Which came first—the spirit or the age?
An exhilarating new history of American culture during the Cold War refuses to offer a simple answer, finds Leo Robson
To set about describing an epoch is to enter a booby-trapped maze. Calendar time proves little use as a guide. The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson once argued that the 1960s underwent a “break” in “the general area around 1967,” before ending more decisively in “the immediate neighborhood of 1973.” Then there are questions of causality. Do culture, politics and philosophy reflect their times? Or perhaps it’s the other way round. Which came first: the spirit or the age?
Louis Menand, the author of an enormous new historical survey, The Free World, is acutely aware of these dangers—so aware that it may seem surprising that he embarked on the project at all. The book’s first footnote (of 2,587) identifies 10 other writers who have been “drawn to this period for reasons like mine.” But in those cases the intentions were more baldly stated: to trace the “origins of a cultural style,” for instance, or show how “everything changed” in 1959. Menand’s own subtitle, “Art and Thought in the Cold War,” seems non-committal, and he is murky on the matter of how the process exactly works. In a brisk preface—a thousand words of throat-clearing for a 720-page aria—he writes, “As conditions changed, so did art and ideas.” Then a page later: “the environment changed dramatically. So did art and thought.”
But as it turns out, Menand—a Harvard professor and staff writer for the New Yorker— isn’t much clearer about what constitutes that “environment.” The Bay of Pigs is mentioned once in passing, the Cuban Missile Crisis not at all. The Kennedys only really surface in chapters about feminism and civil rights. The pages on Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones make no reference to “Masters of War” or “Street Fighting Man.” Menand has explained in an interview that, for reasons of length, he was forced “to cut all the stuff” about Trotskyism. Yet the pages on Cahiers du Cinéma remain. This is the rare Cold War history in which there are index entries for Lennon but not Lenin.
So if “Cold War” is a kind of shorthand, what is it shorthand for? To a large degree, Menand’s concern is what he calls “the business of cultural exchange”—the traffic of ideas and products between America and non-Communist Europe accelerated by, among other developments, the wartime alliance and air travel. On or around December 1941, the Atlantic Ocean shrank. The following year—to take just one example— Alvin Johnson, the director of the New School for Social Research, helped to launch the École libre des hautes études in New York, which is where the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss encountered the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, and structuralism was born. At other points in the buzzing narrative, the future Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton frequents the US embassy in Grosvenor Square to gorge on Good Housekeeping and Life; the composer John Cage appears as a celebrity contestant on an Italian game show; his friend Robert Rauschenberg cements his international reputation—and that of American painting—at the Venice Biennale; and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is performed in every American state except Arkansas and Alaska. Betty Friedan reads Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex— then writes The Feminine Mystique. Martin Heidegger inspires Hannah Arendt, who inspires the sociologist C Wright Mills, who inspires the New Le activist and anti-Vietnam campaigner Tom Hayden in the late 1960s, which is when, with the free-world consensus splintering, Menand’s account draws to a close.
The book is divided into 18 chapters. Some are longer than 50 pages, and almost every one has a claim to being the best introductory account of its subject. The amount of material is daunting, to put it mildly. Just take the scattered references to the number 24—among other things, the number of white-spored mushrooms (Cage’s specialist topic on the quiz show Lascia o raddoppia), the number of records a jukebox could hold until the M-100A was introduced in 1949 and the number of
countries represented at the 1956 Pan-African Congress. Menand’s sources include a biography of the Liverpool DJ Bob Wooler ( The Best of Fellas) and an economics paper about the role played by household technology in the US baby boom. The opening pages on Abstract Expressionism introduce 11 characters (Lee Krasner, he says, was “the glue”).
Menand is a genial hand-holder and amazingly good company. As a practitioner of paraphrase, his only English-language rival is Stefan Collini, who also started off as a Victorian specialist before turning his attention to mid-20th-century thought. The approach is marked by a certain sturdiness. As he writes of Hayden, his “charisma was the cool kind. He was lucid and unflappable.” His handling is not just authoritative (I noticed fewer than a dozen errors in the whole book), it’s also distinctive and constantly inventive. A chapter entitled “Concepts of Liberty” covers the Berlin Wall, Isaiah Berlin meeting in Russia with the poet Anna Akhmatova and obscenity trials brought against publishers.
