of the monied class of Pre-revolutionary Russia, the Futurist group could afford to work full time on art and travel as needed, and they became more interested in what was going on in Europe; particularly Paris and Munich. In order to distinguish themselves from a burgeoning number of other futurist groups they renamed themselves the Cubo-Futurists. 

Among the group, and possibly inspired by the ambiance of Hylea was a feeling that the group shared, about transplanting the roots of what they wanted to be their new feeling about art, their avant-garde, from Western Art and Cultural history to a certain specific Eastern terra firma, that which the poet Velimir Khlebnikov* was deeply involved with.  Concerning Klebnikov:  

The following is an abstract of a book from a Journal article in JSTOR. It's in that nutsy academic-speak but I suppose it gives a hallway pass to those young minds interested in Ms. Banerjee's book, which I hope to read soon. (Supposed to be available online but I haven't found it yet.) 

Liberation Theosophy: Discovering India and Orienting Russia between Velimir Khlebnikov and Helena Blavatsky  by Anindita Banerjee. (Journal and Publishing information below)

Abstract       

Between the Volga and the Ganges lies a vast yet little-examined zone of linguistic, religious, ethno-racial, and political contact shaped over many centuries by mobile communities of trader's, saints, soldiers, and rebels. This is the space from which Velimir Khlebnikov, modernist poet and philosopher of  history, articulates a vision of revolutionary internationalism. Khlebnikov's quasi-fictional journey from Russia's Islamic borderlands to the Indian sub-continent "in search of an idea that will free all oppressed people" transforms Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical interpretation of ancient Indian religious philosophy into a cornerstone of political resistance against global imperialism in the twentieth century. The intersectional history of violence through which Khlebnikov imagines a community of minorities, misfits, and mystics wandering between the peripheries of the Russian and British Empires challenges monolithic constructs of the Orient as well as dominant discourses of Russian and Indian national identity.

The Banerjee book would appear to throw some light on the art-cultural direction that the Hylea group hoped to infuse their work with, (although how intersectional violence triumphs over monolithic violence will have to be explained to me.) I wonder if the idea for which the fictional Klebnikov goes searching isn't more theosophical than political?     

 

Then, in the course of my researching, I came across the following book, Russian Futurism, A History: by Vladimir Markov; which I've been skimming through, and with great joy came upon the following gem of a paragraph;  

Chemyanka was a place in the area of the former Tavrida (Taurida) Government not far from the city of Kherson and the Black Sea coast, and from there the Burliuks' father managed the huge estate belonging to Count Mordvinov. The senior David Burliuk lived there in patriarchal simplicity and abundance, surrounded by a big family (three sons and three daughters) and enormous expanses of the steppes on which uncountable herds of sheep and pigs were grazing. For Livshits, there was something Homeric in this way of life. Prehistory looked at him not only from the meandering ornamental patterns on the houses and from the Scythian arrows found in numerous mounds, but also from the simplicity of their eating, hunting, and courtship habits. In short, it was the Hylaea ("Gileya" in Russian), the name used by the ancient Greeks for this area, mentioned four times by Herodotus, and familiar to all these future futurists from their school lessons in classical history as the setting of some of the deeds of Hercules. "Hylaea, the ancient Hylaea, trod upon by our feet, took the meaning of a symbol and had to become a banner." [Which quote I think is from Herodotus but not sure.]   

 

If 'explodidity' aptly fits the Futurist agenda, it also reminds me of the big best-seller art book, The Shock of The New, by Robert Hughes, from way back in 1980, published first by Random House, which success I suppose reminded people of the necessity for artists to make their work stand out from what is and was already available. "Over here! Look at My work!" Which is undoubtedly part of what Kandinsky was saying to the powers that were, das Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen; (Munich New Association of Artists in Munich; of which he had been the founder in 1909), when in 1911, (two whole years later), he created der Blaue Reiter group. The Blue Reiter is widely considered the first modernist secession and a pathfinder for 20th-century German art.  

Many Russians and European artists at that time still considered themselves Symbolists,  the dominant ouevre since mid 19th Century particularly in poetry and painting and, in terms of influence, a reaction against realism. The Symbolists were particularly interested in the spiritual, as were the Futurists and the Blue Reider group. ...In poetry Symbolism began with Baudelaire, (who had been influenced by Edgar Allen Poe); was further defined by Mallarme and Verlaine, and without going into it any deeper, a caste of dozens over the second half of the 19th century.     

Along with Kandinsky, Burliuk and his brother Wladimir, and several other Russians including Jawlensky, Natalia Goncharova, Marianne Von Werfkin....and the Germans Franz Marc, Paul Klee, August Macke, and Gabriele Munter exhibited paintings in the first Blaue Reider show. The show gave them and all the participants a wide audience and encouragement in their careers, at least up till the First World War. ...There exists a painting by Kandinsky named der Blaue Reider but it is not certain whether that is the origin of the name of the movement. Twenty years after the exhibition Kandinsky declared that the groups name was derived partly from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of riders, combined with their shared love of the color blue.

*Wladimir Burliuk, August Macke and Franz Marc died in the War. 

Gary Lachman was once the bass player for the group Blondie. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; and he has other musical accomplishments to his credit; but I first became aware of him when I came across one of his books on Amazon and got caught up in it enough to order a second one. The two books of his that I’ve read are The Secret Teachers of the Western World, and The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus. I suppose I discovered him, now that I think about it, after reading two of Colin Wilson’s books, The Outsider, and The Decline and Fall of Leftism. The former made Wilson a star, and the latter did much the reverse. Lachman wrote a biography of Colin Wilson, which I have yet to read. He’s written quite a few books and I’m becoming a fan, but will have more on that later. 

The inspiration for this post comes mostly from an article by Lachman that first appeared in Quest Magazine but which I found online on the American Theosophical Society’s website.   

In the article, titled ‘Kandinsky’s Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art’, Lachman proposes a recent renaissance in occult and mystical ideas on culture and the arts. (He doesn’t put a date on it.) He plugs a book he’s written, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse; in which, he says, “I sketch an overview of how a collection of occult ideas and insights fed the European and American post-Enlightenment literary imagination.” He’s also written an article about how the same muse has influenced music, ‘Concerto for Magic and Mysticism: Esotericism and Western Music’, also written for Quest. 

Lachman recommends a book, “a massive catalogue from an exhaustive exhibition..” which he had seen years ago in Los Angeles, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1895 by Maurice Tuchman. A short review on Amazon Books says the following about Tuchman’s book: “The seventeen essays in this provocative book provide a radical rethinking of abstraction, from the Symbolism that prefigured abstract art through the current manifestations of spiritual content in American and European painting.”

I’m a sucker for anything that moves the needle in the art world. I'd love to have a copy of the 'massive catalogue', but have yet to obtain one. Among the seventeen articles, according to Lachman, are many mentions of the most illustrious figures in the last few hundred years of European occult (or spiritual if you prefer) history, including Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi. Among the artists more recently influenced he sites Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and Joseph Beuys. The most recent 'influencers' though, Lachman says, are the Theosophists; and the most openly enthusiastic follower of Theosophy among the painters appears to have been Wassily Kandinsky, who Lachman gives the honor of being the first non-representational painter.

Well, someone had to go first! And it sounds right to me. It appears that Kandinsky, along with many of his artist associates circa 1910, felt that the world was going to hell in a hand-basket. It was materialism that was the problem and spirituality was the answer. Kandinsky shared this view along with artists outside of the painter’s world, including Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann. He had an extensive occult library, but was particularly interested in Leadbeater, Annie Besant, and Rudolf Steiner.  

