Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

8

VOLCANO

Every so often history gives us a time to savour, a truly defining moment that stands out for all time. 1913 was such a moment. It was as if Clio, the muse of history, was playing tricks with mankind. With the world on the brink of the abyss, with World War I just months away, with its terrible, unprecedented human wastage, with the Russian Revolution not much further off, dividing the world in a way it hadn’t been divided before, Clio gave us what was, in creative terms, arguably the most fecund – and explosive – year of the century. As Robert Frost wrote in A Boy’s Will, his first collection of poems, also published that year:

The light of heaven falls whole and white …

The light for ever is morning light.¹

Towards the end of 1912 Gertrude Stein, the American writer living in Paris, received a rambling but breathless letter from Mabel Dodge, an old friend: ‘There is an exhibition coming on the 15 Feb to 15 March, which is the most important public event that has ever come off since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, & it is of the same nature. Arthur Davies is the President of a group of men here who felt the American people ought to be given a chance to see what the modern artists have been doing in Europe, America & England of late years…. This will be a scream!’²

In comparing what became known as the Armory Show to the Declaration of Independence, Mabel Dodge was (one hopes) being ironic. Nonetheless, she was not wholly wrong. One contemporary American press clipping said, ‘The Armory Show was an eruption only different from a volcano’s in that it was made by man.’ The show opened on the evening of 17 February 1913. Four thousand people thronged eighteen temporary galleries bounded by the shell of the New York Armory on Park Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. The stark ceiling was masked by yellow tenting, and potted pine trees sweetened the air. The proceedings were opened by John Quinn, a lawyer and distinguished patron of contemporary art, who numbered Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce among his friends.³ In his speech Quinn said, ‘This exhibition will be epoch-making in the history of American art. Tonight will be the red-letter night in the history not only of American art but of all modern art.’⁴

The Armory Show was, as Mabel Dodge had told Gertrude Stein, the brainchild of Arthur Davies, a rather tame painter who specialised in ‘unicorns and medieval maidens.’ Davies had hijacked an idea by four artists of the Pastellists Society, who had begun informal discussions about an exhibition, to be held at the Armory, showing the latest developments in American art. Davies was well acquainted with three wealthy New York wives – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan. These women agreed to finance the show, and Davies, together with the artist Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, an American painter and critic living in Paris, set off for Europe to find the most radical pictures the Continent had to offer.

The Armory Show was in fact the third great exhibition of the prewar years to introduce the revolutionary painting being produced in Paris to other countries. The first had taken place in London in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries. Manet and the Post-Impressionists was put together by the critic Roger Fry, assisted by the artist Clive Bell. Fry’s show began with Edouard Manet (the last ‘old masterly’ painter, yet the first of the moderns), then leapt to Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin without, as the critic John Rewald has said, ‘wasting time’ on the other impressionists. In Fry’s eyes, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, at that point virtually unknown in Britain, were the immediate precursors of modern art. Fry was determined to show the differences between the impressionists and the Post-impressionists, who for him were the greater artists. He felt that the aim of the Post-impressionists was to capture ‘the emotional significance of the world that the Impressionists merely recorded.’⁵ Cézanne was the pivotal figure: the way he broke down his still lifes and landscapes into a patchwork of coloured lozenges, as if they were the building blocks of reality, was for Fry a precursor of cubism and abstraction. Several Parisian dealers lent to the London show, as did Paul Cassirer of Berlin. The exhibition received its share of criticism, but Fry felt encouraged enough to hold a second show two years later.

This second effort was overshadowed by the German Sonderbund, which opened on 25 May 1912, in Cologne. This was another volcano – in John Rewald’s words, a ‘truly staggering exhibition.’ Unlike the London shows, it took for granted that people were already familiar with nineteenth-century painting and hence felt free to concentrate on the most recent movements in modern art. The Sonderbund was deliberately arranged to provoke: the rooms devoted to Cézanne were next to those displaying Van Gogh, Picasso was next to Gauguin. The exhibition also featured Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, Erich Heckel, Aleksey von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Egon Schiele, Paul Signac, Maurice de Vlaminck and Edouard Vuillard. Of the 108 paintings in the show, a third had German owners; of the twenty-eight Cézannes, seventeen belonged to Germans. They were clearly more at home with the new painting than either the British or the Americans.⁶ When Arthur Davies received the catalogue for the Sonderbund, he was so startled that he urged Walt Kuhn to go to Cologne immediately. Kuhn’s trip brought him into contact with much more than the Sonderbund. He met Munch and persuaded him to participate in the Armory; he went to Holland in pursuit of Van Goghs; in Paris all the talk was of cubism at the Salon d’Automne and of the futurist exhibition held that year at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. Kuhn ended his trip in London, where he was able to raid Fry’s second exhibition, which was still on.⁷

The morning after Quinn’s opening speech, the attack from the press began – and didn’t let up for weeks. The cubist room attracted most laughs, and was soon rechristened the Chamber of Horrors. One painting in particular was singled out for ridicule: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp was already in the news for ‘creating’ that year the first ‘readymade,’ a work called simply Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp’s Nude was described as ‘a lot of disused golf clubs and bags,’ ‘an orderly heap of broken violins,’ and ‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’ Parodies proliferated: for example, Food Descending a Staircase,⁸

But the show also received serious critical attention. Among the New York newspapers, the Tribune, the Mail, the World, and the Times disliked the show. They all applauded the aim of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors to present new art but found the actual pictures and sculptures difficult. Only the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune liked what they saw. With critical reception weighted roughly five to two against it, and popular hilarity on a scale rarely seen, the show might have been a commercial disaster, but it was nothing of the kind. As many as ten thousand people a day streamed through the Armory, and despite the negative reviews, or perhaps because of them, the show was taken up by New York society and became a succès d’estime. Mrs Astor went every day after breakfast.⁹

