Michael Henderson suggests

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Modernism: The Lure of Heresy

Lives less ordinary

Peter Gay
Heinemann, 640pp, £20,

Rupert Christiansen

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Rupert Christiansen

A more thematic organisation, cutting across conventionally demarcated art forms, might have proved more fruitful. Early Modernism’s fascination with the machine (the Bauhaus, Futurism and Constructivism, minimalist music) could have constituted one coherent section, as could the exploration of the unconscious (surrealism, the monologue interieur, Expressionism). An intriguing aspect of Modernism’s latter phase is the increasingly hectic speed with which the avant-garde has become accommodated into the mainstream. Gay quotes John Cage’s telling remark that ‘if my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not’, but doesn’t seem to want to pick up on its implications.

The most frustrating chapter is devoted to Modernists whose social and political views swung to the authoritarian Right rather than the Left-leaning anarchism or individualistic irresponsibility which was the movement’s norm. This is potentially a field of richly interesting contradiction, not often explored, which someone of Gay’s intellectual cast could usefully have charted, and what he says about T. S. Eliot’s ‘racist’ lectures, After Strange Gods, Charles Ives’s obsession with virility and Knut Hamsun’s Nietzschean idolatry of Hitler is tantalising. But the discussion peters out just when it begins to get interesting. Ten books have been crammed into one here, and the result has the blandly correct superficiality of a series of encyclopedia entries.