Did he, though, actually paint ‘thought forms’? I can imagine what the artist would say to that;  “…Let the forms speak for themselves.”  (Not for nothing would he be called a precursor to abstraction.)   

Kandinsky wrote several books, including an autobiography, but his most well- known, the one Lachman calls his manifesto, is Concerning the Spiritual in Art; Uber das Geistig in der Kunst, written in 1912. Books which “fueled his speculation”, according to Lachman, included Man, Visible and Invisible, 1902, by C.W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms, 1905, by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy, 1904. He came to believe that thoughts are things; that shapes and colors had vibratory individuality, moods and feeling. He felt with the material world having been burnt out, the future for man’s expression was inward. [Editorial note]; I’m in the middle of Concerning the Spiritual, right now, so I can’t say I have a complete grasp of the manifesto. 

....I should probably alert my readers to the fact that Gary Lachman appears to be very much on the side of the occult and spiritual as opposed to the side of the skeptics. Now, there are those of us who are on the fence, some more on one side, some on the other, and some in almost perfect balance. I should admit that I'm coming down more and more on the Lachman side, but not without aligning myself with (dropping some names of) some big intellectual guns.   

 .....I thought I’d see if my cohorts on Goodreads had anything to say about Lachman; I was in for a big surprise.  

Goodreads I should say is an on-line library where you can list all the books you've read and review them or review other people's reviews, that sort of thing. And, it's of a higher quality than the other similar site, 'Library Thing', that I once joined and then quit, due to the low quality of it's readership; snobbery I suppose, but that subject I will leave for another time. 

I looked up Lachman and saw that he has written a biography of Madame Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality; 2012 Tarcher: Perigee. Important note; I haven't read it. So, ordinarily I might stop there. However; among the more than forty reviews of the book, many with five stars, a few two-star, and from an across-the-board selection of intelligence, (it's an open-for-amatures reviewing site), I noticed a review by Carl Rollyson.* Well, I had to see what ole Carl has to say; (not that we're BFs. Never met the guy.) Rollyson is a major biography writer, critic, play-write, and college professor; Baruch College. Although I've only read three of his books, all of which are about Rebecca West, I can say that he seems to be as much on Rebecca's side as I am. So he is my brother Rebecca West Fan, and I'm inclined to like him. He is a former president and founder of the Rebecca West Society. The West bios (which I've read) are Rebecca West; a Modern Sibyl, 1996, Rebecca West: A Life, 1996, and The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, 2007. 

Rollyson gives Lachman's Blavatsky three stars, and pretty much takes the gloves off. He says that while Thomas Edison and Mohandas Gandhi found her "persuasive" many others' regarded her as a "world class fraud, a trickster and plagiarist whose ruses were exposed and whose accounts of her own life were largely fiction." Then, top of next paragraph, without declaring his analysis, he adds; "Pity the poor biographer who has to deal with such an elusive and prevaricating figure." Then, he backs off a little saying that Lachman isn't exactly an apologist for Blavatsky, but he does appear to cede her more ground than other biographers. Well, (I thought), ceding ground isn't exactly the same as calling her a fraud.    

Since I haven't read the Blavatsky book I'll leave it at that, except that for someone of Rollyson's level of credibility, three Stars is a bit more than chopped liver.    

*A blurb from Amazon books;

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of a dozen biographies, including American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated, the latter three published by University Press of Mississippi. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Criterion, and other major periodicals.

 

 

I remember one summer day in my 19th year sitting in a car in a parking lot at the local ocean beach drinking beer with a tall freckle-faced Irish woman who was a graduate student at a New York City college majoring in Theology. She was giving me what I felt at the time was an enthralling lecture, an introduction to Teihard de Chardin. I remember having a sense of excitement that lingered for days, maybe even longer. I remember nothing else about the day; not the girl's name; not the effect of the beer; not anything. A dozen years later or so, I was down and out, feeling mighty blue; searching for some sort of help; I thought of God. Then I thought of the Irish girl; then I thought of Teihard de Chardin. Some how, I'm sure it wasn't easy especially in my depressed state, I got hold of Teihard's book, The Phenomenon of Man, and read it cover to cover. I was inspired; I felt better from the beginning of reading it. But in the process of becoming a non-aligned Chardinian, non-aligned because I still didn't buy the Nicean Creed or the R.C. Church in all its orthodoxy, I looked for further salvation in Bergson. How I came up with Bergson's Creative Evolution I'm not sure; I think the title sounded Chardinian. Those two books became a foundation for my coming to believe in, well, something as opposed to nothing. Today, I believe in a power greater than, you guessed it, me.       

 

And now it's fifty years later and I'm again standing at the foot of Bergson Mountain. I'm re-reading Creative Evolution, and have installed two other of his books on my Kindle, with intention of becoming, to the best of my aged ability, conversant in Bergsonian thinking. Toward that effort I've also been researching Henri Bergson to find out why he has been an 'influencer' to so many of the great minds of the 20th century. And when I say 'minds' I am including painters, poets, writers and in particular any person or persons thought by themselves or others to be 'Moderns'. So. Just to be clear. I am not a Bergson scholar. I'm a beginner at learning Bergson's philosophy. Going forward, I hope to learn more. 

 

Henri Bergson was born in Paris on 18 October, 1859, of Jewish ancestry. His father was an accomplished musician from a wealthy Polish-Jewish family; his mother, Katherine Levison was of English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish heritage, born in Northern England, the daughter of a Yorkshire doctor. (A sister, Mina Bergson, married Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers a British writer of occult themes and one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.)     

The young Henri spoke English and French as a child; the family lived in England for a few years during the boy's childhood. He attended the Ecole Normale Superieure from 1878 to 1881, became a professor of philosophy, was appointed to a post at the Lycee Clermont-Ferrand in 1883, in 1888 back in Paris he taught at the Lycee Henri 14 for three years. In 1900 he was named professor of philosophy at College de France. He remained in that position until he retired because of ill health in  1921. 

 

For many years he gave  weekly lectures that attracted large numbers of people, including the Catholic Thomist Jacques Maritain and the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel. He became such a popular speaker that he was asked to lecture throughout Europe, England and even the United States. 

His four most important books are Matter and Memory, published in 1896; Time and Free Will, published the same year; Creative Evolution,1907 and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932. Two collections of his writing were published more recently in 1959 and 1972.

 

In 1891 Bergson married a cousin of Marcel Proust, Louise Neuberger. Proust was best man at the wedding, which leads me to believe that perhaps Marcel and Henri had been friends prior. It has been said that Proust thought favorably of Bergson's ideas, had read some of his writing and perhaps attended some of his lectures. I don't know of any written communication between the two, but I am aware of Proust's use of the plasticity of time in his great body of work. (With Albert Einstein though, there were problems. Henri and Albert held a famous debate, at which it was said that Einstein won, but even though time continues to creep forward, it might still be said a century later that philosophy is not permitted on relativity's turf. That can't last forever!)

One of the great American minds of the 19th, or any other century, William James, said the following about one of Bergson's first published essays; 

"I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read for years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that his philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old frameworks and brings things to a solution from which new crystalisations can be reached."

In his Hibbert Lectures, (A Pluralistic Universe), which he gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London, William James told of the encouragement he had gotten from Bergson's thought, and referred to his confidence in being "able to lean on Bergson's Authority".  

"....to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be." It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it."

