Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (66 page)

A different view of film was provided in 1936 in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ published in the newly founded
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
(Journal for Social Research), put out by the exiled Frankfurt Institute. Benjamin, born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a Jewish auctioneer and art dealer, was a radical intellectual, a ‘cultural Zionist’ as he described himself (meaning he was an advocate of Jewish liberal values in European culture) who earned his living as a historian, philosopher, art and literary critic, and journalist.

Of a slightly mystical bent, Benjamin spent World War I in medical exile in Switzerland, afterward forming friendships with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the
sculptress Julia Cohn, Bertolt Brecht, and the founders of the Frankfurt School. In a series of essays and books –
Elective Affinities, The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
and ‘The Politicisation of the Intelligentsia’ – he compared and contrasted traditional and new art forms, anticipating in a general way the ideas of Raymond Williams, Andy Warhol, and Marshall McLuhan.
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In the most celebrated, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ written when he was already in exile, he advanced his theory of ‘non-auratic’ art.
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According to Benjamin, art from antiquity to the present has its origin in religion, and even secular work kept to itself an ‘aura,’ the possibility that it was a glimpse of the divine, however distant that glimpse might be. As Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and José Ortega y Gasset had said, this implied a crucial difference between the artist and the non-artist, the intellectual and the proletariat. In the era of mechanical reproduction, however, and especially in film – a group rather than an individual activity – this tradition, and the distance between artists and nonartists, breaks down. Art can no longer appeal to the divine; there is a new freedom between the classes, no distinction between author and public, the latter ready to become the former if given the chance. For Benjamin the change is a good thing: in an age of mechanical reproduction the public are less an agglomeration of isolated souls, and film in particular, in offering mass entertainment, can address the psychological problems of society. As a result, social revolution might be possible without violence.
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Benjamin’s arguments, written by a liberal intellectual in exile, may be contrasted with Goebbels’s. Both understood the political power of film. Goebbels appreciated its force as a political instrument in the short run; but Benjamin was one of the first to see that the very nature of art was changing, that part of its meaning was draining away. He had identified a phase in cultural evolution that would accelerate in the second half of the century.

In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art had opened in New York, its first exhibition devoted to Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh. Arguably more influential, however, was an exhibition about architecture since 1920, held at the same museum in 1932. This was where the terms ‘international style’ or ‘international modern style’ were first coined. In New York at that time the new buildings attracting attention were the Chrysler headquarters (1930) and the Rockefeder Center (1931–9). Neither was in the international style, but it was the Manhattan designs that were the anachronisms. In the twentieth century, the international style would prove more influential than any other form of architecture. This was because it was more than just a style, but rather a whole way of conceiving buildings. Its aims were first clearly set out at the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), meeting during a cruise between Marseilles and Athens in 1933.
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There, CIAM issued a dogmatic manifesto, known as the Athens Charter, which insisted on the importance of city planning, of ‘functional zoning’, and of high-rise, widely spaced apartment blocks. The moving spirit behind this approach was a forty-six-year-old Swiss, christened CharlesEdouard Jeanneret but known since 1920 as Le Corbusier. Walter Gropius,
Alvar Aalto (a Finn), Philip Johnson (the curator of the MoMA show, who coined the term International Style), and even Frank Lloyd Wright shared Le Corbusier’s passion for new materials and clean straight lines in their search for a more democratic form of their art. But Le Corbusier was the most innovative, and the most combative.
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Le Corbusier studied art and architecture in Paris in the early years of the century, much influenced by John Ruskin and the social ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He worked in Peter Behrens’s office in Berlin in 1910–11 and was affected by Wright and by the Bauhaus, many of whose aims he shared, and who produced similar buildings.
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After World War I, Le Corbusier’s schemes for new architecture gradually became more radical. First came his ‘Citrohan’ houses, a variation of Citroën, suggesting that houses were as up-to-date as cars. These houses abolished conventional walls and were raised on stilts or
piloti.
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In 1925, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels, in Paris, he designed a stark white house with a tree growing out of it. The house was part of a
plan voisin
(neighbourhood plan) that envisaged demolishing much of central Paris and replacing it with eighteen huge skyscrapers.
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Le Corbusier’s distinctive international style finally found expression in the Villa Savoye at Passy (1929–32) and in his Swiss pavilion at University City, near Paris (1930—32). These were both plain white rectangular slabs, raised off the ground.
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Here, and in the Salvation Army Hostel, also in Paris (1929— 33), Le Corbusier sought to achieve a simplicity and a purity, combining classical antiquity and modernity with the ‘fundamentals’ of new science.
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He said he wanted to celebrate what he called ‘the white world’: precise materials, clarity of vision, space, and air, as against the ‘brown world’ of cluttered, closed, muddled design and thinking.
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It was a noble aim, publicly acknowledged when he was given the commission to design the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1937 (where Picasso’s
Guernica
was shown).

