Clara Bow biographer David Stenn talks about how this poor abused beauty from Brooklyn became

Hollywood's first real sex icon -- and why she was so reviled for it.
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BY MICHAEL SRAGOW
June 10, 1999 | "A rogue -- But her manner was gay and delicious. She could make a Baptist preacher choke With laughter over a dirty joke." -- Joseph Moncure March, "The Wild Party" When March described a redheaded flapper in his notorious 1928 verse novel, he must have modeled her on Clara Bow, who had been dubbed the "It" girl two years earlier. From 1925 to 1933, the entire moviegoing world knew this ravishing live wire as the epitome of the Jazz Baby, "naughty of eye" and "expressive-lipped" -- "cute, lecherous: lovable, treacherous." Well, maybe not "treacherous" -- except in the minds of scandal-mongers and pop moralists. A jawdropping Turner Classic Movies documentary, "Discovering the 'It' Girl" (debuting Monday at 8 p.m. EDT, 5 p.m. PDT), reveals that Bow was a generous and plucky gal, on-screen and off. Her multifaceted beauty -- dreamy and kinetic, spellbinding and spine-tingling -- will mesmerize those who've never seen her. And her tale of triumph and woe will astonish those who've never heard of her. She wasn't merely a movie star, but a battered Hollywood heroine. On ambition and instinct alone, she pulled herself out of Brooklyn tenements, escaping from a sexually abusive father and a murderously unbalanced mother who tried to slit Clara's throat when she was sleeping -- catalyzing, among other things, a lifelong case of insomnia. Clara's father put her mother in an insane asylum, where she died while her daughter was appearing in a picture. Becoming a performer in a disreputable fledgling art form, Clara managed to use her disadvantages and her psychic wounds. As Budd Schulberg says in the TCM press notes, "She felt so unable to cope on many, many levels. And that's why I think, in a way, she was so promiscuous." To Schulberg, that was how "she could speak without using the 'ain'ts' and fracturing the language." Her vocabulary was "her sexuality." Bow's swift, intuitive mastery of a new erotic syntax made her a revolutionary star. She was all the more alluring -- and, to some onlookers, "dangerous" -- because her sexuality was part of her overall life force. As the documentary's abundant film clips illustrate, Bow's performances have depth of feeling as well as dynamite charm. In addition to the documentary (Courtney Love narrates from a script by co-producers Elaina Archer and Hugh Munro Neely, who also directs, and John J. Flynn), TCM will be showing "It"; her first talkie, "The Wild Party" -- a college film from 1929, unrelated to the March poem; and the 1922 whaling film "Down to the Sea in Ships," which gave Bow her first major role. These are world television premieres, and presumably TCM is showing them for their historical interest -- as movies they creak. TCM isn't broadcasting what is arguably her juiciest vehicle, "Mantrap," directed by Victor Fleming -- who was, along with Gary Cooper, Gilbert Roland and Bela Lugosi, one of her many lovers before she settled down in Nevada with cowboy star Rex Bell.

Bow's story contains two grand retreats: one from moviemaking, when a combination of microphone fright and scandal fatigue made her give up on Hollywood in the early talkie days, and the other from public and even family life, when Bell became a Republican politician. After a year at Hartford's Institute for Living (she was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1949), Bow separated from her husband and began a reclusive life back in Los Angeles, where she died in 1965. David Stenn, the Yale-educated author of the groundbreaking biography "Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild" and a writer for TV shows ranging from "Hill Street Blues" to "Beverly Hills, 90210," sees her as bloodied but unbowed. A creative consultant on "Discovering the 'It' Girl," he spoke with me last week about the intertwining of Clara Bow's agonies and ecstasies. Do you support the film's notion that she was the first sex symbol? She overturned the whole manner of courtship in this country -- the titles of her movies speak for themselves. "Get Your Man," "The Wild Party," "Rough House Rosie." And the plot was always the same. She would see a man, she would go after him and she would get him. The idea that a woman could pursue a man and not be a bad girl changed the way men perceived women and women perceived themselves. I've always thought that the true decade of sexual liberation for women -- the decade when the major changes took place in this country -- was the '20s, not the '60s. Women had just received the vote, and they were starting to open up to the stirrings they were feeling and also reading about in F.Scott Fitzgerald or Gertrude Atherton. Clara Bow wasn't only or exclusively about sex, but she enjoyed it, and she wasn't ashamed of it. A coed in a movie like "The Plastic Age," a girl in school who wanted to "go the limit," which was what they called it, with her boyfriend? That was "flaming youth," that's what the '20s were about and that's what freaked out the parents. Watching her, the flapper generation found a role model. They felt, "She doesn't feel bad about it, why should I?" Weren't there sex stars before Bow, and erotic dramas by De Mille and Von Stroheim? Yes, but the sex was tawdry and depraved. What you had were "vamps" -- and Bow was not a vamp. Vamps were "foreign," which meant decadent. Theda Bara? She was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, but nobody knew that, and she always played foreign women. Vamp comes from vampire -- Bara played women who were sucking the blood from American men. Bow is the woman as sexual being; there was an innocence to her that saved her from being immediately condemned. She played American girls. She never appeared as an upper-class character, only as manicurists and shop girls, and her own background mirrored her characters'. So people felt they were seeing her, and to a real extent they were -- although, of course, to another extent they weren't. It's almost impossible for us to conceive of a time when there wasn't a female sexual icon in our popular culture. When Madonna hit, everyone said she was doing Marilyn Monroe, and when Monroe hit, everyone said she was Harlow all over again. But when Bow hit there was no precedent. It's almost impossible to imagine what that must have been like. She wasn't able to do what Madonna and Monroe and Harlow did, even when they were doing it on an unconscious level -- which was to look at a predecessor and say, this worked for her, this didn't work for her. As far as I am aware, according to everything I've read, Monroe chose not to wear underwear because Jean Harlow didn't wear underwear. And with Madonna -- it almost doesn't bear discussion because it's so obvious what she did: the postmodernity of her saying, "I'm going to show you how calculated my act is." When she does the video for "Material Girl" and we all know it's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," it's not subtext, it's above-text -- she's saying, "I'm Marilyn for you guys." But Bow was so new. That was the cause of her impact, and also the cause of why people turned against her. And the fact that she achieved so much is a testament to her drive. People ask me what the most