 

The following seems like such a good summary of Bergson's most well known writing that I've surrendered to the impulse to borrow a long quote, from a much longer excerpt in The New Catholic Encyclopedia; GALLAGHER, I. J.

"Bergson's leading ideas are encompassed in four principal works. In Time and Free Will he showed that free will is the most evident of facts and that its denial follows upon the confusion of succession with simultaneity, duration with intensity, and quality with quantity. In Matter and Memory he proved that spirit as well as matter exists. By demonstrating that consciousness is not identical with cerebral activity, he paved the way for a proof of the survival of the soul after death. In Creative Evolution, his most famous work, he showed that the mechanistic interpretation of evolution is not justified by the facts. Viewing the data of evolution in the light of his intuition of duration, he described the evolutionary process as the forward thrust of a great spiritual force, the life impulse (élan vital ), rushing through time, insinuating itself into matter, and producing the various living forms culminating in man. Its movement is not predetermined but creative, ever generating novel and unpredictable forms. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion represents the full flowering of Bergson's thought. Morality and religion are traced back to their double source in the evolutionary process. Bergson distinguished two separate moralities and religions—the open and closed moralities, the static and dynamic religions. Closed morality pertains to social cohesion. It is static and rooted in social pressure, the morality of a group enclosed upon itself. It represents a halt in the evolutionary process. Open morality transcends the group to unite all mankind in a common brotherhood. It is progressive and creative, a forward thrust of the élan vital. Whereas closed morality and static religion originate in the instinct for survival, open morality and dynamic religion are inspired by the moral heroes, saints and mystics, those superior representatives of the human race who, like a new species, foreshadow the future condition of man. They draw man upward to a higher spiritual level by their vision of human destiny and of God, the source of all love. It is in the experience of the mystics that Bergson found the most convincing evidence for the existence of God."   

Let us not forget that the available bandwidth was shorter then. And the means of communication simpler. And reading was not competing with radio, television, electronic media and the world-wide web. So, a philosophical text that becomes a best seller meant something more than it would mean today. Much more. A smart, sophisticated multi-lingual world traveler would have known that Henri Bergson was a celebrity in the greater civilized world, from Rio to Hong Kong, from Sydney Australia to Sydney Nova Scotia. Without having to dig I think we can rest assured that Kandinsky, Burliuk, and company, were aware of Henri Bergson and the boost he had given to the metaphysical in its contentious relationship with the materialistic, mechanistic world with its bonding of Marx and Darwin. Of course there was opposition to Bergson's philosophy but it did not destroy Bergson's foothold in the world of the intellect.  The opposition had it's say, and was able to diminish his seeming importance relative to other powers that be; the Catholic Church, which debated him on doctrine and dogma; Marxists, who denied the whole elan vital business; and the Soviet Government which made anything artistic-cultural other than Soviet Realism illegal.

Based on his work on life and evolution, Bergson came out positively on the side of France in the First World War; depicting the Germans as Barbarians. The French government embraced his outlook and sent him on a number of missions, most notably, early in 1917, on a secret mission to the United States to speak to President Wilson, helping to persuade Wilson to enter the war on the side of the French. Later he was an important influence in the decision to create The League of Nations. He was appointed President of its International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation. Members of the International Commission included the following:

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born physicist, naturalized American. One of the most notable personalities in the history of science, recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, he was active in several other areas, from philosophy to politics. Member of the ICIC from 1929 to 1939.

Marie Curie (1867-1934), born Maria Sklodowska, a Polish-born physician French naturalized. Her research on radioactive substances led her to be the only female winner of two Noble Prizes in 1903 and 1911. Vice President of the ICIC from 1929-1936.

Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), Australian-born British. Philologist, Professor of the language and culture of Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford. He was President of the ICIC from 1928 to 1940.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher. His work had a strong influence in the fields of psychology, biology, art literature and theology which were worth the 1927 Noble Prize in literature. Chairman of the ICIC from 1922 to 1925.

Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928), Dutch physicist known for his research on electromagnetism and electrodynamics which had a deep influence in the study of Physics and won him the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics. Was Chairman of the ICIC from 1925 to 1928.

Alfredo Rocco  (1875-1935), an Italian jurist and politician who promoted the codification of a new Code of Criminal Procedure. President of the IECI from 1929 to 1935, member of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, 1936-1938, and member of the ICIC from 1929 to 1936.

 Kristine Bonnevie (1872-1948), Norwegian biologist in the fields of cytology, genetics, and embryology.  She was Norway's first female professor and deputy representative to the Parliament of Norway. Member of the ICIC from 1929 to 1936.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), a Bengali intellectual who laid the foundations of experimental science in India. Member of the ICIC from 1926 to 1939.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945), a French writer, poet, and philosopher. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years. He was member of the Committee of Letters and Arts of the ICIC, serving as its president in the 1930s.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German novelist and writer. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, he is considered one of the most prominent figures of 20th Century European literature. He joined the Committee of Letters and Arts in 1931.

In 1918 Bergson was appointed a member of the Académie Française. In 1927, he received The Nobel Prize for Literature, "...in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented." But wait. Literature, not Philosophy? Well, yes.  It's really quite simple. Physics hadn't caught up with Philosophy; and Physics rules. Physics is how we measure things; from light years to microbes. (The sub-atomic measurement situation hadn't come into focus yet. Even now we don't know what to do with it, though we've made some sort of headway. I won't say 'great strides'.) Bergson might be unique among scientists who were ahead of his time in that he couldn't be proved wrong, so he couldn't be burned at the stake.

[Editor's note: Max Planck was born in 1858, one year before Bergson.]   

 

 

One of the most interesting pieces of writing that I came across in my research was the following, which is an attempt to explain Bergson's thinking by reviewing a book about Bergson's thinking which is a book about another book about Bergson's thinking. To wit; Alex Gomez-Marin's book review of Craig Lundy's book Deleuze's Bergson which is about Gilles Deleuze's book about Bergson titled Bergsonism.  Welcome to the Bergsonian weeds!  

 

DELEUZE ON BERGSON    by Alex Gomez-Marin 

Review of Craig Lundy’s Deleuze’s Bergsonism (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 192 pages.

Alex Gomez-Marin is a theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist. He has a PhD in physics and a Masters in biophysics. For more than a decade he has been working in the field of behavioral neuroscience. He is currently a Ramón y Cajal Fellow and the Principal Investigator of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, Spain. Combining theory, computational data analyses and biophilosophy, his research aims to establish shared organizational principles of animal behavior across species. Quoting from Gomez-Marin;   

"Bergson’s infamous élan vital is his means of putting life back to life. The élan is the nature of the movement of life. It is duration that differentiates itself. The élan actualizes the virtual along the lines of differentiation, whereby evolution is creative. Importantly, the virtual is already real; it does not need to be realized. The opposite of the real is the possible, not the virtual. The virtual is opposed to the actual. And actualization, contrary to realization, does not take place through resemblance, limitation or elimination, but via differentiation. Since the virtual diverges along different lines, evolution is not a recombination of actualities but a dissociation of the élan. Life is precisely the tendency to diverge. In fact, life acts on matter in order to insert on its necessity the largest possible amount of indetermination. For Bergson, humanity is capable of bootstrapping its own condition." 

 

 

At this point fate came along and supplied me with a way to conveniently back away from European Intellectualism. I was Googling away, and I came across the following; Middlebrow Mystics; Henri Bergson and British Culture 1899 - 1939:  Helen L. Green. It is her Phd. thesis, written in 2015 while at Northumbria University, U.K., and it is, in my admittedly non-professional opinion, after giving it a careful reading, a wonderful piece of work. I think the abstract gives a sufficient summary of the paper which is very much worth reading in total, and is available online.  