After New York the Armory Show travelled to Chicago and Boston, and in all 174 works were sold. In the wake of the show a number of new galleries opened up, mainly in New York. Despite the scandal surrounding the new modern art exhibitions, there were plenty of people who found something fresh, welcome, and even wonderful in the new images, and they began collecting.¹⁰

Ironically, resistance to the newest art was most vicious in Paris, which at the same time prided itself on being the capital of the avant-garde. In practice, what was new one minute was accepted as the norm soon after. By 1913, impressionism – which had once been scandalous – was the new orthodoxy in painting; in music the controversy surrounding Wagner had long been forgotten, and his lush chords dominated the concert halls; and in literature the late-nineteenth-century symbolism of Stephane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, once the enfants terribles of the Parisian cultural scene, were now approved by the arbiters of taste, people such as Anatole France.

Cubism, however, had still not been generally accepted. Two days after the Armory Show closed in New York, Guillaume Apollinaire’s publishers announced the almost simultaneous release of his two most influential books, Les Peintres cubistes and Alcools. Apollinaire was born illegitimate in Rome in 1880 to a woman of minor Polish nobility who was seeking political refuge at the papal court. By 1913 he was already notorious: he had just been in jail, accused on no evidence whatsoever of having stolen Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre. After the painting was found, he was released, and made the most of the scandal by producing a book that drew attention to the work of his friend, Pablo Picasso (who the police thought also had had a hand in the theft of the Mona Lisa), Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and a new painter no one had yet heard of, Piet Mondrian. When he was working on the proofs of his book, Apollinaire introduced a famous fourfold organisation of cubism – scientific, physical, orphie, and instinctive cubism.¹¹ This was too much for most people, and his approach never caught on. Elsewhere in the book, however, he wrote sympathetically about what the cubists were trying to achieve, which helped to get them accepted. His argument was that we should soon get bored with nature unless artists continually renewed our experience of it.¹²

Brought up on the Côte d’Azur, Apollinaire appealed to Picasso and the bande à Picasso (Max Jacob, André Salmon, later Jean Cocteau) for his ‘candid, voluble, sensuous’ nature. After he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a writer, he gradually earned the tide ‘impresario of the avant-garde’ for his ability to bring together painters, musicians, and writers and to present their works in an exciting way. 1913 was a great year for him. Within a month of Les Peintres cubistes appearing, in April, Apollinaire produced a much more controversial work, Alcools (Liquors), a collection of what he called art poetry, which centred on one long piece of verse, entitled ‘Zone.’¹³ ‘Zone’ was in many ways the poetic equivalent of Arnold Schoenberg’s music or Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings. Everything about it was new, very little recognisable to traditionalists. Traditional typography and verse forms were bypassed. So far as punctuation was concerned, ‘The rhythm and division of the lines form a natural punctuation; no other is necessary.’¹⁴ Apollinaire’s imagery was thoroughly modern too: cityscapes, shorthand typists, aviators (French pilots were second only to the Wright brothers in the advances being made). The poem was set in various areas around Paris and in six other cities, including Amsterdam and Prague. It contained some very weird images – at one point the bridges of Paris make bleating sounds, being ‘shepherded’ by the Eiffel Tower.¹⁵ ‘Zone’ was regarded as a literary breakthrough, and within a few short years, until Apollinaire died (in a ‘flu epidemic), he was regarded as the leader of the modernist movement in poetry. This owed as much to his fiery reputation as to his writings.¹⁶

Cubism was the art form that most fired Apollinaire. For the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, it was fauvism. He too was a volcano. In the words of the critic Harold Schonberg, Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet produced the most famous scandale in the history of music.¹⁷ Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered at the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May and overnight changed Paris. Paris, it should be said, was changing in other ways too. The gaslights were being replaced by electric streetlamps, the pneumatique by the telephone, and the last horse-drawn buses went out of service in 1913. For some, the change produced by Stravinsky was no less shocking than Rutherford’s atom bouncing off gold foil.¹⁸

Born in Saint Petersburg on 17 June 1882, Stravinsky was just thirty-one in 1913. He had already been famous for three years, since the first night of his ballet Firebird, which had premiered in Paris in June 1910. Stravinsky owed a lot to his fellow Russian Serge Diaghilev, who had originally intended to become a composer himself. Discouraged by Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, who told him he had no talent, Diaghilev turned instead to art publishing, organising exhibitions, and then putting on music and ballet shows in Paris. Not unlike Apollinaire, he discovered his true talent as an impresario. Diaghilev’s great passion was ballet; it enabled him to work with his three loves – music, dance and painting (for the scenery) – all at the same time.¹⁹

Stravinsky’s father had been a singer with the Saint Petersburg opera.²⁰ Both Russian and foreign musicians were always in and out of the Stravinsky home, and Igor was constantly exposed to music. Despite this, he went to university as a law student, and it was only when he was introduced to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1900 and taken on as his pupil after showing some of his compositions that he switched. In 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died, Stravinsky composed an orchestral work that he called Fireworks. Diaghilev heard it in Saint Petersburg, and the music stuck in his mind.²¹ At that stage he had not formed the Ballets Russes, the company that was to make him and many others famous. However, having staged concerts and operas of Russian music in Paris, Diaghilev decided in 1909 to found a permanent company. In no time, he made the Ballets Russes a centre of the avant-garde. His composers who wrote for the Ballets Russes included Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Sergei Prokofiev, and Maurice Ravel; Picasso and Leon Bakst designed the sets; and the principal dancers were Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and Léonide Massine. Later, Diaghilev teamed up with another Russian, George Balanchine.²² Diaghilev decided that for the 1910 season in Paris he wanted a ballet on the Firebird legend, to be choreographed by the legendary Michel Fokine, the man who had done so much to modernise the Imperial Ballet. Initially, Diaghilev commissioned Anatol Liadov to write the music, but as the rehearsals approached, Liadov failed to deliver. Growing desperate, Diaghilev decided that he needed another composer, and one who could produce a score in double-quick time. He remembered Fireworks and got word to Stravinsky in Saint Petersburg. The composer immediately took the train for Paris to attend rehearsals.²³

