Notes

Caught Up in the Mix: Some Adventures in Marxism

1Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, first published and produced 1949; text and criticism edited by Gerald Weales, New York: Viking, 1977. The lament “The only thing you got,” by Willie’s neighbor Charlie is on page 97; Happy’s graveside vow, 138–9. The story about Miller cited in the epigraph is drawn from John Lahr, “Making Willy Loman,” New Yorker, January 25, 1999, 46–7.

2In fact, these 1844 notebooks had been published in Berlin by the Marx-Engels Institute in 1932 as part of the projected (but never completed) Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. That edition was suppressed in Germany by the Nazis but was continued for a time in Moscow, where Georg Lukács, by then a refugee, played some editorial role. Herbert Marcuse made creative use of the 1844 Manuscripts in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. But there was no popular edition until the Khrushchev era, when Moscow sponsored translations into many languages and sold them by the millions dirt cheap.

3Citations from Marx, unless I note otherwise, are drawn from the Marx-Engels Reader [MER], 2nd edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, New York: Norton, 1978, which uses Milligan’s translations of the 1844 material. The core of the 1844 Manuscripts consists of five essays: “Alienated Labor,” “Private Property and Communism,” “The Meaning of Human Requirements,” “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” and “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole.”

4Marx had offered a definition a few months earlier, in a “little magazine” called the German-French Yearbooks, published in Paris. That definition is mostly negative: You will know them by their multiple wounds and exclusions. They form “a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society,” and “a total loss of humanity that can redeem itself only by a total redemption of humanity” (“Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” MER, 53–65). This is very different from the proletarians we will meet in the Communist Manifesto and Capital. There they are the primary source of power for the immense engine of modern production and industry. Here we come to know them by all they are not; they seem much more like the poor people portrayed by Dickens and Dostoevsky, or like the insulted and injured group that contemporary US social scientists have named “the underclass.”

5Engels, in his 1880 pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (derived from his polemic Anti-Dühring, 1878) is perceptive in judging Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew as the “two great masterpieces of dialectics” produced by the Enlightenment (MER, 694). My first book, The Politics of Authenticity, New York: Atheneum, 1970, 1972, traces some of the roots of Marxism in the radical Enlightenment.

Alienation, Community, Freedom

1See Raymond Williams’s essay “Prelude to Alienation” in Dissent, Summer 1964.

2And yet, as we can see in those great passages (mostly in The Prelude) where Wordsworth evokes nature most powerfully and beautifully, his very conception of Order explodes the premises of any such Party. The order of Nature, as Wordsworth feels it, is inherently dynamic, infused with energy and exuberance, itself “Promethean.” I hope to show in a more elaborate study how Wordsworth’s politics actually betray his deepest poetic insight.

Notes Toward a New Society

1Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p. 256.

2Asbley, Karin, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Home Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” New Left Notes, February 28, 1969.

3Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, New York: New York Review of Books, 1950.

Unchained Melody

1Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Verso, 1998.

Take It to the Streets: Conflict and Community in Public Space

1“A Persian on the Streets of Paris,” in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1721.

2“Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” music and lyrics by Robert Hazard; copyright 1979 by Heroic Music. Lyrics revised here by Cyndi Lauper.

3Marx would also have admired Lauper’s sense of social reality. Her rendition of the Declaration of Rights at the song’s end is prefaced (and modified) by a repeated refrain: “When the working, when the working, when the working day is done.” Conscious of her class, she knows that the golden coach will turn into a subway train at dawn and that, whatever magic happens on the street at night, she will have to go back to work in the morning. Still, even during the working day–perhaps especially then–she is determined to dream.

4Sometimes the trial, judgment, sentence, and execution are all over before the defendant even knows what hit him. In September 1983, Michael Stewart, a young black man, was arrested for peaceably writing graffiti in the Union Square subway station. A few minutes later, a whole crowd of white policemen beat, stomped, and strangled him into a coma, then delivered him to Bellevue to die. (In November 1985 an all-white jury found six of those policemen innocent on all counts.)

