Many Modernisms

Robert M. Crunden. Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. xvii + 418 pp. Notes and index. $35.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

Christine Stansell. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. 338pp. Notes and index. $30.00

Even from the self-defined heights of post-modernism, the landscape of modernism has remained a brilliant but puzzling perspective of lights and dark. Obscure, first, because of the word modern: a heavy-laden term that suggests contemporaneity and a shifting but impressive list of intellectual and cultural achievements. Confusing because modernism can and has been applied to art and politics and significantly differing combinations of the two. Confusing because by itself modernism is a term that has defined aspects of culture produced during the first five decades of the twentieth century. And, finally, confusing because modernism's representatives can be selected from a large range of characters and characteristics to exemplify one or another set of definitional requirements, as diverse, almost, as the number of commentators on the subject. If only because so many distinguished groups of participants have called themselves modernists and invoked modernism as their creed, we cannot dismiss this profusion of definitions. To do so would weaken the meaning of post-modernism and introduce a fatal disequilibrium into an already wobbly term which has been used to describe the present. Even more, we would lose one of the most fruitful concepts of "modern" cultural history, a concept that has its useful place, like romanticism or Enlightenment, in our cultural vocabulary.

Neither of the books under consideration here--Christine Stansell's American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century nor Robert M. Crunden's (posthumous) Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism--does anything to halt the luxuriation of the possible meanings of modernism. And both books, in a very general sense, tell a familiar tale of declension. Stansell, who focuses on the first two decades of the twentieth century, folds her narrative into two larger historical cycles: the brilliant rise and tragic crack-up of optimism and experimentalism between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I and the larger shift of American civilization from a production to a consumption ethic, which became sharply visible in these decades. Crunden begins his tale of a "Lost Generation" beginning around 1910 but ending toward the latter part of the 1920s. It is no accident, I think, that both authors allow Malcolm Cowley, that teller of tragic tales about buoyant, experimental living and sober endings, to speak the final words in their books.

But if this is a well-known general pattern invoked by both authors, the larger focus is, in a profound sense, irrelevant to the brilliant arguments that both make in describing the personalities and creative energy that play between familiar goalposts. Even more interesting and important is the fact that Stansell and Crunden seem to be talking about the same historical events, yet the characters, issues, politics, and cultural productions upon which they focus are almost never the same. Certainly, several characters appear in both books (Ezra Pound, Randolph Bourne, Emma Goldman, Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Anderson, for example), but invariably in different shades, as major or minor players in what, between the two books, represents a shifting kaleidoscope of color and nuance. The result illustrates the extreme difficulties and complexities inherent in the term modernism, even while it argues persuasively for the necessity of modernism as a descriptive term. We cannot pare down exactly what modernism means by adopting the perspective of either, but we can admire the achievement of both authors in providing two very persuasive but different visions of how modern American intellectual and cultural life was constructed.

In part, modernism is defined by both authors by what it is not, and in this sense, there is considerable agreement. Modernism was a reaction against Victorian, Protestant, small-town, white, middle-class America...