Text Analysis and Annotation
The life and work of Ludwig Lewisohn. volume I. “a touch of wildness”
Analyze
Voyant is a, "is a web-based text reading and analysis environment," that provides a graphical interface for analyzing the full-text as a wordcloud, limiting by searches, word and phrase co-locations, terms distribution throughout a text, and much more! Click the button below to analyze this text in Voyant:
Annotate
Below is the full-text of this text that may be annotated by users using the Hypothes.is platform. The full-text will display on the left, with links to reveal the image of each page if desired. To use, select the text from the left-hand side to annotate, and using the Hypothes.is window on the right, record an annotation for that passage of text.
Page 1 - [see page image]
The Life and
Work of
^LUDWIG
LEWISOHN
VOLUME /I
A TOUCH OF WILDNESS
Ralph Melnick
Page 2 - [see page image]
THE LIFE
AND
WORK OF
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
VOLUME 1
Page 3 - [see page image]
Page 4 - [see page image]
THE LIFE
AND
WORK OF
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
VOLUME 1
“A TOUCH OF WILDNESS”
Ralph Melnick
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
DETROIT
Page 5 - [see page image]
Copyright © 1998 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.
All material in this work, except as identified below, is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of
this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/.
All material not licensed under a Creative Commons license is all rights reserved.
Permission must be obtained from the copyright owner to use this material.
Humanities
MELLON
The publication of this volume in a freely accessible digital format has been made
possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and
the Mellon Foundation through their Humanities Open Book Program.
Library of Congresss Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Melnick, Ralph.
The life and work of Ludwig Lewisohn / Ralph Melnick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
Contents: v. 1. A touch of wildness.
ISBN 978-0-8143-4467-5 (paperback); 978-0-8143-4466-8 (ebook)
1. Lewisohn, Ludwig, 1882-1955. 2. Authors, American—20th century—
Biography. I. Title.
PS3523.E96Z76 1998
813'.52—dc21
[B] 97-36411
Wayne State University Press gratefully acknowledges The Jacob Rader Marcus
Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) for their contributions to this vol
ume, including the use and publication of a selection of Ludwig Lewisohn photo
graphs. To access these photographs and many other collections preserved at the
AJA, please visit the AJA website at www.AmericanJewishArchives.org.
The Press also wishes to thank the following organizations for their generous per
mission to reprint material in this book: College of Charleston; HarperCollins Pub
lishers; Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; and Wisconsin
Historical Society.
Exhaustive efforts were made to obtain permission for use of material in this text.
Any missed permissions resulted from a lack of information about the material,
copyright holder, or both. If you are a copyright holder of such material, please
contact WSUP at wsupressrights@wayne.edu.
http:/ / wsupress.wayne.edu/
Page 6 - [see page image]
For my parents, Evelyn and Lester
And
My sons, Joshua and Ross
“To everything there is a season”
And
For Rachel, about whom Koheleth wrote,
“Enjoy life with the wife
whom thou lovest with all thy life”
Page 7 - [see page image]
Page 8 - [see page image]
“All literature, all art is in its final and ultimate depth
an answer to the question: What shall we do to be saved?.
All poems, novels, plays are inherently philosophies,
cosmogonies, moral universes.”
Ludwig Lewisohn, The Creative Life
Page 9 - [see page image]
Page 10 - [see page image]
9
Contents
Preface 11
Acknowledgments 17
Part 1: Minna
1. Homeless in a New World 23
2. With Manifesto in Hand 50
3. Forbidden Loves 76
4. Mask of Fiction 106
5. A Suspect Race 126
6. Bitter Fate 149
Part 2: Mary
7. World of His Ancestors 173
8. First Blood 211
9. Fear of Death 244
10. Against the Tide 270
11. Suffering Unjustified 289
12. A Younger Woman 313
13. Guiltless and Free 340
Part 3: Thelma
14. Journey East 365
15. Teshuvah 384
Page 11 - [see page image]
Contents
16. Exiled to Paris 400
17. A Man of Letters 422
18. To That Island Within 444
19. On Course 464
20. In Self-Defense 479
21. Vision of Terror 502
22. Shylock’s Redemption 516
23. Dissident Voice 534
24. Private Furies, Public Washing 557
25. On the Edge 582
26. Pagan Revolt 608
27. Out of Prison 635
Notes 667
Bibliography 737
Index 747
Page 12 - [see page image]
11
Preface
In 1965, three Brandeis University students came to St. Matthews,
South Carolina, to help with voter registration among the town’s largely
disenfranchised black community. With the exception of the court clerk,
none of the players in this drama—neither students nor townspeople—
knew anything of the man from St. Matthews who had in so many ways
struggled to remake the country in which this was now possible. He
had been largely forgotten in the decade since his death, but it was here,
in this up-country village, that Ludwig Lewisohn, social iconoclast and
founding member of the Brandeis faculty, had seventy-five years earlier
spent his first days as an immigrant child in America. It was here that
he had first tested this new world, and found it wanting.
Though from time to time his name has appeared in one place or
another, in America and abroad, Ludwig’s vast contribution to literature,
the theater, social change, and the struggle for Jewish survival and
renewal has remained all but forgotten—as he believed it would. He
had harbored few illusions. Once of great concern, this loss of fame
seemed not to matter after a time. Where once “the immortality urge”
had driven him to write, he had in the course of his years found a more
important reason to continue. Had he not, he might have laid aside his
pen when the veil of obscurity began to descend upon his prominence
and notoriety. But he simply could not remain silent before the injustice
and moral error that had moved him to such great efforts, even as his
energies waned in the final days of his life. “Man is only half himself,”
he affirmed, “the other half is his expression.” If he had experienced
Page 13 - [see page image]
12
Preface
more than his share of pain, disappointment, and abandonment, there
was in him an underpinning of prophetic belief that would not allow
him to desert the fight. Yet if he could offer so positive an example, how
had he come to this end? Why the obscurity when lesser men remained
known, even celebrated?
I was only nine years old when Lewisohn died in 1955, and a dozen
more years would pass before I first encountered Up Stream, his piercing
critique of America, written more than four decades earlier. I had found
it during a time of national turmoil and personal soul-searching, and
despite its distance in time, it rang true in so many ways—as it still
does. Fifteen years later, I would begin to seek a better understanding
of his experience and to write about it. The search for an answer would
demand these many years, and in its pursuit, I would learn to take
seriously his advice, that all who would “explore the recorded deeds
and sayings of a famous man . . . [must] search among them for hints of
secret things from which to weave a clear and animated picture of his
life.” In the years since I began, there have been reasons enough to stop.
Each life has its own detours. But few biographers choose subjects who
have not in some way already touched their lives. There is a resonance.
Something compels, if only the questions that echo in ourselves.
How might understanding his fall into obscurity help us, I won
dered? At the height of his fame, Ludwig had argued that “all sound
creative art is rooted in a ghetto,” a notion I discovered to be both
true and damaging to him in an America not yet willing to accept the
realities of ethnicity. “I am still necessarily functioning as the product
of that smaller ghetto which, in fact, I had never left, which no one can
leave but only pretend to leave.” As an exile in search of himself and his
community, as the outsider shorn of the need to defend the world as it
is, might he not have something to teach us for our own time of radical
change? “My hierarchy of values is different,” he proclaimed openly as
a part of his insistence upon the right to share in the larger society, but
on his own terms.
Such forthrightness, however, had contributed not only to his vision
of the life around him and to his rejection by those against whom he
had rebelled, but to attacks by those whose struggle for a more just
society he had once shared. They, too, could brook no dissent. Pacifist
and socialist, he had come ultimately to question even these positions
as the years brought the challenges of Nazism and Stalinism. If others
wished to hold him to ideas they had once espoused together, he could
respond only as the person who had emerged from the struggles of his
day with a deepening Jewish consciousness. And if Zionism remained
for some either too bourgeois or an article of old-world faith, he could
Page 14 - [see page image]
13
Preface
not so readily dismiss the liberation of his fellow Jews. The world had
grown too dangerous for that, too uncaring and worse, and he, too
deeply committed to his Jewish self. How could he set aside the obvious
in order to defend the abstract? Above all else he was a Jew, and his
values and sensibilities had been stamped irrevocably by that fact. Who
else would he be if he would not be himself, that person he had become
by force of will?
And if there was to be some meaning to his life, it would be found as
a Jew vying for all men’s souls against those forces arrayed against them.
Believing himself endowed with a sacred trust, he had little choice. He
saw the sham more clearly, felt it more deeply, worked more passionately
for its demise. His life and the works that grew out of it were products
of this vision, personal experiences and global events transformed onto
the scale of universal drama in the ever-changing process of the written
and spoken word. Little was spared his insightful pen. He could cut
deeply, but never without a cure in mind. There were, inevitably, errors
in judgment—of people, of events, of ideas—but there was an uncom
promising honesty that pierced straight into the frail human heart and
demanded of others the same persistent and passionate search for truth.
In the closing days of his life, Ludwig would look back to see what
he had learned that was worthy of being passed forward into the future.
“There still remains the me, the I, the innermost,” that person he could
recognize most clearly. “Who am I?” he asked. Merely “a very humble
person who must try to keep hold of the insight that has been granted
to him, who must try not to lose it again amid the clamor of the world.”
For it was a life that spanned the end of the old order and the
onslaught of the new. Born in Berlin to a highly assimilated, upper-
middle-class Jewish family in 1882, he had been ripped away from this
comfortable setting by the financial necessity and emotional instability
that characterized his parents’ lives. When continuing failure brought
the Lewisohns from Germany to rural South Carolina in 1890, and then
to Jim Crow-era Charleston, they fared as poorly, sealing the family’s
isolation from those among whom they had hoped to find acceptance.
A precocious and prodigious student, Ludwig entered the College of
Charleston at the age of fifteen, having graduated the city’s high school
as its valedictorian. But academic honors could not breach the social
walls built by class traditions and religious prejudices. And so, despite
the continuing scholarly success that earned him a master’s degree after
only four years at the college, he spent these years largely in solitary
contemplation of the society around him—and of the literature it had
composed to defend itself—and in fierce debate on campus, defending
the most unpopular political and social issues of the day.
Page 15 - [see page image]
14
Preface
He had planned to continue his graduate education as the necessary
stepping-stone to an academic career in English, but Jews were seen as
unsuited by birth for such positions in early-twentieth-century America.
Denied a fellowship by both Columbia and Harvard, he sat out the year
following his graduation, frustrated as well by the refusal of the local
academy’s headmaster to allow him to teach his students, though Ludwig
had for years lived as a Methodist in a bid to win acceptance. Then, with
limited funds raised by his father and other local supporters, he set out
for New York in 1902, only to abandon his dissertation after another
two years of pressure from advisers at Columbia who repeatedly warned
that no college or university would ever offer him an English position.
Continuing failure to secure one of the many openings available to others
confirmed their assessment.
Seeking to begin a career as a writer, he worked as an editor for
Doubleday, while writing literary reviews and serialized potboilers in the
evening. After labor activism cost him his job, he fled homeward, leaving
behind his lover, a woman nearly twice his age. In flight from husband
and children, she later followed him to Charleston, where they wed in
1906. The circumstances of their marriage, however, would remain a
matter of dispute during the more than three decades that passed before
Mary granted him a divorce.
Completion of his first novel brought them back to New York,
where, with the help of Theodore Dreiser, The Broken Snare was pub
lished in 1908. It would prove fortuitous, enabling him to join the
growing circle of iconoclasts in the period before the Great War. Offered
teaching positions in German first at the University of Wisconsin and
then at Ohio State, they left New York in 1910, only to return seven years
later when his German birth and antiwar advocacy caused his dismissal.
A reputation as an astute critic and scholar of French, German,
English, and American literature built up through these years in the
Midwest now brought writing assignments with a number of lead
ing journals, and, eventually, positions first as theater critic and then
as associate editor of the Nation. In the years that followed, Ludwig
would count among his close friends and associates Sinclair Lewis, Paul
Robeson, H. L. Mencken, Edgar Lee Masters, Edward G. Robinson,
Upton Sinclair, George Jean Nathan, and Carl and Mark Van Doren.
So, too, did he win the unending enmity of those who opposed his
shattering voice in the hundreds of critical articles that spilled from his
pen, and in the books that appeared, one after the other, particularly after
declaring in his coming-of-age memoir, Up Stream, that “Life among us
is ugly and mean and, above all things, false in its assumptions and
measures. Somehow we must break these shackles and flee and emerge
Page 16 - [see page image]
Preface
into some beyond of sanity, of a closer contact with reality, of nature
and of truth.”
With the death of his mother in 1914, Ludwig had faced a crisis of
spirit and identity that brought with it a new commitment to his Jewish
heritage. Deepening slowly in the years that followed—and strengthened
by his struggle against a “puritanical” society that held him hostage to
a failed marriage—this interest turned to dedication. In 1924, he leapt
at the chance to go to Europe, North Africa, and Palestine on a fact
finding mission for the Zionists with his new love, Thelma, a woman
half his age.
After completing his report in Vienna in 1925 and publishing it un
der the title Israel, he settled with Thelma in Paris, where they established
one of the great salons of the Left Bank. Until 1934, Ludwig spent his
mornings writing, his afternoons afoot or at a cafe, and his evenings
either at the theater or entertaining James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Roy
Titus, and a host of Europeans and Americans who passed through his
doors. Here, too, he wrote endlessly, including his most widely acclaimed
and translated novel, The Case of Mr. Crump, praised by Sigmund Freud
as a masterpiece of psychological drama.
But the Crash of 1929 changed life for everyone, and as financial
hardship raised the specter of Nazism in Europe, Ludwig sensed the
danger ahead. Speaking out on the threat of anti-Semitism as early as
1925, he extended his warning to the whole of European civilization in
a series of articles written in the early 1930s. With the birth of his and
Thelma’s son, James, in 1933, Ludwig made renewed efforts to regain
his passport, lost when Mary’s wrath brought his flight with Thelma to
the attention of the State Department. Only the intervention of friends
having influence with Franklin Roosevelt allowed him to return home
in 1934 after ten years abroad.
Ludwig’s skill as an orator would help supplement his earnings
as a writer, as we well see in the second volume of this biography. A
tireless spokesman for the Zionists and for the best in Western culture, he
repeatedly crisscrossed the country, lecturing everywhere on the threats
few yet recognized, including the dangers he saw posed by Stalin’s
tyranny. An engagement in Rochester, New York, in 1939, at a time
when his relationship with Thelma was ending, brought him in contact
with a second woman twenty years his junior. They would marry in the
coming year, but Edna would not prove to be the stabilizing force he
needed, nor he the literary catalyst she hoped would make her a writer.
The notoriety of their wedding, followed by widely publicized court
battles over James’s custody and then by Edna’s tubercular collapse in
Santa Fe, eventually broke their marriage. As she returned to her former
15
Page 17 - [see page image]
16
Preface
lover, Ludwig sought comfort from Louise, the woman with whom he
would spend his remaining years.
The Holocaust in Europe and British intransigence in Palestine after
the war continued to propel Ludwig forward as he poured much of
his remaining energy into the editorship of the New Palestine. But he
soon added a second issue to that of promoting a haven for Europe’s
despised Jews. Commitment to his fellow Jews in America now extended
to their spiritual health as well, an issue that few Jewish leaders had yet
to seriously consider. Long after the establishment of the State of Israel
and his appointment in 1948 as Brandeis University’s first full professor,
Ludwig continued to speak out on this need for American Jewry to
rebuild itself by adapting the best of its religious and cultural heritage.
During his last years, Ludwig won his greatest audience from among
the students who applauded him wherever he appeared. Of those who
memorialized his passing in 1955, it was they who seemed to take most
seriously his charge to the future—that life could not be fully lived
without the soul’s striving for redemption in an imperfectible world. A
decade later, other students would come to St. Matthews from Brandeis
to aid with voter registration. They would not have recognized Ludwig’s
name, but his life had helped to radically alter their world.
Page 18 - [see page image]
17
Acknowledgments
It was Dan Walden of Pennsylvania State University who first sug
gested in 1979 that I attempt a biography of Ludwig Lewisohn. His
own interest had brought him to the College of Charleston where I
was its Archives Director. I brought out the unpublished poetry, short
stories, and correspondence I had recently discovered, and his excitement
became contagious. In time, I was hooked.
Colleagues at the college proved equally enthusiastic. Lee Drago,
Nan Woodruff, and Marty Perlmutter helped me as a New Yorker to
better understand the South. But my fellow archivist, and loyal friend,
Oliver Smalls, gave me a deeper feel for the region’s eternal outsiders.
Though the African-American and Jewish experiences were in so many
ways different, this element of being “The Other” in a highly stratified
white Christian world was shared by us both, as Lewisohn himself so
clearly understood.
Ted Rosengarten, biographer and chronicler of the southern expe
rience, and a fellow New Yorker, taught me much of this history—and
provided the first important critique of an earlier draft of Lewisohn’s
first thirty years. “Lewisohn deserves a biography,” he recognized. “We
need a biography of him, or we will continue to suffer a cultural loss.
He was and should be valuable to us, but we have rejected him, more
than he ever rejected us. To bring him back from Hades, to show us
what we miss by denying him, what is important and beautiful in his
work, is your job.” He encouraged me to “commemorate less and doubt
more. More Melnick will give us a truer Lewisohn,” he insisted, warning
Page 19 - [see page image]
18
Acknowledgments
that the “boundaries” between the two of us were too “blurred.” “I
miss your wit and skepticism, your sense of the injustice done his name,
your judgment of his work and his voyage, your estimation of him as
truthteller and liar, your presence as thinker as well as scribe. I miss all
the qualities I feel when we talk about Lewisohn.... I want to draw
out the constellation of Melnick with Lewisohn which has a peculiar
power and fascination to me.” If I quote here at length it is because
Rosengarten’s gift was so very crucial in the process of drawing this
portrait of Lewisohn. I hope I have succeeded in fulfilling his vision.
John Bevan, Academic Vice-President of the College of Charleston,
expressed his faith in me and my work on so many occasions, offering
financial help that was invaluable. Paul Hamill helped in securing this
and other assistance, but more crucially befriended me, offered his
expertise as a scholar of the American experience, and has patiently
waited to see the fruit of this labor. Perhaps more importantly, they
appreciated and understood the politics that made my departure from
Charleston so necessary. Lewisohn, too, would have understood.
Stanley Chyet, a scholar of Lewisohn and one of his first students at
Brandeis University, deserves special recognition. A real mensch, he has
been helpful throughout these years, with ideas, criticism, and support,
both for my Lewisohn and in so many other ways.
There is a seemingly endless list of others who proved important or
essential at various points. For the many fellow librarians and archivists
whose institutions are referred to in the notes, I send my deepest thanks.
You are the facilitators without whom some of the best scholarship and
writing would be impossible. So, too, to the many who answered a
1980 author’s query in the New York Times. Nor could I have drawn so
clear and colorful a portrait without the permission of Lewisohn’s son,
James, to quote from published and unpublished material, no matter
how painful it might prove. To him credit is truly due for his courage and
his faith in my fair and accurate treatment of his parents’ relationship.
But of the endless legion, particular mention and thanks are due
to Max Lerner, Tom Savage, and Milton Hindus, all members of the
early Brandeis faculty, the latter being close personal friends; to James
Connolly, who introduced me to his mother, the Lewisohns’ house
keeper at Brandeis; to Elihu Winer, for his memories of Lewisohn’s later
years; to Leonard Dinnerstein, a thoughtful student of the American
Jewish experience; to Martin Bauml Duberman, with whom I shared
Lewisohn’s friendship with Paul Robeson; to James Lieberman, whose
interest in Otto Rank brought him to Lewisohn; and to Jacob Marcus,
who listened to an early presentation of my work one summer so many
years ago.
Page 20 - [see page image]
19
Acknowledgments
George Max Saiger has long shared my obsession with Lewisohn—
we have corresponded and met over many years. I hope this work
will only deepen this tie. Roy Lekus, New York filmmaker in Paris,
worked indefatigably on a documentary of Lewisohn’s life. We have
spent many pleasant days together. His work is worthy of support—
only the shortsightedness of those who continue to weaken the arts in
America has prevented its completion.
Throughout the years, Abe Peck of the American Jewish Archives
proved ever patient, loyal, and supportive. Grants from the National En
dowments for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, Southern
Jewish Historical Society, American Jewish Archives, South Carolina
Committee for the Humanities, College of Charleston, Southern Re
gional Education Board, and other agencies and institutions were all
received with his help. Yet more importantly, he has urged me to finish
this work and helped to secure its publication. Many, many thanks.
Arthur Evans’s courage in taking on so large a project as this two-
volume work is most noteworthy in an age when the bottom line seems
to rule so many publication decisions. My gratitude for this and for
his cheerfulness throughout is heartfully offered. So, too, to my so very
enthusiastic editor, Jennifer Backer, whose words of encouragement have
been the kindest any author could hope to hear. Credit and sincerest
thanks are due as well to my two typists, Deborah Tomasi and Richard
Teller, whose welcome responses and suggestions were as helpful as
always. To learn that Debbie’s office suitemates eagerly awaited each new
chapter’s turn in the story was ever so gratifying during the tedious final
stages of manuscript preparation. No less so the expert helpfulness of
Jonathan Lawrence, my copy editor, who anxiously awaited the second
volume of this work after so enthusiastically reading the first and saving
me from innumerable endnote lacunae. I am also indebted to Robert
Couch, who served as photographer for several of the images in the
photo section.
Ultimately, however, it is to my family that I give my deeper thanks.
As always, my ever supportive parents, Evelyn and Lester, and my
siblings, Mike, Bill, Don, and Barbara, and their spouses, have listened
to the endless tales of Lewisohn. But my sons, Joshua and Ross, deserve
as much and more, for the years in which their presence in my life gave
balance and joy and fulfillment beyond anything even this accomplish
ment could ever provide. And it is to Rachel, my life’s companion, who
listened to the tales, gave the balance and the joy and the fullest, that
my deepest feelings go. Only she can truly understand what this work
has meant, and how much more she is to me.
Page 21 - [see page image]
Page 22 - [see page image]
Part 1
#
Minna
Page 23 - [see page image]
Page 24 - [see page image]
23
1
Homeless
in a New World
Ludwig’s birth in Berlin, Germany, on May 30, 1882, was an oc
casion for rejoicing as his parents looked back upon the good fortune
that had brought them to this moment. After centuries of exclusion from
Germanic society, legislative decree in 1872 had completed the gradual
transformation of the Jews’ civil (if not social) status in Germany from
that of pariah to near partnership with their Christian hosts. A century
of change, sustained or weakened by the impulsive tides of egalitarian
struggle and the calculated risks of power brokers, had removed the legal
restrictions crippling human intercourse between Jew and Christian for a
millennium and a half, encouraging an unprecedented number of Jews to
leave the caste-bound shelter of the small town for new lives in Frankfurt,
Hamburg, and, particularly, Berlin, where the Jewish population was to
double in only a decade. 1
Throughout this process, the Jewish community had undergone
convulsive internal change as well. The first hint of freedom found a
number of Jews more than willing to throw off a lifestyle abhorred by
outsiders for centuries. Acculturation became widespread as the years
passed, and total absorption into the larger society through conversion
became a viable option for thousands seeking to dispense with the
disabilities their Jewish status had caused them to suffer. But many more
thousands persisted in their Jewishness in some form, and sought com
promise between an unpleasant past and what they believed would be a
better future. Flight, ironically, became both easier and less necessary as
German Jewry grew more able to liberalize itself and accommodate those
who might not otherwise have wished to remain within the community.
Page 25 - [see page image]
24
Ludwig Lewisohn
Yet few felt at ease, for the legislation that had opened the ghet
tos’ doors had heightened these intertwined communal and personal
conflicts. In Berlin these tensions were greatest, the options more fully
developed along a spectrum of choice that ranged from uncompromising
Orthodoxy to a Reform Judaism influenced by Protestant modes of
observance, and beyond it, to conversion itself. There was, as well, the
new option of a secular life outside these structures, a conversion to the
liberal ethos of a cosmopolitan Berlin, with or without Jewish communal
affiliation—as much a choice against Judaism in any of its forms as it
was against conversion to Christianity as a means of normalization. Leg
islation, it was thought, had already normalized life for the Jews. Little
more was needed than to share in the growing excitement around them.
Ludwig’s parents were among those who had sought to participate
in the building of this new secular order. Jacques (b. 1859) had spent all
but the first five years of his childhood in the Berlin home of his adoptive
parents, wealthy relatives into whose care he was placed after his father’s
business had failed. Kind and educated people, acculturated, prosperous,
and generous to a fault, their overindulgence would make it difficult for
Jacques to understand the need for financial restraint when the time for
it later arose. He wanted for nothing as a youth, and received the finest
schooling in France and Switzerland before beginning his gymnasium
training in Berlin’s Royal Realschule. Only his stepmother’s oncoming
madness, diagnosed as incurable while Jacques was an adolescent, upset
“his tireless devotion to things of the mind” and to the music of the Ger
man masters. To escape this increasingly erratic domestic environment
and his own academic self-doubts, he chose not to attend university, but
to open his own business and live away from home. Each of these factors
would have a lasting effect upon his increasingly unhappy life, causing,
in his son’s opinion, a “habit of Utopian scheming” mixed with a “harsh
self-assertiveness by which he strove to deaden his own sense of failure
and insignificance.” 2
Minna Eloesser, Ludwig’s mother and Jacques’ first cousin, spent
her first twelve years in East Prussia before coming to Berlin in 1872
after the death of her father, a circuit-riding rabbi. Left with six chil
dren, her widowed mother could no longer afford to keep Minna at
home. Overprotected by her older brothers already residing in the city,
and confined by a rigid social system that dictated a mannered and
insufficiently educated life, cut off from employment opportunities as
someone of middle-class status, she had an unhappy time as a child
and young adult. Though she studied music privately, learned French
from her mother, and received institutional instruction in literature and
the womanly arts at the girls’ Hohere Tochterschule, she felt frustrated
Page 26 - [see page image]
25
Homeless in a New World
by this restrictive existence and would steal away for hours, wandering
alone through the city or writing poetry that she would refuse to share.
Leaving behind the unhappiness of her early life and finding a kin
dred spirit with whom she could share her love of music and literature,
Minna married Jacques in 1881. Together they would find a new life in
this seemingly enlightened world, a life that a future inheritance would
make certain. Jacques, in turn, saw in their marriage the escape that he
had sought from the madness at home which even his departure three
years earlier had failed to provide. But neither yet knew that much of
the wealth once held by Jacques’ adoptive family had been lost in the
“Crash of 1873.” This revelation would only add to the frustrations
that soon began to mount as the initial glow of the marriage ceremony
began to fade.
Ludwig’s birth in the first year of their marriage and in the tenth year
of Emancipation forestalled the inevitable for them both, as Jacques and
Minna took it as a sign that they were soon to enjoy a new life in this
age blessed with human progress. At first moderately prosperous and
relatively happy together after a stormy beginning was somewhat quelled
by Ludwig’s arrival, their acculturated lifestyle came to resemble that of
most non-Jewish, progressive, middle-class Berliners whose world they,
like so many other Jews of their social group, hoped to join. Mercantile
interests, the enjoyment of German music and literature, a concern for
liberal ideas and values of many stripes, a love of quiet walks in the
Tiergarten and carriage rides through the streets of the kaiser’s imperial
city (“rugged and grey” with “an air of homely and familiar comfort,”
as Ludwig later remembered them), and the warmth of close family and
friends each became an important element of their broadening existence,
and of the vivid memories of their child’s world that was to end abruptly
with emigration to America eight years later.'
Ludwig’s formal education had begun four years earlier with a
brief stay at a Berlin kindergarten. Restless, perhaps bored, he was sent
home and placed under the tutelage of his grandmother, a small woman
“with rose-tipped wrinkles as precise as porcelain, a little white cap
on her smooth grey hair,” remembered by Ludwig as often seated by
the window reading or doing “tatting work.” He later recalled that
his life truly began after she had taught him the alphabet. Grimm,
Andersen, and the Arabian Nights were followed by his first volume
of children’s stories, Bechstein’s Maerchen. He lived to read, dwelling in
the imaginative worlds of literature and fantasy. Minna, however, grew
concerned that her son preferred his books and his own thoughts to the
company of other children, and insisted upon daily excursions to the
Tiergarten and a regimen of piano and athletic instruction (gymnastics,
Page 27 - [see page image]
26
Ludwig Lewisohn
swimming, ice skating, and the like), which left him “sturdy and broad-
chested” and able to withstand two severe early childhood illnesses. He
clearly benefited from her persistence, which kept him not only from
the ravages of difficultly managed disease, but also from the constant
eyestrain and fevered brow, and the inevitable solitude, he had begun to
experience with growing contentment. 4
Such preparation provided an uncommon literary facility for the
six-year-old Ludwig as he began to study at the local Gymnasium’s
Vorschule. Minna, despite her earlier insistence upon moderation, sud
denly grew increasingly determined that her son would fully develop
his intellectual faculties. Tears of exhaustion streamed down Ludwig’s
face as mother and child spent hours without end in preparation for the
coming day’s lessons. For there was no question in the Lewisohns’ world
“that a liberal education was the necessary foundation of right and noble
living,” the proper preparation for a life to be built upon Gymnasium
and university. To do otherwise was to court an early death. Hard work
brought recognition, and by the time of Ludwig’s departure to America
in 1890, his teachers saw in their pupil the makings of a scholar. Not that
his entire life was occupied with his studies, for Minna made certain that
a host of diversions would offer the respite she understood necessary for
this academic success. Music, summer and winter sports, a social life
with his peers, daily outings, and family vacations all had continued to
provide young Ludwig with “a rich and happy childhood.” 5
Jacques’ poor management of his textile factory and other business
interests had by 1890 led to a series of business failures. Every attempt to
stem these losses put even greater strain upon the modest bequest left to
him by his stepfather in 1889. A final, ill-conceived venture wiped away
most of what remained, and within a short time the once bright future
seemed irremediably darkened. “Overcome by shame and despair,” as
Ludwig vividly recalled, Jacques “fell ill” with a depression from which
he would never fully recover. 6
During this same period of financial decline, Minna’s brother Sieg
fried had written often of his growing prosperity in the New World town
of St. Matthews, South Carolina, to which he had come a few years
earlier. No longer able to bear her husband’s continuing failure or the
deepening depression into which it had thrown him, she halfheartedly
suggested that they join her brother. She had hoped that Jacques would
be shocked into a state of emotional stability by the idea and would
refuse to consider a plan that would drive him from the nation he
loved. She was wrong. Instead, he latched onto her suggestion like
a drowning man. He liquidated what he could of their possessions,
sparing only Ludwig’s books and Minna’s jewelry. Within a few short
Page 28 - [see page image]
27
Homeless in a New World
weeks, Minna stood upon a ship’s deck, horrified at the thought of
never again seeing her beloved Berlin. What should otherwise have been
a storybook adventure for the overly imaginative Ludwig became an
occasion marked by the foreboding grasp of his mother’s hand as she
faced homeward for the last time. 7
But tears and the sadness that pervaded their fifteen-day journey
from Hamburg soon turned to momentary joy. Docking in New York’s
dizzying harbor, they wandered the streets of lower Manhattan in a
state of euphoria. Their first experience of this chaotic world, far from
the orderly setting they had known in Berlin, proved exhilarating—if
only because it was a release from the troubled weeks that had preceded
their ocean passage.
The dreaminess of these days, enhanced by a week’s coastal voyage
to the warm shores of Charleston, South Carolina, in that winter of
1890, was soon shattered by the unexpected roughness they encountered
on their railroad trip from the port city seventy miles inland to St.
Matthews. Wonder became terror as parents and child looked with
rapidly growing apprehension upon the unpolished, rural world that was
replacing the lost civility of Berlin. Minna was struck by the horror of it
all. But Jacques, having lost the ability to deal effectively with unpleasant
realities, soon blocked this scene from his thoughts, and talked only of
the sugarcane and rice that his reading in Germany had told him were
the truly important facts about his adopted home. Ludwig was stunned
by his parents’ divergent reactions, and when they finally arrived in
St. Matthews, he looked out of the car’s window in amazement upon a
radically different world for which even his most beloved and frightening
fairy tales could not have prepared him. At the “up-country” station of
this “squalid village” of thirty-three hundred they were greeted by a
large mustachioed figure. Ludwig later recalled how his uncle Siegfried,
clothed in a striking red sweater, approached him and, to his disgust,
heartily kissed him on the mouth. Siegfried would forever remain a
symbol of the “raw . . . wildness . . . and strain of violence” that was
to quickly transform the young Berliner into an American. “Here did
the descent begin” in this world of “white men [who] wore broad-
rimmed wool hats, whittled and spat and talked in drawling tones,”
and of “burly Negroes who gabbled and laughed weirdly,” a world of
“hot turmoil” and the “characteristic odor of peanuts and stale whiskey
and chewing tobacco” that stood where once had been his Tiergarten
filled with middle-class Berliners. 8 For all of this, Siegfried would be a
useful symbol in Ludwig’s troubled process of adjustment.
To walk the streets of St. Matthews today is to step back into the
past of Ludwig’s rural South Carolina hamlet. Though the pavement
Page 29 - [see page image]
28
Ludwig Lewisohn
now runs in new directions, and electric lights have replaced the oil
lamps that lighted his way on quiet country evenings over a century
ago, many of the sights that greet the contemporary traveler would
seem quite familiar to him. For shops, homes, and churches have only
slightly changed in the older section of town, and the social patterns of
settlement—with the more prosperous and better-educated Methodists
to one side of the dividing railroad tracks, and the Baptists and blacks
to the other (though more rigidly contrived today than it was then)—
would have appeared normal to the undersized immigrant child who
gazed upon it all in wonder as he set out to explore this whistle-stop
corner of America.
Yet St. Matthews, despite the developing social and racial strictures
of the post-Reconstruction era, was still an accepting society, with a
white population of notably diverse national origin and of seemingly
little overt anti-Semitic feeling. Jews had rapidly become an integral
part of this rural society after the Civil War. Bennett Jacobson, one of
St. Matthews’ leading Jewish citizens, had migrated from Germany in
1868, and had opened a small shop that quickly prospered. He had built
the village’s first brick structure in 1879, and by the turn of the century
would be elected to the town council. 9 Other Jews had followed his
lead, among them Ludwig’s uncle Siegfried. Together, this small group
of Central and Eastern European Jews comprised much of St. Matthews’
merchant class. If Jacques’ business eventually folded, his failure was the
exception, for his co-religionists rose to positions of economic and social
prominence—positions still held by the few descendants of these families
living in and around St. Matthews.
To the Lewisohns, this openness was evidence that their thoughts in
Berlin had not been totally unrealistic. Given the world they discovered
upon their arrival in America, Jacques and Minna’s desire to seek a place
outside of the small Jewish enclave in St. Matthews and to reestablish the
socially integrated pattern of their former lives seemed perfectly justified.
While in Berlin, they, like countless other Jews who had abandoned their
strong Jewish communal life for the wider world, had counted among
their social acquaintances a good many Christians with whom they had
enjoyed the Christmas and Easter holidays. Germans before all else, they
had treated these occasions as national celebrations, while continuing
only marginal observance of a few major Jewish holy days. Ludwig
recalled in his first memoir, Up Stream, the sight in his Berlin home
of his very own Christmas tree, standing “in it’s glimmering splendor
and around it the gifts from my parents and my grandmother and my
uncles and aunts.” Led toward this “taste [of] glory” by his mother,
he felt “as though I myself were walking straight into a fairytale.” Far
Page 30 - [see page image]
Homeless in a New World
less “native and familiar to the heart of the child” that he had become
was the experience of the synagogue he entered one Berlin Yom Kippur.
“The penitential scene was wonderful and solemn,” he remembered,
but “weird and terrifying and alien,” for Judaism had always played
but a secondary role in his parents’ married lives. Not that they would
ever assimilate through conversion. Not in Berlin, nor in St. Matthews.
Minna’s ties to the past were far too strong for that, while Jacques
considered himself a freethinker and condemned all religion as part of
the dark and superstitious past that had been exposed by the light of
reason. Rather, it was for reasons of social acceptance and personal
preference that Ludwig’s parents now sought out those few Methodists
who comprised St. Matthews’ more prosperous and educated class. 10
With their assistance, Minna believed she would find the means
to help her child avoid becoming one of the uneducated and uncul
tured masses by whom she felt surrounded. Seated in Berlin amidst the
trappings of cultural sophistication, she could not have foreseen the
challenges that awaited her in this rough new land. How was she to
nurture the mind of a young child, barred as she was from any real center
of learning and culture? The challenge, it seemed, only strengthened her
resolve, perhaps morbidly, as the same “emotional tenacity” that had
caused her to retain something of a Jewish identity amidst the pull of a
promising assimilation and left her to “yearn very bitterly for her native
land, her friends and kin, for music and for all the subtle supports of
the civilization in which she [was] so deeply rooted,” now forced an
unflagging determination upon her to secure for her son what she had
always aspired to provide for him. 11
The task, she soon realized in despair, was further complicated by
her need to learn a new language and to adjust to a new way of life.
Jacques, with a fair knowledge of English acquired years before in Berlin,
soon found himself befriended by a young lawyer with whom he played
chess and from whom he borrowed Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, and
other English authors. Minna, however, had to learn her neighbors’
tongue while securing the same skill for her son. To do so, she sought
the friendship of several prominent individuals, among them an elderly
physician who brought her flowers each week to lift her flagging spirits,
and a Mrs. Cain (identified in Up Stream as Mrs. C.), who, as a member
of a leading Methodist family, acted as Minna’s chief guide through these
first months in America, before the culturally claustrophobic life of the
rural countryside and Jacques’ continuing pattern of business failures
brought this small family of urban-dwellers back to Charleston in search
of the civilization they had left behind in Berlin and the economic
opportunity that continued to elude them.
29
Page 31 - [see page image]
30
Ludwig Lewisohn
It was Mrs. Cain who advised Minna concerning the proper steps
needed for the completion of her son’s Americanization. 12 In St. Mat
thews, where public education only began in 1895, the Jewish child
from Berlin soon found himself enrolled in a rural Southern Baptist
day school (the Methodists had not yet established their own). Minna’s
choices for Ludwig were limited to this church-related institution and to
an inferior one conducted by an impoverished former Confederate major
of Huguenot descent, a member of the class that had ruled the region
for generations before the “War for Southern Independence.” It was
Mrs. Cain’s recommendation that had brought Ludwig to the church-
run school. His stay there was short, however, as was his subsequent time
under the major’s tutelage, evidence of Minna’s feelings of desperation. 13
Dissatisfaction with both ultimately forced Minna to withdraw her son
and to devise her own program of study for him, including English in
struction, “with a German-English dictionary in hand.” Apparently they
learned together, exploring their “first fragments of English literature.”
“I have never had instruction more accurate or solid,” Ludwig later
recalled in tribute to his mother’s earnest efforts. : 1
To supplement this personal attempt to teach Ludwig his new lan
guage, Minna, again following Mrs. Cain’s suggestion, sent Ludwig to
the Methodist Sunday School. Having withdrawn him from St. Mat
thews’ two day schools and taken upon herself the role of educator, she
thought Ludwig would benefit from this increased exposure to spoken
English. She could not have imagined how rapidly her son would absorb
those religious ideas to which his impressionable mind was further
exposed, when he remained after class to attend worship services.
The degree of confusion and frustration all this change was creat
ing within him made the process of Americanization a not altogether
pleasant experience for Ludwig. So traumatic was it, in fact, that much
of this first year in St. Matthews forever eluded his memory. He spoke
more readily of the earlier years in Berlin than he did of this later period.
The experience of being thrust into a world where daily discourse was
at first impossible was particularly trying for someone as verbal as he.
Forced to develop a rapid facility for English to avoid being cut off
from the world, he would never be able to reconstruct the events that
led to the development of this skill. His earliest memory of using the
language was of a time when he was already capable of communicating
with the people of St. Matthews: “My next memory. . . shows me in
my little German velvet suit and cap seated aloft sacks of cotton-seed
in the postmaster’s shop and explaining, in some sort of English, the
peculiarities of German life to a crowd of tall, rough, tobacco-spitting
but evidently tender-hearted yokels. Tender-hearted! For they asked the
Page 32 - [see page image]
31
Homeless in a New World
quaint little German boy to come again and again and never teased him
but were, in what must have been their amusement, unfailingly gentle
and considerate.” 16 Not that he was altogether ready to abandon his
mother’s tongue. His German soul fought hard to dominate the emerging
speaker of English that first spring and summer in America. But the
transformation was occurring too rapidly for him to control it, or to
allow him to properly integrate the old with the new. Instead, it was for
him an upheaval of shattering proportions.
Out of the psychic adjustments needed to master this unevenly paced
re-creation of self came his first literary expression. With the aid of the
language of his past, he gave the first breath of life to the American
writer he was to become. In relieving the unendurable pressure of this
process, he created those autobiographical images that would forever
crowd his imagination, images of a disastrous sea voyage and of endless
wanderings in search of an island of peace. For if he was too young to
fully understand the dramatic changes taking place within himself, his
thoughts had developed far enough to offer some expressive outlet for
the passions they aroused.
Suddenly upon a day amid the steady radiance of that Southern summer a
blind, imperious impulse took hold of me. Though always clumsy with my
hands and careless of manual skill, I hastened into our little yard, gathered
some abandoned boxes and built me a rude, shaky little desk. It was too
high to sit at. So I stood and wrote—for the first time—verse and prose: tales
of disaster at sea, of ultimate islands, of peaceless wanderings. The prose
and verse were mixed indiscriminately, assonance sufficed in the place of
rime, all I felt was an intense inner glow. It was all instinctively done in
German. And I emphasize this fact in the development of an American
since that childish outburst marked the first and last time on which I used
my original mother-tongue in writing as a matter of course.. . . That first
impulse lasted, with daily but decreasing passion, for some weeks. Then it
died out. I neither wondered nor regretted it. To me it was a solitary game,
and most of my amusements were solitary. Perhaps the shifting from one
language to another caused this, perhaps a momentous change in my inner
life which now took place.'
Even the physical environment of the South, strangely affected by
sudden tempests and blinding sun-filled skies, had begun to transform
him, awakening an intense joy and fascination with nature’s powers that
was coupled with “a sharp nostalgia for the land of my birth and my
life.” The very sight of an unfamiliar grove would recall the lost forests
of his native land, and he would be overcome by “a sense of grief.. . .
Somewhere beyond those dark trees, beyond leagues of country, beyond
the ocean, lay our home. . . and I wept bitterly”—as he would years
later for the “peace I have sought in vain.” So enduring was the effect
Page 33 - [see page image]
32
Ludwig Lewisohn
of this new world upon him. As he himself fully realized, “Both my
intelligence and my instincts ripened with morbid rapidity and I attribute
many abnormalities of temper and taste that were mine to that sudden
transplantation.”''
Confronted by these sweeping cultural and environmental changes,
Ludwig clung to the memories of his Berlin childhood. It was a part of his
past to which he could retreat for security, with Minna accompanying
him on many of these excursions, for she experienced the same needs
and ambivalence. Though fascinated by this strange new world, she was
often overcome by a yearning for the quiet peacefulness of her former
home, whose culture she diligently transmitted to her son as a leavening
influence upon the English lessons she prayed he would absorb.
But if her tie to Germany was firmly entrenched, and her desire for
Americanization stridently pursued, her identification with the Jewish
people was no less of a motivating factor in her confused and crowded
life. Minna’s family, the Eloessers, had included many rabbis through
the generations. Having spent her early years amidst the Jewish com
munity of a small East Prussian town, she had continued to feel a
deep sense of ethnic identity. And though her father had adopted the
outward appearance of an emancipated Jew and had abandoned much
of traditional Jewish life, his acculturated adherence to the ways of his
ancestors remained constant as he ministered to the religious needs of
several communities. 19
Despite her avowed cosmopolitan attitudes, she sought to pass this
heritage on to her son as well. Late in life, Ludwig recalled his mother’s
continuous observance of certain basic Jewish ceremonies in the privacy
of their home, to the constant displeasure of her husband. Apparently,
Jacques could do little to force Minna into completely abandoning her
Jewish heritage. In her own home, with Ludwig at her side, she covertly
hoped to counteract those forces that would otherwise have destroyed
any remnant of Ludwig’s Jewish memory. 20
Ludwig thus came to suffer the confusion of an eight-year-old child
asked to live in three worlds at once. Competing truths in one so young
led to an undying skepticism that destroyed any possibility of intellectual
or emotional certainty in his early life. For Ludwig, it was a devastating
time. The inner turmoil he experienced further deepened the insecurity
known by all emigre children, and forever colored his perception and
memory of the people and events of this time. Though Up Stream was to
have been an indictment of the puritanical America against which he was
struggling, Ludwig, even in his fortieth year, was unable to overcome his
bitter memories of Siegfried and his family. Of the forces at war within
him as a child, his Jewish identity, so foreign to this new land, became the
Page 34 - [see page image]
33
Homeless in a New World
most difficult to assimilate. As practicing Jews, the Eloessers remained
an unconscious symbol of all that had caused his earliest experience of
discomfort and profound sadness.
The recollections of Siegfried’s daughter Cora provide an important
basis upon which to judge the accuracy of her cousin Ludwig’s memory,
and the depth of his trauma. Though the years undoubtedly affected her
ability to recall the past, as they had his, the extent of their perceptual
differences is most telling. The gruff, sweater-clad uncle who became
Ludwig’s earliest memory of St. Matthews was, according to Cora, “a
very educated gentleman, graduate of two colleges . . . [who] to his last
day never wore a sweater.” Siegfried, in fact, had been greatly upset by
reading in Up Stream what he considered a grossly inaccurate description
of his first encounter with his nephew.
Siegfried’s wife, Fannie, suffered a similar fate in young Ludwig’s
mind. Despite some pleasing qualities, Ludwig found his aunt guilty of
being “a Jewess of the Eastern tradition, narrow-minded, given over
to the clattering of pots and pans—‘meaty’ and ‘milky’—and very ig
norant.” But the very ignorant Aunt Fannie of Ludwig’s memory lit
tle resembled the woman Cora remembered as her mother—a native
Charlestonian, graduate of its well-respected Memminger High School
(for young ladies), with an excellent command of English, a little knowl
edge of German (acquired from her husband), and not the slightest
familiarity with a single word of Yiddish, the language Ludwig recalled
her using on numerous occasions to scold her children. 21
On the other hand, Cora’s portrait of her “uncle Jack” little resem
bled Ludwig’s picture of his gentle father. She remembered him as a man
of anger, resenting “Judaism and that my mother kept up the Tradition,
lighting Friday night candles, Passover, High Holidays, etc. He thought
himself above every body and my mother was nothing compared to his
intelligence.” 22 Minna, however, was warmly thought of by Cora—the
only point of agreement between her and Ludwig. 23
Cora’s parents saw how greatly the continuous tension between
Jacques and Minna had disturbed Ludwig, who witnessed their many
bitter quarrels over the issue of religion. There was little they could do,
however, aside from offering Minna words of comfort, for Jacques was
unapproachable. 24 If enlightened in other ways, he remained thoroughly
unprogressive in his attitude toward family life, believing that he had to
maintain the image, if not the fact, of ruling over his household as a
restricting, autocratic husband and father, to be obeyed by a dutiful
wife and a submissive son. He would accept no outside interference in
his private affairs. But Minna was no more anxious to please Jacques
than she was to see her son find a place within the American milieu by
Page 35 - [see page image]
34
Ludwig Lewisohn
losing the diverse heritage she valued so highly. She attempted a compro
mise between these conflicting desires, only consenting to church-related
activities for Ludwig after asserting her right to maintain some minimal
level of Jewish observance within her home. One can only imagine the
degree of frustration that led her to so quickly remove Ludwig from the
school he attended, favoring her own instruction, untutored as she was
in the refinements of English. And if she found it difficult to endure her
son’s education in Christian day schools, she must have agreed to his
Sunday School attendance with only the greatest reluctance and with an
even more overwhelming sense of frustration at not being able to fully
provide the language skills he needed for his future in America.
Siegfried, knowing of his sister’s frustration, could only watch as
Ludwig attempted to cope with these familial and personal tensions, and
the beginning of anxieties that would plague him throughout the years
ahead. Such inner turmoil would cause Ludwig to suppress memories, to
recall the past inaccurately, to believe unswervingly that “culturally we
really felt closer to the better sort of Americans in the community, and so
there began in those early days,” as he would later write with remorse,
“that alienation from my own race” from which he would spend much
of his life recovering. 25
Yet, however great the degree of alienation he may have experienced
at this time, it was never as deeply seated as he later imagined it to have
been when he spoke in Up Stream of having found his relatives and
their friends so distasteful that he quickly and totally withdrew into the
exclusive company of Mrs. Cain’s children. 26 Even by his own admission,
this had not been the case, as evidenced by a letter to Cora written shortly
after the completion of Up Stream. “You must remember that [cousin]
Ida was the first little sweetheart of my childhood [in America] and as
such I have often thought of her in later years,” a closeness that Cora
herself later confirmed. 27
Such an exclusive relationship with only one Jewish child in St.
Matthews was but a repetition of a pattern of behavior Ludwig had es
tablished during his years in Berlin. If this pattern already fulfilled needs
in a satisfying world, how much more fulfillment might it now afford him
in an unpredictable one. As he would do again in St. Matthews, he had
rejected most of his playmates in Berlin because they simply interrupted
his life of fantasy. The only child he had permitted to enter his private
world was a young female cousin.-' Withdrawing into his imagination
and seeking only the most intimate contact in St. Matthews with one
other child, a family member, now provided a part of the security he
had lost during the voyage to this new world. It was a pattern more
fitting to his experience than any into which he would later try to force
Page 36 - [see page image]
Homeless in a New World
the events of this time when the continuing pain of these days persisted
in clouding his memory.
In the end, however, it was Minna alone whom Ludwig later de
scribed as the victim of “an emotional tenacity which made her road
the harder,” and who became the only truly constant and integrating
link to the diversity and trauma of his early life. Far more than Jacques
or his cousin, she was his source of security. Throughout the years, she
would remain, either in life or in memory, an intimate part of his search
for a meaningful peace. She was the comforting mother who felt what
he suffered, and her image would become the protective womb within
which he could escape from the dangers of external change and inner
disruption. 29
Jacques, by fully accepting this new world, shared none of the
conflicts experienced by Ludwig and could offer little comfort to his
son (as he could not for his wife). Instead, he felt at home immediately,
settling into the unpainted wooden back house to which they first came
and then in the small apartment above one of the town center’s few
brick shops, content with “the many extraordinary virtues” he found in
his adopted country. Nor could he appreciate how unsettling his own
continuously uncertain business career was to Ludwig. Though Jacques
saw a profit, his grocery was never to become overly prosperous, in part
because he paid little attention to his mostly black customers, preferring
instead to read, play chess, and discuss politics with his few friends. 30 So
inattentive was he to his business affairs that he would leave his shop in
the care of his eight-year-old son, whose similar, but more excusable, lack
of commercial acumen added little to the family’s prosperity. Returning
one day after a long walk through the countryside, he was “astonished,
delighted” to see a crowd in front of the store. “A new fortune has
begun,” he thought to himself, as he would later recount the incident.
But as he entered, he found Ludwig “happily bestowing the last of our
small stocks of cakes and apples on the eager crowd of young negroes.”
When Jacques objected to his son’s largesse, Ludwig cried, “Oh Father,
how could I refuse when the little black children told me distinctly that
they were hungry?"'
The early but moderate success of his shop had temporarily relieved
the depression that had brought Jacques to America. Impulsive by na
ture, and growing more so as a symptom of his developing mental illness,
he suddenly decided to speculate on his recent invention of a nonrefillable
bottle, believing it would make him rich. Minna, refusing to recognize
her husband’s emotional imbalance, “deliberately indulged” herself with
this dream of instant wealth. But when his design was stolen by the patent
attorney who had advertised for such a device and to whom Jacques had
35
Page 37 - [see page image]
36
Ludwig Lewisohn
sent his idea, all seemed lost. (Might this theft of his father’s design have
influenced Ludwig’s lifelong aversion to business and technology?) Only
escape seemed open to them. They auctioned the shop’s contents, sold
Minna’s jewelry, paid their debts, and left St. Matthews on February 22,
1892, carrying with them four hundred dollars and Jacques’ unreliable
ideas for another fresh start. 32
While Ludwig would later remember the move to Charleston as “a
bright adventure,” it did not, in reality, add to his sense of well-being.
Coupled with “the fascinating bristle of packing and departure . . . [that]
engaged my imagination” 33 were his anxious memories of the horror-
filled train ride from Charleston of a year earlier, soon to be repeated,
while concerns common to all nine-year-olds encountering a similar
change were made more acute by the singularly eventful odyssey of these
last years and by an incident that preceded his departure. A half-century
later, he would recall for his wife the story of his mother’s gold and
diamond watch as an explanation for the incurable insecurity he had
experienced throughout his life. Behind in their rent, Jacques asked for
the watch to sell, which Minna, in resignation, brought to him. “You
may as well take this,” she stated with utter defeat in her voice. “I’ll
never go any place where I can wear it again.” Ludwig, near enough to
hear his parents’ exchange, trembled with fear and terror, only able to
calm himself twenty minutes later. '*
Minna, on the other hand, having “steadily hoped for fairer condi
tions in some larger center of American civilization,” was perhaps en
couraged by thoughts of a better life to come despite her personal losses
during this latest transition. It was the last time she would experience
such excitement. For if the Lewisohns had left behind in St. Matthews the
painful reminders of repeated failure and of their former lives in Berlin
(through the presence of the Eloessers), they had also abandoned their
one experience of what Ludwig would later speak of as “that honest
simplicity, that true democratic kindness which we like to associate with
the years of the primitive Republic.” '' The apparent openness of this
new land had left an idealized mark upon its new subjects’ “imaginative
inheritance” as Americans. The society they were about to confront in
Charleston would be far, far different. Ahead lay those bitter days which
thirty years later would elicit from Ludwig a woeful lament as he looked
back with the heaviest of hearts upon this pristine time—“those things
are gone” he would write in Up Stream during another difficult period
of his life. 36 A dozen years later, his life having taken a somewhat better
turn, he would look back upon St. Matthews as an idyllic time when
held up against all that was to follow. “What a quaint world it had been
and an easy-going world!”’ 7
Page 38 - [see page image]
37
Homeless in a New World
The Charleston to which they came was a world in obeisance to its
self-image and to a mythic past that is still carefully nurtured. It is a land
where nature’s sirens and man’s creative hand have seemingly conspired
to distort and distill, romanticize and capture for eternity the essence of a
past wished into existence by those who came after it. What better place
could there have been for Ludwig to continue the purposeful re-creation
of himself as an American?
The seeds of this image were planted in those early days of 1670,
when the first English settler went ashore through the muddy marsh
land to establish an outpost of European civilization upriver from the
peninsular city of present-day Charleston. Charles Towne, reestablished
a decade later on this narrow lick of land deposited by two rivers pouring
forth from the interior, became a village by the sea, a magnet for the
rejected of the Old World—second sons, disinherited by a patriarchy
too strong to break; those down-and-out, hoping for one last chance; a
steady stream of religious dissidents, Jew and Christian alike, in search
of free expression; scattered but strong-willed political adventurers,
seeking a new system of self-rule; and the inevitable economic specu
lators, investing in the future with slave and indentured capital. French
Huguenots, German shopkeepers, and Jewish outcasts all added to the
mix of African slaves and British Islanders from whom an aristocracy
would develop, grow, and prosper, intermarrying with members of other
ethnic groups to form a class system unique to the country.
Charles Towne became Charleston as colonial dependence passed
with revolution to national confederation. The village had grown over
the intervening century into a major port, rivaling northern population
centers in wealth and culture. It was, perhaps, the most cosmopolitan city
of the new Republic—surely the most European—marked by a leisurely
gentility that only an immobile servant class could provide. But if the
slave was bound by law and chain, his master was chained by luxury
become need, and by a mean social structure that often forced the denial
of kinship to one’s chattel, if not of one’s basic humanity.
Single-crop economics and its slave underpinning slowly tarnished
the facade of gentility that shone so brightly from African polish. The
pressure and friction of a century and a half of servitude, regional pride,
and the spurious issue of states’ rights all fanned the long-smoldering
fires that broke out with the deathly glow of civil war in 1861.
The period of Reconstruction that followed was more a process of
reshaping the old order than of building anew. The leading families of
the past were now money-poor but had retained their status, and after
a decade they had reestablished their position of dominance by denying
the right of self-direction to those seeking a new life. Past glories now
Page 39 - [see page image]
38
Ludwig Lewisohn
lay buried beneath Charleston’s rubble, and those responsible for them
had passed with the generations before the war. Only the tale remained.
Cultural roots languished and became distorted memory as Charleston
became a land of dreamers and mythmakers, of old families desperately
clinging to an increasingly distorted image of the past with which they
hoped to ensure the survival of their social order. And for generations
it did. Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian and a descendant of
Charleston’s early settlers, fell under its spell while on a pilgrimage to
his ancestral home. In paying homage to the city, he wrote in his novel
of Charleston, Lady Baltimore, that he had been mystified by “the most
wistful town in America” and by “a handful of people who were like
that great society of the world, the high society of distinguished men
and women who exist no more, but who touched history with a light
hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and letters that
we read today with a starved and homesick longing in the midst of our
sullen welter of democracy." w
Yet despite this idealized vision, Charleston had never been a mono
lithic society of servant and served. The great struggling mass of native-
born, like the immigrants entering the port city in the late nineteenth
century, had experienced in its streets a world quite different from the
land of perfumed gardens and high brick walls, of stately old houses and
church bells that rang with predictable rhythms, all sanctuaries to those
stirred by discomfort and the fear of change. The peoples of the streets
inhabited a world of vibrancy, of movement, of chaotic liveliness. It
was this world that Leon Banov, the son of Eastern European Jewish
immigrants and the city’s first public health physician, later recalled
as the setting for his own childhood during the period of Ludwig’s
stay there.
The street that I lived on was paved with wooden planks adorned with
a set of narrow rails for the horse cars that ambled lazily along, sharing
the street with an occasional queue of mule-drawn drays carting enormous
bales of cotton towards the water front. King Street was just around the
corner, and to me it was a colorful thoroughfare, full of life and activity with
people walking in all directions. The street vendors added vivid contrasts
and sound to the picture as they gracefully balanced their wares in baskets
or wooden trays on their heads.... I wish that I had the ability to depict
the cacophony of sound to which I walked each morning. 39
When Ludwig later tried to recapture his youthful impressions of
the city, he fell to romanticizing it as others had done. He, too, was
forever caught in its spell, “the faintly and beautifully old” with its
“element of pathos which. . . accentuated so often [the] beauty and
repose” of the city upon which “had fallen a gentle touch of decay,
Page 40 - [see page image]
39
Homeless in a New World
a faint shadow of dissolution,” as he would describe it in his earliest
novel, The Broken Snare. Yet he drew his own unique and curious
portrait of it as well. To him, this world whose pride rested on the
past glories of its statesmen, planters, and warriors remained forever
veiled in the imagery of a woman: “Queenshaven. I hear the sharp,
quick rustling of the palmettos, the splash and murmur of the incoming
tide, the melancholy song of Negroes across the bay; I see the iridescent
plaster of the old walls at sunset, the crescent moon, so clear and silvery,
over the lighthouse, the white magnolias in their olive foliage; I feel the
full, rich sweetness of that incomparable air.” 40
The Lewisohns arrived in this city of varying reflections on Wash
ington’s Birthday, 1892, a day whose national symbolism could not have
been lost on this family striving to become Americans. Taking Mrs.
Cain’s advice, they settled into a respectable boardinghouse at 34 Pitt
Street, where they would remain for the next five years. With their few
possessions quickly unpacked, they set out to find their way in this city
which they, too, had created out of dreams. But Charleston, ruled by
those increasingly fearful of losing control over it, was not St. Matthews.
The openness of that rural community had ill-prepared the Lewisohns
for the socially restrictive walls that would soon rise before them, day
by day, brick by brick, shutting them into a world they alone would
inhabit. Shunning German Americans (“peasants turned grocers” 41 who
“had no thought of entering the society of Queenshaven gentry” 42 ) and
Jews (“rather ignorant, semi-Orthodox”), with whom they should have
felt most comfortable, Jacques and Minna sought a place among the
seemingly educated and cultured of another class, as they had done
before in St. Matthews. Jacques fully believed that a democratic spirit
prevailed in America, that neither humble employment nor even poverty
would preclude an educated man’s joining the society of his intellectual
peers. 43 The shattering experiences of constant rejection and isolation
would slowly destroy his spirit, as it would Minna’s.
In this disappointing and friendless world, the Lewisohn home
became the family’s refuge. As Jacques’ final business attempt began to
fail, he retreated deeper into the protective walls of 34 Pitt. And when
the shop finally closed and he was forced to accept the far less socially
elevating position of a furniture salesman and collector of installment
payments in a business dealing with a largely black clientele, he retreated
still further, abandoning all hope of acceptance by those with whom
he had hoped to share his life. It was mean work, from which he
would withdraw each evening into the sanctuary of his home, reading
Goethe and Kant, playing the lilting sounds of Mozart on his piano,
and surrounding himself with his family. In The Case of Mr. Crump,
Page 41 - [see page image]
40
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig’s fictionalized account of these early years, he (Herbert) recalled
how this life had ultimately broken his father (Herman), destroying his
dreams, leaving him in his middle age with only the dull and exhausting
pace of unrewarding work to show for years of effort: “He might have
been a moderately prosperous man; he was for years, a very busy one.
Herbert always kept a vision, an early one, of his father’s tall, spare figure
leaning forward and peering on account of his nearsightedness, hurrying
with compressed lips and a frown, half of annoyance, half of timidity,
from one appointment to another. Herman Crump had nothing left him
at last but his position.” Often in the years ahead, Ludwig would sit and
listen to “the cry of his father’s frustrated life,” as “an ache came into
his own heart that stilled his brief triumph."'"
Minna remained at home as the dutiful wife of Jacques Lewisohn
was expected to, creating for her husband his private world and sanc
tuary, doing the best she could with the small means available to her
now that Jacques had settled into the defeated but steady pattern of
earning a wage. “There was no money,” Ludwig recalled in Crump.