Buildings Are Judgment, or “What Man Can Build”

1This motto, which appeared on signs along Moses’s Long Island Expressway, and which was meant to explain the detours and troubles caused by the construction of his 1963 World’s Fair, obligingly documented the convergence theory that American and Soviet ideologists were trying so hard to bury. The fact that Moses professed a fanatical hatred for communism—he had ruined many opponents with McCarthyite smear campaigns and often threatened, “I’ll let the Daily News loose on you!”—only made the convergence more ironic.

2It is striking that, in what was probably Moses’s cruelest and most humanly destructive project, fellow Jews were his victims. The fact that Caro, also a Jew, is telling the story now, may be a symptom of an important shift in American Jewish self-awareness. Alongside our glowing “only in America” success story, we may be slowly coming to confront a darker story that could be entitled “even in America.”

3This is the sort of vision that animates the great TVA and FSA documentaries of the thirties and the Soviet “tractor films” of the same era. (It may be most readily available to us through Woody Guthrie’s many “dam songs” and celebrations of the man “born with a jackhammer in his hand.”) It suggests that thinkers like Carlyle and Durkheim, whom the Left has always disparaged, were right to insist that workers could find meaning and fulfillment even in jobs that were physically grueling and mentally empty—jobs that would be, by many people’s standards, utterly “alienated”—if they had a vision of the meaning of the work as a whole, and if they could believe in its real value to the human community. Moses was one of the first to show that it could happen even in America.

4Younger New Yorkers imagine that the area was all romantic natural loveliness until Moses got there. In fact, as Caro shows, most of the romance of that riverfront was created by Moses himself.

5It should come as no surprise that Moses fought unrelentingly—and successfully—against the diversion of public money to the alternative vision of mass public transit.

6This sort of tragedy is the basis of the oldest story in the world, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. King Gilgamesh destroys monsters who menace his people, but then turns on the people themselves, and turns himself from their hero into their terror. He seeks immortality, fails to find it, and dies unfulfilled. But he does attain a kind of immortality on earth by building a monumental Great Wall.

7Note a crucial change in radical iconography: The arm and hammer and hammer and sickle were the most vivid and powerful symbols of the Old Left; the New Left proclaimed its presence most dramatically with a clenched fist. All these are symbols of strength, determination, and potential violence; but the icons of the Old Left also express the will and power to build.

The Dancer and the Dance

1Even within the terms of the nineteenth century, we can ask—as men of the nineteenth century themselves asked—whether many conventional endings didn’t hurt more than they helped. Think of that Radio City Music Hall chorus at the end of Faust, dissipating all its human intensity; of Raskolnikov sitting on a Siberian river bank and suddenly seeing the light—but don’t ask, dear reader, what that light was; of the mountains of junk/shit/money that dominate the world of Our Mutual Friend getting simply carted away—but don’t ask where they went; of Tolstoy at the end of War and Peace doing his best to obliterate not only our experience but his own achievement. If we think of works and endings like these—and it would be easy to think of many more—the absence of an ending might not be such a bad idea after all.

Cosmic Chutzpah

1History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.

2See Morris Watnick, “Georg Lukács: An Intellectual Biography,” Soviet Survey, January–March, April–June, and July–September 1958, and January-March 1959.

3“The Ideology of Modernism,” in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander, London: Merlin, 1962, 17–47. The essays before and after “Modernism” are blows in the same culture war, and just as bad.

4On Lukács and Naphta, and Lukács and Mann, see Judith Marcus [Tar], Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann: A Study in the Sociology of Literature, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

5Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.

6Said by Lukács’s friend Anna Lesznai; quoted in Michael Lowy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso, 1979, 128.

