The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

Louis Menand’s curiously titled The Free World is more a insightful history of the American left’s cultural influence from roughly the years spanning 1945 to 1970. Thus, the reader gains everything from the ability to appreciate the art of Jackson Pollack to an understanding of the essays of Susan Sontag. Throughout the text, it’s not hard to detect the author’s nostalgia for an era in which the left had all, or most, of the country’s creative energy.The book’s premise is that America built tremendous cultural capital by its defense of the world from Nazism and thus was able to dominate Western culture in an era when many European countries were simply trying to recover. Thus, Menand aptly closes with the Vietnam war; a war in which whatever moral superiority the United States enjoyed on the world stage was quickly dissipated.The book’s major strength is its ability to discuss difficult cultural artifacts, such as Jackson’s drip paintings, to a reader who doesn’t have the intellectual apparatus to understand them on their own. Menand also ties together cultural figures and currents into a united story; one could easily imagine this used as a text in an undergraduate seminar.Its major fault is that it fails to give any recognition to conservative culture. When conservative figures are mentioned it is almost always derisively; even respected scholars like Mortimer Adler are dispensed with in a few sentences.But it will probably serve as a paradigm for the history of post WWII left leaning American culture for a long time to come. Whatever flaws it has from its nostalgic aspects are somewhat balanced by the historian’s critical eye that separates yarns and legends from actual history. Despite flaws, it is worth reading by all who want to understand American cultural history. Highly recommended.