Abstract

This thesis explores the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on middlebrow literature between 1899 and 1939. In doing so it engages with the work of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood and John Buchan as well as critics John Mullarkey, Suzanne Guerlac, Michael Vaughan and Michael Kolkman who, over the past three decades, have instigated a significant interdisciplinary revival and reassessment of Bergson’s work. Specifically, this study builds on, yet also extends, the work of literary critics like Paul Douglass, Hillary Fink, Mary Ann Gillies and S.E. Gontarski who since the 1990s have produced extensive studies exploring the impact of Bergson’s philosophy on modernism. While each of these studies confirm the considerable impact Bergson wrought on the culture and literature of this period, each limit their focus to canonical ‘highbrow’ modernist writers. Given the pervasive popularity of Bergson at this juncture, and following the spirit of recent calls in modernist studies for more inclusive, ‘flexible and perspicuous’ interpretations of the period’s literature, this project aims to extend the parameters of existing research to encompass early twentieth century ‘middlebrow’ fiction in the belief that Bergson represents a significant cultural and ideological bridge between these too often polarized literary streams.

As such, this study expands on the work of scholars like Nicola Humble, Kate  Macdonald, Erica Brown and Mary Grover who, to borrow Humble’s term, have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ and reassess critical perceptions of the early twentieth century’s ‘middlebrow’ writing. Following a detailed explanation of Bergson’s philosophy, its place in early twentieth century British culture and its pertinence to literary studies today, I will move on to discuss key works by Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and John Buchan in relation to Bergson’s philosophy, placing particular focus on their more mystical aspects and thematic, structural applications. Such an investigation does not aim to negate the unique contribution Bergson made to inspiring, elucidating and supporting the formal innovations of modernism but hopes to emphasize the fact that his ideas resounded far beyond this context, capturing the attention of an unexpectedly broad spectrum of society in often unexpected, unconventional and as yet, under-explored ways.

[ pp.15 Bergson’s work, as embraced and assimilated by this ‘ordinary’ or ‘middlebrow’ audience, did not survive the transition from academia to popular culture in unadulterated form. Rather, just as in the hands of Deleuze, from the beginnings of his remarkable career Bergson (his thought and character) was subject to a fascinating process of distortion.]

* Re; influencing and its origins, after reading Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, I'm inclined to think that influencing is pre-Proto-Indo-European.  

  

 

 

                                          

Semi-Annual Report, Summer 21

 

 

 

Well, happy Global Warming to you all. Try to look on the bright side, will you? Look at me, I'm aging like a good steak, mold and all. And do I complain? Well..., if you wouldn't mind....

I bit off more than I could chew.  I just spent a month working on a post that was the equivalent of a master's thesis. For whom you ask? Well, I suppose in my Lancanian mode I would say The Other. Do I know what the fuck I'm talking about? Well, I knew, today, enough to delete the whole mess. 

You might have noticed that my posts, maybe the last two or three were getting more longish, which, is fine, for me I guess, but uh, (duh), I tried to take on a subject that was way too broad for me and about which I had to learn as I wrote. I gave up. Do you want to know what the topic was? Well, no, I won't tell. Mum's the word. I may confess at sometime in the future, but I'll say this: It was a month of research that was at times enjoyable, but I'm sort of proud of myself for seeing that it was too much.  

While I take the summer off from thinking, my plan is to involve myself with The Modernist Journal Project, something the late Robert Scholes and others put together. I'm on a book ban, (again,) this time at the behest of my wife, so it's more serious. And the subject of magazines is one I've had on the back burner for awhile. (Years.) I actually wrote a nice paper in college about a magazine.., which was the start of my thinking along those lines.....

I will leave you, as together we broil to death in the too hot sun, with two clippings that I plan to use as sources of contemplation. 

Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. (The novelist served as best man at Bergson's wedding.) Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris. 

Wikipedia 

 

And the following, part of an essay by Gary Lachman; 

"The best book I know for making clear exactly how much modern art owes the occult is The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890—1985 by Maurice Tuchman, a massive catalogue from an exhaustive exhibition I had the good fortune to see many years ago. While recently re-reading some of the catalogue's articles, I came upon a few names with considerable frequency. Certainly, the history of the occult's influence on art is filled with many illustrious figures, including Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi, for example. The roll call of artists so influenced reads like a who's who of the cutting edge: Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and Joseph Beuys, to name a few. However, as I said, certain names kept turning up, especially in the period preceding the birth of abstract art. These were the Theosophists Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner.

The artist upon whom these leading Theosophists made the strongest imprint was the one most associated with creating non-representational art, Wassily Kandinsky. Just when the first abstract painting was made is still a matter of debate. Some say it was Kandinsky's First Abstract Water Colour in 1910; others give the honor to the Czech Frantisek Kupka. But Kandinsky is the name most associated with the new approach to painting."

From the Theosophical Society webpage; by Gary Lachman. 

A Wall

 

 

                                            A Wall 

 

You put up a wall, and I recognize it as your wall. We get together on the telephone and talk about it. Or perhaps we e-mail, or snail-mail. I tell you I'd like to put some of my stuff over on your side of the wall. It's not a fence, mind you. I'm not talking about general earth-bound real estate. I'm talking about Intellectual Property, Cultural Capital, the Psychic Self, and the Psychological Self, but in all those contexts I suppose I'm still talking about turf. You remember, I'm sure, how the Snow Leopard marks his turf. Very real stuff! Potent smell! So now we can rest assured, we know turf.  

            *   *  

I went to the funeral of a former girlfriend. Her father was there. I went up to look at her body and then walked toward the area where her family was standing. I said something to her father and I started to cry. I was embarrassed. I walked out onto the porch and headed in the direction of my car. My feelings of sorrow shut down as if a wall had descended in my brain. By the time I got to the car I had no feelings. It frightened me though. Such a powerful force in my mind that seemed to be beyond my conscious control. 

                      *   *

In his book, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction, Popular US Novels,, Modernism, and Form, 1945-75, Prof. Tom Perrin writes about blustering among mid-20th century literary critics. Here is a summary of one of the essays, written by Perrin.; 

"Part of a collection of essays on The New Yorker. I argue that the mid-century critic Dwight Macdonald’s prose emblematizes a mid-century middlebrow literary mode to which I give the name blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self-contradiction. Furthermore, I argue that blustering might itself be seen as an example of the modernism seemingly conspicuous by its absence from the mid-century New Yorker. I want to claim blustering as a variety of what Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” an example from the expanded repertoire of modernist cultural productions that has been assembled in the new modernist studies over the last fifteen years or so. Hansen suggests that vernacular modernism comprises “cultural practices” outside the traditional modernist canon “that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity.” Macdonald's blustering in The New Yorker is an exemplary instance of such a practice – a modernist and middlebrow mode mediated by modernism's self-contradictory and competing ideologies that at the same time attempts to articulate those ideologies." 

I've only read the one essay by Prof. Perrin but I found it to be brilliant and I'm hoping to read the rest of that book as soon as I can and whatever else of his that I can find. I am particularly interested in his ideas and description of what he refers to, referencing Hansen,  as vernacular modernism and its "cultural practices" outside the traditional modernist canon, and whether those who practiced this vernacular came into contact with certain walls in their thinking and...of what did those walls consist?