7“Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” trans. and introduced by Judith Marcus Tar, Social Research 44.3, Autumn 1977, 416–24. This was written in Hungarian in December 1918 for the journal of the Galileo Circle, a group of radical intellectuals at the University of Budapest. Editor Karl Polanyi had asked Lukács for a contribution. “Tactics and Ethics” was written a couple of weeks later, directly after his conversion. It is reprinted in Lukács, Political Writings, 1919–1929, trans. Michael McColgan, ed. Rodney Livingstone, London: New Left Books, 1972.

8Although it is indeed Razumikhin, in Crime and Punishment, who gives this formulation—to lie one’s way through to the truth—it is not his own lies and truths that he is talking about, but Raskolnikov’s; and he offers the formulation as a caricature, hoping (in vain) that Raskolnikov will disavow it. Razumikhin is a delightfully un-Dostoevskian character, poor and radical like Raskolnikov—he has been kicked out of the university for punching a policeman—but sane, emotionally sunny and unproblematic in all the ways Raskolnikov is not. (When Raskolnikov is sentenced to Siberia, Razumikhin gets to marry Raskolnikov’s sister, and readers are happy to throw rice.) But Raskolnikov is the one with whom Lukács identifies, and the prime model for his various betrayals and regenerations, from youth to old age.

9See Georg Lukács, Selected Correspondence, 1902-1920. Lukács’s tragic romance is one of the focuses of this fine volume (the others are Lukács’s intimacy with Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and other great thinkers old enough to be his father). After Seidler’s suicide, Lukács published a heartrending dialogue, “On Poverty of Spirit.” It has been translated by Jane and John Sanders, and reprinted in Philosophical Forum 3, 1971–72, 360–83, with an introduction by Agnes Heller. Cf. Heller’s longer essay “Gyorgy Lukács and Irma Seidler,” in Lukács Reappraised, edited by Agnes Heller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, 27–62.

10What a great Hungarian movie this sad story would have made! And there were two generations of fine Hungarian directors—Miklos Jansco, Marta Mezaros, Pal Gabor, Istvan Szabo, Karoly Makk, and others I’ve forgotten or never knew—who could really have grasped it, who knew how to situate a phenomenon like communism and an emotion like love in the same frame, and knew there was a rich variety of possible ways for them to play out. Alas, Irma and György will never be made. It is too late now: the memory is gone. Eastern Europe in the 1990s has lost its tragic sense of communist life, lost it as inexorably as Western Europe once lost the art of medieval stained glass.

11This interview was reported in the New York Times, whose Central and Eastern European correspondents discovered Lukács’s importance in 1956. It is discussed in detail in J. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998, 48–51, 276–8. Hoberman writes elegiacally of the Kádár era, the age of “frigidaire socialism,” when, he says, “Hungarian pop offered a way to criticise Hungarian socialism,” and “the worker’s state incubated its own revolutionary opposition.” In Hoberman’s fine essays on Polish, Hungarian, and Czech cinema yesterday and today, Eastern European culture converges surprisingly with North American in a shared nostalgia for radicalism born of abundance.

Waiting for the Barbarians

1Cynthia Ozick, “The Year of Writing Dangerously,” New Republic, May 8, 1995.

2Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Broadway, Love, and Theft: Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer

1In Constance Rourke’s classic study American Humor: A Study of National Character, New York: NYRB Classics, 2002 (first pub. 1931), blackface minstrelsy is central to American humor and character. It is a subject that has generated many fascinating books. See, for instance, Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford: OUP, 1974; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Black Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Oxford: OUP 1993; Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters, New York: Cane Hill, 1994. More fine work continues to appear; see Margo Jefferson in note 3 below.

2Jim Hoberman, “The Show Biz Messiah,” in Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991, 64–68. Hoberman has another fine piece, “On the Jazz Singer,” in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. This volume, the catalogue for a show that opened at New York’s Jewish Museum in 2003, features a provocative and visually strong section on The Jazz Singer. It includes a splendid essay by Mark Slobin, “Putting Blackface in Its Place,” and an elaborate chronology of Jolson’s and The Jazz Singer’s many incarnations up to 1998. Hoberman occludes another strong candidate for “the world’s first superstar”: Charles Chaplin.

