Radical Dreams
Abrahams, Edward
Radical Dreams THE LYRICAL LEFT by Edward Abrahams University ofVirginia Press. 265 pp. $20. There is an Emma Goldman T-shirt frequently worn at rallies and demonstrations that reads, "If I can't...
...When are the two goals compatible...
...Abrahams recounts these developments in a lucid and engaging manner...
...It would have been much stronger if Abrahams had exhibited some of the intellectual courage and audacity that made his subjects so remarkable...
...Stieglitz never met Bourne, but shared his hope that authentic self-expression might have revolutionary social implications...
...Yet he acknowledges at one point that political goals that do not furnish some hope for personal freedom are incomplete...
...A graceful and charming book, The Lyrical Left is worth reading...
...And when liberal intellectuals, including John Dewey, supported the entry of the United States into World War I, Bourne produced a series of inspired and now classic pieces on how war subverts democracy...
...Before he died of influenza in 1918 at age thirty-two, Bourne had become a major voice of youthful radicalism in the nation...
...Abrahams has a good ear for the telling quote, one which illuminates an entire outlook in a phrase...
...He was a teacher and mentor of Georgia O'Keeffe...
...In so doing, they struggled against not only the defenders of corporate capitalism, but also the liberal reformers centered around The New Republic who, they felt, wanted to "build a world and leave out all the fun...
...But Stieglitz was more than a photographer...
...Abrahams remarks on a number of occasions that Bourne's commitment to individual liberation and collective development was contradictory...
...But Abrahams does not explore this any further, leaving us with assertions so vague as to be meaningless...
...There is an Emma Goldman T-shirt frequently worn at rallies and demonstrations that reads, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution...
...Yet his handicap never stunted his belief in the possibility of life...
...Robert D. Holsworth (Robert D. Holsworth, a political scientist, is on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University...
...They were married in 1924, and he produced extraordinary portraits of her...
...Hutchins Hapgood, one of the few sympathetic critics of what was taking place at the Photo-Secession, compared Stieglitz's efforts to those of the IWW leader "Big Bill" Haywood, inasmuch as both desired to "dynamite the baked and hardened earth so that fresh flowers could grow...
...His political naivete actually led him for a time to believe that World War I was a calamity that would ''bring the people to a realization of what life really means...
...Beset by financial problems, Stieglitz closed his gallery, and though he remained a productive artist, he no longer exuded the brimming self-confidence about modern art's capacity to change the world...
...He also promoted the careers of American modernists such as John Marin and Arthur Dove, who challenged the establishment's view of what constituted serious artistic expression...
...The bulk of Abrahams's book consists of two extended essays tracing the backgrounds, careers, and ideas of Randolph Bourne and Alfred Stieglitz...
...He captures the conviction of Bourne and Stieglitz that an essay, a photograph, or a show were instruments for building a new society...
...Moreover, the tactics of activists in the antiwar and antinuclear-weapons movements of the past two decades owe a large debt to our early modernists...
...Hopeful that the cessation of hostilities would once again allow his dreams to flourish, Bourne died without seeing how irrelevant these would become to postwar society...
...Nonetheless, The Lyrical Left is not a fully satisfying book because the author's own judgments never really grapple with the questions raised by the cultural radicalism of Bourne and Stieglitz...
...The Lyrical Left is about two of Goldman's contemporaries from Greenwich Village who combined a commitment to spontaneity and self-realization with the pursuit of radical social change...
...By 1917, however, he realized that war's de-structiveness undermined the affirmation of life for which he had always stood...
...Photographs such as "The Steerage" and "The Hand of Man" remain notable examples of what the medium can accomplish and are historical artifacts that continue to influence our perception of New York at the turn of the century...
...Yet it is a safe and comfortable piece of work, one that does not venture beyond a narrowly drawn vista...
...Unfortunately, the epilogue in which he sets out to examine these developments is perfunctorily written and almost useless...
...At a time when managerial liberals worried about unassimilated immigrants and when the editor of The Atlantic Monthly could wonder "what we have to learn of the institution of democracy from the Huns, the Poles, the Slavs?," Bourne argued that the immigrant ghettos were bringing America a cosmopolitan civilization that might rescue it from tasteless conformity...
...Stieglitz is probably best known for establishing the legitimacy of photography as a fine art through his ability, as Abrahams notes, "to create poetry where there had been only physics and chemistry before...
...Under what circumstances might the former be legitimately sacrificed to the latter...
...For many years now, there has been an ongoing debate in intellectual circles about the role of the "aesthetic dimension" in fostering social change...
...Stieglitz's hopes, however, were to go as unfulfilled as Bourne's...
...A similar problem arises in his commentary about the implications of Stieglitz's failure to mesh artistic innovation with social revolution...
...His first experimental showcase, The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, was the first in the United States to sponsor one-person shows of Rodin, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso...
...Between 1913 and 1918, Bourne wrote important essays on education, immigration, the State, and war that tried to reconcile what he described as "my fanatical belief in mass movements" with a "sensitiveness to unique and distinctive personality...
...He never developed a plan for connecting his artistic ideas to the social revolution he endorsed...
...But one would hardly know this from Abrahams's discussion...
...Facially disfigured at birth and the victim of spinal tuberculosis in childhood, Bourne was a hunchback who grew to a height of only five-feet...
...Where ought the balance be found between individual liberation and collective development...
Vol. 50 • October 1986 • No. 10