Without getting into a discussion of the subjects of semantics and linguistics too deeply let me just say that concerning walls, I'm using a broader definition than when describing an actual wall like the Great Wall of China. I'm using the term when it's discussed metaphorically; as I think I've said, in "You've put up a wall in our discussion of your mother!" As in the old topic of humor, the mother-in-law joke. I'm also using the term in other than geographic applications, as, for instance, the wall of a vein or artery, or a dam, such as the Hoover Dam, or a dam in an irrigation trench; walling up a river or a stream.      

I find the thought intriguing to go beyond the subject of literature to the subject of painting during the same historical period to which MacDonald and his peers aimed their criticism. I'm thinking specifically about MacDonald's essay, Mass Cult and Mid Cult. Can I assume, (let me just speak for myself at this juncture), that the mode of vernacular modernism spread over the entire world of art and cultural criticism of that time? One thing that is different of course is the effect that commodification has had on the value of individual art pieces as time went on, relative to the value of the printed word.  

But what about the construction of blustering? Of what does it consist? One thing that readily comes to mind is the fake. I think of Mike Tyson; a fake jab with one hand and a powerful blow aiming at the head with the other. Not once but many times, sometimes round after round. When I think of more boxing metaphors I could almost get carried away, but from shuffling I jump to shuck-and-jive which has to be another metaphor of numerous possibilities along those lines. What part do walls play in blustering?  

Painting?  Where to start?  Partisan Review? The Nation? Art News? Blustering? Well now, the first generation of abstract expressionism would be unique. They were developing a language; and there was a line-up of critics and a line up of galleries and buyers and promoters. But, is it even possible that it never got out of hand?

 * * *

Let's go back to the beginning for a minute. The Wall. I've mentioned the wall that is the discussion of the mother-in-law; a taboo subject.  That's a different kind of a wall; assuming we started out with the wall in our house next to where we're sitting. The living-room wall, the bathroom wall, the wall in the basement that is part of the foundation but has fake pine paneling on it so that it looks more like a wall. So, for the sake of my own semantic and/or linguistic intentions in this post, I'll be using the word wall as an alternate nomenclature for something which might more normally or for different purposes be using another word. (Keeping in mind that when it comes to walls for hanging paintings on we're talking about a completely different generation, ie Structuralism and Post- Structuralism.)   

Here are some places where I could use the word to describe something that is not the Great Wall of China:

A road block; a blood clot; a mental block; writers block. Suppose I stick with the letter b for awhile. Barrier, barricade, battlement, bar. Or a barrier by any other name, like the Maginot Line. (It was meant to be a wall, and Hitler did go around it; which is what you do to a wall.) [But, sorry, I switched from b to m.]

 

*    *    *  

 

The wall that is in the mind is the one I'm most interested in. The one that blocked my tears. On occasion, it has been there purely for self-torture; in terms of memory blockage. There have been occasions, with me as with most people if I may so presume, that there's been a wall, a conscious-unconscious wall between me and where I left my car keys. If you have a car that doesn't need a key please feel free to substitute.  O.K., I won't go further than this, but what I might do is use this post as a footnote to future mentions of walls in this context.   

 ........

Lacan; From a talk entitled "Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever".

"The question* that the nature of the unconscious puts before us is in a few words, that something always thinks. Freud told us that the unconscious is above all thoughts, and that which thinks is barred from consciousness. This bar has many applications, many possibilities with regard to meaning. The main one is that it is really a barrier, a barrier which it is necessary to jump over or to pass through. This is important because if I don't emphasize this barrier all is well for you. As we say in French, ça vous arrange, because if something thinks in the floor below or underground things are simple; thought is always there and all one needs is a little consciousness on the thought that the living being is naturally thinking and all is well. If such were the case, thought would be prepared by life, naturally, such as instinct for instance. If thought is a natural process, then the unconscious is without difficulty. But the unconscious has nothing to do with instinct or primitive knowledge or preparation of thought in some underground. It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness. The question* of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your watchfulness. The question is to find a precise status for this other subject which is exactly the sort of subject that we can determine taking our point of departure in language."

*Question? 
*Should this second bringing up of question be re-phrased as problem?  And where does he allow for the watchfulness to become conscious of a thought? 
[Here, I'm asking help from Lacan in arriving at a conscious thought. Is this too much to ask?  And/Or why did I add the above quote to my perfectly sensible short essay?  Probably, it's a fishing expedition.] 
 

Anarchists and Volcanos

I've just finished re-reading Survivors in Mexico, a book by author Rebecca West, left unfinished  at the time of her death. The man who edited the book is Bernard Schweizer, (b. 1962-) a professor of English at Long Island University Brooklyn. Schweizer is a naturalized American citizen born in Switzerland. His education began at the Waldorf School, an elementary school in Biel, Switzerland, continued with an apprenticeship in health care, autodidactic study for the federal Swiss baccalaureate, backpacking around the world, two years of college study at the University of Lausanne, a B.A. in English earned at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities Campus), and a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University in 1997. He held a teaching and research appointment at the University of Zurich from 1996-1999, was a research fellow for the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2000-2002. He joined the faculty of Long Island University in 2002. 

  He has published several books and essay collections on topics in British and European literature, is a leading Rebecca West  scholar and has edited or co-edited a number of West’s previously unpublished and uncollected works. In 2003, he co-founded the International Rebecca West Society in New York and was the second president of the Society, after Carl Rollyson, a West Biographer and author of many, many biographies and books and a University Professor. (I don't know where Rollyson is at present. He is a staggeringly productive man who really gets around.)   

In 2013, Schweizer founded another scholarly organization, the International Society for Heresy Studies,  and is currently it's vice-president. Heresy studies is designed to provide an intellectual platform for philosophers, literary critics, theologians, historians, and artists who are interested in the dialectic between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and who want to explore dissenting and heretical ideas outside of both confessional and anti-religious frameworks. He's the author of several books including Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, and Christianity and the Triumph of Humor: From Dante to David Javerbaum, two titles that almost make me wish I'd stayed in school.  

Prof. Schweizer isn't limited to writing in academic-speak. He can write well enough to pass muster with someone who appreciates Rebecca West for her writing style. Schweizer's substantive introduction explains in detail how he pieced together the notes and manuscripts of the book. I expect the chapter headings were part of this piecing together. Chapters include Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky, Mexico City, Race Relations and a dozen or so more subjects all in the best Westian prose.  My favorite part of the book though is that about Dr. Atl and the Reclus brothers.

 

West was a prolific writer. She began writing for the Feminist publications The Freewoman, and The Clarion while still in her teens. She must have been a gifted child, if only because she was interested in and reading about the Dreyfus case, which trial was in 1899, when she was only seven years old.  I've read two biographies of her; one book of letters; her semi-autobiographical novel; most of her better known novels; but none of her short stories and probably haven't made a dent in her journalism, though I have read The New Meaning of Treason, and A Train of Powder. I suppose I was trying to keep the memory of my father alive when, after his death in 1981 I felt compelled to read Black Lamb Grey Falcon. And when Robert Kaplan came out with his homage to Rebecca West with his book Balkan Ghosts,  I latched on to it, all the while congratulating myself for being prescient concerning Rebecca West's importance. And my love still grows.   