3From an essay on humor that Williams wrote in 1918 for American magazine. Cited in Margo Jefferson, “Blackface Master Echoes in Hip-Hop,” The New York Times, October 12, 2004 (italics mine).

4Eric Lott, Love and Theft. As a lover of this book, I was delighted to see it become the object of a theft by Bob Dylan, in his powerful 2002 album, Love and Theft. More on Dylan later.

5Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, is the classic study of the culture of the Lower East Side. The book aches with nostalgia for that lost world; but its most spirited portraits are of people who spent their lives as transgressors against it. In the sections on entertainment and popular culture, Howe’s heroes—Jolson, Irving Berlin, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor—turn out to be people who not only worked in blackface but felt personally close to black people, black music, and black culture. Howe and Libo note this in passing but don’t explore it in depth.

6Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. Douglas’s “mongrel” title is a variation on a metaphor used by Dorothy Parker to describe herself, 5. For Jolson and skyscrapers, 8. This fine book, also a classic study, is also very interested in people who practiced “crossovers” between Jewish and black worlds. The Gershwin brothers play leading roles in both.

7The Jazz Singer, screenplay by Alfred Cohn, edited with many appendices by Robert Carringer, Winsconsin: University of Wisconsin Film Center, 1979, 51.

8Ibid., 62–65.

9Ibid., 68.

10Ibid., 84ff. That cantor was a real person, Josef/Yossele Rosenblatt, one of the first Jewish religious figures to not only record his voice but market it. His capacity to incarnate both religious and market values prefigures The Jazz Singer’s happy ending.

11Jolson developed blackface routines in the 1900s, in his teens, while he was working as a solo performer and traveling from carnivals to burlesque houses around the country. He attracted the attention of Lew Dockstader, the head of a widely admired minstrel traveling show, worked in blackface with the company for the next five years, became increasingly prominent, and was written up in Variety. In 1909 he went to work for the Shubert Brothers. Within a few months, in a Shubert musical called La Belle Paree, he became “the first performer to perform minstrel comedy in what was then called the legitimate theatre.” The best account I have found of Jolson’s early career is Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001, especially chapters 14–17, on “Jewish minstrelsy” and “Jewish versions of blackness.”

12Erikson, one of Freud’s most creative followers who developed the concept of ego-identity, had identity problems of his own. In 1975, in the New York Times Book Review, I reproached him for his cover-up of his Jewishness. In the language of 1970s culture, this was translated as “outing Erikson as a Jew.” This episode is discussed skillfully by Lawrence Friedman in Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

13The Jazz Singer, 119–23.

14Ibid., 120.

15Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 1 (my italics).

16Ibid., 164. Alexander calls this “a theology of exile” growing out of the basic contradiction in Jewish life, “a communal covenant with God and a communal exile” (180ff).

17MAHZOR for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: A Prayer Book for the Days of Awe, ed. Rabbi Jules Harlow, Rabbinical Assembly, 1972, 376–79. This is a Conservative prayer book, and Jack/Jakie’s of course would have been Orthodox (and untranslated). The idea of a collective confessional and the basic items in it go back to Rabbinic times and are shared by Jews all over the world. But some congregations since the 1960s have added to the catalogue of sins. (Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanovsky, note, October 14, 2004).

18William Blake, “For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise” (1793, 1818), in The Portable Blake, edited by Alfred Kazin, New York: Viking, 1946, 1968, 268.

19The Jazz Singer, 99; italics mine.

20But he would never have tolerated charges like those made by my late, dear friend Mike Rogin in his book Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Oakland: University of California Press, 1996, that not only The Jazz Singer but virtually all popular culture created by Jews is a giant rip-off of blacks. Rogin was one of the best minds of my generation, but this late work is over the top.

21The Jazz Singer, 96–100. The screenplay, 144–45, gives intricate dialogue beyond what is in the script, and something like what is actually on the screen. Samson Raphaelson, author of the story and the play on which the movie was based, felt let down by the movie. But this mother-son encounter was the one scene he really liked.