Unfortunately, there were serious problems with Le Corbusier’s approach. The available materials didn’t do justice to his vision. Plain white surfaces soon stained, or cracked, or peeled. People didn’t like living or working inside such buildings, especially minimalist apartment blocks.
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The white world of the international movement would dominate the immediate post-World War II landscape, with its passion for planning. In many ways it was a disaster.

It is common now to speak of an ‘Auden generation’ of poets, which included Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, John Betjeman and, sometimes, Louis MacNeice. Not all of them spoke in an identical ‘Audenesque’ voice – nonetheless, Audenesque entered the language.

Born in 1907, Wystan Hugh Auden grew up in Birmingham (though he went to school in Norfolk), a middle-class boy fascinated by mythology and by the industrial landscape of the Midlands – railways, gasworks, the factories and machinery associated with the motor trade.
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He went to Oxford to read biology, and although he soon changed to English, he always remained interested in science, and psychoanalysis especially. One of the reasons he changed to
English was because he already knew that he wanted to be a poet.
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His first verse was published in 1928, by Stephen Spender, whom he met at Oxford, who had his own hand press. T. S. Eliot, by then an editor at Faber & Faber, had previously rejected one collection of Auden’s poems, but the firm published a new set in 1930.
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The collection showed that at twenty-three Auden had achieved a striking originality in both voice and technique. His background in the already decaying industrial heartland of Britain, and his interest in science and psychology, helped him to an original vocabulary, set in contemporary and realistic locations. At the same time he dislocated his syntax, juxtaposing images in deliberately jarring ways, reminiscent of the arrhythmia of machines. There was something familiar, almost ordinary, about the way many lines ended.

Or:

Reading Auden is strangely calming, as though a ‘stranger were making our acquaintance,’ perhaps because, in the changing insecure world of the 1930s, his familiar, clear images were something to hold on to.
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He was not averse to drawing his ideas from sociology and the sort of information gleaned from surveys carried out by Gallup, which started its polling activities in America in 1935 and opened an office in Britain a year later.
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Auden’s later poems, as Bernard Bergonzi has observed, had a more political edge, but it was ready the new ‘palette’ he discovered that characterised the Auden style, appropriating the rhythms of jazz, Hollywood musicals, and popular songs (now infinitely more popular than hitherto because of the radio), and peppering his lines with references to film stars such Garbo or Dietrich.

Auden was quickly imitated, but the quality and intensity of his own poetry fell off at the end of the 1930s, after one of his finest works,
Spain.
Auden was in Spain in January 1937, not to take part as a combatant in the civil war, as so many prominent intellectuals did, but to drive an ambulance for the Republican side, though that didn’t happen. While there he came across the desperate infighting among the different Republican factions, and he was shocked by their cruelty to the priests. Despite these misgivings, he still thought a fascist victory needed to be prevented, and on his return to Britain he wrote
Spain,
which was completed in less than a month.
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His main concern is liberalism, what it is and whether it can survive.

Among the lines, however, was the following:

George Orwell, who wrote his own account of the civil war, in which he himself fought,
Homage to Catalonia,
vehemently attacked Auden for this poem, saying that these lines could have been written only ‘by a person to whom murder is at most a
word.’
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In fact, Auden was unhappy about the phrase and later changed it to ‘the fact of murder.’ He was subsequently attacked for being one of a group of intellectuals who favoured political murder and turned a collective blind eye to the terror in Russia.

Orwell didn’t go that far. Like Auden, he feared a fascist victory in Spain and so felt obliged to fight. So did many others. In fact, the range of writers and other intellectuals who travelled to Spain to take part in the civil war was remarkable: from France, André Malraux, François Mauriac, Jacques Maritain, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard; from Britain, besides Orwell and Auden, there was Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Herbert Read; from the United States, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreiser; from Russia, Ilya Ehrenburg and Michael Kol’tsov; from Chile, Pablo Neruda.
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There was not yet the grand disillusion with the Soviet system that would come later, and many intellectuals were worried about the further extension of fascism beyond Germany and Italy (fascist parties existed in Finland, Portugal, and Britain, as well as elsewhere). They thought it was a ‘just war.’ A small number of writers supported Franco – George Santayana and Ezra Pound among them – because they thought he might impose a
nationalistic and aristocratic social order, which would rescue culture from its inevitable decline; and there were a number of Roman Catholic writers who wanted a return to a Christian society. Some authors, after the senseless slaughter in the nationalist zone of Spain’s own best poet, Federico García Lorca, also joined the fight. From among these writers the war generated several firstperson accounts.
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Most of the issues raised were overtaken by World War II and the Cold War that soon followed. But the Spanish Civil War generated at least two great novels that have lasting value, and one painting. These are André Malraux’s
L’Espoir
(translated as
Days of Hope),
Ernest Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
and Pablo Picasso’s
Guernica.