Diaghilev was astounded at what Stravinsky produced. Fireworks had been promising, but Firebird was far more exciting, and the night before the curtain went up, Diaghilev told Stravinsky it would make him famous. He was right. The music for the ballet was strongly Russian, and recognisably by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, but it was much more original than the impresario had expected, with a dark, almost sinister opening.²⁴ Debussy, who was there on the opening night, picked out one of its essential qualities: ‘It is not the docile servant of the dance.’²⁵ Petrushka came next in 1911. That too was heavily Russian, but at the same time Stravinsky was beginning to explore polytonality. At one point two unrelated harmonies, in different keys, come together to create an electrifying effect that influenced several other composers such as Paul Hindemith. Not even Diaghilev had anticipated the success that Petrushka would bring Stravinsky.

The young composer was not the only Russian to fuel scandal at the Ballets Russes. The year before Le Sacre du printemps premiered in Paris, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky had been the star of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. No less than Apollinaire, Debussy was a sybarite, a sensualist, and both his music and Nijinsky’s dancing reflected this. Technically brilliant, Nijinsky nonetheless took ninety rehearsals for the ten-minute piece he had choreographed himself. He was attempting his own Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a volcanic, iconoclastic work, to create a half-human, half-feral character, as disturbing as it was sensual. His creature, therefore, had not only the cold primitivism of Picasso’s Demoiselles but also the expressive order (and disorder) of Der Blaue Reiter. Paris was set alight all over again.

Even though those who attended the premier of Le Sacre were used to the avant-garde and therefore were not exactly expecting a quiet night, this volcano put all others in the shade. Le Sacre is not mere folk lore: it is a powerful legend about the sacrifice of virgins in ancient Russia.²⁶ In the main scene the Chosen Virgin must dance herself to death, propelled by a terrible but irresistible rhythm. It was this that gave the ballet a primitive, archetypal quality. Like Debussy’s Après-midi, it related back to the passions aroused by primitivism – blood history, sexuality, and the unconscious. Perhaps that ‘primitive’ quality is what the audience responded to on the opening night (the premiere was held on the anniversary of the opening of L’Après-midi, Diaghilev being very superstitious).²⁷ The trouble in the auditorium began barely three minutes into the performance, as the bassoon ended its opening phrase.²⁸ People hooted, whistled, and laughed. Soon the noise drowned out the music, though the conductor, Pierre Monteux, manfully kept going. The storm really broke when, in the ‘Dances des adolescents’, the young virgins appeared in braids and red dresses. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns left the theatre, but Maurice Ravel stood up and shouted ‘Genius.’ Stravinsky himself, sitting near the orchestra, also left in a rage, slamming the door behind him. He later said that he had never been so angry. He went backstage, where he found Diaghilev flicking the house lights on and off in an attempt to quell the noise. It didn’t work. Stravinsky then held on to Nijinsky’s coattails while the dancer stood on a chair in the wings shouting out the rhythm to the dancers ‘like a coxswain.’²⁹ Men in the audience who disagreed as to the merits of the ballet challenged each other to duels.³⁰

‘Exactly what I wanted,’ said Diaghilev to Stravinsky when they reached the restaurant after the performance. It was the sort of thing an impresario would say. Other people’s reactions were, however, less predictable. ‘Massacre du Printemps’ said one paper the next morning – it became a stock joke.³¹ For many people, The Rite of Spring was lumped in with cubist works as a form of barbarism resulting from the unwelcome presence of ‘degenerate’ foreigners in the French capital. (The cubists were known as métèques, damn foreigners, and foreign artists were often likened in cartoons and jokes to epileptics.)³² The critic for Le Figaro didn’t like the music, but he was concerned that he might be too old-fashioned and wondered whether, in years to come, the evening might turn out to have been a pivotal event.³³ He was right to be concerned, for despite the first-night scandal, Le Sacre quickly caught on: companies from all over requested permission to perform the ballet, and within months composers across the Western world were imitating or echoing Stravinsky’s rhythms. For it was the rhythms of Le Sacre more than anything else that suggested such great barbarity: ‘They entered the musical subconscious of every young composer.’

In August 1913 Albert Einstein was walking in the Swiss Alps with the widowed Marie Curie, the French physicist, and her daughters. Marie was in hiding from a scandal that had blown up after the wife of Paul Langevin, another physicist and friend of Jules-Henri Poincaré, had in a fit of pique published Marie’s love letters to her husband. Einstein, then thirty-four, was a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or ETH, in Zurich and much in demand for lectures and guest appearances. That summer, however, he was grappling with a problem that had first occurred to him in 1907. At one point in their walks, he turned to Marie Curie, gripped her arm, and said, ‘You understand, what I need to know is exactly what happens to the passengers in an elevator when it falls into emptiness.’³⁴