incredible part of her story is, and the most incredible part is that she even had a career. There's never been a less educated star or one who came from more dire Dickensian poverty. Think of the rest of the female stars in silent movies -- they all had a mother. I mean, Mary Pickford's mother was such a good negotiator Adolph Zukor was afraid of her. Clara Bow had nobody. She had a father who took her money and went off to the whorehouse, that's all she had. She didn't have an agent, she didn't have a manager. She didn't have anyone guiding her professionally or personally. When you think of her mother hovering over her sleeping body with a knife, or her father raping her, it's amazing she lived. Marilyn Monroe was like Laura Ingalls Wilder by comparison. And I think the whole Bow personality is intensely lovable -- you root for her, you really care for her, because she is kind and decent. Despite what other people did to her she never retaliated. The documentary says she was naive, and that's one way of looking at it. But that naivet came out of her generosity of spirit. I mean, Marilyn Monroe keeping Clark Gable waiting on the hot Nevada desert for six hours on "The Misfits" -- Bow didn't speak that language. She had a nervous breakdown because she was upset about holding up production. Watching the documentary, I thought: Harlow died at 26, Monroe at 36, but Bow lived till she was 60, stayed married and had two kids who still love her to this day. She maintained her dignity, which is really incredible, and she kept her money, which neither Monroe nor Harlow did. Bow was plagued by scandal. Yet celebrities were usually protected from it, even in Monroe's day. How did stories get started like the absurd but ubiquitous one about Bow "taking on" the whole USC Trojans football team? I did find a newspaper report that the Trojans' coach had declared Clara Bow's house off-limits. But what one was to extrapolate from that is a different story. It was really Kenneth Anger in "Hollywood Babylon" [published underground in 1959, above-ground in 1975] that first printed the story, and that book is primarily fiction. There was usually a difference between things that got printed and things that got discussed. But her case was a huge exception, because there was a whole series about her in a tabloid called the Coast Reporter that was unprecedented and hasn't been matched since, and that led to an obscenity trial that preceded the "Ulysses" trial by three years. This man accused her of bestiality and drug addiction and incest and insanity and lesbianism and venereal disease. One of the issues concluded by saying, "You know, Clara, you'd be better off killing yourself." It never happened before, and it never happened since; the guy went to federal prison for eight years, to do hard labor. But the fact that he had printed that stuff showed how far her reputation had gone. Here's how I interpret how it worked in those days. If it got out in the community, it gave the local press -- and by extension the chains they were all part of, like the Hearst papers -- permission to print things that otherwise they never would have. Because they heard so many more outrageous things about her, what they were printing was still worse than what they'd print about anyone else. Even the fan magazines -- they might have used schoolmarm language, but people understood what they were saying. In the documentary you see one with Clara on the cover and the headline, "Quit pickin' on me!" -- mocking her language as well as showing that she's being harassed. And they tell you why she's being harassed, but they don't tell you that any of the scandals are untrue, so in a way they acknowledge them. They say, "It's because of her background, it's because she's so young, it's because she's a motherless child, it's because she didn't have any guidance." She was crucified by the press, but also by her own public demeanor. She talked about breaking her engagements, about trying to choose between Victor Fleming and Gary Cooper and Gilbert Roland: "Well, Vick-ie mothered me, but Gary was a big bashful boy." Everyone knew what a euphemism "engagement" was for her. When I started the book I was skeptical about the coarseness of her reported

language. But when I interviewed the actresses she worked with and Tui Bow (her stepmother and pal), they all said, "That's how she talked!" She'd compare sizes of her lovers and that kind of stuff -- unheard of in those days, especially in public. Esther Ralston said, "She used to come on the set and love to shock me." After Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish -- who, as you write, played Victorian heroines -- to project something that was groundbreaking and individual, didn't a woman have to be sexually adventurous on-screen? What other avenues of expression were open to her as an actress? Without her looks what else would Clara have had to offer? That's why Elaina Archer, one of the show's producers, picked that clip from "Dangerous Curves" -- Clara's character looking in the mirror and saying, "You did it yourself." Elaina thought it symbolized Clara's life and career. She was totally self-made. She dubbed herself a working girl, and she was -- being a star was her job. She called her fans her "wonderful fan friends"; they had helped anoint her the It girl and she was going to do the best she could to live up to that title. And by doing so she broke herself, or was broken. Because in the history of this business there has never been anyone so viciously persecuted. Most people in Hollywood were burying their past; she was exhuming hers. They were doing everything behind closed doors, and she was talking to the press. Esther Ralston told me a story on herself that I thought revealed a lot about Clara and Hollywood. She and Clara were shooting "Children of Divorce" and the day they wrapped Esther was having a big party. Esther was very proper -- blond, petite, pretty -- and she lived in a big mansion. And everyone in Hollywood was invited -- that is, all the right people. So Esther was getting dressed in the dressing room and Clara walked by and lingered in the doorway and said, "You're having a party, ain't cha, Esther?" And Esther said, as if it had just hit her, "Oh Clara, would you like to come?" And Clara Bow stood in the doorway and said, "Oh, no, I know you don't want to invite me." This is the biggest star in Hollywood -- and she's a pariah to the point where no one even pretended to accept her. And Esther liked her. I mean, there are plenty of people around who don't like the big female stars today, but they sure put on a great act.
salon.com | June 10, 1999

http://archive.salon.com/ent/col/srag/1999/06/10/bow/index.html

TO BELIEVE IN WOMEN __WHAT LESBIANS HAVE DONE FOR AMERICA -- A HISTORY

BY LILLIAN FADERMAN HOUGHTON MIFFLIN NONFICTION 434 PAGES
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BY NORAH VINCENT
June 24, 1999 | Lillian Faderman's "To Believe in Women" is a classic example of what PC neologists call "herstory." It's lesbian history plucked out of obscurity and plunked down center stage -- sort of the dyke's equivalent of one of those Budweiser commercials where you land on an island populated entirely by Amazons, except this time they're all wearing blue stockings instead of string bikinis. You get to pretend for a while that at one time practically every formidable woman in America was gay, and if you're a dyke, it kinda makes you feel normal for about 10 minutes. If you're not a dyke, of course, the experience won't mean much to you, and there's nothing about Faderman's prose that would otherwise entice you to make the leap onto planet Lesbos. But then again, Faderman, who has made a career out of writing lesbian herstory, isn't slaving away in the archival trenches because she wants to give you a good time. She's out to leave a record of a small but very real part of American life that, until a little over a decade ago, had never found its way into print, except distortedly in sexology manuals written by crackpots like Havelock Ellis and Richard von KrafftEbing. In this regard Faderman is an admirably unselfish scholar. Like her previous books ("Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present," "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America"), "To Believe in Women" is a thorough and laudable piece of work that should stand up well in the eyes of future historians and curious lay people. Because "lesbian" is not a term anyone would have recognized before World War I, Faderman concerns herself chiefly with what she is careful to call "women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose chief sexual and/or affectional and domestic behaviors would have been called 'lesbian' if they had been observed in the years after 1920." She separates her various influential lesbians into four groups: suffragettes, social welfare pioneers, educators and professionals. Of the suffragettes, Faderman writes: "From its inception, women's fight for the vote was largely led by women who loved other women ... Feminism was the theory, and lesbianism was the practice." Here, she meticulously reconstructs Susan B. Anthony's relationship with fellow suffragette Emily Gross; Women's Christian Temperance Union president Frances Willard's romantic cohabitation with Anna Gordon, a fellow activist, and subsequently with Kate Jackson, a locomotive heiress; the numerous passionate relationships of activist Anna Howard Shaw, onetime president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with women; and the intimacy of Carrie Chapman Catt, founder of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, with fellow activist Mollie Hay. In her section on social welfare pioneers, Faderman documents the lesbian attachments of Jane Addams, founder of the famous settlement house called Hull House. She begins: "Addams was responsible for awakening America's social conscience. That being so, how could she have been a lesbian?" By examining Addams' private correspondence, Faderman reveals the decidedly romantic quality of her subject's domestic partnerships with Ellen Starr (the co-founder of Hull House) and, later, with Mary Rozet

