Peter Gay's 'Mornism' Wields a Heavy Yardstick

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.

PETER GAY’S ‘MORNISM’ WIELDS A HEAVY YARDSTICK

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.

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.