Menand tends to proceed by gentle correction. “The Beats weren’t rebels,” he writes. “They were misfits.” The aim of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was “not to anatomise Stalinism” but “to warn about totalitarian tendencies everywhere.” It’s the small-scale counterpart of his taste for dichotomies—the force that drives the book. Menand notes in passing Jakobson’s claim that the world’s languages were based on 12 binary oppositions. The Free World presents us with at least as many: moralism vs realism in foreign policy, extrinsic vs intrinsic in literary studies and dissonance vs consonance in music. But if you look closely—or perhaps stand back—you notice again and again a battle between the dogmatic on the one hand and the pragmatic on the other.
Though Menand only renders about half a dozen value judgments, and always in passing— Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiqes “was received as (and is) a classic of French prose”—it’s clear that he prefers flexibility to the doctrinaire and preconceived. His principal figures include the diplomat George Kennan, who argued that Marxism
was a “convenient” rationalisation of longer-term Russian instincts, and that the US should put aside moral concerns and think purely in terms of selfinterest; Isaiah Berlin, who wanted to escape the narrow circuity of determinism and rationality; the literary critic Lionel Trilling who, a er turning his back on communism, refused to embrace the alternative doctrines of liberalism; the graphic artist Rauschenberg, who was “excited by serendipity” and promoted (in his own words) “random order”; the film critic Pauline Kael, who made her name by attacking “auteur theory” and disdained the Platonic quest for locating “what cinema ‘really’ is”; and the civil rights activist and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall who, in contrast to Martin Luther King Jr (an absolutist with a dream), was “a pragmatist” with “a strategy.”
Menand’s own allegiance has never really been in doubt. In 1988 he co-edited a book called America in Theory which argued that America only exists in practice. And for more than a quarter of a century, Menand has been a leading scholar of pragmatism in its philosophical form—the body of thought developed by William James and John Dewey around the turn of the 20th century. Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001), his Pulitzer Prize-winning group biography of the movement’s founders, argues that pragmatists view ideas not as reflections of an eternal truth but tools for coping with particular scenarios. The pragmatist is antiideological and anti-foundationalist, a believer above all in context and contingencies.
Menand insists on human history as a largely pragmatist affair. His first book, Discovering Modernism: TS Eliot and His Context (1987), proposed that Eliot had dominated 20th-century literary culture by taking advantage of a moment of change. The genius of his “literary strategy,” Menand wrote, “might be characterised as the genius of a weak pragmatism.” In the opening pages of The Free World, he states without ambivalence that cultures are transformed by “random acts of cross-pollination” and “serendipitous street-level interactions.” Rock ’n’ roll, he says later, was “completely unplanned,” while “freedom” was not a genuine good, merely “the slogan of the times… invoked to justify everything” (a tool, in other words). Menand emphasises Sartre’s loathing of ideologies (despite being a communist) and his denial—in “Existentialism is a Humanism”—of a “general ethics.” He also points out that Sartre only met de Beauvoir because he failed an exam he should have passed— an event he describes as an “unanticipated contingency.” And he likes to show how manifestos, the dogmatist form par excellence, are o en betrayed by their own makers. Susan Sontag, for example, disparaged intellectual seriousness in “Notes on Camp” and “Against Interpretation,” yet devoted her life to its practice.
In a chapter called “The Free Play of the Mind,” Menand points out that the “method of reading” known as deconstruction is “difficult to explain in a manner consistent with deconstruction.” But pragmatism has always yielded a method. The philosopher AO Lovejoy, in a 1920 essay, noted that it was typical of the pragmatist to proffer “not simple deductions from an antecedently defined dogma, but independent ‘considerations,’” and Menand is seeking to evoke all those acts of cross-pollination with what he calls “a series of vertical cross-sections,” some of them (on art and race) forming a series, others (on film, music and feminism) more or less free-standing. And though Menand insists that his “dots do connect,” it’s typical that he refrains from saying how. As Sartre—one of the book’s guiding spirits—said of Hemingway’s heroes, they never “explain themselves.”