Smith (a benefactor of Hull House). She likewise makes the case for lesbianism with early 20th century social reformer Frances Kellor. In her last two sections, Faderman continues in this vein, identifying as "inverts" (to use Havelock Ellis' term) a host of less famous venturers, including various female academics, women's-college presidents, doctors and other professionals. This will bore you quickly if you're not an enthusiast, but you can pick up a few spicy factoids along the way to keep yourself occupied. The most memorable and amusing tidbit is Faderman's citation of a hilariously clever term for female homosexuality coined by the Hearst newspapers in the 1940s; the half-closeted lesbians among you can drop it into conversation. The next time you're at a stuffy cocktail party and somebody asks you if you have a boyfriend or a husband, you can say, "Nah, I'm in the doll racket."
salon.com | June 24, 1999

http://archive.salon.com/books/review/1999/06/24/faderman/

Ceci N'est Pas Surrealism, Even if you don't know Surrealism,

it knows you. By Carol Kino, Posted Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2002, at 11:02 AM PT short tour of Surrealist art. Click here for a

Since September, Surrealist exhibitions seem to be cropping up everywhere: in big surveys in London, New York, San Francisco, and soon, Paris, and in countless smaller gallery shows. Perhaps you feel that life in those and other cities has grown surreal enough already. But there's a major difference between the little-s and big-S surrealisms: Our everyday use of the term shows how much we owe to the artistic movement of the same name, but it also glosses over its aims and accomplishments. If nothing else, the current explosion of historical Surrealism may help clarify the matter. Even those who know something about Surrealism (the movement) often get it somewhat muddled. Because the best-known Surrealists are Salvador Dal (he of the melting watches) and Ren Magritte (famed for "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and men in bowler hats), many believe today that their goal was to concoct wacky, fantastical imagery. Au contraire. Like many early 20th-century art movements, Surrealism aimed to revolutionize life and art bothin this case, by accessing the subconscious and recording the results. Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe a spontaneous verbal creation one that was beyond, or "sur," reality. In the next few years, several creative types vied to expand the term into a full-fledged movement that would incarnate the Zeitgeist. But the one who won out was Andr Breton, a minor poet and surgeon who published his first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924. In it, Breton denounced "the reign of logic" and applauded Picasso and Freud (whose work at that stage was barely known in France). He gave Surrealism a historical pedigree, which included the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud. He also delineated the many methods he and his friends had used to expand their minds, such as falling into a hypnotic trance or practicing automatic writing (made by penning whatever words came into their heads). Breton's own automatic writing, some of which he included, drew on other flotsam and jetsam of the times, such as advertising slogans and the ravings of shell-shocked soldiers that he'd treated at a sanatorium during the Great War. In fact, Surrealism, together with its precursor, Dada, is generally regarded as a reaction to the climate of despair that surrounded World War I, when it seemed as though Europe's social and technological advances had culminated in nothing greater than its own self-destruction. With Dada, which began in New York and Zurich, artists protested with "actions" and other activities designed to disrupt the status quo (like Marcel Duchamp's classic gambitdisplaying a urinal as art). Surrealism, which began in Paris, took this radical impulse in a more positive and creative direction. Surrealism was more of a religion or philosophy than an artistic style. Its artistsincluding Dal, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and the poets Jacques Prvert and Paul Eluard, among othersvalued any technique that would allow them to make work automatically, the better to freely associate and thereby reach into the collective unconscious. Collage was a favored method. So was Exquisite Corpse, derived from a party game: One person would begin a drawing or a sentence, cover it, and pass it on to others to be continued and completed. They also developed many other automatic methods, like decalcomania, in which watercolor was pressed between two pieces of paper to make a Rorschach-like blot, and frottage, a pencil-on-paper rubbing of an object to which one felt attracted. The sexualized nature of some of this terminology was no accident, for the Surrealists were notably active on that front, too. In their lexicon, desire, the open relationship, the chance encounter, and the mnage trois (or more) loom large, often as an avenue to self-revelation. (Breton's book Nadja, for instance, which documents an intense affair, begins with the words "Who am I?") What's curious, though, is that these relationships were the opposite of casual: Desire was frequently accompanied by love, which often led to marriage. And in many cases, these unions lasted for years, albeit in a somewhat untraditional fashion.

But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Surrealism was that it was open to allso long as Breton, its rather autocratic leader, approved. Poets and booksellers made collages; photographers made paintings; painters and sculptors made films and played around with word games. Perhaps because of Breton's medical background, the movement also had a quasi-scientific bent: Its first office was called "The Central Bureau of Surrealist Research," to which the public was invited to voice their views and find out more. They even passed out advertising fliers that bore slogans like "Parents! Tell your children your dreams" and "If you love love, you'll love Surrealism." By the 1930s, Surrealism had spread throughout most of Europe, with a particularly active chapter in Prague. In the 1940s, after World War II began, many of its adherents decamped for America and Mexico, where the movement continued to thrive until Breton's death in Paris in 1966. Art professionals are becoming hot on Surrealism because this extraordinarily long-running movement can now be seen as part of 20th-century art historyand also, perhaps, because it was so all-pervasive that it has never quite gotten its due. Surrealism, we now realize, prefigured Abstract Expressionism, 1960s Happenings, 1970s performance artjust about everything, in short, from Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to the 1980s porn-star-turned-performance-artist Annie Sprinkle. Many of the young British artists included in Charles Saatchi's "Sensation" show are clearly reworking Surrealist concerns. Even the ineffectual, so-called "political" art that we saw too much of in the early 1990s has a Surrealist precedent: Before the war, many of Breton's followers protested fascism with shows, leaflets, and "actions" designed to awaken Europe to the enemy within. Yet the truly fascinating thing about Surrealism is that American cultural life as we know it today would not be possible without it. Most of our visual culture, including music videos, television, and advertising, remains permeated by its typically disjunctive imagery, its knee-jerk desire to shock, and its fixation upon sexuality and the subconscious. Tabloid front pages, with their dummied-up composite photographs, frequently resemble Surrealist collages. Movies, too, owe much to the movement: The orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut recalls a famous Surrealist costume party, to which guests came naked from chest to thigh, as well as the elaborate masks concocted by Argentinian Surrealist Leonor Fini (also said to have inspired Pauline Rage's Story of O). And at the Metropolitan Museum show, I was astonished to see a painting by the Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez that depicted a woman caught in an "electrosexual" sewing machine; it's horribly reminiscent of the girl-in-a-meat-grinder idea that graced that notorious Hustler magazine cover. The Surrealists helped to popularize Freud: Our love of therapy, self-knowledge, personal autonomy, and the child within probably could not have advanced so far without them. They also helped promote what used to be called "exploring my sexuality." At times, reading movement histories, it's easy to believe that the story is set in 1970s-era San Francisco. "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" is a semiSurrealist statement. So, perhaps, is the bumper sticker that enjoins us to "challenge authority" and the mandate "go with the flow." They're also responsible for popularizing the game Truth or Consequences. What's even more surprising is that the Surrealists may well be responsible for the most purportedly rational aspect of the modern world: our obsession with polls. Starting in 1928, they began holding roundtable discussions, sending each other surveys, filling out questionnaires, and otherwise probing each other's opinions on subjects like love, sexuality, the chance encounter, and the striptease. They even discussed impotence, multiple partners, "clitoral" versus "vaginal" orgasms, and how they felt about women who faked them. (Because these discussions were open only to men, perhaps they weren't so revolutionary after all.) This happened nearly 10 years before statisticians like George Gallup began to quantify public-opinion gathering as a science and nearly three decades before Masters and Johnson started their grand study of human sexual relations. Of course, in recent months, we have come to value the common good over individualism and are perhaps more bent on rediscovering humanist values rather than challenging what's left of the status quo. Curiously enough, however, Breton foretold this, too. In 1960, he reflected: "The sickness that the world exhibits today differs from the one exhibited in the 1920s. ... In France, for example, the mind was