Following his special theory of relativity, published in 1905, Einstein had turned his ideas, if not on their head, then on their side. As we have seen, in his special theory of relativity, Einstein had carried out a thought experiment involving a train travelling through a station. (It was called the ‘special’ theory because it related only to bodies moving in relation to one another.) In that experiment, light had been travelling in the same direction as the train. But he had suspected since 1911 that gravity attracted light.³⁵ Now he imagined himself in an elevator falling down to earth in a vacuum and therefore accelerating, as every schoolchild knows, at 32 feet per second. However, without windows, and if the acceleration were constant, there would be no way of telling that the elevator was not stationary. Nor would the person in the elevator feel his or her own weight. This notion startled Einstein. He conceived of a thought experiment in which a beam of light struck the elevator not in the direction of movement but at right angles. Again he compared the view of the light beam seen by a person inside the elevator and one outside. As in the 1905 thought experiment, the person inside the elevator would see the light beam enter the box or structure at one level and hit the opposite wall at the same level. The observer outside, however, would see the light beam bend because, by the time it reached the other side of the elevator, the far wall would have moved on. Einstein concluded that if acceleration could curve the light beam, and since the acceleration was a result of gravity, then gravity must also be able to bend light. Einstein revealed his thinking on this subject in a lecture in Vienna later in the year, where it caused a sensation among physicists. The implications of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity may be explained by a model, as the special theory was explained using a pencil twisting in the light, casting a longer and shorter shallow. Imagine a thin rubber sheet set out on frame, like a picture canvas, and laid horizontally. Roll a small marble or a ball bearing across the rubber sheet, and the marble will roll in a straight line. However, if you place a heavy ball, say a cannonball, in the centre of the frame, depressing the rubber sheet, the marble would then roll in a curve as it approaches this massive weight. In effect, this is what Einstein argued would happen to light when it approached large bodies like stars. There is a curvature in space-time, and light bends too.³⁶

General relativity is a theory about gravity and, like special relativity, a theory about nature on the cosmic scale beyond everyday experience. J. J. Thomson was lukewarm about the idea, but Ernest Rutherford liked the theory so much that he said even if it wasn’t true, it was a beautiful work of art.³⁷ Part of that beauty was that Einstein’s theory could be tested. Certain deductions followed from the equations. One was that light should bend as it approaches large objects. Another was that the universe cannot be a static entity – it has to be either contracting or expanding. Einstein didn’t like this idea – he thought the universe was static – and he invented a correction so he could continue to think so. He later described this correction as ‘the biggest blunder of my career,’ for, as we shall see, both predictions of the general theory were later supported by experimentation – and in the most dramatic circumstances. Rutherford had it right; relativity was a most beautiful theory.³⁸

The other physicist who produced a major advance in scientific understanding in that summer of 1913 could not have been more different from Einstein. Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Dane and an exceptional athlete. He played soccer for Copenhagen University; he loved skiing, bicycling, and sailing. He was ‘unbeatable’ at table tennis, and undoubtedly one of the most brilliant men of the century. C. P. Snow described him as tall with ‘an enormous, domed head,’ with a long, heavy jaw and big hands. He had a shock of unruly, combed-back hair and spoke with a soft voice, ‘not much above a whisper.’ All his life, Bohr talked so quietly that people strained to hear him. Snow also found him to be ‘a talker as hard to get to the point as Henry James in his later years.’³⁹

This extraordinary man came from a civilised, scientific family – his father was a professor of physiology, his brother was a mathematician, and all were widely read in four languages, as well as in the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Bohr’s early work was on the surface tension of water, but he then switched to radioactivity, which was the main reason that drew him to Rutherford, and England, in 1911. He studied first in Cambridge but moved to Manchester after he heard Rutherford speak at a dinner at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. At that time, although Rutherford’s theory of the atom was widely accepted by physicists, there were serious problems with it, the most worrying of which was the predicted instability of the atom – no one could see why electrons didn’t just collapse in on the nucleus. Shortly after Bohr arrived to work with Rutherford, he had a series of brilliant intuitions, the most important of which was that although the radioactive properties of matter originate in the atomic nucleus, chemical properties reflect primarily the number and distribution of electrons. At a stroke he had explained the link between physics and chemistry. The first sign of Bohr’s momentous breakthrough came on 19 June 1912, when he explained in a letter to his brother Harald what he had discovered: ‘It could be that I’ve found out a little bit about the structure of atoms … perhaps a little piece of reality.’ What he meant was that he had an idea how to make more sense of the electrons orbiting Rutherford’s nucleus.⁴⁰ That summer Bohr returned to Denmark, got married, and taught at the University of Copenhagen throughout the autumn. He struggled on, writing to Rutherford on 4 November that he expected ‘to be able to finish the paper [with his new ideas] in a few weeks.’ He retreated to the country and wrote a very long article, which he finally divided into three shorter ones, since he had so many ideas to convey. He gave the papers a collective title – On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. Part I was mailed to Rutherford on 6 March 1913; parts 2 and 3 were finished before Christmas. Rutherford had judged his man correctly when he allowed Bohr to transfer to Cambridge. As Bohr’s biographer has written, B revolution in understanding had taken place.’⁴¹

As we have seen, Rutherford’s notion of the atom was inherently unstable. According to ‘classical’ theory, if an electron did not move in a straight line, it lost energy through radiation. But electrons went round the nucleus of the atom in orbits – such atoms should therefore either fly apart in all directions or collapse in on themselves in an explosion of light. Clearly, this did not happen: matter, made of atoms, is by and large very stable. Bohr’s contribution was to put together a proposition and an observation.⁴² He proposed ‘stationary’ states in the atom. Rutherford found this difficult to accept at first, but Bohr insisted that there must be certain orbits electrons can occupy without flying off or collapsing into the nucleus and without radiating light.⁴³ He immeasurably strengthened this idea by adding to it an observation that had been known for years – that when light passes through a substance, each element gives off a characteristic spectrum of color and moreover one that is stable and discontinuous. In other words, it emits light of only particular wavelengths – the process known as spectroscopy. Bohr’s brilliance was to realise that this spectroscopic effect existed because electrons going around the nucleus cannot occupy ‘any old orbit’ but only certain permissible orbits.⁴⁴ These orbits meant that the atom was stable. But the real importance of Bohr’s breakthrough was in his unification of Rutherford, Planck, and Einstein, confirming the quantum – discrete – nature of reality, the stability of the atom, and the nature of the link between chemistry and physics. When Einstein was told of how the Danish theories matched the spectroscopies so clearly, he remarked, ‘Then this is one of the greatest discoveries.’⁴⁵

In his own country, Bohr was feted and given his own Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, which became a major centre for the subject in the years between the wars. Bohr’s quiet, agreeable, reflective personality – when speaking he often paused for minutes on end while he sought the correct word – was an important factor in this process. But also relevant to the rise of the Copenhagen Institute was Denmark’s position as a small, neutral country where, in the dark years of the century, physicists could meet away from the frenetic spotlight of the major European and North American centres.