“It was only her . . . excellent management that kept the family from
the open humiliations of poverty.” And as she managed their affairs
through the years, she dreamed of the life she had left behind in the
increasingly mythicized Berlin, “never truly . . . reconciled either to the
soft, fiery beauty of Queenshaven nor to the society,” hoping, with
growing expectation, that her son would find the success and acceptance
that she knew would forever elude her and Jacques. She had begun her
married life with expectation and optimism, but the years of unending
disappointment had changed her mood, leaving an indelible mark upon
her spirit until the end. 45
Ludwig’s world in that first Charleston year was filled with unfa
miliar and exciting sights and sounds and smells, each adding to the
fantasies he wove into his daily wanderings through the city, fed as
they were by his readings of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels and
the endless tales of Charles Dickens, all brought into his world by
Jacques. “The visible world intoxicated him from the beginning,” he
wrote of himself in describing the youthful Crump. “More dearly and
elementarily the world of sound.'"'’ But at day’s end, he too would
return home to the safety of Minna’s world. If he was drenched by
the phantasmagoria of his Charleston daydreams, he nonetheless felt
that the center of his world, the place from which all thoughts and
imaginings radiated, was the home that she had created for him. “Above
all, there was the house with its verandahs and its tangled gardens.. . .
I played at its being a castle.... I was living in a magnificent world,
a pageant of infinite variety and splendor. " J But this childhood Eden
Page 42 - [see page image]
Homeless in a New World
had its serpents, as Ludwig undoubtedly suspected. Soon he would meet
them face to face.
The tutoring begun in St. Matthews and completed during their first
year and a half in Charleston had left Minna confident that her eleven-
year-old son could sit successfully for the entrance examination to the
High School of Charleston in September 1893. Though the high school
was part of the city’s public school system, admission was competitive
and attendance required the payment of tuition, with only a few of its
students meriting financial assistance. Ludwig’s admission on October
2, 1893, and his award of a scholarship were to his parents signs of
their son’s promise. They believed strongly that one day he would be
among the school’s top graduates, destined to attend a large, prestigious
university as the next step in a brilliant future. 48
As a part of this conservative society, the high school (established
on May 6, 1839) stressed classical learning as a means of preparing
Charleston’s best citizens for roles of leadership in the community.
Virgil Cornelius Dibble, a one-armed hero of the Civil War and a strict
disciplinarian, had first come to the school in 1868, and had assumed
the role of principal one year later. He was convinced that a “classical
school, doing its work faithfully and well, exerts through its pupils an
influence which will in time permeate the community.” The skillful use
of English was to provide the means by which the culture he cherished
would be rescued from the danger posed to it through the presence of
unfamiliar elements within the city.
Students were taught that no task was too difficult, no problem
so perplexing that it could be abandoned. America, even in this distant
corner of post-Reconstruction Charleston, was undergoing a new indus
trial awakening—productivity was its watchword, the cornerstone of a
glorious and gilded future. The primacy of education for its own sake, a
value belonging to an idler period, had been abandoned to a new spirit
that afforded “no happy mean between strenuous labor and slackness.”
Nor could much be left to the natural development of the child. The
romantic spirit of the antebellum world, with its belief that even society
itself had assumed its natural order, had given way to a quickened, more
deliberate pace in the drive to manipulate nature to fit the purposes
of man. It had always been so, but a greater awareness, a sharpening
of vision, had been achieved through the disruptive influence of war
and its aftermath of Reconstruction. Training, not spontaneity, would
develop the child into a useful member of this progress-oriented society.
Dibble saw Rousseau’s Emile as “the creature of the poet’s imagination;
the real Emile, nature’s petted and spoiled child, grows up an ignorant,
uneducated, indolent man, and his life is a failure.”
41
Page 43 - [see page image]
42
Ludwig Lewisohn
There was more than a spark of Emile in Ludwig, but it lay largely
dormant during these years of pedagogical malaise, and through the re
enforcement accorded this educational torpor by a static society that
sought to maintain the status quo by recognizing those students who
would accept its tenets. For most of his stay at the school, Ludwig
appeared to accept things as they were. He was to begin his open revolt
only in the latter part of his final year at the institution, feeling by then
too hemmed in by traditions far too alien to accept without question. Yet
this revolt would be staged within an acceptable framework, remaining
private and imperceptible to those around him.
Minna, meanwhile, thought this educational system to be the very
best possible schooling her son could receive—cultural training and
access to Charleston’s elite all accomplished in a single stroke. Hoping to
please his parents and bring them the success that he, too, now realized
was beyond their grasp, Ludwig began to display the industriousness
that was to typify his entire adult life. From hard work soon came his
reputation as a scholar among the educated of Charleston.
But it was also a time when the inner struggles of his life deepened
and became more disturbing, giving impetus and direction to his often
compulsive need for public self-expression and the recognition it could
bring to him. For despite this success, a shadow had already descended
upon the dreamworld of his early years, slowly dissolving them into
the hard reality of life at a school designed for children very much
unlike himself. As he later described his experience in Crump, “It was
school that at last created the division between day and dream. It could
be dismissed no longer. . . the trouble with teachers, the atmosphere,
the boys.. . . School was to Herbert a leashed chaos at best, namely
in the classroom, an open pandemonium before and after classes. The
boys’ spirit of raising hell for its own sake irritated him obscurely, but
deeply.. . . Spit-balls and pea-shooters seemed to him, years before he
could formulate such feelings in words, stupidly and nastily irrelevant
to the situation. Foreign-born, he was a conspicuous addition to the
student body; as a Jew, he was fair game for those of his schoolmates
who wished to taunt him mercilessly.
Anti-Semitism in America had its roots in the ancient world. The
Merchant of Venice was among the most popular plays performed
across the country throughout the early years of the Republic. Christ-
killer and Shylock were images alive in the population’s imagination.
Even the more sophisticated, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, were believers
and purveyors of this bigotry. “There sat the very Jew of Jews, the
distilled essence of all Jews that have been born since Jacob’s time,”
he wrote a generation before Ludwig came to Charleston. “He was
Page 44 - [see page image]
43
Homeless in a New World
Judas Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at
the same time the truest type of his race.... I never beheld anything so
ugly and disagreeable, and preposterous, and laughable as the outline of
his profile, it was so hideously Jewish, and so cruel, and so keen.... I
rejoiced exceedingly in this Shylock . . . for the sight of him justified me
in the repugnance I have always felt towards his race.” Only five years
before Ludwig had entered Charleston’s high school, Anna Dawes, in
a treatise widely circulated throughout America, would proclaim Jews
to be “the most narrow of bigots” because of their maintenance of
a different religious culture, and offered that “this makes wholesale
colonization the only solution” to their disruptive presence in other
societies, “unless you would contemplate extermination.” Certainly, in
the wake of a burgeoning wave of immigration of non-Anglo-Saxon
peoples, there was a willingness to listen to such pronouncements. Even
one as progressive as Wait Whitman could write of the “dirty looking
German Jews” in these years, years in which more so even in the South,
still unaccepting of defeat, Jews were “thought of as aliens even when
their fathers had fought in the Confederate armies.” ' 1
And so, each day brought with it the threat of physical violence.
Outclassed in the schoolyard arena, Ludwig tried to avoid his chief
tormentor, “who, tall, wiry, sheer muscle and sinew, smote all the boys’
hip and thigh surreptitiously in the classroom, [and] openly on the play
ground.” But the life of the mind one afternoon gave way as Ludwig’s
rage burst forth. Summoning unknown strength, Ludwig attacked again
and again until he was pulled from his bloodied victim. So formative
had the incident been in his life that he used it in several of his novels.
Speaking of it some three decades later in a story of passion’s ascendancy
over unnatural restraint (Don Juan), he related how “he could still feel
the hot tingling of animal fury in his throat. He had come out of the
encounter limp and rather bloody. He didn’t mind. He had been foolish.
He knew it quite well. But the bruises would heal and the folly and
the experience were his own.” He had spoken their language, and had
taken their message to heart. The external wound healed within days,
but inside, the incident left a permanent scar upon his image of America.
And if Minna “vowed revenge” against his “Jew-baiting school mate,”
and was held at bay by Ludwig’s tearful appeal not to speak with Dibble,
he came away with a second lesson, that he could defend both himself
and his mother from the world’s cruelty. 52
If these days had their uglier side, the near-isolation they imposed
upon him (he did make a few friends among Charleston’s “gentler
families”) had a positive effect as well, offering him a welcome relief
from the distractions that kept him from more meaningful activities,
Page 45 - [see page image]
44
Ludwig Lewisohn
particularly his writing. Ever since his earliest attempts at poetry in St.
Matthews, Ludwig had continued “the constant scribbling” that was
“his great secret occupation.'"' Filled with the stirrings of words and
experiences, he would sit day after day in his garret room or on the
adjoining piazza (as Charlestonians had named their porches), filling
one small notebook after another with what he later admitted in Crump
was “chaotic” and imitative verse.' ‘ And as the next several years passed,
his writings would acquire a recognizable sophistication in style and
content, if still somewhat characterized by a youth’s religiosity and
sentiment.
This solitary passion, so much a part of the young poet’s life, was
first recognized by others in his fourteenth year. Thomas della Torre,
the “fiery and dynamic” instructor of Latin at the high school, suddenly
turned to Ludwig one day during a sight translation of Virgil. Perhaps
out of frustration with the other students, he pointed to Ludwig and
exclaimed, “That is the only boy who has a natural ear for verse.” It
was a piercing moment in Ludwig’s development as a writer. Having long
admired his teacher’s sensitivity to literature, the compliment confirmed
Ludwig’s deepest aspirations and dreams. “A keen strange quiver went
through me. I realized the meaning suddenly of the constant scribbling
which I had been impelled to do during the preceding months. I had a
gift for literature: I knew it now: I never doubted it again. My fate had
found me.” 55
In Crump, Ludwig looked back with special fondness upon della
Torre and the time they spent together during his final year in high school.
Della Torre, transformed into “the enormous dark jovial” musician and
composer Petersen, “still in his thirties,” had become a companion of the
young poet, teaching him what he knew of poetic composition through
the examples of the ancient masters, while communicating to him a sense
of the rich life of the artist. It was della Torre who planted in Ludwig the
seeds of what would later become a significant part of his own vision of
the artistic life and of the need to disregard meaningless and destructive
social conventions.
Together, after lessons, they wandered through the dark, delightful streets
of Queenshaven, sat late in Battery Park talking and planning and ended up
at a little restaurant.. . . What sank into Herbert’s mind was the character
of the world that Petersen pictured. A world inconceivably remote from the
prim preoccupations and trivial social rivalries of Queenshaven. A world
in which art was a supreme and a living thing which men pursued with an
unquestioning earnestness. And in that world the forms of life were shaped
not according to a received and prescribed pattern, but were molded to
serve purposes austere and commanding in themselves. Herbert was far too
Page 46 - [see page image]
45
Homeless in a New World
young to formulate such thoughts in precise language. What he retained
from Petersen’s talk was the abiding sense of the existence of a world in
which perfect freedom was blended with a consecration so genuine that it
was beyond the need of solemn gesture or direct expression. 56
Della Torre, watching from a distance over the years to come as Ludwig
carried this vision further and further toward greater artistic achieve
ment, would continue to feel the warmth toward his former student
that so many others would allow to cool. Better than anyone else in
Charleston, he understood Ludwig and the artistic and personal choices
he would make throughout his life.
Here, in della Torre’s concern for him, Ludwig had found the recog
nition and encouragement he needed. With blind, unceasing dedication,
and following a time-honored method of poetic instruction, he worked
harder than ever at translating the authors of Latin antiquity. The use
of his translation of Horace’s “Diffugeres Nives” as a part of the high
school’s commencement was reward enough for the years of effort that
preceded this day, its anticipated publication in Charleston’s News and
Courier public confirmation of his achievement and worth. Ludwig’s
parents were overjoyed. He had recently told them of his desire to
become a professor of English literature; his inclusion in the program
was taken by them as a sign of a bright future for their son, and of their
own ultimate success in America.
Ludwig’s choice of this text, however, was not without its deeper
purpose. He had deliberately selected a poem that he felt most clearly
reflected the direction his own thoughts had begun to take. Ludwig
had by now grown ambivalent toward all forms of accepted religion,
scorned as they were by his father and increasingly out of step with his
own developing adolescent self-image as a freethinker. Not that he had
abandoned the search for some greater meaning to life that all religions
had sought as well. His own involvement in one form or another of this
quest had been too deep for that. But the constancy of change over these
years had left him with a skepticism toward all doctrine that bordered on
cynicism, and a need to find some spiritual expression at this important
moment in his life.
While in St. Matthews, as he later recalled in Up Stream, he had
entered into the faith and spirit of the place.... [I] accepted the Gospel story
and the obvious implications of Pauline Christianity without question and
felt... a spirit of faith not wholly unlike that of the primitive Church. . . .
I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior. ... At the age of ten my emotional
assimilation into the social group of which I was a physical member was
complete. I would not have touched any alcoholic drink; I would have
shrunk in horror from a divorced person. I would have felt a sense of
Page 47 - [see page image]
46
Ludwig Lewisohn
moral discomfort in the presence of an avowed skeptic [parents apparently
excepted].
But on leaving St. Matthews, he had left behind the Methodist Church
that seemed so much a part of the world he had abandoned, believing
that a new setting would demand of him new loyalties and new ways of
response, as it had in the past.
The Charleston boardinghouse to which the Lewisohns had moved
was owned by an Irish Catholic family whom Ludwig often accompanied
on walks through the city. One such outing during his first weeks in
Charleston had brought him to the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
during High Mass. This first encounter with Roman Catholicism had
opened a new world for Ludwig, intensifying his sense of beauty and of
the grandeur of human expression. More importantly, it had confirmed
his sense of powerlessness before something greater than himself which
the constant movement in his life had first brought to his consciousness.
A profound, if child-defined, sense of man’s homelessness before the
vastness of time and space, and of the unforeseeable vicissitudes of
life, had become deeply troubling to him. A recurring dream sequence
involving his mother’s death had only added to the uncertainty and
spiritual distress of this trying period. Somehow the experience in the
cathedral had made all of this seem less frightening. For reasons beyond
his youthful understanding, he had found a sense of spiritual well-being
there that he had not experienced since undergoing the upheavals that
had brought him to America. Weekly attendance at Mass would diminish
and then stop over the next two years, but not before lasting impressions
had been formed. ' ’ Childhood thoughts of the priesthood as a vocation
would later find a place in his writings as a symbol of this continuing
sense of spirituality.
Ludwig’s move from Catholicism back to the Methodist Church
was caused in large measure by the practical lesson of his schoolyard
experiences, and by the influence of Virgil Dibble. A cultured and kindly
man, he was greatly admired by many of the school’s students who, like
Ludwig, valued education and gentility. He was “the only man I have
ever known who truly embodied the peculiar ideal of the Christian gen
tleman. He had both sweetness and strength, profound piety and wide
charity.'"' Following his example and with the hope of finding social
acceptance, Ludwig again involved himself in the Methodist community,
joining the Epworth League (a youth association) and teaching Sunday
School. Each was a part of his attempt to remake himself in this new
world. As he would later note, “It is clear then, that at the age of fifteen,
I was an American, a Southerner, and a Christian . . . believing that the
Page 48 - [see page image]
47
Homeless in a New World
South was in the right in the War between the States, that Christianity
was the true religion . . . that the Democratic party was the only means,
under Providence, of saving the White Race from obliteration by the
Nigger, that good women were sexless.
But like his memories of Siegfried and his family, this assessment
was born of traumatic memory and not reflective of reality. It was more
a characterization of the society to which he had aspired than of what
he himself had become. In Charleston, Minna had continued to observe
the basic Jewish rites she had fought hard to maintain in St. Matthews.
And though a bar mitzvah was not celebrated, his thirteenth birthday
had special, lasting significance for Ludwig and his parents. Even the
acculturating Jacques looked with pride upon his son’s secularized rite de
passage into manhood. (Jacob Levy “learned English slowly and spoke it
with a heavy German accent to his death,” Ludwig wrote of his father in
The Island Within, a novel of assimilation and remembrance. “A dumb
instinct kept his closer relations Jewish.. . . But the instinct which guided
him was so obscure that he would honestly have denied the existence
and explained the nature of his closest alliances upon other grounds.”)
The survival of a studio photograph of Ludwig dressed in his finery and
of the flyleaf from a volume of Macaulay’s essays (his favorite author at
this time), inscribed by his mother with love from both parents on this
occasion, is testimony to Minna’s devotion to Jewish tradition and to
Ludwig’s involvement in it as a function of his mother’s place in his life." 1
Still, there can be little doubt that the continuing transformation he
underwent from one persona to another in search of some permanent
place within some community had greatly weakened the hold of this
or any culture upon him. The competing truths to which he had been
exposed had brought upon him an unshakable skepticism that prevented
him from favoring one over another. There is little evidence that he ever
held an unquestioning allegiance to Dibble’s world. Hints in Crump of
his early struggles with “the Queenshaven attitude toward the Negro”
and of his hungering “for [sexual] temptations to which to yield,” are
clear indications of his divergence from accepted norms of thought and
behavior, from what Lillian Smith, in her masterwork Killers of the
Dream (1949), would characterize as “the banning of people and books
and ideas . . . (and) the banning of our wishes . . . over forbidden areas
of the body”—both prohibitions being integral parts of the southern
ethos into which she had been born in the year of Ludwig’s graduation
from high school. Nor could he abide “the matter of games,” a feature
of his world he found “aimlessly competitive . . . incomprehensible and
odious.” He could never quite translate his personal love of physical
exertion out-of-doors into the organized conflicts of the field. And no
Page 49 - [see page image]
48
Ludwig Lewisohn
matter how far his ideas would wander in the years ahead, to the left or
the right, the notion of competitiveness, so fundamental to the system
under which he would live, always seemed morally corrupting. Taken
together, then, and given his desire to pose as the southern gentleman,
his “boyish soul was [left] tormented and warped,” struggling with a
“wretched conviction of sin” against which he fought with the soul of
the German Jew that he was.
This fundamental inner conflict with his society over issues he was
forced to affirm, but could not, served as a key factor motivating his
literary productivity, then as in the future, for writing was one of the
very few means open for anyone in the South at that time seeking to
express himself and his vision of a changed society."- “Diffugeres Nives,”
his valedictory presentation, was the first evidence of this. Deceptively
masked in this choice were the doubts and discomfort he felt in his
attempt to play an alien role. In his mind, it became an unmistakable
plaint against the moral order and false sense of well-being that dom
inated Charleston’s high society, and against its feeling of security that
had discounted the forces of nature and the irreversibly fated pattern of
life and death.
The moons their heavenly course mend,
But we when to us comes our end . . .
Not birth, nor eloquence, that hour
Oh! friend, can help you, nor a power
Of earth or heaven.' 1
Of even greater significance, however, was its protest against his
own insincerity in trying to adopt this posture as his own. It was, he had
finally realized, a violation of the spiritual quest that had already begun
to dominate his life. He later wondered in Up Stream whether this early
search for that “power in which there is no variableness, neither shadow
of turning,” was “all a child’s shallow religiosity,” though he knew it
was more than that. “Not all, I think, for I had a sense, shadowy and
inarticulate, but deep enough, of our homelessness in the universe, of
our terrible helplessness before it. I had seen something of misfortune
and uncertainty and change and my mind desired then as, with such
frugal hope, it does now, a point of permanence in the ‘vast driftings of
the cosmic weather.’
And so, with no lasting “point of permanence” yet found, he turned
in the end to his mother, whose “sensitive sympathy [had] never failed”
him. She alone offered the comfort he had hoped to find in some eternal
and immutable source, and the possibility of finding a way to once
again accept the Jewishness that was such an integral part of his being.
Page 50 - [see page image]
49
Homeless in a New World
Minna’s central role in his world became more crucial during those last
troubled months in the spring of 1897 as he tried unsuccessfully to bury
the “rebellious things . . . deeper and deeper,” until forced from within
to give them a voiced She was the one constant element in his life to
which he could always return when all else seemed to turn from him. If
Charleston had held for him the many idyllicized romances of the years
before this rebellion began, it now assumed a greater importance for
him as the dwelling place of the mother whose embrace was his only
source of security and peace. As such, the city became his queen’s haven,
the Queenshaven he spoke of so passionately years later, even after he
had come to see how this transformed and seductive vision of Charleston
had been both the haven and the hell within which he had so desperately
struggled to re-create himself as an American.
Page 51 - [see page image]
50
2
With Manifesto
in Hand
As the summer of graduation passed into autumn, the barely fifteen-
year-old Ludwig spent his days deep in literary pursuits (reading, trans
lating Horace, and composing imitative verse), interrupting them on
occasion to gaze out of his garret window at those wondrous “Southern
heavens . . . [filled] with strong blues and golds, the pink of sunsets, the
grave glitter of constellations” that had first captured his imagination
in St. Matthews, or to listen to the unfamiliar black church music and
street sounds emerging from outside the Lewisohns’ newly rented house
at 115 Calhoun Street. In time he would come to associate much that
had been positive in his Charleston years with this new home. “The
word home,” he later wrote in Crump, “never meant anything else than
the house on Calhoun Street.” 1 It was at once paradise and portal, the
place where Ludwig and his parents “were so happy and so united,” 2
the place where he was to spend days on end imaginatively developing
his abilities as a writer, and where his sensitivity to life’s variety began
to ripen into an appreciation of cultural differences and the need to
defend each as a source of artistic inspiration and fulfillment and of
personal freedom. Only his walks about the city with Minna broke into
his daily, homebound pattern of life as these two soul mates, drawing
ever closer, talked away the days and months of loneliness they shared
in the otherwise restrictive world of fin-de-siecle Charleston.
Jacques and Minna, in their youth, had learned to value Mozart
and Beethoven and Handel and Schumann as the premier composers
of the world’s greatest music. Like Charleston’s white society, they
Page 52 - [see page image]
51
With Manifesto in Hand
too believed that their works, and others like them, were the only
musical sounds worthy of one’s interest. But Ludwig discovered a new
world of sound that summer. Believing it futile to disagree with his
parents, he kept his developing love for these new tonal combina
tions and rhythms to himself. Here were the sounds, unlike any oth
ers he had ever heard, that “made the child tremble and turn pale”
and released such feelings of ecstasy “that he . . . dropped sobbing on
the floor” more than once. Here was a world of sound, a cultural
source of artistic expression “to which his father and mother paid
little attention,” as he noted in Crump, but one that “thrilled and
haunted him and remained forever memorable to him” as example
and refuge. 3 “There were Negroes in the back-yard [a line of tiny
black two-story cottages], as it was called; there was the Negro Church
across the street [Emmanuel A.M.E.]; there were Negroes all around.. . .
Paul Fludd, the butcher. . . singing in his vibrant bass voice . . . [and]
the elderly Negresses coming from the key. . . [who] in their rich un
tutored voices . . . would cry their wares.. . . And there was one old
Negro man who sang up and down the scale in a dreamy, strange
sing-song.” 4
These were “the tones and cadences ... of his childhood that many
years later puzzled the critics in his works.” Of this Ludwig was con
vinced. But even more so was he certain of the lasting effect that the black
church music, “interwoven with all the memories of his earlier years,”
had had upon his ability to withstand the “dark and tortured hours”
he later encountered, repeatedly, long after these musical experiences
of his youth had passed. In that earlier time, he would sit in his garret
room, and as “he half dream[ed] over a book,” he would listen to the
singularly “melancholy chant” that emerged each Sunday, week after
week, year after year, from across the road. Almost immediately, he knew
that this was not a song of defeat, but of the spirit in flight—not of a
“great resignation,” but of some “terribly moving aspiration. Did not
the souls of the overburdened liberate themselves in it for one moment
of eternity? Only to return to earth to be sure, but with a vision and a
hope that sounded full and strong and sonorous.” Here was a song he,
too, wished to sing, but with chords composed out of an experience that
returned him to this memory once more as he retold his life in Crump.
“He used often to think as time went on and on and life turned out so
strangely for him that if he could only go alone to visit Queenshaven . . .
and stand in front of the old houses and hear the Negroes chant that
chant again, that then the foul ice which fate had made to congeal in
his bosom might melt and a miracle happen within him to placate the
seemingly implacable powers.” 5
Page 53 - [see page image]
52
Ludwig Lewisohn
But he knew nothing of these powers that summer of 1897, only
of the sounds and thoughts that had begun to move him, and of his
desire to read the ancients and the Victorians, and thereby become a
great poet. Minna understood Ludwig’s aspirations, but Jacques, while
supportive of his son, cared little for the poetry over which he thought
he was wasting his time. Yet Jacques himself had never quite managed
to be rid of “the romantic movement [that] was in his bones” as well,
of which Minna’s freer expression remained a gnawing reminder over
the years. He had fought valiantly to become the modern man he valued
above all else, eschewing all faith in the nonrational traditions of the
past, replacing them with the art and science that “cooled his head.”
Still, as Ludwig recognized early, Jacques “hungered for the ineffable
and the infinite . . . [and] was, in his humble way, a knight of the spirit.”
Though he had wished to wean his son from ideas he himself thought
outmoded, recommending to him the works of Arnold, Darwin, Fiske,
and Huxley, there was a part of him that could empathize with his son’s
longings. He was, as Ludwig eulogized him in Crump, “a righteous man
[who] in his small obscure place in the world. . . stood firm for the
good,” as though it had some greater basis than human creativity. 6
Minna knew of her husband’s internal conflict, and of his mistaken
belief that Ludwig had “inherited his grandfather’s sobriety of temper,”
and thus could share in this thoroughgoing rationalism. She knew better
than he that Ludwig was far more the romantic than the rationalist.
He was her son by temperament and training.' It was she to whom
he read his poetry, even when he wrote out of an “ecstatic eroticism—
fierce, earnest, almost exalted,” 8 thoughts of which at times seemed to
consume much of his energies, though he would translate them into
more respectable expressions fit for a mother’s ears. He had had his
first experience with a young woman that spring, “nothing fatal and
ultimate,” merely innocent fun under the guise of a game within a
group of like-minded youths, each experimenting with their newly found
desires. 9 But it had happened only once, and with fear and social pressure
taking command, he could now desire her only from afar—pure and
sweet in the hands-off tradition of Charleston’s gentry. With only a few
high school companions admiring, but little understanding him, he was
left with Minna alone as his true friend and confidante. And so they
walked Charleston’s streets that summer, heavy with the season’s languid
air, their lives filled with the expectation and anxiety that came to them
with all new beginnings. 10
There appears to have been some discussion at this time within
the Lewisohn household regarding Ludwig’s further education. Minna,
valuing her German culture over that of her adopted country, had hoped
Page 54 - [see page image]
53
With Manifesto in Hand
to send her son back to Europe for his college training. There were a few
dollars set aside, but not nearly enough. Finally, it was Ludwig himself
who opted to stay in Charleston. He, too, had “longed for that strange
and beautiful world in which so great a part of his imaginative life”
had been spent, but he feared the separation more than he wanted an
experience he believed could be his at some later time. Minna, despite her
desire to see Ludwig well educated, similarly dreaded their separation
and was, in the end, pleased that she would have him by her side
for another four years. Jacques was relieved at not having to find the
means to support Ludwig in Germany, and pleased that his son would
receive the “systematic education” that he himself had failed to acquire
in his own youth. He resolved to help Ludwig develop his rational
faculties, while Minna, despite her ambivalence, grew more determined
to “save harder than ever during those four years” so that he might then
go abroad. 11
The massive oaks lining the walkway from the porter’s gatehouse to
the main building of the College of Charleston had stood for more than
half a century when Ludwig first crossed the small urban campus as a
student that fall of 1897. Under the shade of its trees had walked the sons
of Charleston’s social elite, and for over half a century before the young
seedlings were planted, the fathers and grandfathers of these sons had
passed their days in study on this hallowed ground. It was to Charleston
what the Academy was to Athens, for despite its post-Civil War loss of
prominence, the inhabitants of this small town still thought themselves
citizens of a great modern city-state. The college itself promoted this
image, stating in its catalog that “the city of Charleston, from earliest
colonial times a centre of culture, is admirably fitted in every way to
be the seat of an institution of learning. It presents to the student a
more extended field for the study of the history of this country than
any other of its cities; memorials of a great past constantly teach lessons
of patriotism, courage and endurance; the busy city with its extensive
commerce reminds the student of possibilities of a greater future.” u
The possibility of a college had first been discussed in the 1760s, as
Charleston’s planters gathered in their newly formed Library Society
to speak of cultural and educational needs and desires. Intervening
Revolution and the uncertainties of the new Republic had delayed its
opening, but by 1785 it was a chartered institution of higher learning,
conducting classes for the first time that fall. One of the oldest colleges in
the country, its fortunes closely paralleled the history its graduates were
to play so great a part in shaping. Often in financial difficulty, it became
the first municipal college in the United States and, with an infusion of
new capital in the 1820s, razed barracks from the French and Indian
Page 55 - [see page image]
54
Ludwig Lewisohn
War to construct the buildings in which Ludwig was to spend the next
four years. Even today, evidence of this heritage can be seen in bricks
from these earlier structures, set into the foundations of the old library
whose construction accompanied the planting of the oak trees. With a
student body rarely exceeding seventy and a faculty of fewer than ten,
the intimate atmosphere of the college afforded a student with serious
intentions the freedom and resources for exploration and growth.
Not that this had continued as the overriding concern of the city’s
leadership. In their minds, the college existed to produce their successors,
passing on those skills and ideas that would keep Charleston basically
unchanged for generations to come. The importance of religion, nar
rowly defined, and the nature of true patriotism were left undisputed.
Daily attendance in the chapel was required of all, as each day faculty
and students would turn their backs to the north (as the town fathers
had done with their memorial statue of John Calhoun) and offer their
prayers and devotion to the old order.
Ludwig spoke with understanding in Crump of his fellow students
during those four years, and told how “despite their many intellectual
awakenings,” they had moved through this period of their lives as if in
“a mild trance.”
The boys were all young.. . . Existence in Queenshaven was a simple
enough thing in those years. There was no extravagance and no harsh
poverty. The Spanish War passed like a pleasing legend. None of the bitter
problems or conflicts of the world touched those old brown buildings or
those sunny trees. Most of the boys expected after graduation either to
study medicine at the local medical school or else to read law either in their
father’s office or in some other office on Broad Street. There was little or
no rivalry in those bare, mild classrooms. Those who had a taste for study
did well; those who had not, slipped through or quietly dropped out. 14
Ludwig, however, had come to the college for a very different reason.
Believing that unfettered opportunity awaited all who worked hard to
earn it, he carried into its classrooms the hopes of his parents and his own
dream of a professorship in English literature. Brimming with youthful
optimism (or was it another mask of self-deception?), he looked forward
to reaching this self-appointed destination as soon as possible. Little
ambition beyond this goal existed for him. If conscious of the possibility
for failure, he acted as though it could not be his fate. He would seize
life and wring from it the fullness of his days. “Some see it never,” he
wrote that fall, “and yet it lies / Before them ever and anon, / But wise
men see it ere ‘tis gone, / Ere away it hies.” 15 Or so he thought in those
early college months before the dream began to fade in the shadows of
darker days. With few exceptions, his academic career at the college was
Page 56 - [see page image]
55
With Manifesto in Hand
a sparkling success. Only poor grades in mathematics and the sciences,
subjects of little interest to him, kept him from attaining the college’s
highest honors. Having finished the work of three years in his final two,
he was graduated in June 1901 as the salutatorian of his class, with the
further distinction of being awarded both the bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in English literature at the age of nineteen. 1 '
While classes on Horace, Cicero, Livy, Catullus, and Virgil had
long been taught and were for some time now joined by those on
Moliere, Racine, Hugo, Chateaubriand, Sand, Lessing, Schiller, and
Goethe, a considerable increase in the number of class offerings in
English and American literature had only just been added (though not
including the work of Theodore Dreiser, a favorite of Ludwig’s whom
he had discovered that year). 17 These earlier classes in belles lettres had
always included some British authors, and composition had long been a
freshman requirement. But a new emphasis upon a more Americanized
education was taking hold among the younger faculty recently hired by
the trustees. Harrison Randolph, not yet thirty years old, had assumed
the dual role of mathematics instructor and president of the college in the
spring of 1897. Thomas della Torre, 18 Ludwig’s Latin instructor at the
high school, had moved down George Street with his former pupil that
fall to fill the position in classical languages. The pedagogical experiences
of the new instructors differed greatly from those whom they replaced,
and promised to revitalize a curriculum that no longer seemed capable
of training the city’s future leadership to deal effectively with external
changes that were certain to affect Charleston in the century about
to begin.
The following year brought to the college a new member of the
English faculty, the scion of Virginia aristocracy, a man whose father
had been a personal friend of Robert E. Lee and a recognized scholar in
southern academic circles. Breeding and pedigree were of great concern
to the guardians of culture, and Lancelot Minor Harris embodied all
that was wished for in a teacher of that language and literature whose
sanctity was not to be violated by alien blood. One recommendation
after another in support of his candidacy for the position enumerated
his personal qualifications as “a man of exquisite tastes and most refined
sentiments.'’ 1 ' “He comes from good Virginia stock; his father was a
professor of distinction at Washington and Lee University for a number
of years. Mr. Harris had, therefore, all the advantages of having been
reared in a cultured home amid people of unusual refinement. This, as
every teacher of English knows, goes for very much in the selection of a
professor for this department.... A gentleman by instinct, inheritances,
and education.” 20
Page 57 - [see page image]
56
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig’s choice of an English major put him under Harris’s close
supervision in the beginning of his sophomore year, and Harris quickly
became the dominant literary influence in his life. As Ferris in Ludwig’s
tale of Queenshaven, Up Stream, the unmalleable Harris was recalled
as a teacher appreciated by only a few students at the college. But to
Ludwig, he meant everything.
Ferris took notice of me at once, of my ambition and of my talent. He taught
me how to train myself to write; he gave me generously of his time; he
paid my efforts the fine tribute of searching criticism and merciless veracity.
During the four [sic] years that I was his pupil I do not think he praised
me twice. But now and then a certain earnestness, almost solemnity would
come into his eyes and then I knew that I had approached my goal a little
nearer. For I recognized in him at once a singularly subtle and exquisitely
tempered literary intelligence. 21
Harris was similarly taken with his new pupil, recognizing in him the
makings of a potentially fine literary scholar and writer, though troubled
by elements of a “prophetic strain” and an “outspokenness” he could
not keep in check. Thirty-seven years after their first meeting, Harris
would speak admiringly of his former student and the life he had led
since leaving their beloved campus.
No teacher of English literature could have failed to see that his reading in
literature had already been extraordinary, had been thoroughly assimilated
and subjected to a critical sense amazingly mature for his age. His writing
at that time was somewhat tinged with Germanisms, but this did not last
for long. He was already writing verse—I think he said verse at that time—
though I remember that later he announced his decision to say in the future
not “my verse” but “my poetry.” I recall an imitation of Byron’s “Don
Juan,” which he wrote for the college magazine. It was very mature—
altogether in the spirit and form of the original—but for him, merely an
incidental byplay. He read very rapidly and, of course, assimilated what
he read. I recall his taking from the college library the four volumes of
Taine’s “English Literature,” in French, and finishing them within a week.
Naturally, he was somewhat alien to the average student, though I think his
literary talent was recognized. I remember that once in a faculty meeting,
Professor De La Torre remarked that Lewisohn would do more credit to
the college than any other student we had, and that this prediction was
received with some skepticism. This was quite natural, since for other
subjects than the “humanities,” Lewisohn had no interest, and limited his
study to what was necessary to a bare pass. His own lot was certainly a
hard one through many years, and this may have been partly due to his
outspokenness. He was never “practical”—particularly when, against the
grain, he occasionally tried to be so. I always think of him as, in the essence,
a lyric soul, and in connection with his present activities, recall the lines
of Milton:
Page 58 - [see page image]
57
With Manifesto in Hand
Till old experiences do attain
To something of prophetic strain.
That is, he was quite as serious in the matter as Milton was. 22
While this mutuality of affection developed rapidly between student
and mentor, an unbridgeable chasm remained to separate them, even
long after their days together at the college. Each had brought to the
relationship vastly differing experiences, incompatible perceptions, and
temperaments as far apart as the extremes of passion and rational
restraint. If Ludwig wished to be the gentleman that Harris was, his
passionate, artistic spirit would forever betray his every attempt. Older,
more aware of her son’s plight, Minna had repeatedly warned Ludwig
of the unapproachable distance that separated him from Harris. But
Ludwig would not heed her words of caution. Many years would pass
before he could admit that she was right, that his unquestioned faith in
Harris had caused him to misperceive the situation.
Deep, strange, silent things seemed to divide us.. . . Gentility! ... He was a
Virginia aristocrat. His mind had fared forth boldly on all the quests of man;
apparently his intellectual flexibility and moral freedom were boundless.
But at the slightest translation of that freedom into action, were it by so
much as a vivid gesture, a spiritual discomfort seized him and the gentleman
conquered the man. Since art means passion and since all passion has a touch
of wildness, he was ever too much a gentleman to be an artist. Not with
his mind and heart, but with his unconquerable tribal self he always loved
something else—a quiet manner, reserve of speech, an aristocratic nose—a
little better than he loved truth or beauty.... In the best and deepest hours
we spent together there was in him a shadow of withdrawal from me—a
shadow of watchfulness, of guardedness.. . . He too must have realized it,
must have reflected on it for I also stood for something in his life, and I am
unwilling to believe that such a nature as his yielded without a struggle to
the injustice of its tribal self. That shadow . . . remained in my mind as the
symbol of an essential isolation. 23
The irrefutably divisive effect of Ludwig’s Jewishness upon their
relationship would ultimately determine Harris’s larger role for his stu
dent, as a symbol of that intolerant world that would repeatedly reject
him in the years ahead. “He never, I think, quite forgave me for being
what I am,” Ludwig wrote in Up Stream. “I think your Jew boy is
wonderful.... I think your power over this clay in your hands speaks
you a Master of more than one,” wrote Nannie Scott, headmistress
of Virginia’s elite Bel Air School, in response to her nephew Harris’s
characterization of Ludwig. ’ Harris looked upon Ludwig as a profes
sional challenge—could he make of this unhewn Jewish stone a finely
polished scholar and poet? Harris’s friend and fellow English teacher H.
M. Belden praised him for obvious success, though he still perceived a
Page 59 - [see page image]
58
Ludwig Lewisohn
less than perfect cut. “I was so far interested in the poems you sent from
your Jewish disciple.... I thought extremely well of them,” though he
remarked woefully of one he particularly admired, that “perhaps it is
Jewish, and will not sing for the Gentile. ” ;
Ludwig forever remained his teacher’s Jewish student, a victim of
the notion of racially determined consciousness and aesthetic sensitivity
common in Harris’s world. More than a decade after Ludwig had left
his classroom, Harris could still describe the tone of a letter from him as
“half-sincere ... an indispensable and inevitable Semetic [sic] quality:
there can be no epistle from the Hebrews without it.” 26 This belief in
Ludwig’s lack of sincerity was a mirror of Harris’s own inability to look
beyond his prejudices. Some two decades would pass, and countless
articles and books would be written, before he would acknowledge that
the little Jew with the more than aristocratic nose had earned, through
his own strenuous efforts, a place alongside him in the world of English
literary scholarship. Harris was, in these years, simply incapable of
imagining his “Jewish disciple” as his colleague. Only the weight of
his literary productivity and its recognition by noted authorities would
change Harris’s image of Ludwig.
Yet, if Ludwig’s background and experiences were not a sufficient
reason for Harris to treat him differently than he did others, there was no
denying that they had created in Ludwig a heart and mind far different
from Harris’s, which Harris undoubtedly detected in the early days of
their relationship. Ludwig’s inordinate wish to enter Harris’s world was
nowhere more forcefully or unwittingly betrayed by Ludwig himself than
in the very arena in which he first sought acceptance as an equal—the
college’s Chrestomathic Society. With his scholarly reputation preceding
him, Ludwig was nominated for membership during his first week at
the college by E. H. Pringle, Jr., the son of a leading Charleston family,
and later president of the college’s board of trustees and the father of
several of the city’s more progressive citizens. Pringle, the Ralph Green
of Crump, had, like Ludwig, found his fellow students too quiescent,
and had protested against the “extremity of peacefulness” pervading
their campus. “This place is dead,” he complained often, “there isn’t
any incentive."" He hoped for a political career and worried that his
experience at the college was poor preparation for such a future. Every
attempt to rouse the interest of his peers in issues of the day had failed.
Only Ludwig responded to his appeals.
A third student, J. Waites Waring, often accompanied them on
their walks through town, sharing in their discussions of “politics and
literature and sex and the ways of God to man.” Remembered in Crump
as Walter Ware, “a tall, blond, indolent brainy chap,” Waring would
Page 60 - [see page image]
59
With Manifesto in Hand
later be ostracized by Charleston society for rendering several landmark
civil rights decisions as a federal judge, among them the 1948 ruling that
opened the South Carolina Democratic Party primary to black voters.
If Pringle “was for reforming everything” and “lived in the burning
light of a great future that he had planned for himself,” Waring was
more content “to discuss all things than to plan.” 28 Both were several
years older and farther along in their education than Ludwig, but they
recognized his unusual talent and fine mind, and sought out his company
in those early months.
Ludwig “would glow inwardly” at their recognition of him as an
artist, but still valued most his time alone, after he had left them and
was making his way home “through the soft fragrant air of the night.”
Though he greatly enjoyed “the warmth of debate” and “the agreeable
sense of community with his friends,” he found the experience strangely
heightened by his leavetaking and by the often recurrent thought of “his
essential separateness and superiority in his art.” He would hurry home,
and “in such late and silent hours” would prepare his arguments for the
next Chrestomathic gathering, or compose a piece for publication in the
society’s College of Charleston Magazine. 19
Within a month of his election to the society, Ludwig would defend
the first of the many unpopular causes he was to espouse over the next
four crusading years. A selective list of issues reveals a sharp portrait
of Ludwig as a young radical whose own “unconquerable tribal self”
supplanted the wishes of his heart and mind. Among those things he
opposed were the United States’ aggressive policy toward Spain and
the retention of the Philippines as war treasure; the granting of fifty
thousand dollars as a presidential discretionary fund; the injustices of
business syndicates; capital punishment; the use of jails for punitive
rather than reformatory programs; the notion that only taxes raised
from blacks be used for black education; and the idea “that women were
put here for evil rather than for good.” In a positive vein, he promoted
the ideas of compulsory education (particularly as a preventative for
crime); a federally funded national university; the justifiability of suicide;
women’s suffrage; and a socialist form of government, though warning
his classmates of the need to keep a vigilant watch over the political
affairs of their city and nation.
Ludwig was passionate in his defense of these issues, often violating
the rules of civility by interrupting speakers, “exclaiming,” “making a
comment aloud about another’s debate,” laughing, and “gesticulating,”
as the society’s charges of misconduct against him read. In fact, he was
fined no less than sixteen times for these indiscretions, well above the
number cited for other members of the group. Ludwig was never to
Page 61 - [see page image]
60
Ludwig Lewisohn
bend willingly to another’s sense of discipline. Not surprisingly, other
members were almost never fined for similar violations.'
Before long, Ludwig began to feel an estrangement not only from
Harris but also from his classmates and fellow Epworth League mem
bers. He had hoped to win acceptance into their society, and looked with
increasing sadness upon his growing isolation. His essay on Goethe, de
livered at the college in January 1898, was an expression of his deepening
resentment toward the society that had so quickly and unfairly rejected
him. If acceptance already appeared unattainable, why then violate ele
ments of his own background and nature which were alien to others, but
an integral part of himself? Might not such self-denial be more injurious
than the social isolation he could do little to remedy? Giving the Goethe
essay his best effort, he delivered a talk worthy of special mention in the
society’s Magazine. If undefined by the reviewer, there was something
in Ludwig’s oration that had struck him, something powerful and yet
disturbing in the ideas and the manner of their presentation. 31 Clearly,
Ludwig was a presence that could not easily be ignored. On campus but
four months, he had already begun to create a stir among students and
faculty. In his remaining three and a half years at the college, he would
use both the Chrestomathic Society and its Magazine as outlets for his
thoughts and frustrations.
Ludwig was quick to follow this initial public, if heavily masked,
protest with another, less obliquely disguised, entry in the Magazine. Dis
turbing emotions and thoughts could no longer be suppressed. “Maggie’s
Fate,” ostensibly the story of a young man’s failure to win the hand of
the woman he idealized, was, in fact, the painful telling of Ludwig’s own
isolation from those he had hoped to befriend; for “Maggie” was the
name most often used by his peers for the Magazine, and as such, an
easily recognizable symbol for the group that had socially rejected him.
Waring, in part responsible for this rejection, later corroborated the
truth of Ludwig’s sense of social isolation from those who had otherwise
accepted him as their fellow student. Harrison Randolph had founded
the college’s only fraternity, a chapter of Alpha Tau Omega, when he
arrived in 1897. 32 But not all were eligible. As Waring later admitted,
many who possessed the intellectual capacity for membership in the
Chrestomathic Society were, because of social or ethnic differences,
found deficient in the necessary qualifications for fraternal belonging:
Yes, we had the Chrestomathic Society where we met once a week—Monday
night I think it was—and we had quarters in the college. We had debates,
readings, criticism, and so-called orations. I took a rather active part in
the literary society, and was an officer in it. You see, it was a rather small
college with small classes, and almost everybody took some part. We lived
Page 62 - [see page image]
61
With Manifesto in Hand
a rather restricted life in the sense that the same people met every day. We
were cliquish. We had a fraternity, and we just didn’t let them in unless they
were strictly our kind. Fraternities are pretty good things in some respects
but they can be awfully aristocratic]. I can look back and think of some
pretty good fellows who were friends of mine. We turned thumbs down on
them just because they didn’t quite measure up to what we wanted. 33
And what they wanted was certainly not someone whose Jewish back
ground, despite Methodist attachments, had automatically made him
ineligible according to the newly adopted bylaws, though, as one of
Ludwig’s classmates later said, they had wanted to invite him into their
company. From photographs of his class, and from the tenor of the
description given nearly four decades later by this classmate, it is easy
to see how Ludwig’s ethnic variance was seen as reason enough to reject
his application.
Ludwig Lewisohn? I remember a sallow-faced, introspective Jew, unathletic,
short, inclined to be flabby. I see a round head and straight black hair,
the coordinated workings of a brilliant mind, a slightly aloof boy, but
reasonably liked and not unfriendly. ... It is known that the young writer
was terribly hurt when a fraternity was formed and he was not asked to
join. The charter members of the chapter were his best friends, and probably
would have liked to have taken him in. Unfortunately, there was a rule
banning Jews. 34
This unreasonable, and for him still incomprehensible, social rejec
tion by those he had hoped to “wed” confirmed his growing suspicion.
Despite the intellectual acceptance and degree of camaraderie he had
come to enjoy so quickly, the courtship with “Maggie” had, indeed, been
short-lived. And so he ended this pursuit, and began another. “I have
always had peculiar ideas, and therefore I released her. I have always
thought to every man there is a woman in the world who is his fate, and
to every woman a man, and to separate such is evil. I am married now,
and am convinced that Maggie was not the woman of all women for
me. And so are also Maggie and John who are happy together, happy of
a necessity, for it was evident that John was Maggie’s fate.” 35 To whom,
then, was he now married? Who was it that had replaced his early dream
and had engaged his spirit “to discover the secret,” as he had spoken
in “Maggie” of his search for the ideal mate? If Maggie symbolized
unyielding denial, then Ludwig’s mate would be life itself in its larger,
more liberated sense. Life’s journey, he was beginning to conclude from
these experiences, was best chartered with a more worldly compass,
and not with the narrowness of interest and vision used by Charleston’s
elite to decide against allowing him to enter their sacred precincts. But
to merely raise the banner of freedom was not enough. Blindly and
Page 63 - [see page image]
62
Ludwig Lewisohn
slavishly, using false imagery of their own creation to lead them, men
had too often knotted their own fetters in the name of some illusion of
freedom, forgetting how to truly love the goodness of the world. In a
poem (“Oh Well for Him”) published alongside “Maggie” in February
1898, Ludwig declared his independence from this misguided path and
boldly proclaimed his intent to strike out along a different road in search
of the mate who was truly his. 36
“The world began to clear for me,” he later wrote of this period of
his life, his powers of reason and observation “suddenly awakened . . .
[as] the source of constant, sharp revelations.” A garden party sponsored
by the Epworth League remained fixed in his mind as the occasion for the
sharpest of these enlightening moments. Listening to the “chaff, feeble
to the point of imbecility,” he realized that the well-groomed young
men and their fair young women (who, admittedly, had given him “a
faint, sensuous pleasure” just to look upon the “glint of sunlight on their
smooth hair”) were “all witless, stale and puerile beyond conception—
refined through sheer weakness, well-mannered and yet incurably ill-
bred.” Their laughter was “without true mirth,” their minds “ignorant
by temperament, profession, and pigheadedness.” They had neither the
vigor nor the temper to seek the truth, and in listening to the retelling
of missionary work among the heathens of Mexico, he “wondered if
the Mexicans, though less hygienic and refined, weren’t in all likelihood
more interesting and vital”—a judgment he noted as one of the earliest
to mark “the passing of the boy into the man.” 37
He remembered as well how this revelation had coincided with
a new perception of the universe, in part the product of his father’s
“wearying of my dogmatic assents.” Jacques had insisted that Lud
wig read the Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy by Harvard University
philosopher and historian John Fiske. It proved an “admirable choice
for an awakening intellect,” as “strong, cool light seemed to irradiate
my mind.” As a follower of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Fiske
had attempted to spread their ideas and thereby remove the encrus
tation of prejudices that had remained intact for centuries. Jacques’
soul mate had painted a picture of the universe and of man’s place
within it that seemed for Ludwig far closer to the truth than any he
had previously given assent to. “All my emotional forts collapsed at
once,” he dramatically recalled in Up Stream. If his actual reaction
had been less cataclysmic than this, the reading of Fiske and others
like him undoubtedly gave Ludwig the intellectual underpinning and
emotional security he needed in his attempt to deny the ideas of his
youth. He “thirsted to know . . . hungered to create,” and this thirst and
hunger, which could not be slaked through the exercise of old restraints,
Page 64 - [see page image]
With Manifesto in Hand
tipped the balance in favor of his continuing search for a new way in
the world. 38
A young woman entered his life during those early months of 1898,
heightening his anxiety as she struck him in a familiar but now more
troubling way than ever before. No longer was he willing to sublimate
his passions in repetition of the previous summer’s activities. “Something
within me began to ache with a very definite, small, sharp, insistent
ache.” It would not go away, though he thought that the woman’s
“maidenly propriety” would not allow her to give in to her own feelings
toward him. And so he fled, excusing his reluctance as hers. 39
Three times in his later fiction he would speak of this brief flirtation
and its effect upon him, trying always to rewrite the end to which
this flirtation and confusion had brought him, succeeding each time in
demonstrating how slowly his recovery from the trauma was evolving.
In Don Juan, written a quarter century later out of a different struggle
not unrelated to this earlier experience of repressed sexual need, he
played with the possibility of a bad ending for the young woman, and
the shame and guilt it would have brought him, perhaps foreshadowing
the brutal solution to this later struggle he found emotionally satisfying
as a fictional device for Crump.
He had met the daughter of a man who kept a hardware shop near the
campus. The man and his wife were rigid and repressed and gloomy people,
people who lived in terror of their own impulses, people who, knowing no
mean between barrenness and brutishness of life, chose the former. They
guarded the girl dourly, but she had not their inner curb. She had a ruddy
sort of loveliness and eyes that were large and limpid though a little empty. In
those days Lucien had had the shyness of the idealist and he had understood
but had not dared to understand the measure of the girl’s urgency. While
he wrote bad verses to her, a Greek waiter with an oiled mustache took her.
There was a little scandal and the girl was sent away from home. He had
writhed over this with an immeasurable pain. He called himself a miserable
coward who had thrown the bread of life into the gutter.... It was known
that he had liked the girl and he had to hear himself praised for his decency
and manliness and cleanness. And all the while he knew that his abstention
and the ugly results in the girl’s life had stained and tarnished both his vital
impulses and his imagination. 40
Three years later, partially liberated from the circumstances that
had brought him to Don Juan, Ludwig returned once again to this
experience, rendering it more factually than before. In Crump, even his
choice of the young woman’s name was a pointed reminder to himself
of the temptation without fulfillment he had been forced to accept, then
and, in a different way, during the long years since. “Rosie Brierfield
had lured Herbert into the glamorous live-oak woods at Otranto on a
63
Page 65 - [see page image]
64
Ludwig Lewisohn
Sunday School picnic and let him kiss her and had then slipped away.
On Meeting Street she walked in front of him in the morning, turned
around and smiled and pulled her long gold braid provocatively and half
beckoned him toward her house. He burned and dared not understand.
How could one be sure?” 41
Freer still in 1930, he drew the fullest portrait of this youthful
sexuality and of his attempt at satisfying these natural inclinations,
unburdened by intervening events. Of his parents, he would write in
Stephen Escott that they were “kindly, educated, reasonably well-born
people” who were “in fact, wholly without insight into life, into human
relations, into any of the real sources of happiness; they lived morose,
chill, disappointed lives, irked, dissatisfied, uncommunicative, isolated,
dull.” It was his most compelling portrait of them, and though fictional,
the most honest. He remembered how all those years before he had found
them incapable of offering him the comfort which in other instances
had been fully and readily given. Turning to his peers, he and a half
dozen other boys had found release during high school in “a series of
highly-polished-looking photographs of quite nude women in coarsely
alluring poses,” though he felt overwhelmed by “a gravity of dread and
fascination and outrage and strong, helpless temptation. The memory of
that emotional shock . . . stayed with me,” he reported, though “its con
sequences, whatever they were, have vanished or become irrecoverably
repressed.
“Not so with one other sudden revelation that profoundly troubled
my adolescent soul,” he went on to confess, telling of his college en
counter with two girls in the wooded area beside the picnic grounds
during the Sunday School outing. One was “slight, demure,” the other
“a great, black, overdeveloped hoyden with gleaming cork-screw curls
down to her white neck and falling, when she leaned forward, upon
her full womanly bosom.” It was she who attracted his attention, her
sexuality emphasized as she straddled his companion’s bicycle, her pet
ticoats and silk stockings revealed “in a falsely involuntary display.”
“I burned and suffered,” he recalled, thinking back on what he had
imagined lay beneath her dress, but overcome with “a sudden shyness,”
he returned to the designated picnic boundaries, feeling “an unbear
able desolation and blight and disappointment pouring through me,
reaching every corner of my body. I sat down on a tree stump in the
clearing, and but for the pride of my sixteen years I would have wept.
It colored my thoughts and my dreams. It made me timid and self-
conscious in the company of girls and young women whom I could
no longer see without a faint half-conscious memory of that scene in
the woods."' 5
Page 66 - [see page image]
65
With Manifesto in Hand
He resolved to fight this “troubled sex conscience” by establishing
a sexually dormant relationship with another young woman, rather
than by doing what so many others had, satisfying their needs by first
compromising and then mistreating defenseless black women, the moral
consequences of which were, for him, more disturbing than sexual
repression. “The sons of families who had been in Carolina for three
or four or even five generations took this situation more lightly and
naturally,” but the “children of recent immigrants . . . missed any such
adjustment.” Ludwig believed, even then, “that the very helplessness
of the Negro made such guilt not even expiable.” Such thoughts had
already earned for him and his parents, who affirmed his opinions, the
opprobrious label of “nigger lover.” 44
It all seemed so unnatural to him, the denial of need and the morally
degrading abuse of others. To one just emerging into a sexually active life,
the social imperative of concealment and denial of “physical needs . . .
[so] easily transformed into moral suffering” by a code one “never
dared break through” seemed unendurable. A society that could not
accept the “very powerful instinct of sexual selection” awakening within
him in his sixteenth year, an instinct “tabooed by all the impalpable
forces of Queenshaven decency,” was hardly worthy of his allegiance,
he concluded. He had “dreamed of a union of passion and love,” but
instead of moving toward some possibility of fulfillment, had “found
himself caged by conscience in a world like a moral china shop where he,
at least, could never make a free gesture without the danger of smashing
a hundred apparently precious and necessary things.” He wondered if
others had succeeded in not smashing these fragile objects, or if, perhaps,
they had not seen them in the way that he had, as “dreadful delicate little
idols” in need of smashing? 45
Only a complete break with this unnatural sense of propriety and
its theological supports seemed capable of easing “the anguish of his
blood.” He came to realize after months of “dark depression, of harsh
pessimism and a sense of sin,” 46 that the image of an otherworldly deity
demanding fidelity to this unnatural way of life was no match for a
rational accounting of the world and for the wilder forces he perceived
within himself. Memories of rough seas and stormy tempests, and a
new awareness of seasonal change, symbolic of the grand schema of
birth, life, and death of which he was a part, added to this shattering
realization. A basic dynamism was lacking in the static, lettered culture
of Charleston, and he strained to be free of it. Nature, not as John and
Maggie would have viewed her, but as that force within the world that
granted to man the fullness of his life, seemed now to hold out her hand
to him. Was she to be his mate, he wondered as his sense of her absolute
Page 67 - [see page image]
66
Ludwig Lewisohn
power deepened with this turning from Charleston’s stultifying society
and the Christian ethos that had shaped it?
“How exquisite is this whole picture of nature,” he proclaimed
after reading Tennyson’s “Claribel” that April. “Nothing pertaining
to humanity appears in it.” 47 Fleeing a genteel, passive Christianity
grounded in a distorted image of man and his world, he found in
Tennyson the suggestion of a more purified road to his own salvation.
Unlike countless others, he would follow “that shadowy figure” at whose
“mighty call we go; from life till death she leads us still—great and
unconquerable Necessity.” In a poem of that title in October 1898,
he spoke of “Necessity” as his true fate—not in the restrictive sense
as others had defined her, but as the fulfillment of his own individual
nature, playing out its true and natural destiny. 48
He was now determined to wage war upon a world that had so
willfully denied him the opportunity to become who he truly was. Secure
in this new belief and in his course of action, he proceeded to take the
unfavorable positions he chose in the Chrestomathic debates and to write
with fewer masks upon his work. By more openly challenging things
as they were, the once rejected Jewish heritage, the often suppressed
German cultural roots, and the thoughts and desires long denied would
all begin to play their part in his pursuit of a more honest means of
self-expression. Yet paradoxically, this very denial and the sublimation
of these elements of his personality would help to increase his literary
productivity as “he composed uninterruptedly and with a fervent sense
of continuous inspiration” over the next several years. 49
Early in his sophomore year Ludwig discovered the Jewish author
Israel Zangwill. Still uncomfortable with his recent decision to challenge
the cultural harmony of Charleston’s ruling elite, he cryptically noted
in the college’s Magazine that “the talented author of ‘Children of the
Ghetto,’ ‘The Master,’ and other novels of more than ordinary merit,
has lately issued a book called ‘Dreamers of the Ghetto,’ which is so
truly admirable in every respect, that we reluctantly restrain our desire
to praise it according to its merits, for fear of seeming to exaggerate."'"
Zangwill’s view of the world seemed to justify Ludwig’s own, particu
larly his notion of Jesus, not as the Christ, but as a suffering Jew. In
his own inner process of identity selection, this transformed imagery
would become a critical support for Ludwig. He had already begun to
question the Victorian Christianity he would later call puritanism when
he found in Zangwill ideas that appeared to mirror his own. In “Maggie’s
Fate,” Ludwig had called himself “J. C.” as a means of differentiating
between an image of Jesus with whom he could personally identify—
the Jesus who, like himself, had been martyred by a gentile society
Page 68 - [see page image]
67
With Manifesto in Hand
because of his identity as a Jew—and the image of Christ that dominated
the world of John Clapis (again, a “J. C.”), the deity that Ludwig no
longer found in his very personalized reading of the New Testament.
Might Ludwig not have already felt, as he undoubtedly did after reading
Zangwill, that those who excluded him from their society would also
have excluded Jesus in the name of that image of a Christ that barred
Ludwig and others from their company of believers? Here, in Zangwill,
he read of this same brother in Israel whose teachings were rooted not
in an “elaborately jewelled ritual” but in the “Hebraic spirit of love
and righteous aspiration.” How could he help but identify himself with
Zangwill’s dreamer into whose life this vision of “something larger had
come”? “A sense of a vaster universe without, and its spaciousness and
strangeness filled his soul with a nameless trouble and a vague unrest. . .
about all the elaborately jewelled ritual evolved by alien races from the
simple life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. ‘Oh Jesus, brother in Israel,
perhaps only those excluded from this sanctuary (church) of thine can
understand thee!’" 11
Barred, too, from this sanctuary was Germany’s Dionysian philoso
pher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works, acquired by the college library
in the fall of 1898, 52 undoubtedly crossed Ludwig’s desk in his renewed
exploration of German culture. Nietzsche’s desire to question the as
sumptions by which men lived and to replace Pauline Christianity with a
glorification of the power of nature clearly threatened the stability prized
by the late-Victorian Anglo-Saxon world Ludwig inhabited. Content
with the achievements and social order that had unjustly been achieved
after decades of strife, these Victorians were unwilling to risk their
modicum of tranquillity for Nietzsche’s cry of personal renewal at all
costs. Nietzsche offered only the uncertainty of change, without a clear
sense of where it would lead. Few would ever join him in his celebration
of The Twilight of the Gods; few would ever welcome “the yes-saying
to life, even to its strangest and most difficult problems; the will to
life rejoicing at its own inexhaustibleness in the sacrifice of its highest
types.. . . Not to relieve one’s self of terror and pity, not to purge one’s
self of dangerous emotion by a vehement discharge but rather, far beyond
pity and terror, to be the eternal joy of Becoming itself—that joy which
also involves the joy of destruction.” 53
Nietzsche’s writings held the fascination of forbidden fruit for those
who longed to taste its promise of freedom—but dared not. Writing to
Harris in 1895, Belden had spoken of his first disturbing exposure to
the “new Prophet” when Nietzsche’s English translator, Belden’s German
instructor at Johns Hopkins University, had preached his message “with
such fervid scorn of all things English and American.” It had come at
Page 69 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn
a time when Belden had been uncertain of his own beliefs and of the
direction in life he had chosen for himself; Nietzsche’s challenge had
made the crisis all the more unbearable. Having reluctantly, but reso
lutely, opted to put aside “the aimless, nameless longing, the boundless
desires . . . lest they destroy us, and our ego be all dissolved into vapors
of egotism,” Belden had been “afraid to read Nietzsche . . . for fear [that]
my new resolutions, which are only a formulation of the inevitableness
of mediocrity, should give way . . . and I be carried out to sea again to be
dashed against some distant reef and left a carcass stinking in the sun.” 54
Ludwig had no such fears. Filled with the youthful passion that
eluded Harris and Belden, he forged ahead without a care for the
challenge or the danger in it. Instead, he welcomed the mysterious,
unseen world spoken of by Nietzsche, that world of spirits born of a
cold northern clime, where the “ancient grandame” would spin tales that
touched the depths of man’s soul. Welcoming the “joy of destruction”
and the chaos that was certain to follow, Ludwig invoked for his readers
in the fall of 1898 those ancient German gods whose twilight had
proclaimed an end to all that brought man spiritual death and a life
of self-betrayal, a time “when order would be gone / And chaos dread
with darkness reign supreme”; a time of new worlds aborning and of
life renewed.''
