Criticism:Peter Gay is one of that select band of German refugees from Hitler who transformed American intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Berlin in 1923, he settled in the US in 1941 and published his first book in 1952.
A professor of political science and of history at Columbia and then at Yale, he has, in the past half century, poured out a stream of books, mainly on social and cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries and on Freud. In 1998, he published a memoir, My Jewish Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin, which was enthusiastically reviewed. As the founding director of the Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he tells us in his acknowledgements to this volume, he "had the pleasure, starting in 1999, of having an abundance of consultants, 15 different fellows each year, at my fingertips"
Why then is this book so appallingly bad? One reason, perhaps, is because good books are written by individuals, not teams, and by individuals who know their subject and know what they are doing. Gay seems totally at sea. I have rarely read a book so full of vague, practically meaningless utterances: "Expressionist poems, abstract paintings, incomprehensible compositions, plotless novels were together making a revolution in taste". "In long retrospect, it may seem that the modernist revolution in fiction progressed through a series of preordained steps to the summit of literary radicalism". "The imaginative, versatile sculptor Vladimir Tatlin performed highly original experiments with a wide gamut of materials, providing heretical thrills for Russian viewers".
As if this kind of thing weren't enough, Gay and his team of researchers even contrive to get their facts wrong: The Rite of Spring dates from 1913, not 1911; The Waste Land is not "five poems assembled under one title" (and to believe it is surely disqualifies one from speaking at all on the subject of Modernism); the figure with the enormous penis in Baselitz's early painting, Great Night Down the Drain is not female (incidentally, Baselitz tells us it is based on an image of Brendan Behan); L'Année dernière à Marienbad is not taken from a novel by Robbe-Grillet. And so on and on.
What has led to this disaster? Gay tells us coyly that "this book is not my fault", that he was persuaded by his editor at Norton to write it, instead of the "psychoanalytic-historical study of liberalism" he was planning to write. He should have stuck to liberalism and psychoanalysis. He clearly finds everything about modernism distasteful, and his attempt at a magisterial tone, combined with a curious ad hominem manner of sniping, only makes matters worse. "There is much talk in Whitman's Leaves of Grass of manly, comradely love, but there is no Sonnet of the Asshole, a joint production by Paul Verlaine and Rimbaud, who between 1871 and 1873 did more together than compose joint sonnets." I didn't think this kind of language was even acceptable any longer. To demonstrate his evenhandedness, though, he contrives to taint modernists in general not just with the terrible stain of homosexuality but of larceny as well. Georg Kaiser, the German expressionist playwright, it seems, was in the habit of renting expensive villas and then, when his money ran out, of pawning or selling the owner's furniture. "He performed this modernist pilfering twice", we are told. Modernist? Has Gay reached such eminence that he has simply been given the licence to parade his prejudices over 500 pages?
HE DOES HAVE an argument or thesis of sorts, but it is so vague and general that it has no power to illuminate. Modernism for him consists of two strands, a desire to épater la bourgeoisie and a desire to "express subjectivity". Dealing with the first allows him to concentrate (with relief, one feels) on such public events as the trials of Flaubert, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde: Modernism, it seems, has to do with obscenity in art and with the flaunting of ways of life that are shocking to the bourgeois masses. The trouble with this is that it is partly true but very superficial. What makes the work of Flaubert and Baudelaire (and Joyce and Lawrence) important is not its perceived obscenity but something else, something which the writer on Modernism is duty bound to try to understand.
The second, strand, subjectivity, is so vague a term as to be practically meaningless. Thus, we are told, "modernist painters . . . exhibit their innermost being"; "As a faithful, in fact, an extreme modernist, for Mondrian subjectivity was all," "the modernist novel is an exercise in subjectivity".
Not only that: because Gay thinks of it as a key which can unlock everything, he totally misreads Henry James, for example, who creates works that are, precisely, designed to keep the reader from entering the "innermost lives" of the characters just because these lives are mysterious to the characters themselves; and, as even Gay has to admit, it is not a key that seems to fit Kafka at all. Most of the time, though, Gay is content to plod through some of the main artists in the period from 1840 to 1960, happiest when he can forget his brief and tell us about the post-war novel in Germany or France, or the interconnection of artists and dealers, architects and those who commission them.
BUT A POSITIVIST history of this sort will get us nowhere. The book is a wonderful example of Walter Benjamin's theses on history and his argument that because positivist history does not question it cannot get a handle on the multiform events that form the past. To compare Gay's plodding 500 pages with five pages of Barthes or Blanchot or Erich Heller is illuminating: for them Modernism is not a period, like Mannerism, but a crucial moment in the history of art, when art arrives at an understanding of itself, a degré zéro beyond which there is only silence. Grasping this they can see what it is Modernist artists from Mallarmé to Beckett were really up to, and they can see the relations of Modernism to Romanticism and beyond, to that first modern European intellectual and spiritual crisis, the Reformation, as well as to the present. In so doing they are at one with the authors they are looking at. Compare Gay's bland "No doubt Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the choral last movement had much to answer for", with Wendell Kretschmar's impassioned lectures in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus on why Beethoven never composed a third movement to the piano sonata opus 111, and on Beethoven and the fugue. In a few pages Mann succeeds in conveying the issues that faced Beethoven and have faced composers ever since, while Gay cops out comprehensively with his "much to answer for".
The best that can be said for this sorry production is that it provides us with a lesson on the poverty of a certain kind of history, but, at 500 pages, that is a lesson that most students will be happy to dispense with.
Gabriel Josipovici is a novelist, playwright and critic. His most recent books are The Singer on the Shore (essays), and Everything Passes (fiction), both published by Carcanet in 2006
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy By Peter Gay William Heinemann, 574pp. £20