For psychoanalysis, 1913 was the most significant year after 1900, when The Interpretation of Dreams was published. Freud published a new book, Totem and Taboo, in which he extended his theories about the individual to the Darwinian, anthropological world, which, he argued, determined the character of society. This was written partly in response to a work by Freud’s former favourite disciple, Carl Jung, who had published The Psychology of the Unconscious, two years before, which marked the first serious division in psychoanalytic theory. Three major works of fiction, very different from one another but each showing the influence of Freudian ideas as they extended beyond the medical profession to society at large, also appeared.

Thomas Mann’s great masterpiece Buddenbrooks was published in 1901, with the subtitle ‘Decline of a Family.’ Set in a north German, middle-class family (Mann was himself from L¨beck, the son of a prosperous corn merchant), the novel is bleak. Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno die at relatively young ages (Thomas in his forties, Hanno in his teens) ‘for no other very good reason than they have lost the will to live.’⁴⁶ The book is lively, and even funny, but behind it lies the spectre of Nietzsche, nihilism, and degeneracy.

Death in Venice, a novella published in 1913, is also about degeneracy, about instincts versus reason, and is an exploration of the author’s unconscious in a far more brutally frank way than Mann had attempted or achieved before. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer newly arrived in Venice to complete his masterpiece. He has the appearance, as well as the first name, of Gustav Mahler, whom Mann fiercely admired and who died on the eve of Mann’s own arrival in Venice in 1 9 1 1. No sooner has Aschenbach arrived than he chances upon a Polish family staying in the same hotel. He is struck by the dazzling beauty of the young son, Tadzio, dressed in an English sailor suit. The story follows the ageing Aschenbach’s growing love for Tadzio; meanwhile he neglects his work, and his body succumbs to the cholera epidemic encroaching on Venice. Aschenbach fails to complete his work and he also fails to alert Tadzio’s family to the epidemic so they might escape. The writer dies, never having spoken to his beloved.

Von Aschenbach, with his ridiculously quiffed hair, his rouge makeup, and his elaborate clothes, is intended by Mann to embody a once-great culture now deracinated and degenerate. He is also the artist himself.⁴⁷ In Mann’s private diaries, published posthumously, he confirmed that even late in life he still fell romantically in love with young men, though his 1905 marriage to Katia Pringsheim seemed happy enough. In 1925 Mann admitted the direct influence of Freud on Death in Venice: ‘The death wish is present in Aschenbach’s consciousness though he’s unaware of it.’ As Ronald Hayman, Mann’s biographer has stressed, Ich was frequently used by Mann in a Freudian way, to suggest an aspect or segment of the personality that asserts itself, often competing against instinct. (Ich was Freud’s preferred usage; the Latin ego was an innovation of his English translator.)⁴⁸ The whole atmosphere of Venice represented in the book – dark, rotting back alleys, where ‘unspeakable horrors’ lurk unseen and unquantified – recalls Freud’s primitive id, smouldering beneath the surface of the personality, ready to take advantage of any lapse by the ego. Some critics have speculated that the very length of time it took Mann to write this short work – several years – reflected the difficulty he had in admitting his own homosexuality.⁴⁹

1913 was also the year in which D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers was published. Whether or not Lawrence was aware of psychoanalysis as early as 1905, when he wrote about infantile sexuality ‘in terms almost as explicit as Freud’s,’ he was exposed to it from 1912 on, when he met Frieda Weekley. Frieda, born Baroness Frieda von Richthofen at Metz in Germany in 1879, had spent some time in analysis with her lover Otto Gross, a psychoanalyst.⁵⁰ His technique of treatment was an eclectic mix, combining the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche. Sons and Lovers tackled an overtly Freudian theme: the Oedipal. Of course, the Oedipal theme pre-dated Freud, as did its treatment in literature. But Lawrence’s account of the Morel family – from the Nottinghamshire coalfields (Nottingham being Lawrence’s own home county) – places the Oedipal conflict within the context of wider issues. The world inhabited by the Morels is changing, reflecting the transition from an agricultural past to an industrial future and war (Paul Morel actually predicts World War I).⁵¹ Gertrude Morel, the mother in the family, is not without education or wisdom, a fact that sets her apart from her duller, working-class husband. She devotes all her energies to her sons, William and Paul, so that they may better themselves in this changing world. In the process, however, Paul, an artist, who also works in a factory, falls in love and tries to escape the family. Where before there had been conflict between wife and husband, it is now a tussle between mother and son. ‘These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them…. As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul.’⁵² Just as Mann tried to break the taboo on homosexuality in Death in Venice, Lawrence talks freely of the link between sex and other aspects of life in Sons and Lovers and in particular the role of the mother in the family. But he doesn’t stop there. As Helen and Carl Baron have said, socialist and modernist themes mingle in the book: low pay, unsafe conditions in the mines, strikes, the lack of facilities for childbirth, or the lack of schooling for children older than thirteen; the ripening ambition of women to obtain work and to agitate for votes; the unsettling effect of evolutionary theory on social and moral life; and the emergence of an interest in the unconscious.⁵³ In his art studies, Paul encounters the new theories about social Darwinism and gravity. Mann’s story is about a world that is ending, Lawrence’s about one world giving way to another. But both reflect the Freudian theme of the primacy of sex and the instinctual side of life, with the ideas of Nietzsche and social Darwinism in the background. In both, the unconscious plays a not altogether wholesome role. As Gustav Klimt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal pointed out in fin-de-siècle Vienna, man ignores the instinctive life at his peril: whatever physics might say, biology is the everyday reality. Biology means sex, reproduction, and behind that evolution. Death in Venice is about the extinction of one kind of civilisation as a result of degeneracy. Sons and Lovers is less pessimistic, but both explore the Nietzschean tussle between the life-enhancing barbarians and the overrefined, more civilised, rational types. Lawrence saw science as a form of overrefinement. Paul Morel has a strong, instinctive life force, but the shallow of his mother is never absent.