That December he took the critique a step farther and boldly pro
posed the transformation of Christmas from a celebration of divine birth
to a time of man’s own rebirth, and not only of his spirit, but of his flesh as
well. The world of Christmas cheer became, in Ludwig’s hands, a dark,
cold, forbidding realm in which “rise human aspirations all untold.”
True salvation was not to come from some distant dream of death and
resurrection, but from a personal awakening into the fullness of human
existence. He wanted more than the “lost sailors . . . happy shore / In
which to rest. . . and sail no more.” He wanted not heaven, but earth.”
There would be days ahead when he, like these sailors, would
welcome the “dreary bliss” of sleep. But he would draw back each time
from the sweet “Nocturne” that lulled so many others. “Driven by the
murmuring sea” since early childhood, he was prepared, by Easter of
1899, to continue on in his journey toward a meaningful, creative life.
A spirit greater than his dwelt in those waters, a spirit of some “vast
unknowable light. . . [that] keeps its vigil” over man and his world.'
There, in these terror-filled waters, he would seek out this Spirit and
bring to an end his search for the freedom that would bring rest to his
wearying soul.
In the months that followed, Ludwig became increasingly obsessed
with this search, and by May 1900 he began to feel as though he were
68
Page 70 - [see page image]
69
With Manifesto in Hand
being consumed by an “everlasting hunger in my heart” and a “burning
in my aching soul.” 58 Little happened to cool his passion that summer,
and as classes began again in the fall, he found himself caught up more
zealously than before in the search for a truth whose “presence in the
waters vast” now seemed to be filling every one of his “fleeting. . .
earthly days.” 59
Yet as fervently as he pursued this search, little more than a handful
of clues and blurred perceptions materialized. Months of seriously trying
to break through the ineffable imagery of the world had brought only
failure, and by November 1900 he would lament that
we stand upon the unpassed brink
Of things divine, and hear
The melodies of the universe, and drink
Their sound with eager ear.
But, though we break our hearts with deep desire
And listen year on year,
The eternal voices come to us no nigher,
Nor do they wax more clear.* 11
In self-defense, he thought that, perhaps, this was as it should be. Man,
after all, was earthbound. There was nothing to be won by posturing
heavenward. Convinced that this realization was but a first step toward
the more rewarding earthly existence he sought, he decided to take
satisfaction in this scanty knowledge, at least for the moment. It would
have to suffice. He could no longer sustain the intensity with which he
had undertaken the pursuit.
Emotionally exhausted, he felt it was time to reassess his progress,
doing so in a fancifully disguised retelling of this spiritual journey pub
lished in the Magazine under the title “In the Seventh Heaven.” Years
later he would create a similar scene in the novel For Ever Wilt Thou
Love, where, posing as an architect, he spoke of longing to construct
“the house of a poet, the tomb of a prophet, a temple of the Unknown
God, or else a theater for a great dramatist, a lecture hall for true sages,
a legislative chamber in which sat men who really believe in liberty.”'’ 1 In
1900 he saw himself coming in a dream to this sacred place where “the
air was pure and cleansing and light.. . . All around was silent, except
that now and again came murmurs from an immeasurable distance, as
when on earth, although far from the sea, we hear as in a dream the
rolling of its waves.” He pursued the sounds as they took him to a small
temple “built of marble, smoother than a virgin’s breast.” Ascending
its steps, he saw a single table in the center of a great hall, around
which were seated twelve men upon whose yet “unidentifiable brows”
seemed to rest “all the majesty and wisdom of heaven and earth.” As he
Page 71 - [see page image]
70
Ludwig Lewisohn
drew nearer, he began to recognize them. No, they were not the twelve
apostles of Christ, as he had cleverly misled his readers to expect, but “a
counsel of poets, the greatest of earth,” the true prophets of this Spirit
within whose company Ludwig hoped one day to be. Heinrich Heine,
the Jewish poet of Germany who ultimately rejected the assimilation
of his youth, was the first to be heard, voicing a strident criticism
of Goethe’s “immovable, cold, statue-like pose.” Heine agreed with
Moliere that Goethe’s works were superior to his own, but “hated the
man . . . that thought to cure the world’s evils by cold philosophizing,
the man that watched bones while I was striving, exerting, while I was
laughing and crying, to free man!” As the warrior of battles “that drank
of the blood of my heart,” Heine could not accept the peaceful silence
that the others had so pleasingly found to be their heavenly reward.
He wanted nothing of this heaven, wishing only to continue his earthly
battles so long as men in their folly needed him. So strong had been
his love of life and of those with whom he shared it that he wanted all
of it back, even the pain. “While there are men on earth, foolish and
erring as of old, so long my love for them, my pity for them will not let
me rest.” 62
Ludwig’s sympathies were clearly with Heine. The vision of heaven
he had drawn was of a land “strewn with all the colours of an earthly
evening,” very much like the Charleston of becalming distraction. When
Heine cries out “against the powers that confine me here,” it is Ludwig’s
own frustrations and desires that are heard. “Even in Death, let us live!”
he proclaimed through the mask of Heine.' •
When it was that Ludwig began to conceive of his own life in
terms of Heine’s (“quietly comparing himself,” as he wrote in Crump) 64
is uncertain, but visions of himself as Heine’s latter-day incarnation
began to crystallize into a unique biography of the poet by the early
fall of 1900. The work was begun in secrecy and completed in much
the same way within a year. A master’s thesis on Matthew Arnold, an
ambitious course load, and the editorship of the Magazine were more
than enough for anyone, even Ludwig. No one could have suspected
that he had undertaken yet another project. Still, he feared disclosure.
Merely shrouding his own life’s story within a stylized telling of Heine’s
was not enough. If this code was broken, he was sure that serious
repercussions would befall him at the hands of those whose society he
had set out to criticize more severely than ever. Only this double layer of
secrecy and deception, he believed, could offer the soundest protection
possible.
In his “Prefatory Sonnet” to the biography, Ludwig paid tribute to
its protagonist as martyr and seer, signaling the image he was creating
Page 72 - [see page image]
With Manifesto in Hand
for himself and the assessment of his own life that had brought him to
this conceptualization:
Mourn for him not. The high gods crowned him, gave
Their holiest lyric crown, their awful scorn,
Too heavy for a mortal to be borne.
It crushed his living spirit to the grave.
And yet he sang, yet fought, was it not brave?
For in that crown was ranged thorn on thorn—
Lordly it was; another would have torn
The wounding crown away himself to save. 65
Here was Ludwig as Heine, envisioning himself crucified by the same
high gods of society. Had he, too, not borne their awful scorn? Was he
not, like Heine, a singer of the spirit, yet uncrushed and alive? Did he
not share a similar heritage and a similar dream of artistic achievement?
Each incident Ludwig selected from Heine’s early life carefully mir
rored events in his own. He knew well how it was to live as a social
outcast, to be branded a blackguard, though recognized for literary
talent. His character, like Heine’s, had been questioned more than once,
and when he wrote of Heine’s enemies it was all too reminiscent of
his own experience. “Within his own lifetime, a false conception of his
character, derived mainly from the presentations of his enemies, seems to
have arisen.... It is as a ruthless mocker, as a systematic blasphemer of
things venerable, that Heine appears to the popular mind.” 66 Of German
ancestry, Heine’s parents were among the first to experience the changes
brought about by Emancipation. Though fully acculturated, they had
withstood the temptation of conversion’s social and economic benefits.
His mother’s family included several Jewish communal leaders who,
because of financial success, had gained the tolerance of their gentile
counterparts. Father Heine was a ne’er-do-well in business, and while
well read, did not play as important a role in young Heine’s intellectual
development as had his mother, who became Heine’s first teacher. As
a lover of things German, a deist, and a conscious Jew, she imparted
lifelong values and ideas to her son and cultural heir.
A dreamer of great visions, the youthful Heine transfigured himself
and his world into realms of fancy. Like Ludwig, his garret world became
a land of enchantment, of princes and princesses, a land where in his
dreams he championed heroically against the forces of darkness. Of his
youth’s fantasies, the greatest was surely that of God, a deistic being,
creator of worlds without number, “the beginning and the end of all my
thoughts,” an ineffable force in nature, not unlike the Spirit of Ludwig’s
meditation. But if Heine’s deistic being sounded like the God of the
Enlightenment philosophers, he yet looked very much like the God of
71
Page 73 - [see page image]
72
Ludwig Lewisohn
popular Jewish imagination. “Once in a dream, I remember I saw God in
the furthest distance above. He looked cheerfully out of a small window
in heaven—a gentle old face with a little Jewish beard—and He scattered
many grains of seed, which, as they fell from heaven and became lost
in space, immediately assumed an enormous extent, until they became
shining, blooming, peopled worlds like our own earth."' -
Formal schooling at ten, a facility with languages, a love of literature,
well-educated parents possessed of a cosmopolitan vision, and a passion
for the French Revolution and beautiful women were all part of Heine’s
development as a freethinker. His rebellion took shape in words, and by
the age of eighteen he had published poetry expressing his disdain for
the narrowness of spirit he had already encountered.
He was out of place by temperament and by birth. Despite the official
decree of Emancipation, Heine and his people were quick to learn that
anti-Semitism could not be eliminated by a stroke of the pen. As a Jew, he
faced unending restrictions. Even with the university degree for which he
struggled financially, most positions would forever remain closed to him
because of his religious background. Vocationally restricted and socially
ostracized, he grew to resent his debilitating Jewishness and sought a
solution to his problem. Neither the prominent faculty member who
befriended him at the university nor his mother’s healing presence and
unalterable love could stave his final decision to undergo conversion. It
was, simply, a matter of perceived necessity.
Ludwig understood fully the position Heine occupied; had he not
occupied it himself? “Place these conditions against the background of
the youth’s inner life, his growing sense of literary power, his immense
sensitiveness, and we can understand that even at this early period, the
springs of life were (in his own words) poisoned at their source."'' But
if Ludwig could empathize, he could be critical as well—and not of
Heine alone. In his condemnation of Heine’s conversion, he condemned
himself. Had he himself sufficiently protested the oppressiveness? Had
he been intellectually honest? Had he demonstrated an unimpeachable
morality in assuming the guise of a Methodist? Heine had “bartered his
integrity for a mess of pottage,” and in the end had succumbed like other
men to the prevailing culture by accepting baptism. For a poet, it was
an indefensible act. Ludwig felt this very deeply in his own life, and his
final judgment—that Heine could not be forgiven—was an act of self
indictment. 69
There was, however, one saving factor to this morally and intellectu
ally reprehensible act. The change had involved only his external status.
Birth, not declarations of faith, Ludwig maintained, tied the individual
Jew to his people. Apostasy could not dilute the bond of blood. As if in
Page 74 - [see page image]
73
With Manifesto in Hand
self-defense, he proclaimed Heine a Jew. “He has been called a renegade
because of his baptism. This is absurd. Judaism is not a religion, it is a
race. The faith which that race happens to hold, meant as little to Heine
as any other faith. He was no whit less a Jew for being a Lutheran.” " Nor
by this reckoning was Ludwig less a Jew for having become a Methodist.
With him, as with Heine, it had been merely a measure of expediency.
The Jews were a people tied together by far more than a religious credo.
How could one renounce a blood tie? Heine had counted himself among
his fellow Jews not in religious terms, but as part of a people and their
history, sharing their ideas, their moral witness, and their martyrdom as
“the just man who suffers for the good of humanity.''''
Heine spoke to Ludwig with a prophetic voice, and became the
catalyst who transformed Ludwig’s uncertainty about himself and his
future into an unbending determination, filling him with a limitless
resolve to set forth and shepherd the human flock, Jew and non-Jew
alike. If Ludwig could no longer return to the somnolent Charleston of
his earlier days, he would carry those who would follow him into the
comforting embrace of “Nature’s arms.” Together, they would hear the
real turbulence of the flowing sea, bask in the true “sunny light of day,”
and be renewed by the freshening breezes of that forgotten “morning of
the world.”
In years past, Ludwig often awoke early “in his garret room and
would go to the window and see Queenshaven in the dawn like a city
carved of mother of pearl under a sky as faintly iridescent as the inner
curve of a seashell.” ' But by February 1901, he knew that this romance
with his adopted world was over, destroyed forever by the reality of
his life. Others had “drifted beautifully from day to day. . . [in] the
land of the lotus-eaters.” He, too, had “wandered about in the quiet
streets with their tangled gardens,” '* and had nearly lost his way trying
to reconcile his past with his present, without ever understanding how
they were parts of the whole person he had become in the process.
Minna had often tried to comfort him, telling him how “all artists
have had to struggle for recognition.” But Jacques, in a rare moment
of objectivity, was more honest in his assessment: “Talent you have—
there is no doubt,” but something more essential was missing. “You
have tried ... to add Southern atmosphere to the German tradition,” he
reproached his son, and had thereby failed to find his own “different. . .
idiom.” Ludwig knew immediately “that every word his father had
said was true.” Had not his parents’ failure to find their own voice,
substituting instead the mythology of American equality and individu
alism, destroyed them, particularly his father? “He knew that, in his
deepest mind, he had known the truth all along.” Suddenly, he felt
Page 75 - [see page image]
74
Ludwig Lewisohn
free for the first time. He had direction that was of his own making.
He would set out to destroy this very same mythology—in order to
build anew. 75
Queenshaven would often serve thereafter not as a symbol of a
world filled with promise, but of an old and tired realm built upon
decaying social foundations and personal decadence. No longer would
he bend his knee to this queen of death by whose rule his fellow citizens
had determined the direction of their lives. In rejecting her, he knew
that many would reject him even more than they had in the past. But
there was no real choice left to him. The queen’s mask had fallen, and
her “loathsome foolish spirit” had been exposed. “The land of love,”
the land he thought he had known so well, had slowly and irrevocably
become for him what he realized it had always been, a “land of hate.”
Sorrowfully, but without recourse, he let her go. 76
Those who could not, those who had sent him into perpetual exile
by holding fast to another age and an unnatural ethos, would find only
death. Of this, above all else, he was certain. Only he who neither
“strives to hold [back] the wheel of fate” nor “from the battles of the
world retreatfs]” would bring to mankind the true message of earthly
redemption. 77 Where this truth reigned, no arbitrary convention could
exist to separate one person from another. As a poet, he was to be its
bearer, bringing to mankind the instrument with which to free itself from
the idolatries that enslave and destroy—“the truth of poetry is the truth
that makes us free,” 78 he proclaimed in his well-received salutatorian
address of June 1901. (“These Southerners had a way of becoming
sincerely exalted on the appropriate occasions,” he would recall rather
cynically in Crump.) v
He “who soon learns earth and men,” he had written as a freshman
in February 1898, “will better fight the false and wrong / Will better
love the good below."’" He had followed his own instincts as best
he could from that point on. When in 1901 he challenged his fellow
Charlestonians, he did so with far less hesitation than he had back then.
For in the “glitter of maturing day” and in the night’s “darkening sky,”
he had discovered how the “sea’s life has grown a part of me.” This
metaphor for the full life, the life of intellect and passion, of openness to
experience and to the truth of earthly existence, spoke to him of the Spirit
that moved the limitless world he wished to embrace without hesitation:
“Tho’ far away, with voice inaudible / It calls me back, and binds me
in its spell."’ 1 The old unrest that had driven the child had continued
in the man that was emerging, but in a more positive way. Vacillation,
confusion, sadness, and the joy of discovery had each in its own way
destroyed the child’s longing for an illusory peace.
Page 76 - [see page image]
75
With Manifesto in Hand
With manifesto in hand, he, the creator-poet, destroyer of idols,
would engage the world in a mortal struggle for its soul. After four
tumultuous years, Ludwig was now determined to go forth like Abraham
the patriarch, “clothed in the new strength and beauty of perfect wis
dom,” without fear for himself and without doubting the righteousness
of his cause. ,;
Page 77 - [see page image]
76
3
Forbidden
Loves
He felt certain, early that summer of 1901, that the world breath
lessly awaited his message, and dreamed of journeying forth to proclaim
it. At less flightful moments, however, he realized that while such dreams
could sustain his spirit, they could hardly fill his stomach—nor satisfy
his parents’ longing for vicarious success through their son’s academic
achievements. He had continued through these years to think of a ca
reer as a professor of English literature, and as his college graduation
approached, his plans for achieving this goal became the Lewisohn
family’s “immediate occupation.” All anxiously agreed that Charleston
held no real promise for him, that graduate school elsewhere would be
necessary, and that, regrettably, some great distance would soon alter
their relationships, perhaps forever. 1
Minna offered her son the few hundred dollars she had saved over
the past four years, hoping that he would at last make his way to Berlin
to study. Though Jacques understood her desire for Ludwig to be near
family, he attempted to explain just how impractical her scheme was.
Despite his own reluctance, Ludwig knew that only a doctorate from
one of the leading American universities could open the academic world
for him. He knew, also, that such a course would necessitate greater
sums than Minna had saved. Never having worked before, and without
any specifically marketable skills, he knew just how ill-prepared he was
to seek employment. Still, he was determined to do so, if not desperate
to begin immediately. Having watched his parents struggle for so long,
he could no longer accept the assistance they now so freely offered.
Page 78 - [see page image]
77
Forbidden Loves
Instead, he would postpone his departure for a year, hoping within that
time to earn enough for graduate school in the fall of 1902. 2 Two local
institutions had just now begun their search for new instructors, and he
was certain that one of these positions would be his, if only his anxiety
proved unwarranted.
Whatever the reason, thoughts of some imminent disaster seemed
suddenly to chill his enthusiasm. Perhaps he was merely impatient, he
thought, or was it the knowledge that he would always be perceived as
innately alien, despite the praise he had received from so many quarters?
Might he not have stayed too long in Charleston? Or had he allowed
his fear of separation, and an unrealistic assessment of his world, to
unduly influence his thinking? In many ways his years in Charleston had
been “a delightful time,” he conceded—“but that time was over.” The
sharp contrast now between expectation and apprehension remained a
disturbing memory and would resurface in Crump in midlife.
He had, beneath his busy and pleasant surface life, a feeling as though he
were despite all signs to the contrary, at the beginning of some vague but
great defeat. He knew or thought he knew with an obscure yet definite
knowledge, that he ought to have gone to New York right away. Was not
his remaining here—he brushed the suspicion aside only to have it strike
him at odd and unexpected moments—was it not somehow the symbol of
an instinctive turning from life, of an inability, perhaps, to see and grasp
the world of naked reality at all? 3
As events unfolded that summer, this vague suspicion and fear
proved well founded. Having enjoyed so favorable a reputation as a
promising scholar and poet, he had confidently submitted his applica
tions, though Jacques apparently expressed less confidence that someone
of Ludwig’s background would be hired for these positions. 4 Harrison
Randolph dutifully recommended his former student to the Porter Mil
itary Academy, a Reconstruction-era Episcopal school dedicated to the
maintenance of Charleston’s gentlemanly ruling class. Ludwig had been
one of the College of Charleston’s finest students, Randolph told the
academy, a young man of sterling character, high moral worth, and
maturity of feeling and thought. 5
Lancelot Harris echoed these sentiments in recommending him to
The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college, founded after the abortive
slave rebellion organized by Denmark Vesey in 1832. Harris spoke of
Ludwig’s great facility with languages, and praised his English skills,
both oral and written. More importantly, Ludwig possessed a manner
that would indicate the makings of a fine teacher, he told the trustees. Of
the many students who had been at the college within memory, it was
Page 79 - [see page image]
78
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig, Harris stressed, who was regarded by so many as the one most
likely to achieve distinction. 6
Little wonder that Ludwig was so traumatized by the double rejec
tion he summarily received. Harris was similarly surprised, and thought
him perhaps guilty of some impropriety. Ludwig was quick to respond
to this charge with an unequivocal denial. If anything, he had always
been circumspect. Aside from his parents, only Harris and a classmate,
Hal Brown, had been privy to some of his critical thoughts. If Porter had
rejected him, he told Harris, it was because their absurd ideas would not
allow them to extend to him his rightful place in their world. He had
never publicly voiced his objections to their beliefs, objections he now
felt compelled to more fully relate to Harris for the first time:
You do not know how difficult it is to repress an inborn tendency to mocking
and virulence. That the clergy stand for the same thing I do, I doubt. No one
can realize more strongly the beauty of certain ideals which they hold up.
Did not a devotion to the adorable personality of Christ for years induce me
in spite of knowing better than to accept the miracle of resurrection? But so
long as the clergy (and this is true of all that I have ever known) posing as
intelligent and learned men uphold in the face of our present knowledge the
monstrous absurdity of miracles ... so long I must have for them a deeply
inimical feeling which in private if not in public utterance will sometimes
make itself heard.
Perhaps he felt unqualified for the Citadel position and looked upon
their decision as further proof of his need for graduate training, having
raised no objection to it in his correspondence with Harris. But Porter’s
rejection, the more crushing of the two, was beyond acceptance by him.
The school’s board of trustees had, in fact, accepted his application, only
to be overruled and relieved of their positions by the school’s founder,
Rev. Anthony Toomer Porter, who rose from his deathbed to prevent a
Jew from influencing Charleston’s young elite.'
Terribly embittered by the experience, fighting feelings of rejection
and uselessness, he tried to work on several new essays and short
stories and to compose a few lines of verse, but the results were all
disappointing. His heart and mind were not in the work, and he began
to question all that he had ever written. “He destroyed a great many of
his older compositions,” he reported in Crump, “others he rewrote and
tightened [as with the Heine biography, whose editing he would complete
that December], He did new work sparingly and with a watchful critical
eye.” 9 Only the best of his earlier efforts had approached the artistry
he envisioned himself capable of producing, and even they had missed
the mark. Echoing the nineteenth-century romantics he had grown to
admire, he told Harris in August 1901, “I want to write one essay,
Page 80 - [see page image]
79
Forbidden Loves
one poem—nay, one paragraph or one stanza which will be perfect in
its way beyond cavil, but that I suppose is the Vision Beautiful of art
which as Stevenson says is ever on the Hill Top while we die scaling the
steep sides."' 1
Yet, to publish even the best of his work he thought an act of self
betrayal, as if a confidence would be violated, disclosing his evolving
identity, to which they gave evidence, while lessening his chances for
success. “They are to such a great extent me,” he told Harris, who
now encouraged his former pupil to seek out the prestigious Sewanee
Review as a publisher for his poetry." In his confusion and vacillation,
profound feelings of unease sharply competed with a sense of amazement
at Harris’s suggestion. The ambivalence nearly paralyzed him now as the
deeply felt desire for self-justification became painfully compromised
by an equally forceful and terror-filled need to hide his true thoughts.
Art could reveal the soul of the artist; but it could also conceal it most
artfully, and Ludwig was becoming a master, learning to hide behind a
consciously drawn image of himself as a young poet who, like so many
other poets, appeared merely to be crying out for the recognition he
feared might forever elude him. Yet even Ludwig was beginning to have
problems separating this carefully drawn self-image from the masks he
had more unconsciously begun to wear. They would prove devastating
in the years ahead.
None of this, however, could long substitute for the reality of his
situation. By the fall of 1901, Ludwig had reluctantly admitted to himself
that little remained for him in Charleston, aside from parents and the
few individuals who had shown some interest in him as a scholar and
writer. Realizing how consumed by bitterness he had become, and feeling
increasingly isolated from the provincial town he had known in his
youth, he was desperate to find the means by which to begin his search
for new worlds. It was now time to make his move—he dared not wait
until the following year as he had originally planned.
Following Harris’s earlier suggestion, Ludwig sent a copy of his
master’s essay to W. P. Trent of Columbia University’s English faculty,
hoping it would lead to a fellowship that fall, classes not yet having
begun. Rejecting his appeal for financial aid, Columbia nonetheless
admitted him to their graduate program. To the notice of matriculation,
Trent appended his comments concerning the Arnold study (“I cannot
recollect ever to have read a better thesis of the kind”), recommending
that it be sent to the Sewanee Review for publication, advice quickly
followed by Ludwig to a successful end. Trent thought it the work of
an already astute literary critic, possessing “fine sympathies, a scholarly
spirit and grasp, and what is best of all, much judgment.” The author
Page 81 - [see page image]
80
Ludwig Lewisohn
of so illuminating an essay, he was convinced, would increase in ability
and power in the coming years. 1; Ludwig was encouraged by this first
publication in a recognized literary journal. It might not have been the
best he was capable of producing, but its acceptance, he recalled, seemed
“a solid fact in the midst of empty plans.”
Armed with letters of reference from Harris and Randolph, and
with a copy of Trent’s comments on the Arnold thesis, Ludwig wrote
to President Charles Eliot of Harvard, asking in one breath for advice,
admission, and financial aid for that same fall semester. He explained
his lack of financial means and told Eliot how his liberal religious views
had precluded his teaching at a number of sectarian institutions. 14 As
with Columbia, Harvard admitted him to the graduate program but
refused him financial assistance. Though recognized as an able scholar,
he was deemed in both cases ineligible for the assistance without which
the granting of admission was largely an empty offer.
Out of school, out-of-place, unemployed, with little prospect of a
future, Ludwig again turned to his books and his writing, hoping, beyond
all reasonable expectations, that somehow, mysteriously, he would find
something in the weeks and months ahead that would enable him to go
north by the following year. But they could not offer strong resistance to
the deepening anxiety he felt over his future, nor against an all-pervasive
feeling of helplessness. He grew more terrifyingly convinced that his
initial decision to remain in Charleston for the year had been the grave
mistake he had initially thought it would be. “The second part of winter
was irradiated by no delusion,” he wrote in Crump. He had grown
“lonely, restless, bodily and spiritually ill at ease . . . what was he doing
here?” he wondered. “What was this leading to?” Certainly nothing had
been gained, and a year had been lost. “Whatever the plunge and the
pain—he felt he must be gone.” The season “dragged to a weary and
disappointing end,” and by the spring of 1902 there was nothing left
but his resolve to leave as soon as possible. :
In June he accepted an invitation to the College of Charleston’s
commencement exercises. It promised him an opportunity to say farewell
to old schoolmates, and a chance to once again bask in the light of a
former glory that had not yet faded in the sight of others. He needed
their affirmation of his talents. Yet he knew that the inner glow he had
once felt had already dimmed, that he would never be able to recover
it in “a world outside, waiting, waiting, jealous of our little Island of
the Past.” 16
After commencement, Ludwig joined a group of celebrating grad
uates for an evening of beer and sad talk of all that was now behind
them. More than any of his companions, he knew how much they had
Page 82 - [see page image]
81
Forbidden Loves
lost. In the midst of conversation, he composed a few lines of verse for
the occasion, and gave it to one of the graduates, who, out of respect
for the learned writer, kept them for nearly a quarter of a century before
publishing the poem as part of his own retelling of these college years. “I
wonder if he had ever recalled them to mind in the long after-struggle Up
Stream," the graduate wrote of Ludwig, who that night had commanded
his fellow celebrants to “Drink when this midnight hour appears, / Glad
hour that vanishes too soon, / Marking the last of all our years / That
finds its death in June.” 17
“Wish that our lives were as made up / Of years that end in June,”
he had written, but they no longer were, and as this second June passed,
and the need to leave remained, he found himself forced to accept
money from those who unexpectedly came to his aid. Several leading
Charlestonians offered their assistance, but the largest portion of the
money he needed for a semester’s tuition and lodging came from his
parents, whose burden, above all else, he had hoped for so long to
eliminate by his success. There was little choice left to him, however,
now that all else had failed. And so, as the fall of 1902 approached, he
began to prepare for his escape to New York and for his new life as a
graduate student at Columbia University.
Not that he was any less fearful of leaving the womblike comfort
of his home and “the soft familiar life of his native city” than he had
been a year earlier. He was still apprehensive of the catastrophic changes
that awaited him, and experienced endless guilt at having to impose
upon his parents for the money they could ill afford to give him. Nor
could he rid himself of his anxiety over what effect this first separation
would have upon his parents, particularly Minna, what he would later
characterize in Crump as “his mother’s quiet changing.” But Ludwig
knew there really was no choice. “At last Time which in youth and in
Queenshaven had seemed so often to stand still—a golden tower by the
edge of a purple sea—shook and crashed. The tower tumbled; the world
reeled.” He would soon be gone. “Amid circumstances that seemed not
so much hopeful as fatal,” he packed away the childhood years and
steadied himself for the journey ahead. 18 A larger world awaited him as
he departed late that September of 1902, dressed in ill-fitting, provincial
clothes and possessing a “name and physiognomy . . . characteristically
Jewish”—hardly the wherewithal for pursuing the distant goal of a
college teaching career."
A coastal steamer brought Ludwig northward to a city colder now
than when he had first encountered it as a child a dozen years earlier.
Despite his feelings about Queenshaven and his desire to free himself
from her grasp, this new world seemed even more unbearable. Alone in
Page 83 - [see page image]
82
Ludwig Lewisohn
a massively vibrant metropolis, unknown to any of the millions outside
his door, huddled in a corner of his cold boardinghouse room in which
he shared a bed with another impoverished Columbia graduate student,
he felt as though the press and roar of Babel would soon grind him up.
His roommate, Childs De Walsh, would later recall Ludwig’s “strong
artistic temperament” with its periods of “poet’s frenzy” during which
he would often toss emptied beer bottles out their window. Though
later claiming to have had the manhood not to write home during this
emotionally distressing period, 20 he did, in fact, write to Harris out of
a need for contact with someone other than the parents he wished not
to upset:
I arrived here on Wednesday October 1 last after a rather pleasant voyage.
The first impressions of New York have bewildered and displeased me, and
though, no doubt, I will get accustomed to it all in time, I have already
registered a vow in Heaven nevermore to revile the calm and monotony
of Charleston, which when remembered in this Babel seems so beautiful,
so healing to one’s very soul. But perhaps my impressions are distorted.
The separation from my parents, temporary though I know it to be, is
the bitterest grief that has ever come to me, and tends, no doubt, to color
everything darker. 21
Ludwig had arrived at Columbia University only months after the
inauguration of its new president, Nicholas Murray Butler, but long
before Butler had had an opportunity to effect the changes that would
significantly alter the school’s programs and make it a leading center of
graduate education. Ludwig was not to remain long enough to benefit
from these improvements. Of the professors he encountered at Columbia
in those first weeks, only Trent impressed him, having spent his two
happiest hours in New York together in conversation. Nothing pleased
Ludwig more, however, than the stories he heard of endless possibilities
for employment. “I should be very glad to be able to earn a few dollars
and so be less of a burden to my father,” he told Harris that October,
before reminding him of his own offer to inform a certain gentleman at
the Saturday Evening Post of Ludwig’s presence in New York. 22
Alone and feeling isolated, he was nonetheless beginning to discover
that Babel’s languages could, after careful listening, be understood and
quickly assimilated. Within weeks of his arrival he had begun to make
his way through its labyrinthine maze, seduced as he was by its cultural
treasures and its universe of opportunity. His growing excitement and
enthusiasm for this new life poured into each line of his next letter to
Harris that November. If he had not conquered this world, he had at
least tamed the monster that was New York. No longer fearful, he had
begun to explore its vastness, the good and the bad. Life had suddenly
Page 84 - [see page image]
83
Forbidden Loves
become a cascade of events, too numerous and experiential to relate. “To
tell you all about myself is a pretty difficult matter—there is so much of
it, and so much, too, that is more or less intangible and hard to express
clearly." ’' Though his enthusiasm was soon to alternate with depression,
he had caught the fever of New York, and while the opened door had
brought a chill to his southern bones, he would enter through it again
and again over the next half century.
His work at Columbia in English, with a German minor, proved to
be as disappointing as anticipated, consisting of courses in the history
of the English elegy, nineteenth-century drama, English composition,
Heine and Schiller, and the German romantics—all of which he had
previously studied. The lectures, particularly those delivered by Trent
(elegy) and Brander Matthews (drama), were occasionally interesting,
but more often “dull and dispiriting,” while the level of work required
of the students was far more elementary than he had expected—often
absurdly simple, he thought. He saw that his former college, though rec
ognizably provincial, had provided “invaluable advantages, especially
for younger men, which no university however great and wealthy can
make up for.” Rather than focus on his studies, he took advantage of
the great libraries of New York and read all those German authors
whose works had not been available to him in Charleston. If Niet
zsche had inspired his earlier rebellion, these new authors—Sudermann,
Hauptmann, Hoffmannsthal, Halbe, Schnitzler, Wassermann, Mann,
and the many others he now discovered—offered confirmation and
support. 24
As the weeks passed, the “sweat and tears” reality of their writings
replaced the drive to conformity of their English-language counterparts.
“This was freedom . . . this was life . . . our mortal fate,” contrasting
sharply with the “rigidly bounded . . . intellectual and ethical categor
ies” of even the best writers of Britain and America. “The pangs and
aspirations of my own heart—and of all hearts, if men would but be
honest among us,” he would argue in Up Stream, “were here, the
haunting echoes of my inner life, the deep things, the true things of
which I had been ashamed and which I had tried to transmute into the
correct sentiments of my Anglo-American environment.” 25
Emerging from his cloistered life of reading and escape, he would
try now and then to brighten his days with the few people he came to
know at Columbia. The openness of Trent continued uninterruptedly,
and George Carpenter, secretary (chairman) of the English Department,
was still quite friendly. (The more patrician Matthews, however, would
never befriend him, and years later would attack, Ludwig, whose very
presence reminded him of those heinous Jewish characters befouling his
Page 85 - [see page image]
84
Ludwig Lewisohn
city, whom he had drawn on several occasions in his own fiction over the
past decade, sinister figures whose adherence to their cultural traditions
made them unassimilable, financially ruthless, subversive, and prone to
criminality.) 26
While a few of Ludwig’s fellow students seemed capable of mean
ingful conversation, they were too immersed in their schoolwork to
become dedicated companions, having received preparations far infe
rior to his own. Only one student matched, if not surpassed, his own
scholarly training; in the years ahead, William Ellery Leonard (the Ellard
of Up Stream) would remain one of Ludwig’s closest friends. 27 Out
side the university community, Harris’s contact at the Evening Post,
Mr. Mather, proved to be a pleasant companion, possessed of “both
sweetness and light in an unusual degree." 7 ' And in time, Ludwig’s small
social world would come to include the young artists Sam Weiss and
Maurice Stern, the Alsatian German-language poet Frederic Michell,
and a future scholar of Judaica, Israel Davidson, each of whom would
help him to better understand his Jewish background and see it as other
than a lifelong curse. 29
As Ludwig’s sense of alienation from his surroundings and himself
slowly diminished, the fear of being identified as a Jew began to diminish
in somewhat equal proportion—a major step for him in abandoning the
mask of southern gentility. Caught up in the throbbing pace of New
York’s cosmopolitan cultural scene, with its vibrant Jewish component,
he felt increasingly more confident in his ability to chance unveiling his
private writings. Trent’s advice, upon seeing the Heine biography, was to
send it on to Longmans, Green for publication. Though it was rejected
for marketing reasons, Ludwig was encouraged by their favorable as
sessment of its quality. He sent it on to Macmillan, with further plans
for Henry Holt and others, should success continue to elude him. 30 In
the end it would.
More rewarding were the opportunities he found for employment.
Two evenings each week he was ferried across Manhattan’s East River
to Ward’s Island, where he taught German to the medical staff of its state
mental hospital. At three dollars per lesson, Ludwig’s dependency upon
his father was lessening more rapidly than even he could have hoped. !
At the end of the first semester, Ludwig returned to Charleston for a
brief visit, feeling rather satisfied with his adjustment to New York and
the disappointing program at Columbia, only to come back to the city in
January 1903 more deeply depressed than ever. The thought of having
again left the warmth of his home for what he painfully admitted would
be another academically unrewarding semester shattered the fragile
optimism that had recently begun to take root.
Page 86 - [see page image]
85
Forbidden Loves
Ironically, conditions at Columbia during his absence had actually
grown far worse than even he had anticipated. The English faculty had
precipitously reversed its decision regarding his proposed dissertation on
Robert Louis Stevenson. They informed him soon after his return that
if he hoped to receive financial assistance from the university, he would
have to select a more complex topic. Abandoning the Stevenson study,
he began to work on “The Beginnings of English Criticism.” A month
later he would abandon this project as well, leaving himself once again
in search of an idea with which to satisfy his own needs as well as the de
mands of others. Perhaps out of embarrassment over yet another failure,
he made no mention of these developments to Harris, but instead assured
him that the Stevenson study would be completed by summer’s end.
Equally disturbing was Harris’s sudden refusal now to support
him in his renewed search for a teaching position. The frustrations of
Columbia had brought Ludwig to the brink of flight. But Harris was
more realistic in assessing Ludwig’s chances, advising him to complete
his doctorate, without which teaching positions would be vastly more
difficult to secure. After several more desperate weeks at Columbia, Lud
wig began to contemplate a change of programs from English and Ger
man to Philology and Psychology. The change, however, was never made,
as everything appeared to be falling apart at once. Deep in despair, he
wrote Harris on January 29,1903: “Alas, I used to think that I was one
of the sanest persons of my acquaintance, and now the blue devils have
got me by the throat, and I don’t seem to be able to shake them off.” 32
Ludwig, for so long sheltered by his parents, was ill-prepared to face
these disappointments on his own. Needing an escape, he found himself
driven to thoughts of an earlier time of warmth and security, nestled in
the bosom of the Charleston he had but a few months earlier thought of
with disdain. The lonely but mellow autumn along the Hudson seemed
long ago to have faded, and in its place had come the dreariness of
winter in this cold clime, accentuated by his visit home and his chilling
return—a reality more forcefully felt than any the young poet had yet
experienced.
All seemed lost when suddenly, springlike weather returned three
weeks later and brought with it a sense of renewal. He had hit bottom
and was struggling to make his ascent. Always strongly influenced by
nature, he took this change as a sign of returning good fortune. On
February 22 he told Harris of his slow recovery, unable to share such
intimate feelings with any of his teachers at Columbia:
After a week of intense cold, the most enchanting Spring weather has come
here, and, as I was reading Chaucer the other day, a little scene which you
will handily recall came to my mind. One day, it must have been in Spring
Page 87 - [see page image]
86
Ludwig Lewisohn
of 1900, you and I and Mazyck, carried our chairs from your classroom to
that little enclosed piece of the campus which lies at the end of the basement
portage. We sat down there, and read the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
The ground was green with clover, and a Spring wind of thrilling sweetness
passed over it. I remember how you and I furtively dipped our hands among
the clover and felt its exquisite cool freshness. I felt rather hopeful then, and
I do again now, and yet, is it not strange that this necessary revolution of
things which has no connection with our little individual scratchings in the
earth’s mud, should affect us so strangely? 33
Ludwig had found a mentor in Harris, but at Columbia there were
only instructors. The anchor needed to steady his tottering life during
this precarious period was missing, and so for weeks he merely drifted,
able to cut classes and still complete the required assignments with a
minimum of effort. Free of classroom strictures, he would spend his
days in Columbia’s Low Library, transforming it, as he had the garret
of his earlier days, into the seat of his imagination. Here he explored
new worlds, here new ideas helped to elucidate the past and seemingly
to illuminate a path for the future. And when he tired after a long day
of cerebral wanderings, he would search out the one person who had
gradually come to fill the void left by Harris’s absence, William Ellery
Leonard. What had begun months earlier as a passing acquaintance was
deepening now, in the needy spring of 1903, into what would become
a lifelong friendship. Together, they would walk the streets of the city,
eat and drink in saloons and cheap restaurants, and all the while trade
thoughts and dreams of artistic glories yet to be. 34 “I was student, lover,
friend, enemy, and practical vagabond,” Leonard would write in his long
poetic tribute to Ludwig’s friendship in those early “New York Days.”
(Was there relationship more intimate than either would ever reveal?)
Here, he and Ludwig lived out their poet’s fantasies under the “awful
smile” of this “Empire city of the isle”—“My fate be on you, said the
Voice; / ‘Aspire, and if you can, rejoice.’ ” " Daily, they would flee from
Columbia (“not the college of our hearts”) in search of “other ends
to win,” wandering endlessly among the city’s streets and music halls,
“where passion most was rife, / Our fevered talk of human life. ” Together
they “journeyed to each other’s room. . . / Piled with our books and
manuscripts /. . . encaved forevermore / Upon some cliff or mountain
shore” where they “read in bardic ecstasies . . . / Or chanted verses of
our own ... I That sometimes clove so true and free, / To us, ‘twas
immortality.” 36
Ludwig had met Leonard (seven years his senior) in November 1902
on the steps of Fayerwether Hall during their first weeks at Columbia.
Their initial conversation was cause for great elation on Ludwig’s part—
Page 88 - [see page image]
87
Forbidden Loves
he had discovered a fellow poet. “I felt drawn to him at once,” he later
wrote in Up Stream. “I knew instinctively that his verses were better
than mine, far better, and curiously enough I was not sorry but glad.” 37
Leonard, educated at Boston University (B.A.) and at Harvard
(M.A.), where William James had taken a special interest in the young
English scholar, had recently returned from two years of study in Bonn
and Gottingen (financed by a traveling fellowship from Boston Univer
sity, where he had taught Latin while working on his master’s degree at
Harvard), and had come to Columbia to write his dissertation on Byron’s
influence in America. Though a New England Brahmin by birth, Leonard
had absorbed the intellectually and spiritually enlivening atmosphere of
the Rhineland, only to find himself mired once again in the America he
had vowed, while abroad, to revive through his future prophetic work
as “the revealer of this great country.” Here to dampen his enthusiasm
was a land of “cheering Americans” now symbolized for him by the
enervating world of graduate study at Columbia. 38
Not until he met Ludwig had he found a sympathetic ear. In their
common critique and their isolation from America, and in their shared
love of poetry and the thought of using it to bring about a new order,
they formed the basis for a true friendship—something that neither of
them had ever really experienced before. Their common distaste for and
disinterest in the work at Columbia, their unceasing devotion to German
culture (in part, as a foil against America), and their desire for “the grand
passion” of a woman’s love, which neither had yet known, served to
further cement their bond. Two exiles adrift in a strange Babylon, they
would forever hold this time together as sacred.
Leonard’s Germanophilia first brought him to the home of adoles
cent poet and iconoclast George Sylvester Viereck in the fall of 1902.
Here he had hoped to improve his language skills by taking up residence
in a German-speaking household. The Vierecks, always in need of ad
ditional funds, gave him lodging as one of several boarders. George’s
father, Louis, a Hohenzollern of illegitimate birth by a Jewish actress,
and a past associate of Frederic Engels, had fled to America for po
litical reasons in 1896. A prominent journalist for William Randolph
Hearst’s New York German-language newspaper, Das Morgen Journal,
he became a propagandist for German culture in America, while also
serving as a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt and authoring
several books on German immigrant life and language instruction in
America. He would return to Germany without his family in 1911, and
would die there eleven years later at the age of seventy-one. 39
Ludwig, who would replace Leonard as a boarder the following year,
portrayed the elder Viereck in Crump as an intelligent, bitterly cynical
Page 89 - [see page image]
88
Ludwig Lewisohn
man (Hasselmeyer) married to his American-born first cousin (Laura),
a kindly, understanding, and forgiving woman whose life had come to
revolve around her family and her boarders:
One did not inquire of Hasselmeyer, the majestic. One didn’t see him till din
ner when tall, bulky, iron-grey, sardonic he loomed at the head of the table
and in his resonant basso profundo poured out his scorn over the universe.
Were these boarders at the table? To hear Hasselmeyer one would have
said henchman at worst, pupils at best.. . . Mrs. Hasselmeyer . . . seemed
colourless and neutral at first. Later one came to know her intelligence, her
tolerance of mind, her warmth of heart. Not out of supineness was she the
slave of Hasselmeyer and of the house. She loved and admired her grim
and ruthless lord. She was of the opinion that life had not dealt justly with
him. She knew the storms he had braved and the sufferings he had calmly
undergone.. . . They could have lived quietly and obscurely in a small flat
on his salary. Mrs. Hasselmeyer had deliberately assumed the burden of this
establishment to give her imperious husband a sense of amplitude in life, a
background and an audience. 40
While Louis would interrogate his lodgers endlessly, fixing his “cold
ironic grey eyes” on them as “his bass boomed” with an onslaught
of questions as wilting as any, Laura would comfort her wards “with
a motherly hand” and reassure them of her husband’s better nature.
(“Don’t mind Papa. You’ll discover his good sides too.”) If he was
disturbingly abrupt, it was she who would do all that she could to meet
their artistic needs, even if it meant enlisting her husband’s assistance
surreptitiously. 41
Harris, attempting to see Ludwig a year later, would corroborate
this fictionalized portrait of George’s parents. “I visited there once, and
met his father at the door, who was so morose and apparently inclined to
kick me down the stairs of the tiny flat that the mother hastened out to
be pleasant.” Nevertheless, in their unique way, the Vierecks had created
a “tenacious institution” to which some aspiring artists felt attracted by
both a warm welcome and by the intellectual challenges that confronted
them each day at the dinner table. Neither Leonard nor Ludwig could
have hoped for anything better. 42
The Vierecks’ son, George, born in Munich on the last day of 1884,
was clearly a product of his parents’ world, and much the child of
his father. Leonard vividly recalled having first met George when he
was taken by Mrs. Viereck to see one of her available rooms. Leonard
was amused and impressed by the sixteen-year-old youth who followed
him about the house, repeating over and over in “exotic but rich and
passionate” German speech that he was a poet—yes, he was a poet.
Though he had come to America six years earlier, and had begun at
tending the City College of New York that fall of 1902, he still felt
Page 90 - [see page image]
89
Forbidden Loves
more comfortable using his native tongue. Leonard saw him as the
image of a youthful Goethe, with poetry and essays already published
by his thirteenth birthday in Das Morgen Journal, the Berlin Tageblatt,
and the Staats-Zeitung. In the decade and a half that followed his
association with Leonard and Ludwig, George Viereck would become
a poet of some note and wide reputation, though his fame would wane
thereafter, and his life turn in questionable directions with the rise of
Nazi Germany. 43
It was only a matter of time before Ludwig would make his way
to Leonard’s garret room at 517 West 124th Street and meet young
Viereck. Ludwig, too, was somewhat mesmerized by the young man’s
seriousness of purpose and considerable talent as a poet. For long hours
into the night, the three would debate their common concerns, believing
themselves to be in the vanguard of a cultural revolution. As Leonard
later reported, “Ludwig, Sylvester and I talked as I’ve never heard others
talk since. We really had things to say! Ludwig would say, ‘We three will
become the leaders of American literature,’ and we would believe him.
Socrates would have reveled in our discourses, our speech-making to
each other, our soul-talks.”'" Together they had created a small, intimate
society of like-minded souls which time, politics, and racial thought
would disrupt but never completely dissolve.
Yet, as rich as this conversation had been, it was the poetry that drew
Ludwig back to the Viereck home time and again. He was captivated by
Leonard’s work and thought himself to be his disciple. Nearly forty years
later, Leonard would draw a vivid physical and psychological portrait
of Ludwig during these months of dependence and feverish activity.
To my corner bedroom at the Vierecks came also one other miserable, the
future author of “Up Stream” and “Israel.” Ludwig Lewisohn has painted
my portrait in his American chronicle. Full length, excited, and unshorn, I
would choose to sketch him half length, seated and unshaven, but no less
excited. Seated at the typewriter in my corner here, ticking off my verses
from my lips as I lay on the bed. His stocky frame, supporting an eager,
kindly, leonine face, of pronounced Jewish cast and swartness, sat night
after night at the table-job, with chubby but delicate fingers and sonorous
interjections. He was younger than I, with at that time a more provincial
experience, a sensitive and aggrieved South Carolinian, but his reading in
English and German and Latin was extraordinary in range and in organic
integration with his spirit. Poetry meant the world. And poetry was not of
yesterday but for today and forever. My verses lay about in scrawls that
nobody could read. Mankind should read them, especially our professors.
I could not typewrite. He could. I cite his humble and mechanic task as
a fine witness to the reality of his passion for the creative life. I have his
typewritten manuscript still.*'
Page 91 - [see page image]
90
Ludwig Lewisohn
And then, suddenly, Leonard fell in love that spring of 1903. But she
was far more cautious than he, and when he proposed marriage after
only a few weeks together, she politely thanked him and moved on.
Leonard grew despondent. Unable to lift his spirits, he decided to return
to Germany, 46 compounding Ludwig’s own feelings of disappointment
with the year, making his troubles at Columbia far less bearable. Only
this poetic triumvirate had lightened the blows he had received upon
his return from Charleston that past January. He, like Leonard, had for
a time been able to retreat into their private world. But now, as the
semester was nearing its end and his professors were growing impatient
with his failure to choose an acceptable dissertation topic, there seemed
nowhere to hide. At the very time that Ludwig most needed Leonard,
he was preparing to leave, without any thoughts of return.
Desperate for his own escape, Ludwig decided to leave graduate
school at the end of the semester and seek a friendlier climate in which
to rest and find work, one that would bring him nearer to the comforting
home of his parents. On May 7 he wrote to Randolph, asking that
he send a letter of reference for him to the English Department at
Wake Forest College in North Carolina. Trent was hopeful, and Ludwig
desperate for a change. “I hope that I may be successful, as I am especially
anxious, after the experience of the last months, to obtain a position in
the South. '
But the position he sought continued to elude him. Unsuccessful and
despondent, Ludwig returned to Charleston for the summer, sinking
once again into the loving security of his parents’ home. It was an
important season in his life, a time to reexamine his past and his options
for the future. In a lengthy accounting to Harris on August 28 he spoke
openly about the society into whose bosom he had come to hide, but
whose vision of the world seemed narrower after his experiences in
New York. Remaining ever polite, though with detectable sarcasm, he
referred to certain Charlestonians (including Harris’s fiancee) whose
conversations had convinced him that some “rationale” did exist for
the self-acknowledged provincialism of their ideas.
When not consumed with worry that summer, Ludwig feverishly
poured out a history of South Carolina literature. Seeing himself as the
arbiter of all values in such matters, he produced a biting critique of
this provincial world. Serialized from early July through mid-September
in Charleston’s News and Courier, “Books We Have Made” was to be
the first draft of his new dissertation, now that he had decided to return
to Columbia for one final suffocating year. “I have driven my pen so
hard recently that it well-nigh refuses to be driven any longer.” Trent
thought well of the several chapters he had been sent, though there were
Page 92 - [see page image]
91
Forbidden Loves
some minor problems with the text. Ludwig pressed him about these
troublesome aspects of the work, but Trent thought them nonessential
and advised him to complete the study and make the necessary changes
when he returned to Columbia. Harris, whose opinion he valued far
more than Trent’s, reassured him that it was, despite the incredible speed
at which it had been put together and the occasional gaps in the material
available for study, a very well-written analysis.”
Myopically, Harris had failed to see the implied critique of the larger
culture that ran throughout Ludwig’s work, as the history of its literature
became an excellent mask behind which to mock the whole of it. South
Carolina’s writers, nurtured on its soil, breathing its air, and imbibing
its spirit, had developed a restricted vision that had withered their art.
“In literature this provincial spirit shows itself in a confusion of values
from which results inevitably a lack, not of honest and praiseworthy
endeavor or a sincere love of letters, but of that true intellectual seri
ousness which the production of true art inexorably demands." 1 ' Of
the state’s many writers, only William Gilmore Simms’s works were
applauded by Ludwig. Simms, having remained forever unacceptable in
the loftiest social settings, had moved Ludwig deeply, though he had long
abandoned the rather odious sentiments present in his apologetics for
the Old South. Ludwig’s sharpening pen cut deeply into those Charlesto
nians who called themselves Simms’s friends but who maintained his
exclusion from their most intimate circles. 50 The News and Courier,
sensing something amiss in the articles they were publishing but unable
to articulate their unease, noted how the essays had become “the subject
of admiring comment, whether or not the reader always concurred in
all his criticisms and conclusions.” 51
In retrospect, it had been a not altogether unpleasant or unprofitable
summer. Ludwig had completed what he thought to be the first draft of
his dissertation, and as he wrote to Harris at the end of August, he could
now foresee an end to his stay at Columbia within the coming year.
The reward of that long-dreamed-of teaching position seemed nearer to
fulfillment than ever before, as his resolve was strengthened in a negative
way by the summer’s success. He had thought of journalism as a possible
career the previous spring, but this positive experience as a writer for
the local newspaper had convinced him of his dislike for the profession.
Tested, he knew that he could maintain the pace, but the “necessity of
composing in every mood” had been ruinous to his literary art, with
which he hoped still to accomplish something worthwhile. Everything
he had written thus far—the Arnold essay, the Heine biography, and the
literary history—had been done in haste, with little regard for artistic
criteria. “When I think over the past few years I find that I have never
Page 93 - [see page image]
92
Ludwig Lewisohn
yet been able to do myself justice.. . . Now my ambition is to write a
book at my leisure, to make it as good as I can, to let no sentence pass
which does not come up to the brightest standard that I am capable of
reaching. Not until I have done that will I really know whether I am
good for something.” He was concerned that the literary history had
kept him from composing even one line of poetry, “and when I don’t, I
some how lose my self-respect.” 52 The return to New York would rectify
this with a poetic outburst unequaled later in his life.
On September 21 Ludwig set sail again for New York. The News
and Courier remarked that it was a “misfortune that Charleston and her
College cannot retain him for the rest of his natural life." : ' It is doubtful
that he would have accepted such an offer, pulled as he was by the larger
world that awaited him. Having spent a long summer in Charleston, he
had grown to miss the cosmopolitan excitement and adventure of New
York, and was more anxious than ever to be on his way.
Ludwig now saw his return to Columbia as a time to rest from the
pressures of the previous summer. Believing his dissertation in need of
only slight revision (“no question, finally, of getting the Ph.D. degree
this June”), he looked forward to an uneventful year filled with poetic
pursuits. His living arrangements promised to be equally pleasing. With
Leonard in Germany, Ludwig moved into his friend’s old room, trading
his cold, lonely boardinghouse existence for the intellectual and artistic
atmosphere of the Viereck home. “The most vital change in my life
here as compared to last year is that I am living with an unusually
charming family of literary proclivities etc. etc.,” as he described his new
life to Harris in mid-October. 54 His financial situation had improved as
well. Four nights a week that fall were occupied with teaching English
to immigrants (whom he identified years later as Jews studying in a
settlement house—the People’s Organization of Crump—located on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan)." For the first time, he had just enough
income to support his student lifestyle. He was, in fact, quite beside
himself with satisfaction, and indicated this unaccustomed feeling by
asking Harris whether he had perceived “from these jerky sentences into
what a state of complete insanity I have temporarily (?) fallen.” 56 Nearly
thirty years later, in his novel Roman Summer; Ludwig would speak of
the euphoric feeling associated with his new life and of the room into
which he had moved, carrying
a trunk of clothes, a few dozen books, and a Corona typewriter. It was
a great adventure for him. He had space for the first time in his life.. . .
Time took on an adventurous beauty. He could divide it at his own will.
If the duties of his job permitted it, he could read in bed in the morning
until noon. He could linger (on the way home from late assignments.. . .
Page 94 - [see page image]
93
Forbidden Loves
He could drink in the nocturnal streets at will.... He had another source
of quiet satisfaction. He had the people from whom he rented his room.. . .
He had all he wanted now, though it was dealt by fate with so sparing a
hand. But what more did one want? 57
But euphoria without worry was not Ludwig’s emotional pattern.
Without reason, he began to question the literary merits of his disserta
tion. Trent, not yet indicating a problem with its content, held it to be
“a real contribution to our knowledge of American Literature.” When
asked by Ludwig about its writing style, Trent’s response had been a
wry laugh, to which he added that “in his verdant youth he too wrote
a style.” Ludwig then implored Harris to come to his aid. “I want your
criticism in all its old accustomed frankness and severity and unvarying
helpfulness.” 58 But the appeal went unanswered.
Unforeseen money problems soon added to his anxiety, as the fi
nancial ease he had felt suddenly dissolved in the face of unpaid tuition,
which he had mistakenly believed would be covered by the fellowship
previously held by Leonard. Carpenter notified him in the early weeks
of November that he would be excluded from all university activities if
his fees were not soon received.
Frustrated in his several attempts to respond personally and pri
vately to Carpenter’s note, Ludwig sent along “the few words that I
wish to say to you.” Blaming his failure to meet this financial obligation
on a reduced income (“just enough to meet my current expenses which
are small”), he maintained that his plea for an extension was worthy of
special consideration—as a Jew, he had a far greater need than others for
the doctorate. Without it, he argued, his chances of securing a teaching
position were far worse than his classmates’:
I have the less hesitation in asking your help because I know that both you
and Professor Trent take a friendly interest in me, and because the matter is
of far more vital importance to me than to nearly any other student. Those
provincial and sectarian colleges that still sometimes take a man who has
not the Ph.D. degree would not, I need hardly say, take me on account of
my extraction. More liberal institutions will not take one who had neither
experience nor the higher degree. My being able to stay out this year is,
therefore, the very condition upon which my whole future depends."
Carpenter, visibly uncomfortable, stressed as the reason for this decision
the university’s disappointment at not having had “its full influence on
you.” Yet, within a few weeks, a personal loan for Ludwig had been
arranged between himself, Trent, and Matthews, an obvious sign of their
troubled conscience. 60
For the next several months, Ludwig felt free of financial concerns
and able, once again, to concentrate on his poetry. Ironically, Leonard’s
Page 95 - [see page image]
94
Ludwig Lewisohn
absence added to this poetic resurgence by freeing Ludwig from his
deference toward his mentor, which had not fully allowed him to do
his own work. Feeling the sudden urgency of the moment, lest the flame
die before great songs had been sung, he wrote Harris on October 17 and
asked that he return the few poems he had given him the previous year. 61
Viereck had already shared his own work with Ludwig, and now that he
felt encouraged by the general condition of his life, Ludwig wanted to
reciprocate as a means of rekindling the fires that had burned so brightly
when they had last been together. Though their circle had grown smaller,
it would prove to be as inspiring as ever for the two who remained.
A small, handwritten journal first begun on or before the date of his
request to Harris has survived from this intense and rarefied atmosphere.
Some general, often unrelated notes are found in its opening pages,
but soon only poetry is recorded. Each poem, he would write a year
later, “embodies a mood that was deeply and sincerely felt,' and if an
“imperfect crystallization” of these moods, they were “none the less real
in that account."'' 1
Ludwig wanted most of all to strike out against that “Tyrant of the
Whole” who had forced him “to barren ground / And to my lips the
bitter cup.” In the first poem of the journal, “The Sphinx,” he noted
how the heavens had uncaringly looked on as he suffered the ills of the
world. He sketched often in the journal, and the pictorial rendering of
this divine Sphinx (as he named the Tyrant) was that of a stern figure,
against whom he declared, “These words are just, here dies a soul.” 64
But if the plaint was just, he realized that “unrelenting hate” was self
destructive, nothing “but pale letters of a printed name.” The thought
seemed liberating as he composed his “Lines Written in a Study” that
October 17. If there were forces marshaled against his yet unconquered
soul, he was confident of ultimate victory. School, society, heaven—all
could be overcome. Others would be stifled, but not he. Instead, he
would joyfully forsake “base security” and give free reign to his “seeking
spirit.” Only by living free of all restraint could he truly experience “the
splendor of life”:
I shall rifle the world of every pleasure
Of soul or of sense, or of god or beast
And fully taste of the splendid measure—
Prayer or poison—of life’s large feast. 65
To cry and fawn, he wrote ten days later in “The Final Shame,” or
to offer praise out of false humility, were marks of “the slavers brand
upon our brow / The curse of gladness and its final shame. It was the
way of death, and not of the life whose large feast was yet to be tasted
Page 96 - [see page image]
95
Forbidden Loves
in all its variety. The pleasures Ludwig had suppressed throughout the
years in Charleston had to be experienced—only then could he break
the bondage of this repressive culture.
The margin of the journal page on which these “Lines Written in
a Study” appear is adorned with a sketch of a large ejaculating penis,
the kind of drawing with which an adolescent might indulge himself.
Ludwig’s sexual development, arrested by a restrictive society, now
quickened rapidly under Viereck’s influence, leaving little wonder as
to why the final typescript of Ludwig’s poetry was dedicated to him
in 1905. “Because life, since our meeting, has changed for me; because
through you I have learned to know its possibilities of joy; because our
affection, that has now weathered all storms, must surely endure unto
the end, I dedicate to you these poems. Read them, not only for such
faint loveliness as they possess, but for that devotion which makes all
that is mine yours in an equal measure."'"