So if pragmatism is compatible with intellectual history, then it’s intellectual history of a particular and unorthodox kind. On the one hand, pragmatism wants to recognise that ideas are, to quote Menand in The Metaphysical Club, “always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them.” On the other hand, the pragmatist mindset is by its nature tentative, and Menand can seem more faithful than ever to the vow of reticence—eager not to put too fine a point on anything. “Il n’y a pas de signe dans le monde,”
Sartre recalled saying, in the passage of “Existentialism is a Humanism” known as “the student’s dilemma.” And there are no signs in The Free World
either. Stefan Collini has acknowledged that he is drawn more to particularities than to the theory or even the explanation. But he has chosen as his vehicle books of linked essays or collections-on-atheme—the form that Menand’s The Free World
adamantly refuses to be.
One of pragmatism’s most obvious shortcomings—or omissions—is replicated in the book’s local habits. Lovejoy once identified the pragmatist’s
“The closest that Menand comes to any overarching principle is to say that history is serendipitous, a welter of contingencies”
impatience with the “trans-experiential”—things we cannot see for ourselves. Menand himself has acknowledged that pragmatism talks about human desires, but doesn’t wonder where they come from. The Free World suffers from a kind of incuriosity, evident in the habit of providing aetiologies so firmly rooted in social and institutional factors. He provides torrents of detail and quotation, makes brilliant connections, but then takes refuge in the idea of the peculiar or mysterious. Psychology, though it frequently arises as a discipline, is largely avoided as a source of insight. Jackson Pollock’s alcoholism was a “medical condition,” and Elvis’s stillborn twin is just a fact. Andrew Warhola Sr may have died when Andy was 13, but “he had saved money for his son to go to college.” Though Menand notes the contradictions of Sontag’s thought, he doesn’t speculate on its sources in her personality (a strength of Benjamin Moser’s recent, Pulitzer Prize-winning, biography).
Menand’s favoured alternative to reductive (as he sees it) theoretical thinking is the eloquence of narrative. The Metaphysical Club called itself “A Story of Ideas in America.” Menand began with the American Civil War and ended with the eclipse of pragmatism a century later. (Dewey lived until 1952.) Here, though, it isn’t one story. It’s a series of parallel trajectories, seven at least. The longest chapter, on the coterie that emerged from Black Mountain College—Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham—comes to an end when “the fabulous foursome was a foursome no more.” On the following page, we begin more or less afresh: “The first person to use the term ‘youth culture’ was a Harvard professor, Talcott Parsons.” It can be hard to tell if the endings are merely showing deference to chronology, or hinting at a lesson or irony. A chapter on anthropology (“The Human Science”) is clinched with the abrupt (or abrupt-seeming) reflection that although Roland Barthes adopted and popularised structuralist thinking, Lévi-Strauss “had no taste for his work.”
The closest that Menand comes to any overarching principle is to say that history is largely a matter of chance, a welter of contingencies, and between 1945 and 1965, “the rate of serendipity increased.” This is to a degree clearly true. A greater incidence of diplomatic meetings and academic conferences, more people studying at university and inhabiting urban centres, yielded pathbreaking new ideas and a diversity of cultural forms. But for readers who don’t share Menand’s suspicion of frameworks, of doing more than what the latter-day pragmatist Wilfrid Sellars called “seeing how things in the broadest possible sense hang together,” the reflection that more stuff yields more stuff may not quite do the trick.
The Free World could be described as an attempt to write an account of human and social affairs without the help of Marx or Freud—or, in more positive terms, to produce a specifically American kind of intellectual history, descended from Dewey and James but also Kennan and Kael and magazine journalism. Whatever the case, the effect is clearly intentional. As Menand puts it, keeping concepts at bay “requires constant discipline.” And when a historian as dexterous, reflective and intellectually capable as Menand adopts an approach, it would be churlish to say he’s fouled up. Besides, whatever its apparent oddities, the book remains a colossal achievement and an exhilarating experience. And in a straightforward sense, Menand has fulfilled his central aim. He has side-stepped the maze, and in so doing, liberated the reader to draw their own conclusions. Leo Robson is a contributing writer at the New Statesman
“Psychology is avoided as a source of insight. Elvis’s stillborn twin is just a fact”