threatened back then with coagulation, whereas today it's threatened with dissolution. ... It's perfectly obvious that such a situation calls for different reactions from today's youth."
http://www.slate.com/id/2061761

Desire unbound, The surrealists were funny, poetic and deeply transgressional all at the
same time.
By Graham Joyce Oct. 5, 2001 | London -- That furry cup, when first exhibited in New York in 1936, caused an absolute sensation. Of all the surrealist art on show, this was the one that got the town talking. Well, it was a good one: funny, poetic and deeply transgressional all at the same time. It hit the spot. After all, Meret Oppenheim's "Object," a cup, saucer and spoon covered in gazelle fur, is so surprising that its perversity is undermined by its brilliantly playful quality. And it's still funny. But is it still poetic and is it still a transgression? In the U.K. there is a television comedian called Ali G who, confounding correctness, has made it his trademark to ask serious-minded lesbians if it is "good to drink from the furry cup." Surrealism has long since found its way into the music-hall joke. The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot. Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny -- or not so tiny -- leap of the imagination is made. And what does it better than sex? We've been educated out of the shock of surrealism, and as for the sexual frisson so central to this art movement, it sometimes seems that there isn't a lot left to surface. Unless it runs to the very dark. Which brings us to "Desire Unbound." It is a wonderful, bulging compendium and, as the title suggests, the focus is on the sexual response. The surrealists saw desire as the hidden voice, the key to the true nature of the inner self. This brilliantly curated exhibition now open at London's Tate Modern through December (and traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Feb. 6 to May 12, 2002) offers a kind of essay on the unfolding nature of the artists' preoccupations with desire. But in that there is a problem. A series of chambers, differently mooded with subtle lighting, suggest different states so that the visitor walks through a mentalistic universe. The entrance contains a spectacular hanging of that great icon of the movement, "Men Shall Know Nothing of This" by Max Ernst. The work is suspended uniquely in a black light chamber, the visitor kept at a distance, peering in, while a heartbeat throbs violently. It promises the excitement of a dream to follow, but it doesn't quite deliver. Each chamber carries an enticing label such as "The Bride Stripped Bare," "The Accommodations of Desire and Her Throat Cut," and the exhibits are conceptually grouped. But sometimes it's a bit of a stretch to go with the concept. It's a rationalization of swinging emotional states: clever stuff, but strangely at odds with the search for the unconscious impulses and weird poetic crossovers that surrealism is all about. Maybe the designers of the exhibition were straining a little too hard here, not entirely trusting the art to do its job. In some ways the exhibition is more rewarding if you forget about the conceptual grouping and wander the moody halls making your own connections. The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream. The designers have worked hard on trying to create a distortion. In the chamber called "Before the Mirror" there are two translucent mirror doorways. Curator Jennifer Mundy describes their function. "People will come in and out of focus in the mirrors because of the way the light is arranged, and that's a metaphor for desire: You want to see but you can't see. Desire involves not getting what you want as much as achieving the object of your desire. This is an example of the ways we have tried to address the irrational."

Through the distortions one can find clarity of purpose. It's great to see in this comprehensive assembly work absolutely seminal to the surrealists, like Giorgio de Chirico's mysterious painting "The Child's Brain." The story goes that Andre Breton saw this painting in a gallery window from a bus. So struck was he that he got off the bus to go and inspect it, and later bought it, displaying it prominently in his apartment for most of his life. It certainly is a painting that exudes a sense of repressed sexuality and withheld paternal love, and gloriously admits to so many interpretations that it defies reduction. The exhibition is crowded with gems. There are many of surrealism's greatest hits here, along with a lot more obscure material, and a considerable collection of pamphlets, publications, poetry and photographs connected with the movement. There is a copy of Robert Desnos' booklet "La Liberte ou L'amour," published in 1927 and, of course, censored. It stands open at his discourse on the Sperm Drinker's Club. A translation from the French reads: "The Sperm Drinker's Club is a vast organisation. Women are paid by it to masturbate the handsomest men throughout the world. A special brigade is dedicated to the quest for the female liqueur ... Each harvest is stored in a small phial made of crystal, glass or silver, meticulously labelled and despatched with the utmost care to Paris. The founders of the club, top occultists, met for the first time at the beginning of the Restoration (1815). And since then passed down from father to son the society has continued with the dual aegis of love and liberty." There they go again, those top occultists. Salvador Dali is well represented here -- perhaps overly represented because the Tate owns so many of his famous works. Some of the pieces have been shoehorned into the concept, and he is one of the surrealists I least associate with Eros in the forces he conjures. For example, his "The Accommodations of Desires," from which one of the conceptual chambers takes its title, seems, like much of his work, to be figured around neurosis, disgust and emotions of anti-desire. But Matisse, Man Ray and Delvaux and all the usual suspects are gathered for the party, photographed in full brigade turnout, with and without the husbands and wives they seemed to share in pursuit of the primal force generating surrealist art. You can even play the game of detecting "who went insane after sleeping with whom" in the hope of tracking down the original spirochete of madness if that sort of thing interests you. The exhibition breaks exciting ground in the final two chambers, particularly with the work of some of the later and rather less-feted women practitioners. Surrealism was fond of casting women as muse creatures, as enigmatic child-women or alluring bird figures. Yet from the mid 1930s a new generation of women artists were attracted to the movement, and the self-representations move from the sexually passive to the active, to shamanistic and transformative, event threatening forms. Dorothea Tanning's "Birthday" is a self-portrait in which she appears bare-breasted, almost Amazonian, a scary enchantress with a skirt of swirling naked torsos and a demonic familiar spirit at her feet. Leonora Carrington's "Cat Woman" sexualizes ancient Egyptian statuary. Eileen Agar's blindfolded head "Angel of Anarchy" evokes a similar spooky power, as does work by Toyen and Frida Kahlo. It is clear that these women artists were working with very different elements, emotionally. (In fact Kahlo was contemptuous of the male-dominated movement.) Certainly the formulas for depicting desire are darker, and somehow more visceral. Jennifer Mundy talks of "a sense of imminence" of this period, in which something new entered the movement. "From the 1940s," she says, "the movement was very much connected to ideas of magic. Though many of the surrealists were uncomfortable with this turn as they felt it offered no answer to questions of Stalinism, of communism, of the atomic bomb. Though Breton himself said in 1944 that it was time to value women's ideas over those of men, which he described as bankrupt." These works command a shudder of recognition that has somehow deserted many of the other, more famous, pieces, which are perhaps worn out by familiarity. Jennifer Mundy gently disagrees. "Even those

