The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
By Timothy Sandefur
New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2021
880 pp. $35 (hardcover)
Louis Menand is a writer of great gifts, whose 2000 book The Metaphysical Club is a masterpiece of intellectual history. Expertly blending curious biographical details with a clear exposition of complex scientific and philosophical concepts, it traces the development of Pragmatism from about 1865 to 1920 through the intersecting lives of a league of intellectuals that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and John Dewey. It won the Pulitzer Prize and deserved it. In 2003, Menand followed it up with American Studies, an anthology that examined everything from the Hippie movement to the life of Larry Flynt with equal wit and insight.
Unfortunately, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War fails to recapture the magic. That’s partly because despite its bulk—880 pages—it’s curiously incomplete. For example, it never mentions television. Any book on the art of the period Menand covers (1945-1970ish) should discuss Westerns or science fiction—probably the era’s two most important literary and dramatic legacies—but these, too, go unmentioned. Any examination of the period’s culture should also discuss political conservatism, but this is also omitted. The birth control pill, Walt Disney, the Space Race, and the Korean War are never referenced. Vietnam occupies only part of the last chapter.
Menand’s immense cast of characters includes everyone from poet Allen Ginsberg to publisher Robert de Graff—but not Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, or Billy Graham. This, plus the lack of any summation, makes The Free World feel less like a work of history than a collection of essays or a free-association list of interesting trivia.
Still, although the book never coalesces around a single idea, themes do emerge—most notably the dangerously misguided conception of “freedom” shared by many of the writers, artists, and activists of the time. From Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre (chapter 3) to novelists such as Norman Mailer (chapter 15), to popular gangster films such as Bonnie and Clyde (chapter 17), one of the most lasting obsessions of the era’s intellectuals was “authenticity”—by which they meant engaging in action, unmediated by reason, simply to obtain “experience,” or acting out forms of “rebellion” to prove one’s “autonomy.” In The Wild One (1953), when Marlon Brando is asked, “What are you rebelling against?” he replies, “What have you got?”
Many artists of the era sought to rebel against the forms that make art possible—fashioning a “sculpture” out of a stuffed goat and a tire (266), or composing a piano piece in which the performer never touches the keys (256)—in order to somehow prove themselves “free.” Many other intellectuals did the same; Menand observes of critic Jacques Derrida that he “was, in effect, removing the gyroscope from the system and opening up an unending play of interpretation” (507). The problem, of course, is that without a gyroscope, a plane isn’t made freer—it just crashes.
In short, one of the most significant strands of thought in the quarter century after World War II was the notion that one gains autonomy by overcoming not only social or political restrictions on choice, but the limits of reality itself. There was nothing new in this ultimately doomed enterprise; Dostoyevsky had anticipated and satirized it in 1864 when he depicted the protagonist of Notes from Underground as a man who tries to assert his free will through self-destruction. When Norman Mailer claimed in 1957 that “the only Hip morality” was “to do whatever one feels whenever and wherever it is possible” (609), he was just proving Dostoyevsky’s point: conceiving of individuality as an act of pure will, or a rebellion against nature, is ultimately nihilistic.
That nihilism can be detected beneath much of the era’s art and philosophy. In a chapter on Andy Warhol, Menand notes that the artist’s famous painting of thirty two identical Campbell’s soup cans “does not engage you in any kind of visual experience. They give nothing back to the gaze” (534). In other words, Warhol was not simply repeating the gimmicks of Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp (who in 1917 signed a pseudonym on a urinal and called it sculpture) but was “turning the screw one rotation further” (539) by attacking the very idea on which Duchamp’s stunt was predicated: that there is any distinction between art and non-art. Duchamp’s piece implied that sculpture should be regarded as something more significant than a banal commodity; Warhol denied that—indeed, denied any difference between reality and performance, or any validity to values. Little wonder that “he made movies of things that never moved . . . sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on a lecture tour . . . had other people make his paintings, or pretended that he did . . . and systematically lied in interviews” (514). This goes beyond mere cynicism. As one critic put it, Warhol was “both the last representative of the traditional avant-garde, as well as its self-appointed assassin” (541).
As the word “assassin” implies, the nihilism at the end of this misbegotten conception of authenticity could easily erupt into violence. In fact, two years after the soup cans painting, a member of Warhol’s entourage named Dorothy Podber walked into his studio, pulled out a gun, and fired it into a stack of pictures of Marilyn Monroe, then simply walked out. She called it a work of “performance art.” (Warhol sold the pictures as Shot Marilyns.) Four years later, another member of his retinue, a schizophrenic writer named Valerie Solanas, whom Warhol had cast in one of his movies, shot the artist himself, almost fatally.1 These women were just two of the bizarre coterie Warhol gathered around him—a crowd that, as Menand shows, eerily resembled a religious cult, with followers adopting pseudonyms and costumes and engaging in bizarre gestures, the “sole reward” for which was “proximity to the artist” (516). It seems to foreshadow the Manson Family.