Yet, given the intimacy of their friendship, it is more than curious
that mention is never made in Up Stream of George Viereck or of
Ludwig’s having been a part of the Viereck household during so crucial a
time in Ludwig’s development. Flesh and spirit, separated in his youth by
the Pauline ethos of Charleston’s Victorian society, were joined through
exposure to Viereck at a time when Ludwig’s internal inhibitors had
begun to weaken with the rising tide of a sexual need that could no
longer be sublimated. Where once Ludwig had found in Leonard’s poetry
the voice of love as spiritual adventure and of sex as its physical-poetic
expression, it was now the adolescent Viereck who spoke the language of
Ludwig’s true coming-of-age, and whose sexual drive touched Ludwig’s
unleashed libido, making him a lasting ally of the senses. In sending a
copy of Up Stream to Viereck some years later, Ludwig would tell his
former lover that in speaking of their time together, he had given him “a
being, but not a name.” 68
If Leonard had embraced New York for its metaphorical imagery
and their days together as source of poetic inspiration, a “brotherhood
of song and pain,” 69 it was Viereck who gave real flesh to Leonard’s
bloodlessness and in this “Empire City” found for Ludwig an alternative
to the puritanical world that had held them all in its grasp. Leonard’s
vision was cerebral—Viereck’s one of sensual delight. He was the city’s
lover, she his muse; together, they would build and declare a new world
of blood and dreams. And if his fate be “shameful pleasure,” rather
would he live “in a mansion vowed to lust” than be lost forever without
“the after-savors of thy kiss.” 70
Ludwig’s long search for his own muse had often carried him far
from his goal. Easily seduced, he had repeatedly groped his way back on
Page 97 - [see page image]
96
Ludwig Lewisohn
course. Now, at last, he, too, could sense her presence. Charleston and
Minna had been his queens, but they had passed out of his immediate
world—and he needed again to sense the presence of his muse, to hear
her voice, to feel the press of her poetic hand upon his as he poured out
his heart, line by line. In the early months of his return to New York,
it was Viereck who awakened in Ludwig the sensual life he had never
before known. “It was in Autumn that we met,” he noted in his journal
a year later, and later in Up Stream, how, “In the passionate crises of
the second year I often walked as in a dream.” “Under his guidance
we drifted downtown and eastward, and found ourselves at a rather
late hour on the Bowery,” Ludwig would write a quarter century later
in Escott. “Lone women, some young and not ill-looking, drifted by,
stopped in front of us two young men in the hope that we would join
them.” When he had indicated a possible desire to go with them, Viereck
protested. “For heaven’s sake . . . don’t take to that because you can’t do
better. There’s no satisfaction in it.” And when on occasion he would go
with others “to a rather rowdy dance-hall at the other end of town,” or
would fall “into erotic reveries instead of studying,” Viereck would chide
him for the futility of such empty gestures in place of the experiences
life offered them. “Already sardonic, already a reader of strange books
in languages to which I had no access, [Viereck] turned to me and said:
‘What you need is a little honest dissipation.’ "
Viereck had long been a devotee of sexual gratification, literary as
well as physical, first with older women as a young adolescent, and by
1902, as a member of an unusual circle of participants involved in erotic
experimentation under the direction of an aged physician. It was Viereck,
in “The King of Dreamland,” who “walked beside him [Ludwig] in the
mist / Where all was shadowy” and made of “the City of Dusk / a radiant
treasury.” “I had guessed his secret soul,” Ludwig would write in May
1904, some six months after their relationship had begun, “and I had
found my King.” 72 In the first blush of his love for Viereck, he spoke of
this final “Consolation,” achieved by having suffered so much pain in
the long search now ended in this moment of “freedom” and “delight”:
The barren vigil of the endless days
Of sunless days and starless nights
Is over, and at last
Its radiance unimaginably sweet
One keen star shivers through my window pane,
And the great loneliness that compassed me
Amid innumerable human eyes
Has faded like a shadow. And there comes
To nestle in my heart
Page 98 - [see page image]
97
Forbidden Loves
A song, a dream, an exaltation,
A sense of freedom, a divine delight,
As comes to one who after piteous nights,
After the wistful watch of tearless nights
Discerns the distant radiance of the dawn. 73
It seemed to him a dream realized, how in the “night when all the
world was still” and he “cried aloud. . . my faint voice was small,”
there suddenly
from the distance burst one rose of light,
Far, far away, but radiant as the dawn.
Nearer it came, and nearer, and I knew
By that sweet pain, that thrill, that ecstasy
That longing and that gladness—it was thou!
Viereck, his redeemer, had come “To save me, my beloved, from my
doom /. . . O sweet and gracious miracle, I felt, / How thy dear lips
pressed close upon my lips.” All that had been denied to him—beauty
and art and liberation—broke forth at once and would forever be his:
And at that magic touch, the awful vault
Asunder burst, and faded,—and we stood
Together and alone beneath the stars,
Stood hand in hand in the free universe. '
Their days apart now seemed “unending slumber,” prelude to the nights
when once again they would hold each other in passion and love:
Then the night came, and with it my long watch
Was ended; on my hand a white hand’s touch
Lingered; a cheek pressed my cheek softly; lo,
The veil was from love’s lyric face withdrawn,
And like a fiery lily all aglow
Bloomed out of mid-night a miraculous dawn. 75
If only he could express what he had experienced, Ludwig thought,
what his soul had felt, the rendering of his muse’s force upon the life that
had changed so dramatically—no matter how inadequately, just so that
the great love that burned so bright might not be lost with the passing
of all things, for then he would be happy, “for I should attain / The
unattainable”:
If I could fittingly thy praise rehearse,
And burn my soul into one radiant verse
That should endure when all fair things are dead,
And thou and I alone remembered,—
If I could make the beauty of my soul
Take form and substance, and the perfect whole
Page 99 - [see page image]
98
Ludwig Lewisohn
Of my best self become reality
That at the last, beloved, thou couldst see
Love whom no stain of earthly soilure mars
Crowned with the glory of his deathless stars. '■
But such staining he knew would be their fate. Passion had not
totally obscured his vision. He knew his world only too well, and feared
what consequences might fall upon them if their secret became known:
Who shall forgive these heavy sins that weigh
Like iron on lightless hours, who now
Will understand, forgive, and love, and lay
Cool hands of pity on my burning brow?
Thou, my beloved, thou alone for whom
All grievous burdens I have gladly born,
For whose dear sake I dare the bitter doom
Of all the world’s intolerable scorn. 77
More “unclean” were they to the world than even “The Lepers” he
spoke of in an accompanying poem, for “were our love known,” then
even the harlot in the street
Would rather make the gutter her abode
And share the leper’s bed without a sigh,
Than touch our hands, but praying, thank her God
That she is not even as thou and I. 78
Viereck’s response to Ludwig’s poetic offerings was to raise his own
voice, a voice more cynical, more combative with the world around
them, and more strident in its determination to express their love no
matter the circumstances or fate that might befall them. In his own poem
to “Love Triumphant,” Viereck spoke fiercely and without remorse of
“their primal marriage night,” celebrated “in the jungle” where “might
is right” and “the god in me and the beast in you” found “The prize of
love for a single night,” where “all deep things come up to light”:
Your body’s treasures are mine to-day,
Though bitter as gall be their savour still;
From head to foot shall my kisses play,
Till naught is kept from their sovereign will!
The voice of my need supreme must guide
My passionate love to its destined goal;
My feverish fingers shall seek and glide
Until at the last I hold the soul.
My hot strong hands will no veil endure
That shadows your radiant nakedness;
Page 100 - [see page image]
99
Forbidden Loves
Lay bare each beauty, conceal no lure,
Leave naught to hinder my fond caress!
Have courage, Viereck demanded of Ludwig—what mattered the
world’s response, for surely there would be only condemnation and the
inevitable corruption of the love they had found. It must be so—“Young
blood beats onward unchecked by shame, / When passion’s harvest is
ripe to reap.” What more was there to lose, once innocence was gone.
Exalt, instead. Rejoice. “You have taken all,” he told Ludwig, and “My
soul is drunk with your maddening charms.”
So let us struggle, both flame and flood,
Let love and hate and sense have play
Till the slow dawn rises bathed in blood,
And you and I are dead ere day! 79
“I could feel those lips against my lips,” Ludwig recorded in his
notebook on New Year’s Day 1904, and that “magic touch” as they
made their way “hand in hand in the free universe.” “I would make of
my heart a holy shrine / To treasure those fair words that thou didst
say,” he added in an untitled and unfinished poem not shared. For if this
had been his wish, he could already sense the dangers that lay ahead.
“Now up the many passes of the hills / We are alone no longer,” 80
words he would keep to himself that day, choosing instead to write
Viereck from Charleston of the changes he advised in the poetry he was
editing for Viereck’s first volume, scheduled to appear that spring. “Omit
your frequent passages of moralizing.. . . The American public . . . does
not care for your reflections,” 81 he wrote in bitter reflection of his true
concerns. A month later, he would write privately again of his growing
fear and hope that what they had shared might not be “lost”:
Dear God, that one brief joy was unto me
As to a Mother is her only child,
I kept it pure and free and undefiled
From any taint of self. Can such things be,
That it has gone? Day breaks with ashen sky
And the eternal minutes will not die. 82
It was Ludwig’s critical and editorial advice that would make a
success of Viereck’s first collection of poetry, Gedichte von George
Sylvester Viereck, whose printing costs they shared, as it was Ludwig
whose help brought Viereck through his transition from a German-
language to an English-language poet, the first fruits of which would
appear in this volume and, more fully developed, in Viereck’s Nineveh
and Other Poems (1907), where certain themes and a poem’s title were
shared between them. 83 Years later Viereck would acknowledge this early
Page 101 - [see page image]
100
Ludwig Lewisohn
dependence upon Ludwig’s guidance, noting in his highly unorthodox
memoir, My Flesh and Blood: A Lyric Autobiography with Indiscreet
Annotations (1931), that his association with the “distinguished poet”
was the single most significant literary relationship of his youth. 84
But Ludwig could not in 1904 see their relationship this way, believ
ing instead that he had received far more than he had given, for under
Viereck’s influence he had come to realize that his true needs had been
far different from those he had ever perceived while in Charleston. He
would write in Up Stream that
To me, as to every American youth, it had been said: “Passion, except within
marriage, is the most degrading of sins. Within marriage it is forgiven but
never mentioned as being, even there, unmentionable. This is the law.”
Meantime all the men and youths I knew slunk into the dark alleys of
Queenshaven whither I did not follow them. And curiously, in that very act,
they still believed the follies they proclaimed. They were simply moral men
sinning against their own convictions. That astonishing ethical dualism . . .
that ethical duality of conscience I hold the chief and most corrupting danger
of our life as a people. It must be fought without ceasing and without mercy.
And so he fought as hard as he could, adding flesh to the untouchable
ideal of the spiritual muse he had brought with him from his youth. He
sought pleasures long denied with a conviction that only twenty years of
intervening life would enable him to see as a bit misguided, not because of
the nature of this first love, but because of what was to follow. “Having
been a slave so long,” he acknowledged critically in Up Stream, “I ran
amuck in my freedom and in the recoil came almost to utter grief.” He
felt no lasting sinfulness or shame, only the sadness of having lost his
way in this unfamiliar world of feelings and passion, and the bitterness
of having failed still to find the path that was truly his.
A face, a voice, a gesture that seemed strange and unheard of arose before
me and I was stricken by a blind and morbid passion. All the repressions of
my tormented adolescence, all the false inhibitions in thought and deed now
went toward the nourishing of this hectic bloom. It was winter. A white and
silent winter. Playing with curious fancies we called our passion roses in the
snow. I committed every extravagance and every folly. I knew nothing of
life, nothing of human nature. I knew ethical formulae which, obviously,
didn’t apply—that were, at best, vicious half-truths. Thus all the defenses
of my soul broke down. I had never been taught a sane self-direction. The
repetition of tribal charms which were quite external had been deemed a
sufficient safeguard. Happily, though my passion was morbid enough and
caused me untold suffering, it was blended with the love of letters and with
a keen though unwholesome romance. There was nothing in it of baseness,
nothing of degradation. I am not proud of it but I am not ashamed of it. I
look back upon it and it blends, in strange tones, into the inevitable music
Page 102 - [see page image]
101
Forbidden Loves
of life—neither good nor evil, neither right nor wrong. We are both married
now and meet in pleasant friendship and remember half-humorously that
long ago—so long ago, it seems a fairy-tale—we caused each other delights
and pangs and tears.
He would repudiate nothing, but instead would teach others the wisdom
even of this youthful folly and the folly of so unwisely condemning the
very search for love that had brought him to this earlier moment in his
life. In one of the more eloquent defenses of love, wherever it might be
found, he recorded in Up Stream that
if I had a son, I should say to him: “Dismiss from your mind all the cant
you hear on the subject of sex. The passion of love is the central passion of
human life. It should be humanized; it should be made beautiful. It should
never be debased by a sense that it is in itself sinful, for that is to make
the whole of life sinful and to corrupt our human experience at its very
source. Love is not to be condemned and so degraded, but to be exercised
and mastered. If you are of a cool temper and continence leaves your mind
serene and your imagination unbesmirched, very well. But let not your soul,
if it is ardent, become contaminated and disordered by false shames and a
false sense of sin. Love in itself is the source of loveliness and wisdom if it
is gratified without falsehood and without abandoning the sterner elements
of life. Natural things are made sinful only by a mistaken notion that they
are so. Account love, then, as inevitable and lovely, but remain master of
your soul and of yourself and of the larger purposes which you were born
to fulfill-”**
In the setting of this new world, painted for him by Viereck in deep,
sensuous tones, he had searched for the lover with whom he could
share his youthful passion. Yet he never revealed the identity of this
lover in Up Stream or in any of his published works, or ever dared to
speak of Viereck as his housemate even under the seemingly innocuous
circumstances of a boarder, fearing that the world in which they lived
could not have understood and would have condemned them for the
feelings they had shared. When years later he attempted to write of this
passage in his life, he spoke in Crump of his fictionalized first lover as a
young singer employed by the Shuberts, of her artistic dreams to which
he could respond, and of a physical presence that shook loose the desires
that society had sought to keep repressed within him. He spoke of his
immediate attraction to her (“his human self. . . floating in an ineffable
and divine ichor that soaked into his marrow”) and of hers to him as “a
pity, strangely enough, that embraced them both.” Their first moments
together had stayed with him always, and he tried once again to re-create
its image, masking as best he could the identity and gender of the person
before him:
Page 103 - [see page image]
102
Ludwig Lewisohn
He always afterward remembered that first sight... as she stood for a
moment, her blond slimness framed in that door. She was lifting one of
the straps of her blue evening frock that had slipped down her slim white
shoulders. He knew suddenly what was meant by wheat-blond, he knew
how blue eyes could be, blue as a mountain lake under an autumn sun.
He had the impression of something Northern, boyish, of something cool
yet burning—of a creature as precise as a snow-crystal yet as haunting as
a legend."
It would be as close as he would come to openly detailing what once
he had hoped would remain an “eternal passion,” and what by 1926 he
knew only too well to have been an all too short-lived experience. For
by the spring of 1904, the pressures of the outside world had begun to
encroach upon their private domain and to shatter the peace they had
briefly known. Spring itself, with its message of renewal, seemed only
to mock his growing despair. By April he would be forced to admit that
the heights they had sought could not be reached: “No, we must dwell
amid life’s common air, / Still must we toil beneath the starless skies, /
And still our wounding earthly fetters wear.” 87
As the weeks passed and fear of the world’s “intolerable scorn”
intensified for Ludwig, he grew more desperate to make permanent their
tie, one to the other. Willing to risk even the displeasure of his parents, he
proposed that he and Viereck defy the world and live openly, accepting
the consequences that were surely to follow. “He had the normal instincts
of the young male—to make a home,” he wrote in Crump, “to tend
the ancient fire, to seek the hearthstone as the centre of his life.” But
Viereck was unwilling to commit himself so completely, fearing either the
notoriety he had once scorned, or the need to compromise the freedom he
valued above all else. “Marry you? Let you take care of me? What empty
talk! What would it amount to actually? Being poor together, pulling
each other down.. . . We should take what happiness we can now.”
There followed “atrocious suffering punctuated by rare ecstatic hours,”
until, under severe pressure, Viereck left him. 88 Ludwig implored him to
return, or “pale and passionless my life shall be.” 89 Viereck would not.
Slowly their relationship returned to the friendship it had been
before passion had swept them closer. But Ludwig could not accept
this change and continued to pursue Viereck. “What can I bring thee,”
he begged, “What honor for thy faery head, / What regal panoply?”
Though more aware now of the world’s weight upon them, they need not
deny what they had found together, “the great joy” that had made their
“heart. . . sing.” If they could not have all they once had envisioned,
there was still so much to be won with a love that ought not die and
with lives whose course together they alone should set:
Page 104 - [see page image]
103
Forbidden Loves
We are alone and exiled, take
The honor that I bring,
The love that cannot change or wane
As ‘twere an earthly thing,
That was born in a land beyond the sun,
The land where thou art king. 90
“Passion has its supreme rights,” Ludwig had argued in his preface
to Viereck’s poetry that spring, “and to have added a new and striking
note to the large chorus of human passion is Viereck’s praise.But
Viereck’s thoughts were moving elsewhere. He would have other lovers,
male and female, and ultimately marriage and a son. Still, five years
later, he would send Ludwig a copy of Nineveh and in it annotate “The
Haunted House” (in which he “marked your passion in its nakedness
/ And all your love-sins when your love was new /. . . [and] did yield
to passion’s swift demand”), adding for only his former lover to read—
“My arms embrace you, and a violent host / Of shadows rises ... at
each side a ghost.” ' - '
“Like a maddened gamester,” Ludwig had set his “whole heart’s
meal upon a single throw, / And I have lost it, though I dare not yet
/ Peer on the dice through folded hands and know the bitter, naked
truth.’*'” But failure at love would prove to be one of a number of
coinciding factors contributing to the collapse of his world that spring
of 1904. Weeks earlier, on March 6, he had written Minna that all was
going well at Columbia. Trent had edited a new edition of Crevecoeur’s
1782 homage to the new Republic, Letters from an American Farmer,
and had honored Ludwig with the opportunity to write its preface. 94
Impressed by his student’s work, Trent’s foreword praised him as an
able scholar; or as Ludwig told Minna, “He advertises me beautifully.” 95
Knowing how much happiness this success would bring his parents, he
enclosed an advertisement for the book from the previous day’s New
York Times.
He included in this letter to Minna a brief outline of what he
characterized as a typical day. Anticipating his return to Charleston that
summer, and concerned that his intellectual and emotional transforma
tion might be alarming, he had thought it best to prepare her for the
changed son she would soon encounter. They had between them, as she
had written in a poem he carried with him to New York in 1902, “the
closest union of the hearts." 4 ' He deeply feared the weakening of their
bond, perhaps more than anything else, and without fully disclosing his
relationship with Viereck, wrote how,
In the morning I either attend lectures or work. Then after dinner I am
obliged to take a little nap because I find it impossible to go to bed before
Page 105 - [see page image]
104
Ludwig Lewisohn
12 or 1. Then we take a walk. Well then—I don’t get to work more than three
nights in the week. Either its Trent who wants me occasionally teaching his
classes at the “people’s institute,” or there’s the English Club, or somebody
drops in, or Putty [George’s childhood nickname, given because of his
diminutive stature during his first years] Viereck and I go out. And all this
is necessary. The reason I could not work at all last year is because my
life was so barren, absolutely without the smallest pleasure. That’s bad for
working. 97
But life had become so much more fulfilling these past months, and he
rushed to share more good news with her. “Books We Have Made,” after
its final acceptance as his dissertation, was to be published, and a circular
had already been printed announcing its forthcoming appearance. In
quiries about its publication had left him confident that he would earn a
few dollars for his efforts. When he closed the March letter with “Dearest
love and kisses to you and Papa,” and with “affectionate regards” from
Leonard (recently returned from Germany) and Viereck, he had no idea
that his home in Charleston would soon become a refuge, that once
again he would be in need of a sanctuary.
On April 11, just as his relationship with Viereck was reaching
its point of crisis, Carpenter notified him that the English faculty was
unable to accept his thesis as written. Trent had been selected to provide
the detailed reasons for its rejection, and to offer suggestions for its
improvement. Added to this was the request of his creditors, including
Trent, that he arrange for repayment of his loan at the earliest possible
moment. 98 Trent’s need for such assurance convinced Ludwig that he
might never receive the degree he so desperately needed.
In the weeks that followed Carpenter’s message and the subsequent
breakup of his relationship with Viereck, Ludwig looked with inordinate
hope to the last possibility of something positive in his life, word from
Carpenter of an appointment to discuss a college teaching position
for the coming academic year. All of his classmates had received such
an invitation. But none came. With mounting apprehension, he wrote
Carpenter for an explanation, only to receive his advice that he consider
a different career. No Jew, Carpenter told him, would ever find a position
teaching English at this level in America. “It is very sensible of you to
look so carefully into your plans at this juncture, because I do not at all
believe in the wisdom of your scheme. A recent experience has shown me
how terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position. I
had always suspected that it was a matter worth considering, but I had
not known how wide-spread and strong it was. While we shall be glad
to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot help feeling that the
chances are going to be greatly against you.” 99
Page 106 - [see page image]
105
Forbidden Loves
Though Ludwig was shocked, as he had been once before in Charles
ton, this experience would provide a crucial step in his development.
“For the first time in my life my heart turned with grief and remorse
to thoughts of my brethren in exile all over the world,"' " and he grew
more distraught than ever. Nothing could console him. He wandered
the streets on his own, rode the elevated trains gazing at the city that
had become his hell, lost in his thoughts of a first love now gone, of
a career destined to failure before it began, of his parents far away,
unsuspecting of the news he would have to send them. “Remorse blended
with nostalgia. He didn’t know just why. After all, he was only twenty-
two. . . . He seemed to himself, somehow, to have gone to pieces."' 1 All
that he had hoped for seemed lost. He thought again of going home, but
this time, it would be to stay. “Always my mother’s hand in mine and
her eyes upon me made me well again,” he thought.' ’’
He went to Trent’s office and told him of his decision to leave
Columbia and not return. Trent was angered by Ludwig’s determination
to throw away his future in academics. “He strode up and down and
rebuked me with a sternness that showed his friendship toward me,”
Ludwig recorded in Up Stream. “I sat huddled in a chair. I couldn’t bear
to tell him what was going on within me.” 103
But some of this he could share with Minna. She at least could offer
the salving warmth he so desperately needed. And so in the early summer
of 1904, he packed his bags and boarded the coastal steamer for what
he felt certain would be the last time.
Page 107 - [see page image]
106
4
Mask of Fiction
Charleston, haven of Ludwig’s youth, worked its magic once more—
if only for that brief moment before the southern sky again lost its glow,
and the oppressiveness of balmy summer months left him longing for
the world he had all too hastily left behind. 1 Days were spent reworking
his poems, preparing a first typescript, hoping that the process would
help him sort through the experiences and thoughts of these last two
years. Perhaps some identifiable path into the future lay hidden within
these writings, born of the “night’s stillness” and the “dream state”
from which he was only now beginning to emerge. In sending Viereck a
“Tentative first draught!” he asked that he “Look not upon me in that
wise” nor “turn those maddening lips away.” Left only with his “long
despair ... of lost delight,” with “Visions that break the peace of day, /
The silence of the night,” he dedicated the volume to his unnamed lover,
willing “never more [to] find rest,” if only one last time he could “keep
and hold / Thee closer, closer to my breast— / As in the days of old! ”
“Whether many others will be added to these, I know not, though my
hope is unconquerable. Still, as they are, here and now, I wish you to
see them, you, whose name I dare not speak, but to whom these poems
of right belong, and whose dear image is with me now and shall be
ever—even unto the end.” 2
He would write Viereck often that summer, always ending his letters
“Your L.,” or “Your Majesty’s Faithful and Loving Subject,” echoing the
earlier poems to the “King of Dreamland” and “The Sphinx.” But the
poetry would grow more solemn, more resolved to the inevitability of
Page 108 - [see page image]
107
Mask of Fiction
the end, more accepting of what could not be and of the troubled state of
mind through which he was passing. “There is no breath of any wind,”
he wrote with the imagery of a familiar summer “Southern Night.” “My
boat lies stirless as a stone . . . my lattice droops for drought,” with only
“the storm clouds” to ease “the parched earth . . . sick for rain,” and his
spirit sick for peace.
Let the storm break, the waters lash
Each leaf that crackles like a scroll,
And with intolerable crash
The resonant thunder beat and roll!
I cannot run unto thy breast
Beloved—in the storm my soul
May find its rest. 3
By late summer, Ludwig could note in his journal, “All my passions
fuse together in these orisons that heal the pain and the remorse I feel.” 4
Somehow, separation and the heat and storm-filled skies of Queenshaven
had helped to cool his passions and bring some focus back into his life.
Leonard’s return that spring had brought to their spiritual bond
the promise of renewal for Ludwig. Similarly hopeful, Leonard had
addressed Ludwig poetically, “Ye who see snowfields of cotton-boll in
Carolinas,” and gave to his friend, in this moment of still unrelieved
depression, the sacred task of bearing witness to his life. “I am dead—
Thou livest, report me and my cause aright.” 5 But Ludwig dismissed
the gravity of the charge, and looked forward to their meeting in New
York and the further healing it would allow. He was relieved to think
that never again would he, or Leonard, be concerned with the demands
of academic life. Leonard had completed his doctorate after returning
to New York that summer, while Ludwig planned to go on without it.
The impersonality of a publishing job would be a blessing after so much
frustration, Ludwig thought. Editorial work by day would support his
poetry by night. “My head aches and throbs,” he wrote Leonard on
August 3, 1904. “My depression has not quite yet worn off. The inner
and real reason I cannot get myself to write. My only hope is that time
will heal it, for nothing else can.... It is in work, largely in poetic work,
that I find rest.” 6
It was now time to bid his parents farewell, time to board the
New York-bound steamer, back to his world of literary hopes, and
away from this land of summersun that had healed him once again,
but which continued to see its gifted Jew as a boy “too young, too
unripe and too anxious,” as Charleston’s most prominent literary figure
would soon write to his daughter. 7 Endless nights of fiery pain, cooled
by storm clouds casting their shadow across old dreams—here he had
Page 109 - [see page image]
108
Ludwig Lewisohn
found temporary rest for his weary soul. 8 Here, too, he had found reason
enough to leave.
Soon after his return to New York in mid-August, he found a small
apartment at 505 West 124th Street and began writing articles for the
American Monthly Review of Reviews and the New York Times. “I’ll see
what I can do at the Times,” he wrote Leonard concerning the possible
publication of his friend’s poetry. Perhaps this was the moment when
their lives as serious writers were to begin. With Trent’s assistance,
Ludwig found firmer ground writing synopses of the classics for the
Warner Library, “one of those huge compilation sets which people seem
to buy. . . and, one hopes, read with profit,” he would add in Up
Stream. But the work was pure drudgery, and in searching for a new
position he found a spot at Doubleday, Page writing advertising copy
to promote their publications. While not what he had hoped, the work
served to wean him from the flowery language of the previous century
that had so marked his work. But issues would arise, questions about
Doubleday’s decision to publish George Warner’s anti-Semitic tract The
Jewish Spectre while rejecting honest literary efforts (Doubleday himself
had suppressed Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in 1900), and about the
injustice of wage slavery where management cared little for the staff
that sweated to earn the boss’s fortune. Ludwig refused to become a
“slave of the soul,” and after a year’s promising start he would be given
a good letter of reference as to his abilities as a writer and dismissed
for labor agitation, once again leaving him to feel unsuited for all but a
writing career. 9
That year, Leonard found work in Philadelphia on a Lippincott
dictionary, leaving Ludwig in New York “Alone, alone, with none to
succour me,” and without the anchor he had hoped would steady his
course “In outer Darkness, on the restless sea.” In late November he
would write,
I thought the storm its might had spent,
Thee deep as life through love had grown,
No more would sails be lashed and rent,
The shop no more from harbor blown.
Where might he find “A light and solace on the sobbing sea”? 10 Two
months later, on January 22, 1905, he would record, “Still were you
with me in the wind-swept day. / Still were you with me in the embattled
night.” But he would speak as well of a different search, “Beyond
the maddened people and their roar /. . . [whose] scorn and hate have
quenched the light.” Through “tears [that] blind me,” and hesitant to
reestablish his relationship with Viereck, he was determined to seek the
Page 110 - [see page image]
109
Mask of Fiction
“pale and pitying hands . . . [and] yearning eyes” of a woman to comfort
and arouse and fulfill his needs. 1
And as conditions at Doubleday worsened, he felt the need still
greater, and thought again of what he and Viereck had once shared. It
saddened him to see all things changing without recourse, and wished
one last time for “A little while to hold thy hand, / To save a dream
time can not alter.” But “time and tide are moving still; / A month—
and other loves grow stronger." 1 On September 9, 1905, Ludwig sent
Viereck a final poem. “Our Master comes and finds us wearied,” he
acknowledged with finality. “We are unprofitable servants still.” It was
to be his farewell gift, and after the poem’s conclusion, he added a final
prayer: “May the winds of heaven touch you softly and the stars keep
watch over you; may dawn clothe you in violet and day in gold and
azure. May neither storm nor rain have power to touch your dear head,
but may peace be with you and joy—even as my love is.” 13
For in his loneliness, “crushed, scared, [and] confused by the preva
lent American mores and prejudices,” Ludwig had found comfort in the
arms of an older woman the previous fall. Mary Arnold Crocker Childs,
born in Surrey, England, on March 2, 1861 (perhaps illegitimately to
an American woman recently arrived from America), the undivorced
mother of four children, the oldest of whom was only two years Ludwig’s
junior, had come “To save me, with the starlight of thine eyes / With silver
snowflakes clinging to thy locks / To save me, my beloved, from my
doom.” 14 “He had had dozens of flirtations, slighter or more serious,”
Ludwig later wrote in An Altar in the Fields, one of which was “with
a married woman with whom he roomed on Morningside Heights.”
Mary’s husband, Henry Arnoux Childs (from a socially prominent New
York family), was a less than prosperous accountant for the American
Tobacco Company, and reportedly an incorrigible gambler and drinker
who had subjected his family to increasing poverty. Mary, who would in
time become a minor playwright of some note, winning praise from John
Galsworthy and others for works produced in New York and California,
had already published her poetry in the journals to which Ludwig had
also contributed material. 1;
Perhaps they had met as he noted in Altar, or at the editorial office
of one of these journals. Or possibly, as he told in Crump, he had gone
to the Jewish People’s Organization (the Henry Street Settlement House)
looking for work and there met Mary, who served the group as its
“chairman of the committee on cultural activities.” They seemed to have
been attracted to one another almost immediately. His advances, or at
least her interpretation of his interest in her, seemed to offer her the
hope of escape from a worsening domestic scene, if not an occasion for
Page 111 - [see page image]
110
Ludwig Lewisohn
self-flattery at the thought of attracting someone as young as Ludwig.
And she undoubtedly fulfilled Ludwig’s need for the comforting mother
he had left behind, someone to whom he could run and hide from the
world, someone who could offer the company of a fellow writer and
an outlet for his sexual frustration (“naked sex hunger”)—all set in
the irresistible, classically romantic mold of the young European artist
befriended by the older woman as both patron and lover in his early,
struggling years, as he would one day write of it in Crump
Whatever the cause of their attraction to each other, she filled the
emptiness of his lonely days and nights. He thought little of the things
that divided them or of their future together, never believing that their
relationship had any real possibility of permanence. As he would later
recall in his revised edition of Up Stream, “She was forlorn and so was
I. What seemed to me the pathos of her fate harmonized with my own
misfortunes. And out of similar tastes and similar temporary emotions
there arose a passionate friendship which, for a time, hid from me
the unbridgeable chasms of character and origin which were always so
fatally to divide us.” 17 But for now, in the late summer of 1905, she and
Ludwig were lovers, sheltering each other from life’s disappointments,
aware that their time together would be brief, that soon the world would
creep back into their lives, to stay forever.
As the weeks passed, he made less and less of an effort to find new
employment, losing himself in the embrace of his affair with Mary. They
would meet for long walks as often as she could steal away from her
husband, and while dining at the West End near Columbia, “poured out
their souls to each other” before finding “refuge and forgetfulness” in the
“exorbitant passion” of their lovemaking. But then winter came, poverty
deepened from artistic romance into crushing hunger, and the city, as if
reflecting this personal change, “grew colder and more inhospitable.”
As before, his thoughts turned to the warmth of his parents’ “refuge at
home.” Mary’s appeals could not lessen his steadily growing determina
tion to flee. In self-defense, she wrung from him a series of promises and
assurances about their future together which he apparently had no real
intention of keeping, believing that their relationship would end with his
departure for Charleston. Mary brought him to the boat, and he said
good-bye, expecting never again to see her. 18
As always, his parents’ happiness at their son’s homecoming shielded
him from their probing thoughts. Not that he wished to expose them
to the troubled affairs of his life. He had come home seeking their
understanding and security, and the special touch of his mother, “dearer
than all things most dear and sweet.. . . Life of my life, of my soul, soul,
my all” 19 —dearer even than Mary, who now belonged to the world
Page 112 - [see page image]
Mask of Fiction
he had left behind. Why drag them into the middle of things? Why
destroy their illusion? And so, as he had done with his first love, he kept
from Minna and Jacques the nature of his relationship with Mary, about
whom he spoke briefly and guardedly.
Burdened by the thought of reimposing financial hardship upon
them, he grew desperate for a way to break failure’s grasp. In a rare
concession to reality, he decided to sacrifice the fulfillment of poetry for
the possibility of selling short pieces of fiction to popular magazines. He
later recalled having completed three stories while “in a state of very high
mental tension—extraordinarily clear and yet almost mystical.” With
some confidence in their merit he sent them to the Atlantic Monthly.
Rejection came swiftly. He continued to write and to submit his work,
always with the same result. 20
Weeks passed and became months, and then a year, and suddenly
eighteen months had come and gone since his return to Charleston, with
little tangible to show for the efforts he had made. (“I developed slowly
after a precocious beginning,” he would assess in the last months of
his life.) 21 Deeply discouraged, he thought his time misspent, only to
realize years later just how indispensable this fallow period had been
in helping him to understand and integrate all that had happened since
first leaving Charleston. “He would sit down at his little desk in the attic
room of his boyhood and try dispassionately to think his way through
this situation and to think of a way out,” he later wrote in Crump.
“The things I had seen and lived through in New York with all the
impassioned observation and pain of youth seemed to become denser at
certain points.... I seemed suddenly to be able to see them with a more
penetrating eye.” 22
Soon these perceptions would find their way into his writing. On
February 10, 1906, Ludwig lectured to the Chrestomathic Society at
the College of Charleston, presenting a paper titled “Aspects of Modern
Poetry.” It was a small audience of local people, offering little reason to
suspect that his message would go beyond the city’s confining limits. But
he had touched upon a sensitive issue, what he identified as that fear of
life endemic to American society as reflected in its literary expression.
He had anticipated the anger and denial of local critics, knowing that
they would point to material growth and military prowess, and the
restrictive pattern of personal behavior that supported them, as evidence
of American vitality. But these, he mentioned, were poor substitutes
for the “impassioned experience of the elemental phenomena of the
individual life.” Here alone was the true source of literature, the river
from which the new poetry must flow. But America’s streams had slowed
to a trickle.
Ill
Page 113 - [see page image]
112
Ludwig Lewisohn
We in America will not help write this new poetry, nor will it be read in our
midst, unless we learn to love life more and to fear passion less, unless we
come to recognize that the deepest and most abiding sense of the supreme
and absolute value of life comes not from speculation, philosophic or
theological, but from large, free and full experience—that courage, strength
and sanctity in human character, or the note of assured immortality in poetry
are the fruits, not of propriety, conformity or restraint, but of such action
and passion as makes each man’s life his very own. ... It is not through
quietude and evasion that man achieves, but through tears and travail.
If “to live fearlessly and fully is the first condition of poetical produc
tion,” then the way to the future for him, and for America as well,
seemed perfectly clear. 23
He had been moving in this direction since childhood, and as he
had drifted into this latest period of despair, love and need had become
enveloped by passion, and nature had burst forth with thoughts of the
glory of bodily delight—surely, here was the road to spiritual fulfillment.
In this he belonged, perhaps unknowingly, to that small part of his
generation that was losing its American innocence in these first years
of the new century. For them, the old pretense of moral certitude, of a
binding and universally accepted order, all too rationally drawn without
concern for the totality of human experience or for the individual’s
uniqueness, had been shattered by the challenges they raised against this
old order and by their own certitude that change was possible. To them,
nothing appeared beyond redemption, neither the purported progress
of materialism nor the science and technology upon which it fed, and
certainly not the literary ways of the past. 24
Those who supported the status quo had begun to feel the threat
of this dissent and were growing steadily more vigilant. That Ludwig’s
attack had reached the editors of several influential literary journals
through a report that had appeared in the critical pages of Charleston’s
obscure, small-city newspaper was not all that surprising. “America,
true to its principle of democratic freedom, has expressed itself very fully:
every man or woman who has had, or has thought he has had, something
to say, has said it—and printed it. This has not been an unmixed blessing;
the result has often served to make us ridiculous,” Leonard had written in
his preface to Byron and Byronism in America the previous year, certain
that Ludwig, as he wrote on his gift copy’s title page, would “appreciate
this peculiar sympathy and insight.” But the mostly positive reaction
of these other journals was particularly gratifying to Ludwig, who had
thought of himself as a lonely crusader. The Literary Digest, on March
3,1906, praised his lecture for its significant contribution to the growing
post-Victorian debate on the future of America’s literary tradition, an
Page 114 - [see page image]
113
Mask of Fiction
opinion with which Current Literature and the America Monthly Review
of Reviews would concur that fall. 25 They, too, had sensed the growing
movement toward change, and were willing to entertain dissenting ideas
in the spirit of a lively debate about the arts. They, however, would pull
back in the years ahead, and would reject the more radical conclusions
to these debates, attacking many of the solutions to social and artistic
problems offered by this small but increasingly influential number of
scattered dissenters, many of whom had yet to meet, but who had
independently drawn similar conclusions from disparate experiences
that had the basic commonality of a struggle with the society in which
they were attempting to function.
Unlike these others, however, Ludwig’s own emergence into this new
world had come not only from his rejection of late Victorian propriety,
but also from his emerging need to find a creative role for his ethnic
identity. Society had confirmed him in his otherness, and had relentlessly
persisted in reminding him of it. Even Mary, who shared much of this
critique of American society and had supported the socially progressive
“single tax,” 26 would later side with those who pointed to his Jewishness
in an attempt to explain away his ideas and objections. Others on the
Left would later do so, as well.
Despite his declaration and challenge to the existing order, Ludwig
had sought Harris’s initial response to his lecture, which Harris, confined
to a hospital bed, had been unable to offer. Hoping that Harris had read
the address in the News and Courier, Ludwig made three attempts to
see him over the next four days, but each time his efforts were thwarted
by the hospital’s staff. After sitting through visiting hours for the third
time, he went home on February 14 and sent Harris a note laced with his
growing sense of alienation. “A very pretty nurse twittered indefinitely
and a sister of mercy looked at me severely. Doctors ran in and out
most ritualistically a la Chesterton. Nobody would look at me. I felt
quite an outcast, tried to look smaller and smaller in my chair and
finally vanished into thin air.” Discouraged but not defeated, he had
advanced upon his alma mater but met only Randolph surveying a
campus struck by illness. Everyone seemed to be getting sick now, even
Viereck back in New York, and “a certain lady in whom I am interested.
I am beginning, unconsciously, to hunt for symptoms within myself,” he
confessed, though his illness was of the spirit. He had turned to his
writing for a cure, with two short stories (“oh mysteries of psychology
and passion”) and the beginnings of a “NOVEL” as his response. 27
The unexpected arrival of Leonard’s letter in early March 1906 was
an occasion of great joy for Ludwig, and he hastened to relate his happi
ness and hope for a renewed friendship, as nearly a year had passed since
Page 115 - [see page image]
114
Ludwig Lewisohn
they had last corresponded. Having heard from Viereck that Leonard
had been dismissed from Lippincott, he now tried to reassure his old
poetic mentor that someone with his talents would secure a professorship
with little trouble (“employment more worthy of your powers”). The
only advice he could offer was to stay clear of Columbia. Distance had
not lessened Ludwig’s bitterness. “I wouldn’t fool with the Columbia
people though. Try to get a job on the strength of your attainments
alone. I have some rather sinister but not unfounded suspicions of the
professorial gentlemen in New York. Don’t go near them.”
The Literary Digest’s reception of his lecture had already raised
Ludwig’s spirits by the time Leonard’s letter appeared. After nearly two
disappointing years, this brief but significant literary attention seemed
to Ludwig but the first fruits from a field left unharvested for far too
long. Feeling as though “the dogs of life” had at last lightened their
pursuit, he used the writing of his response to Leonard to reassess
again the experiences of the last eighteen months. He told Leonard how,
with eyes severely strained and nerves ready to snap, he had left New
York after only a brief stay, “not in defeat, I see now with clearer and
saner vision but simply because I was trying to do things (‘Times’)—
degradation-fawning-on-publishers-for-the-sake-of ad business (there’s
stylistic compression for you) included—things, I say, that were unfit and
unworthy and unprofitable.” His father had encouraged him to come
home, Ludwig continued, and here he was, planning to stay for as long
as it would take to land a job or make a real contribution to literature.
Confiding in Leonard, as he had in the past, he spoke of strange thoughts
and feelings that had crystallized into a number of short stories and a
novel he planned to write. There had continued to be occasional poems,
but occasions were now felt less frequently. (Much of the poetry he
would publish over the next few years was derived wholly or in part
from the work he had finished before coming home this last time.) If his
muse had once again looked upon him, she had made of his pen a plow
with which to prepare new fields for sowing. Such thoughts left him
rejuvenated, and he looked forward to the future. “I have regained here
my health, and the power that in the sordid struggle for the wherewithal
to live seemed to be leaving me.” 28
Finally, after months of waiting, William D’Alton Mann bought
three stories in the late spring of 1906 for his newest journal, the Smart
Set. Though the gossipy atmosphere of Mann’s earlier (and continuing)
endeavor, Town Topics, had been carried over into his latest venture,
he was seeking a decidedly more sophisticated readership, searching for
“tales not too somber nor too analytical,” yet filled with “cleverness”
and “interest” alongside “action.” Ludwig had become familiar with
Page 116 - [see page image]
115
Mask of Fiction
the magazine in his last months in New York. Admiring its realism,
and in need of money, he was willing to write what Mann and his
editor, Charles Hanson Towne, might want to buy. They found the
honesty and frankness of Ludwig’s stories appealing, and with this initial
purchase, at a penny a word, began a literary relationship that would
last a dozen years.
When late that summer Joel Chandler Harris paid Ludwig $125 for
a fourth story that was to appear in his Uncle Remus’ Magazine, Ludwig
saw this as a further confirmation of his talent as a writer. Thoughts of
future successes seemed to transform his characteristically gloomy mood
into one of mild happiness, believing now that the years of vocational
and artistic disappointment had finally come to an end. 29
Jacques and Minna, unrealistic and overly self-compensatory as
always, took greater comfort than Ludwig in this moment of growing
recognition, believing him to be at the start of a new life of unending
accomplishment. They seemed little concerned, or even aware, of the
confusion and reserved joy evident in their son’s face, for earlier that
year Mary had descended upon the Lewisohn household (now at 55
East Bay Street) without warning. Ludwig’s cousin Cora, visiting the
Lewisohns that spring, later recalled the turmoil caused by Mary’s un
expected visit. It was the first time Jacques and Minna had learned of
the extent of their son’s relationship with the woman with whom he had
been corresponding since his return. Ludwig was beside himself, and
wandered through the house in a state of shock—she had actually come
and he could not believe his eyes. Jacques and Minna, at first horrified
by the prospect of a daughter-in-law nearly their own age (she was a
year younger than Minna), grew fond of her as the days passed, and in
time invited her to vacate her Society Street boardinghouse room and
stay with them. Nevertheless, they still hoped that she would change her
plans for their son. Cora concurred with their feelings, thinking Mary a
charming and intelligent woman but far too old for her cousin. 30
But nothing could dissuade Mary, certainly not Ludwig’s response
to her affections. His earlier feelings for her, expressed in the poetry
he had often sent during their long separation, were soon rekindled
by the intense and passionate lovemaking they began to enjoy again,
night after night—“all night my arms enfold thee,” 31 he wrote in his
journal. Since leaving her in New York, Ludwig had never once clearly
denied these feelings, nor attempted to discourage her thoughts about
their future together. It was as if he were holding her in reserve, to be
a haven for some unforeseen storm he knew awaited him. If he feared
that she might actually hold him to his promises, and one day come
to Charleston as she had so often said she would, he also missed her,
Page 117 - [see page image]
116
Ludwig Lewisohn
and perhaps feared that she might not. He had been deeply ambivalent.
“There was no doubt about that,” he wrote in Crump of this time away
from her. He had missed her attention, missed her physically, missed
his long, uninhibited talks with her. There was, he admitted to himself,
despite the closeness of his relationship with Minna, “no one else in
the world with whom he could be so frank, with whom he could so let
himself go.” 32 His unrepudiated affections, coupled with her continuing
search for an escape, were bringing to an end her marriage of twenty-one
years. There was no turning back for her; she was determined to begin
a new life. If he remained deeply ambivalent, her sense of purpose only
intensified as she readied her return home to New York that April.
A year earlier, on May 1,1905, Mary had taken Ludwig’s advice and
gone to Philadelphia to see Leonard concerning her troubled personal
affairs. After so many years of marriage, she had felt quite hesitant about
the prospect of leaving her husband. Bearing a letter of introduction from
Ludwig, she found Leonard’s apartment and knocked on his door. He
had not been expecting her, but received her most graciously. As she
reported to her husband the following day, “He ushered me into the
front room, read the letter, measured me mentally and evidently liked
me for he said he would be glad to take me sight-seeing and I say he was
sincere.” They spent the afternoon in Fairmont Park, among the natural
beauty of its woods and streams, enjoying each other’s companionship.
She spoke of her love for Ludwig and of the end of her marriage—
he counseled her and offered to speak to Mr. Childs. She had found a
confessor, and he a woman of sympathetic character. Even her literary
sensibilities caught his imagination, and he urged her to accept him as
her mentor.
With renewed confidence, Mary told her husband of her plans to
leave him and of her hope that he would soon regain his faith in himself,
“having it in your soul to rise above despair.But he would not be
consoled by her good wishes. He stood ready to fight, prepared to do
all that was necessary to rescue her from the “worshipping of strange
idols,” as he described what to him was her inexplicable attraction to
Ludwig. Her young lover seemed to him nothing more than an “ignoble
soul” and a symbol of “treachery and dishonor.” He told Mary on May
6 of his plan to meet with Leonard and explain this situation to him,
believing that Leonard would then convince Ludwig to break off this
relationship with his wife. 34
In his anxiety, Childs made one last, vain attempt to reclaim his
marriage. “Your request that I think of you as dead shocked me,” he
wrote Mary on May 8. “I give you the opportunity of reconsidering such
a request. You must recognize its seriousness and awful import."' : But
Page 118 - [see page image]
117
Mask of Fiction
Mary’s thoughts were now of a more pleasant life far from the domestic
troubles she would be leaving behind—unmanageable children, an aging
mother’s demanding illness, a husband long past redemption. To her
husband’s charges she offered a vigorous denial, and protested his claim
that sinful desires had motivated Ludwig. She went on to defend her
own innocence, and laid the blame for what had happened at her
husband’s feet:
As for myself I do not feel the least sinful. You assume that lust is the root
of Mr. Lewisohn’s love for me, apparently. You knew that he loved me long
before I cared a particle for him and you did not object then. If his conduct
has been reprehensible it was just as reprehensible then as later. I believe that
so far as he knows his own state of mind Ludwig Lewisohn has a sincere
love for me which for the sake of conventions he will strive to outgrow.
I think you are bitterly unjust to him. His faults are those of an ardent,
generous nature and he is young. 36
Ludwig, in fact, had done little to discourage her during their second
period of separation, “delicately” suggesting “that perhaps it would be
better for her to yield to her husband’s pleadings and for them to resign
themselves to the inevitable. '“'It should not have been at all surprising to
him that in October 1906, six months after her first visit, Mary notified
the Lewisohns of her approaching return and readiness for marriage,
delayed momentarily by the minor accident her daughter Helen (who
was to accompany her) had sustained. Minna, still blind to her son’s fear
and ambivalence, consoled her future daughter-in-law with the story of
Ludwig’s illness on the eve of their own departure from Germany. “I
can well feel for you my dear child, I had my experiences too.” She
added that Ludwig had become somewhat difficult to manage during
her absence and thought him overworked and distraught with worry.
“Some nights Ludwig hardly can bear the longings and wants his Molly
[as he called Mary] right away.” 38
The accuracy of Minna’s impressions must be judged against a letter
Ludwig wrote to Leonard the following day, October 13. As if trying
to repress the thought of Mary’s imminent arrival, he asked his friend
to send her a copy of his book on Byron, only to interject suddenly
and with alarm, “Not in my care! She thinks of moving!"’" True, he
and Mary shared certain natural, moral, and aesthetic affinities. But his
writing, particularly the poetry (to which he hoped to return now that
he was selling his stories), was the thing in life he cared about most, as
he had written Leonard ten days earlier. 40 He never intended to marry
Mary, and here she was about to press her demands. The prospect of
her returning to Charleston and disturbing his world, so soon after the
first hopeful signs of success, had sent him into a frenzy.
Page 119 - [see page image]
118
Ludwig Lewisohn
Mary felt justified in demanding that they marry when she returned,
having already damned convention by leaving her husband. But Ludwig
did not agree. Whatever they had shared in New York and Charleston
seemed insufficient to warrant so permanent an arrangement. Certainly,
he did not feel the deep love for her that he believed was a necessary
precondition for marriage. Mary, according to Ludwig’s later accounts,
had threatened to make the nature of their relationship public by com
mitting suicide in Charleston and leaving behind his letters to her if he
refused “to save her honor and her very life.” Perhaps she threatened as
well to disclose the secret of his relationship with Viereck, about which
Ludwig must have spoken during their early days together when he and
Viereck were in the final stage of their troubled affairs. Either of these
would have caused a terrible scandal and thoroughly embarrassed his
parents “in this tiny native city of his where everyone . . . knew him and
his people.” There would be little recourse for them but to leave town.
He feared for them, he recalled in Up Stream, believing that she would
indeed carry out her threat and destroy the modicum of peace they had
finally come to know. 41
Years after their marriage had turned into the unending horror
chronicled from Ludwig’s perspective in Crump, Mary would allege
that it was Ludwig who had coerced her into marriage. “In your de
termination to possess me as your wife, by the ardor and the obstinacy
of your love,” she wrote him in 1934, “you overcame all obstacles—
including my better judgment—enlisted the cooperation of your parents
and begged . . . our family pastor [in New York] ... to facilitate our
marriage by helping me to obtain the divorce which you urged upon me
and planned for me!” Ludwig, she further asserted, had made all of the
arrangements, including the date, without consulting her, and had even
secured the license before her arrival, her signature not being needed.
Yet given the lack of outside corroboration to support her charges, the
evidence of Ludwig’s abiding ambivalence and wish not to marry anyone
at this time, and their second wedding ceremony three and a half years
later in Newark, New Jersey (possibly because of her failure to have
as yet obtained a divorce from her first husband in her haste to marry
Ludwig), her later claims appear exaggerated, if not totally unfounded. 42
Unaware that Ludwig was being forced to wed someone he did not
love, Jacques and Minna had come to think their union, despite age and
cultural differences, a suitable one. In their own, gentler way, they, too,
began to apply pressure, pleased at the thought of his finally settling
down. Under the strain of events, in a time “out of touch with reality,”
he, “sorry, helpless and confused,” capitulated; on December 12, 1906,
they were wed at the Charleston Unitarian Church. Harris attended as a
Page 120 - [see page image]
119
Mask of Fiction
witness, and with the bride and groom and his parents, returned to the
Lewisohns’ home to celebrate the event. 43
In a number of short stories that found their way into the Smart
Set and other magazines over the next few years, Ludwig tried to make
sense of all that preceded and followed the wedding—the anger and the
frustration, the ugly scenes, the peevish arguments, the unreasonable
demands, the genuine warmth they occasionally shared, and most debil
itating of all, the doubly-bonded dependency they knowingly had upon
each other. On the eve of Mary’s return, he wrote that “she knew what
she had been to him, and at what terrific cost to herself; she remembered
the anguish of innumerable hours when she had forced herself to speak
of his work, to follow the subtle movements of his mind, or others in
which she had restrained his measured fervor by assuming a laughing
Superiority. She was terribly afraid of his youth and of her years. Thus she
had held him, she believed, by a continual denial of the deepest needs of
her woman’s soul.” 44 He, in turn, recognized how needful of her he had
become. “I depend upon her absolutely,” he noted remorsefully more
than a year after their marriage, “and that dependence sustains her; I
should be lost without her and the consciousness of that fact secures her
perfect faith; she has found all her strength—through my weakness.
The harsh reality behind their relationship, and their inability to
break the bonds that made them captives of one another, brought on
much of the tension that filled their lives. Ludwig’s first retelling in Up
Stream of this early period was far too idyllic to be convincing, and
clearly a product of his need at that later time to maintain a fragile peace
(“Mary and I watched the horned moon float over the silken swell of
the dark waters and listened to the tide”); 46 his later recounting of these
same months in the revised edition of Up Stream, written after his flight
from Mary, seems too contrived in its effort to discredit her as a woman
with “neither humility nor true kindness,” whose “responsibilities to
her family had robbed her of the power, even though she had had the
will, to be my wife.” 47
As always, the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes. She
had been less than thankful for his parents’ financial support during
their first two years of marriage, though she had often disrupted his
work in an effort to win his complete attention, rather than allow him
the uninterrupted time he needed if they were ever to be independent.
With some empathy, Ludwig did admit in Crump that Mary had been
motivated by a not unreasonable desire for them to start a new life
in their own home. But life alone with her was precisely what he had
come to fear most during this period, sensing how much control she
wished to wield over him. Fearing her domination, he refused to leave
Page 121 - [see page image]
120
Ludwig Lewisohn
the protection of his parents’ home, arguing that their meager income
was reason enough to stay where they were until conditions improved—
fully aware that by remaining in Charleston there would be little chance
for such change. 48
Still, despite all of this, his feelings for her were strong enough to
elicit his “Sentimental Story” about their happier times together in New
York. Written in the midst of this first troubled period and published in
the Smart Set of May 1907, it carried with it a desire to recapture the
spirit of that “strange and brief and lonely life” when they had found
each other “amid the clangor and haste of Babylon.” He spoke lovingly
of how together they had once “fled from the needs and indignities of the
world”—and of how the fires that had warmed their hearts were all too
sadly “long spent and cold.” If only they could use the few remaining
sparks between them to rekindle the flame that had once illuminated
their world. 49
As time passed and their entanglement grew more complex, he
felt the need for a larger canvas, something far more expansive upon
which to lay out and examine the events that had altered his world. He
needed room to explore his changing moods, and to portray the actions
and reactions of a panoply of characters drawn with the colors of an
emotional spectrum as varied and as vivid as the precipitous experiences
of his life. Such stories were impossible to place in the magazines that
paid well. As Harper’s editor told him, he needed to give it “a happy
ending.’ M " He could not. Above all, he needed to discover a way to
spring the trap of circumstance and be free.
To do so, he forged a truce with Mary, agreeing to leave his parents’
home if she, in turn, would cease her hostilities toward them, and give
him the opportunity to write the novel that would provide the means
by which they could return to New York. She agreed, and he, though
knowing that her agreement was a sign of his own capitulation, began
to frantically work away at The Broken Snare, pouring into it the story
of his years and all that he knew of literary form and aesthetics, hoping
to create a truly masterful work that would give him the recognition he
thought he deserved. Under this pressure, he began to suffer ever greater
attacks of insomnia. (Decades later, he would speak of this condition as
one of the prime factors behind his extraordinary productivity.) 51 “Often
now I wrote on my sheer nerves. Yet, with every allowance made, the
thing was felt, seen, rendered. It was young, that first novel of mine, but
there were pages and chapters that both in the texture of the prose and
the shaping of the matter had a touch of life and beauty.
Behind the mask of fiction he could weigh everything, without the
fear of discovery or the pain of confrontation. In the telling of a young
Page 122 - [see page image]
121
Mask of Fiction
woman’s struggle to be free of her own emotional restraints and of
the Victorian, Pauline ethos that dominated American society in 1907
and defined her role in the world, he could at once explore his own
parental dependency, examine his dispiriting relationship with Mary,
and attempt to redirect his life by finding a personal morality that would
enable him to satisfy the emotional, sexual, intellectual, and artistic
needs that had been unfulfilled for so long. Using the voice of a young
woman (Frances) in Snare to mask his own, he drew on his search for
the freedom from which he believed all else, including the passions of
life, flowed:
Driven by an unconquerable desire of light and love, she had made a first
fine break in the spiritual wall that enclosed her life. A series of events
which as she looked back upon them, seemed, by their very maddening
subtlety, beyond the exercise of any direction, had widened the breach
until—tomorrow or the day after—the whole structure might crash with
ruin to the earth! And the ultimate cause of her defiance of the social law,
of the lies that were hateful to her, of the terrible pain that she would give
her parents, lay not in any deliberate evil, originated by her will, but in
the unchangeable necessities of her being. This was the more clear because
she knew that she would not, ultimately, draw back from that last and fatal
step.. . . Alone with the mysteries of her life . . . she could see that good and
evil were naught, that we are driven by desires not of our own devising, by
needs that, if denied, will crush loyalty and honour. . . . She arose, lit the
dim jet of gas, and stood before the mirror. Her heavy hair lay darkly in
thick folds upon her white nightgown; her grey eyes burned; the full, red
lips gleamed strangely. The night-gown falling open, revealed her throat
and bosom to the delicate curvature of her small, cuplike breasts. A passion
of pride and power and the glory of coming days, of soaring liberation from
the constraints of the past, surged up in her—She was free to live, made to
enjoy, strong to conquer.' 1
With the lover who promised to end her loneliness and feed her
burgeoning appetites, Frances fled the restrictive life she had known
with her parents in New York and went to Charleston in the hope
of fulfilling needs they could never understand. What had seemed an
existence without hope had been transformed by her lover’s touch. For
the chance to feel it again and again, she had willingly sacrificed the
comfort of her home and the role she had seemed fated to play, of “self-
torture and self-humiliation,” and of “the wearier duties of her life.”
But as a poet, her lover, Julian, knew the risks she was taking. Theirs,
he told her, was no safe and quiet love, but a swirling tide of passion.
Their love might diminish with time, or their attempt to live outside
society’s accepted patterns might fail, leaving her alone to face the scorn
of those among whom she would have to rebuild her life. But she willfully
Page 123 - [see page image]
122
Ludwig Lewisohn
disregarded his warning and urged him to come away with her, risking
all for the chance of a new life in an unknown future. 54
Charleston stood before them in all her pathos, a luminous city
overshadowed by a gentle hint of decay, a strange city of propriety and
decadence. It was the ideal setting for Ludwig’s story, a place of promise
and disappointment with which to frame the picture of his heroine’s final
dissolution. In the rooming house to which they had come, Frances had
found a fellow boarder mesmerizing, and as she walked with him (and
without Julian) through the soft gentle air of an evening by the sea, she
felt something primal surging up within herself. They soon came to a
black church, and as she sat listening to the rhythms of its people, she
found, to her amazement and fright, that she, too, felt its fervor. Caught
without warning by the spirit of something she could not identify, she
was set adrift upon waves of sheer emotion. Even as she fled, she knew
that something in her life had changed forever. 55
Soon after her night of discovery, she carried back to New York
the seed of Julian’s love. But distraught over his continuous refusal
of marriage, she fell gravely ill and lost the child. 56 In the months of
convalescence that followed, she found nature to be as great a cure for
her soul as it was for her body, “a power of spiritual restoration, a source
of strength and endurance and quiet joy.” 57
Out of her suffering had come a new, more impregnable faith than
any she had ever known. In its light, she reexamined the thoughts
of her youth and declared America utterly without a soul, “appalling
in its sheer externality. . . not the simplest reflection, not the faintest
idea ... an interminable clutter of things, things, things,” 58 grounded
in the forbidding vision of an otherworldly Christ in whose name life’s
fulfillment had been denied to all. It was as if a conspiracy of silence
had overshadowed the true Jesus who, in all his humanity, had walked
among the poor of Galilee. Only by stepping out of this world of corrupt
imagery and into the eternal stream of nature could she resolve her own
chaos; only through the personal recognition of what was naturally hers
to experience in fullness and in joy could she find the true and lasting
source of comfort. The events of the year just passed had confirmed this
belief and given her life a new direction. ‘
But this was only a part of Ludwig’s understanding, the part that he
had hoped all who read the novel would carry away from it as a first
step toward building new lives and a new society. There was in Snare,
as in much of his writing of this period, a second, more personal and
secret meaning to this story. The passage quoted as a frontispiece and
from which the title is derived—“our soul is escaped as a bird out of the
snare of the owlets: the SNARE IS BROKEN, and we are escaped” 60 —
Page 124 - [see page image]
123
Mask of Fiction
is a part of Psalm 124’s offer of thanksgiving by Israel to “the Lord
who was for us . . . [and] who has not given us as prey to their teeth.”
Ludwig, too, felt saved from the jaws of an alien nation, as if he, like his
Jewish ancestors before him, had been freed from the bondage of a new
Egypt and, in his wandering search for the promised land, had received
a new revelation.
The novel took more than a year and a half to complete, and as the
weeks of intense effort passed, he found the work far more disturbing
than he had anticipated. Midway through the work, in September 1906,
he had sent Harris what he embarrassingly excused as “a perfect cascade
of silliness” but which nonetheless expressed feelings that were quite
sincere. His emotional entanglement with the book’s protagonist had
made the writing ever more difficult to continue. And as the writing
slowed down to a few lines each day, he lost himself in a labyrinth of
emotional stress and artistic immobility:
The truth is I’m blue, as the sea, the sky, anything that is utterly so. Life
is in the immortal words of Henley, “a blunder and a shame.” I’m in one
of those moods when I’m sure that everything I touch, because I touch it,
falls into dust and ashes. Worse still, I’m fagged, utterly, irremediably. I
need a change, or I can’t go on. Part first of the novel is done, one chapter
of part two, and I’m stuck. Not because I don’t know precisely what to
do or how to do it but simply because I don’t have the vitality.... I have
had no difficulty with the big things, the bravura passages, the passionate
scenes. But I’ve nearly broken my heart over the connecting passages. I can’t
use stereotyped phrases (I wish I could; I’d probably have a better chance
of success), I can’t use affected and precious verbiage to describe a room,
and my charming heroine in it washing her face. I kill myself trying to do
these things simply, yet with a touch of freshness and grace. At present I try
nothing. I write and tear up, write and tear up.