Marcel Proust never admitted the influence of Freud or Darwin or Einstein on his work. But as the American critic Edmund Wilson has pointed out, Einstein, Freud and Proust, the first two Jewish, the latter half-Jewish, ‘drew their strength from their marginality which heightened their powers of observance.’ In November 1913 Proust published the first volume of his multivolume work A la recherche du temps perdu, normally translated as Remembrance of Things Past, though many critics/scholars now prefer In Search of Lost Time, arguing that it better conveys Proust’s idea that the novel has some of the qualities of science – the research element – and Proust’s great emphasis on time, time being lost and recovered rather than just gone.

Proust was born in 1871 into a well-off family and never had to work. A brilliant child, he was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and at home, an arrangement that encouraged a close relationship with his mother, a neurotic woman. After she died in 1905, aged fifty seven, two years after her husband, her son withdrew from the world into a cork-lined room where he began to correspond with hundreds of friends and convert his meticulously detailed diaries into his masterpiece. A la recherche du temps perdu has been described as the literary equivalent of Einstein or Freud, though as the Proust scholar Harold March has pointed out, such comparisons are generally made by people unfamiliar with either Freud or Einstein. Proust once described his multivolume work in an interview as ‘a series of novels of the unconscious’. But not in a Freudian sense (there is no evidence that Proust ever read Freud, whose works were not translated into French until the novelist was near the end of his life). Proust ‘realised’ one idea to wonderful heights. This was the notion of involuntary memory, the idea that the sudden taste of a pastry, say, or the smell of some old back stairs, brings back not just events in the past but a whole constellation of experiences, vivid feelings and thoughts about that past. For many people, Proust’s insight is transcendentally powerful, for others it is overstated (Proust has always divided the critics).

His real achievement is what he makes of this. He is able to evoke the intense emotions of childhood – for example, near the beginning of the book when he describes the narrator’s desperate desire to be kissed by his mother before he goes to sleep. This shifting back and forth in time is what has led many people to argue that Proust was giving a response to Einstein’s theories about time and relativity though there is no real evidence to link the novelist and the physicist any more than there is to link him with Freud. Again, as Harold March has said, we should really consider Proust on his own terms. Looked at in this way, In Search of Lost Time is a rich, gossipy picture of French aristocratic/upper class life, a class that, as in Chekhov and Mann, was disappearing and vanished completely with World War I. Proust was used to this world – his letters constantly refer to Princess This, the Count of That, the Marquis of the Other.⁵⁴ His characters are beautifully drawn; Proust was gifted not only with wonderful powers of observation but with a mellifluous prose, writing in long, languid sentences interlaced with subordinate clauses, a dense foliage of words whose direction and meaning nonetheless always remains vivid and clear.

The first volume, published in 1913, Du côté de chez Swann, ‘Swann’s Way’ (in the sense of Swann’s area of town), comprised what would turn out to be about a third of the whole book. We slip in and out of the past, in and around Combray, learning the architecture, the layout of the streets, the view from this or that window, the flower borders and the walkways as much as we know the people. Among the characters are Swann himself, Odette, his lover and a prostitute, the Duchesse de Guermantes. Proust’s characters are in some instances modelled on real people.⁵⁵ In sheer writing power, he is able to convey the joy of eating a madeleine, the erotic jealousy of a lover, the exquisite humiliation heaped on a victim of snobbery or anti-Semitism. Whether or not one feels the need to relate him to Bergson, Baudelaire or Zola, as others have done, his descriptions work as writing. It is enough.

Proust did not find it easy to publish his book. It was turned down by a number of publishers, including the writer André Gide at Nouvelle Revue Française, who thought Proust a snob and a literary amateur. For a while the forty-two-year-old would-be author panicked and considered publishing privately. But then Grasset accepted his book, and he now shamelessly lobbied to get it noticed. Proust did not win the Prix Goncourt as he had hoped, but a number of influential admirers wrote to offer their support, and even Gide had the grace to admit he had been wrong in rejecting the book and offered to publish future volumes. At that stage, in fact, only one other volume had been planned, but war broke out and publication was abandoned. For the time being, Proust had to content himself with his voluminous letters.