I know she has her detractors, and I respect their right to be right or wrong. I'm sure she made some errors of judgement and some errors of fact in Black Lamb Grey Falcon, but how could one not, in a book so huge? Anyway, history has a way of switching bogey men. One characteristic of R.W.'s writing which some might find annoying is her frequent use of hyperbole. For instance; in writing about Elie Reclus's attractiveness to women, she said..."There are two types of women which eternally attract Frenchmen, one tall and pessimist and Racinean, and the other small and optimistic and Molierean, and Arabella was highly Racinean." (Arabella was her paternal grandmother.)  

 Carl Rollyson gives a chapter to Survivors in Mexico in his biography Rebecca West A Modern Sibyl. With the help of her notes, he explains beautifully how a monumental book idea developed in her mind during her first trip to Mexico. That trip happened in 1966 at the end of a book tour in which she promoted her novel The Birds Fall Down, which had been a big success in both the U.S. and the U.K. The tour had been financed by The New Yorker editor William Shawn in the non-contractual hope that she might produce an article or two for his magazine. West's husband Henry Andrews accompanied her but was somewhat of an impediment due to mental lapses probably caused by hardening of the arteries. Henry was 72; Rebecca was 74. (He died two years later.)  She makes a few light-hearted comments about his flakiness but to understand her relationship with Henry is beyond the scope of this post. ...She loved him sometimes. Rollyson is very good about Henry, understanding better than the other biographers I've read so far that Rebecca knew that she was hard to love and not the most tolerant and patient of lovers.  

 

Here's how the book comes alive, for me. West extracts a tap-root from her own life to structure the expanse of the book. She goes back to her Paternal Grandmother. Arabella Fairfield was the second wife of Grandfather Major Charles George Fairfield, who, though he was Irish, served in the Third Scots Guards. He died in 1851 in middle age, of an infected gall bladder, leaving behind his attractive young wife, a daughter, and four young boys. Though she wasn't poor, had a pension and some property, they kept a low profile, both because of the potato famine and it's resultant poverty, and because she was member of an austere religious cult, the Plymouth Brethren, a cult also known as The Darbyites, after their founder, John Nelson Darby, a renowned preacher. Arabella, said Rebecca West,  "....looked like the figurehead of a ship and was a bigoted Protestant, ardently professing a faith hostile to ardor."   

   Mother and children divided their time between London in winter and Ireland in summer. In Dublin Arabella put an ad in the paper for a tutor, and one of the two Reclus brothers, Elie, responded. The brothers, Elie and Elisee, were political refuges from France, having been exiled due to their revolutionary politics. The two had dabbled for some years in different leftist sects from Switzerland to Paris, while at the same time attending University and picking up degrees; Elisee concentrating on Geography and Elie on Ethnography. For no particular reason that I could see, both Reclus brothers had a fascination with Volcanoes, which Elie transmitted to the children. All four boys loved Elie, and he stayed with them long enough to see two of them into the Military and two into Civil Service. 

*There were five Recluse brothers but for my purposes here we need only concern ourselves with the two.  

 

After his time with the Fairfield boys Elie continued his Anarcho-Syndicalist tendencies and with his brother was involved with the Paris Commune, and later, through political connections, became a director of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Rebecca West sums up her father's relationship with Elie this way: 

"Naturally, my father [Charles Fairfield] was in part Elie Reclus all his life long. Of course, Elie failed in his intention of instilling into his pupils no idea contrary to their mother's faith. It is true that my father was a Tory, but of the extreme sort which exalts the individual and would give the state hardly any powers at all, which is very close to anarchism, as conservatism often is today. When William F. Buckley junior tells his students that the only thing the state should be allowed to do is to regulate currency, he is making a remark which most of the great anarchists of the past would have happily endorsed. Since my father was so largely Elie Reclus, so am I, and that is why I have a certain insight into the mind of Dr. Atl, who had certainly read the works of the Reclus brothers and claimed to have been closely acquainted with both of them, and probably with truth, for they were always surrounded by anarchist sympathizers from all parts of the world, including a number from Latin America."
          

Some say Rebecca is, at least, expanding on her relationship with her father when she credits so much rubbing off of personality, but what was in her mind is guesswork at this point. I expect, (and I'm not alone); she had a father fixation. She does, certainly, romanticize him. And if that leaves her open to the critique of reaction-formation with the men in her life, well, I expect there's not too much room for argument there. Nobody's perfect.   

There was plenty about her father's story that could use a clean-up. Born the son of a British army officer in County Kerry, he had enlisted in the Army at the age of 17 and became a lieutenant. Gambling got him booted out of the Army. ...While working as secretary to the Soldier's Daughters' Home in Whitehall, he re-visited the Royal United Services Institute, which he had visited while in the Army and which contained a valuable collection of books, coins and badges. To bail himself out of gambling debts, he stole and sold a huge cashe of it's collection, was caught, and served five years hard labor. After prison, there is a lose of ten years, at least as far as my research is concerned. Is there any record of those years? I'd love to know. Was it during that time that he enlisted in the Confederate Army in America as a stretcher bearer? And was it after that episode in this life that he went to Mexico to see the Volcanoes?   

Ten years after he left prison he migrated to Australia, where he met Isabella Campbell Mackenzie, a Scot whose brother was the principal of London’s Royal Academy of Music. Fairfield was “a skilled horseman and a gifted orator”*..and charming. He and Isabella were married and moved back to London. Enough time elapsed for them to have three children, all girls, Cicely-Rebecca being the youngest. However, by the time they settled in Streatham, a district in south London, “Charles’s womanizing and squandering had led to a breakdown in the relationship. It was no longer a happy marriage.”*

*West's World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rebecca West;  Lorna Gibb;  Macmillan. 

 

What we know is that Charles Fairfield knew Elie Reclus well. Do we know that Dr. Atl and either one or both of the Reclus brothers knew each other? As far as I can tell Rebecca wants us to believe so. We do know that the Reclus brothers were two of the prime movers of Anarcho-syndicalism. And we know that Charles mentioned in a letter that he had met Dr. Atl. But as to a real physical meeting I'm not sure. ...I see it this way. It was a much smaller world in those days, and all three were in Paris at that time, perhaps the 1890s. Dr. Atl made it a point to hear Henri Bergson speak on several if not many occasions, and it is almost certain that both Reclus brothers did the same. Is there a connection between Anarchism, Revolution, Bergson's Elan Vital and volcanic activity? I think that element can be safely included on metaphoric grounds. As for his adoption of the Anarchist-syndicalist faith, West has this to say; 

"This was the most fashionable of all socialist theories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. To apply the current test, it would certainly have been asked to a Truman Capote party, while Marxism, though well established, was just a little too dowdy for that, and social democracy, of the sort which has won in Great Britain, [circa 1960] would never have hoped to do more than read about the festivities in the newspapers." 

Born in 1875 into a wealthy Mexican family, when he was 21 his father sent Gerard Murillo to Rome to study law and philosophy, which he did, but at the same time he became more and more involved with painting, his first love, and, as West says, 

"Working for some time in Paris teaching studios, [Dr. Atl] adopted the Anarcho-Syndicalist faith. Of the nature of his treasured faith, Anarchism, most people will have to be reminded, for it is no longer modish. It rejected parliamentary Socialism in favor of a society formed of self-governing unions of urban and rural workers who minded their own business and left a minimum of power to the state, which it hoped to confine almost entirely to the conduct of international relations."       