who know the images well through reproductions will be drawn by the tactile, physical qualities of the exhibits. And the themed nature of the exhibition will itself have disruptive qualities." She goes further. "The aim of surrealism was never to be provocative for the sake of provocation only. It was to disrupt people's way of thinking about the world and I think that challenge still poses questions for us today." The key to understanding the surrealists, and this exhibition, lies in the way that the surrealists saw desire as being the thing that made the imagination tick. Perhaps this is why there is a relationship between eroticism and the act of thinking itself. The imagination is not unchained at all: It is chained by desire. The air of the visitors to the Tate while I was there was oddly muted, casual even. I did not detect the frisson, the sense of transgression one might associate with an exhibition like this. Certainly the surrealists cannot be viewed as thoroughly modern. Their preoccupations might even be said to be romantically heterosexual in character and do not confront darker matters of desire surfaced over the course of the last century -- such as rape, prostitution and pedophilia. Perhaps it is no longer possible to witness a public expression of sudden insight into the dark movements of desire in the human psyche. When a barrage of aggressive modern media has made public so much sexual content it is perhaps not surprising. Even the merchandising in the hall outside the exhibition offers a Dali Lobster Telephone Book and a surreal PVC shopping bag. Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box. After all, the furry cup is on permanent exhibition in New York. Nevertheless, this exhibition is unmissable. The sense of a movement sideways since the inception of the surrealist movement is unmissable, too: Still we strain at the bonds.
http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2001/10/05/surreal/

Anarchy in the U.S.

A century of fighting the man.

By David Greenberg, Posted Friday, April 28, 2000, at 12:00 AM PT The vernacular meaning of "anarchy" is something akin to "all hell breaking loose." And judging by the video images of last week's chaotic protests by anarchists against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, that definition would seem to make some sense. The scattered demonstrations; the desultory clashes with the police; the impish posturing of the twentysomething activists; the failure of any single message to captivate the news mediaall this led intellectually impatient observers to conclude that today's anarchist protesters are nothing but ideologically aimless malcontents, rebels without a cause. The "anti-globalization left," right-wing pundit David Frum wrote in the New York Times, lacks "a clear and coherent vision of a better world." But this is a mischaracterization, resting partly on a confusion of the lay and philosophical meanings of anarchism. Anarchists don't preach pandemonium. They have a relatively coherent (if fanciful) ideology, which holds that if people in society organize themselves without rulers or laws, natural human instincts for altruism and cooperation will bring about greater freedom, happiness, and equality. Anarchism thus defined has a long pedigree in America, dating at least to the Revolution. Beyond opposing formal government, most anarchists also reject capitalism in favor of a cooperative or communal method of allocating goods and land. (One exception is so-called "individualist anarchists"essentially libertarianswho consider private property a right.) In 1840, the French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon wrote that property earned without labor (interest) is "theft" and should be forbidden. Other anarchists went further, to argue for abolishing all private property. And certainly since the Industrial Revolution, anarchists have, like other radicals, denounced the vast, state-supported power of corporations. Anarchists have a lot in common with anti-capitalists in general, and that's one reason they can protest globalization alongside Trotskyists, protectionists, and the motley leftist brigade.

ike good left-wing schismatics, though, anarchists have always underscored their critical

differences from other revolutionariesa point lost on critics like Frum, who lump all leftist movements together. The differences date at least to the "First International" of 1864, the original party of European and American anti-capitalists. In 1872, anarchists in the International frustrated that socialists and Communists dominated the showsplit off to form their own group. Where the Communists waved the red flag, the anarchists took black as their color, which it remains today. (This isn't to say all anarchists are likeminded; they themselves have been divided among [at least] six factions.) During the Gilded Age, the wretched plight of laborers fed anti-capitalist movements, anarchism among them, especially in America's industrial hubs. Chicago in particular became an anarchist hotbed, hosting, for example, the 1881 Congress of the Black International, which convened delegates from 14 cities. Chicago's anarchist leaders were of the syndicalist or Communist variety, often espousing violence in the name of fighting capitalist oppression. To widespread consternation, the Chicago journal the Alarm printed instructions on how to use dynamite and published other provocative summonses to terrorism.

n 1886, Chicago's anarchists squared off against state and capital in anarchism's moment of

greatest notoriety: the Haymarket Square Riot. At the beginning of May, some 40,000 workers were striking for an eight-hour day. The strikes rapidly led to protests, the protests to battles with the police. On May 3, police fired on strikers who were menacing the strikebreakers at McCormick Harvester, and several strikers were injured. Labor leaders then convened a mass meeting for the following evening at the city's Haymarket Square. As the peaceful rally was concluding, the police summarily demanded it be shut down. In the ensuing moments, someoneit was never learned whothrew a dynamite bomb toward a cluster of cops, who responded with sprays of gunfire. Seven policemen died, and several workingmen were injured. Public judgment swiftly fingered the anarchist leaders for punishment, and in a matter of months eight of them, in a group trial marked by corruption and impropriety, were convicted of conspiracy or other crimes. Four, including Albert Parsons, publisher of the Alarm, were hanged; one killed himself in prison. The others were pardoned six years later by Illinois' new governor, John Peter Altgeldwhose political career ground to a halt.

he Haymarket trials radicalized, among others, America's most

famous anarchist, Emma Goldman. A Russian Jewish immigrant, Goldman left a Rochester, N.Y., sweatshop at age 20 for New York City, where she met a charismatic young revolutionary named Alexander Berkman. For the next 20 years, the couple shocked the nation with their rhetoric and escapadesBerkman for trying to kill the industrialist Henry Frick, Goldman as a radical woman who lectured on not just anarchism but birth control, female suffrage, and the plays of Henrik Ibsen. She also defended Leon Czolgosz, the deranged man who assassinated President McKinley in 1901. (Czolgosz identified himself as an anarchist, but he had no ties to any movement.) In 1919, Berkman and Goldman were deported to the Soviet Union for interfering with the World War I draft. True to her principles, the repatriated Goldman pronounced Lenin's government more repressive than that of the United States. The last well-known appearance of anarchists on the national scene was the murder trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. As every schoolchild knows, Sacco and Vanzetti were prosecuted during the Red Scare for the murder of two Massachusetts shoe-company employees. Their trial, which became a cause clbre, was marred by false testimony, doctored evidence, and a judge who openly sneered at the defendants' politics. In 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, over the protests of liberal society.

ince the '20s, anarchism has never recaptured the prominence it had at the turn of the

century, yet it has retained a solid marginal appeal. The Catholic activist Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker in 1933, identified as an anarchist for many years, as have other religious pacifists from World War I through Vietnam. During the 1960s, Paul Goodman, author of the influential Growing Up Absurd, and Murray Bookchin, a former labor activist, were leaders in seeking to combine anarchism with environmentalism, education reform, and other New Left causes. Some scholars have also described the libertarianism of novelist Ayn Rand and others as an intellectual descendent of the individualist anarchism of the 19th century.