Since 1900 Freud had expended a great deal of time and energy extending the reach of the discipline he had founded; psychoanalytic societies now existed in six countries, and an International Association of Psychoanalysis had been formed in 1908. At the same time, the ‘movement,’ as Freud thought of it, had suffered its first defectors. Alfred Adler, along with Wilhelm Stekel, left in 1911, Adler because his own experiences gave him a very different view of the psychological forces that shape personality. Crippled by rickets as a child and suffering from pneumonia, he had been involved in a number of street accidents that made his injuries worse. Trained as an ophthalmologist, he became aware of patients who, suffering from some deficiency in their body, compensated by strengthening other faculties. Blind people, for example, as is well known, develop very acute hearing. A social Democrat and a Jew who had converted to Christianity, Adler tried hard to reconcile the Marxist doctrine of class struggle with his own ideas about psychic struggle. He formed the view that the libido is not a predominantly sexual force but inherently aggressive, the search for power becoming for him the mainspring of life and the ‘inferiority complex’ the directing force that gives lives their shape.⁵⁶ He resigned as spokesman of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association because its rules stipulated that its aim was the propagation of Freud’s views. Adler’s brand of ‘individual psychology’ remained very popular for a number of years.

Freud’s break with Carl Jung, which took place between the end of 1912 and the early part of 1914, was much more acrimonious than any of the other schisms because Freud, who was fifty-seven in 1913, saw Jung as his successor, the new leader of ‘the movement.’ The break came because although Jung had been devoted to Freud at first, he revised his views on two seminal Freudian concepts. Jung thought that the libido was not, as Freud insisted, solely a sexual instinct but more a matter of ‘psychic energy’ as a whole, a reconceptualisation that, among other things, vitiated the entire idea of childhood sexuality, not to mention the Oedipal relationship.⁵⁷ Second, and perhaps even more important, Jung argued that he had discovered the existence of the unconscious for himself, entirely independently of Freud. It had come about, he said, when he had been working at Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich, where he had seen a ‘regression’ of the libido in schizophrenia and where he was treating a woman who had killed her favourite child.⁵⁸ Earlier in life the woman had fallen in love with a young man who, so she believed, was too rich and too socially superior ever to want to marry her, so she had turned to someone else. A few years later, however, a friend of the rich man had told the woman that he had in fact been inconsolable when she had spurned him. Not long after, she had been bathing her two young children and had allowed her daughter to suck the bath sponge even though she knew the water being used was infected. Worse, she gave her son a glass of infected water. Jung claimed that he had grasped for himself, without Freud’s help, the central fact of the case – that the woman was acting from an unconscious desire to obliterate all traces of her present marriage to free herself for the man she really loved. The woman’s daughter caught typhoid fever and died from the infected sponge. The mother’s symptoms of depression, which appeared when she was told the truth about the wealthy man she had loved, turned worse after her daughter’s death, to the point where she had to be sent to Burghölzli.

Jung did not at first question the diagnosis, ‘dementia praecox.’ The real story emerged only when he began to explore her dreams, which prompted him to give her the ‘association test.’ This test, which subsequently became very famous, was invented by a German doctor, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). The principle is simple: the patient is shown a list of words and asked to respond to each one with the first word that comes into his/her head. The rationale is that in this way conscious control over the unconscious urges is weakened. Resurrecting the woman’s case history via her dreams and the association test, Jung realised that the woman had, in effect, murdered her own daughter because of the unconscious urges within her. Controversially, he faced her with the truth. The result was remarkable: far from being untreatable, as the diagnostic label dementia praecox had implied, she recovered quickly and left hospital three weeks later. There was no relapse.

There is already something defiant about Jung’s account of his discovery of the unconscious. Jung implies he was not so much a protégé of Freud’s as moving in parallel, his equal. Soon after they met, when Jung attended the Wednesday Society in 1907, they became very close, and in 1909 they travelled to America together. Jung was overshadowed by Freud in America, but it was there that Jung realised his views were diverging from the founder’s. As the years had passed, patient after patient had reported early experiences of incest, all of which made Freud lay even more emphasis on sexuality as the motor driving the unconscious. For Jung, however, sex was not fundamental – instead, it was itself a transformation from religion. Sex, for Jung, was one aspect of the religious impulse but not the only one. When he looked at the religions and myths of other races around the world, as he now began to do, he found that in Eastern religions the gods were depicted in temples as very erotic beings. For him, this frank sexuality was a symbol and one aspect of ‘higher ideas.’ Thus he began his famous examination of religion and mythology as ‘representations’ of the unconscious ‘in other places and at other times.’

The rupture with Freud started in 1912, after they returned from America and Jung published the second part of Symbols of Transformation.⁵⁹ This extended paper, which appeared in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, was Jung’s first public airing of what he called the ‘collective unconscious.’ Jung concluded that at a deep level the unconscious was shared by everyone – it was part of the ‘racial memory.’ Indeed, for Jung, that’s what therapy was, getting in touch with the collective unconscious.⁶⁰ The more Jung explored religion, mythology, and philosophy, the further he departed from Freud and from the scientific approach. As J. A. C. Brown wrote, one ‘gets much the same impression from reading Jung as might be obtained from reading the scriptures of the Hindus, Taoists, or Confucians; although well aware that many wise and true things are being said, [one] feels that they could have been said just as well without involving us in the psychological theories upon which they are supposedly based.’⁶¹

According to Jung, our psychological makeup is divided into three: consciousness, personal unconsciousness, and the collective unconscious. A common analogy is made with geology, where the conscious mind corresponds to that part of land above water. Below the water line, hidden from view, is the personal unconscious, and below that, linking the different landmasses, so to speak, is the ‘racial unconscious’ where, allegedly, members of the same race share deep psychological similarities. Deepest of all, equating to the earth’s core, is the psychological heritage of all humanity, the irreducible fundamentals of human nature and of which we are only dimly aware. This was a bold, simple theory supported, Jung said, by three pieces of ‘evidence.’ First, he pointed to the ‘extraordinary unanimity’ of narratives and themes in the mythologies of different cultures. He also argued that ‘in protracted analyses, any particular symbol might recur with disconcerting persistency but as analysis proceeded the symbol came to resemble the universal symbols seen in myths and legends.’ Finally he claimed that the stories told in the delusions of mentally ill patients often resembled those in mythology.