If retreat had been possible, he would have fled into the conventional
world of accepted thoughts and actions. “If I were to pray for anything,
it would be for all the proper little feelings, and all the proper little
orthodoxies and the proper little modicum of intelligence and no more.
Oh Lord, make me a fool! ” But to do so would have meant surrendering
to all of those forces from which he had hoped to free himself through
the analytical processes of fictional composition and catharsis. If he
looked on jealously at those who contentedly knew nothing of their
ensnarement, he knew that he could not follow their path and would
have to push on, even if fearful and alone. “I know, too, what it is to seem
to come home to the simplicities, the sanctities of life! But I force myself
when possible out of this mood, because I know that these same sweet
and kindly people would in certain contingencies which are possible to
Page 125 - [see page image]
124
Ludwig Lewisohn
my temperament, turn upon me and rend me with as little pity as a steel
machine. It’s after all, like the whole of life."" 1
As before, he regained his confidence with the passage of time and
the resurgence of a desire for artistic achievement. By October 13, he
reported to Leonard that Snare was again under way. The pendulum
had made its inevitable swing back, and he felt better about his life. “So
I seem to be getting on. Frankly, I sit down and wonder at myself.. . .
I’m doing it, praise God!” 62
As the next few months dragged on, he began again to wonder if it
would ever be completed. “I am really killing myself to do it,” he told
Leonard on December 3. 63 It took until the end of the summer of 1907 to
finish the book, and though he was pleased with his accomplishment, he
still thought his poetry to be the true expression of his passion. Here was
“the one thing whereby, deep down, we live,” he declared despite having
written Leonard the previous November that he had grown “doubtful
whether I can do it [poetry] at all. I’m on such a different track."" If he
regretted the change, he was not unhappy that his efforts had brought
out a work he was proud to have written. The writing and tearing
and the hunt for a fresh phrase had paid off. “I’m either a complete
fool, blindly besotted in my folly, or else I’ve written a novel which will
make at least some part of the world sit up,” he could write Leonard on
October 9, 1907. 65
Throughout the writing of Snare, the thought that it might play
some role in the future of American letters had helped to keep him going.
He had on several occasions during the past year encouraged Leonard
to feel the same about his poetry. They were no longer “green youths
purling the verses of adolescence.” It was time to set aside false humility
and acknowledge their place in the development of a new literature. 66
Surely the “solemn bulwarks of American [literary] Philistia” would
not. 67 “There comes a point in one’s development when, with all due
humility to the great and immortal masters of the art, this hedging and
hesitating as to ourselves and our place in our time must cease."’"
He knew, of course, that finding a publisher, and the recognition he
believed rightfully his, meant returning to that “broader field of activity,”
New York. Continuing tensions between Mary and his parents, their
own growing concern that he had made a grave error in marrying her,
and, most upsetting, his financial dependence upon them all finally led to
his desire to leave as quickly as possible, now that he had a major work
with which to make this one last assault upon America’s cultural capital.
Mary, wanting desperately to be rid of their shameful dependence upon
the Lewisohns, and anxious to see her three children who had remained
in New York, pledged to live simply and to work at whatever she could
Page 126 - [see page image]
125
Mask of Fiction
to help pay their expenses. Jacques borrowed four hundred dollars and
gave it to Ludwig, promising a bit more later on. Ludwig, saddened
but without an alternative, “looked into his father’s eyes and nodded
gratefully . . . [knowing] what economies, even privations, that would
mean.” 69 He pledged to do most anything he could to support his family
and to help repay the loan—except for one. “I’ll not degrade myself
again by applying for an academic position and be told that I’m an
‘Ebrew Jew.”
“And so it seems that Babylon will see us again!” he wrote Leonard,
in a mood of mixed anxiety, sadness, and expectation. 70 Minna was, of
course, deeply upset by his leaving and unable to mask her emotions as
the day of his departure neared. Ludwig shared her feelings about their
separation and feared that this stay had quite possibly been his last.
“My mother and I had a sense of the bitter tragedy of that parting,” he
recalled in Up Stream. Yet there was something terribly engaging about
the possibilities this change might bring. If a part of him felt “broken and
defeated,” another saw the potential that might be awaiting him. Early
one late-October morning, armed with his manuscript, he boarded the
New York-bound train with Mary and waved farewell to Harris and
his parents, never again to make Charleston his home. 71
Page 127 - [see page image]
126
5
A Suspect Race
“Our determination to go for good was so sudden,” Ludwig wrote
Harris the day after his October thirtieth arrival in New York, that there
had been little time to prepare for it emotionally. All through the journey
northward, it felt as though he were crossing the threshold of a new life,
and that in it, his soul would be stripped bare in some final testing. The
“trying emotional circumstances of the moment” and the uncertainty
of his future made him long for the security of his parents’ home and
for the city from which, through memories real or romanticized, he had
always drawn his strength. 1
The prospect of a New York return had long been a source of anxiety
for him, but in his compensating manner, he had thought of that future
time as a chance to recapture the warmth he and Mary had known
during their first encounter, when “nestled in the glimmering streets,”
they had found refuge in an embrace.
Old thoughts, dear thoughts
Come to me again,
How we two wandered lonely
In the wind and rain. 2
But the grey autumn skies of New York had been quick to fade
these brighter memories, and the reality of a long winter’s approach
had replaced the idyll of a distant past. Mary’s son, Harold, had rented
a room for them in a boardinghouse on Morningside Avenue, near
Columbia University. They, however, found it unacceptable, even by
their modest standards, and began looking for other quarters the very
Page 128 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
next day. Mary, despite her displeasure with these first accommodations,
found just being in New York a cheering experience. Ludwig’s reaction,
though, was quite different. Surrounded by so much of her family, and
forced to listen to her heroic stories of survival in rustic Charleston,
he felt more depressed than he had expected to that first night. Within
minutes of his arrival, a chilling sense of what the combined force of
Mary and her family would mean to his future came over him. Most
distressing were thoughts of ever increasing demands upon his time
and energy that would have to be endured without parents for support
and refuge. His anxiety over the “immediate necessities” of an income
through some meaningful employment, and of a publisher for Snare,
requiring him to be “in 3 places at once, and doing so many things,”
made him fearful of the coming weeks. How, in such a state, would he
ever be able to accomplish anything artistic?'
After a brief search, they leased a small, recently built apartment on
Washington Heights (511 West 172nd Street) that he characterized in Up
Stream as “dingy by nature—cheap, ugly, abominable. ”* A more detailed
description in Crump of their new home pointed to a more positive and,
by other evidence, more accurate picture of it. Three windows faced
the street, and on a sunny day the kitchen would be bathed in light.
Two living rooms, two bedrooms, and a bath completed their small,
but adequate, quarters. More importantly, he was within easy walking
distance of the parks, rivers, and wooded shorelines that filled and circled
his part of Manhattan island—all routes of escape into nature when
things became too intolerable at home. 5
He was at first rather proud of not having been paralyzed by the
loneliness of New York or the dreadful prospect of having to live with
and support Mary’s family. “We’ve made quick work of it. Behold us
(with your spiritual eye) established in a pleasant but, naturally tiny
apartment on Washington Heights—to my mind the one tolerable spot
in Babylon. Here or wherever else the life of the modern nomad sends
us, a warm welcome awaits you whenever you turn up in these regions!
They’re cold; to me unbeautiful. Charleston stars baked in a pearly haze
haunt me. But this is, beyond doubt, at present, my place.’"' But after four
months, he realized just how “perilous” it had been to leave Charleston,
“with all the security that it meant,” and to go to New York in search of
a literary livelihood. They had come with four hundred dollars and the
surplus furniture and household goods provided by his parents. Money,
in the big city, had not lasted as they thought it would, and under
the increasing press of poverty, his search for employment made New
York once again seem a dark mistress. As he had anticipated, Mary’s
demands for herself and her family only added to his fears of financial
127
Page 129 - [see page image]
128
Ludwig Lewisohn
ruin, continued dependency upon his parents, and artistic failure. Still,
he remained determined to succeed, driven as he was by the new hope
that had brought him back to New York, “not beaten, but apparently,
destined to prevail over the shocks of circumstance.” To bolster his spirits
that January of 1908, he assured Leonard of the ultimate victory that
lay before them both, if only he could “burst these bars that hem our
spirits in . . . [and] see but the silent stars, hear not the maddening din.”
It was their task to break through the restrictive barriers that had been
set before them. 7 Those others who filled their lives with meaningless
pursuits, avoiding this challenge, were destined to face “the Terror of
a Judgment Day” that neither he nor Leonard would ever know. They
alone, and not these other “celebrants” of a “Babylonian fate,” were the
living spirits of a better world. They alone would prevail. 8
But circumstances had thrown him together with these revelers
during his first months in New York, H. L. Mencken and George Jean
Nathan among them. “The respectable magazines would have none
of me,” he wrote in Up Stream of his many attempts to publish his
poetic journal, now titled Amor Triumpbans. Editors had praised his
work, but thought their readers would find his writing unacceptable
(as they did with Viereck’s and Leonard’s that same year). Mann of
the Smart Set, “my one editorial friend,” had introduced him to F.
A. Munsey, publisher of a series of popular magazines, among them
All-Story Magazine, Scrap-Book, and Cavalier. “There’s no money in
this business unless you publish trash,” Mann told him, and Ludwig,
desperate for a steady income, had agreed. Munsey’s editors, always in
need of more and more material to feed their insatiable readers, offered
him several writing projects from which to make his own choice of
assignments. “The various editors received me in a most heartening
manner,” he had reported to Harris his first day back in New York.
After some thought and brief discussion, he settled upon a series of “pot
boilers,” mysteries written in six installments, according to a rigid format
devised by Munsey that deprived his authors of any possibility of artistic
expression. But for Ludwig, this was not his immediate concern. He
would earn some money under a pen name and look to the publication
of Snare for his artistic outlet. For now, he was satisfied with the mere
“taste of his good fortune upon his tongue” and the thought that “the
hard invisible walls of the great world had yielded just a little. He was
no more amid the hopeless,” he remembered in Crump years after the
mood had changed. 9
Feted by Munsey at a party given in his honor, Ludwig embarked
on this new career “to bridge over the time until the novel should
make my fame and fortune.” But by January he realized how much
Page 130 - [see page image]
129
A Suspect Race
he had sacrificed in his pursuit of financial security, for everything he
had tried to develop within himself as an artist through his work on
Snare was slowly being eroded by the countless hours he spent writing
these serials. Image and structure, word harmony and syntax, the whole
of his literary art meant little in this business—all was subservient
to the bottomless hunger of publisher and reader. When he thought
of the sacrifice he was making, “tears streamed down his face,” he
wrote in Crump. “I had trained myself in the austerest methods of the
novelist’s art.... I wrote slowly, with infinite pains, weighing each word
for its values in flavor, color, tone—hovering over the melody of the
sentence, the harmony of the paragraph, desperate when the beauty of
the prose failed to orchestrate the strain of the meaning.. . . But I had
to make money."'
Having to write fifty thousand words every three weeks was “kil
ling.” He was being crushed under a mountain of meaningless pages,
pounding away on his typewriter, never going back to revise, fearing all
the while that whatever talent he possessed would be destroyed in the
process. And to his horror and disgust, Mary and her children, needing
his income, applauded his efforts and called these stories his best work.
By encouraging him to continue, they confirmed his sense of self-betrayal
and his feeling of shame at having abandoned the artistic standards that
he and Harris and his parents had long admired. ! '
After another six months of this disheartening work (having pro
duced seven serialized potboiler novels for Cavalier, Argosy, and All-
Story),- he began to speak of a time when he would be out “from under
the yoke of Romantic Fiction for—money.. . . These are not the end of
me,” he reassured himself in writing to Harris during a moment’s rest
from his latest serial, ironically titled “The Gates of Liberty.” For during
this period, Snare had been accepted for publication, allowing him to
dream of a time when “ease of mind and pocket-book” would enable
him to return to more serious work, and perhaps even to Columbia
University, which looked more inviting than ever when seen from the
depths of Munsey’s world. He now longed “for the academic life, for
the atmosphere that is mine.” In the little time that was his alone, he
had set out “on the track of the dramatic question.” Here was work that
could begin to answer the “still small voice” that had been heard through
“the noise and blare of the trumpets” surrounding him in his potboiling
world. The voice, growing stronger with time, “urges me back, for my
own soul’s ultimate good, to the quieter ambitions, to quieter work—to
less production and more thought.” He was prepared to forsake even
the success of Snare, should it come his way, “for a little honey and a
little oil and a professorship.” 13
Page 131 - [see page image]
130
Ludwig Lewisohn
Though he would steal a few moments of each overworked day to
lay out his thoughts, these moments, so loosely strung together, were
no substitute for the life he had long envisioned for himself. Isolated,
pushed and pulled by necessity, he was again experiencing that sense
of turbulence and that absence of perspective, dimension, order, and
silence in his life from which some meaning could emerge. Like his
heroine in Snare, he longed for the quiet that should have followed “the
old, impassioned chords” of “mad musicians in my brain.” Saturday
afternoon and evening, when Mary habitually left the apartment with
Helen to visit her older daughter, “constituted his real Sabbath and day
of rest,” he wrote in Crump. “From this Sabbath mood of quiet, ideas
and motifs and melodies would arise. ” 1 ' “Thank God there is no sound,”
he wrote in a moment of “healing silence,” when “the cool rustling of the
trees” helped him to ponder the feverishness of his life and to remember
“that death comes at the end.” Perhaps this silence was all the comfort
he could ever expect. 1 '
Yet Ludwig was rarely constant in his moods and thoughts. If a
peaceful life seemed all too elusive, he could still live in ameliorative
anticipation of Snare's publication that fall. “Best of all,” he had joyfully
told Leonard on January 3, “the novel on which I spent so much time
and thought has found an energetic publisher both here and in England
who expects it to do great things." The intervening months dragged on
interminably, but by August 1908, with publication imminent, he again
felt hopeful, believing that the book would relieve him “of the necessity
for hackwork of any description,” allowing him to write a second, more
serious novel that “I have pretty well mapped out in my mind, and that
ought to be larger in bulk and scope at once.” 17
And why not? Snare's acceptance for publication had been achieved
with relative ease. Ludwig had been in New York only a few weeks
when Charles Towne passed the novel along to his good friend Theodore
Dreiser, who had just reissued his own Sister Carrie after Doubleday,
Page’s earlier suppression of it in 1900. 18 Dreiser may have seen in
Snare's Frances much of what he himself had tried to portray through
Carrie. Upon finishing the reading of Ludwig’s manuscript, Dreiser
had immediately invited him to his office. “It was in the office of
B. W. Dodge & Company [in which Dreiser had purchased a large
share on June 6, 1907] that, like a symbol of the life and literature
to come, Dreiser first appeared on my horizon.” Here was the “great
rude man who was to renew American literature,” whose very rudeness
and stylistic barbarisms “were like rain on parched earth." ’’ Ludwig,
long an admirer of Dreiser’s work, found him sympathetic, someone of
stature who admired his work, who supported him and offered the help
Page 132 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
that he had hoped to find when in Charleston he had first decided to
return to New York. They quickly became friends, the young writer and
the accomplished author eleven years his senior. Together they would
walk through Madison Square and its environs, talking of life and art
without end. 20
Dreiser’s friendship would ultimately fail to relieve the mounting
pressures of life in the months and years ahead, but Ludwig could sense
nothing of this as he emerged from Dodge’s office, contract in hand,
hopes raised high with expectation beyond reality. He and Mary walked
along the Heights that evening, bathed in the cool moonlight of a New
York autumn, dreaming of sales in the tens of thousands. In the morning
he telephoned his parents, who added to his joy by assuring him that
this was but the first of many successes. 21
Nearly a year had now passed between his return to New York and
the appearance of Snare in September 1908. The interim had been filled
with meaningless scribblings and anxiety, but as September neared, his
frustration and waning self-confidence began to disappear in a wave of
pleasant expectation. The reviews of Snare—plentiful, immediate, and
mostly positive—further revived his flagging spirits as portents of a far
better future. So numerous were they that before he could read the first,
a dozen others had appeared. Controversial material had to be examined
without delay.
Most critics found it to be a work of significant merit and impor
tance. Despite its flaws, it was, as the New York Times stated on October
24, “a novel of rather unusual quality in its serious intent, its clearness
of vision, and its workmanship.” What troubled many, though, was the
author’s failure to wield his pen more delicately, something which in his
future writings, as in his life, he would never manage to accomplish.
“The author,” noted the reviewer, “might have developed his story, it is
true, with more reticence and equal power, and so have run less risk of
offense." 1 '
William Morton Payne’s review in the Dial was the most glowing
of all. As a leading critic, Payne’s nearly unqualified praise strengthened
Ludwig’s resolve to challenge those few detractors whose opinions he
would have to face. Wrote Payne of Snare’s artistry and moral position,
It is not often that we come upon a novel written with the conscious artistic
sense of Mr. Lewisohn’s “The Broken Snare,” in which the imperative
demands of technique—both verbal and architectonic—are never ignored,
and which yet has no lack of rich human substance. . . . Despite its boldness
of speech and conception, [it] is ethically wholesome. It does not seek by
means of false sentiment to incline us to the acceptance of evil, and its moral
emphasis is not misplaced. It is not a book for the young person to read,
131
Page 133 - [see page image]
132
Ludwig Lewisohn
but it is one from which the mature mind can get nothing but good, and
one which offers a singular satisfaction to the artistic perceptions. 23
Two days later, on November 3, Ludwig received a letter from his
father telling him of a “particularly unpleasant review” in Charleston’s
News and Courier maligning the book as a “profoundly disgusting
story.” The paper’s editor had been appalled to see the most intimate
relationships between a man and a woman portrayed in a manner
“reeking with the sweat of the vulgarest of human passions.” Believing
it a “devilish” work whose only positive feature was the literary artistry
it displayed, he lamented its ever having been written, particularly by a
Charlestonian who once had enjoyed a favorable reputation among the
polite society he now so eagerly scandalized. “The author would not talk
about such things to the people he respected in the ordinary associations
of life—why should he write about them and with such vividness as to
arouse the resentment of ordinarily respectable people?” Even if pure
water could be distilled from a cesspool, he asked, what decent man
would want to drink it? “True nature is not to be taught by libidinous
morbidity.''-'
Ludwig was outraged by what he felt to be an unjustified pillo
rying. Though his life in Charleston had known social ostracism and
restricted employment, he had continued to enjoy the respect of those
few Charlestonians possessed of some literary judgment. With a growing
list of publications, his reputation among them had steadily increased.
Just months before the appearance of Snare, Harrison Randolph had
proudly noted in his June commencement address that Ludwig’s “literary
ability is widely recognized throughout the country.” (His work, fiction
as well as poetry, was now appearing in both commercial and more
scholarly literary journals. ! '
Such growing pride in their adopted son had for some time made
Ludwig a figure sought after for companionship and advice during his
last residence in Charleston. Old acquaintances had made a point of
seeing him regularly, while those who had previously ignored him had
begun to approach him as the years passed. “I like him better as I know
him better,” his former history professor, Nathaniel Wright Stephenson,
had remarked in a letter to Harris during the summer of 1906. “I seem
to find more and more that I can sympathize with him personally.. . .
I seem to see, by degrees, a sweeter and loftier strain than at first I was
aware of”—particularly after his own literary efforts had been improved
upon by following Ludwig’s suggestions. 26 Even John Bennett, perhaps
Charleston’s most prominent writer at that time, had acknowledged
Ludwig’s growing stature by sending him a copy in 1906 of his latest
Page 134 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
work, The Treasure ofPeyre Cetllard, prompting Ludwig to speak of the
extraordinary joy it had brought him after so many days of magazine
writing. Bennett was not unsympathetic to Ludwig’s plight, and in a
letter to his own wife after a chance encounter between the two writers
at the Charleston Library Society on September 3, 1907, he had drawn
a sharp portrait of his young literary acquaintance during that difficult
period just prior to his departure for New York: “He said that the literary
world crumpled up and was all in desuetude . . . and that he can’t bear
anything from, or do anything in, New York. His book is roosting up
some gigantic bombax tree, somewhere, and just roosting. He says the
only happy lead is Munsey’s, which wants romantic short tales, and that,
having written one once, he is exhausted, and cannot do that stunt at
all. . . disgustubas erat. So we mutually smiled and passed on.” 27
All of this had now been swept away by the News and Courier's
review. Yet if his fellow Charlestonians were outraged by his impropriety,
Ludwig felt equally angered by their reaction, and deeply embarrassed
for the city he still thought of as home. He sent the newspaper a lengthy
rebuttal, but believing such efforts to be futile, mailed a second copy to
Harris, hoping to enlist his aid in this matter.
Ludwig had reason to expect Harris’s assistance. He had often
asked Harris to visit him, and Harris, in New York that September,
had accepted his invitation. It was a good time to do so, for Ludwig,
in anticipation of better days ahead, had already ended his self-imposed
exile on Washington Heights and had, the previous month, moved back
to the Morningside Heights area (43 West 121st Street) to be closer to
his rapidly expanding circle of literary friends. Ludwig and Harris spent
the evening of September 2 together, dining at the Little Playwrights’
Club before attending the theater with tickets purchased by Ludwig. The
following day he took Harris to meet the staff of the Nation, many of
whom had become Ludwig’s friends; and after dinner the next evening,
they joined Mary and her daughter Edith at the Lyceum Theater for a
revival of The Easiest Way.
Feeling good about Harris’s visit and the strong affection they had
expressed for each other, Ludwig decided to reveal, as a fitting way to end
their brief time together, a statement of literary principle he was prepar
ing for publication. But Harris thought the statement “intolerant.” Mary
concurred with her guest, and Ludwig, wishing to be the perfect host,
chose not to protest, leaving Harris to remark to his wife that “we all
three felt that we understood each other, or almost understood, and
there was a real deep cordiality in our parting.” Ludwig, however, did
not hesitate to supply Harris with a list of new authors to read, hoping
to reeducate his former professor before Snare made its appearance. 28
133
Page 135 - [see page image]
134
Ludwig Lewisohn
Now that the book was in need of support back home, Ludwig was
confident that Harris would help. In writing to Harris, he pointed to the
more than forty favorable reviews it had already received from major
critics throughout the country. Though he was usually less concerned
about such provincial reactions to his work, it was impossible to ignore
so severe an attack from “my own home city, for which I’ve always done
my best.” Somewhat rhetorically, he asked Harris how he was to explain
Charleston and its unfortunate attitude to his New York friends. “Am I
to say: Charleston] is a narrow-minded, ignorant, smallish hole? Well,
the predicament is clear.” The protest and support of his Charleston
friends—“provided I have any”—would be needed to counter the review
and to restore Charleston’s good name in New York’s literary circles. He
was sure that Harris, having recognized the “loftiness of purpose and
instinctive workmanship” of his novel, would come to his aid. 29
Bennett, a more astute observer of his city, thought that any protest
by Ludwig, however well founded, would be rather futile. Months
earlier, he himself had “raised a hornets’ nest about his head . . . when
he gave to a large audience of women the substance of his collections of
negro legends and stories and nig-lore. Much of it was very unsavory,”
Harris reported to Ludwig, but Bennett appeared “to have been so rapt
in his artist’s and folklorist’s preoccupied enthusiasm as to forget the
effect of the crude impact on the uninitiated.” 30
Ludwig had been guilty of a far greater impropriety, for his unsavory
tale had not been a mere retelling of stories originating among blacks.
Harris understood the same hornets’ reaction to Ludwig and thought
Bennett’s sympathies for the young writer to be misplaced. He himself
had found Ludwig’s transgressions inexcusable, and looked upon them
as a product of his origins. In a private conversation that he related to his
wife that October, he told her that in talking with another Charlestonian,
“some things came up ... of Jews and of Lewisohn’s novel,” and of
how the two, “together,” had “suggested certain hypotheses . . . [and]
speculations on his quality of mind”—none of which he repeated, though
their nature is not all that difficult to imagine. Nevertheless, Harris bore
a strong sense of loyalty to Ludwig as a part of his gentleman’s code, and
came to his former student’s public defense as best he could. Without
compromising himself, he pointed to the work’s literary merit in an at
tempt to allay his neighbors’ fears, while adding that, in his opinion, the
novel did not really represent a threat to the moral order of their society. 31
Without knowing Harris’s true feelings, Ludwig thanked him for
this apparent kindness, telling him, on November 19, “how profoundly
I appreciate your prompt and cordial and heart-warmingly loyal defense
of my book and my intentions.” Curious to know the feelings of others
Page 136 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
in Charleston whose opinions he respected—della Torre and Randolph
among them—he asked Harris to report back to him in confidence. 32
Harris’s response remains unknown, if sent—perhaps ignored in the
hope of quickly putting it all to rest.
Relations with Mary, in the meantime, had grown more tolerable as
the date of Snare’s publication approached. The glow of that event seems
to have momentarily brightened everything else. Struggling as they had
over the past few years, there was now reason to look forward to better
times. They had struck a new truce—he to meet her monetary needs,
and she to allow him to work in peace. The balance held for a time. In
such a mood, Leonard’s impending marriage prompted Ludwig to wish
his closest friend the happiness that he had recently found with Mary—
“That you and the lady of your choice may be as happy and as united
as my wife and I are; and our relations, as you well know, began in little
that has a conventional sanction.” Whatever their past had been, their
affection had grown as life had become more fulfilling. 33 In New York
they had discovered a world populated not by “sullen people . . . [with]
shallow pride . . . [and] emasculated brain,” but a “land glimmering,
languorous, and sweet,” filled with the “music of the spheres” and
the “lightening love of God,” which only the “children of the Sun”
could perceive. He and Mary, through the recent deepening of their
relationship, had been privileged to experience this higher vision. As he
wrote in “Dionysia” that fall,
We, through the sounding loom of days,
Beyond the sunlight and the storm,
Discern as in dawn’s silver haze
The feet of a Diviner form;
That spirit of high imaginings,
That heavenly Muse whom Milton saw
Across the argent Ariel wings
Stands by the flaming Throne of Awe. 34
Mary had become much more than a source of sexual delight and
motherly security by the end of their first year in New York. In Minna’s
absence, she had become a part of Ludwig’s creative effort, inspiring him
to do his best work. She seemed to know his secret thoughts, his greatest
hopes, his every wish. As he confessed to Leonard that November, “She
judges my work with finer insight than I do.” 35 They shared more now
than they would at any time in the future. Her death, he said, would
rob his spirit and leave the “wonderful sweet words” of his love for her
“silent upon the air.” 36
But then the storm clouds began their inevitable descent. Sales
continued to be slow in the early months after Snare’s publication, and
135
Page 137 - [see page image]
136
Ludwig Lewisohn
the possibility of having to return to the magazines began to seep into his
thoughts. For the moment, though, he remained hopeful and continued
to work on a second novel, feeling certain that, in time, Snare would sell
to a much larger audience. 37 He continued to find satisfaction both in the
critics’ favorable response to the novel and in the opportunity to make
a statement through it about his life and the world as he saw it. All he
wanted now was the chance to write more. The few negative reactions
Snare had received had only supported his belief that what he had to say
was important.
By early winter of 1909, Snare’s continuing failure to sell left Ludwig
with a profound sense of public rejection. And then, without warning,
his second novel—“a bare, plain, austere transcript from life. . . the
very core of reality . . . without one touch of the sensuous beauty of the
first”—printed and ready for distribution, was confiscated by govern
ment censors and destroyed under the direction of Anthony Comstock.
Comstock had written New York State’s forty-year-old morality statutes
and, through his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had man
aged to use the government to ban and obliterate over 160 tons of printed
material. Ludwig’s book was but a small bit of fuel for Comstock’s fire—
but to Ludwig, it symbolized the great struggle that lay before him. All
trace of the book was eradicated, except for the brief mention of it in Up
Stream, leaving us to speculate about the contents of a book he proudly
recalled as having “massive moral implications.” (Its spirit, if not its
contents, may have survived in parts of both Up Stream and Crump.)
From the high point of a few months earlier, life had suddenly come
full circle, back to the depressing circumstances of the previous year.
The fall was shattering. With the academic world closed to him, he
had hoped to make a life for himself as a serious writer. But this, too,
appeared not to be his destiny. “I was beaten, broken, breadless. I was a
scholar and forbidden to teach, an artist and forbidden to write. Liberty,
opportunity. The words had nothing friendly to my ear.” 38
Forced to return to the magazines, but without a new schedule of
commitments, Ludwig required several months before he had enough
work to barely pay his bills. An occasional review of German literature
for the Nation or a story in Forum was all he could find at first. The help
of good friends, the remainder of his father’s savings, and the reading of
a manuscript or two for Dodge pulled him through the roughest days
that followed. After a few months, he was again writing pulp fiction for
Town Topics and Smart Set; but with no other prospect, the thought
that this might be his only future became frightening.
In desperation, he approached Trent with the idea of completing
his degree at Columbia. The possibility of finding a university position,
Page 138 - [see page image]
137
A Suspect Race
despite the frustrated efforts of the past, seemed increasingly attractive
the longer he worked on the serials. He knew the problems he would
face. Little had changed in the academic world. It was as unwelcoming to
Jews as ever. Of this he was certain. Still, as he had earlier told Leonard,
“I care for the life and wish I were of it.” 39 Trent listened sympathetically
to his former student’s thoughts—“that it was now the sober faith of my
maturity that scholarship was the only profession in which I would have
the chance to do whatever lay in me”—and agreed to support his return,
settling upon Shelley’s poetry for the dissertation. Leonard was excited
by his friend’s decision, and agreed that his work could be completed
within a short period. And so Ludwig began, once more, to dream of
making the scholar’s life his own. 40
Progress on his dissertation was, not unexpectedly, slowed by the
serials that he was still forced by financial need to write, though he had
put aside an already carefully mapped out third novel in order to finish
his doctoral work as soon as possible. Predictably, the combination of
both the serials and the dissertation began by the early spring of 1909
to exact their physical and emotional toll. “You see, it’s a cul-de-sac,
spiritually,” he wrote Harris on March 28. 41
In April a teaching position became available at the University of
Virginia that appeared uniquely suited to his abilities—a joint appoint
ment in English and German literature. His long-awaited goal once again
seemed within reach, and with it freedom from having to write “infinite
quantities of wretched romantic slush for inferior publications in order
to maintain my family respectability.” He had the support of the people
at Columbia and hoped that Harris’s friendship with C. Alphonso Smith,
the department’s chairman at Virginia, would be of help. But when two
weeks passed without word from Smith, Ludwig sent a second appeal
to Harris, trying not to believe that he had been condemned to a life
of artistic and scholarly atrophy simply because of his Jewish birth.
Even the people at Columbia were surprised that Smith had not as yet
contacted him. He pleaded with Harris to intercede:
We all considered the affair as settled, and I was set up over the blessedness
of the thought of leaving a thrice-damned Grub street.. . . But day followed
day and no answer came: none has come yet. Thorndike and Trent are at
sea, just as I am. I know you’ll serve me if you can. It means a great deal
to me. I’m tired; I’m afraid my faculties—creative faculties of the higher
type will go if I can’t cut loose from the drudgery of the past year. . . . Do
you suppose that Smith would hesitate because I’m a Jew or that Virginia
would? That would be in my case particularly hideous and damnable.. . .
Write to him at once and touch delicately on the question of race ... if you
think wise. 4 -
Page 139 - [see page image]
138
Ludwig Lewisohn
Smith finally contacted Ludwig a week later and reassured him
that he was familiar with his ability as an English literary scholar, but
having only just completed his visiting lectureship at the University
of Cincinnati, he still had not seen the letters of reference which he
was certain would attest to Ludwig’s comparable ability in German
literature. Ludwig felt slightly encouraged and on April 29 urged Harris
to send Smith a second letter on his behalf. 43
In response to Harris’s second note, Smith sent Ludwig a second,
“gracious and gentlemanly” letter. But the “scurvy rogue,” as Ludwig
called him after reading it, had “with great courtesy and friendliness . . .
bestrode the fence.” Smith had, in the interim, questioned the judgment
of Columbia’s faculty in recommending Ludwig to them, a move that
enraged Trent. “If the man thinks we are all liars and won’t take you,
why doesn’t he say so straight forwardly, and if he means to take you,
why let you dangle another week, why suddenly so reticent, so laconic, so
grand eh? Either he takes you now or he’s something of an a—! ” Ludwig
would only hint at Trent’s epithet as he appealed to the more genteel
Harris for an explanation of Smith’s motives. If there were “powers and
principalities I must fight in the dark,” he told Harris on May 4, then
he insisted upon knowing who and what they were. 44
By now Ludwig had already begun to slide back into the depression
that had brought him to Columbia the previous fall. He had written
Harris on April 29 that if he again failed to secure a university position,
there would be little reason to go on. Nor could he, now that his pen had
inexplicably ceased to bring forth the serials which, though “dreadful
beyond all speech,” had at least paid the bills. Even Snare held out little
hope as Dodge neared the edge of bankruptcy. How, he asked Harris, was
he to survive? “In sober earnest: If I don’t get an academic appointment,
I might as well get out of life! ... I can’t do it any longer." ‘ 5 Frustration
and disappointment brought back the intermittent headaches that had
begun the previous August 46 as he anxiously awaited Snare's critical
reception and financial success; but now thoughts of suicide all too
frequently seemed the only cure.
“Always some new element of horror seems to add itself to my fate,”
he protested May 4 after learning with alarm that Harris had told Smith
about Snare. The Columbia people, not knowing how Smith might react
to it, had prudently omitted any reference to the novel in their letters of
support. (Not that they had been without criticism of the book. It had
shocked Carpenter while others had thought the choice of subjects rather
unfortunate.) 47 But Harris, feeling compelled by Smith’s questioning of
Ludwig’s suitability for a conservative community, thought it dishonest
not to bring it up. Deeply hurt by this ill-conceived decision, Ludwig
Page 140 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
was even more outraged to learn that Harris agreed in principle with
those who would bar him from academia because of his literary honesty.
Harris obviously knew what such a novel would mean to the keepers
of English letters, particularly when written by a member of a suspect
“race.” As loyal to him as Harris had been, there was no other course
for him to take—Ludwig had violated a sacred canon of the society
whose expression of values he presumed worthy of teaching. Ludwig
was simply beside himself with anger and told Harris that he, not Smith,
would be responsible for whatever might happen. “You alone were in a
position to know that it might hurt me, and you obtrude it. This action
I don’t understand. If I don’t get this position, or if I am turned down
in a way that reflects on me I might as well cut my throat. That again
is no phrase, but a cold fact.” 48 He was, in fact, absolutely serious, and
Mary knew it. Gravely concerned about her husband’s repeated talk of
suicide, she followed Ludwig’s last appeal to Harris with one of her own:
“Unless Ludwig secures this lectureship ... I foresee the gravest results;
I may say even fatal results.... It seems to me that the awful strain of
the past month has affected Ludwig’s mind. He is in a state of profound
melancholy and has made up his mind that he must ‘get out of life.’
At first, I thought this a passing mood, but now, I am convinced that
there is the gravest danger. Finally and saddest of all—he believes that
the real cause of his misfortunes is the fact that he is a Jew. I need not
say more.” 49
As expected, the notice of rejection arrived less than a week later,
but without any explanation accompanying it. Ludwig believed its im
plication clear—as a Jew, he would always be excluded by a society
unwilling to look beyond this immutable fact. His condition enraged
and sickened him, but Trent counseled patience and encouraged him
to continue his efforts, advising him of Columbia’s willingness now to
support him regardless of how many colleges he applied to, or how long
it might take to secure a position. 50
Realistically, however, there was no chance of success. The thought
itself was strangely and unexpectedly comforting after the tension of the
preceding months. Slowly, his anxiety subsided. The daily business of life
had to proceed. He found a new apartment in the still semi-countrified
atmosphere of upper Manhattan (564 West 171st Street), and by July he
had regained enough equilibrium to resume his writing, even though he
continued to complain that “if I had half a chance in this world, I could
do something.” Assignments from the Atlantic provided a subsistence
income that summer of 1909 and allowed him to work on several new
projects he believed would make the “literary agents sit up!” The first of
these was a one-act play, in rhymed verse, in which he hoped to “open
139
Page 141 - [see page image]
140
Ludwig Lewisohn
vistas into the realm of a re-vivified, human, vital lyrical Drama!”' He
had “touched depths in the Inferno” from which he now could draw
inspiration and imagery; having pulled himself hack from the abyss, he
was more determined than ever to use his experiences to challenge the
society that had driven him to its edge. 52
But as the late-summer weeks dragged on and his play neared
completion, paid writing assignments again grew scarce. “Lewisohn,
poor fellow, is sweating for a living,” Harris noted on August 8, 1909,
in a letter to his aunt, Nannie Scott. 53 Earning but seventeen dollars that
month, Ludwig complained late in September to Richard Watson Gilder
of the Century Company that he was “breadless and unemployed.”
He thought again of an academic appointment, but knew he would be
“prevented from practicing the profession for which I was trained.”"
Several openings were applied for, including Princeton and Michigan,
but offers never came. In some instances, neither did responses to his
inquiries. Even Trent and his Columbia colleagues were beginning to lose
hope. Ludwig, knowing the cause of so many rejections, again raised
the specter of anti-Semitism in explanation of his continuing failure.
“You will understand,” he wrote Leonard on September 27, “that I’m
raw. Every time now that anyone doesn’t answer my letters, every time I
think I’m slighted in the least, I hear, as in a lurid dream, the immemorial
[anti-Semitic cry] Hep! Hep!” 55
Leonard, of course, remained sympathetic to his friend’s needs and
kept alert to news of even the slightest possibilities. When in October an
opening was first discussed in the German Department at the University
of Wisconsin, where Leonard taught English literature, he spoke to them
of Ludwig, and immediately advised him to apply. Student enrollment,
however, failed to reach the anticipated level, and the position was
canceled. But the very fact that he had by then become the department’s
choice for the vacancy was heartening in itself. '
So, too, was the critical reception he had received for his essay
on “The Modern Novel” appearing in Sewanee Review, and for his
one-act play A Night in Alexandria, published by the highly respected
literary house of Moody. In his essay, he had maintained that the modern
writer’s task was to portray the true “spirit of man”; through “so
fragmentary a representation” as his tale, the novelist must find an
effective means with which to “convey an essential truth,” and thereby
become, like Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson before him,
a force for cultural change. To accomplish this crucial work, greater
artistic and personal freedom was needed, without which literature
would have neither “strength, richness, [nor] variety.” “Cramp it, limit
the play of its possibilities, curb it with irrelevant restrictions and the
Page 142 - [see page image]
141
A Suspect Race
result is the timid, parochial, unintelligent average novel of British or
American manufacture. For the novel, if it is to be more than the
transitory plaything of an hour, is potent through its very flexibility,
through its faculty of rendering life so intimately and at so many points.”
As the victim of “a press which, puritanical in its criticism, reeks with
foul news upon another page,” he felt certain of the need to destroy
society’s wish to escape reality by denying its artists access to their shared
and deepest fears and desires. 57
A Night in Alexandria was to be his own weapon in this struggle.
Through it, he would expose the unnatural contemporary ethos that
had nearly destroyed him, tracing its puritanical oppressiveness back
to its Christian roots. Characters and scenes, meticulously set into the
Alexandrian world of 360 a.d., would reveal the way in which this
unnatural faith served to deny the individual his right to a spiritually
satisfying life of fulfilled love and creative expression. Reminiscent of
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as a denial of life, Ludwig portrayed
Charito (Caritas, love) as self-sacrificing, otherworldly, and stern, deny
ing herself the reality and the fruits of the flesh.
My sorrow is without a name—
Christ keep us safe against the day!
We suffer, as the Master taught
And then are eased of all our ills.
And this poor flesh, perverse and vile,
Is into shining glory wrought.
Her lover, Lucillian (Lux, light, Ludwig), could not bear to see her
reject the love she felt for him, or allow her to deprive herself of its
physical expression. “All our paths lead to death,” he told her. What then
was life’s reward, if not earthly love in all its manifestations? Certainly
not some baseless hope of a heavenly reward. “Very hard of heart / my
God seems to my foolish mind,” he protested. “Wilt thou find / The
long years lonely without love? /. . . This is our day, so brief, so sweet,
/ Spurn it not.” 58
The slow demise of Arthur Symons, now suffering “hopeless melan
cholia,” had dramatically demonstrated what spurning life could mean
for an artist. “I felt so close to him and it hit me hard,” he wrote in a
review of Symons’ The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, published
a month after the play. “To be one’s self,” Symons had written, “whether
in art or in life ... is the highest good.” Out of his own experiences,
Ludwig had come to realize that “the individual artist’s measure of valor
and energy is that battle for self-realization which is life."' 1 '
Page 143 - [see page image]
142
Ludwig Lewisohn
Yet at times it seemed as if he had already lost the battle. “I am so
worn out,” he had written Harris on October 14, “that if it weren’t for
my mother and my wife I’d take an anesthetic rather than go through
the winter that is before me. I have to drag myself to the contemplation
of the next ten months as a criminal, poor thing, has to drag his feet to
the gallows. It’s the last bit, the final shred of human pride and the dear
illusion of manhood that keeps him—and me—from struggling and cry
ing out.” 60 Ludwig thought again of suicide, and then of the obligations
to others, as well as to himself, that he could not leave unmet. He pulled
himself together again, using the money he earned from writing, reading
manuscripts, and tutoring, and the occasional check from his father,
to forestall the “day of inevitable collapse,” all the while continuing
to search for some means by which he could eventually overcome this
emotional and spiritual distress. Years later, he spoke of how, with “all
the forces of life . . . against me,” he had decided to “struggle on”:
And so there comes to me now from that period the memory of many
months, strangely quiet, for all the care and need, and full of an almost eerie
sunshine. I see myself wandering across queer neighborhoods—a sticky,
swarming yet faintly genteel street called Bradhurst Avenue—on my way to
Third. Somewhere about me I carried, carefully wrapped, the silver spoons
I was going to pawn. The gas-bill had to be paid or the milk-bill. Then
my father, in his ever watchful goodness, would send a money-order or
a small cheque would come in and I would take a long tramp just for
fun. Up Riverside Drive to Dyckman Street or into queer neighborhoods in
the Bronx where I discovered, among many other things, an empty, sandy,
forlorn little street called Shakespeare Avenue. These wanderings rested my
worn nerves.*’
In place of suicide’s illusory peace, he continued to seek a more
meaningful escape through his work. Poetry, short stories, dramatic
sketches, and critical reviews all added positively to the notoriety that
had come to him with Snare, until suddenly, with great surprise, he found
himself being approached by publishers who sought his critical opinion
of material they were considering for publication. Chief among these
was Benjamin W. Huebsch, who saw in Ludwig’s work much of what
he himself had been trying to accomplish as a publisher, to bring out
what “was good rather than [what] I thought. . . would pay.... I was
a good deal more idealistic than I seemed to myself then.” 62
Huebsch, the son of a prominent German-born New York Reform
rabbi, had left school at the age of ten to apprentice with his uncle as
a printer. In 1902 he brought out the first book to bear the Huebsch
imprint, though without the seven-branched candelabra that was soon
to mark the title page of each of his books with the ethnic origin of
Page 144 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
their publisher. Experiencing the rejection that Jews were then facing
in the publishing world, and finding his way barred in his search for
“respectable” and profitable authors, he hit upon the idea of introducing
the avant-garde literary and political works of dissenting Americans and
Europeans (in translation). At a time of growing social unrest, his own
reputation and notoriety were instantly assured. 63 In a short memoir
published many years later, he wrote of the more deeply personal reasons
for publishing the radical works of writers like the socialist Eduard
Bernstein: “It may be a deviation from the strict truth to intimate that
my publications, viewed in their entirety, represented no tendency of
my own, for I was always more likely to succumb to the persuasion
of authors who wanted to make the world over than to those who
celebrated the world as it is. Unable myself to create ‘the Federation
of the World’ or to emancipate the victims of a clumsy social system, I
sank into a vicarious saviorship.” 64
As a fellow Jew and admirer of German culture, Huebsch had little
trouble empathizing with Ludwig’s plight or appreciating his talents.
Ludwig, “a pedant, in a good sense,” as Huebsch characterized him,
sensed their kinship and dug out his Heine biography for Huebsch to
consider. Postponing the decision until completing his examination of
the manuscript and its marketing potential, he offered Ludwig a German
work to translate while he decided its fate. “I thank you very heartily for
your very kind thought of me—as kind as it was unexpected,” Ludwig
responded on October 18, 1909, agreeing to undertake the project
of rendering Ernest von Feuchtersleben’s Health and Suggestion: The
Dietetics of the Mind. 65
Ludwig’s candidacy for the Ph.D., begun in 1902, had lapsed by
this time, but hoping again to find academic employment, he sought
its reinstatement. He explained to the English Department on October
23 how the necessity of earning a living had occupied most of the past
year, when he had not been too physically ill or too emotionally drained
to work. Disregarding his earlier agreement with Trent to do a study of
Shelley’s poetry, and thinking his history of South Carolina literature too
crude and of little value, he proposed three new possibilities—“The Tribe
of Ben,” “The Critical Ideas of Coleridge,” and “The Art of Fiction.”
He felt particularly qualified to handle the latter, and offered his essay
“The Modern Novel” as its first chapter. After a month of discussion, he
was offered a final opportunity to matriculate and given until April 1,
1910, to complete the original study of Shelley. Fully intending to earn
his degree, he quickly resumed his research. 66
But as always, the necessities of life quickly overshadowed the plans
he had so carefully made. Ludwig, turning Huebsch’s translation into
143
Page 145 - [see page image]
144
Ludwig Lewisohn
a serious intellectual exercise, imprudently allowed it to occupy more
of his time than was necessary. What should have been a simple and
quickly completed task became overly complicated by his desire to edit
and rewrite what he judged to be an inadequately prepared text filled
with important ideas from an original thinker whose work could be
more widely read if made more accessible. Depleted of time and energy
by the project, he had again jeopardized his chance of earning the degree.
Worse still, it had prevented him from accepting other assignments, thus
aggravating his ever precarious financial situation. Short of money by
early December, he approached Huebsch for a small short-term loan.
Huebsch granted his request, believing that a good publisher lived not
only with his books, but with “his author and the author’s family and
the family’s troubles.” Perhaps thinking of Ludwig, he later wrote that
“the publisher often serves his author as adviser, as banker, as confessor.
I may not develop this theme too far; suffice it to mention the case of
one in the trade who was not infrequently telephoned for by an au
thor of suicidal tendencies whenever the symptoms became manifest.”''
Ludwig thanked him for his help on December 9, unsuspecting that this
dependency, repeated so many times in the years ahead, would ultimately
destroy their friendship."'
“Pm living a rather breathless existence,” he told Leonard on De
cember 12, as he watched his energies being sapped by the translation
and the dissertation, without the compensation of any truly creative
work. “Somewhere in the depths of me, there’s a lyrical drama. But life
must present itself on very different terms before I can hope to get it
out.” 69 While he awaited that time, he stole what few moments he could
from his vigorous schedule to write an “appreciation” for Leonard’s The
Poet of Galilee, just then going to press for Huebsch. Ludwig saw it as
an opportunity to strike back at society by again calling into question
the use of the Christ image of Jesus to support its unnatural ethos: “The
ecclesiastical Christ, the proclaimed of priest and pontiff, the figure upon
gorgeous canvas or carven altar—he it is who obscures his humbler if
divine brother of the Galilean hills. Nor is this all. For, living in the stream
of a civilization historically Christian, our very hearts have to suffer an
estrangement from their instinctive selves . . . [which] will reveal itself,
upon analysis, to have depended not upon the divine Son of Man, but
upon the mythical Son of God.” 70
On December 30, Ludwig stopped to reflect upon the awful year just
ending, and realized unexpectedly that its conclusion was, in fact, better
than its beginning. Money problems continued, but the long-overdue
dissertation was slowly being written. Two books were scheduled to ap
pear, the translation of Feuchtersleben’s treatise and a study of German
Page 146 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
prose for Henry Holt, a workmanlike text of selections and explication
for classroom use, recently contracted for and due at the publisher’s by
the spring of 1910. In addition to these, he had reason to be hopeful
that Huebsch would soon agree to publish his Heine biography, and
suggested to him that the Holt study would boost its sales. Calvin
Thomas, professor of German at Columbia, and Ludwig’s friend and
adviser, had even suggested that he suspend work on the dissertation
and concentrate on these other studies, believing that they might prove
more helpful to him in pursuing a teaching post. But Ludwig disregarded
the advice, wanting both the degree and the literary recognition he felt
he deserved.
On February 21, 1910, in the midst of all of this writing, Ludwig
received word from Leonard that an opening in the German Department
at Wisconsin again seemed likely. Leonard had taken the initiative and
had already interceded on his behalf. The outcome appeared more
promising than before, and so he encouraged Ludwig to contact the
university immediately. A long series of letters were exchanged between
A. R. Hohlfeld, chairman of the department at Wisconsin, and Ludwig
regarding his training, publications, long-term professional goals, and
pedagogical experience. He assured Hohlfeld that he was well equipped
to teach elementary German, and that despite his focus on English in
Charleston and at Columbia, he was intensely interested in German
literature, as indicated by his forthcoming book on the subject. 72
To remove other potential impediments to his employability in this
genteel setting, Ludwig may have remarried Mary on March 10, as she
later recorded, thereby eliminating any appearance of social or legal
improprieties that still remained as a result of the delayed final decree to
her divorce from Childs, about which Ludwig presumably had been
unaware at the time of their Charleston wedding. That this second
ceremony was reportedly held in Newark, New Jersey, away from all
who knew them, is perhaps telling. 73
When the specter of ethnic exclusion raised its head again, Thomas
quickly laid it to rest. He appreciated the full measure of Ludwig’s
predicament, and apparently without Ludwig’s knowledge, had chosen
to mislead Hohlfeld, reassuring him that Ludwig belonged among them:
“He is a Jew by his father’s beard only, a Christian by his mother’s.
His sympathies and tempers are Christian.” In his youth Ludwig had
been “a little big-headed—not altogether a pleasant person in social
relations,” but the world had “battered and chastened” him; humbled,
he had become “a man of agreeable manners whose speech possessed
that gentleman-like quality of the high-bred Southerner." 1 Hohlfeld
was satisfied and notified Ludwig of his appointment to the faculty.
145
Page 147 - [see page image]
146
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig was overjoyed and on April 8 thanked Hohlfeld for his faith
in him. He pledged his best effort for the work ahead, and as a sign
of appreciation, promised to send a copy of his prose study, German
Style, as soon as it appeared, the book having already gone to press. He
may also have wanted to share his thoughts with his future colleagues,
particularly his assertion that most German literary critics had been
“primarily concerned with the historical expression of ethnic ideals, and
but little with that intellectual beauty which is the be-all and the end-all
of the art of letters.
Ludwig could now hope to find peace away from the maddening
pace of New York. He had loved its excitement, its stimulation. It was
a writer’s city. But his inner self had grown up in a very different place,
with rhythms of a simpler, more slowly paced life from a world not
yet touched by the forces that drove the city to which he had come
seeking escape. Each time he would return to live in a city throughout
the years until his death, he would think of the natural world beyond
it and of those earlier days he had spent living closer to nature. “I need
air, light, purple sunsets, a glitter of constellations, a plain, a lake, an
ocean—real things,” he had written in his introduction to German Style.
He shared with Nietzsche “that morbid delicacy and curiosity of the
senses” which only the “phenomenal world” could satisfy, and believed,
as did “so much modern literature,” that the urban life of industrially
based civilization had been secured at the cost of a more natural physical
and cultural environment. What its supporters claimed as benefits were
themselves the products of this unnatural distance and something to be
looked upon with wariness and a healthy dose of skepticism. 76 He had
long felt this sense of unease and deprivation, particularly at times of
stress. In the midst of his struggle to secure the position at Wisconsin,
he had written to Harris of this acute need to be closer to nature and
of the rather strange way in which he planned to satisfy it while locked
in this urban world: “Our chief private solace just now is a recently
acquired bowl of gold fishes and snails. The snails have the quaintest
habits, and faces like elderly gentlemen in a rage. Next time I go down
town I shall buy a green frog and a little tortoise. You observe the state
of my mind.” 77
He longed to leave New York and return home amidst the more
natural setting of the Carolina Low Country that in years past had
been so healing. Now that his dream of a university position had been
realized, he could return to Charleston for a few months and revive
his spirits beneath its starry skies and in the shelter of his parents’
home, before beginning his new life. Mary was to stay behind in New
York and join him in Madison in late September, after the legal battles
Page 148 - [see page image]
A Suspect Race
against her former husband regarding their daughter’s inheritance from
her grandfather had been settled. 78
After nearly three years in New York, he went home. He recalled in
Crump how even the train ride southward seemed to brighten his world.
The mere thought of return, of leaving behind the cares that for years
had weighed so heavily upon him, had in itself been liberating. He had
felt like a man who had been through a long and weary illness. How clean
and fresh it was to be alone. How cool and pure and wonderfully peaceful.
How green the trees were and how washed the sky looked. How good
food tasted. How strong and young his body was. Foolish to have been
as hopeless as he had been. Life would relent to him. As his grandfather
used to say, God is good. Soon he would press his father’s hand and feel
his mother’s kiss and stretch himself out between the sheets of lavendered
linen and hear the tide splash and gurgle among the rocks of the bay. 79
“Here I am at last, after many struggles and difficulties,” he wrote
Leonard from Charleston on July 12,1910. 80 Away from the chaos of his
life in New York, he sat back to reflect upon his past and future. “I went
over those years bit by bit,” he would later write. What were his failures,
and what his successes? Though he thought himself a “wretched failure,”
it had not been totally of his own doing. “A man can make neither
his gifts nor his character count except through those methods and
institutions which society had organized”—and from these, for reasons
at times subtle, at times “gross and obvious,” he had been “mercilessly
excluded.” As outlet and compensation, he had turned to his art as a
writer. But here, too, he had been excluded. “My way of looking at
life seemed strange and sinister to most of my countrymen.” They had
wanted stories that were “shallow . . . false and dishonorable,” tales of
“sweetish things . . . all pleasantly prearranged,’’told by “cheerful liars”
with the backing of church, school, government, and press. They had
denied that life was an arena of conflict where harsh realities challenged
man’s noblest dreams, where “love and aspiration and health” vied with
the individual in a struggle for spiritual survival. He had wanted to teach
this to the masses, and to deny them the right to their own self-denial,
only to be threatened by all but a handful of fellow artists and critics
who discussed his Jewish birth and not his ideas.*'
Yet he took comfort in the thought that in his own struggle to survive
he had remained true to himself, however marginally effective he had
been in reaching his goals. He had pursued an academic post, and after
fourteen years had been granted one—though at twenty-eight, he was
just beginning as an instructor in a field of second choice, and at the
low salary of one thousand dollars. He had spoken out about society
and had attacked its attempt to control dissent, though not many had
147
Page 149 - [see page image]
148
Ludwig Lewisohn
bothered to listen, and many who had, fought back with measurable
success. And he had brought a bit of joy to his parents with his writings
and his appointment at Wisconsin, though he could not change their
lives as he had hoped to do for so many years. “I knew that the good
dream of the years was over and that I would never lift my father and
mother out of the life they were living, that I would not even be able
to dwell near them again, but always half a continent away. Final and
fatal issues.
Still, despite it all, he had preserved his honesty and his dignity. He
had willingly paid the severe and exacting price demanded of all who
refused to abandon the “eternal verities.” And now, after so many years
of penury, hustling, hardship, and pain, there was reason for pride in
his limited achievements and for confidence in his future. Of this he felt
certain that September of 1910, as he looked back one last time from
the threshold of what he hoped would be a new life.''
Page 150 - [see page image]
149
6
Bitter Fate
“No chart have I in this mad race,” Ludwig wrote in elevated metaphor
of his life that September as he began the journey to Madison. The storms
of youth had not yet subsided, and here he was, at twenty-eight, about to
set out on a new course, cut loose from life’s moorings, his sails “lashed
and rent.” Adrift on that “eternal ocean” of the spirit, he had come to
welcome the storm itself as his guide on this “visionary quest." :
With Mary still in New York, he had gone ahead to ready their new
home at 118 West Dayton Street, anxiously anticipating her arrival in
early November. 2 The small-city atmosphere of Madison was a welcome
relief from the quick pace of New York, and it in turn seemed to
welcome him without reservation. Leonard, of course, was there to
ease his transition, though Ludwig was by no means shy. Teaching,
he soon discovered, was a pleasant occupation, offering both a stage
and a forum from which to posture and pronounce. For the moment it
seemed the perfect vehicle for his thoughts and energies. His effectiveness
in the classroom and the acceptance he enjoyed among his students
added to his growing enthusiasm for this new life. “I am a success as a
teacher—of elementary German,” he wrote Harris as the first half of the
academic year was ending. “There’s a noble ambition nobly achieved.
I’m popular, in a rather decent sense, with the students, and that is,
perhaps, a worthier thing—strange creatures though they be.” 3
The University of Wisconsin had been passing through a period of
ferment under President Van Hise’s creative leadership (1903-1918).
Teaching, scholarly research, and participatory governance were of
Page 151 - [see page image]
150
Ludwig Lewisohn
prime importance to him, and the young faculty welcomed the challenge.
They were encouraged to argue issues affecting their future, and were
required to set their own thoroughly reasoned policies regarding curricu
lum and professional development. Van Hise’s dictum, that “nothing is
more certain than that scholarly work and inspirational teaching go
hand in hand,” was taken seriously by the faculty. The “essential spirit
of a university, which under no circumstances should it yield,” consisted
of free, reasoned inquiry, with the courage to look squarely at the past,
to know it for what it was and for what it could offer, and to fearlessly
work for a better future. Conflict was inevitable, and Van Hise saw it
as evidence of the intellectual exchange he sought to encourage. “If a
University were content to teach simply those things concerning which
there is practical unanimity of opinion . . . there would be quiet; but it
would be the quiet of stagnation.” Advocating what came to be known
as “The Wisconsin Idea,” Van Hise and his faculty involved themselves
in the business of civil legislation and social engineering during those
confident years, fully believing in that progressive spirit not yet tarnished
by world war and economic depression. 4
Ludwig was perhaps less enthusiastic about this aspect of academic
life than most. Their world appeared so vastly different from his own.
Had they known even a fraction of his struggle? Could they appreciate
the darker side of life that he had known so intimately? Would they ever
be able to see through the blinding light of reason? Life for Ludwig
unquestionably improved in these first months, but the memory of
all those past years still persisted, surfacing irrepressibly even when
conditions seemed to improve. “Do you begin to note an undertone
of sadness?” he asked in his first letter to Harris from Madison. It was
December 29, a last chance to keep their year from ending in silence.
“Ring the eternal note of sadness in!” he proclaimed with peals of the
past to welcome a new year of anticipated uncertainties. 5
The small salary that was standard at Wisconsin for an instructor
without a Ph.D. had proven woefully insufficient as hopes for a life
without financial struggle quickly faded. Mary and her children had
found unexpected ways to spend the little money he was working so hard
to earn. There were twenty-eight faculty in the German Department, and
no real prospect of advancement for many years to come. He had gotten a
late start, and sterner men of fewer years, “men of iron constitutions in a
healthy climate,” already held higher positions. It was unlikely that they
would resign, retire, or die in time for him to benefit from their departure.
Ludwig, of course, blamed Hohlfeld for his financial predicament, a
“kind-hearted, well-meaning gentleman,” but “a man utterly devoid of
strength of character and hence of influence.” There was little chance
Page 152 - [see page image]
Bitter Fate
that he would do more than accede to the administration’s demand
for low salaries. Ludwig knew that he appeared unappreciative of his
improved status, but argued that he was not like other men. “I know
that surcease of suffering is grateful to the unpromethean man,” but he
thought of himself as a burning, Promethean soul, gravely threatened by
a world “dead, damned, cold, clammy.” The academic life, he protested,
should not have required a vow of poverty.
With elevated self-image intact, he had written to Huebsch on
November 26,1910, seeking editorial work, or a translation, preferring
the odious pressures of publishing deadlines to the tightening squeeze of
an empty stomach. “Have you anything, any plan in re or in spe by which
a poor gentleman can earn a few pennies? If not, cheer me with hopes. H< '
Huebsch, for some time now, had been planning a multivolume
edition of the works of German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-
1946), and was encouraged by Ludwig’s offer. In 1889, Hauptmann’s
play Before Dawn had inaugurated the naturalistic movement in the
German theater. His fame and influence had spread quickly, and in 1912
he would receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Sharing with Ludwig the
common purposes of social reform and artistic advancement, Huebsch
looked forward in late 1910 to a happy renewal of their relationship.
Who better to have as editor and chief translator than one whose lin
guistic talents and appreciation for Hauptmann’s work were unquestion
able? Ludwig’s forthcoming article in the Nation (a copy of which he
had sent to Huebsch) had praised Hauptmann’s work as the epitome of
this modern naturalistic literature. It alone, he asserted, among all other
schools of writing (classicism and romanticism in particular), would lead
to a new humanism. 7
And yet, despite his love of German culture, Ludwig had found
his colleagues at Wisconsin, seemingly at first “one of the goodliest
fellowships of comradely and learned men on earth,”' a bit too Ger
man as his association with them deepened. These “militant Germans,”
he sadly discovered, thought all other cultures inferior. In their zeal,
they had offended his more cosmopolitan tastes, what he referred to
as that “ancient virtue still in me.” Having tirelessly praised German
culture since his college years, he now found himself rebelling against
the excesses of its narrower advocates. “To care for any other literature
is flat treason against the kingly state of Dutchdom,” he protested, much
to his own surprise. At the risk of becoming vulgar, he offered a biting
definition of the Germans in what he called an “Extract from the New
Truth-Telling Dictionary Written by a strayed Child of light in the wilds
of Wis-con-son—The Germans: a heavy, unilluminated, beer-drinking
people noted for bargain-counter chauvinism in intellectual matters and
151
Page 153 - [see page image]
152
Ludwig Lewisohn
given to exalting their second-rate scribblers above the divine poets of
more gifted races.”