If anarchism has assumed different guises in American politics, its adherents have had one thing in common: They have consistently won renown less for their ideas than for their martyrdom. In all of the above episodesthe Haymarket affair, Emma Goldman, Sacco and Vanzettithe anarchists in question were hardly models of good behavior. Some Chicago anarchists preached or undertook violence; Goldman apologized for an assassin; Sacco (though probably not Vanzetti) may well have been guilty of murder. And yet history has been kind to them all, treating them as martyrs. Historians now generally agree that the Haymarket trial was a travesty of justice. The Red Scare prosecutions of Goldman, Berkman, and others are widely considered a shameful breach of free speech. And 50 years after their execution, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis declared Aug. 23, 1977, "Sacco and Vanzetti Day," an occasion to atone for prejudice against foreigners and unpopular political views. History is most interesting for its ironies: here, the fact that the anarchists' enemythe state contributed more than anyone to making them martyrs. Today's anarchists do have a critique to make of global capitalism. Trivializing them runs the risk of making them martyrs and giving them a glamour they could never otherwise obtain. http://slate.msn.com/id/81276

First Fig (published June 1918) My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends It gives a lovely light!

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. Her mother, Cora, raised her three daughters on her own after asking her husband to leave the family home in 1899. Cora encouraged her girls to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of music and literature from an early age. In 1912, at her mother's urging, Millay entered her poem "Renascence" into a contest: she won fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year, bringing her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar. There, she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. She also developed intimate relationships with several women while in school, including the English actress Wynne Matthison. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women. Millay, whose friends called her "Vincent," then moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where she led a notoriously Bohemian life. She lived in a nine-foot-wide attic and wrote anything she could find an editor willing to accept. She and the other writers of Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, "very, very poor and very, very merry." She joined the Provincetown Players in their early days, and befriended writers such as Witter Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell, who asked for Millay's hand in marriage. Millay, who was openly bisexual, refused, despite Dell's attempts to persuade her otherwise. That same year Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923 her fourth volume of poems, The Harp Weaver, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman (1927). Millay married Eugen Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist and widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew quite famous. According to Millay's own accounts, the couple acted liked two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" throughout their

twenty-six-year marriage, which ended with Boissevain's death in 1949. Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C070308

Lyric Opera, What Courtney Love mightve learned from Millay

and Dickinson.
By Meghan O'Rourke, Updated Monday, Oct. 29, 2001, at 5:48 PM PT

Emily Dickinson

The reclusive Emily Dickinson used to hide behind a parlor door whenever Mabel Loomis Todd, one of her few confidantes, visited. From there, keeping her face hidden, she'd hand over a glass of wine, and, if she had one, a new poem. But Dickinson also spoke with a boldness that led Thomas Higginson, her future editor, to comment on her very wantonness of overstatement. In 1890, four years after her death, her literary executors published a volume of the poems she'd left behind, accompanied by a daguerreotype of a fraillooking girl dressed in a white ruffled shirt. The public loved the poems. But they were as intrigued by the poet: Who was this retiring woman who wrote with such intensity and passion? As Archibald MacLeish put it some 70 years later, Most of us are half in love with this girl." That photo of Dickinson, we now know, was touched up, because her brother and sister thought the Dickinson looked "too plain": In the original, there was no white ruffled shirt and no wispy curls, only a somber girl with straight hair in a black dress.

This fall brings three new biographies of two female poets: Alfred Habeggers carefully researched biography of Dickinson and last months pair on Edna St. Vincent MillayNancy Milfords substantive Savage Beauty and Daniel Mark Epsteins brisk What Lips My Lips Have Kissed. The Millay biographies received a lot of publicity: The New York Times Book Review put them on its cover; Vanity Fair serialized Milfords book. But whats odd about this is that Millays poetry is no longer widely readunlike Dickinson'sand neither Millay biography makes a serious call for its reconsideration. Reviewers have debated whether her poetry is of enduring merit, but most have done so halfheartedly. So why does she continue to hold our attention? Millay had a genius for self-presentation: At least one reporter of the time called her the ultimate embodiment of the poet-girl. She had highly public love affairs and maintained a theatrical sense of style, dressing in gowns from Bergdorf Goodman and a cloak, like Lord Byron. These affairsand her unwillingness to stay with any one manexplicitly became her subject matter. Her poem First Fig was a kind of Smells Like Teen Spirit for the 1920s and made her a cult heroine for Jazz Age girls tasting the first fruit of sexual liberation: My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night/ But ah, my foes, and oh/ my friendsit gives a lovely light. Early on, she understood that she could use looks and wit as erotic currency. As a teen-ager, she entered a compromising correspondence with a judge of an important poetry contest. When he failed to deliver her the first prize, she attempted emotional blackmail: My mother is crying. Did you ever hear your mother cry as if her heart would break? It is a strange and terrible sound. I think I shall never forget it. In college, she tried to seduce a well-connected older poet: I have got a beautiful speaking voice & somehow I knew I could really interest him with that quicker than with almost anything else. In fact, she managed to use her voice to gain a national audience: In 1932, she began recording a weekly radio broadcast, the first of its kind. It helped her sell some 50,000 copies of Fatal Interview, a book about a failing love affair, at the height of the Depression. Louis Untermeyer said, There was no other voice like hers in America. Edmund Wilson, an estranged lover, wrote to tell her how much the recordings of her poems meant to him.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Her recordings remain extraordinary today, in part because they so clearly reveal Millays notion that being a poet meant performing. Nancy Milford implies that newspaper depictions of Millay as a fragile, unearthly girl-poet made her become a fragile, unearthly girl-poet and led to her drug addiction and death. But the recordings suggest that Millay was invested in the publics notion of herand had an idea