The notion of archetypes, the theory that all people may be divided according to one or another basic (and inherited) psychological type, the best known being introvert and extrovert, was Jung’s other popular idea. These terms relate only to the conscious level of the mind, of course; in typical psychoanalytic fashion, the truth is really the opposite – the extrovert temperament is in fact unconsciously introvert, and vice versa. It thus follows that for Jung psychoanalysis as treatment involved the interpretation of dreams and free association in order to put the patient into contact with his or her collective unconscious, a cathartic process. While Freud was sceptical of and on occasions hostile to organised religion, Jung regarded a religious outlook as helpful in therapy. Even Jung’s supporters concede that this aspect of his theories is confused.⁶²

Although Jung’s very different system of understanding the unconscious had first come to the attention of fellow psychoanalysts in 1912, so that the breach was obvious within the profession, it was only with the release of Symbols of Transformation in book form in 1913 (published in English as Psychology of the Unconscious) that the split with Freud became public. After that there was no chance of a reconciliation: at the fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Munich in September 1913, Freud and his supporters sat at a separate table from Jung and his acolytes. When the meeting ended, ‘we dispersed,’ said Freud in a letter, ‘without any desire to meet again.’⁶³ Freud, while troubled by this personal rift, which also had anti-Semitic overtones, was more concerned that Jung’s version of psychoanalysis was threatening its status as a science.⁶⁴ Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, for example, clearly implied the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had been discredited by Darwinism for some years. As Ronald Clark commented: ‘In short, for the Freudian theory, which is hard enough to test but has some degree of support, Jung [had] substituted an untestable system which flies in the face of current genetics.’⁶⁵

Freud, to be fair, had seen the split with Jung coming and, in 1912, had begun a work that expanded on his own earlier theories and, at the same time, discredited Jung’s, trying to ground psychoanalysis in modern science. Finished in the spring of 1913 and published a few months later, this work was described by Freud as ‘the most daring enterprise I have ever ventured.’⁶⁶ Totem and Taboo was an attempt to explore the very territory Jung was trying to make his own, the ‘deep ancestral past’ of mankind. Whereas Jung had concentrated on the universality of myths to explain the collective – or racial – unconscious, Freud turned to anthropology, in particular to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and to Darwin’s accounts of the behaviour of primate groupings. According to Freud (who said from the start that Totem and Taboo was speculation), primitive society was characterised by an unruly horde in which a despotic male dominated all the females, while other males, including his own offspring, were either killed or condemned to minor roles. From time to time the dominant male was attacked and eventually overthrown, a neat link to the Oedipus complex, the lynchpin of ‘classical’ Freudian theory. Totem and Taboo was intended to show how individual and group psychology were knitted together, how psychology was rooted in biology, in ‘hard’ science. Freud said these theories could be tested (unlike Jung’s) by observing primate societies, from which man had evolved.

Freud’s new book also ‘explained’ something nearer home, namely Jung’s attempt to unseat Freud as the dominant male of the psychoanalytic ‘horde.’ A letter of Freud’s, written in 1913 but published only after his death, admitted that ‘annihilating’ Jung was one of his motives in writing Totem and Taboo.⁶⁷ The book was not a success: Freud was not as up-to-date in his reading as he thought, and science, which he thought he was on top of, was in fact against him.⁶⁸ His book regarded evolution as a unilinear process, with various races around the world seen as stages on the way to ‘white,’ ‘civilised’ society, a view that was already dated, thanks to the work of Franz Boas. In the 1920s and 1930s anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict would produce more and more fieldwork confirming Totem and Taboo as scientifically worthless. In attempting to head off Jung, Freud had shot himself in the foot.⁶⁹

Nevertheless, it sealed the breach between the two men (it should not be forgotten that Jung was not the only person Freud fell out with; he also broke with Breuer, Fliess, Adler, and Stekel).⁷⁰ Henceforth, Jung’s work grew increasingly metaphysical, vague, and quasi-mystical, attracting a devoted but fringe following. Freud continued to marry individual psychology and group behaviour to produce a way of looking at the world that attempted to be more scientific than Jung’s. Until 1913 the psychoanalytic movement had been one system of thought. Afterward, it was two.

Mabel Dodge, in her letter to Gertrude Stein, had been right. The explosion of talent in 1913 was volcanic. In addition to the ideas reported here, 1913 also saw the birth of the modern assembly line, at Henry Ford’s factory in Detroit, and the appearance of Charlie Chaplin, the little man with baggy trousers, bowler hat, and a cunning cheekiness that embodied perfectly the eternal optimism of an immigrant nation. But it is necessary to be precise about what was happening in 1913. Many of the events of that annus mirabilis were a maturation, rather than a departure in a wholly new direction. Modern art had extended its reach across the Atlantic and found another home; Niels Bohr had built on Einstein and Ernest Rutherford, as Igor Stravinsky had built on Claude Debussy (if not on Arnold Schoenberg); psychoanalysis had conquered Mann and Lawrence and, to an extent, Proust; Jung had built on Freud (or he thought he had), Freud had extended his own ideas, and psychoanalysis, like modern art, had reached across to America; film had constructed its first immortal character as opposed to star. People like Guillaume Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Proust, and Mann were trying to merge together different strands of thought – physics, psychoanalysis, literature, painting – in order to approach new truths about the human condition. Nothing characterised these developments so much as their optimism. The mainstreams of thought, set in flow in the first months of the century, seemed to be safely consolidating.

One man sounded a warning, however, in that same year. In A Boy’s Will, Robert Frost’s voice was immediately distinct: images of the innocent, natural world delivered in a gnarled, broken rhythm that reminds one of the tricks nature plays, not least with time:

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason.⁷¹