 

In Europe, in addition to painting, he studied philosophy and law at the University of Rome, and heard Bergson lecture in Paris. In Italy he worked for the Socialist newspaper Avanti and became involved with Socialist causes. In 1902 he changed his name to Dr. Atl..  Here's Rebecca on the name change;

" ...[and]...he early changed his name to Atl, which is a word in the Aztec language, Nahuatl. That it means water, sperm, urine, brain-stuff, cranium, head, and war suggests that conversation in Nahuatl must be a risky game; but indeed, an idea can be seen passing in a stately way through these definitions, moving from an essential fluid (one without then one within man), extending to the idea of man's essential part, the intellect, and ending with what the Indians conceived to be man's essential occupation." 

 

In 1906 having returned to Mexico and connected with Diego Rivera, Francisco de la Torre and Rafael Ponce de Leon the three put together an exhibition of paintings sponsored by the editors of the magazine 'Savia Moderna'. Atl issued a manifesto calling for the development of a monumental public art movement in Mexico linked to the lives and interests of the Mexican people, a precursor of the Mexican Mural Movement launched in 1933. He was also commissioned by the Diaz government to design a glass curtain for the institute of Fine Arts under construction in Mexico City, which he did and which was executed by Tiffany's of New York. The curtain featured the two volcanoes overlooking the capital. 

He returned to Europe in 1911, and, in Paris, founded the newspaper Action d’Art, which related European Socialism to the political situation in Mexico. During the same period he printed a flyer against Victoriano Huerta; and also found time to study Vulcanology. 

 

 

On his second return home to Mexico Dr. Atl joined the Revolution on the side of the Constitutionalist forces led by Venustiano Carranza and through Carranza was appointed Director of the Academy of San Carlos, which, because he felt it was outdated and didn't belong with the Revolution, he immediately shut down. He founded the newspaper Accion Mundial and a journal entitled America. During the Revolution, he persuaded two young art students, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to join the Carrancistas and illustrated La Vanguardia, the Carrancista official paper.  

 

 

The following is taken from a talk given in Mexico by the artist and teacher Lucinda Mayo:

 

"The Revolution rejected the euro-centric direction the Mexican government had held onto into the 19th and early 20th century. Post-Revolution there was a new interest in Mexico's rich indigenous past and the current popular arts, music, arts and crafts, and folk dancing.  Dr. Atl prepared a two-volume study, Folk Arts in Mexico, published by the  government in 1922. No single artist influenced the 20th century Mexican art revolution as much as he, and – as Diego Rivera said, Atl “...was one of the most curious people ever born on the entire American continent. 

"He has the most picturesque story of any painter, impossible to even begin relating without filling several volumes. He introduced aesthetic theories, painted the finest colorful sensations with incredible brush strokes, led strikes, wrote criticism that set off sparks, agitated the populace, swindled morons, borrowed all his friends’ cameras,  organized their exhibits, and without having a cent, somehow subsidized dozens of them, while feeding them huge bowls of macaroni! He reinvented solid oil colors with Mexican minerals, planned businesses, formulated government programs, prepared presidents, "'...and got all my canvases sold at one time, so I could go to Europe.'"
 

Atl had a long career in Mexico as a landscape painter, often painting volcanoes* as part of his landscape. And he was a writer. In 1950 he wrote the book, "How a Volcano is Born and Grows - Paricutin, in which he told of witnessing that volcano's irruption in 1943, during which his leg was injured, later having to be amputated. He wrote about the Revolution. He even wrote a Novella, La Perla, which influenced John Steinbeck to write a similar novel, also called The Pearl. He had a famous, perhaps notorious affair with Carmen Mondragon, a movie actress turned poet and painter, who he called "Nahui Olin", a symbol of Aztec renewal meaning "four movements", the symbol of earthquakes. Long before he died in 1964 he had become a famous and beloved part of the cultural life of  twentieth century Mexico.   

*All active volcanoes of Mexico are listed in many places so you needn't rely on me for your volcanic literacy. The nearest I can tell there are 48 Volcanoes in Mexico. Mexico's volcanoes are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and formed on the North American continental tectonic plate under which the oceanic Pacific and (in the south) Cocos plates are being subducted.
The most active volcanoes of the country are Popocatepetl, Colima and El Chichon, which had a major eruption in 1982 that cooled the world's climate in the following year. (I remember taking close note of that occurrence because I was, being way ahead of the pack, worried about Global Warming. Since then I've found other things to worry about.)

 

By now Amazon knows of my relationship with Rebecca and the other day sent me an offer I couldn't refuse, The Essential Rebecca West; uncollected prose put out by someone called Pearhouse Press, Inc., a selected collection of 16 book reviews and 7 essays, ...for me it's just a perfect bunch, a great gift to myself. Full of humor, ...and "off the nose" criticisms. (Off the nose being a term from jazz, or swing, or someplace, meaning coming in a little before or after the beat..., drum, bass, whatever..rhythm.) Among the essays is an extract from 'Survivors', "Cortez Meets Montezuma", which not only works well in 'Survivors', but just as well in this collection, book-ended by two smart essays on writing. For that piece she did a lot of reading, mainly from the writings of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier with Cortez on that fateful trip for Montezuma.  

 

Prof. Schweizer says it well in his introduction to Survivors in Mexico,  

"As in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, West brings her conventional historical material to life with brilliant interpretations and creative narrative extrapolations. She embellishes Bernal Diaz's stolid account of Cortes's first interview with Montezuma, for instance, so ingeniously as to shed a revealingly new, personal light on this fateful encounter." 

Bernal Diaz, who's writing she must have read carefully and with enthusiasm judging from the way she drew from it, was with Cortez on that expedition. Diaz, born in 1492, the beginning of the age of discovery, was an astronaut of his day. Colonialism was in its infancy and Europe was in dire need of gold.* Without it Western Civilization was going down the tubes, something that Marxists of today might wish had happened, but leaving that behind......,

*Probably one reason why there were so many alchemists around in those days.  

 

In The Essential Rebecca West there is an introduction by Anne Bobby, an American actress, who explains to her fellow readers who Rebecca West was since according to Bobby no-one had ever heard of her. [Well, O.K., My father was a Yugoslav,  ...and..., everyone's heard of H.G. Wells..., I guess, because of Tom Cruise...] 

As soon as Anne Bobby heard about Rebecca West she set about writing a one-woman show about her, starring, well, Anne Bobby. Of course she had help, probably lots of help, from Carl Rollyson and a grand-niece of Rebecca's, Helen Atkinson. For me though, there was one particular problem with the intro and that was a quote from the play. Is it from Rebecca West, or the playwrights? But wait, it sounds familiar. I went to my copy of Rollyson's The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, to the end of the book, and there it was in the first few pages of chapter nine. 

Anne Bobby introduces the quote in the following paragraph;  "I remember a line from the play in which Rebecca traveling in Mexico with her husband, Henry, visits Trotsky's grave, and in speaking with his grandson feels the idea for what would have been her last book, her,  "Final algebra of human suffering...," take shape;

"I would tell (Trotsky's) story, and mixed into it...would be my marriage, my family background and Henry's, the Aztecs, Meso-American art, the Spanish conquest, Cortes and Montezuma, even Napoleon. For we were all exiles and survivors...Though it was a huge pyramid of a book to scale, I hardly noticed."  

Is that a direct Rebecca West quote? The last sentence in particular? If it is it must have come from Rollyson's research, or from that chapter, which, by the way, is fine by me.   

  

West's first trip to Mexico was in 66. My first trip across the border was in 1963, having hitch-hiked from Amagansett, N.Y. to Laredo, Texas. My impressions though were registered on a muddled if not blank slate of a mind, since I hadn't bothered to learn much of anything up to that time. I was twenty and stoned. Rebecca West was 74 and she had been reading and retaining ferociously for probably 70 years.