What Ludwig did admire in German culture was the more critical,
modernist, experientialist temper that he had found expressed in the
work of Goethe, Nietzsche, Hauptmann, and others like them. He
thought his colleagues guilty of blindly and uncritically accepting all
of German culture, holding it up above all others. To counter their
inexcusable excesses, he quickly and diligently prepared his response.
He had decided on December 29 to undertake a comparative treatment
of the German and English lyric, and to present it before the English,
German, French, Latin, and Greek faculties within a month’s time. He
was sure that his talk would open their eyes. If nothing else, his colleagues
in the German Department would realize that a new force had come to
challenge their chauvinistic attitudes. “I shall raise my voice and. . .
make myself heard,” he told Harris defiantly. 9 But with little need to
consider the opinions of a junior member of the faculty, only silence was
to follow his presentation.
He had thought in December, perhaps in defensive anticipation of a
stinging reaction from his colleagues, that he might wish ultimately “to
fade away, not into the forest dim—but eastward.”'" In the few short
months since leaving New York, he had come to miss the recuperative
powers of its culturally vibrant urban life. Nature seemed now to have
its limitations when surrounded by little else that could satisfy needs
beyond the primeval peacefulness it promised. The big city, as idea and
place, had already begun to look better than ever. And when shattered
by the unspoken dismissal of his thoughts January, he began to feel again
the cosmopolitan magnet that would often draw him back to New York
during his years of Midwestern exile.
Disillusionment had come as swiftly as always. Life would have
been better, he told Harris that December even before his disappointing
presentation, had he been appointed to Leonard’s English Department.
They were a more congenial group intellectually, and he would have been
pleased to share his time with them. Looking to blame someone for his
being unhappily situated in the German Department, he rather oddly
pointed to Harris, and half in jest, asked why he had not left Charleston
five years earlier for a chairman’s post in an English Department, one
“that yearns for an enlightened professor—a man, sir, of such spiritual
vitality that he can even, at times, strike a spark of response from. . .
practical men.” If he had, then he himself might have found a position
with him, preferably in “the Blessed East.” He was not being selfish—it
would have been to Harris’s benefit as well. Had not he, too, found their
“dear and unforgettable old town” a deadly trap, “lying adream there by
Page 154 - [see page image]
153
Bitter Fate
its bay” ? They had a debt to repay, Ludwig told Harris, an obligation
to add to the scholarship from which they had drawn so much. Did
not he, too, feel a moral obligation to better use these gifts? l et others
teach those “clods in Wis-con-sin who take German ‘two’ and consider
Latin an absoloote waste of time.” Spirits such as they were meant to be
“dynamic and to force conditions to yield us our due.” Rather than fall
victim to the inertia that he, too, had come to fear, he urged Harris to
chart his own course, not understanding that Harris had done just that
years before, finding his own little niche in the world, content merely to
rest his nondissenting soul. 11
Ludwig would have to sail on alone, though as 1911 began he found
himself as ill-provisioned as ever. He had but one source of financial
support left to him; with his parents’ savings depleted by his own recent
needs, only Huebsch could offer the possibility of assistance. With
the Hauptmann project still unsettled, Huebsch offered Ludwig two
additional projects—the editing of a translation from the French of the
late-nineteenth-century naturalists Yves Delage and Marie Goldsmith’s
Theories of Evaluation, and the translating of Hermann Sudermann’s
Indian Lily from the original German. In return, Ludwig promised to
repay Huebsch for past loans with the money he expected from the
sales of his previous book, German Style. Its critical reception had been
most favorable. (H. C. G. Brandt of Hamilton College had called it “an
original book in every sense,” and Marie Kopp of Smith College, “a
rare . . . excellent beginning along a new line in text books.”) Suddenly,
only a month after his woeful letter to Harris, there was reason for
Ludwig to feel encouraged. Once again, “the road to a real success”
seemed open. 12
Huebsch, however, still sensed a bit of despair beneath the renewed
enthusiasm that filled Ludwig’s letter of January 31. He was quite accu
rate in his assessment, as life at the university had come to be a constant
source of irritation for Ludwig, particularly after his colleagues’ silent
reception of his paper. Despite a successful semester in the classroom
and the university’s offer of a new contract for the coming year, he
had decided to seek a position at another institution. The climate was
disagreeable, he told Huebsch, too cold now that winter had descended,
the atmosphere in his department having proved equally chilling. “The
appalling crudeness under the thinnest of veneers” bothered him greatly.
As soon as possible, he would move nearer to the East, where he thought
it would be easier to supplement his income by writing and editing.
“This is too far and bleak,” he wrote to Huebsch. Ever faithful to
talent of whatever stripe, Huebsch unhesitatingly offered these two
additional assignments, hoping they would raise his author’s spirits.
Page 155 - [see page image]
154
Ludwig Lewisohn
With a burgeoning publishing house, Huebsch needed all the talent he
could find; and Ludwig, needing all the financial help he could garner,
happily accepted the offer. '
And then, just as suddenly as his confused life appeared to be
settling down, Leonard’s wife committed suicide. A beautiful, intelligent,
artistically sensitive woman, she had long suffered from periods of severe
depression, and had been hospitalized several times before they had met.
Leonard knew of her illness, having lived as a boarder in her family’s
home since first coming to Madison in 1906. But he believed his love
would cure all that troubled her. The early months of their marriage
in 1909 were unmarked by emotional instability, but by 1911 his love
was proving incapable of conquering her deepest problems. With the
death of her father, she began to fear the onset of another descent into
madness. Hoping to save her lover the suffering she knew would follow
in the years to come, she swallowed a lethal dose of poison. When he
discovered her, she was still alive. In a panic, he called Ludwig. But
Ludwig, overwhelmed with terror at having to face the reality of an
act he had only threatened to carry out, sent Mary. After several days
of unremitting agony, Leonard’s wife died, leaving him paralyzed with
grief and a depth of guilt bordering on madness of his own.
Leonard never quite recovered, and in the three decades that fol
lowed her death, his phobias and depressions mounted with increasing
ferocity until he was unable to leave the area around the university—and
at times, even his home. Ludwig and Mary spent much of their time that
winter and spring trying to save their friend from complete emotional
collapse. They succeeded in stopping the downward slide (though he
would resume the descent once they were gone that summer), but were
themselves emotionally drained in the process, making it more difficult
than it otherwise might have been in the year ahead to confront and
endure each other’s idiosyncratic needs and the intense complications
they had brought to their own marriage. 14
Madison and its university would later be recalled in Up Stream
as an oasis in America’s Midwestern desert, a culturally vibrant place
when compared with the wasteland of Central City’s university (Ohio
State), at which he was to spend the six years that followed his brief
stay in Wisconsin. “The sense of liberation and security which my
first academic position gave me, the beauty of Monroe [Madison],
the presence of Ellard [Leonard], the forming of new friendships—all
these things caused me to take immediately a very glowing view of my
situation.... It was as nearly as possible the free seat of learning of a
strong and hopeful democracy.” Time and need would play upon his
memory, and a decade would later transform this stay in Madison into
Page 156 - [see page image]
155
Bitter Fate
a happy memory. He would recall little from those dark days, believing
that only the separation from his parents and the lack of money needed
to visit them had caused the “wild restlessness” that had burned inside
of him. But in 1911, in the midst of it all, he could not forget. And so,
when a position at Ohio State University paying four hundred dollars
more was offered to him that spring, he accepted—“not without doubt
and hesitation,” but with the belief that it was a necessary first step on
his journey back to “the Blessed East.” 15
A trip to Charleston that summer, paid for with the few dollars he
and Mary had scraped together, gave him a chance to be alone with
his parents for several weeks. Mary had gone to New York with the
remainder of their meager savings. While there, her daughter suffered
a nervous breakdown, diagnosed as “manic depressive insanity.” This
extra expense used up the funds set aside for their return trip to Colum
bus, leaving Ludwig with the unpleasant task of approaching Huebsch
for another loan. From Charleston, he wrote Huebsch on August 15,
reminding him of the novel he had spoken of the previous January,
though Huebsch had already refused to offer anything for an unseen
novel, even one as “first-rate” as Ludwig had assured him it would be.
It was now half completed. Could he use it as collateral for the small
amount of money he needed to borrow, he asked Huebsch? His first
paycheck from Ohio was still five weeks away. With “a decent salary
now,” he promised swift repayment. He was in a “maddening fix” and
needed ten or fifteen dollars, or “anything! . . . Judge my state of mind.
If I weren’t fundamentally sane, I’d break down.” With this money, he
could send his family on to Columbus and end his worry. 16 Huebsch
forwarded the money immediately, but wisely did not ask for the novel.
He was a kind man by all accounts, but he needed the other works
completed, and correctly believed that Ludwig’s delayed return of both
had been caused by his emotional state. The pressure of the novel would
only delay them further.
Mary’s departure from New York with her daughter eased Ludwig’s
mind but made him feel terribly obligated to Huebsch, grateful as he was
for his seemingly endless understanding and helpfulness. “I shall not
easily forget your kindness,” he wrote on August 25. “I’ll see to it that
the Sudermann is properly done; I only wish I could help more radically
with the Delage.” Andre Tridon’s translation of it had played havoc
with the English language, and Ludwig, always taking great pride in his
work, and now feeling particularly indebted to Huebsch, was upset at the
thought of his having paid for this “bad business.... I wish there were a
way out, for the book is an admirably useful one and for all we can do, it
can’t escape criticism.” Ludwig hinted at its need for a new translation,
Page 157 - [see page image]
156
Ludwig Lewisohn
finding Tridon in “hopeless enmity with every English preposition, with
every English word-order.” Even quotes from English and American
naturalists used by Delage had been retranslated into an “irrecognizable
dialect.” Ludwig could not understand why Tridon had failed to consult
the original English texts. He promised to have the Sudermann trans
lation finished by September 18, and having truly enjoyed the work,
thought that a completely new translation of Delage would make a fine
second project. With the pleasant prospect of beginning a new position
in a month’s time, conditions were right for a swift completion of this
second translation. Huebsch, however, refused his offer. 17
September’s arrival meant that Ludwig could no longer postpone
his departure. Each prior leavetaking seemed more difficult than the last,
and this one was no exception. What he had found upon his return home
had left him more concerned about his parents than ever. They seemed
older and sadder, and to have “acquired a habit of brooding.” His
father had grown more serious and humorless, and appeared possessed
by a “touch of moroseness,” while his greying mother, filled with an
uncharacteristic “querulousness,” was no longer able to offer him the
once comforting smile that now seemed to him one of “abstract pain.”
They went nowhere, and rarely saw the few people they knew. “Others
have you,” she told Ludwig with “bitter resignation,” and would not be
consoled by promises of more frequent visits or invitations to visit him
in Columbus. He had known how intertwined their hopes were with
his, but had never realized the full depth of their dependence upon him.
“They substituted his life, work, plans, ambitions, for their own,” he
wrote in Crump, and having “lost him” to a distant world, felt drained
of life. “They had given up the will to live. They had crossed a hilltop
and the downward slope was swift.” There was nothing he could do but
go on with his own life, averting his eyes “from that fatal glow.” Perhaps
his future successes—literary, academic, and monetary—might “mitigate
their sense of loss and failure.” The thought offered him a moment’s
“measure of contentment.” But the expressions on his parents’ faces as
they said good-bye at the station, and the thought of returning to Mary’s
incessant material demands without any real expectation of finding the
love he had once sought in their relationship, left his “carefully woven
psychical fabric” torn and tattered by doubt. 18
Despite his recollections in Up Stream and Crump of a slow, difficult,
and never-to-be-completed settling in, his first impressions of Columbus,
Ohio, of the home that Mary had prepared for him there, and of his new
position at Ohio State University were far more positive. Though he was
already nostalgic for Madison and homesick for his parents (“indeed
my heart is always with you,” he told his mother), life did look more
Page 158 - [see page image]
157
Bitter Fate
promising on first glance than he had anticipated, “luckless creature that
I am. ” On September 12 he wrote Minna that “Dear Molly had the house
all fixed, and I must say that it is delightful. Here I am in my study at my
own desk on my own chair with all my books around me and a beautiful
green tree waving its bough just outside my window. I really think this is
the place where something can be accomplished.. . . Everything here . . .
looks mighty favorable for me, both professionally and in respect of the
conditions of life that always mean so much to me.” 19
Ohio State University had been carved out of 439 acres of forest and
farmland acquired over the years since its founding in 1873. There were,
in 1911, some thirty-five hundred students and thirty-nine buildings,
among them a new library that opened within weeks of Ludwig’s arrival.
Over the next six years, thirteen more buildings would be added, in
cluding facilities for agricultural and biological sciences, physics, home
opathic medicine, and home economics, as well as barracks for military
trainees. This last would signal Ludwig’s imminent departure in 1917. By
then, the student body would nearly double to almost seven thousand,
the sixteenth-largest student enrollment in the country.
With a student/facuity ratio of ten to one, Ludwig was able to enjoy
a more intimate contact with his students than most other institutions
would have afforded him. But they had come almost exclusively from
Ohio, and many, if not most, were from farm and rural communities
where the inadequate preparation of a small-town high school had left
them far less ready for college than Ludwig had been at a younger age.
Few, however, seemed overly concerned. They had come solely to be
trained in the useful task of their choice, for the betterment of Ohio. The
university’s president, William Oxley Thompson, had written that it was
the institution’s task to adapt its programs “to the needs of the state as
discovered from time to time . . . furnish [ing] adequate opportunity for
the training and efficiency of young men and young women.”*
This was clearly not the classical educator’s idea of education—
certainly not Ludwig’s. He thought this peculiarly American vision of
“higher education of the most democratic type” nothing more than “the
business of education.” The students had not come to be transformed
by new insights into their lives, nor to have their deepest convictions
challenged by new ways of seeing their world. They had come “not
to find truth, but to be engineers or farmers, doctors, teachers,” he
disdainfully recorded years later. The Ohio State University Lantern
reported in banner headlines on September 11,1911, that “Students Are
Flocking In On Every Train.” Attendance was up more than 20 percent
over the previous year, but most had come to enroll in the Agricultural
and Veterinary Colleges. As the story reported, “the advantages of an
Page 159 - [see page image]
158
Ludwig Lewisohn
agricultural training are becoming more and more recognized."-' 1 It
would all become so disheartening to Ludwig as the years wore on.
He tried at first to prod his colleagues, but they thought him obnox
ious, “brilliant. . . but personally Impossible”; and when he worked
hard to upset his complacent students, most simply looked on without
curiosity. Yet if they rarely understood his thoughts, they at least real
ized that he was “bent upon some business in which their souls were
somehow really concerned.” They were grateful for this, and he in turn
found what pleasure he could in that occasional student whose altered
expression would shine through the sea of unknowing faces, that one
student, now and then, who “heard me in the deeper sense and accepted,
however imperfectly, the spirit of my teaching—one who at least in the
years to come would realize through memory that once in his youth he
had heard a summons from the common and mean, a protest against
the obliteration of all freer and finer values, a call to become a member
of that small company of elect spirits who have been, in every age, the
guardians of the torch of the true humanities.” Nearly two decades later
a student confirmed what Ludwig had earlier written in Up Stream. “All
I know about the enjoyment of life I owe to him sub specie aeternitatis,”
he told Ludwig’s wife during a chance encounter in 1940. “He woke up
the excitement in all of us. You are in a . . . new world full of richness
when you are with him.. . . He told us to break down our conceptions
of things, everybody’s conceptions. Taught us to read in five directions.”
He considered himself “privileged to be his friend,” recalling how “he
sat with me and another student under the trees after classes."-''
For all of the criticism he later leveled against them, Ludwig be
friended a large number of those who came into his classroom. This
was particularly so with several of the young women whose “clear eyes,
smooth throats, soft arms, [and] the rustle and the fragrance of girlhood”
filled him with a “mild state of delightful intoxication” and mercifully
distracted him from the irremediable conditions of his academic and
domestic life. (He was long past the feelings that had made both Viereck
and Mary appealing to him.) “Subtly and adorably different from the
repressed and burning misses of his southern boyhood,” he admired
their bold, natural bearing with the eyes of a young man. Their open,
frank relationship with him, despite his position, endeared them to his
memory as an uncommonly positive element in a largely disappointing
enterprise. Fourteen years later, he would vividly recall in Crump how
greatly
they seemed to like him, their young professor.. . . Within flexible but
reasonable limits they were not afraid of showing this liking. A few came
into . . . [his] classroom early or lingered when the work was over and
Page 160 - [see page image]
159
Bitter Fate
chatted with him or strolled into his little office to consult him about
their work, about their future.. . . The situation was delicious and terrible,
tempting and shameful. How much of the inwardness of his situation the
instinct of the girls told them.... Or was it all his imagination that smooth
hands were always brushing his own and the scent of hair was always in his
nostrils and that even more heady and desperate perceptions were always
being thrust upon his defenseless heart and his defenseless senses'
How much of this was fact, how much imagination? Was there anything
to his allusion in An Altar in the Fields to a relationship “with a young
woman of Tulsie [College]”? Certainly, there was a need felt and a
wish left unfulfilled that perhaps distorted the shape and color of his
world. But there was, as well, an attraction between teacher and student
that struck a deeper chord in both. The author Susan Jenkins Brown, a
student of Ludwig’s during his last years at the university, remembered
him as a man of great intellect and warmth who made her time at Ohio
State “one of the most interesting and enjoyable of my life.” 24
Ludwig continued, through these years, to build his scholarly reputa
tion with one publication after another. By the end of September 1911 he
had mailed the Sudermann translation to Huebsch. It was ten days late,
but with good reason, having contained ten thousand more translated
words than the estimated sixty thousand. Added to this was a second,
more difficult problem—a “badly jaded” style and imagination that
often passed “the limits of nonsense in straining for effect.” He had done
all that he could to improve it, remaining faithful to the original while
applying “sane” judgment to whatever changes appeared necessary. No
one else would have worked on this book “as scrupulously in less time,”
he told Huebsch. 25
Financial need, as much as artistic pride, lay behind this boastfulness
as money continued to be an upsetting factor in his life. He seemed
always to be one contract behind his needs, spending a portion of what
he anticipated earning before he had even completed the work. Mary,
promising herself a well-furnished home, had without his knowledge
made a number of expensive purchases in Columbus while he was still
in Charleston. The university’s president, to whom she had appealed for
assistance, had arranged credit for them with the local merchants, and
then subsequently consolidated their debts with a loan from the bank
on whose board of trustees he sat. On hearing of these arrangements,
Ludwig knew that he had been trapped by her unreasonableness and by
the president’s sense of propriety. 26 And when a bank in Madison, from
which he had borrowed a small sum, unexpectedly recalled the loan out
of fear that his departure would make its collection more difficult, he was
left with only Huebsch to whom he could turn, though his previous loans
Page 161 - [see page image]
160
Ludwig Lewisohn
had yet to be repaid. Nor was Huebsch ready to pay for the translations
he had just that moment received. But Ludwig had no other prospects,
and so, accompanying the manuscript on September 30 was his appeal
for another loan of fifty dollars, to be charged against the money he
would earn from this and the Delage: “It will cripple me even with the
money from you; without it I should be lost!
On October 12, Ludwig thanked Huebsch for the loan, and apolo
gized for his affairs’ always seeming to reach a sudden crisis. The Suder-
mann page proofs that had accompanied the loan would be mailed back
the following day. He had worked hard to repay Huebsch’s kindness.
“I am mighty glad you are satisfied, and generous, and friendly—as
always.” He was equally pleased that Huebsch had agreed to publish
Leonard’s work, having recommended his friend’s poems in August, be
lieving that “they will—alone of contemporary poetry—stay.” It was not
a friend’s judgment, he insisted, but an objective, critical one; Leonard’s
work was born of “a breadth of vision, a nobility of mood, an authentic
ity of inspiration and an originality of verbal and metrical technique that
render it unique and uniquely impressive.. . . There is no other the future
of whose work is so secure.” When Huebsch continued his reluctance in
September, Ludwig had again pleaded his friend’s case—this time with
success. “If you want to be sure of going down to posterity—no, this isn’t
a joke—print Leonard’s poems. But you won’t have to wait that long for
your reward. I don’t believe that great work in the greatest of the arts
can—even in this age—altogether miss fire. And it is great work.” 28
Leonard reciprocated by telling Huebsch of Ludwig’s own poetry,
but Ludwig chose not to seek its publication, still finding it somewhat
difficult to make public his most private thoughts. Huebsch had known
nothing of this work until Leonard’s intercession, and encouraged Lud
wig to continue his poetic efforts, hoping one day to see the results. As
always, Ludwig was appreciative, and told Huebsch of the important
role poetry had played in his life: “The truth is that poetry has always
been and is now my profoundest preoccupation—the essential aim of
my life.” Perhaps one day he would exchange a translation for the
publication of a small volume of his verse, he told Huebsch, though
if his life continued on its present course, he would undoubtedly need
the money instead. His fourteen-hundred-dollar salary and the money
he earned from Huebsch simply could not meet the obligations and
responsibilities that had unjustly fallen upon him. Mary and her children,
he complained bitterly, were mercilessly sapping his strength and robbing
him of all hope. 29
Overwhelmed by work, worry, and a persistent cold that he blamed
on the emotional stress of the preceding weeks, and fighting a return
Page 162 - [see page image]
161
Bitter Fate
of the depression he so gravely feared, he thought of Leonard, still so
overcome by his wife’s death, and tried that fall to raise both their spirits
with a poetic recollection of their time together in Wisconsin, and of the
sacred trust, so long ago granted to them as poets, which they were not
free to dismiss, no matter what they had been forced to endure. They
had to push on. There was still so much work to be done.
We trod the autumn woodland side by side,
Holding high converse near that far blue lake
As in past years; but from our speech would break
The sad humility of hearts long tried
And deeply troubled. Harsh, no more defied,
Fate loomed above; yet, for its own sake
We clung to what nor years nor tears can take
And loved those noble things that shall abide . . .
Death came into your house and into mine
Distraction. Think not therefore less divine
The voice that bade us speak in our far dawn,
The voice that is our glory and our fate,
Whose sound no sorrow can annihilate,
And which still bids us, now as then: Speak on. 30
But passionate words could not change the reality that had marred
Ludwig’s best efforts. As he had already admitted to Harris on October
21, “The battle is more or less lost, the fine plans are all come to
nothing.” Teaching had been pleasant enough, but life itself had worn
him down. Something inside had died, “a robustness of mind and body
that you used to speak of.” For the first time, he had begun to question
the quality of his work, afraid that he was writing “nonsense.” He even
suggested to Harris that it might have been wiser to have stayed in
Charleston after all—“to give no hostage either to fortune or to ambition
but to dwell with quietness and watch the sunsets. ”' 1
Ludwig’s spirits were raised several weeks later when Huebsch asked
his opinion of two Hauptmann novels he thought of publishing in
translation. Were they well written? Would there be a market for them in
America? Huebsch thought Ludwig a perceptive observer of the literary
scene and awaited his judgment. Erlenchtrumen und Verfnstenumen
was a far better and more marketable book than Emanuel Quint, Ludwig
responded, adding that he would be pleased to do the translation. But
what of their earlier discussion of Hauptmann’s collected plays? There
was a rapidly growing college market for modern European drama
in translation. With a well-received introduction in the first volume,
the set’s reputation would be won and large sales assured. Of this he
was certain. 32
Page 163 - [see page image]
162
Ludwig Lewisohn
By early December, there was still no decision on either Hauptmann
project. Ludwig had been offered a chance to teach summer school, but
preferred working on the plays for Huebsch. To do so, however, would
require a small advance in order to free him from this other work. In
the meantime, he had finished the Delage volume—the book “eminently
valuable, the translation incurable.. . . It’s a stupendous mess. Anyhow,
I have done my best.” Ludwig recommended omitting the conclusion,
since it was preceded by a fine summary of the book’s scientific argument.
The conclusion was a “stupid, old-fashioned, materialistic bit of clap
trap which will justly offend and annoy any reader who has the slightest
philosophic culture.” Such “godless twaddle,” he argued, should not be
allowed to devalue an otherwise important work. Tridon was offended
by Ludwig’s criticism and suggestions. Ludwig, feeling “mean,” sent his
apologies through Huebsch the following week, adding that “between
you and me and the almighty, he can’t write English, and of course, I
had your interests in the matter in mind.” 33
Yet, more importantly, Huebsch had begun to show serious interest
in Hauptmann’s plays. He wanted to know how long Ludwig would
need for the first volume, and what compensation he would require.
Further, he asked which plays would be included should he decide on
the series, and in what order they should be published. To cut expenses,
he hoped that the Hauptmann material already in translation would be
adequate. Ludwig responded by telling Huebsch that he was willing to
make a compromise between his own artistic and financial needs and
Huebsch’s ability to pay, and thereby arrive at some mutually agreed
upon combination of series inclusion, translator’s fee, and royalties. He
promised Huebsch fame and fortune from the venture, “moderately
so, at least.” If the plan were followed, the set would be the most
complete collection of Hauptmann’s prose plays in any language, and
cost permitting, his retranslation of some, and first translation of others,
would give them the stylistic homogeneity that was lacking in what had
already appeared in English.
The project meant more than a source of income to Ludwig, though
that, too, was important. He needed the extra money to pay back his
small loan from Huebsch and to keep out of debt in the near future. But
his commitment to the project was greater than his financial need, for
which he would seek other sources of relief if the need arose. “I want to
do this job because I believe in it, because I will do it in such a way as to
add materially to my repute as a scholar.” No one in the country knew
more than he about naturalism in modern literature, particularly the
German contribution to this movement. For the chance to demonstrate
his knowledge and to prepare a portion of the larger study of literary
Page 164 - [see page image]
163
Bitter Fate
naturalism he had begun to outline, he would write the first volume’s
extensive introduction free of charge.
I know everything that has been written by and about Hauptmann. I know
the whole period. I’m slowly, like a coral-insect, building up in spare hours
my great (!) work on the Naturalistic Movement in Modern Literature. Of
the German section of that book Hauptmann is the chief figure. I think I
can say without exaggeration that I probably know more about the whole
subject than any one in this country. I lectured on it at Wisconsin; I will
give a course exclusively for graduates on it here next year. My introduction
would be the completest and most authoritative thing in English to be had
for love or money. You would get it. . . for love. All jesting aside: you may
depend on what I tell you in this matter. 14
While he awaited Huebsch’s final decision, he went ahead with
his study of the naturalistic movement, believing that an affirmative
response to the Hauptmann proposal would bring with it little opportu
nity for much else. He hurriedly wrote the study’s introduction and put
together an outline of the rest, and then asked Hohlfeld on December 26
if he might impose upon his time and good judgment at such an early and
important stage of his work. The study had already grown so complex
that another, more objective appraisal was crucial “for the ungrateful
task of reading MS. I am, at last, positively at work.” 35
Hohlfeld was pleased to receive the manuscript, though as he told
Ludwig on January 3, 1912, his own demanding schedule would force
him to put it aside for several weeks. In the meantime, he had taken
a look at Ludwig’s scheme for the Hauptmann project and thought it
an “excellent plan, indeed.” He counseled the inclusion of the verse
plays as well, believing them more representative of the author’s work,
and more likely to enhance Ludwig’s reputation as a writer. Hohlfeld
concluded his letter by passing along the kind words he had heard from
Ohio State concerning Ludwig’s work, while extending his own hopes
that, with time, the scholarly isolation he now felt would prove to be
only a newcomer’s first impression. v ’
Ludwig had already heard similarly positive sentiments expressed at
Ohio, but as he had told Huebsch two days earlier, he would feel more
confident about the future once he began to work on the Hauptmann
project. Could he know in a week’s time? If not, “my goose is cooked."''
One week passed, then another, and finally Huebsch said yes, tentatively,
asking for clarification on volume arrangements, translations needed,
and payment schedules. Ludwig’s response on January 16 again outlined
the set he envisioned, and reassured Huebsch that new translations
could be built upon old ones through changes, improvements, and
paraphrases. It was a method he had learned years before while doing
Page 165 - [see page image]
164
Ludwig Lewisohn
editorial work for the Review of Reviews. As to payment, three notes
dated six, twelve, and eighteen months from the present would be fine.
Another week and a half passed, and he was growing more and more
anxious to begin; but still no word from Huebsch. Near bankruptcy,
fearing dismissal from the university as an embarrassment to the in
stitution (“in the academic world, such things are not gladly seen”),
he pleaded with Huebsch on February 3: “The world is coming to an
end”; without some additional income, “the jig will be up!” 38 And then,
on the very next day, the contract arrived, freeing him of all immediate
financial worries. (Seven volumes would appear under Ludwig’s editorial
guidance between 1912 and 1917.) At once the skies seemed to clear, if
only because he perceived an end to the “two years’ necessary evil” of
staying at Ohio State until his reputation had been made through the
critical acclaim he was sure the first volumes of the Hauptmann series
would receive.
Nature herself appeared to be lending a hand to this new beginning,
as an unseasonal break in January’s chill unexpectedly turned his world
“warm and blue and golden.” He was nearly thirty years old now, and
a touch of grey could be seen at his temples, but he felt the surge of that
season of renewal, “the warmth of youth and life, the call to adventure on
open seas.” He dared even to fantasize a new life with one of his students,
“a girl with deep blue slumberous eyes and a high firm bosom . . . [who]
walked with an ease and vigour equal to his own.” They had spent
many moments together that winter—innocent of any bodily contact,
he claimed in Crump, but growing more closely tied in thought and
feeling with each chance meeting. The “immemorial urgency” of an
anticipated spring had unstopped the creative flow, and as he worked
away on Hauptmann, speaker of “the eternal fate and verities of man,”
he continued to build a world of dreams into which he could escape
and imagine himself beside her. She had helped (along with Huebsch)
to bring him back from the “edge of bleakness,” and he, treating her
as the muse of an approaching springtime in his life, had dedicated the
moment’s poetry to “the health and sweetness of her.” 40
But spring never came that year for Ludwig. In mid-February, he
was summoned to Charleston by his father. Minna had to undergo an
emergency mastectomy, and despite Ludwig’s hopes to the contrary (“her
life is saved—please God—for many years,” he wrote shortly afterward
to Huebsch), 41 he knew that her time was limited. Before the year’s end,
cancer would claim her. Mary and the young student of his fantasy
each, separately, urged him not to lose hope as he began the sad and
hopeless journey that brought him home to Queenshaven, now but “a
toy city in an eerie dream.” His father’s “white face contorted” and
Page 166 - [see page image]
165
Bitter Fate
his mother’s “touch of Paleness” were there to greet him, betraying the
“fatal truth” they tried to hide from one another. Both played their part
in this concluding drama. Ludwig dared not weep in front of her as they
talked away the hours before the operation. And for ten days following
it, he sat beside her, helping her to pretend in the face of reality that she
had been spared. Feeling better as the days passed, she began to talk of
the future. Ludwig, turning from the futility of the moment, reassured
her that all was well. But he could not lie to himself, knowing that her
dreams would turn to a slow death of unendurable pain, and that her
life would end before he could bring her the joy he had so long promised
himself would be hers. He found the grief and frustration intolerable.
“My old race against fate and death was lost,” he later recalled in Up
Stream.* 1 He said good-bye and returned to Columbus.
Minna wrote often. She was optimistic, believing that her daily im
provement would become permanent. Blindly, wishfully, Ludwig hoped
that she might actually recover, or that her life might at least be spared
a few more years. He thought of other things—of her adjusting to the
physical changes caused by the operation, and of her returning to the
daily routines of making a home for Jacques. And then he thought,
with a crushing sense of grief and guilt, of how, at the moment of his
parents’ greatest financial need, he was unable to help them. Jacques’
small savings were quickly being depleted, and Ludwig, who had gone
to them so often in the past, had none of his own to give. And so, on
February 22, he appealed once again to Huebsch: “They have stood
by me and sacrificed themselves for me all my life. And in their hour
of need I am helpless!” The Hauptmann project was now under way,
with half of the introduction finished, and though he was to be paid
only for the translations, he hoped Huebsch would send an advance
of one hundred dollars. Desperate, he promised to do anything, at
any time. 43
Huebsch, his patience and understanding not yet exhausted, sent
the money as requested; and Ludwig, in thanking him on March 10,
spoke of Mary’s sudden illness and of her need for an operation. It was
as though he had become a victim of the fates. Just as he would begin
“to feel almost human again,” something else would happen. “A kind
of terror of the gods” seemed to have been visited upon him. Was there,
he asked in utter frustration, no escape?
There was still further reason for Ludwig’s deepening anxiety.
Huebsch’s check had brought with it his concerns over the progress
being made on the translations. They were his only real hope of ever
recovering the money, and perhaps, if lucky, of weaning Ludwig from
this continuous financial dependency. There were still editorial con-
Page 167 - [see page image]
166
Ludwig Lewisohn
siderations to iron out, Ludwig explained—questions of dialect, of
transferring connotations, of using language throughout “that will sug
gest the psychycal [sic] and folk peculiarities of the original.” Plays set
in Berlin had to sound linguistically different from those having Silesian
characters. “This whole problem is an extremely subtle one, but it is the
very problem on which critical considerations of our edition will fit its
attention.” It was for this reason that he was so concerned about the use
of others’ translations; often they had failed to consider the particular
dialect involved. Extensive modification, if not retranslation, would be
necessary, he maintained. “In a word, we must [first]. . . adopt some
principle of linguistic and literary homogeneity.” 44
Ludwig had grown particularly sensitive to questions of textual
fidelity following the biting critique of his Sudermann translation in
the March 7 issue of the Nation. It was marred, said the anonymous
reviewer, “by a pretentiousness which appears to be not altogether an
involuntary reflection of the salient quality of Sudermann’s own style.
The translator is not lacking in a sense of rhythm, nor in the capacity for
handling periods; but he shows himself sometimes unaware of the mean
ing of words; and what was in the original a novel, perhaps incongruous,
but at least intelligible designation or epithet, becomes in his translation
frequently grotesque. ” * : Ludwig, priding himself a linguist and student
of literature, vehemently disagreed with this “grammar and lexicon”
approach to translation. Fully mindful of “the values of literature” being
“connotative, and its medium one of symbols,” he had tried to make
Sudermann’s “wretched” book readable by paying careful attention to
“the exact sense” of each word. 46
Concerned that he might receive a similar critique for translating
Hauptmann in much the same manner, he planned to introduce the first
volume of the set with a note about his own theory of translation, and
with a discussion of how Hauptmann’s Silesian dialect had “offered a
problem of unusual difficulty.” The solution, Ludwig would point out,
was “to invent a dialect near enough to the English of the common
people” that could offer “a closer interpretation of the original shade
of thought or turn of expression” in Hauptmann. 47 He thought it best,
however, to have Hauptmann himself clarify several points and to judge
whether his interpretations of a number of passages were accurate before
finalizing the introduction. Accordingly, he had begun to correspond
with the playwright several months earlier. Not sure when the printer
would begin to typeset his manuscript, he had asked Hauptmann to
send his thoughts as soon as possible. Ludwig was already aware of a
few minor changes that he would make, and wanted to add a preface
and other front matter to the volume. Concerned that it be presented
Page 168 - [see page image]
167
Bitter Fate
accurately and advantageously, he chose to usurp a major portion of
Huebsch’s editorial function.
Huebsch said nothing of this, but rather suggested again that one
or two of the rejected translations be reconsidered. Might they not be
amenable to emendation? Perhaps, responded Ludwig, but there was one
particular play that only he was capable of accurately translating. With
so many verse passages, a poet was needed. The translation handed him
by Huebsch had fallen far short of the mark. “To have beautiful verse
turned into broken-backed prose is a sin against the Holy Ghost,” he
protested. If not he, then someone of comparable sensitivity and ability
would be needed. William Butler Yeats, he assured Huebsch, would
be a fine choice. 48 Though shaken by an unfortuitous world, Ludwig’s
confidence in his literary abilities had held. It had become his only real
source of stability, and the one means by which he might possibly expose
“the constant and bitter conflict in the world that does not arise from
pointed and opposed notions of honour and duty held at some rare
climactic moment, but from the far more tragic grinding of a hostile
environment upon man or of the imprisonment of alien souls in the cage
of some social bondage. ” 4y
And then, in the fall of 1912, Minna died. “Very ill and broken,”
she had come to her son’s home for one final visit that August, and had
remained there throughout her final weeks. In October she suddenly
worsened, and there, on the twelfth, in her son’s presence and in Mary’s
arms, her brief, painful struggle ended. “She was a strong woman with
a vigorous constitution and it was hard for her to die,” Ludwig would
recall nearly thirty years later.'" In the months following her operation,
she had appeared hopeful, if only for Ludwig’s sake. She knew what
her illness meant to him, and would send cheerful notes as if nothing
were about to change. “To-day we had the first figs,” she had written in
July. “Papa is eating right now some. Yesterday we had the first shrimp
pie of the season—glorious.. . . Dearest love and kisses to your dear
ones, a heart full of love and many kisses to you my own dear Boy from
your devoted Mother.” By August she had sensed the approaching end
and had come to say good-bye. “In the coffin she looked young again,”
Ludwig thought, “and her face wore an expression of serenity and severe
sweetness which I had not seen on it for many years.”
When she left him, night descended upon his soul. He would often
think back on those days, remembering, as in Up Stream, how
the tentative and prayerful aspiration toward some extra-mundane source
of power and good which had remained with me from my Christian youth
died out entirely. I saw the world in a harder and drier mood. I lost my last
shred of respect for all religious and ethical formulations—for all types of
Page 169 - [see page image]
168
Ludwig Lewisohn
supernaturalism and absoluteness in thinking—for everything except such
forms of beauty or freedom or justice as might mitigate our stark wretched
ness on earth. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, unspeakably
monstrous that, in a world where people are poisoned by cancer, they should
persecute each other by social distinctions, ill-apportioned wealth, ethical
bickering or rob each other of a moment’s peace in the brief pitiful sunlight
in the name of any absolutist formulary, legal or moral or religious. 52
Nearly three decades later, the painful memories still etched on his face,
he would tell his wife how “for years after my mother’s death” he had
continued to be “contemptuous of the values upon which people base
their lives."'
From each of these “values” Ludwig had been made to feel pain,
and with the shock of Minna’s death, and the memories of the sheer
cruelty she had been made to endure in America, the pain grew more
acute. Fie sank into his deepest depression ever. “My mother’s outraged
ghost seemed to be knocking at my heart,” he would recall in Escott.
Once before he thought that he had reached bottom; now he believed
there was none. Life’s depths appeared to him as limitless chasms, and
his course apparently ever downward. Somehow, he had to reverse this
deathly descent and remake his world in the process. All else paled into
near obscurity. He saw for the first time how little the passing moments
of financial desperation had really meant, and how unimportant his
wish for fame and fortune had been. In error, he had allowed the primal
search for meaning and purpose to be set aside, substituting its demands
with the more ephemeral worries of publishing and employment. He
would go back now to his work and to his students, but they could no
longer be the focus of his life. More than the financial security and the
professional recognition they could offer, he needed to concentrate his
energies elsewhere if he was to survive.' 1
He forced himself to go through the daily motions of existence,
and resumed the work for Huebsch, apologizing for its delay, hoping
that Huebsch might have some understanding of the significance of his
mother’s death in his life. He had not been able to work on Hauptmann
during those final two months. Now that the vigil had ended, he was
back, teaching and translating and going ahead with his responsibilities,
“unless somebody else dies.” He had not fallen apart, as Leonard had
after his wife’s suicide. There were no bouts of hysteria, nor had he,
like Leonard, refused to teach for six months or rejected Henry Holt’s
offer to publish his work. He had gone on, carefully and purposefully
focusing his attention upon his father’s upcoming visit on December 24
(for which he sought another loan from Huebsch), and upon the need to
find some lasting meaning in his life. Despite his feelings of despair, he
Page 170 - [see page image]
169
Bitter Fate
would “come out on top yet,” he assured Huebsch with a touch of pride
on December 6. “A certain native toughness—one of the good heritages
of our race,” had saved him from insanity. 55 And so he felt completely
justified in chiding Huebsch a week later for the impatience and growing
annoyance with him that he had shown in his response to Ludwig’s
explanation for the still incomplete second Hauptmann volume:
However unfortunate that delay, I don’t think it quite fair or kind to rake
me over the coals for it. Have you ever lost any one—unexpectedly—on
whom all through your life, your whole heart was centered? I tell you, that
during all my days, my first thought and my last, my chief preoccupation
and reason for living was my mother. This is no exaggeration—it is the
sober truth. I am not given to sentimentalizing. But I trust that you will
never learn what it is to be so stricken as I am. The wonder of it is not that
Vol II is delayed; the wonder is that I have had the manhood, knowing what
is in my soul, not to throw every interest to hell and go to a madhouse. 56
The first Hauptmann volume appeared as Ludwig was writing this
latest letter to Huebsch in mid-December. His efforts received instan
taneous critical approval. H. L. Mencken thanked Ludwig in his Smart
Set review “for undertaking the extremely arduous enterprise of opening
[Hauptmann’s] whole canon to readers who are dismayed by the origi
nal.” Hohlfeld’s review in the New York Times was not unexpectedly the
more detailed and the most glowing of all that would appear. Pointing to
the difficulty of reading dialect in one’s own native language, he praised
Ludwig for having communicated the true sense of the text through
out the translations. With a “deftness of touch,” this “scholarly and
experienced editor” had rendered the texts intelligible, thereby winning
a wider audience for Hauptmann among students, teachers, and the
general public. He was to be thanked as well for his superb introduction,
evincing a “warm sympathy and appreciation” for Hauptmann’s work,
though examined with “critical sobriety.” After so remarkable a success,
Hohlfeld told his readers, he anxiously awaited the remaining volumes,
certain that they would make a significant contribution to the English-
reading world’s understanding of modern German life and culture.'
Hohlfeld’s joyful anticipation, however, was for Ludwig “a tunnel
without sight of the outlet gleam for months and months!” Volume
two was nearly complete, he told Harris shortly before the New Year;
unfortunately, three more awaited him. And now Henry Holt wanted
him to compile an extensive anthology of German poetry, with a detailed
historical introduction, for publication in the fall. Ludwig needed the
money; how could he refuse? Years would pass before it was written,
and years more before published, with a world war interceding between
the writer and his audience. But there was no way to know this as he
Page 171 - [see page image]
170
Ludwig Lewisohn
hurried to finish the second Hauptmann volume and begin the book
for Holt.
And then, in the rush of things, the facade of “native toughness”
began to crumble as the props of teaching and writing collapsed under
the weight of grief and into the now empty center of his life. He tried
to convince himself that some public forum, where he could share his
concerns about society, would help him to refocus his vision. “I’m
burning to deliver myself of some thoughts that force themselves on
me,” he wrote Harris on December 29, 1912, proposing to do so at the
College of Charleston’s upcoming commencement. As a last chance to
somehow reestablish the irreparably broken tie to his past, it seemed an
appropriate setting for just such a cathartic deliverance. A dozen years
had passed since his graduation, and if he had not accomplished all that
he had hoped to in “this miserable world” (“When I consider what I
hoped to be, gave some promise of being, and am! . . . Good Lord!”), he
was unquestionably the college’s most celebrated alumnus. There need
be no fear of disgracing the college with his ideas, he assured Harris.
Though admittedly distraught and confused, he had not entirely lost his
sense of proportion. “What I have to say is really immensely conservative
in its nature . . . and lends itself to the noble timbre so much beloved and
cultivated in the dear old town.”
He thought of asking Huebsch to publish the address as a pamphlet
and “scatter them,” hoping thereby to achieve some sense of personal
continuity, to “eternize yourself somehow” beyond death—something
his mother had apparently failed to do with her life. Or was this, too,
illusory, merely one more trick he had played upon himself? Could
he really fend off the ultimate disillusion that he so dreaded, perhaps
more than all of his many other fears? “Is that itch for putting oneself
down only another delusion of this phantasmagoria in which we waver
about?” To say yes, he realized, would certainly put an end to all of
his striving, if not to his belief in the potential meaningfulness of life
itself. Yet the events of thirty years seemed to him proof enough of
man’s ultimate powerlessness and isolation in an uncaring world without
promise. To Harris that December, he lamented, “I was never, from the
first, much deluded as to the fate that awaited us. And it’s a bitter fate.
I haven’t recovered my contact with reality: I don’t believe I ever will.
I’m transplanted into an unfamiliar, strange, weird, homeless world.
The roots of being are stricken off. Here I float—dazed, in worlds
unrealized."' ’
Page 172 - [see page image]
Part 2
#
Mary
Page 173 - [see page image]
Page 174 - [see page image]
173
7
World of
His Ancestors
“It is said that grief and accidents of mortality soften the heart,”
Ludwig wrote in Crump of his reaction to Minna’s death. “They may
also harden the mind, liberating it from hope and illusion. He had
nothing more to fear in the world or in the universe,” or so he later
romanticized. 1 But if he was not free from fear or hope, the experience
and the events that followed destroyed most of the illusions by which
he had lived and upon which his unfulfillable hopes had been founded.
He began, as well, to grow contemptuous of what he judged to be the
illusory values upon which most others based their lives. 2 Such claims
to truth had been rendered as meaningless as his own by the trauma of
her passing. Without either set of illusions for support, he felt rootless
and without a purpose in his life during those first months, save the
need, more strongly felt than ever, to seek out some new and meaningful
direction.
Such understanding, he quickly realized, would require the most
intensive self-examination of his life. The ruthless honesty with which
he resolutely pursued this over the next several years would bring him
first to the edge of disaster, and then to a new sense of identity and self-
worth. In 1917 he would be willing to relinquish his hard-won academic
position for the right to dissent in the service of a vision of a new world
to be shared by the larger community of man. But before he could see
this greater picture, he would have to find his way back into the world
of his ancestors, and then, marking the most significant decision of his
life, publicly affirm this identity and his right to live it.
Page 175 - [see page image]
174
Ludwig Lewisohn
They would be difficult years for him, and only after some four
decades would he be able to fully assess the impact of her death upon
the subsequent course of his life. In a diary entry for August 14, 1952,
he spoke of how Minna’s end had deepened and made more urgent the
search for “faith and form” that had dominated his life since childhood:
Through the tragic alienation of my parents who represented a certain
segment of the German Jewry of their time, I was impelled to go to mass
with friends . . . next I was impelled to go with Methodist friends. But if,
during that very period the Rabbi of Beth Elohim had stretched out a hand to
me . . . When, therefore, through my mother’s death in 19121 was impelled,
ploughed to my very depth to find a way of life along which I could go—
when, reflecting on her life which had not been her life and her death which
had not been her death, I came, and I would have phrased it then, to my
Damascus—I began to return to Israel and to the God of Israel and of the
world. 3
When Minna died, she took with her Ludwig’s last visible connection
with the Jewish world from which she had drawn much of her own
strength during the long years of isolation and disappointment. German
and French culture had been her means of outward expression, but
her spiritual life had been rooted in the ethos of her Jewish ancestors
and to a timeless place, separated from both the America to which
she had given her son and the Berlin in which she had spent her own
adolescence and early married life. She was Ludwig’s tie to this older
world, to the religious claims of her people, which seemed to violate, in
an increasingly positive way, the overbearing rationality of the academic
and literary communities to which he aspired. Though in his later youth
he had moved closer to the intellectual sphere inhabited by his father,
the emotional pull of his mother had remained the stronger force in
his life. His immediate reaction to her death—the sense of liberation
from all value systems—would slowly pass. In its place would come
an acceptance of his mother’s legacy to him as a Jew. In his heart he
was his mother’s son, a European Jew whose Jewishness had often
imperceptively colored his perception of existence and mis-fit him for
the larger world as it was. If at first he had rejected a part of her
world, he would learn in time that he had rejected a basic part of
himself as well. He could not continue in this way, nor would the
world about him permit him to. The liberation he felt at the time of
her death had pointed to the emptiness of the world he had chosen
to join, and to the shallowness of his life within it. The road “to my
Damascus,” away from this meaningless life, would first carry him
back to his past, and then far beyond it into an unforeseen future
born of it.
Page 176 - [see page image]
175
World of His Ancestors
As a writer, Ludwig lived by words, and in the very process of
composing each line, he had often found an opportunity to expose
his innermost feelings and deepest thoughts to himself. On paper, he
could dissect himself, question his motives, rearrange his ideas, and put
the pieces together in a newly integrated pattern, only to repeat the
process when the next crisis struck. And so, after his father returned
to Charleston for the last time in January 1913, Ludwig went back to
work on the second Hauptmann volume, hoping to find some means
by which to move on. Holt had rejected his outline for the anthology
they had requested, but he was not disappointed. There was enough to
do already, and he was, admittedly, not the most qualified person for
the task. Though the first Hauptmann volume had not sold as well as
Huebsch had hoped, its critical success had made it required reading at
a number of universities, including Harvard, Cornell, and Wisconsin.
There were other schools where the very appearance of his volume had
stimulated the creation of courses in modern German drama. The first
order of business, then, was to continue with volume two, the one long
term project that could offer him the stability now so totally absent from
his life.
In the end, though, he had no choice but to pick it back up as quickly
as possible. The wolves were again at his door, and Huebsch, whose own
financial situation had worsened because of the Hauptmann volumes’
poor sales, was no longer able to help him as he had in the past. He was
willing to continue publishing as many volumes as Ludwig produced,
but advances were now out of the question. He hoped Ludwig would
understand. “We haven’t fought so far and we shall not begin now,”
Huebsch assured him. 4
But as Ludwig sat at his desk, day after day, all that came to mind
were thoughts of his mother’s death and of his father’s steady descent
into insanity, made more obvious to him by the growing depression
and disorientation he had witnessed in Jacques during his last visit to
Columbus. “So depressing did these conditions become,” Ludwig wrote
Hohlfeld on February 18, “that I was very near a breakdown.” Aware
of his own worsening emotional state, he fled to New York in February
for a brief stay, before the oppressiveness of the new semester began.
The ten days’ respite overwhelmed him with a sense of fulfillment
and deprivation he had never before experienced. Exiled from the cur
rents of American literary life, he had been unaware of the extent to
which his reputation had grown during his eighteen months’ absence.
Suddenly, doors opened where previously he had been shunted aside;
literary essays and poetry were now being asked of him in place of those
demeaning serials that had nearly wrecked his art and his mind in years
Page 177 - [see page image]
176
Ludwig Lewisohn
past. “The editors of the Times and Nation practically gave me carte
blanche in the matter of articles; I was able to sell some poetry at a higher
price than I had ever dared to ask.... I found myself better known than
ever,” he wrote Hohlfeld. Even Columbia University appeared interested
in him as a possible faculty member—in the German Department, of
course. Returning to Ohio, Ludwig wrote his father of this sudden good
fortune. Jacques, in turn, related the contents of the letter to Harris when
they met on the street. As Harris told his wife, “Old Lewisohn stopped
me in great glee on the street this morning to show me a letter from
Ludwig. The latter had been in New York and had been well received
by professors at Columbia and by litery [sic] gents. He is promised
ultimately a place at Columbia, is given more remunerative work in the
publishing way, and . . . $100 for ‘The Laboratory.’... It will appear,
of all places, in The Smart Set.” 5
How utterly discouraging, Ludwig told Hohlfeld, that after these
triumphs in New York, he was faced with the “farcical” prospect of
another year in Ohio. Perhaps something would materialize to change
the course of his life in the coming months. “If I don’t, at least, get a call
from somewhere my position would become unendurably humiliating
and ridiculous! ” Ludwig would later recall these feelings of exhilaration
and subsequent frustration as a time of “vaguely vagabonding about the
country,” taking “the Broadway Limited for a vacation in New York.
That was splendid. And he had availed himself of the opportunity on
several occasions. He had stopped at the Hotel McAlpin . . . had gone
to plays, to a cabaret or two; had visited the great establishments of
the metropolitan dailies; and had always had, in the end, a baffled and
defeated feeling. How life, he reflected, the life of one’s town and class
and family, did cage a fellow.” 6
This latest trip east had helped to clear his perception, and to give
him a more sympathetic perspective on his relationship with Huebsch.
Both of them, he now realized, had been caught in a whirlpool of uncon
trollable events. Ludwig had planned to use Huebsch’s earlier promis
sory notes for the future Hauptmann volumes as collateral for a new
loan, but they had been refused by banks in Columbus and in Charleston.
Despite the Smart Set money, he still could not pay his latest bills or all of
his previous loans. In the past he would have lashed out at Huebsch for
not providing a further advance, but instead, knowing that Huebsch was
in a similar bind, he wrote sympathetically on February 22 that he was
“grieved and chagrined that, after all your kindness, this contretemps
should occur. There’s always some fly—rather some beetle, black, mon
strous and clawed.. . . I’m sorry, damned sorry, and I shan’t put my trust
in princes nor in the sons of men in the shape of bankers hereafter!” 7
Page 178 - [see page image]
177
World of His Ancestors
Ludwig now tried everything—a new college being organized in
Connecticut, the half-promised position at Columbia, a possible re
turn to Wisconsin. His friends—particularly Thomas and Hohlfeld—
supported him, but nothing happened. Even Hohlfeld’s reassurance that
Ludwig was “a man of delightful personality and high ideals, and entirely
free from those undesirable traits of character we so often associate with
Jews,” was of little help. 8 And when these efforts failed, Ludwig tried
to accept his situation and remain hopeful—what else was there to do?
“I shall stay here one other year and then, in all likelihood, go to one of
the largest eastern universities, where a position is gradually being made
for me.” 9 But the reality of the moment still angered him.
When in April his request to address the College of Charleston’s
commencement continued to go unanswered, he took it as another sign
of his victimization by an unjust society that sought to deny him access to
those whose unrest it feared. If this was to be the college’s final decision,
he would accept it and be done with them. “If you people don’t want
me,” he had told Harris on December 29,1912, then “I wash my hands
of you. You will have sunk too low. There . . . you have my deliberate
opinion. Seriously.' -1 " The intervening months between Minna’s death
and the new year of 1913 had strengthened his resolve, and now, after
three more months of waiting, he bitterly lashed out on April 1 at what
he thought to be his final rejection by Charleston:
For months and weeks I have been waiting for some word from you. At
first I didn’t quite understand. Gradually the reason has dawned on me. My
suggestion that I might possibly be a commencement orator at home (!) has
struck Charleston dumb. Snowden, Hemphill! But who am I, a foreigner
etc., a rank outsider, to aspire to such honors? You will see, in my remarks,
no doubt, the deplorable violence of the Semitic temper. I only feel, you see,
that Charleston darkened my mother’s life, warped my father’s magnificent
intellect and now treats with contempt the suggestion at some slight act of
separation and justice. Isn’t there some old fogey, the author of local trash,
whom our dear alma mater delights to honor? Well, there is a deep sadness
in it all to me which transcends any rancor, however just, which I may feel.
And, by God, I do well to be angry. 1
He had long “craved an object of loyalty, a local habitation in a rather
homeless world,” always returning in his thoughts to the Queenshaven
of his youth. With “intense grief,” he was now forced to “finally give up
the self-deception.” He had no choice but to be the “renegade” that he
was, if he was to stand “in any deep and true and broad sense, for the
humanities of life, and not merely for local cults and decaying prejudices
and snobbishness.” Having paid Harris what he characterized as the
“compliment of utter frankness,” Ludwig asked his old teacher to freely
Page 179 - [see page image]
178
Ludwig Lewisohn
share these thoughts with those to whom they were more appropriately
addressed. They were not meant for his ears alone. There was no need to
keep them private. “Someday—when the personal wretchedness is out
of it all—I shall tell, in print, the history of my relations in Charleston.” 1:
Up Stream’s beginnings may well rest in this moment of passionate
conception. Knowingly seen by others as a renegade of “Semitic temper,”
Ludwig willingly accepted the damnable accusations of ill-manners and
ungentlemanly behavior.'' They were, after all, elements of a character
very much unlike that of his attackers. In their minds, they were an innate
part of his. Ludwig was at bottom a Jew, and not a part of the culture
from which this biased vision had sprung. His ties to it had always been
more tenuous, his friendships less certain, his loyalties more suspect.
That very year, the United States commissioner of immigration, William
Williams, had announced that “a great many very estimable Jews” had
made “the mistake ... of considering the interests of their race before
those of their country.” Individuals like Ludwig were clearly among
those to be watched with care. The slightest infraction of “decaying
prejudices” had already raised the full force of local wrath against him.
The rejection confirmed Ludwig’s sense of himself as fundamentally and
irreversibly apart from them all. Now, finally, there was no denying
his alien nature. He would proclaim his independence and seek a new
home, and, ultimately, take pen in hand to relate his journey to self
acceptance. 14
But for the moment, Ludwig felt only anger and the need to strike
back. In an “Introduction” to another’s translation from the German
of Gustav Frenssen’s Jorn Uhl (requested by Boni and Liveright because
of Ludwig’s growing literary reputation), he praised this ethnic tale as
an example of “the bread of life... [a] fresher and more nourishing
art.” Criticizing the narrowly confined mentality of this hurtful America,
he pointed to the greater vision of life that derived from accepting
the legitimacy of all peoples’ experiences. No single group retained
exclusively within itself the truth to which it aspired. Rather, such
“universality comes from the folk,” he wrote that spring. The particular
“is also the broadly human . . . [and] in its highest aspect, has the best
chance of being not only a national but a universal” vision of this truth.
“From simple men we learn most concerning man.” 15
By July 1913 this feeling of alienation, of isolation from the flow of
the world, had sharpened his despair over not finding the position he
had hoped for in April, and had begun to deepen into an attack of severe
depression. A physician advised a radical reduction of work and more
rest; but Ludwig could ill afford either, now that the unending stream
of bills had been joined by Huebsch’s sudden request for repayment of
Page 180 - [see page image]
179
World of His Ancestors
his loans. In response, Ludwig could offer Huebsch only his latest work,
a study of modern drama. The research, he told Huebsch, was already
completed, and an outline had been prepared. “It will be the biggest book
on the subject—the most alive. It will be a text-book and a book for the
public, for critics and play-wrights.” He would analyze the French and
German naturalists, the Scandinavian realists, the comedic and satiric
playwrights of England and Austria, the renascent Irish theater, and
much more. While sure of placing it with at least two other major
publishers, he preferred Huebsch whom he knew, and who knew his
work and his situation. 1 ' 1 Huebsch, aware of his author’s mental state,
told Ludwig how “keenly interested” he was in the work (which in fact
he was), and allowed him to postpone repayment. There was, of course,
no chance of an advance; his own accounts were now long past due. If
he could not secure the work without this advance, he would reluctantly
have to pass up the opportunity. 17
The matter seemed partially resolved in Ludwig’s mind when he
excitedly wrote Huebsch about another possible teaching position, this
time at the City College of New York. He would need the two Haupt
mann volumes sent to Edward Lauterbach, chairman of its board of
trustees. Because of Lauterbach’s German-Jewish background, Ludwig
felt unusually hopeful. His immediate problems remained, he told Hueb
sch, but if he were successful in securing this higher-paying position,
“we’d all have a better time together.” Huebsch, however, had fallen
upon such hard times that to send even these two volumes gratis would
have added a significant hardship. He, too, was suffering an onerous
burden. “If I could afford to become a nervous wreck at this stage of the
game,” Huebsch told Ludwig on August 4, “I should do so.” He had
little doubt as to how cold-blooded this sounded, but he had come to a
point where “self-preservation is the first law of nature . . . [though] if
sympathy and good will were convertible into cash you would soon be
relieved of your troubles.” : *
Ludwig had of course written to Hohlfeld asking him for a letter
of reference “of the same old variety.” The request, mistakenly dated
August 13, was answered on the eighth, having been received on the
sixth. Hohlfeld, in jest, remarked that it had made “good time,” not
realizing how protracted Ludwig’s nervous state had become, nor the
obvious distraction it was causing. As Ludwig had told Huebsch the
previous week, he was “wretchedly ill.” 19
Things only got worse as his creditors threatened to disclose his
financial troubles to the university if payment was not received by August
10. “I’ll be kicked out,” he cried to Huebsch, certain that no one would
believe his story of poor sales. “Hauptmann is considered an immense
Page 181 - [see page image]
180
Ludwig Lewisohn
and admirable achievement.” He had heard it being talked about as the
book of the year, a work that had greatly advanced American literary
scholarship. Certainly the university’s administration would think him
a liar, or even worse, someone incapable of handling his private affairs.
Dependent now upon the reluctant goodwill of a neighborhood grocer,
and having again grown unsympathetic toward Huebsch’s own claims of
financial hardship, Ludwig awaited some assurance from his publisher
that a few dollars would miraculously appear. '
When money from Huebsch arrived in late August, Ludwig was
quick to apologize. He assured Huebsch that financial need, not artistic
temperament (“Life has knocked whatever of it I had out of me”), had
forced him to be so relentless and to appear so unfeeling toward him.
“It is all because I am so clearly driven, because all my earnings do not
suffice to satisfy the demands that are made on me.” Personally frugal,
he had been made to support the whims of Mary and her children.
Such were the “circumstances of fate.” 21 “I became merely the father
of your child and the provider of your home,” he told Mary through
his play The Lie, published several months later. - She and her children
lacked “a conscience that was reasonably enlightened and sensitive,”
and thus “had no shaping force within,” he was to write in Crump.
Their world was a moral chaos. “They had never given a moment’s
thought to how they drained him of his energies in their pursuit of
personal gratification.” 23 Even his attempt to cut expenses by securing a
scholarship at Wisconsin for Mary’s son Harold had cost him $125 just
to clothe him and transport him to Madison. “For heaven’s sake, what
can I do?” 24
Inner strength and peace, some meaning to it all—somehow, he had
to find them amidst the turbulence of his life. A year earlier, after the
onset of Minna’s illness, he had turned again to poetry, and in one of
his best efforts, “The Laboratory,” had envisioned himself an anatomist
of the spirit, at work in a “streaming world,” dissecting man’s soul as it
labored under the stress of life’s “imperious storm. ” Confronted with the
likely prospect of her death, he had needed above all else to experience
some sense of spiritual well-being, to find some way in which even this
tragedy, more horrible than any he had contemplated, could allow him
to stand forever “calmly in the somber glow” of a greater truth beyond
all the evils of the world. There had been such moments in the spring
before her death, when he still felt that
My way was free. The winds had driven
The cloudwrack from the liquid heaven.