of what that notion should belong before the public knew it should have one. After all, this is a young woman who once explained her capricious behavior by saying to her mother, You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. Its only that. Theres a long tradition of lyric poets who were as invested in their persona as in their poems, among them Byron and Hart Crane, a rough contemporary of Millays, and many of the French lyric poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and others. The difference between Millay and those poets was that their persona was born of an aesthetic, an idea about how to write that implied an idea about how to live (or vice versa). Take the French Symbolist poet Grard de Nerval, who was once found parading in the Palais-Royal with a lobster on the end of a pale blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and knows the secrets of the sea). Millays persona, on the other hand, was born of a desire for material transformation, not of an aesthetic: She wanted out of the impoverished, socially limited life she led in Camden, Maine. She wanted not to have to keep house for her two younger sisters while her mother worked as nurse in a neighboring town. She wanted new dresses and witty new men. And her persona gave her what she was after: a fistful of lovers and more sales of an individual volume than nearly any poet since. Where Millays life is marked by public misbehavior, Dickinsons is suffused with private mystery. She spent most of it in her family home in Amherst, Mass., but there's a lot we don't know about her. We do know that her intellectual curiosity was almost too susceptible to the impression otherparticularly male minds made upon her. In the early 1860s she appears to have suffered a personal trauma of erotic or religious nature (perhaps intensified by the uncertainty of the Civil War). From the time she is in her early 20s, she writes with some playfulness of her own vulnerability: "In thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane. Her impulse to hide away resembles a form of self-preservationless an aesthetic than a prescription. Whether or not Millay took her cue from the hue and cry surrounding Dickinson's posthumous publication (which began two years before Millay was born and continued until the 1930s), she set out, during her lifetime, to cultivate a poetic persona for all it was worthwhich turned out to be a great deal. If Millay's persona has eclipsed her poetry, she is complicit in this. Seclusion allowed Dickinson to pursue poetry single-mindedly, but Millay depended on attention to feed her work. You could say that being a poet was, for Millay, a way into the world, never an expression of withdrawal from itthis was what "Renascence," the poem that made her name, was all about: a girl emerging from self-imprisonment. This doesn't mean that her poetry wasnt important to Millay; it was. And of course she had ideas about what she wanted it to be: accessible to a wide audience, rooted in an American tradition of highly musical, syntactically simple lyrics. But her ideas about it were never avant-garde, and in comparison to the Bohemian ideal of her life they now seem curiously conventional. (Especially given that she lived while Ezra Pound and the Modernists were renovating cultural notions of poetry and calling for a readership of no more than fifteen people.) Today Millay looks more like Courtney Love than T.S. Eliotrenowned for her performance, not her poetic achievement. But this is, in its own way, an accomplishment. Even Sylvia Plath, who has been held up in our era as the tortured, brilliant apogee of Poet-Girldom, had her reputation made after her death (or by her death)somewhat like Dickinson. Millay made it happen during her lifetime. She was the first to sense that a long-held American idea of work could be applied to art, as well: specifically, that a strong performance will lead to material success. The fact that were still throwing roses shows how right she was.
http://www.slate.com/id/2057858

The Last of the Anarchists, A working-class hero passes away.

By Paul Berman, Posted Wednesday, Sept. 25, 1996, at 12:30 AM PT

There used to be many thousands of Italian-speaking anarchists in America-people from Sicily or southern Italy who came to America, worked in bluecollar trades, and read newspapers with names like Subversive Chronicle, The Call of the Refractory Ones, and The Hammer. The Italian anarchists played an impassioned role in the American labor movement in the 1910s, and in the 1920s, two of them, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, became still more notable as victims of American injustice. That was pretty much the high point for Italian-speaking anarchism in America. The old-fashioned Italian-American anarchists never entirely disappeared. Even after the last of the newspapers folded, in 1972, there was always someone who could stand up in front of a room full of people and explicate the old ideas--until now. For in June of this year, a fine old man named Valerio Isca died at the age of 95, and Italian-American anarchism lost its last public voice. What did the Italian anarchists offer to America? The classic explanation was given by John Dos Passos in USA and a couple of his other novels. In Dos Passos' picture of America, Big Business was getting bigger, working people were getting more desperate, and the prospect of a left-wing revolution was getting likelier. But, the America's left-wing movement was likewise going to hell. The cynical Communist champions of dictatorship were getting ever stronger within the left, and the immigrant anarchists and Wobblies (the trade-union anarchists) with their idealistic zeal for freedom were fading into the shadows. But at least the anarchists and Wobblies never gave up their principles. There were always people who refused to be exploited--or to exploit anyone else, who didn't want to be ruled--or to rule over anyone else. The anarchist version of clinging to those high-minded notions was a little unworldly, in Dos Passos' portrait. Yet, he felt for those people. Anyone who has turned the pages of USA, has marveled at Dos Passos' lonely anarchist champion of a doomed working-class ideal. Parkinson's disease made Valerio Isca vibrate almost violently (though it didn't impede his labors as a machinist). His hair was white and wild, his Sicilian accent wobbled in a wide tremolo, and when he stood up to speak, it was impossible to take your eyes off him. He would explain that he wanted a society of solidarity and freedom--and every word radiated emotion. For he was convinced that, as an anarchist, he represented a powerful revolutionary force: that he scattered radical thoughts, and the bourgeoisie reeled in terror; that he spoke, and others gasped. He served in the Italian army during World War I. Afterward, he came to New York and New Jersey, and joined the International Group, the Road to Freedom circle, and a couple of other anarchist groups-working-class organizations with hardly any intellectuals or people with middle-class educations. Those old-time anarchist groups never did acquire a vast influence. It was because of a chink in their reasoning: They could never identify a plausible strategy for getting from the world as it existed to the world of their hopes. The faction around The Call of the Refractory Ones leaned in a terrorist direction (and, in fact, one of that newspaper's readers from the Bronx, Mike Schirru, went to Italy and tried to assassinate Mussolini--and was caught and executed). But Valerio Isca was not a partisan of violence. The faction around The Hammer favored trade unionism. Isca approved. But unionism in America did not point in a revolutionary direction. Still other people favored community-building. Isca participated in two such colonies. One of them, in Stelton, N.J., contained a famous school run on nonauthoritarian principles and was celebrated for its artistic spirit. The other, in Mohegan, N.Y., was more modest. Both the colonies were pleasant enough, if considered as working-class suburbs for people with an imaginative sense of how to live; but neither colony was in the slightest bit subversive. Then came World War II, and Isca and the anarchists had to choose between upholding their revolutionary intransigence or supporting the United States in the war--

and he and probably a good half of the anarchist movement, the people around the anarcho-syndicalist theoretician Rudolf Rocker, came out for the war, which was sensible of them. But in that way the anarchists demoted their tiny revolutionary movement to a philosophical current, even if they stoutly denied doing anything of the sort. "Anarchism at bottom is an ethical philosophy," Valerio Isca told the historian. "When a man realizes that it is immoral to exploit another man and immoral to oppress another man, and when he refuses to do so, that man has become an anarchist, as far as I am concerned." His language was noble--and antique. Who speaks like that today? No one.
http://slate.msn.com/id/3277

