A Cultural Critic Looks Back

...Thanks to her all-night poker games during his childhood and her self-deluding gentility, Mumford was spared the typical afflictions of excessive maternal attention...

...We embraced one another then, and we embraced the world in the pure joy of being: knowing life at that moment held nothing better...

...and an extemporaneous trib-ute-cum-criticism, reconstructed from memory, delivered on the day of Wright's death...

...s nephew, Lewis, becoming pregnant and moving out of the household to bring the child up by herself...

...One can only hope that in the next installment he will remember more of them and leave his positioning in the ephemeral ideologies to others...

...Then, as if by a whispered command, we neighbors all sallied forth on the streets, hushed in their whiteness, without even the track of an auto visible: ploughing our way through the inner courts, tossing snowballs at each other, licking samples of the fresh snow, pausing silently to take in the muted rosy beauty of the night sky over Manhattan, by turns breathless with delight and shouting with laughter as we encountered some familiar face, ruddy with the same intoxication...

...then for a few hectic weeks in 1894 Elvina had an affair with J.W...

...The mentors, though tarnished, emerge with the reader's sympathy and Mumford, who doth protest too much, winds up sounding self-righteous, priggish, diminished...

...A decade before he was born his mother had married a Canadian, John Mumford...

...Traits of conceit and intellectual arrogance developed at the same time, and unfortunately they interfere with Mumford's examination of his ideas' gestation...

...It is assumed throughout that these concepts are common currency, that the reader is conversant with each of Mumford's many books, magazine articles and even unpublished notes and letters that are quoted selectively to reinforce the printed record...

...The best section of this book by far is his account of his parentage...

...My mother," he says, "was a baffling combination of firmness and softness, of traditional pieties and current fashions, of fearsome prudence and unthinking recklessness: but perhaps her dominant trait was her submissiveness to those around her...

...At one point Mumford rather ludicrously compares his relationship with Wright to Chekhov's with Tolstoy...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels, "Artists in Tune With Their World" This first volume of the author's projected memoirs consists of two parts...

...The marriage, perhaps unfulfilled, was annulled, and Elvina Mumford (she kept the name, passing it along to Lewis) proceeded to fall in love with a handsome, cultivated lawyer of German Jewish extraction, J.W., for whom she acted as housekeeper...

...The strenuousness of the effort at self-justification defeats its purpose ????especially the attempt to establish originality or priority among such early pioneers of city planning as Patrick Geddes, Victor Branford and Frank Lloyd Wright...

...Mumford has no ear for music or for poetry (his sole expressed enthusiasm among a half-century of major American poets is Josephine Strongin, whose poems I have not been able to locate and whom he has no hesitation to rank with Emily Dickinson...

...Moreover, although a great deal of space is devoted to Mumford's appreciation of Geddes' and Branford's eccentricities and warmth, a reader who does not know their arcane publications should not be obliged to accept Mumford's denigration of their contributions...

...It is moments like these that make Lewis Mumford's autobiography worth reading...

...Citing Freud's contention that "a man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror," the author notes that he had plenty of solitude amid an endless round of trivial activities to explore the world within and without, and to develop habits of self-reliance...

...Nevertheless, he does offer sharp insights along the way, including the observation that Wright "lived from first to last like a God...

...It was not until 47 years later that the author discovered these facts...

...Years later, at his home in Sunny-side, Queens, there came "a night in winter when the snow, which had been falling all afternoon, mantling thega-bled roofs, outlining the branches of the plane trees, haloing the street lamps, turning bushes into huge white mushrooms, ceased falling around 10 o'clock...

...There is little relaxation or humor to relieve this unrelenting search for primacy, a task that would have been better left to scholars not so immediately involved...

...In the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whose personality and achievement the present reviewer was familiar from 1933 on, much of the critique depends on two somewhat dubious sources: Mumford's references to a letter he signed "With all respect and admiration as from one Master to another," which Wright, who had just put him down as a "mere scribbler" and "ignoramus" understandably did not answer...

...There is no reason why these two voyages of self-discovery could not have been recounted together successfully, throwing light on each other, yet the amalgam does not work...

...It could be argued, of course, that such a book should be reviewed only by an expert in the field of city planning and cultural dynamics, yet one must ask whether an "autobiography" shouldn't be accessible to less learned scrutiny...

...At Newport, for example, where he served time in the navy during World War I, he stepped out of the Redwood Library one evening under a violet sky with a sense of his whole future spreading out before him, feeling "the exaltation of pure being, the ultimate reality for which all visible bodies and passing experiences were only a preparation...

...But on several occasions he does evince the emotions of a poet...

...This love, too, remained unconsummated...

...On the one hand we are presented with his private (at times very private) life as an illegitimate child in search of his identity, a young man making a belated, often painful attempt to come to terms with his erotic impulses, and as a family man in his 20s struggling to reconcile a happy marriage with an affair that for reasons unrevealed seems to satisfy neither of its participants...

...one who acts but is not acted upon...

...It is a strange tale, told with great delicacy, of thwarted loves and of the mother and nurse who raised him in an atmosphere of affection to be securely self-confident...

...The second theme is a long and very involved account of Lewis Mumford's coming of age as the critic of cities and cultures...