The dear, familiar world stretched far
Before me, and the peace of God
Page 182 - [see page image]
181
World of His Ancestors
Brooded above it as I trod
Serene, under the evening star. 25
Such visions, at first absent, had on occasion returned in the year
since Minna’s death as he thought of her, his “Muse of Tragedy,” 26
“now of that world in which there is neither variableness nor shadow
of turning.” In such moments, he saw an essential unity underlying each
individual entity as it moved through its allotted span of time toward
inevitable disintegration and reabsorption into this essence. But man, in
knowing this, experienced a curiosity and discomfort that forced him to
seek some harmonious acceptance of this reality, if he were ever to avoid
the paralysis of will that might otherwise be his fate. These thoughts
alone had helped to steady Ludwig’s fragile sense of balance in late 1913,
now so easily shattered by “the glare and heat of those raging egotisms”
that had so often proven insufferably difficult to endure. His own desire
to somehow live in harmony with this essence seemed to bring him a
taste of that eternity to which Minna now belonged, as he, too, would
in time. 27
Out of the years of chaos, he had at last drawn some meaning;
he had found a vision to which he could cling in “The Quiet Hour,”
beyond the call of the world. “Passion, pomp and pride” had proven as
destructive as the “faltering of pain or fear” that had accompanied them.
He realized that beyond all of this there was an “essential Energy” to be
felt, and a soft “murmur of the infinite” to be heard by the patient soul
attuned to its quiet call. Ludwig’s spirit was slowly being revived. “The
gradual stars are lit.” He felt new life stirring inside himself. In putting
aside the “harsh memorials of a louder day,” he felt well prepared at last
to resume his journey. 28
Such thoughts had helped to support him in the season of hardship
and pain through which he had passed. Most distressing of all, perhaps,
had been his father’s worsening mental state and the effect that this and
the many other developments of that year had had upon his marriage.
Jacques had finally crumbled under the emotional strain of Minna’s
death and the oppressiveness of his own life, lived too long without
purpose. Harris had met Jacques that spring, and had been struck by his
rather unusual behavior. “Old Mr. Lewisohn came, and we had a long
talk and drank a little wine,” he had written his wife on April 3. “The old
man is amazingly frank and told me all his most private affairs. They are
interesting, but he does things that I couldn’t do!"Even his earlier refer
ence in February to Jacques’ greeting him with “great glee” shortly after
Minna’s death, seemed to indicate a troubled emotional state. Were these
signs of approaching insanity? That spring Ludwig and Mary had been
Page 183 - [see page image]
182
Ludwig Lewisohn
summoned to Charleston to carry Jacques and his few belongings back
to Columbus, where he remained hospitalized, depressed far beyond
any possibility of recovery, now forever to be institutionalized. After a
particularly difficult summer, this new strain had left Mary physically ill
and Ludwig in an intensified state of nervous exhaustion.
By December 1, Ludwig would admit to Hohlfeld that “We are as
sorry a crowd as you ever saw.” 30 Under the pressure of unending strife
and disappointment, and the forces of a changing world, his marriage
had already begun to break apart before Minna’s death. Mary was
simply aging differently than he, and the nature of their relationship in
time had become radically altered by this process. He wanted to be more
than her breadwinner, but her body needed little beyond the sustenance
of food in her advancing years. He wanted her to understand his spiritual
turmoil and to accompany him on his soul’s journey, but she could not.
In their early New York days she had felt what he had felt, and he, what
was inside of her. But they had grown increasingly more isolated from
each other. The weakened bond between them had finally shattered, and
the gulf was widening. Aware of these changes, they seemed unable, or
perhaps unwilling, to reconcile their differences.
It was, as he later noted in Crump, the time of that first “great quarrel
and rebellion.” The end of the previous academic year had brought to
a conclusion the fanciful relationship he had had with his student. She
had written a farewell note, which he would possess as a talisman for
years afterward. In it she had bid him “Good-bye, my dear, good-bye.”
Coming in the midst of his mother’s illness and ending shortly before
her death, their brief but meaningful involvement had left him with the
unshakable determination to be free of Mary. Only then might he hope
to find that “blessed” life he dreamed of with another woman. Only
then, through the child they could bring into the world, would he fulfill
his true destiny, “the constant miracle of renewed life . . . our parents,
our children and ourselves, ageless and of one age, commingled dust or
spirit. . . together in an eternal world.” Stronger even than his desire to
find sexual compatibility and financial relief was this need that Mary
could never satisfy, the “sacred” duty that “his mother be appeased . . .
[through] the same issue as our own.” The permanent bond Ludwig
forged with all that Minna represented left Mary but a symbol of those
elements that had robbed him of the chance to recapture the identity
he had forsaken and without an opportunity to pass on to the next
generation this incarnation of his mother’s spirit. All else troubling their
relationship seemed of secondary importance, merely highlighting and
compounding the spiritual deprivation, that separation from “the larger
life of his kind,” which he was no longer willing to endure."
Page 184 - [see page image]
183
World of His Ancestors
Life at Ohio State had remained substantially unchanged for him
in the months that followed, though he grew better able to cope with
it all by imagining himself “a modern Job,” enduring sixteen hours of
teaching each week, endless writing and translating, and all the outside
lecturing he could find until he could barely utter a sound. Despite the
months of stress, he had completed the third and fourth Hauptmann
volumes, and had begun the fifth. A new series of lectures on modern
drama in Europe was scheduled for the spring of 1914, to which he
would add an introductory essay before publishing them with Huebsch
under the title The Modern Drama. They looked forward to a profit from
it, and coordinated the book’s publication with his last lecture in April.
The mere resolve to find a new identity without Mary had apparently
helped him to cope with much of the wrenching desperation he had
experienced in the months immediately following Minna’s death. Not
that he had abandoned the hope of finding a position closer to New York,
where he could again feel the literary pulse of an America he hoped to
change. “That’s my ideal,” he noted, looking out upon still another year
of isolation in America’s Midwest, as a colleague’s return to his German
homeland forced Ludwig to rethink the possibility of a move at this time
in his own life. With mercilessly sharpening focus upon the confluence
of Minna’s death, Jacques’ decline, the entrapment of his marriage, and
his unfulfilling professional life in Ohio, he saw just how unfit he really
was for life anywhere. He would first have to decide exactly who he
wished to be before he could feel at home in whatever place he chose
for his own—if ever he could make such a choice. Surprisingly, though,
such thoughts no longer set his nerves on edge. He was, at last, learning
how to live with uncertainty. 32
He had found, as well, that Midwestern isolation had at least served
to sharpen his critical senses and make him less fearful of those he so
wished to attack. The “girl next door,” that sacred image with her
“proper Sunday ways” and “accustomed movement,” performing all
that is “godly and meet,” became for Ludwig a symbol of American
purity and of the superficiality of the country’s spiritual life; her facile
worship and “empty . . . oversweet hymns” were for him the sounds of
a life and a world devoid of meaning. He, too, had once been drawn
to this American icon, but now there arose out of the cry of his vastly
different life, an unbridled prayer, reserved for neither a fixed time nor
place, but spontaneous, a moment’s perception and inspiration poured
into a thought or a word.
And I, too, worship the Eternal. Far
Beyond the orbit of the thousandth star
Soars my wild prayer into the universe
Page 185 - [see page image]
184
Ludwig Lewisohn
Even from the arid desert of my woes—
Wherein these bundles of good Sunday clothes
Would only blanch and quiver, cringe and curse!
His neighbors’ empty expressions and the society that produced
them held nothing of value for him. He found its social life “a pan
tomime, a decorative device,” where people brought only their clothes
and their pretentious manners, their minds lacking all interest in any
thing beyond politics, business, and personal standing within the com
munity. As a man of literature, he had become a mere party fixture to
be spoken to by those who briefly sought his company without any real
concern for his thoughts. He had quickly sensed how even among his
colleagues, few really cared about the life of art or of ideas. Like so many
others in Columbus, they merely sought to make conversation with him
out of some dim recognition that he represented something of value in
their world; nor did they even understand his attempt to raise “into
permanence and beauty for our contemplation the experience of man
upon his way.” 34
He had, in fact, made them quite uncomfortable by speaking of such
things; and they, preferring to respond with lies rather than expose their
doubts to themselves, blithely brushed his thoughts and questions aside.
“There was no liberty of mind or emotion or personality or speech,” he
recorded, and after a while he refused one invitation, and then another,
and soon he had traded all of these ice-cream-sweetened evenings for
the honest hours he could spend in a local tavern with a similarly
disillusioned colleague, hours filled with real talk about real life and
with the earthy taste of beer. They “forgathered nightly in a bar-room
to their great physical comfort and spiritual refreshment, but hardly to
the advantage of their reputations as gentlemen and artists,” he recalled
with satisfaction in Crump. ' s
The limitations of this society were more formalized in the regressive
politics of the region, and of the nation as a whole. Reform in political
terms actually meant a further turning from personal liberty. Change
was to be fought, unless it brought to the governors of the social order
greater control over the lives of the country’s workers. “Well-fed, well-
groomed, they sat in their impenetrable stolidity, taking liberty with
everything except their minds.” Ludwig came to know and understand
these wielders of insidious economic weapons, those whose fingernails
were clean but whose hands were dirtied with the guilt of violence
used to break strikes and to starve children of bread and learning. “A
genuine as opposed to a pseudo-democratic bearing might have injured
their financial standing, their professional dignity,” he later wrote in Up
Page 186 - [see page image]
World of His Ancestors
Stream. “In public they all talk liberty. In reality, they were stealthier
than feudal lords." "
Temperance and censorship, as means of further control, had be
come issues of reform to these “maimed creatures.” In private, however,
they thought little of violating their own public standards; their sense
of purity was reserved for those whom they would keep in some other
place. Yet these same “stern advocates of virtue” had become victims
of their own repressed wills. This society, from top to bottom, from
master on down, had sickened and died. “The wine they have never
tasted, the white beauty they have never seen, the freedom of art they
have never known—all their unconscious hungers have turned to gall
and wormwood in their crippled souls. ”' ’
To this paralysis of will had been added, in recent years, a growing
fear of all that was not “home-town.” Anglo-American isolationism,
often bordering on xenophobia, made all other cultures suspect, and
placed those persons representative of them under a darkening suspicion.
The widening anti-German sentiments of the English mother country
had been rapidly transported to her cultural colony, where ties remained
tightly fastened despite more than a century and a quarter of political
independence. Long before America entered the Great War, there began
the accusative whispers of neighbors who spoke of indiscretions, or, far
worse, of seditious ideas. Such a society made of Ludwig, with his love
of German culture, an object of talk and suspicion; he, in turn, made of
this society a target of scorn and derision.
In May of 1914, Ludwig was awarded an honorary Doctorate
of Letters from the College of Charleston. It had been a last-minute
decision. Following Harris’s late recommendation (made out of guilt
over the previous year’s rejection?) and the faculty’s quick approval,
Randolph had petitioned the board of trustees, arguing that it was
unlikely for the college to ever again have an alumnus more qualified
for this degree. Their approval the day before commencement made
Ludwig’s appearance impossible, and the degree easier to grant. In
fact, notification reached him eleven days after the award had been
made. In accepting it, he spoke only of the college, of what it had
meant to him and of his deep gratitude “for the solidity, the orderliness,
the seriousness of the training I received as an undergraduate.” His
conspicuous neglect of any mention of his “home-town” had about
it a sense of this changing national mood. Charleston, he felt certain,
would follow this anti-German mood as the latest manifestation of its
long-standing distrust of alien peoples and ideas. ”
Harris’s rapidly formed position against Germany seemed proof
of this development, confirming Ludwig’s worst fears about the future
185
Page 187 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn
course of events in America. If someone as educated as Harris could
accept such baseless notions about a nation he had once so deeply
admired, what could he expect from others? The whole situation had
left him, as early as September 1914, with a renewed uneasiness toward
Harris. He had so wanted Harris, above all others, to understand his
position on the European question. Ludwig reassured him that despite
years of work in the field of German literature, his own first love had
remained the world of English letters. Yet he could not allow judgmental
errors concerning Germany to go unchallenged. And so he went on and
on, page after page, defending to Harris the land of his birth, now that
war with Britain had begun the previous month: “So I might as well
come out with it: I am pro-German heart and soul: I am pro-German to
such an extent that if I had no one dependent on me and were strong
physically I would make my way to Germany and enlist. It is not because
I love England less; it is because I love humanity and justice and certain
supreme values more.”
Germany, Ludwig maintained, was entitled to the same national
life enjoyed by Britain, France, Italy, and the United States—a thriving
commerce and industry for the people’s welfare, a strong military to
protect national interests, and colonies for trade and raw materials.
The population was expanding, outgrowing its homeland, in need of
additional territory—sixty-five million locked into an area smaller than
Texas. “In a word, the German people is throttled—deliberately—in
the north of Europe.” He thought the English terribly arrogant in their
presumption that the German people wished to be free of the kaiser
and his imperial designs. Kaiserdom was, after all, not imposed upon
the German nation, but the willing expression of the world’s leader
in industry, technology, science, and literature—the choice of a people
deserving its proper place among the world’s great powers.
Yet Ludwig’s own militancy bothered him. By nature a pacifist, he
wished not to be misunderstood. “Not that I admire militarism. God
forbid. I think it’s hideous. But if you’re surrounded by murderers, you’re
a fool not to have weapons. I see no sign of other nations lacking them. If
the German weapon is better, God knows it had to be!” 40 Susan Jenkins
Brown, his student at the time, later noted her impression of Ludwig’s
feelings toward the warring parties, and of his dedication to the values
of the creative life which militated against the bellicose atmosphere of
others in whose midst he was forced to live: “He was not ‘pro-German’
in the sense of being pro-Militaristic or anti-American: far from it. But,
like other Americans concerned with the human spirit, he suffered from
the defilement of the great German examples of that spirit, and could
not join in on it. My guess is that he was, at heart, a pacifist.”'
186
Page 188 - [see page image]
187
World of His Ancestors
This pacifism was no mere posturing for Ludwig, though it was
compromised by what he saw as justified self-defense on the part of
Germany—self-defense not nearly as much against England or France as
against the designing Russians who had misguided their allies into battle.
Germany and its Austrian ally were offering themselves as the first line
of defense against the long-feared Slavic horde and its Russian master,
now preparing to descend upon the civilization so carefully nurtured in
Western Europe. If Ludwig appeared willing to support Germany, it was
out of a commitment to this civilization. It was the only real hope against
this threatened descent into barbarism. Those who fought alongside
Russia—particularly England—were guilty of the most unconscionable
perfidy in history. Germany was prepared to protect Europe from the
“Russian Hun,” but Western Europe had stabbed her in the back. Her
actions in France and Belgium, as heinous as they appeared, were beyond
the question of right and wrong—they were committed of necessity,
justified in the light of the fragility of freedom and civilization. But
fighting on two fronts would most assuredly mean defeat for Germany.
Ludwig was as certain of this as he was of its meaning for the future
of humanity. Voicing a lifelong fear and theme, and one that echoed
through the decades afterward in Germany, he spoke of the “Russianisa-
tion of the world . . . not perhaps in your immediate lifetime or mine,”
but certainly within the next several generations. This was Peter the
Great’s testimony to the Russian and Slavic peoples, “rendered arrogant
by their victories.. . . And England, our England, my England, to her
undying shame, is in league with the unspeakable Russ.” 42
Though hard evidence is lacking, it is quite conceivable that other
factors influenced Ludwig’s thinking at this time. Beyond his support
of German cultural and geopolitical interests, there was his renascent
Jewishness, which could easily have led to a serious concern over the
depth of Russian anti-Semitism, already a dominant theme within Jew
ish circles for several decades. And there was Mary and her family’s
anti-German attitude, and his almost instinctual opposition to all they
upheld. Mary’s surface friendliness toward Jacques began to turn to
resentment during the early war months as he and Ludwig continued
to speak German to one another. She was further angered by Jacques’
use of a little skullcap of black silk, which he wore “to protect his head
from draughts.” Together, his speech and dress clearly emphasized his
alien nature and the newly emerging identity of her husband, which she
undoubtedly found ill-advised, if not offensive. (Jacques may also have
sought comfort in his ethnic past and worn the cap for reasons other
than warmth, reasons that Ludwig could not openly refer to in Crump
if he wished to heighten the larger issue of society’s puritanical control
Page 189 - [see page image]
188
Ludwig Lewisohn
over the individual.) As Ludwig would realize by the time of Crump's
writing, the war had helped him to focus on the important issues in
his own life, and to release him from the petty domestic conflicts that
had for so long disturbed his attention and depleted the energy needed
to confront the more serious questions that lay ahead. “Thus the war
became, in a strange way, a sort of benefit to him. That mighty and
epic preoccupation with its implications involving all the issues of life
and thought, helped his mind to withdraw itself from the grotesque and
sordid miseries amid which he lived.’'' 1
This inherently contradictory posture of anti-militarism and, yet,
excitement over the possible benefits to himself and to civilization by
a German victory, coupled with a growing sense of liberation that the
conflict at first seemed to foretell, was not all that strange a position for
Ludwig to find himself in, particularly when seen against the backdrop
of those younger, discontented Europeans with whose work he was
familiar. Having failed to perceive the economic and expansionist mo
tives that lay behind their governments’ desire for war, these European
proponents of change, whether less or more radical, Central Powers or
Allied—writers, scientists, educators, and the like, intellectuals of differ
ing stripes whose discontent had found little outlet prior to this universal
upheaval—had welcomed the Great War as a cleansing baptismal deluge
that was to mark the rebirth of their world into a new post-Victorian age.
Even those who later became well known for their opposition to
the war—Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Henri Barbusse, Karl Kraus,
Stefan Zweig, and Nikolai Lenin—saw massive devastation as prelimi
nary to a new beginning. As a group, only the middle class, the settled
bourgeoisie of each nation, feared the changes that war would bring.
It was they who were most in need of a jingoistic pitch to their basest
patriotic feelings before they would accept the role that had been as
signed to them by their rulers. Those who sought change needed no
coaxing—they gladly assumed those roles which they believed had been
self-determined. Before the war, and long afterward, the spirit of pacifism
ruled their hearts and minds. But a kind of hysteria had seized hold
of them temporarily as the first guns were fired. It was felt by many
that the anomie, the rootlessness, and the lack of a clear sense of the
future and their part in its development—and, certainly, the corrupt
social order imposed upon them by industrialization and capitalism,
and its attendant cultural forms—would be swept away by the firestorm
of war. Rupert Brooke, the English poet who died of blood poisoning
from an infected insect bite in the early days of the war, symbolized this
hysteria born of desperation and the utter futility that was to meet their
every effort:
Page 190 - [see page image]
189
World of His Ancestors
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage. 44
Ludwig’s similarly conflicted, but hopeful, thoughts of the war’s
effect upon civilization’s future and upon his own renewal would not find
their public voice for another year, and then only partially. In October
1915, the Literary Digest, not yet reflecting the anti-German mood
that would impose unofficial censorship upon the publishing world,
printed Ludwig’s first broadside concerning Germany’s victimization by
the many nations that had unjustly fallen upon her:
West and North
France sends the armies of old hatred forth.
And at her shore waits an invincible fleet—
For Milton’s England, once our star by night,
Untarnished in betrayal and defeat,
Now Chaffers hoarsely with the Muscovite. 45
Another year would pass before he would again speak of the war
publicly. By then he would be far less restrained, even choosing George
Viereck’s uncompromisingly pro-German magazine, The International:
A Review of Two Worlds, as his vehicle, despite rather well-founded
rumors that Viereck was a paid agent of the German government (af
ter the war, he would become the exiled kaiser’s ghostwriter), and in
disregard of his own earlier falling-out with Viereck because “he had
no principle of any kind,” as he had told Harris the previous year. 46 (In
1910, Viereck had published his Confessions of a Barbarian, in which he
had written, “The Germans are the salt of the earth, the chosen people
of the New Order,” basing his ideas on those of two notoriously anti-
Semitic writers, Comte de Gabineau and Houston Chamberlain.) 47 Self-
defensively lodging his most vigorous protest against Germany’s enemies
in August 1916, Ludwig wrote in his “American Ballad of the War,”
Dare, then, to call us traitors,
Who know her cause is just,
Who giveth light and life to men,
And lifts them from the dust! 48
In this morality play, France became Judas, England his knife, and Russia
the Roman legions prepared to attack the innocent lamb, Germany, as
a vulture would its prey. Mindless, controlled armies of wage-slaves,
exemplified by England’s “seven million paupers whom their lords cast
Page 191 - [see page image]
190
Ludwig Lewisohn
forth to die,” had been set against the true republic of the German
people. He pictured Germany a workers’ paradise, mistaking, from afar,
a different but equally rigid form of social control for what he thought
to be a freer society. Unlike those nations whose leaders had hoped to
obliterate what appeared to be a developing socialist nation, he believed
Germany incapable of robbing “a brother’s heart of hope. . . [or] a
brother’s lip of song.” How then could he not speak out before the
larger public and, as a teacher, against those who had “poisoned the
minds of young people . . . against the soul of the German people?”
The real horrors that would follow Germany’s defeat and humili
ation went unperceived by him, as by most others. Perhaps their roots
were too deeply buried to be seen from the artistic heights he had climbed
and from which he had sent forth his pronouncements. Yet how ironic
it seems, in the shadowed aftermath of the debacle that was to engulf
the world in the next quarter century, to find mention in his poem of
“that Eternal destiny that seeth all things clear.If the innocence of a
whole generation was being lost in the trenches of that first Great War,
the birth of a new innocence in the future would soon be made forever
impossible by the ashes of Auschwitz.
But in Ohio, in September 1914, this future was unimaginable. All
Ludwig could see was how wrongly Harris had judged what had become
the “luming [sic] question for every thinking creature at present. ” Gently,
though firmly, Ludwig reassured the aging gentleman that his error had
come not from the exercising of a mean spirit but from a lack of contact
with the German side of the struggle. Though little encouraged by his
experiences, Ludwig still hoped that reasonable men like Harris could re
main sufficiently detached to examine these world problems objectively.
“Lorgive me,” he implored Harris. “But it passes my understanding how
men can fail to see these pretty obvious facts.'”"
Yet obviously they could, even over the minor issues posed by
literature. As Ludwig had already discovered, the Times of London
had ceased reviewing German-related materials, among them his own
Hauptmann volumes. Nor was the British press alone in deprecating,
through silence, the efforts of those concerned with German culture. As
early as October 23, 1913, the Nation's review of the second Haupt
mann volume had chastised the playwright’s “German worshippers”
for making more of him than his writings had warranted. The editorial
staff, guardians of Anglo-American culture, had found Hauptmann’s
vision of life “immoderate,” and the problems he portrayed part of
a Germany they could no longer recognize as the land they had once
admired, now grown totally alien to their own world—“conditions
and characters nothing quite analogous to which can be found outside
Page 192 - [see page image]
191
World of His Ancestors
of Hauptmann’s fatherland.” Life in England and America was of a
different, more pleasant order, they believed. Passing final judgment on
his work, they promised that “no English reader will rise from the perusal
of these plays with the consciousness of having been in the presence of
a great dramatic genius."' 1
Hauptmann was condemned, out-of-hand, simply for being a Ger
man. The injustice of such prejudice, Ludwig felt, was appalling, but
understandable, given the circumstances. There would come a time, he
would later write in April 1916, when Germany’s preeminence would
be acknowledged: “Here, as elsewhere, the world at large has not even
begun to awaken to the central fact of our whole civilization; namely:
the fact that in the past forty years Germany has passed through a
period which I can only—with the utmost scrupulousness and scholarly
conscientiousness—compare to the great renaissance. In all the sciences,
in all the arts that aid or adorn the life of man, this modern Germany has
results to show that are abounding in wealth and that set new standards
of achievement.” 52
The time, however, was far away, and while he awaited its arrival,
he watched the years of critical neglect sharply curtail the sale of his
books, and with it, his hope of financial relief. It seemed as if his own
fate was bound up with that of Germany, that as the war had sunk
into the muddy trenches, so too had his life. As Hohlfeld noted on
seeing the fifth Hauptmann volume in February 1915, “It’s a pity that
your translation . . . must come out at this time when German interests
even in the field of literature have temporarily lost the active support
and sympathy of many who have voiced their interests under normal
conditions.”
Even his volume on The Modern Drama, published a month later,
received a similar greeting. True, his discussion of French, Irish, and
English dramatists, alongside their German counterparts, had elicited
some positive reactions. The Nation, appearing to overlook his earlier
indiscretions, had called it a work of distinctive merit, while H. L.
Mencken enthusiastically noted in the Smart Set how Ludwig’s work
had mapped “the progress of the modern drama with skill and accu
racy.” Aptly considering its place within “the general trend of modern
thinking,” he had provided his readers with a volume of “more coherent
criticism than ten thousand of the rhapsodic tomes that give such delight
to the Drama League of America."’'
But the New York Times, by far the most influential of the three, was
much less forgiving, branding the book “perceptively pro-German” and
characterizing it as shamelessly written in a style that was “bold, direct
and almost lusty in its virility.” Hunnish and sexually arousing, it was
Page 193 - [see page image]
192
Ludwig Lewisohn
work that no respectable person could even think of purchasing. When
few did, Ludwig cried out against the injustice of it, asking Huebsch
rhetorically if the Times was “so thoroughly sold to England that it
can’t even review [fairly] books that don’t slander Germany?"'
Huebsch held a view of the war and its consequences similar to
Ludwig’s, and as the years of conflict deepened America’s involvement
and its people’s xenophobia, he grew convinced of its more serious
threat to individual freedom. In 1948, he would write from the per
spective of another war of the long-term dangers posed by these earlier
developments:
My publishing course with respect to the war 1914-18 was not deliberately
planned; it had its origins in my anti-militarism (I might call it pacifism if
I knew how to define that word). I was influenced, too, by the utterances
of sober students of public affairs which revealed the gulf between govern
mental statements of the causes of war and the truth. I became satisfied,
too, of the relations between war and private profit. And as we went along
I became aware of how the red herring of propaganda was drawn across the
path of public opinion.. . . The attitude of our government during the war
is illustrated by the fact that the Post Office Department was permitted to
suppress several of [my publications] although by no stretch of the imagi
nation could any one of them be regarded as obstructing American ideals. 56
There were, of course, positive things happening in Ludwig’s life
in the spring of 1915. In March he had been elected to the presidency
of the Drama League’s Columbus chapter, 57 while his new contract at
Ohio State that July gave him a 25 percent raise and the dubious honor of
assuming some administrative responsibilities as a reward for excellent
service. 58 These were things to feel encouraged by, things that should
have lifted his spirits, yet they seemed isolated and of small consequence
amidst the many crushing events of the world and in his daily life.
As he wrote Leonard on August 12, “Externally, only externally, my
situation seems not so bad. Yet my battle is still very severe and my
personal sorrows and disappointments have taken the spring out of
my innards!"" 1
The equilibrium he had begun to regain after the first year following
his mother’s death had been seriously compromised by the events that
had followed. Fears of another emotional breakdown had already begun
to trouble him by February 1915, when he appealed to Hohlfeld for aid
in beginning a new search for another teaching post. The chairmanship
of the German Department at the City College of New York was vacant,
and as hope born of desperation conquered reality, he thought it might
be his. “I am asking my friends, especially Professor Thomas and you,
to make a special effort for me. I need the job—I need it as badly as
Page 194 - [see page image]
193
World of His Ancestors
possible. My father is a helpless invalid in my home, my wife’s girls
are growing up, we’re all nervous and shaky and the pressure of life is
grinding!”"’
By August, reality had reconquered hope, and desperation had
turned into deepening despair. In search of understanding, he cataloged
its causes for Huebsch in what he called his “inner history”:
The strain of summer school was intense. I never worked harder. That came
at the end of a long and wearing winter. To aggravate the situation most
bitterly, father grew alarmingly worse. It got to the point that for weeks
and weeks I had to feed, bathe him, etc., and alone. I came so near to
complete collapse that, at the urgent advice of physician and friends, I was
finally forced to commit him to the Columbus State Hospital for the insane.
Of course, I am allowed to pay about $20 a month and the institution,
considering what it is, is above criticism. But I shall never recover from the
blow. I don’t mean that I whine. I don’t even mention it. But when I consider
the towering injustice of what I had to spend my hard won earnings for,
what I have been crippled by debt for—and that this is all I can do for my
admirable, generous, gifted father in his need and misfortune, I swear to
you that I don’t see what keeps me from kicking over this whole blunder
and shame and disgrace that is life. 61
On September 3, he again reported to Huebsch that he felt extremely
depressed, and begged for “tenderness to my feelings.”’ And then,
six days later, came his strongest statement of suicidal intent since the
desperate days in New York years before. “I know how damnably
abandoned my life is. So much so that when I’ve fulfilled my obligations
to you and one or two other people [among them Julius Rosenwald
of Sears & Roebuck, who, like Huebsch, had lent him several hundred
dollars] I’ll step out, somehow.” By the letter’s end, Ludwig’s writing had
become erratic, his hand unsteady. “I don’t care what in hell happens.
My mother is dead; my father is insane. I can’t worry them. I’d rather be
a tramp or dead than live this life much longer.... I don’t give a damn.
But I’ll hang on till I’m square with the two or three people who desire
it of me. Not a day longer.”
He ended the letter with his initials rather than his name, and en
closed them in an unbroken circle, as if to demonstrate how surrounded
and suffocated he felt; and yet, it was as if the two or three people
referred to in these letters, though suffocating him as so much else in the
world had done, were the very things that could still define his world
and give it shape and focus—enough, at least, to help him to go on a
little longer, if only to fulfill the moral obligations that had become his
lifeline and escape route from oblivion in moments such as this. In the
end, they saved him from insanity or death by keeping him in the world
long enough to recover his balance and renew his search for meaning
Page 195 - [see page image]
194
Ludwig Lewisohn
and purpose. In his darkest moments, he could still rely in strange ways
upon these few people, having never cut his last remaining ties to them,
if only for selfish reasons. Of the two who remained, Huebsch was now
the only person with whom he could share his deepest thoughts and
feelings. “My God,” he cried out, “I have to let down the barriers to
some one. I know you won’t betray me.” 63
Nor would Hauptmann’s work. Ludwig had always lived much of
his life through the literature he most admired. Fictional resolutions
of real-life problems were as important to him as those offered by the
people he knew, if not more so, for art could instruct him more ably
than life. From Hauptmann he had learned that no man could long
endure the clash of expectation and reality without bending one or the
other, or losing himself in the attempt. Each man turned to his dreams,
and the artist to those dreams of greater truth and beauty whose clash
with reality would leave a blinding but purifying vision. “The best part
of life remains the dream which is permanent long after the reality is
sere and withered and is as though it had not been.” Ludwig saw that
the true artist always returned “to the old gods, the undying hopes; he
stands at the gate of an invisible world and has glimpses of the supra-
sensual and eternal,” attempting to find some sense of permanence in an
impermanent and imperfect world.
It was this attempt, along with those who needed him, that kept
him alive during this period of his life. The weeks dragged on, and as
the fall semester approached its end, Ludwig began to plan his next,
brief escape to New York in January 1916. Anticipating a change of
scenery, and the chance to visit with old friends and to renew his ties
with the center of America’s more progressive literary life, soothed his
troubled emotions. Once in New York, he found little time to do all that
he had planned. Of the many he had wanted to see, Theodore Dreiser,
his “ chef maitre," was foremost on his list. But they could never settle
on a mutually available time, and ultimately had to postpone their visit
for the indefinite future. 64
As quickly as he had left Ohio, he was back again, back to the
reality of his marriage and Mary’s children and his father and Ohio State
and the unending debt and the ceaseless work. But however brief, the
escape had been beneficial. He returned home with a renewed spirit and
a broader perspective on the future. Months of steady work, without talk
of suicide, followed. He consolidated his debts into a single loan from
the university’s president, and then began to work on a series of lectures
to be presented at Wisconsin and, subsequently, published by Huebsch
as The Spirit of Modern German Literature. Though he knew of the
critical and sales problems it would face, he was now more willing to go
Page 196 - [see page image]
195
World of His Ancestors
ahead with the book, and even sought a contract for another Hauptmann
volume. The verse plays had not been studied or translated, and Ludwig
felt it was time to do his share “for the glory of poetry and the poetic
drama.” For the opportunity, he would charge Huebsch less than he had
for the earlier volumes.”'
There is much in Ludwig’s writings and correspondence of these
months to indicate that disappointment, sadness, and misery continued
to be deeply felt by him because of his personal life and the world around
him. But he no longer seemed to suffer from the psychically crippling
depression that had again brought him close to the edge of nothingness.
Instead, he was more willing than ever to get on with the struggle at
hand. All through the years, he had witnessed so much pretense, so
much sham, that finally he had declared his own war on the mendacity
that held his world together. Domestically, professionally, and politically,
everything seemed to have been founded and sustained by lies. Only the
resolve to pursue whatever truth that awaited him seemed viable. “The
poet has become a seeker,” he remarked in his introduction to the fifth
Hauptmann volume. It was the poet who most felt the need to go beyond
the false call of the moment, who “questions the nature and quality of
various ultimate values . . . [and] abandons the field of the personal and
individual life and sends his soul into the infinite.''””
This same quest had attracted Ludwig to the modern drama, with
its attempt to seek the fulfillment of individual needs in a seemingly
uncaring universe and a world grown destructive through man’s own
devices. “Wherever human beings strive and suffer—there is drama!”
he wrote in his study for Huebsch that year. “And so our playwrights
have enormously extended the subject-matter of the theatre, and have
vindicated the spiritual and artistic values that lurk in the common
lives of men.” The strain of wartime, he asserted, had only lent greater
credence to their message, and to his support of these German writers
in whose work this new drama had achieved its highest development.
“Nothing, as a matter of fact, is so impressive or so heartening as the
number of souls, created with didactic consciousness or premeditation
by the German naturalists, who under the tyranny of hunger, of passion,
of despair, still toil and battle for some ideal value: for beauty, for
justice, for liberty, for inner freedom, for truth.” Out of this new vision,
he fervently believed, would come a new order, and a “life of free
personalities in a free world."'’
Ludwig refused to deny that modern German literature was the most
advanced expression of this emerging vision. All of German civilization
(as opposed to its militarism) had become, for him, an embodiment
of this quest. “The grasping of experience in its totality through an
Page 197 - [see page image]
196
Ludwig Lewisohn
impassioned yet self-governed participation in its concrete forms” had
pointed the way into the future. His own experiences had served to
confirm this hope, particularly his life in Ohio. As he delivered his
Wisconsin lectures in 1915, he asked his listeners, “Have you writhed
under the cool observation of some contemporary schoolmaster that
shopwork and Sophocles are equivalent instruments of education? Have
you seen the machine-made houses, furnishings, churches, creeds, polit
ical opinions, ethical prejudices—the vast and awful spiritual levels of
our own civilization?” Only out of Germany, he believed, could there
arise “values ever higher and more personal which shall make life, for
a constantly increasing number of men, deeper, richer, more reasonable
and more beautiful."’ '
As a means of searching for these higher personal values, Ludwig
again turned to the writing of poetry. A series of occasional midnight
hours, strung together throughout the late months of 1915, had pro
duced several plays of “lyrical and philosophic verse.” He had achieved
something new for himself and, as he boasted, something new for English
literature as well. He was proud to have accomplished a “fusion of
dramatic and lyrical elements” as an expression of this new stage in
his development as a writer. It seamed the most meaningful thing he had
done in quite some time. 69
“The Garden,” subtitled “a modern morality,” gave Ludwig a
chance to portray himself as a man straining at the ropes of convention,
seeking to break loose, but held back by those who would heal his
“sick will”:
The Clergyman: Ah, Can you medicine a soul
By proud, rebellious sin oppressed?
The Justice: That from the ancient, just control
Of law and custom seeks release?
The Physician: I know not; I can give him peace.
The protagonist’s wife had thought him mad, and had refused to accom
pany him to where “In the good hills and golden air / We shall relive
our perished dream.” Instead, she offered prayers to a God who would
intercede “with music of sequestered days.” Deeply hurt by her refusal,
he left her for the lonely pursuit of that persistent vision of his youth,
what he had long seen as “the daily task-work of the race”:
I go
Where in the sombre foliage glow
Lips that shall never be denied,
Exquisite limbs uncrucified,
The deathless passion, swift to seek,
For love’s sake, on the loftiest peak
Page 198 - [see page image]
197
World of His Ancestors
That fronts the barriers of the sky,
One flower the vision saw—and die!
Though resolute, he feared never reaching his journey’s end, to “Die,
and never scaled my Sinai.” Hints of disaffection with Mary appear
earlier in the poem, and in the end it is the man’s mother who comforts
and guides him at this fearful moment. She was God’s gift to him, and
as “Eternal Vigilance,” “uprose and passed where chafe the seas,” upon
whose unending waves he sailed once more. She had made his quest
her own, offering him the shelter of love “that healeth every scar / and
righteth every wrong.”
Yet behind his dream and his quest there remained the nagging doubt
that perhaps “the void be all!” His mother comforted him, insisting that
it mattered not, for the end was in the beginning, to be found in the
questing itself. She reassured him that her presence would be with him
throughout the many years before he would come to this understanding.
And with a final “dear word of blessing and release,” she urged him to
go on. “Even unto death let thy soul burn / If that thou needest. Let it
toss / Upon the crest of every wave.” Renewed by the comfort of her
presence, he set out to find his soul. What was the point of “Life and
more life! Unto what end?” he asked. Surely there was some meaning;
or could there really be no purpose after all?
For guidance, he returned to his mother’s thoughts on life. She had
often explained that beyond the freedom and the quest lay the fulfillment
that would come from having reached deep within himself, finding there
some inner strength that had touched the eternal peace. “Unto what
end?” he asked again. None, he answered,
Unless in glory and vision each
Once, ere death throttles us, may reach
Himself in his divinest mood
Of self-fulfillment, hear the speech
Of God break through the solitude
Eternal—the great word that sings
His music from the sum of things! 70
Here were themes he could rework again and again in his search
for some enduring answers. If life was a series of disappointments, then
that disappointing life itself might be a sign of something eternal. The
artist’s task was to transform “the concrete realities of experience into
the domain of the timeless.. . . The faith by which [he] lives, is the
presence in him of the creative power,” akin to that greater creative
power beyond himself. 71 If youth, with its promises and dreams and
passions, was fading, then he would recall it into being by the power
Page 199 - [see page image]
198
Ludwig Lewisohn
of a “symbol of that eternal creative process in the grasp of which
the whole world travails”; he would, by force of will, inhabit forever
“that peculiar world which is the landscape not only of the earth, but
of the soul.” 72
Minna’s death had released him from the past and set him on his
road to Damascus. The external events of a world at war had heightened
his spiritual crisis, as it had his struggles with Mary and the Ohio State
community. As part and product of this alien world, Mary had ceased
being either symbol or muse, replaced by the returning and enduring
vision of his mother as the “Memories Matris Dilectissimae” to whom
he would dedicate the Spirit volume. Ludwig needed to celebrate the
renewed life he had discovered, but there could be no celebration with
Mary and her children, nor within the confines of the academic and social
worlds he frequented in Ohio and elsewhere. The prevailing attack upon
German culture had added to the long-standing conflict he had had with
the larger society, and having been made more acutely aware of himself
as an outsider, he came to feel more protective of the cultural elements at
the root of his otherness. Minna, as the embodiment of the dual cultural
heritage central to his irrefutable self, had again become his muse. Feeling
other, while feeling again the pulse of his mother’s spirited heart and the
warmth of her poetic hand upon his, Ludwig became at once both more
German and more Jewish.
Minna’s death thus brought him in contact with the local Jewish
community of Columbus (including lectures to the German Reform
Synagogue’s Sisterhood as early as 1914) and, if at first tangentially, with
the Ohio State chapter of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association. The
association was first established at Harvard University in 1906, and a
local group had organized itself at Ohio in December 1910. The society’s
stated purpose—“the Study and Advancement of Jewish Culture and
Ideals”—attracted Ludwig’s attention soon after his arrival and, in May
1913, his participation in gaining for the group the university’s formal
recognition. A banquet was held to celebrate the occasion, and it was
later recorded that “the enthusiastic responses of the members of the
faculty and of the representatives of the Jewish community showed the
most cordial spirit of welcome” to the newly sanctioned group. In
April 1915, Ludwig addressed the society on a topic of Jewish interest, 74
and by the following year he had arranged a lengthy series of talks to
the group that were, in typically impulsive fashion, to lead to “a com
pendium or anthology of the intellectual contributions of Jews to Aryan
civilization in fifteen volumes, titled ‘The Great Jewish Writers.’ ” An
article appearing in the Ohio State Lantern of March 2,1917, described
an even more extensive offering of topics to be discussed that spring by
Page 200 - [see page image]
199
World of His Ancestors
newly established “Study Circles.” These were to include, among others,
“Recent History of the Jews,” “Solution of Jewish Questions as Brought
Out by Leaders of Jewish Thought,” “Economic Status of the Jews in
Various Countries,” “The Jew as Portrayed in Literature of Gentiles,”
“The Survey of Jewish History,” and “Religious Renaissance in Modern
Jewish Literature.” Ludwig’s hand was clearly present throughout these
meetings and at others discussing Zionism and relief for European Jews
affected by the war, gatherings that assuredly influenced the growth of
his Jewish consciousness. 75
Ludwig’s reputation within this relatively closed Jewish world
quickly spread, a probable factor in his continued participation within
it. Invited in 1915, and again in 1916, by Henry Hurwitz, the founder
of the original Menorah Society at Harvard and editor of the national
association’s Menorah Journal, to publish his various talks, he was asked
the following year to give a lecture at the University of Cincinnati on
“The Modern Yiddish Drama” for a program of “dramatic study and
presentation” sponsored by its Menorah Society. (Through Ludwig’s
connection with the Menorah Journal, Leonard would publish his poem
“Menorah” in the first issue.) 76 Though he repeatedly declined Hurwitz’s
offer to publish his lectures (perhaps believing his statements not yet
worthy of print), there is little question that he was seeking a broader
role within the Jewish world as a part of his search for direction. As he
recalled some forty years later,
Even before I studied the Aleph Beth, I made friends in Columbus of certain
Jewish families (I remember old Mrs. Lazarus driving me in her electric run
about . . .) and helped, in spite of my terrible ignorance, to found the first
Menorah Society at Ohio State University. My way, then, was from the start
a religious way, a metaphysical way. I read and re-read what I then called
the Old Testament and looked about me on a visit to New York [in January
1916] for selections from the Talmud in German or French or English and
bought a now forgotten volume, Hebraic Literature, edited by Dr. Maurice
H. Harris, which even then I had to buy at second hand, and so began my
studies of Talmud and Midrash. 77
Through this involvement and study, he began to combine a new set
of social and intellectual pursuits with those still held from earlier years,
creating a different synthesis for a life no longer divided against itself.
The final missing ingredient had been found, and there now remained
the task of defining a new pattern of existence for himself out of the
disparate elements of his being. For if changed, he was not as yet whole.
The pieces were laid out before him; the task of reassembling them in a
non-dissembling manner lay ahead. A dozen years later, he would reflect
with satisfaction upon the choice he had made at this time:
Page 201 - [see page image]
200
Ludwig Lewisohn
The conclusion then which my contact with Jews justified and confirmed
was this: to rise from my lack and confusion into a truly human life, a life
with its right relation to man and God, to the concrete and universal, it
was necessary for me to affirm in quite another fashion than I had yet done
the reintegration of my entire consciousness with the historic and ethnic
tradition of which I was a part. My Gentile friends and comrades were
instinctively integrated with their own. That completeness and assurance
could, alas, never be the portion of my Jewish generation. But I believed
that, when I had achieved that integration as far as possible, I would no
longer need or want to ask: What do you live by? What ultimate satisfaction
sustains you? I would not ask. I would know. I would live the secret and it
would be mine too. And I may say at once that that belief has proved itself
to be wholly true. 78
His earliest public, self-assertive statement reflecting this more fully
integrated life came in May 1915, in the introduction to his translation
of David Pinski’s Yiddish drama The Treasure. For Jews of all kinds, the
Yiddish stage became a point of entry into the larger Jewish world they
all shared, each in his own way. “In what sense did the Jews have a true
theater?” the Broadway director and producer Harold Clurman would
ask in the years after assimilation would bring about its demise. “In the
sense that the fairly religious, the semireligious, the ignorant, the quasi-
ignorant, the aspiring—all could gather in one place, in the theater.”
Here Ludwig could join those to whom he had offered this first English
rendering of a modern Jewish play, attempting to remain true to its word
order and inflection, so that “the soul of the work” and of the people he
proudly claimed as his own would find its proper expression. “Neither
have I struck out all the imprecations—so strange to an American ear—
that abound in the speech of the Jewish folk. For they express the almost
angry tenderness of a people acquainted with grief, the ‘bitter heart’
that has often almost forgotten the uses of delight. They have nothing
in common with an Aryan curse. Under their harshness is the echo of
immemorial sorrow, under their sharp impatience a power to endure in
faith and hope from generation to generation.”''
Ludwig felt confident that he, too, shared in this “power to endure,”
and in the introduction to his 1916 translation of George Hirschfeld’s
German drama The Mothers he spoke approvingly of the Berlin Jew
who, like Minna, had sought to remain a Jew, but had tossed aside her
“archaic Orientalism” in favor of those German cultural elements she
had found most satisfying. One could easily be both—neither was mutu
ally exclusive once the appropriate adjustments had been made. This, he
now understood, had been his mother’s goal, however inadequately she
had realized it. “Woven into the very texture of our souls,” such lasting
impressions of childhood offered the guidance he needed as he sought his
Page 202 - [see page image]
201
World of His Ancestors
own way in the world. With Hirschfeld’s hero, he could proclaim, “My
inner strength has been set free!” 80 But he found his confidence tested in
the late summer of 1916, as Mary’s unending financial and emotional
demands aggravated the problems he now faced as the United States
prepared for war against Germany and unthinking patriotism spread
among his colleagues and fellow citizens. As a German Jew, his position
at Ohio State was becoming less and less tenable.
Returning from a week’s vacation that August, unrefreshed and not
“flourishing,” as he reported to Huebsch, he had still to face the long
standing obligations he had toward his publisher and his university
president. To these had been added several new assignments over the
past spring and summer, in an attempt to clear his debts. Translation
had become easy for him, almost automatic, but it took time away from
the work he really wanted to do. He had hurriedly finished a never-
to-be-published translation—“which I hate for having done,” dictating
it in “enormous chunks at stated intervals—15,000 words at a stretch
twice a week, sometimes only once. (This is confidential.)” Doubleday,
Page had unexpectedly sent this work to him on behalf of the Drama
League, and though he cared little for it, he saw their delay in forwarding
the second German play he had contracted for as part of the trouble he
had always had with such people. “They’re trying to play me a very
shabby trick.. . . These very rich people have elastic methods. I might
have known of old.”
Added to these was a third translation he had reluctantly accepted
out of financial necessity. Waiting to begin the work for Doubleday,
hoping their hesitation meant merely a delay and not a cancellation,
and watching his debts mount day by day, he had signed a contract with
Alice Lewisohn to produce a work she would use for the Festspiel being
planned for New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse—as if his days as a
hack writer were now returning. Even the move to cheaper quarters,
scheduled for September 1, would bring insufficient relief. He would
have to write on and on in his “desperate struggles to keep up with the
financial race.” Recalling Heine’s thoughts at a similar point in his life, he
complained to Huebsch that “at an exhibition of jaded, driven, irritated
nervous systems, mine would take the first prize. The trouble is that my
nerves are sick. I know! Pve cried wolf so often. The fact remains."''
Hoping to calm Ludwig by appealing to reason, Huebsch blamed
the hesitancy of Doubleday and the Drama League on the gathering
war clouds that had cast their shadow over much of the art world.'-' It
was something Ludwig himself could appreciate, for he had long been
proceeding cautiously with his book on modern German literature. “I
write slowly,” he had written Hohlfeld that February as he prepared the
Page 203 - [see page image]
202
Ludwig Lewisohn
book with more care than he had any previous work. “I’m anxious to
write well—especially to build the lectures so that the fundamental ideas
shall be very clear.’" 1 What he feared most were politically motivated
attacks upon his work, and upon the great works he was promoting
through his study. “I shall be scrupulously objective and write with
scrupulous detachment from political issues."” It was clear that many
of Germany’s American supporters had lost all perspective. “The whole
crowd had abandoned all sense of measure,” he wrote Huebsch in
September. 85 He would try to steer the middle course and win their hearts
and minds by carefully demonstrating the virtue of the German cause.
By the time The Spirit of Modern German Literature appeared in
November 1916, he had already begun to work on a larger piece dealing
with the whole of German literature. In it he hoped to be faultlessly
accurate in his judgment, “not for any personal reason, but from the
point of view of the soundness of my service to the cause.” But the fear
that his readers would see his efforts as politically based and without
scholarly merit remained. He was quick to answer the charge even before
it was made, stating in the very first sentence of the preface that “this
small volume is not polemical in spirit or intention.
Huebsch was himself now embroiled in political controversy, having
attempted to be a neutral voice and a buffer between pro- and anti-
German extremes as early as November 1915, when he joined Henry
Ford on a “Peace Expedition” to Europe. Again, in June 1916, as one
of a hundred individuals (“with few pacifists and few pro-Germans”),
among them financier Jacob Schiff, Rear Admiral French Chadwick, the
president of Brown University, Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard,
Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Hull House’s Jane Addams, he had met in
New York to organize an American Neutrality Conference Committee,
with Hamilton Holt as chairman. On August 30 the committee had met
with Woodrow Wilson to convince him of the importance of America’s
role as a peacemaker. After a ten-minute, perfectly reasoned response
to the group’s request for fair and meaningful U.S. arbitration of the
European war, Wilson proposed a conference of all neutral nations,
with a settlement between the warring parties to be reached by majority
vote, without any apparent attempt to impartially adjudicate the moral
claims of those involved in the conflict. “We were dismissed pleasantly,”
Huebsch remembered, “and went out to lunch somewhere or other, and
everybody was flabbergasted. Because the real purpose of the thing had
been thwarted by his—not misconstruction—[but] by the construction
that he placed on the idea, and that was the end of it.” 87
In the early weeks of the war, Wilson had urged neutrality upon all
Americans, saying that “The United States must be neutral in fact as
Page 204 - [see page image]
203
World of His Ancestors
well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must
be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our
sentiments . . . [and remain] a nation that neither sits in judgment upon
others nor is disturbed in her counsels and which keeps herself fit and free
to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace
of the world."” Wilson had used this promise of American neutrality
to win reelection to the presidency the year Huebsch and the committee
visited him, employing the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war” to
rally support. But as Huebsch and the others had already suspected, far
more clearly than some of the more radical writers like John Reed of the
Masses, international misadventure was taking precedence as always.
Members of the committee continued to apply what little pressure they
could, retaining a small bit of hope that they would ultimately have some
influence upon events that were already far beyond their control. When
William Jennings Bryan addressed a rally sponsored by the committee
at New York’s Madison Square Garden on February 3, 1917, his words
fell upon the government’s deafened ears. Huebsch’s hopes that “the
existence of such a conference will be an incentive to the belligerents to
turn to it with their complaints against each other” had been ill-founded.
Wilson had failed them, despite his reputed leanings toward peace. By
February 1917, it was too late. 89
Ludwig had been doubtful of the committee’s success, but wished
them well, though he believed that nothing short of military victory
would end the conflict. The situation in Europe had worsened, and there
seemed little room for compromise. In his assessment of the situation, the
Allies were simply unwilling to admit their own wrongdoing (including
the death of over seventeen thousand German and Austrian prisoners of
war through starvation, physical abuse, and medical neglect), unfairly
placing the entire responsibility for the war’s outbreak upon the Central
Powers. Propaganda ruled the moment. Surely, he thought, there must
be some ultimate justice in the universe by which Germany would be
vindicated. “Or else this is the kind of a universe one oughtn’t want to
live in. There’s only one absolute evil and that is falsehood. And the
Allies are fighting for a lie, with a lie on their lips."“
There were other lies, lies not unrelated to this one, lies that Ludwig
had long been fighting, and when his friend Theodore Dreiser (“the most
suppressed and insuppressible writer in America”) asked for support
in his latest battle with the censors, Ludwig gladly gave it. Attempts
were being made to suppress Dreiser’s most recent novel, The Genius,
published the year before. Ludwig was appalled by the continuing efforts
to destroy creativity and truth. “You must know the depth of my indig
nation and disgust over the matter,” he wrote Dreiser on November
Page 205 - [see page image]
204
Ludwig Lewisohn
28, 1916, thanking him for the copy he had sent of his latest work,
Plays of the Natural and Supernatural. Ludwig thought it a good first
dramatic effort. He had been quite impressed by the volume, finding
“here and there some quite new and powerful extension of possibilities
in her dramatic form.” He had been slow in thanking Dreiser, and had
written only when “a quite noticeable sting of conscience” had finally
overtaken him. There should have been an earlier response, he wrote,
but he had been too unstable to have responded in any meaningful way.
After so many months, he hoped his friend would understand and accept
his penitent offering of a small gift. “I put off writing to you . . . because
your communication meant so much to me: I hadn’t any adequate form
of answering at my command. I detested the notion of the conventional
verbiage. Various inner conflicts, too, and a certain amount of rather
nagging ill-health kept me from finding the right hour, the fitting mood.
I haven’t really found either now. But I am sending you, as some small
amends, my little volume on The Spirit of Modern German Literature
in which I was happy to stop and salute you.”
Ludwig did not consider Dreiser a great writer in an artistic sense,
but there was a “spiritual sincerity” to his work that outweighed literary
shortcomings and gave Ludwig confidence that Dreiser could appreciate
the significance of a new work he himself had begun, as well as the
need for secrecy about it. (Only Huebsch had known of its existence.)
Reworked and expanded over the next six years, the book would become
Ludwig’s principal attack upon the American ethos, Up Stream. “It will
interest you, I know, that I’m hammering away at a MS which has, thank
God, no relation to scholarship—to be published anonymously (so keep
my secret), to be called something like ‘Confessions of an American’—
immensely frank, telling, I hope, and in its innermost nature—to the
seeing soul—of a tremendous irony.” "
In a story Ludwig published in the International shortly thereafter,
in January 1917, the meaning of this irony became clear. “The Higher
Good” (“a unique manuscript. . . the best story I ever wrote,” he told
Viereck) may, in fact, contain the first parts of his “Confessions,” entered
here through the voice of an old poet’s diary, with certain modifications
being made where it was “deemed better to suppress one or two passages
that might either have given pain to men still living or violated their
privacy.” Sitting in judgment upon his life and his writing, he admitted
having always feared revealing too much of himself. Working in fear,
he had donned the masks he now wished to shed, and had given up the
search for natural truths he now hoped to find. In their place, he had
pursued artistry and a style, first to mask from himself the things he had
discovered within himself, and then to mask them from the world. With
Page 206 - [see page image]
205
World of His Ancestors
all of life heightened by the world at war, Ludwig had suddenly found
himself freed from the untruths he had imposed upon his fictional self.'' •'
Seeking “the higher good,” the aged poet courageously tried to break
the patterns of a lifetime.
To speak freely for once, to speak with the natural simplicity, the refreshing
baldness, even, of the untrammeled human voice! If that is possible, if the
years of iron labor at the desk have left me with the power of unsophisticated
speech. I toil and grow old, and yet, in those few printed pages (such slim
result of such indomitable strife), I see no perfection. Subtle cacophonies
rise up against me, purple epithets, a slothful syntax, nerveless at bottom,
and with severity! And over all, the cunning trail of the workman, with
startling revelations of sheer mechanism.
Yet, having said this, he was still suspicious of himself, and of his ability
to know what the truth was if confronted by it. For too long he had
purposefully “watched life for the sake of words” and set these “words
above passions and agonies.”
I am losing my humanity and my power of human communication. I fear
to speak to others, for I can no longer speak truly. I cannot utter a sentence
void of insincerities of literary gesture. I have not for years spoken or
written a word undictated by the haunting spectre of style. These very self-
communings I feel to be insincere. Even they are exercises. There is no word
in the language that I have not weighed and savoured for stylistic uses—none
that can come from me freely. I am imprisoned, shut off from all men—and
from my own soul, wrapt as it is in fold upon fold of a veil of words,
delicate as gossamer, impenetrable as steel. No, I cannot communicate with
my own soul, for all my words are thrice sophisticated, and all my thoughts
are words.... I am become a man of inevitable lies, and the universe, which
I have reduced to a subject of radiant phrases, is now grown monstrous and
turns upon me a colossal mask of irony. 93
In fighting those who would deny the realities of life, he had himself
stripped away life’s flesh, raising the ideas for which he had struggled
too far above the world’s arena to retain any foothold within it. Strident,
exacting, uncompromising with himself and others, the old poet had
lost the very humanity he had struggled to preserve, becoming merely a
“phantom in an iron cage.” Trembling with realization, he feared having
lost his humanity forever. “Do life and love always avenge themselves
upon whosoever has turned aside from them?” Had he separated himself
permanently from his soul by placing artifice before truth? Could he
break the cycle and relearn truthfulness through the search for it? The
damage, though rooted in his reaction to the world, had been self-
inflicted. Perhaps he could still find his way out of this maze. He would
make the attempt, and if the promise would long go unfulfilled, the
Page 207 - [see page image]
206
Ludwig Lewisohn
attempt itself would set in motion a liberating process that would see
him through the years that remained.''
In the “Introduction” to his 1926 revised edition of Up Stream,
Ludwig spoke openly of how he had come to write the first chapters of
his “Confessions” ten years earlier,
in that spring of 1916 when I felt impelled to remount the stream of my own
life and to discover from precisely what source the clean or turbid water
flowed.... I can visualize that garret study in the Middle West, somewhat
secluded from the sordid, brawling house in which at an old desk I wrote
the early chapters of this book. I was sorely beset by life, if ever a man was,
and to say that I should have borne my troubles differently is simply to
say that I should not have been I but another. I found myself hopelessly at
variance with nearly all my fellowmen, in that time and place.
When he returned to these early chapters three years later, with thoughts
of completing the work, he saw in them all “too plainly the shat
tered state in which my mother’s death had left me and that every
where there stained through the necessary suppression of my domestic
wretchedness.” 95
But he chose to change little of what he had written, so that the
reader might learn, as well, how the very quiet he had needed for setting
things in order had been lost in this world beset by a “meaningless
welter... of fierce secular storms of pain slaying with equally blind
cruelty each generation,” as he had written in 1917. 96 War, it seemed
then to Ludwig, was the most serious lie against which he had ever
struggled. It was the ultimate untruth, the ultimate artifice and denial
of life and beauty, all for an unnatural end. Here, in one long act, was
mankind’s deepest depravity. The struggle with society and the fight to
release himself from self-imposed strictures were both elements in his
opposition to the Allies whom he held ultimately responsible for the
death and destruction that seemed, after three years, to be without end.
“I’ve fallen into a kind of lethargy. What’s the use?” he asked
Huebsch on April 7, 1917, the day after the United States had declared
war on Germany. He was worn out, “pumped emotionally dry” by the
repetitive demands made upon him. The next Hauptmann volume was
completed, and with it he planned to send half of his “Confessions” and
an outline of the remainder. But like his request for a ten-dollar loan
to help pay for Helen’s medical care (Mary’s daughter having suffered
another emotional collapse), this, too, seemed relatively insignificant.
“Larger and more ultimate Wretchednesses stalk through the world,”
among them the all but certain loss of his position at Ohio State. It now
seemed only a matter of time. The slightest impropriety was all that was
needed. More than for Helen’s well-being, he needed the loan to keep
Page 208 - [see page image]
207
World of His Ancestors
from further indebtedness and, thereby, forestall the inevitable as long
as possible. “I’m in the iron vise—now more than ever—of my own
professional and social respectability. A rift within the lute—(lute! My
God!)—and the Professor of Hunnish literature would fly out!” 97
Leonard endured a similar time, when all that he did was suspect and
examined in and out of the university. Newspapers had dug into his past
and discovered that he had once taught German in the public schools of
Lynn, Massachusetts, and had written certain things that did not reflect
well upon him. These were not good times in America, even for one
whose ancestry should have placed him above suspicion. Leonard tried
desperately to keep his sanity in the face of
an inversion of all values. Things are in the saddle. More and more. The
German issue disappears in the American issue. What will become of my
country? I learn what patriotism means to me; but I learn that, for me at
least, in the end nothing is sacred but the integrity of my own mind; and
I comfort my failing Americanism with the thought that Emerson, one of
the greatest Americans, had first given me this thought, and that perhaps
this thought is the leit-motif after all of the deeper, the abiding American
spirit... or if not yet, that I will help to make it so, when my time comes.
Like Leonard, Ludwig hoped to make a better world once the
fighting had stopped, though his vision was more politically radical.
“If ever there’s a world again that one can have a share in—if ever!—I
want very seriously in some practical way to join the Socialist party and
propaganda and do my modest share.""' His was a far less personal
vision and promise than Leonard’s, having broader implications for
society. His threat to the status quo had undoubtedly been sensed by
those who opposed him, and in the end Leonard fared better than
Ludwig, as Wisconsin supported the poet’s private right to dissent, while
Ohio State could not tolerate Ludwig’s presence on campus.