The Unreliable Superego, Adam Phillips' revealing new edition

of Freud.
By Adam Kirsch, July 31, 2003

As W.H. Auden wrote in an elegy for Freud, "he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion." Today, Freud's reputation as a scientist is at a low ebb. Psychoanalysis has given way to "therapy" and medication as the best cures for what ails us. Appropriately, however, Freud's achievement has been "repressed" but not banished; like all repressed things, it has returned in a new, disguised form as literature. "Freud as literature" tries to find secular value in a once sacred text.In short, Penguin Classics is treating Freud like the other great imaginative writersFlaubert, Tolstoy, and Melvillein its series. But what does it mean to read Freud as literature rather than as theory? The first books in the New Penguin Freud, published in June, offer some answers. Significantly, the series has started not with major theoretical works like The Interpretation of Dreams or anthropological ones like Totem and Taboo. Instead, the first four books are concrete, practical, and anecdotal: The Schreber Case, The "Wolfman" and Other Cases, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Together, they suggest four ways of approaching Freud as literature. Freud as novelist of manners: Freud believed that he had discovered fundamental truths about the mindlaws and mechanisms that were valid for human beings everywhere. But what strikes a reader today is how richly Freud evokes one particular time and place: Central Europe at the turn of the 20 th century. When Freud mistakes Botticelli for Signorelli in a conversation aboard a train in Herzegovina, we glimpse the vanished cosmopolitan elegance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On the other hand, when he gives a catalog of Jewish jokes, we hear the bittersweet folk humor of a world destroyed by the Nazis. Freud is as much an elegist for these high and low cultures as the great Austrian Jewish novelist Joseph Roth. Meanwhile, the childhood traumas of his patients take place in an haute bourgeois ecosystem, with its nannies and maids and summer villas, that now seems remote as Jane Austen. Freud as literary critic: It is no secret that much of Freud's inspiration came from literaturehis most famous coinage, the Oedipus complex, is an allusion to Sophocles. In his 1916 essay "Some Character Types Met With in Psychoanalytic Work," he turns directly to literary criticism. Drawing on his own clinical work, he offers brilliant insights into Lady Macbethan example of "Those who Founder on Success" and Richard IIIone of those who believe that past injuries have made them "Exceptions" to moral rules. More broadly, however, Freud's approach to jokes, slips of the tongue, dreams, and memories is that of a literary critic. He contends that any "text," from a nightmare to a six-digit number chosen at random, has an "author" in the unconscious; and like a good "close reader," he is always asking why something is expressed in just these words and images. In fact, one might say that Freud's innovation was to treat all of human consciousness as a book, where nothing is written down without a reason. Freud as detective: The secluded study, the thoughtful silences, the brilliant deductive leaps, even the cocaine addictionthere is no mistaking the similarity between Freud and Sherlock Holmes. Someone comes to Freud with a nightmare of six white wolves perched in a tree, or an obsessive fear of horses. The doctor sits in his study, listening quietly as the evidence forms a pattern in his mind, and then triumphantly names the culprit. In Freud's world the guilty party is always the victim himself, wearing the disguise of the unconsciousit is his own lusts and shames that have left him phobic or paranoid. There is another similarity: one often feels with Freud that the solution comes too easily, that convenient evidence is introduced by sleight of hand.

Freud as unreliable narrator: It is very tempting to read Freud as an unreliable narrator, since his theories and conclusions are so often immune to logic. Again and again, he flat-out admits that "I know I shall not convince a single person who does not wish to be convinced" of his theories; as in a cult, one must believe first and understand later. Suspiciously, he seems to pull the same rabbit out of every hat: A full-blown adult paranoiac is suffering from repressed sexual desire for his father. Yet this "unreliability" cannot be a deliberate literary device, since Freud the author and Freud the narrator are identicalevery theory he puts forward is meant with the utmost earnestness. And here is where we reach the limits of "Freud as literature": Freud, unlike Nabokov, would certainly not want to be read with the aesthetic indulgence we give to an imaginative writer. He would be dismayed to discover that, more than 60 years after his death, it is easy for us to enjoy himas long as we don't have to believe him. http://slate.msn.com/id/2086413/

W.E.B. Du Bois, The writer who traveled backward.

By David Greenberg, Posted Friday, April 27, 2001, at 5:30 PM PT

W.E.B. Du Bois is now widely seen as the founding father of the modern fight for black equality. Few people thought that about Du Bois when he died in 1963, at age 95. In the last two years of his life, he had joined the Communist Party, moved to Ghana, and renounced his American citizenship. At his death he was a pariah not just among the establishment powers in his native land, but also, to a degree, among civil rights leaders. While they were gathering for the triumphant 1963 March on Washington, Du Bois was drawing his last breath on the other side of the ocean. But since his death Du Bois has enjoyed a remarkable rehabilitation. His writings, especially his collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903), have been enshrined, by most reckonings, in that nebulous body of must-read literature known as "the canon." In 1987, the Library of America chose him as the first black writer to merit his own volumes. His ideas underpin much thinking about race in America today. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, in a racially progressive Yankee community in Great Barrington, Mass. He attended all-black Fisk University and then Harvard, where he studied under William James and became the school's first African-American Ph.D. Du Bois came to prominence with The Souls of Black Folk, which included an assault on the ideas of Booker T. Washington, the leading black thinker of the day. Washington famously urged blacks to follow a course of self-reliance and accommodation with whitesto trade or postpone their claims to civil rights for the chance to educate themselves in the practical knowledge that would materially better their lives. Du Bois saw Washington's prescription not only as a bad bargain but also as a corrupt one, which rested on a condescending view of black people's capacities and culture. The antagonists' positions in that debate have often been simplified as self-help versus integration. Du Bois, however, championed not just integration but integration on blacks' termsan equality that would not require an African-American "to bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism." As Du Bois elaborated in The Souls of Black Folk, black Americans possessed a "double consciousness" or identity and did not have to choose between being "American" or "Negro" but existed as both, simultaneously. Long before multiculturalism, Du Bois articulated a way of retaining an ethnic identity that did not mean sacrificing full status as an American. The Souls of Black Folk kept Du Bois busy as an activist and scholar for several decades. Committed to complete racial equality, he helped found the NAACP in 1910, and for roughly 25 years he edited its magazine Crisis. His belief in the richness of black culture placed him at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. His book Black Reconstruction in America (1935) upended then-prevalent notions of the post-Civil War Reconstruction and recast it as a noble action led by freed slaves seizing their rights. Decades later, the white historical establishment came around to endorsing his interpretation. Du Bois was prickly, often arrogant, and prone to feuds like the one he picked with Washington. In the 1920s he set himself up as the chief rival to Marcus Garvey and his popular back-to-Africa movement. But Du Bois also provoked liberals. In the 1930s, he fell out with his colleagues in the NAACP, whose campaigns for anti-lynching bills and other measures Du Bois increasingly believed to be too narrow and timid an agenda. Du Bois did not wish to submerge black culture in the fight for equality. He argued that economic segregation was only evil if it involved discrimination and, claimed that in some cases segregation might serve blacks' economic development.

Du Bois reversed the journey of many intellectuals, growing increasingly radical with age. Du Bois became more and more orthodox in his Marxism; he even had kind words for Stalin. Targeted by the government as a subversive, he was stripped of his passport and rendered an outcast. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement, under the leadership of the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was gathering force in its fight against segregation, drawing on the early work, but not the continuing involvement, of Du Bois. Du Bois has become newly prominent because, despite his geriatric dogmatism, his thinking for most of his life was supple and original enough to reconcile what others saw as contradictions. He espoused African identity and American identity, self-improvement and integration, culture and politics. Today, a bouquet of these philosophies flowers among black thinkers and activists. All of them can trace their roots to Du Bois.
http://slate.msn.com/id/104910/