Black Mountain Breakdown

Black Mountain Breakdown EDWARD HAGERMAN Martin Duberman. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: Anchor Books, 1975. 578 pp. It is perhaps surprising that a relatively obscure experiment in the subculture of American intellectual and institutional life should assume growing mythical powers in Canada; more so when the experiment ended some twenty years ago. Yet the "Black Mountain" phenomenon has become a symbolic friction point of Canadian literary life; and there are rumours that the Canadian artistic community west of Winnipeg has an uneasy relationship with the Black Mountain heritage. George Bowering is still feeling the heat from the anti-Black Mountain revolt of his peers which went so far as to stage a counter-award ceremony to his Governor General's award. And Frank Davey, Black Mountain poet and the most prominent literary theorist from the Black Mountain heritage in Canada, is rumoured to be in hiding somethwere in the labyrinth of York University. Yet Black Mountain identification may give Bowering and Davey and the "Tish" poets and critics an otherwise denied niche in Canadian literary history - albeit as a negative reference group. For those Canadian poets and critics who feel more comfortable when poets assume their places in historical groups and critical categories, Martin Duberman's important book on the Black Mountain community , now reissued in paperback, will help them place Irving Layton in American intellectual history as a Black Mountain poet. The Black Mountain experiment in educational, intellectual, and community culture was born with the founding of Black Mountain College in the foothills of the North Carolina Smokies in 1933 and formally died with its closing in 1956. Although the faculty seldom exceeded a dozen and its student body fifty, Black Mountain College was home for varying periods of time to Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Robert Rauschenberg , Arthur Penn, Paul Goodman, Charles Olson and many others who were central to the cultural debates of our time. The most important figures in the intellectual continuity and character of Black Mountain College were probably the refugee Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, who gave the community much of its shape for the first fifteen years of its existence, and the poet Charles Olson, who dominated the school through its last phase from 1951 to 1956 and provided the focus for the so-called Black Mountain school of poetry. Black Mountain College was an experimental search for cultural form in intellectual and community life. Through the highs and the lows, the social and the intellectual life, the interpersonal affiliations and conflicts runs the history of a THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 fundamental concern in western culture from the turn of the century to the present: the crisis in the mechanistic world view and the attempt to formulate a revised or alternate definition of reality. Duberman approaches his difficult subject with a method grounded in the step-by-step reconstruction of individual and group lives through the history of Black Mountain College. He reconstructs mind forms and milieu from the community 's written record as a group in voluminous correspondence, minutes, manifestos and other memorabilia; most important, he attempts to synthesize the written record with interviews among Black Mountain survivors. Duberman 's methodology makes an intelligible whole from the flux of personality patterns, small group dynamics and social and political ideology in the minds of individuals and groups and consequently in the intellectual and social forms of Black Mountain College. Duberman embellishes his method in the last section of the book when he participates in the community's debates, shares its crises, takes his stand. This methodological twist produces mixed results. Duberman's personalization of the fundamental questions gives some indication of why the book is most successful when evoking the tension within and between traditional liberal and conservative social and political attitudes and underlying personality structures; when he relives the battle between nineteenth-century liberalism and conservatism in alliance against the heresies of participatory democracy, "open" education, "Beat" poetry, gestalt therapy, long hair and some celebration of sexuality against rationality. This is Duberman' s personal territory: the world of civil rights, the breaking down of the old social...