Mornism: The Lure of Hery by Peter Gay (ebook)

Contents:

• PETER GAY (1923–2015)
• PETER GAY’S ‘MORNISM’ WIELDS A HEAVY YARDSTICK

PETER GAY (1923–2015)

Surprisgly, the anecdote don’t appear Peter Gay’s “Mornism: The Lure of Hery, ” a massive history of the movement all s artistic forms — patg, sculpture, fictn, poetry, mic, archecture, sign, film (though, bafflgly, not photography, one of the chief talysts of the mornist revolutn). But bee Gay needs the “lure of hery” to thematilly stcture his book, he often ends up not jt rercg the riture of mornists as unhappy outsirs and elist malntents, but flatg is almost as if Gay were perversely termed to unrme his own profound awarens of mornism’s multifaceted and ntradictory nature. Yet although Gay wr betifully about Kafka, about Prot on grief, about thentic middle-class hunger for mornist liberatns and about the fal scene of regnn and unspeakable shame Chapl’s “Cy Lights” — to take jt four exampl among many — he seems to fd more eful to traffic rdboard simplici.

And ’s right for Gay to refer to Munch’s untryman, the odd, fierce peasant novelist Knut Hamsun, as a public admirer of the Nazis who wrote enthiastilly about them even as the Germans were occupyg Norway. But is wrong for Gay not to add that durg his one meetg wh Hler, Hamsun so aggrsively prsed the Führer to stop executg Norwegian ristance fighters and to loosen his reprsive hold on the untry that Hler loathed Hamsun for his solent for Gay’s Parisian mornist “outsirs, ” if the French provid the most extreme asslts on Wtern ratnaly — Rimbd’s “disorientatn of the sens, ” André Breton’s celebratn of primal stcts stored the unnsc, André Gi’s enthiasm for the “motivels” crime, Anton Artd’s “Theater of Celty, ” Mrice Blanchot’s claratn of the ath of the thor — the reason was simple.

It was not that French ndns kept creatg figur remblg Blaire, about whom Gay histrnilly wr that he was “an outst aware of his lonels” — though, as Gay adms, Blaire lived at the center of Parisian cultural energy. ” He seems to have momentarily fotten that Yeats, Elt, Pound, Lawrence and Céle on the right, and Pisso, Gi, Breton and the Rsian mornists (barely allud to by Gay) on the left, were about as far om liberalism as a Cubist patg is om an iPod — not to mentn the toxilly snobbish Woolf, who was neher right nor too much left.

PETER GAY’S ‘MORNISM’ WIELDS A HEAVY YARDSTICK

Conversely, Gay’s survey of postwar Amerin art almost exclively refers to the tensely biased and partisan — toward his own dub theori, that is — Clement Greenberg, which is like quotg a Ju on the character and history of Prottantism. Spendg years workg wh the Enlightenment philosoph, and more years wh Frd — which yield a Frd bgraphy and anthology, and the five books that formed The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Frd — Gay got ed to beg wh the very bt.

Maybe Gay was tired of the people; maybe he felt nostalgia for the pany of the bt, and wanted a chance to be wh them aga, to nnect wh the most creative spirs many untri, many discipl, over a span of more than a century. Gay the longtime teacher of historgraphy would surely have alerted his stunts to sound stant alarms when giant metaphors get wheeled to the foreground like great siege mach — not to mentn, when theology and blogy appear on the page as sudn alli. ” So Peter Gay nclus the fal sentence of “Mornism: The Lure of Hery From Blaire to Beckett and Beyond, ” his sweepg survey of the poets, playwrights, paters and archects who set out to rewre the l of art, transform nscns and, wherever and whenever possible, shock the placent middle class.

Gay, the ement historian of the European Enlightenment, Weimar culture and Sigmund Frd, has spent the greater part of the 1980s and ’90s chroniclg the sensibily and cultural life of the Victorian middle class his five-volume seri, “The Bourgeois Experience. Otherwise is hard to lote the motivatn for yet another general work on a movement whose every breath and gture has been subjected to mute study by legns of Gay adds ltle new what amounts to a llege survey urse. Footnote 5 In the meantime, Gay explored the entertaments of Havana and worked on his English, polishg his prose at the Havana Bs Amy (to which he received a scholarship) and vourg Amerin perdils like Time, Collier's, and the Saturday Eveng Post.

This was ma possible by the terventn of Gay's former high school English teacher, Helen Hunter, who worked out a plan to allow Gay to fish his high school gree by pletg a private urse wh her on William Shakpeare. Lookg back years later, Gay nsired fortuo that he had spent the early years “Middle Ameri, ” a place where was possible to pe the ncerns of the German immigrant muny and bee fully (or at least mostly) “Amerinized.

In Gay's study, Bernste is very much the hero, the reformer who sought to ee the ethil re of Marxism om s encstatn Hegelian metaphysics and rencile socialism's visn of equaly wh the polil stutns of parliamentarism and mocracy. The choice of Bernste reflected Gay's rejectn of both the Stalist left and the McCarthye right; was also a rebuff to those of his lleagu and acquatanc who had migrated om one polil extreme to the other—typilly om the far left to the far right: “I felt fortunate beg immune om what I took to be an often willful polil bldns of two warrg groups who disputed their ground at New York cktail parti and on the Wellfleet beach.

”Footnote 7 Gay remaed fundamentally optimistic regardg Amerin polil stutns, even if his worldview was shaped ccially by tellectuals—many of them also German-Jewish émigrés—whose views of Ameri were hardly naïve or uncril. ”Footnote 8 Marce not only helped persua Gay to take Frd serly, but also to see his view of human nature as fundamentally psimistic, such that s unpleasant featur were unlikely to disappear a postpalist society. Although she never earned a doctorate, Ruth Gay would go on to wre a seri of well-received works on Jewish history, cludg The Jews of Germany: A Historil Portra (1992), Unfished People: Eastern European Jews Enunter Ameri (1997), and Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II (2002).