 

On her first trip to Mexico, stopping in Mexico City, they spent that  evening and several more watching the sunset from the penthouse restaurant of an expensive hotel, followed the next day by a chauffeured tour of the city and it's parks and monuments. 

One Sunday morning the driver took them to the Diego Rivera Museum, which is not the beautiful civilization that Bernal Diaz saw but a carefully arrayed ruins, austere and solemn. Inside the museum she felt a certain feeling of the interior of a pyramid. The shadowed walls were being used as a background for beautiful pottery and sculpture, 

""which were also grey and black, [but], went for nothing because they had been designed to stand in bright light or against bright colours; and since the intention of many of them was comic, they were as disconcerting as Rowlandson* drawings would be hanging in a crematorium." 

*[Thomas Rowlandson, 1757 - 1827 English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era.]    

 

She gives a brief biography of Kahlo without much enthusiasm, but then she can't help interpreting Frida's work, and it ends up that she sees Kahlo as beautiful and crazy; a schizophrenic-narcissistic slightly silly but competent artist. (Can you be schizophrenic and narcissistic at the same time?) Then as they continue driving through the city she lets loose with the following zinger which I love. They drove but she had  "...no idea for how long. It is odd that the evolution of our species never implanted a clock in our brains which would have been most serviceable, but perhaps Teihard de Chardin could have proved that this omission showed a divine care for the populations of Switzerland and Waterbury, Connecticut. [No footnotes for that, you're on your own.]    

But she's not through with Kahlo yet and after seeing her in a certain dress and learning the story of the dress, the China Poblano dress, she tells how China Poblano became a saint in the minds of the people and Frida Kahlo too, a saint in the eyes of the mythologizing cab driver, who lets her know in no uncertain terms that she, Kahlo, was "....so good, so kind. Think of what she and her husband did for Trotsky." 

It isn't far from the Rivera museum to Coyoacan , but West uses that cab ride as an introduction to the story of Trotsky's last days. And she tells the story with great sympathy for someone she believes was a great man. Was Rebecca West in love with Trotsky? I think she says as much somewhere but I've searched back and haven't found the exact spot, but Carl Rollyson says as much in his last chapter of The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, a sensitive critique of Rebecca's last years, 1967-1983.

*

P.S. Notes:  I do think that in her time, (it was my time too, though I was much younger; I still, with the help of clarification by my parents, understood the social import of Trotskyism), to align yourself with Trotsky if you were on the Anti-Stalinist left, was the only sensible thing to do.

Was Rebecca over emphasizing her romantic feelings for Trotsky;  perhaps as a charm offensive on her Communist sympathizing fellow Socialists? Why did she continue to call her self a Socialist? I suppose she thought there was no alternative, particularly in terms of taking care of the poor; but I do enjoy imagining her spending time with William F. Buckley, [which she did], and in the evening having a drink and letting her hair down, so to speak.  

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

The Book Ban Crisis, Vol. ll

 

 

 

A good portion of my life is spent looking for books. I'll be looking for a book I know I have and it's the only one in the house that's completely disappeared. This, I know, is a mental block. More than that, it's my super-ego fighting a winning war against my ego; aka me. I've recently been thumbing through Bergler, his book that I read a year ago and ruminated about previously in this blog;  Bergler; The Super Ego; Copyright 1952, Gune & Stratton, Inc. NYC. : 

In that book Bergler makes a good case for the human condition being that of a hopeless victim of a blackmailing super-ego that terrorizes you, me, and everybody, by offering us a plea deal for our guilty ideas with the promise of letting us cop to a lesser crime. The deal of course is constantly re-negotiated, the lesser crime changing like a will-o-the wisp while the original crime becomes hopelessly lost and, anyway, irrelevant. I suppose since he offers no way out, his book should come with a cyanide pill; but instead he just offers the hope that the pain will be eased by understanding. Fat chance.

 

Another 'search' problem I get into, which, granted I would have even more trouble with but for Google, is looking for articles of the academic variety; those housed in such places as Jstor. I am ineligible for Jstor since I'm not a student or a professor.  

This morning though, I stumbled across an article I wanted to read as a result of having read another article, which I had been able to read.....,  (99+) (DOC) On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism, and The New Yorker | Tom Perrin - Academia.edu ....which article I had stumbled across while searching for more stuff by yet another academic, (I'm warm on academics this week), Bernard Schweizer, a Prof. at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and total Rebecca West expert and editor of that book I so love by West, Survivors in Mexico. His introduction to Survivors is enlightening both about Rebecca and how he, Prof. Schweizer, went about his edit.    

 As to the article I couldn't dig up, except in tease-form where you have to show proof of your academic status and/or pay a fee; that article is Project MUSE - From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: <i>Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</i> and the Creation of Literary Value, by Prof. Daniel Tracy. You may remember that I have my own theory about Middlebrow Modernism which in fact may be related to that of Prof. Tracy's, or not, which had to do, in part, with Dwight MacDonald being a late blooming horn-dog.  

 

At any rate, getting back to the on-going book-ban crisis, and this might be slightly Berglerian; I give myself credit for continuing to look for books on my shelves until my super-ego gets worn down and the book magically appears. But as to those that are stored where only academics can reach them, that calls for meditation, prayer, contemplation and patience, my short suit.  ....How am I doing so far? lately? Well, I've bookmarked several books to be bought down the line, as for instance several by Jean Shepard, (the Talk Show Host not the country singer), in particular one or two about George Ade, about whom I thought I might do a blog post, a couple of books by women abstract expressionists, about whom I'd like to further inform myself, and a few other's I might mention as they come to me.  ...Lastly I'll say on this subject is that I do sneak in a kindle every now and then, with the thought that a book that only costs $2.99, is almost free. 

 

Changing the subject, there is a woman who writes novels galore, and she's a pretty good writer as far as I can see, but she is independently published, and I discovered her while looking to shore up my faith in self and/or independent publishing during the time I jumped into that world with my solitary effort; her name is Libby Hawker, and the last book of hers I read, a couple of weeks ago, was Daughter of Sand and Stone, about a Middle-Eastern Princess who fights the Roman  Empire. I enjoy her writing and it's kind of an escape from my usual focus. I've also been dabbling in William Carlos Williams as a side dish.  

But I've really been absorbed in a bio of Cecil Beaton for the last couple of weeks. I just finished reading it this am. Really long, but very enjoyable. I came to the book through my time spent reading about the Cyril Connolly group. Cecil was part of that. Cecil and Cyril went to the same elementary school. A really important connection the two had though, was that the man who backed, and helped edit, Horizon, Cyril's famous magazine, Peter Watson, was the love of Cecil's life. That story is quite interesting. Watson was an early collector of modern art. Between the three of them, Cyril, Cecil and Peter, they knew all the movers and shakers throughout Europe. 

The author, Hugo Vickers, spares us the sex scenes, which is O.K. by me, particularly since Cecil, at least in Vicker's telling, seems to count love as more important than sex. Cecil, by the way, seems to have been bi-sexual. In fact, more of the references to Cecil having sex are with women than with men. Was that spin? I'll get one of Cecil's unexpurgated diaries and see if I can tell. I suppose it's prejudice but I find the idea that he was women-positive sort of increases his value in my un-deconstructed psyche. Maybe you'll understand this better when you get to the Garbo part. I haven't said anything here about Cecil's photographs, or his set design, drawings, and paintings. That should have it's own chapter. But just for the record I think that is partly because he makes it look so easy.