The Free World is a curious book. It is one of those very long studies of a period, a rather elastic one, which is (to use a cliché oddly apt for it), a mile long and an inch deep. It is anecdotal, reading almost like a work of gossip at times, and journalistic in the sense that its interests seem, much of the time, to be more descriptive than interpretative.That is no doubt to Menand's benefit since most of his attempts to offer interpretations of anything are at best shallow and largely deflationary. This is a book of cultural history by a writer whose primary aim, subtly presented at times, at others overt, is to deflate any pretensions to meaning or transcendent importance that might be claimed by any part of the various cultures about which he writes, including the people within it who create it. Menand often seems to relish the biographical details or historical events he crowds his book with for their capacity to undermine what he regards as false impressions of the arts' importance.Does he look closely at any of Faulkner's novels or stories? No. Instead, he quotes often cited words from interviews that show him at his worst. Does he spend any time thinking about one of Truffaut's films? No. He writes about the director's early flirtations, if that is what to call it, with fascism. Does he look, truly look, at any painting by Rothko or Gottlieb or even de Kooning, whose work is at least referred to with a bit more attention, though shallowly. No. He spends most of his section on the Abstract Expressionists writing about two critics of opposing views, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (representing the work of the latter inexactly), not on the artist's own statements which for Menand would only be a form of posing in any case. He isn't interested so much in the work, as in its critics whose ideas about them predominant over the paintings in his discussions.I am sure he could not abide Rothko's claim for his work, that it is an attempt to revivify the tragic and sublime in his time. The only meanings Menand approves are those meanings which acknowledge their own emptiness. One makes art solely to make art not for its own sake, that would be too aestheticizing for Menand, but to be an artist and enjoy its perks, though it is neat if at the same time it gives others something to look at (Rauschenberg, say) or to pay a kind of mindless attention to (Cage). It is not that his writing on those two, like so many others, is only favorable. He always deflates something about everyone he writes about. But he seems to appreciate their ironies more that he admires more probing artists. At least they lack the smugness of the cultural snobs he finds either controlling taste or lurking everywhere behind the scenes. And, after all, what really is there to probe? There is a nihilistic undercurrent to much of The Free World.It would seem that Menand believes all of art, all of politics, for that matter, is a kind of stunt, a means of getting oneself noticed, of being a player in a world of aesthetic or political consumption. For that one needs a style. (Or, if one is involved in politics, a mode of thought which is tantamount to a style).It is their for style, for instance, that he praises the Beats. On p. 476, he cites work by four poets, W.S. Merwin, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright. Hecht and Wilbur were mid-century formalists, Wright and Merwin poets in part influenced by Spanish surrealism, poets of the deep image. Menand says of the excepts that theirs is the kind of verse "that Eliot was ridiculing forty years earlier." (It is not, but that is another matter.) Stock pastoral props, an archly literary diction, too much about dead dogs, he complains.Then on page 479 he quotes from a long letter by Neal Cassady that begins, "Let me tell you, boy, there is nothing like a fine old mountain ballad, but when Mary Lou got drunk (nightly)..." and so on. This passage, it will turn out, encapsulates what Menard admires about the Beats. They are poets of the body, with no high minded nonsense to them and lots of slang and demotic speech. The four poets he quotes earlier are poets of the mind. The Beats have music in their voices; the poets earlier quoted as examples of bad poetry have none.Again, as so often happens in this lengthy, but not exhaustive book, whenever Menand tries to interpret work of art he either evades looking deeply at it or listening to it attentively or reading it closely (he has a great distaste for the New Critics, mind men all and too many right wingers among them, he claims, again wrongly) or misreads it badly. The last thing Hecht or Merwin could be called is unmusical with no concern for or expressions of the sensual world and the body. How much of either has he carefully read?The heart and soul of their poetry are music and rhythm and sensuality, often far more subtle than anything the Beats, whose poetry tends toward the rhetorical, generally achieved. And if Menand had bothered to read more attentively, not so glibly, the poems from which his excerpts were derived he would have found they are not about pastoral props or arch literary diction or dead dogs. About these four writers he is either ignorant or deliberately obtuse. (So is also the case with many others artists of various sorts throughout the book.) And where are all the many great poets of the era who fit no category whatsoever and therefore would not suit his narrow schematics, far too rigid in its insistence on contrasts, this against that with no resolutions. Where is George Oppen, or Elizabeth Bishop, or James Schuyler, John Logan, Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz, all of them also influential, significant poets? I could easily list dozens more.I do not mean here to set the formalist poets or the deep image poets of the fifties against the Beats. I am offering this one example merely to show how, over and over again, Menand deflates whatever he finds to be pretentious, smug, academic, intellectual, poets as he sees Merwin and the others to be. He is one of those intellectuals who is constantly sniffing out other intellectuals to expose them for what they really are, frauds in a sense, making claims for an importance no art should make. Does Menand see the whole world of culture, even politics, as the world of men and women on the make? His books would seem to imply so, at times. Why do so many of the footnotes he offers add some derogatory remark about those or what he does discuss? Some put down?Perhaps that is why, when he writes about movies, he seems to find more fellow feeling with Pauline Kael than anyone else. After all, it is only entertainment the public is seeking, she says and he seems to agree. And films should be entertaining; that's it. Like her exposing the pretentiousness, a dishonest pretentiousness at that as Kael sees it, of Dwight Macdonald's review of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Menand seems bent on exposing everyone's pretentiousness. Look at how he reads the history of The New Yorker and its intentions, a middle class, middlebrow sham for high art, for which he has little to no use, a form of snobbery to him.As I've already mentioned, much in this book suffers from what it leaves out.. Staying with the chapter on movies for just another moment, I would cite the lack of any mention , for instance, of Bergman or Antonioni or Bunuel, no doubt all too pretentious and self-important and arch and all that for Menand to mention, whatever their politics.His section on music focuses largely on Cage, touches on Boulez and Stockhausen, but there is no word about William Schuman's, Bernstein's, or Copland's music, say, or the other, non avant-garde composers of Britain or France or Russia or Nordic countries whose work would not yield to Menand's dismissals of culture of any kind that attempt at or struggle for transcendent significance.And, of course, along with that lack, the book makes almost no mention whatsoever of religion. One does not have to be a believer oneself to understand that religion of some sort almost inevitably is part of any culture and that, in one or another, any discussion of it needs to acknowledge it. But the problem with it is, like political dogmatism, it claims for itself, whether rightly or wrongly, meanings which are not subject to irony.What I mean is that a book, even a very long one, makes its own purposes clear not only by what it includes, but by what it leaves out. And many of those concerns he leaves out are arts or members of a culture of some sort for whom meaning remains important, however difficult or even impossible it is to achieve, and for whom sincerity and seriousness, however much subject to sentimentality and misunderstanding they might be, remain important, indeed critical.I cite one more instance of poets the book neglects. Menand does mention the poets of the "San Francisco Renaissance" a few times, but he does not seem to know that that name does not designate the Beats but Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and others in their circle whose poetry and poetics were radially different from the Beats. Why?It is hard to know what Menand might have made of them, of course. What he writes about Olson at Black Mountain, is glancing and superficial, but it suggests misunderstandings. Does he not know of Olson's reading at Berkeley in 1965 and its instigations toward Projective Verse? Yes, breath was critical to Olson, the line and breath. But meaning for him was part of that breath: that which exists through itself is what is called meaning, he said. Of course, Menand could have included much more, almost endlessly. That would have made an impossible book. But the choices he does make remain telling, and the San Francisco Renaissance poets are among those of the period for whom what might be loosely called the religious or sacred call of the arts remained potent. I think Menand would find that call ridiculous or absurd. But there it is, nonetheless, part of the "meanings" of the era he discusses.It is meaning that this book is against, the idea that art and its culture should or could be meaningful. It intends to deflate it where it detects such ambitions. The Free World is entertaining to read, well written, full of facts, facts of a secondary kind at least, though many of them might be familiar to those who know the era. I recommend reading the book nevertheless with caution, if only for the anecdotes which are what drive it and keep it lively and entertaining, if entertainment is what one is after.But reading it is also a bit like listening to gossip that means to diminish or dismiss the object of its words: a person or cause or politician, say. After a while, one wants to shout, Can't you find anything better or more important or more generous to say about anyone? Yes, one might be entertained, but afterward, one feels slightly lessened, too, because of all the book's deflations and derogations. At the end of this book, what, really, is one left with?

Menand’s material is fascinating throughout, even if you are too young for the Cold War to seem like the “formative” years of your life. The book lies somewhere between journalism and scholarship, with satisfactions found throughout that range—and you won’t find too many books that try to fit Elvis Presley and Claude Levi-Strauss into the same framework.For readers with other books on the go, don’t be intimidated by the length of this one. I was determined to read it quickly and did so, but taking it a section at a time should be equally satisfying.