22Ibid., 59.

23A Room of One’s Own, New York: Harvest, 1981 (first pub. 1928), foreword by Mary Gordon, 49. One of those sisters was the mother of the great liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was my supervisor at Oxford forty years ago, and I met his mother at his stepson’s bar mitzvah in early 1963. She asked me and my friend Jerry Cohen what we thought of the bar mitzvah boy’s haftarah. I said I thought he had read very well. When Jerry didn’t seem to know what to say, I explained, “My friend had a very strict communist upbringing.” This didn’t faze her at all. She said, with a warm smile, “Yes, God had made human beings different so they could talk and argue, and so teaching and learning could go on.” She spent the next few minutes developing this theme, a remarkable fusion of Molly Goldberg and John Stuart Mill.

24Story included as appendix to screenplay, The Jazz Singer, 167.

25The Jazz Singer, 146.

26Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951. For more complex reflections on this theme, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, New York: Atheneum, 1963 (first pub. 1955). For more recent treatments, see Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, New Haven, CT: Russell Sage / Yale University Press, 2000, and Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002.

27Reproduced in Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, 107–23.

28Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 161, and Chapter 17, “The Jews on Tin Pan Alley.”

29Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Disclosure: An early form of this essay appeared in Dissent, Summer 2002, entitled “Love and Theft: From Jack Robin to Bob Dylan.”

30When I brought home my first Bob Dylan album forty years ago, my mother enjoyed the music, but got stuck on the name: “Hmm, Dylan, what was it before?” I got so mad! But of course she was right. For my parents’ generation, this question was an ongoing joke with a critical edge. (See the Marx Brothers’ “Hurrah for Captain Spalding, the African explorer.”) My mother understood why Jewish boys had had to go in disguise in her time (and Jack Robin’s), but not in mine. Soon Dylan was outed as “Zimmerman.” He seemed to resent it at first, but, like Jack Robin, gradually learned to affirm his real Jewishness along with his wannabe universality in the course of growing up.

31The old Madison Square Garden—which also figures in Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss—was between 49th and 50th Streets, and between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Dempsey’s began at 50th and Eighth, right across the street. For a while he had two restaurants, the original and a “Broadway Restaurant and Bar” in the Brill Building. Then for a generation the Brill Building place reigned alone. The “Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant” website displays a matchbook ad: LOVE MATCHES ARE MADE IN HEAVEN, FIGHT MATCHES ARE MADE AT JACK DEMPSEY’S.

32Even if we can imagine this author’s unconscious ambivalence, what’s the publisher’s excuse? Is there nobody old at Simon & Schuster who remembers, or nobody young who has read about all the years when Jack Dempsey was king of Times Square? (And what about the New York Times? Its Sunday “City” section reprinted this scene, false address and all, on March 26, 2005.)

The Romance of Public Space

1See D. Kagan, Sources in Greek Democratic Thought, New York: Free Press, 1966.

2Ironically, though, this cloud has been incorporated into secular, middle-class culture. Dr. Benjamin Spock, writing after World War Two, may have been the first child-care expert to say that all children deserved “rooms of their own” where they could elaborate their own fantasy lives, create their own worlds. Spock, a founder of peace and anti-nuclear movements, and an official criminal in the Vietnam War years, always argued that people who grew up with more private space as children would become better citizens as adults.

3C. L. Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1721.

4This is a central theme in my first book, The Politics of Authenticity, New York: Atheneum, 1970, also elaborated by Dena Goodman in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994.

The Bible and Public Space

1The great art historian Meyer Schapiro directed our attention to this Eve, one of the most striking and beautiful works of medieval art. See his Romanesque Art, New York: George Braziller, 1977; also Romanesque Sculptures, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

2See “To His Mistris Going To Bed,” “The Good-Morrow,” and many other of Donne’s love poems, which focus on the special human experience of being part of a couple.