“There is no reality except in action,” claimed Jean-Paul Sartre. Man “exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts.”2 This meant moral choices were a form of self-construction, aiming to become what he called “être-pour-soi”—being for itself (74). He insisted that this did not amount to mere subjectivism, but this was not true given that he thought these “acts” were divorced from reason. Unsurprisingly, the “action” by which many of his contemporaries chose to define themselves consisted of violence or self-harm. This is not to say that the intellectuals Menand chronicles were all reading Sartre, but time and again they engaged in brutality or fraud, or romanticized these things, as if they were liberating achievements of être-pour-soi. The novels and memoirs of Richard Wright revel in killing, portraying it as a kind of emancipation (chapter 11). Neal Cassady, who inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and much of Allen Ginsberg’s writing, was a serial rapist (180). Lucien Carr, a friend of Ginsberg and Kerouac, murdered a man in 1944—Kerouac helped destroy the evidence and testified on Carr’s behalf (174). And the literature of the age, particularly the “angry young man” genre (e.g., Wright’s Native Son (1940), J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), N. Scott Momaday’s A House Made of Dawn (1968)) betrays an unmistakable pattern in which the alienated and fearful individual achieves selfhood only by arbitrary violence or self-destruction. Two examples in Menand’s book stand out in particular: the case of Norman Mailer and the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
Mailer, whose war novel The Naked and the Dead was a smash in 1948, stabbed his wife Adele with a penknife at a 1960 dinner party attended by such luminaries as Ginsberg and the editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. When friends tried to help her, Mailer kicked them away. She barely survived, but, as Menand explains, “the stabbing seems to have enhanced Mailer’s social and literary reputation” (559). He did no jail time. His next novel, An American Dream—the protagonist of which strangles his ex-wife—was reviewed in the nation’s leading journals, virtually none of which mentioned Mailer’s crime. To some intellectuals, it seemed part of the aesthetic of authenticity. “The whole business with Mailer turned me so sick with literature, with ‘insight,’” wrote Podhoretz’s wife. “Everyone in New York came alive with sex and titillation. And in this whole God-forsaken city of 8,000,000 there could not be found one healthy philistine to say—this man is a thug, or a criminal. It’s all nothing but experience, experience, experience” (559).
The years that followed witnessed an increasing cultural fixation on brutality, notably in film. Bonnie and Clyde—which was nominated for ten Oscars—became a sensation not because of the shooting and robbing it depicts (these were routine in gangster films for decades), but because of the way in which it glamorized these things—or, more precisely, the way leading intellectuals applauded it for doing so. The movie was not particularly successful at first but was re-released after critic Pauline Kael published essays celebrating how it “discovered the poetry of crime in American life . . . and showed the Americans how to put it on the screen in a new, ‘existential’ way” (681). Bonnie and Clyde became such a sensation that Americans began wearing berets and thirties-style suits.
The “poetry of crime” was not just an individual matter, either. Those who thought authenticity meant arbitrary action sometimes pursued this by drowning themselves in mass movements. That might seem paradoxical, but it was just what Sartre called for. “When we say that a man is responsible for himself,” he declared, “we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.”3 And when college students began protesting on campuses across the country in the mid-1960s, it often felt to them like precisely this kind of “self-assertion”—becoming a cog in a machine “greater than oneself.” “The fundamental appeal of politics for [many people of the time],” writes Menand, “was existential. Direct action was . . . about becoming an être-[pour]-soi” (694). He quotes one student who participated in the “Free Speech Movement” in 1964, and described it as feeling like “the existential amazement of being at The Edge” (706).
There were people who warned at the time that viewing the world this way could turn ugly because, unmoored by reason, an ego in search of “authentic” experience—whether through rebellion or conformity—would only find annihilation. But Menand never takes time to engage these critics. He quotes a columnist who accurately called Bonnie and Clyde “strangely antique sentimental claptrap” (669), but instead of examining this review, he brushes it aside as narrow-minded. He likewise slights writer Diana Trilling for calling Ginsberg and other Beat poets “miserable children trying desperately to manage, asking desperately to be taken out of it all” (486). But Trilling had a point. Their “disreputableness and rebellion” was a “front,” she wrote, and their work—which sought to “generalize their despair though of course without curing it”—was an attempt to conceal the fact that they were actually “docile to culture.” They portrayed themselves as victims of “the Establishment,” when in fact they were simultaneously surrendering to it and begging for its approval. Menand, however, doesn’t quote these parts of Trilling’s essay.4
There were also those who offered a better vision of freedom and individuality. Novels such as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) and Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite (1952), the science fiction of Robert Heinlein and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, movies such as Shane (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), all examined themes of freedom in ways that were grounded in reason and portrayed humanity as efficacious and even triumphant. But these are missing from Menand’s account.
Menand is such a skilled writer that despite its curious omissions, The Free World is lively and often compelling, with a wealth of valuable research. But looking only at one, deeply flawed conception of freedom, without considering its critics or alternatives, makes the book more like a bas relief than a three-dimensional sculpture. And that’s a disservice to both readers and the author himself. In his introduction, Menand says he wrote the book in part from a desire to comprehend the world in which he grew up, and especially to understand freedom. “Now I can see that freedom was the slogan of the times,” he concludes. “The word was invoked to justify everything” (xiv). That may be true of the people he writes about, but a more focused examination of the era would have revealed why so many of them were misled.