It was already well known that Ludwig had taken a number of
students with him on these radical excursions. That January, a group of
students had published a new journal under the title of the Sansculotte
(named for the predominantly lower-class members of the French Revo
lutionary Army, and later, for the ultra-democratic elements suppressed
by the reactionaries following the execution of Robespierre). Malcolm
Cowley, whose poetry and prose would appear in each of its three issues,
would later applaud their effort for its “pacifism in politics, bold realism
in fiction, and hurrah for free verse." l "" On its first page was printed the
poem “Revolt” by Kenneth Burke, later known as a literary scholar of
distinct merit whose inclusion of elements of a Marxist cultural analysis
among his critical tools would add new dimensions to the field. The
poem had been carefully selected to accompany the group’s statement
Page 209 - [see page image]
208
Ludwig Lewisohn
of editorial intent. As a faculty advisor to the group, Ludwig’s thoughts
on the power of art and literature to remake the world, and his grow
ing impatience to do so, were clearly evident throughout the journal’s
preamble:
The group has grown through an intense and unhindered common interest
in things of the mind and spirit, through the interchange of personalities and
the expression of opinion. Our faith is in the essential goodness of man’s
powers, in the worth of his purposes, in the value of art for full and satisfying
life. We attempt to envisage ourselves in respect of the living controls of the
past, and to appreciate our position in our time. We are individuals speaking
each for himself, but speaking each with a definite relation to the others. We
believe that the underlying reality of life is given meaning and force by art,
that art and literature are the interpreters, the coordinators of what meaning
there is in men and their surroundings, that they absorb, assimilate and
nourish the foundational sense and purpose of human existence; that now
more than ever they search out reality and grip and stay the eternal values of
transitory states and deeds; that they are the only unrepudiated confessors of
the soul of modern man, holding in their power his absolution from torture,
wretchedness and sin. What we have to say we say with the fullness of heart,
with all earnestness, with a complete sense of responsibility. We expect in
our readers that same sincerity, a detached, unprejudiced judgment and an
understanding mind. This is the demand that we make. 101
In its second issue, the Sansculotte devoted its entire first page to
Ludwig’s piercing critique of the well-heeled who controlled America as
if by divine right. His poem “Christmas on Fifth Avenue,” written after
returning from his recent three-week stay in New York, spoke of two
worlds, of the rich with their jewelry and bright flowers, gay in their
finery, satisfied with their lives—and of the “vast crowd . . . with fever
in its myriad tread” who walked in their shadow, “a crooked something
half alive.” Ludwig knew that he belonged with them, but would not be
disheartened. Rather, he would overturn the ruling class by transforming
its ethos, virtually standing it on its head. 102
The poem helped him to bring together themes that had come
to mind at various periods in his life 103 and had remained parts of
his consciousness, all of them now seemingly like parts of a total,
integrated, and evolving process. Ludwig’s earlier search for the Jewish
Jesus, combined with his later desire to create a socialist society, helped
to form a new vision of Jesus as risen from within this “vast crowd,”
opposed to the Christ imagery glorified by the rich and powerful in
their attempt to control society, “A Stranger [who] walks beside me.”
In his conception of the poor man’s Jesus as a Jewish socialist precursor,
he saw “The Divine brother of my blood” whose message was that
of an end to what “men in fierce debate / Build with their loveless
Page 210 - [see page image]
209
World of His Ancestors
hardihood— / the image of a perfect state.” In its place would rise a
truly natural, moral order where all would be free of fear and want, and
of the control of others who would destroy their spirits and their chance
for a fulfilling life. “With the flame of inner fire,” men must “Purge clean
earth’s immemorial wrong." Irt '
But the United States’ declaration of war against the Central Powers
had sealed Ludwig’s fate. He would be the one purged. Ohio State
had begun mobilizing its male students a week earlier, having a vast
enrollment in its military department from which to draw its recruits.
President Thompson himself had helped to draft the National Defense
Act of 1916, which mandated the creation of Reserve Officers’ Training
Corps on campuses throughout the country. Involvement in the war
was a chance to fulfill his dream. The Lantern’s editorial of February 2,
1917, had not shared his enthusiasm for warmaking, and had lamented
the possibility of having to fight those very Germans they had come to
know intimately at their university.' " But by April 19, the students, too,
had decided that their first loyalty was to the call of their nation. “Our
country is at war today,” shouted the editorial. “She and her allies are
fighting for principles in which every American believes implicitly."
Two weeks later a flag appeared on the editorial page, and on June
4, Thompson’s commencement address was given banner headlines.
The very “Perpetuity of Civilization” was at stake in this “last great
war,” he told his cheering audience. “The United States entered the war
upon a platform of humanity, declaring its purpose to make universal
and immortal Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech.. . . The cleavage between a
world of patriotism and organized selfishness—between feudalism and
brotherhood—had never been so clear cut as now.” 107
Ludwig thought otherwise, and for many months had found himself
occupying a lonely spot on campus, isolated from all who believed
implicitly in the righteousness of America’s course. He recalled in Crump
how Thompson had earlier spoken in chapel of the war as a holy crusade,
characterizing the Germans “as the enemies not only of mankind but of
the religion of Christ." 1 ’ Isolation for the gregarious and argumentative
Ludwig, both German and “Jew as I am by race,” became increasingly
painful. And yet, while he feared for Germany and lamented his per
sonal dilemma, his greatest concern was for the larger world beyond all
individual and tribal borders. Germany’s defeat would be misconstrued
by most as confirmation of the myths by which America and her allies
had gone to war. He feared, most of all, that their notion of morality
would win “pragmatic sanction as truth in the world of brute realities,”
dealing a deathblow to those “deeper truths” that had always marked
humanity’s slow movement toward a just and liberating social order. 1
Page 211 - [see page image]
210
Ludwig Lewisohn
But there was little more that Ludwig could do to change the
thoughts of those around him, for now that the academic year was draw
ing to a close, so, too, was his stay in Ohio. Thompson, in making every
effort to perpetuate the proper civilization, and with the collaboration
of the local district attorney’s office and the United States Department of
Justice, had asked him to take a year’s paid leave of absence at the end
of the spring semester, giving every indication that he would probably
not be invited to return. Ludwig uncharacteristically accepted his fate.
Relieved of his long and bitter struggle, he seized the opportunity and
readied himself for his long-awaited passage eastward to New York,
where he “could breathe more freely.”"
In anticipation of the day, he had already written a new verse play
that spring, a clever retelling of the classical American myth of Plymouth
Plantation titled A New England Fable. In it he had assumed the guise of
a lonely sea-voyager, who, though ostracized by his fellow passengers,
was the only one among them who possessed the wherewithal with
which to found that new colony of the human spirit for which all had
set sail. His detractors thought his song the music of Satan, but as the
Flute-Player piping a new tune in the wilderness of twentieth-century
America, he knew it to be
. . . music that seemed a call
To a sounding battle under an ardent sky
Silver with flash of swords heroical
Drawn to defend the ancient majesty
And awe of freedom that can never die,
music that sang of man’s full measure of life, of passion and intellect
united in purpose and not joined in battle, of delight mixed with pain,
of beauty and the ways of truth, of dreams sought and won, of oppor
tunities taken and lost.
Yea, such is man whose name I name:
Free, self-directing, high, secure.
His forehead to the nightwinds pure,
And in his heart the crimson flame
Upon a ledge that froths at sea
Stands naked an eternal youth,
His eyes are wells of song and truth,
His arms stretch sunward: it is he!
“Come with me,” he bid his listeners, as he had his students, “Eter
nity’s at dawn.” 111
Page 212 - [see page image]
211
8
First Blood
Sanctuary—a haven in a maddening world. It was the summer of
1917, and Ludwig had returned to New York, an exile from the academic
world he had hoped to make his own. Amidst the excitement and furor
of a war-fevered nation, he had come to the “last unscathed metropolis”
in America to seek his own peace. “Of all the cities of the world I have
lived in,” writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten wrote shortly after
Ludwig’s arrival, “New York delights me most.” With architecture and
“strange restaurants” satisfying every “bizarre appetite,” it was “all so
foreign to the spirit of America, and yet all somehow so right.” It was a
city where “strange adventures occur, a thousand unchronicled episodes
in a night.” And within its shores lay “the heart of Jewry” to which
Ludwig would be drawn.
Greenwich Village, that most cosmopolitan quarter of the city, part
of an older order that had given birth to an enduring expression of
personal rebellion and perennial social revolt, welcomed Ludwig that
summer as one more dissident within its ranks. “Lives there a man with
soul so dead,” the radical journalist and would-be poet John Reed had
asked in 1913, “who in an attic would not rather bask... in lofty-
thinking splendor / Than. . . grow obese and tender?” Certainly not
Ludwig, who with Reed and “those unknown men of genius / Who dwell
in third-floor-rears gangrenous,” had come to the Village in search of
“anarchic Liberty,” that muse “Who asketh nought but joy of such as
me!” Decrying “a dull old world censorious,” 2 he, too, like Reed, whose
journal the Masses would become “a casualty of America’s great war for
Page 213 - [see page image]
212
Ludwig Lewisohn
democracy,” would “fashion something glorious.” 3 But unlike Reed and
the others, Ludwig would find a “small and scattered” Jewish commu
nity there in the Village, one whose “greater distinctiveness protected
its social organization from the disintegrating influences which affected
other local groups,” making it “the most cohesive and self-conscious of
any in the community.” 4
The Armory Show of 1913, that great gathering of mostly European,
non-academic art, seemed symbolic of the challenging spirit Ludwig
shared with the others. He may even have attended during its tumultuous
opening in February. Certainly its spirit was present in his writings of
that earlier period and in the opening declaration made by Sansculotte
four years later. A watershed of American cultural development, the
show created an unprecedented public awareness that the practitioners
of “modernism” were indeed serious in their demands for the right to
express their thoughts and emotions in a totally free environment, with
out the fetters of cultural norms and traditions encircling and strangling
their most individualized efforts.
Perhaps it was the newness of the twentieth century and the ap
proaching end of a millennium that had made so many artists and writers
see their age as the birthplace of a new and greater spirit, a time for the
fulfillment and flowering of the inner man. It was their responsibility
to prepare the stage and to signal its coming, to be a creative force
for the transformation of society—not through some newly configured
repetition of corporate order, but through individually and voluntarily
joined cooperative efforts. There would be an end to what George
Santayana had characterized as the “Genteel Tradition,” that sacred
trinitarian cultural matrix of moral certitude, inevitable progress, and
cultural constancy that had ruled America and all of Western civilization
for too long. Those who had found this tradition meaningless were
now replacing it with an unshakable belief in the moral autonomy
of the individual, a dark vision of the shallowness of material wealth
and technological change, and a commitment to experiment with new
cultural forms in search of a better world. 5
This emphasis upon the individual’s right to express his uniqueness
was, ultimately, an ideological challenge, particularly to the comfortable
and complacent, forcing them either to join or to resist. The Nation, as
yet a voice for the past, claimed that “if the newest art is really to be the
art of the future, plainly homo sapiens must become a new creature.”
Such art, “revolutionized along anti-naturalistic lines,” was clearly “the
insignificant seething of crude and undisciplined personalities.” Two
weeks later, feeling the need to again attack the exhibitors, the Nation
Page 214 - [see page image]
213
First Blood
compared them to the “vitriol-throwing suffragette,” neither of whom
could be acceptable in polite society. 6
Nor could the new theater, the new psychology, the new politics,
and so much else that was too new for the old order’s defenders to
tolerate. As with Ludwig, the fragments of their disparate discontents,
only represented by the Armory Show in what appeared to the fearful as
a greater unity of thought than actually existed among these dissidents,
began to find a focus in the early months following the start of war
in Europe. By the following summer many in Greenwich Village were
feeling much the same frustration and despair that plagued Ludwig’s
thoughts as he looked out upon the forces arrayed against all attempts to
find some personal expression with which to fight for a better world. The
journalist and reformer Hutchins Hapgood later recalled that summer
when “all existing theories had been shown to be un-important. The
sweet creative impulses of peace were no more. Individuals had stopped
their spiritual existence. All were waiting. Lives were vacant.” What
he and the others with whom he shared this despair sought in this
bleak period was “a social effort,” expressed often in some artistic form,
whereby they could “live again—spiritually, to recover from discourage
ment and disappointment, to be free of the poison of self and the poison
of the world.”
Like others scattered throughout turn-of-the-century America, Lud
wig had unknowingly begun to participate in this cultural revolution
during his college years, busily unmasking the monopolistic claim to
morality and propriety dominant in his world as a means of social
control. Often again in the years of isolation that followed his first stay
in New York, he had shared in this movement for change. In recalling his
1917 return to New York and his renewed involvement in this struggle,
he remembered how happy he had been to be “back in civilization.”
Struck by the severe contrast with Columbus, he retained a vivid memory
of these first days, of the writers, artists, and social thinkers of every
stripe, and of an ethnic kaleidoscope that were the elements of his new
world. The sweetshop traded for the tavern, unpleasant acquaintances
for old friends and kindred spirits—pleasant exchanges in a disconcert
ing time. He would sit for hours with a beer and a fellow refugee while
the Hungarian fiddler’s cry mixed with the good talk that knew no limits
of time or place. They lived with the hope that the madness would end
before all that was true and good was beyond recovery, before the puritan
morality and capitalist disorders that had brought on this madness were
beyond defeat. He had been alone in Ohio for so long. The camaraderie
of the Village, with its taverns (among them, perhaps, Mary Crump’s
Page 215 - [see page image]
214
Ludwig Lewisohn
“Crumperie” on West 4th Street) filled with dissident men and women
like himself, would help him to begin the recuperative process that would
give new life to his beleaguered spirit. “Beer and wine and tobacco are
the companions of poetry and philosophy and love; soda-water and
banana splits and sport not as a diversion but as a business, of moral
lynching and the worst forms of sex slavery,” he would record in Up
Stream. 8
But the tavern and his beloved theater to which he could now return
were of the evening. They could sustain his spirit, but not his stomach.
Even John Reed realized that “Art cannot flourish on infrequent rations,
/ We condescend to work in humbler sort, / for Art is long and money very
short.'"' Ludwig’s partially funded sabbatical quickly proved insufficient
to meet his continuing financial needs. He lived in furnished rooms that
first year, ate in cheap restaurants, supported Mary and her children
as best he could. With the aid of a friend, he secured a position as an
instructor of English and Latin at the Harley School, a private academy
housed at the downtown Y.M.C.A. “A tolerable enough prospect,” he
thought at first. Yet even this supplementary income was insufficient in
the costly city, and soon he was forced to accept a second position as the
Y’s evening adult instructor, and by the spring, a third at Hunter College.
The last proved the only “drop of balm” in what had become a “life of
hurry and rush.” Free of Ohio and at last able to pay his bills, he still had
not achieved the life he had hoped for in the dreams that had carried him
back to New York. Without enough time to think, or enough energy to
write a few lines at day’s end, it all began to look too familiar, as if the
drain of the serials had returned in the guise of pedagogical bondage. “I
lived in the streets, neither thought nor wrote. If I had an evening I was
so worn out that we went to the theatre or sat in a restaurant or talked
to people.” 1
Life might have been more tolerable had his full-time position at
the Harley School not been a return to the sweetshop set. If he had ever
envisioned geographical boundaries encapsulating this mindless world,
his experiences amidst this “crowd of unspeakable imbeciles”had
clearly demonstrated his error. They were in New York, as well. The
growing bitterness he felt as the months passed, the repeated failure to
revive the souls of those entrusted to his care, would be a lasting symbol
of America’s spiritual impoverishment.
On the very first day of my activity a blast from some icy and infernal region
seemed to smite my nerves. On the third day I knew that I had entered the
lowest depths of civilization where there are elevators and modern plumbing
and scientific ventilation and hygiene and cleanliness and morality and
where the soul is dead. They were nearly all the sons of wealthy tradesman,
Page 216 - [see page image]
215
First Blood
brokers and manufacturers. They brought with them from their homes a
stony contempt for literature, art and learning, for any form of reflection, for
all tolerance, gentleness, humanity—for everything except money, machines
and blind force when that force was exerted by them or in the direction of
their strictly material interests/ •’
They were immune to all cultural influences; attempts at transform
ing their values or their vision of the future were foredoomed. He had
met their fathers at a school dinner and had better understood the sons. If
more mannered, they were of one mind. While the sons heaped epithets
of “wop” and “kike” upon those outside the classroom windows, their
fathers were more subtle. They had reported his unorthodox views of
the war to the headmaster out of a concern for the dangerous element
threatening their heirs. So Ludwig, a veteran of this national conflict,
vowed never again to speak to them. Besides, their sons were deaf to
his message no matter how often he might express it; had they even
listened to it, there was little chance of their understanding it, and even
less of their carrying it home. There were other, sweeter messages that
effortlessly caught their youthful ears. Unaccustomed to questioning,
their narrowed spirits had found the comfort promised to them by social
position and financial security more to their liking. 1
Ludwig had heard it all before. Even their appeal to a divine source
rang familiar. It was the Charleston of his youth, and the Columbus of
his early adult life, now translated into the idiom of these warring days.
How little had changed over the decades, how similar things were in
spite of great distances and varying historical experiences. The dominant
culture of America was solidly intact, betraying the unwary observer
with regional differences that were but surface-deep. Under its influence,
the Harley students had already become both victims and perpetrators,
all in the name of a heaven-bound abstraction divorced from its historical
reality and true meaning.
They attended earnestly to the malignant moral drivel of the Y.M.C.A.
secretaries which consisted of two negative admonitions: be ignorant of
sex and drink no alcohol, and of one positive one: smash!—smash the
rival team, school, and later the rival business or factory; smash the Hun
and the Bolshevik abroad; smash the other-thinking one—liberal, socialist,
foreigner—at home. And—this was the constant corollary—in order to
smash successfully, “get together,” do team-work, never think, feel, act,
except with and through your particular pack. This gospel of mass brutality
and individual cowardice and dishonor was studded in the chapel talks with
the names of successful men as exemplars—insurance magnates, railroad
kings, oil monopolists—and was offered—such was the effrontery of these
creatures—in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 14
Page 217 - [see page image]
216
Ludwig Lewisohn
And so, at every possible chance, he would wander outside the
school to speak to those he passed on the street. Among the laborers,
craftsmen, and prostitutes he found the openness he had hoped to share
with his students. He found it too distressing to watch these children
being led astray by “pygmy intelligences” who twisted words and spirits
toward their own ends, teaching hate and a perverted sense of loyalty,
mixing love for family with a fear of alien peoples, using the anger these
emotions generated to destroy their children’s innate human decency.
What had troubled him through the years now appeared in the faces of
his students. The fear and hate that had long marked him as a threat
had been absorbed by them, to be used against those competitors whom
they would spend their years “smashing.” 15 The hopelessness of their
lives confirmed Ludwig’s darkest thoughts about American society—and
about himself.
Before leaving Ohio, he had tried to put his life in order, but had
discovered within himself “a heavy burden of psychical morbidness and
maladjustment” that he knew to be as much a product of his struggles
with the world, as it was—in a way he did not quite understand—tied
to his father’s own emotional instability in this same unaccepting and
combative world. Though he kept his thoughts from most everyone, he
had written to Leonard in April of his fear that a similar breakdown
might ultimately destroy him as it had Jacques. His own past had
not been a “particularly pleasant history.” Suicide had too often come
to mind; only the helplessness of his wife and father, and the “self-
protecting callous of the soul,” thickened by the constant abuse of this
“hell of a world,” had kept him from taking his own life—or so he
wished to believe.''
When Ludwig returned to New York that summer, he had sought out
Abraham Arden Brill, whose reputation as a Freudian had led Ludwig
to believe him to be the only one in America capable of dealing with his
confused state and secret fears. Trained as a youth in traditional Jewish
religious texts and history, and expected by his family to become a rabbi,
Brill had abandoned all religion and become a physician, graduating
from Columbia University in 1903. (Ludwig may have met him during
his time as a tutor at the hospital on Ward’s Island where Brill was being
trained.) He had spent the next four years on the staff of the New York
State mental hospital at Islip, Long Island. Until 1910, Brill remained
America’s only psychoanalyst. With a few newly certified colleagues, he
founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society the following year. 17 In
1933, Brill would say of “The Writer and His Outlets” that they were all
“almost necessarily ‘neurotics.’ ” Certainly Ludwig would have served
as an example for his research.
Page 218 - [see page image]
217
First Blood
This statement is not so terrible as it sounds, but is of the utmost importance
if we are to understand the dynamics of the writer. Behind the phenomenon
of the creative writer, and behind all creative artists, lies the domain of
human emotions and mind, and the manner in which they seek their outlets,
or the manner in which these outlets are indulged, twisted, or frustrated.
In no other human pursuit is the inner status of a human being so crucial
a matter as in writing or other artistic endeavors, because what a writer or
artist does is a consummate expression of his unconscious drives, wishes,
or frustrations; an outpouring and a record in words and fine exact shades
of expression of the state of his libido. . . . So-called “normal” people
rarely write. They have nothing to write about, because their urges are all
expressed in everyday routine action, while the writer’s urges are vicariously
expressed through symbols and dream representations. “Mr. Smith,” the
normal man, is always obscure, because the stream of life flows through
him without let or hindrance, with an easy ebb and flow; silent, undramatic,
non-intense, and as monotonously rhythmic as the lapping of ocean waves
on the shore. He has powerful urges, to be sure, but they move healthily
through their normal channels without more than occasional incident. It is
only when the standardized, normal pattern of life is fundamentally violated
by nature or environment and there arises a non-standard or “abnormal”
person, in whom the urges and drives of emotion and instinct encounter
long-continued or permanent obstacles, twists and turns which dam up
free expression in ordinary life, that we have the typical situation out of
which a creative writer emerges. ’
During his early months of analysis with Brill, Ludwig learned a
great deal about himself, and about how to get on in a world hardly
conducive to the psychological well-being of someone as alienated from
it as he. It was with Brill’s help that Ludwig had finally been able to
put aside the enslaving dream of an academic life and find artistic con
tentment as a critic. But there came a point in the process when Ludwig
realized that his more deep-seated need for spiritual contentment, for
finding the larger meaning to his life, tied somehow to his Jewish past,
could not be satisfied by Brill. If he wanted to find his place within the
eternal scheme, he would have to go on alone. Mabel Dodge, in analysis
with Brill during this same period, spoke similarly of Brill’s limitation
and of her own ultimate resolve to seek answers elsewhere:
Anything “religious” was anathema to him. He consistently tried to remove
every vestige of my belief in an inner power, and when I haltingly endeavored
to convince him of something that counseled me and impelled me from my
depths, he said scathing things about a Jehovah complex! . . . Gradually
coming under his influence, I altered my convictions and lost a good deal
of color out of my life with the surplus of tension. It took me some time to
recover my indisputable realization of the force that may be directed, but
that, directed or not, rules all life. 19
Page 219 - [see page image]
218
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig’s will to resist Brill’s suggestiveness had been stronger than
Dodge’s. He had refused to abandon the search for that “force” whose
existence he had felt in so many ways over the years. He turned, instead,
with greater frequency to his Jewish heritage, and by comparing one to
the other, saw more clearly than ever that America’s code of acceptable
behavior was little more than the worship of the idols of economy and
state, the dictates of mammon, sanctioned in the minds of his students
and their parents by some perverted, slavelike sense of righteousness:
“When I saw them transfer their self-respect to their slavedriver, the
moral and political state, I had an old vision—the huge, monstrous idol,
the sacrificial fires, the victims driven by a lust for self-immolation into
the scorching flames. Yes, those dim, far-off ancestors of mine had laid
hold upon a profound truth: idols are purely evil. Alas, they themselves
set up the most menacing of idols—a theocratic state." '"
Jacques’ final descent into madness helped to emphasize the griev
ously oppressive nature of this theocracy as no other event could. It had
come mercifully after a life of suffering under the crushing weight of a
society he had so catastrophically misread. Mary had gone to Columbus
in the spring of 1918 to attend her youngest daughter’s graduation from
the university, and returned to New York with Jacques. With the aid of
Adolph Lewisohn, a distant cousin and one of New York’s financiers
and supporters of the arts, and possibly because of Brill’s connections
at the hospital in which he had once worked, Ludwig was able to
place his father in New York State’s finest mental hospital, located sixty
miles away on Long Island. He was pleased to have Jacques nearby
again—“of such great importance to me”—though he knew there was
no chance of improvement. Overwhelmed by defeat, Jacques’ depression
had deepened; and when insanity became his only escape, he severed the
bridge back into the world of unendurable reality.
Ludwig did not grieve for his father. Rather, a sense of relief came
over him, and in place of sadness, he felt only anger, promising himself
that his father’s wasted life would not pass in silence. When Jacques died
two years later, on March 1,1920, Ludwig began his poetic eulogy with
a recounting of how, in this twisted society, “All things [had] hurt him.”
For years Jacques had concealed his mounting grief from the world,
retreating into the privacy of family and dreams as the only sources of
comfort he could find. The epithets of “vulgar” and “kike” to which
Jacques had been repeatedly subjected, and the social isolation he had
been forced to endure, were for Ludwig symptoms of the greater disease
of repression and prejudice, at all levels, that had ultimately proven
to be his father’s undoing. After Minna’s death, Jacques’ private world
slowly crumbled about him. There had been little that Ludwig could do
Page 220 - [see page image]
219
First Blood
to forestall its collapse. Yet the real tragedy of Jacques’ life for Ludwig
had not been his failure to preserve his private world of dreams or his
sanity, but the loss of his personal dignity at the hands of a society that
had lured him with its illusion of acceptance. Believing in the espoused
ideals of America, Jacques had abandoned his identity as a Jew for the
false promises of full membership in an undemocratic and unenlightened
society. He never recovered from the shattering truth of the America he
discovered in Charleston. -
Coming near the close of the war, Jacques’ flight from the world
seemed symbolic of all that Ludwig had experienced since first seeing
that “strangely freighted sunshine of Queenshaven,” closing off the past
for him as no other single event could. There was no way of returning
to the security of a former time, nothing left now to hold him back,
no one to whom he owed anything, no institution to which he could
be forced to pay allegiance. He was with Mary, but essentially he was
alone. He felt the exhilaration of an unshackled prisoner. Though little
had changed in Jacques’ relationship with the world, his release through
madness had come at the moment when Ludwig’s own resolve was being
kindled anew. Minna’s death and Jacques’ passage “into the twilight
region of settled despair,” his own years of wasted dreams in New York
and Charleston, the moral horror of Ohio—surely the worst was now
behind him. 22
The year before Jacques’ arrival in New York had served Ludwig
well as a time to absorb the new and to reacquaint himself with the
artistic world he had helped to create in his own small way. He had
read the work of many of these dissenters, had corresponded with some
during the lost years in Ohio, and had visited with them in New York
on occasion; but he had missed the immediacy of experience that his
presence could now provide, and the support that the city’s diverse
population could give to his renewed ethnic identity. That he had started
his rebellion in Charleston long before he was aware of these cultural
developments, and had fought on alone in the central cities of America to
find his own individualized and ethnically based direction—these were
factors that would ultimately cause his break with much that he could
now applaud. Not that he would go back to what he had repudiated;
rather, he would take much of what he had found in his search and go
on, past many of his contemporaries. But for now, he delighted in the
freedom he so openly shared with them in their opposition to puritanical,
warring America.
Of those who shared his vision, he felt closest to Theodore Dreiser.
Perhaps it was their common Midwestern experience, or the element of
German ancestry in their backgrounds. Or perhaps Dreiser represented a
Page 221 - [see page image]
220
Ludwig Lewisohn
father figure for Ludwig, though it is doubtful that he needed one by this
time. More than likely, it was Dreiser’s raw, natural honesty, a quality
that few others had, and his greater desire to dissent from untruth than
to be just plain rebellious. Dreiser cared deeply for the future and took
seriously his responsibility toward it as a writer—not for his own sake,
but for those others who were to follow him. He was far from alone in
this, but he was a rare commodity in a setting where the American drive
for success and dominance was to turn the heads of many who had at
first sought a new order.
Dreiser, in those years, was a rather shy man, an element of his per
sonality that may have attracted him to the brash and younger Ludwig,
and Ludwig to him. Sherwood Anderson’s story of his first encounter
with Dreiser reveals the surprisingly close nature of Dreiser’s friendship
with Ludwig. After several false starts, Anderson had haltingly made his
way to Dreiser’s front door. He rang the bell and when the door opened,
mustered his courage and introduced himself:
”1 am Sherwood Anderson. I thought I would come to see you.” “Oh,
hello,” he said. He shut the door in my face. So there I was on the Dreiser’s
doorstep, facing the blank door. I was shocked. Then I was furious. “The
beast,” I said, “The son of a bitch ...” I went along a street muttering this
against the Dreiser. I went into a saloon and had drinks. I got half drunk.
And then later in the day, I went home to my apartment and there was a
note from, him. The man had simply been embarrassed, as I was, when we
stood facing each other. 23
Whatever might have accounted for their affinity, it was Dreiser
whom Ludwig first sought out in the summer of 1917. Their relationship
had grown in the years since Snare's publication, and despite his always
too brief visits to New York, Ludwig had tried to spend some time with
him during each stay. When they met, they would speak of life and art,
and later of the war, overcoming with their talk whatever differences
might otherwise have separated them. Ludwig’s return to New York
quickly intensified their relationship, as meetings and dinners grew more
frequent and Dreiser’s trust in his friend’s understanding of his work
deepened. Of the things that tightly bound them to one another, their
search for truth and justice through literature proved the strongest.
We used to meet at the Kloster Glocke (later to be called the Convent Bell) on
Fourth Avenue. Dreiser ate a certain fish food there with unvarying relish.
The beer was memorable and one of the waiters, a chap who affected an
acquaintance with [the] arts, served us with gusto. To our favorite table
Dreiser brought a story he had just finished. I went over it with him,
confining my criticisms and corrections to purely formal matters. He was
extremely good-humored and really docile about it all. When the story
Page 222 - [see page image]
221
First Blood
appeared, I found all my corrections embodied in the text. But Dreiser had
been busy making corrections, too. For every barbarism I had eliminated,
two had slipped in. I knew then that it mattered little. Now I know that, in
the deeper sense, it matters not at all. 24
This world, “furnished in an imitation Old German style,” would
soon pass forever. They had “caught the last whiffs of a certain savouri-
ness of life that had vanished soon after the war,” Ludwig noted in Altar,
“a savouriness and warmth in [whose] place had come a sterile wildness,
an intoxication without glow and a prodigality without comfort. All
mellowness was gone. Everything was raw and sore and trying to forget
its rawness and soreness." '' He and Dreiser would be a part of the
postwar rebellion against the forces that had led America into it, but they
were not of the younger generation, those who had come back from the
front, those of whom Malcolm Cowley would write, “all our roots were
dead.” Where Ludwig and Dreiser had come to New York to rebuild
the world, their younger compatriots had returned to it simply because
“there was nowhere else to go . . . [but] to the homeland of the uprooted,
where everyone you met came from another town and tried to forget it;
where nobody seemed to have parents, or a past more distant than last
night’s swell party, or a future beyond the swell party this evening and
the disillusioned book he would write tomorrow.” They had little will to
change, no “hope to alter the course of events.” Society was seen either
“as a sort of self-operating, self-repairing, self-perpetuating machine, or
else it was not regarded” at all, “so empty of political ideas were they,”
Cowley would recall, perhaps a bit too simplistically, but certainly not
without reason. They lived, instead, “to write a poem” of such “order
and beauty” that by its ascent “above the tin cans and broken dishes of
their days . . . [all] failures would be avenged."-'’ In time, they would
recover from the trauma of war, and some would become voices of
political and social protest. But for now, it was the older generation
who more often gathered to discuss and to proclaim a course of reform.
Meetings between Ludwig and Dreiser grew more frequent, and
their involvement with each other’s work and hopes deepened with
time. On November 3, 1917, Ludwig promised Dreiser that he would
“drop in . . . and return the play and get the stories which I should like
immensely to see”; on the nineteenth, they arranged to meet over dinner
at their favorite eating spot and discuss the several manuscripts. As the
months passed, this pace quickened as Ludwig came to see that what
truly mattered in his friend’s work were the ideas that had motivated
him. They cared so deeply for their search for the best means to express
these thoughts that Dreiser had entrusted Ludwig with the responsibility
of writing the critical study of his life and work suggested by Huebsch
Page 223 - [see page image]
222
Ludwig Lewisohn
as part of an already established “series of books, not biographies in
the ordinary sense, but evaluations of the contributions to American
political, economic and cultural development of certain important living
men who have not hitherto been celebrated in a book.” 27 Ludwig was
flattered by the request, and thanked Dreiser for his “most generous
authorization.” 28 As early as October 16, Dreiser had noted in his diary
that Ludwig was “coming down tomorrow to get data or part of it
for a book on me.” Two months later, following the reissue of Stuart
Sherman’s 1915 attack upon his naturalistic writing in the Nation,
Dreiser anxiously noted in his diary that Ludwig’s biographical study
was not to be published until the coming year. 29 But the book was
never to appear. By 1918, Huebsch would lose interest in the series as
sales plummeted in the wake of indiscriminate “pro-German” labeling
of many of its subjects.
This censorious wartime isolation only served to make the days
Ludwig shared with Dreiser more memorable. He recalled once meeting
at noon in a small Italian restaurant and later walking through the
snow to Dreiser’s Greenwich Village apartment at 16 St. Luke’s Place.
Throughout the day they spoke of society’s norms and its literary expres
sion and of how these had been used to lull the masses into accepting
whatever unreasonable and dispiriting demands were made upon them.
Dreiser’s views reconfirmed Ludwig’s own thoughts and feelings about
the world he had left behind. So, too, did they strengthen those pacifist
sentiments that had been sorely tested by America’s entrance into the
war. But most of all, he found in his friend’s talk the voice of a soul mate
with whom he could work toward the rebuilding of this shattered world
once the killing had stopped and a new literature could again speak to
those who had been recast in the fires of war.
We walked toward his house in a flurry of early snow. He lifted his cane
toward the sky with an unusual passion and denounced the blood and
hypocrisy and tyranny of the war and derived these things rightly from
certain ethical concepts which he declared to be the historic flails and
scourges of the race. His grim and reasoned denunciation heartened me.
His agreement with my sentiments and opinions gave me an assurance of
the hope that it might be possible to build a decenter world than the old
world of patriotism and repression and conformity to powers that might at
any moment give the command of murder of both the body and the soul.
Standing there in the snow with Dreiser, I remembered Charleston and the
smiling sentiments of its gentry and its literature. We are seeing what such
sentiments and such writing come to. We are seeing that the new literature
was more than a matter of form or fashion or technique. It was the most
vital of the forces that could save an otherwise ruined world. I left Dreiser
still heavily gesticulating in his condemnation of the evil that was darkening
Page 224 - [see page image]
223
First Blood
the sun. I was more than ever convinced that he was not only a great writer,
but a good man and a lover of his kind. 31
Dreiser recorded several of these occasions in his own diary. After
one of their earlier meetings, he noted how Ludwig’s continuing obses
sion with his past seemed to feed the last remaining hope he had for
a favorable outcome to the war, though Germany’s defeat was already
imminent. It was October 27, 1917, and Dreiser, older and more per
ceptive, was far less optimistic.
At 6:30 Ludwig comes without wife.... He says she is sick. We walk across
11th to 5th Avenue and up. Ludwig tells Bert [Estell Bloom Kubitz, Dreiser’s
lover] all about his experiences as professor of Germanic literature and
language at the University of Ohio [sic\. The narrow college life. . . . We go
to the Kloster Glocke. A fair meal. Conversation excellent. Literature, the
war, New York publishers, American newspapers, etc. If the Germans win
he believes things will be a little better intellectually, a little freer. I predict
the eventual breakdown of monogamy, the headmaster of Christianity. We
leave at 9. 32
By the following spring, life seemed to be renewing itself for Ludwig,
despite the odious conclusion to the war which now seemed but a brief
moment away. He was pleased with his separation from the university,
and although he had already begun to worry about the possibility of
not having his partially funded sabbatical extended another year, he
had more immediate concerns. In early March, he and Huebsch began
to wrestle with the question of what to do with the study of modern
French and German poetry he had begun preparing in Columbus more
than a year before (which Huebsch still remembered many years later as
“interesting and instructive”). 33 Now that the work was slowly nearing
completion, their concern for its reception by the public had grown. The
country’s anti-German sentiment left little room for hope. In a letter to
Leonard written shortly after its publication, Ludwig spoke of their final
decision to cut the book in half: “As time went on Huebsch and I saw
that it would be hooted down, the noble poets I loved insulted and the
venture a dead loss. So we cut the book in half and have just published
The Poets of Modern France . . . the companion volume to appear when
the gods permit." J<
They never would, at least not while Ludwig’s interest in the project
remained alive. By the time the climate would permit a fair hearing, he
would be swept up into a world of far different literary concerns. The
change began as many of his new beginnings had, with the need to earn
a living. Teaching at the Harley School had grown more intolerable with
each day, and the possibility of yet another year was simply frightening.
“The future, in any decent sense, looks like a damned blunder and
Page 225 - [see page image]
224
Ludwig Lewisohn
unmitigated shame to me,” he had written Mencken in May 1918. He
simply could not commit himself again to such a course of degradation.
Though still uncertain of the sabbatical’s renewal, he decided not to
return to Harley, and not to seek similar employment elsewhere. “I
won’t teach again, so help me!” Instead, he would try to earn his way
by writing “more stories again."When word finally came of another
year’s sabbatical, but with a further cut to one-third of his former salary,
he nonetheless held to his refusal to teach, “for it would involve (as you
can readily see) a series of acted and spoken lies with which I don’t care to
blacken such rags of intellectual honesty as I may still have about me.” 36
He had come to feel tainted by the very thing he had so desperately
sought as a youth. The dream of teaching had soured beyond redemp
tion, and with this feeling came the sensation of a newly found freedom
and of renewal as a writer. He had finally broken free of the obsessive
need for a classroom which first took hold of him as an adolescent, in
part to fulfill his parents’ need. They were gone now, his mother by
death, and his father by insanity and an unmistakably approaching end.
Little remained of the commitment of those days, except the memories to
which he would no longer be enslaved. His departure from the academic
world into a new setting would be a true rite de passage, filled with
terror and uncertainty, but also with hope and rebirth. Never quite sure
of himself throughout this weaning process, he leaned on Dreiser for
support and sought the approbations of others he respected, including
Mencken and his editorial partner at the Smart Set, drama critic George
Jean Nathan. “I submit to your sapient judgment—and to Nathan’s—
the enclosed first fruits of my renaissance in verse,” he wrote on May
27, 1918. 37
Yet Ludwig knew that an occasional short publication could not
sustain him or Mary financially now that Ohio State had notified him of
its intention to cut his sabbatical salary at the conclusion of the current
semester. Scrambling about the city for a source of supplemental income,
he landed a part-time assignment as drama critic at his old refuge, Town
Topics. It would help carry them through the last weeks at Harley and
into that final summer and fall of the war. He still disliked the routine
that journalistic deadlines imposed upon his creative designs, but felt
fortunate in having this opportunity to express his thoughts without
the censors’ interference. “I was its chief theatre critic, signing The
Highbrow, and I have a dim but kindly recollection of both tales and
playlets which I wrote for it,” he would remark only months before his
death. “The whole thing was (wryly) rather fun and (for those days)
they paid well.” 38 What did bother him more during that period of dual
employment was the extraordinary amount of time that both teaching
Page 226 - [see page image]
225
First Blood
and writing had taken from his social life. As he explained to Mencken
at the time, “We see Nathan often at the theatre for I am doing the
plays [for]—God help me—Town Topics! But one must meet the high
cost of living.. . . I—also my wife—have been wanting always to see
you and Nathan as our guests either at home or in a tavern but the
weeks rush by and one hasn’t somehow time or courage for anything. I
teach in the mornings and witness the elegancies of the American drama
at night.” ,9
While the position at Town Topics was of great help, it could provide
only temporary relief. Certain of financial trouble ahead, he contacted
Mencken in late May, hoping to secure additional employment when
they met. “The wretched school that kept me tied down is nearly over
and this late spring and summer I hope to see something of my friends.
So, this time, if you’ll let me know when you’re here—I do want to have
a talk with you and also, if I may, with Nathan.” 41 '
Little came of their meeting, and few employment prospects pre
sented themselves in the weeks that followed. Yet Ludwig felt less pan
icked than he would have in years past. By July the transformation from
teacher to full-time writer was clearly under way, and though still a bit
anxious about his financial state, he was able to take comfort in this
development. In writing to Leonard about the year that had just passed,
he was able to compare without jealousy his own days of spent time
and energy, filled with “loathsome annoyances,” to his friend’s life “in a
tower of central calm surveying the storms.” Only now had he himself
“reached a precarious sort of resting place.” As if to give this new state
some physical expression, he and Mary had moved two months earlier,
on May 1, from 110 East 22nd Street back to Morningside Heights, their
sanctuary of a decade before, where they now occupied a “pleasant, river
view” apartment on Haven Avenue alongside the Hudson. From this
vantage point, he could assess his year of transition and look forward
to the coming months.
Until the other day—and that from last June on—I have lived a life of hurry
and rush without any chance for thinking, for “Sammlung!” . . . Now I see,
at last, a gleam! . . . So, though Molly and I may have to live very simply
next fall and winter and spring, I shall be able to spend most of my time in
writing and thinking—an inestimable privilege to me. I won’t look ahead
farther just now—no one can. And I know that I have, upon the whole,
fared much better than many of my colleagues in Germanics. 41
Not that all was well between him and Mary. Throughout this
year of change, they had been moving even farther apart. The return
to New York had “at once stimulated and also soothed his starved
and fevered senses,” he would write in Crump. Almost immediately,
Page 227 - [see page image]
226
Ludwig Lewisohn
he felt free of all that had kept him from fulfilling the promise of
his youth. To seriously develop his talents as a writer, he came to
believe in the need to renew his relationship with his muse in the person
of “an agreeable emancipated young woman who would accept his
talent and his devotion in place of more worldly advantages and with
whom he could establish a bond that would heal him in body and in
mind.” He fully expected that “the greater part of his American world
would look upon that strong and frank desire” for another woman with
customary primness and condemnation. So, too, could he assume that,
ultimately, Mary “would have all the active forces of society and all
the machinery on her side” in her fight to maintain a hold over him.
Yet he knew that to deny himself the chance for “complete liberation”
was to become a participant in “such evil” that “he would pass out
of the sunlight into the shadows, more disinherited and defeated than
the meanest among men.” Wandering the streets of New York that first
year, “trying to unravel the tangled strands of thought and motive,”
he realized how for the first time since “she had trapped him into
marrying her,”
his old dream of keeping the better part of life free of the strain of her
consciousness of it might now come true.... He could meet men and
women and perhaps.... He didn’t finish the thought. A delicious shiver
went through him and the skin of his whole body tingled. The vista of
life was suddenly magical and he was content to linger at the gate.. . . O
enchanted city, he thought, I have but to stay and wait. I am still young and
some day that will come to me which will lift from me the burden of my
ache and loneliness and disinheritance and disgust. 42
Nearing sixty, and no longer a match for Ludwig’s undiminishing
sexual appetites, Mary, too, was keenly aware of the growing distance
between them, and of the direct threat it posed to her future. She had
sought Dreiser’s help as early as March 1917, complaining even before
their return to New York of “how restless and sexy Ludwig is.” Once
the influence of the city began to play upon him, she again approached
Dreiser, and in desperation, asked whether she ought not to let Ludwig
go. When Dreiser answered yes, she went into a rage. “I urged her to
do so,” Dreiser noted in his diary, “which she resented, of course.” She
and Ludwig had been reading Dreiser’s manuscripts, and though some
of her comments had proven helpful, Dreiser quickly came to think
of her as a tiresome woman. “Mrs. Lewisohn is duller than ever,” he
noted on one of several occasions, “A horrible bore.... I believe the
woman has talent, but she bores me stiff.” It was Dreiser’s hope that
he could free his friend from bondage to this “mess of a woman,”
Page 228 - [see page image]
First Blood
a “narrow puritan turned semi-liberal and trying to seem worthy of
her husband.”
Despite Ludwig’s own drive to separate himself from her, he tried not
to cause her unnecessary pain, in part so as not to arouse his own feelings
of guilt. Though his intentions were clear, and their “irreconcilability
beyond doubt,” he hoped to end their relationship without incurring
any lasting anger or ill-will, and tried, whenever possible, to defuse
moments of tension by whatever means he could. As a watchful and
curious observer, Dreiser recorded how when Mary worked a Ouija
board one evening, it conjured up “Mrs. L’s mother, who tells her not to
worry and to be happy, etc. (I suspect Lewisohn of working it.)” 43
But such attempts, as Dreiser had easily sensed, were temporary
mitigations, foredoomed by Ludwig’s overbearing need to be free of her
at last. The bond of dependency that had so firmly secured him to her
for a decade, and which had made him incapable of ultimately asserting
himself in any dispute between them, had now been irreparably cut
by the “unconquerable hope” he was experiencing. She had apparently
paid little attention to the many signs of his growing disaffection over the
years, until little chance remained for reconciliation on any level. Perhaps
after so many years of watching his emotions swing from elation to talk
of suicide, she had come to consider all of his complaints and threats
as mere posturing. When she finally realized just how serious he was
about leaving her, it was already too late; by the summer of 1918, she
had become one of the primary symbols of the Anglo-Saxon, puritanical
culture he was seeking to destroy. Everything he examined, everything he
thought about, seemed to conclude in this single-minded analysis. Even
his attempt to write “the first systematic account. . . [of] the American
novel” for Huebsch (who had “great confidence in the steady selling
power of such a book”) ended with an image of her as a sign of all that
had caused his self-alienation. 44
No matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine her otherwise.
They differed far too sharply on too many things, personal and ideo
logical, to achieve any lasting peace. Most fundamentally, they differed
on their attitude toward the dominant American culture. Asserting his
Jewishness, he stood opposed to the ethos that had culminated in the
mean-spiritedness of war, while she chose to share the American war-
makers’ image of the fight against Germany as a holy Christian crusade.
In words echoing an earlier martyr, a young man in Mary’s recently
published play, Pawns of War, calls upon “Dear Lord Jesus” to save
them, while his mother asks rhetorically, “Why are we not sleeping
in our beds like Christians?” The Germans (and by implication, their
supporters) became in her hands the anti-Christ. 45 It was only a mat-
227
Page 229 - [see page image]
228
Ludwig Lewisohn
ter of time before these differences would ensure a stormy end to her
marriage.
By midsummer, Ludwig realized that their inevitable divorce would
not be accomplished peacefully. In “A New York Sketch,” written during
these weeks and published by Mencken in the Smart Set of September
1918, Ludwig spoke with sadness of their inability to end a marriage
tragically destined to bring more of the pain that each had already begun
to visit upon the other:
When you and I sit at a Cabaret
And watch the powdered skin of the plump girls
Under those blue and red lights glide and sway
Upon their hips or leap in perfumed whirls,
And carefully avoid each other’s eyes,
And sip our green Chartreuse—I wonder so
That we don’t break this galling net of lies
And decently to a clean freedom go!
It’s true that once we saw a luminous
And liquid star over a pearly bay—
What has that star or youth to do with us?
For they, like love, are very far away.
But we are married and the whole world knows,
And you’re too proud to break and I too wise,
And so we watch the dancers to the close
And carefully avoid each other’s eyes. 46
Ludwig’s note to Leonard in July 1918 contained, along with a
copy of this “compressed account of at least the outer aspects of life,”
“deeper things” which the strictures of wartime America had made it
inadvisable, and often impossible, to publish. “We cannot write openly
now nor would it serve any good purpose” to condemn those whose
“political actions [had been] dictated wholly by economic pressures” and
who had used the most primitive sentiments to motivate the unthinking
masses into fighting a war from which they would achieve nothing, while
sacrificing their rights to freedom of thought, speech, and action. In so
doing, they had profaned man’s most sacred traditions, and had nearly
destroyed the few advancements in human development that had been
made during the post-Victorian period. To Ludwig, these acts were as
offensive and as inexcusable as the shedding of blood in battle, for the
“moral frenzies” they had unleashed would plague mankind long after
the guns had been silenced. “What concerns me deeply and painfully
is the breaking down, under the hysterical lash of the press, of all the
Page 230 - [see page image]
229
First Blood
sorely gained perceptions, liberalities, outlooks that were beginning—
before the war—to promise a more tolerable world; the lapsing back of
almost all men into religio-patriotico-moral frenzies. I see clearly that
only in proportion as he feels no tribal emotions—especially of a moral
kind—is a man a clean and sane creature.""
Instead, Ludwig used the cover provided by The Poets of Modern
France to propagate these ideas. In his introductory essay (completed
in January 1918), he spoke of man’s consciously evolving need for self-
expression, particularly in an ever expanding global society. The single
voice, nearly consumed by the will of the tribe, had finally created a
mass demand for individuality of expression. The successful “liberating
experience” of a few had given impetus to a significant number of others
who now demanded the same right. None had more strongly expressed
these demands than the progressive poets of all nations in their attempt
to achieve a “personal sense of life.” The French symbolists’ success at
removing the “last restraints” of the old static French poetic tradition
offered one of the clearest examples of this development. Withdrawing
“from the dust and heat of the race into the twilight chambers of the
soul,” they were now poised above the threshold of the future, able
to transform their world through their “creative imagination,” born of
an inner vision of a personal reality. In the midst of a war-intoxicated
world, Ludwig joyfully proclaimed that “the struggle of man, however
blind and stumbling, however checked by tribal rage and tribal terror, is
toward self-hood.. . . The pangs of beauty, the exaltation in truth, the
vision of the tragedy of life arise, in the fullest sense, only when the in
dividual liberates himself from the tribe and faces the universe alone.’ M ’
Here, again, was the voice of free poets in tune with something larger
than themselves. In their sharing of his “image of the World Spirit,”
Ludwig found confirmation for his vision of himself as the recipient
of a divine charge, albeit with an increasingly more Jewish cast. The
political avant-garde had spoken of a similar personal freedom, and had
sought to foster it within the new global community they believed would
rise out of the ashes of the old order. (Had not Europe’s brightest youth
welcomed the war for just this reason?) But Ludwig’s call for renewal had
about it a spiritual quality and a degree of individualism that was largely
missing from these political aspirations. His was a voice originating from
a different source, and a vision of the world that saw life as change, even
to the point of welcoming the changes that would one day make his own
ideas a part of a past which might seek to hold back the future. Keenly
prescient of this possibility, he took comfort in the realization that his
was a living voice that so cared for the world that it could anticipate its
own demise with the pleasure that comes of siring a new generation.
Page 231 - [see page image]
230
Ludwig Lewisohn
In every age the New Poetry and the New Criticism have prevailed in so far
as they produced excellent work according to their own intentions and in
harmony with their own aims. In every age the critical conservatives have
protested in the name of eternal principles which, alas, are not eternal at all.
And generally, for such is human nature, the innovators in art and thought
of one generation, of one decade at times, have become the conservatives
of the next. In another ten or fifteen years I may myself be frowning upon
a still newer criticism, a still newer art. . . . But today I am in the right, not
of my own desert, but through the ways of the World Spirit. 49
Ludwig’s position at Town Topics and the occasional pieces he wrote
for the Bookman and the Dial (mostly unsigned drama and book reviews
assigned by publisher Martyn Johnson, “a gentleman of the exquisite,
half-capitalistic, half aesthetic editorial type”) now saved him from the
“moral horrors of Y.M.C.A. schools” and allowed him to seek out
this “World Spirit.” Not that he had been left unscathed by his days
at the Harley School. In combination with the war, the experience had
opened deep psychic wounds that would not easily be healed. At the most
unexpected moments, the feverishness of it all overwhelmed him, even
after he had abandoned the classroom, leaving him unable to concentrate
on work of more lasting importance. “For months I saw in nightmare or
in sudden, waking vision those spick and span classrooms, those keen,
metallic faces and heard the cackle and clatter of those insufferably alien
voices. I found, too, that the long noise and agitation of the war had
paralyzed the power of seeing, of absorption, that it had estranged me
from beautiful and enduring things.”'"
But he had finally begun to find relief in the balm of authorship, with
its opportunity to speak his mind. With fall came the first cooling breeze,
and though the war raged onward, its end seemed nearer than before.
As his classroom days receded from memory, he breathed the freshness
of the season. He could more undisturbedly contemplate the concerns
that had been his constant companions and look out upon the wider
landscape as he reflected upon the war that had brought him back to
New York: “An autumn came which was like a return home. Once more
I saw shadows on the river and bronze foliage and laid my palms against
the cool trunks of trees. Once more with less of inner fear to disturb my
sight I was able to survey the American scene, and beyond." i 1
With Germany’s defeat a certainty, he tried to assess its conse
quences. His thoughts were not of geopolitical matters, nor of the deep
wound the Allies would inflict upon Germany’s tribal pride (having
forsworn such cares). Nor did he long consider the more significant
economic issues that had become the central concern of so many of his
contemporaries (though he declared himself a socialist, and in a recent
Page 232 - [see page image]
231
First Blood
letter to Leonard, had attacked “capitalist economics” as “the road to
hunger!”). Ludwig’s real concern was for the fragile human spirit and
its ability to lift itself beyond the dross of daily entanglements through
some connection to this “World Spirit,” now so severely eclipsed by the
clouds of war. All else, even his seriously deteriorating marriage, seemed
of minor importance when viewed against the backdrop of that course
of events which had led to this devolutionary stage in man’s history.
As he had done so often in the past, he poured out his heart to
Leonard concerning this grievous development:
I will tell you what I fear sometimes, in dark moments—this: I fear the
pragmatic translation into truth by force of everything that seems to me
spiritual death, intellectual decay, the shutting of all doors of hope on the
human spirit. ... If that were to happen, I should curse God and die. Picture
your world: prohibition, chemical purity, sports, Christian morality of the
ordinary kind looming hugely, shattering all infractions—art a disgrace, and
the empty mind, Y.M.C.A.s, ice-cream receptions of the soul. If you know
on which side your spiritual bread is buttered, if you have any compassion
on the generations to come, don’t quibble about this bit of chicanery or
that, this transitory brutality or that. Get down on your hunkers and pray
God—if there is a God—that everything that saves life from being not a
hell—hell might be interesting, virile, morally astringent—but a goo of sweet
shops—that all that saving grace be not obliterated by a wrong outcome
of the war.
He was convinced that Germany’s defeat would give further impetus to
those stifling Anglo-Saxon forces against which he had been struggling
for the past quarter century. His personal defeat in Ohio was warning
enough of a darkening future, made ever more graphic by the year of
teaching he had just completed. “Our American contemporaries have
minds of too flimsy a texture,” he instructed Leonard. Seated in his
“ivory tower,” Leonard could not possibly have seen the real America
as only one of the “strugglers in the plains” could. The real mood of
America, he advised Leonard, could be found in the fate of The Poets of
Modern France and Germany, truncated now by a meanness that would
coldly silence the dissenting spirit. If only Leonard had seen the material
removed from the book. “But ah, the German ones in ms—the French
are to them what moonlight is to sunlight, water to wine, sweetmeats
to bread!"
Unable to publish all that he had said to Leonard, he looked for
any opportunity to thinly mask his thoughts in the discussion of less
significant matters. His first real chance came with an invitation from
the Bookman to examine the latest developments in fiction. Having
recently acquired the journal, its publisher, George H. Doran, announced
in his first issue that September of 1918 that henceforth it would be
Page 233 - [see page image]
232
Ludwig Lewisohn
concerned with “looking forward always to the new structures of so
cial and intellectual life which is even now emerging from these years
of supreme test.” He saw America emerging as a world leader for
whom intellectual isolation could no longer be possible. It would be
his journal’s policy to further this new global perspective by presenting
“the direction of thought as expressed in the great centers of America
and Europe.’”'
But the Europe it would present would not include the hated German
foe, nor would it retain Russia within its list of centers once the Bolshe
viks had consolidated their power. Ludwig saw through this facade of
universalism under which the narrowed view of American provincialism
was hiding, and intended to make good use of this opportunity to
express, as openly as he could, the dissatisfaction and hope he felt so
deeply. Defiantly, he told Leonard that even though the piece had been
“ordered” and the topic preselected, its content would be of his own
choosing, willingly risking the loss of future assignments, “because the
editor—smooth, slim, tribal minded, correct little gentleman—thought
that would ‘do’ and that I would ‘do’ it nicely. My God, if he got all
the implications of my third section he’d die. But he’s incapable of
understanding—anything. ” 51
Ludwig truly believed, as he had so often asserted, that the sacred
act of writing had originated in man’s quest for self-expression and
understanding, and therefore required the moral freedom needed for
a critical examination of accepted ideas. This belief formed the basis
of his argument in “Foreshadowings of the New Novel”: that critical
writing could not thrive in an age of “fabled heroism,” nor in one of
faith—for above all else, the novel’s purpose was to seek an explanation
of man’s “mortal lot,” something that could not be accomplished in
the clouded atmosphere caused by either of these aberrations of the
human spirit. The romantic novelists had failed in the past because
their work was too “lyrical. . . fantastic and false despite their power.”
The modern novelists, whose works had begun to appear in the mid
nineteenth century, had dedicated their artistic efforts to establishing
a closer contact with reality, the very hallmark of the true work of
fiction. They saw their work as having a cleansing influence, tearing
away at those cherished but banal prejudices that had long separated
individuals from themselves, while plunging the world into a long series
of chaotic episodes. “Born of the spirit of realism, of disillusion and
skepticism ... of intellectual horror and veracity,” the novel, alone of
all forms of human expression, held the one real possibility of creating
a more humane world in the future.
Page 234 - [see page image]
233
First Blood
That effort, often so halting, yet so tentative, so lightly shattered before
the Idols of the Market-place and of the tribe, is nevertheless our deepest
experience and our securest hope... . The great novelist has always been
a man profoundly fascinated by life for its own sake, compassionate of his
fellowmen not with an easy emotion but from the depth of his austerer self,
sweeping aside the moral nominalism of his time and tribe in the service of
his vision of what men really do and feel, infinitely tolerant, through an ever
riper insight into the ache and toil, the travail and confusion of our lives. 55
Of the several national literatures he examined, Ludwig not un
expectedly thought America’s held the least promise. He placed much
of the blame for this failure upon the bourgeois values of its critics,
those who cared more “for propriety than for power, for conformity
than for truth,” and upon those in the academies who had denied
him his rightful place in America’s institutions of higher learning, those
puritanical arbiters of popular taste who looked down upon mankind as
sinful creatures in need of external restraints. Little wonder, then, that
American fiction was largely romantic, moralistic, or homiletic. Only
a few of its authors had escaped this entrapment, among them Mark
Twain, for whom Ludwig had developed a special fondness after reading
his antiwar story “The Mysterious Stranger."' 1 “There spoke a truly
erected mind!” he had told Leonard earlier. 57 But of these very few great
American novelists, it was Dreiser whom he believed had produced the
clearest expression of this nobler spirit: “His work is as plain and homely
as the great democratic masses whose life he has absorbed into his mind.
The world he has described with a sincerity so deep and constant has yet
neither beauty of form nor distinction of spirit. But it is that American
work-a-day world in which we live, which, even if only to transform it,
we must understand." ’'
What then of the novel’s future in Europe and America? Would there
be an inevitable backsliding when the war ended? Would the movement
toward realism in the modern novel be abandoned “in favor of the early
languors of a false and soothing romance”? Ludwig thought not, for the
horrors of modern warfare had already required, and created, a state of
romantic exaltation, combining patriotic and religious (if not mystical)
elements in an attempt to encourage the masses to go forth and die for
what they had been duped into believing was a just cause. Sensitive artists
like himself had seen through this sham, and as the ground reddened,
others had swelled their ranks. The end of the war would bring a
deepening search for truth. Destruction would yield to the inevitable
question of purpose; from the trauma of mass death would arise the
forces of liberation. This free search for truth would inevitably bring
the “change of heart” that would ultimately abolish all war, something
Page 235 - [see page image]
234
Ludwig Lewisohn
that even the well-intentioned “leagues to enforce peace” could never
accomplish through political means/'
As Ludwig suspected, the Bookman’s editor had not understood the
implication of his thoughts. Still attuned to the war’s rhetoric, he had
misread Ludwig’s use of the word democracy for the standard patriotic
talk that had helped America go to war. Ludwig had rejected this sham of
representative democracy, with its annual charade of the voting booth,
for a purer notion whose very soul was tolerance, that one precondition
of all liberty without which democracy was an empty word, “meaning
less if there remain enslaved and silenced and disinherited minorities,
not only among social groups but within each social group.”'’
The pretense of meaning used by the Allied rulers to propagate the
war would fail to retain the people’s support once peace was upon them.
Of this he was certain. His hopes had been crushed in the past by the
herdlike acceptance of nationalistic propaganda, yet by living among
fellow artists and walking the working-class streets of New York, he
had grown more confident that the lies to which he and others were
pointing would ultimately be exposed and overthrown. It would be a
small movement at first, but would gain momentum with time and the
piercing light of truth. As midwives to the future, he and other novelists
were duty-bound to address those kindred souls who understood what
had escaped his unsuspecting editor.
Men can become tolerant only by curbing and transforming their imperious
wills, by resigning all claim to the possession of absolute truth and infallible
judgment, by keeping their vision very humbly and constantly upon the
verities of human character and human experience, upon the multiformity
of human life.. . . The only change that will prevent war is one in the
direction of temperate and realistic thinking, a type of thinking that will
be extraordinarily wary of those moral absolutes—whether of good or
evil—that demand the peace of the earth and the blood of its children. No,
men and women, after the war, will be more and not less eager in pursuit
of the humble truth. It will once more be the truth, not some doctrinal
affirmation or emotional vision, but the eternal foundation of fact and
human experience that will make us free. And to such a temper the novel
will make its most powerful appeal. 61
The greatest novels of the past had possessed this vision and had
served as teachers of the soul, correcting errors of thought, demonstrat
ing the value of liberty, and transforming the imperious into the truly
democratic. In the postwar period, the novel would again serve as this
teacher of tolerance and the guide into a more glorious future: “They
offer us the possibility of vicarious experience by which we are purged
of the monstrous error that our feelings and practices are the measure of
Page 236 - [see page image]
235
First Blood
right feeling and of lawful practice. And in the cooler, more restrained,
more tolerant world that is to be they will come into their own with the
ever-increasing number of temperate and democratic minds.
There were, however, few temperate minds in the closing months of
the war, and fewer still as vengeance upon the Hun found its rival in the
hysteria that was then spreading across the United States in the wake of
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. From the xenophobia that ravaged
the American masses, whipped to a feverish pitch by fearful men of
privilege, a postwar isolationism would develop that would ultimately
destroy whatever faint hopes there had been for a future of peace. In
the minds of most who sought and then gloried in victory, those who
supported these two “enemies” quickly took on the singular image of
a sinister, alien, if unidentifiable, threat to the sanctity of the American
way of life. The economic system that fueled it, the political and social
institutions that supported it, and the sense of moral respectability
that guided it all came to be seen as seriously and unquestionably
endangered by some “vicious enemy” from both within and outside
of the country.
Having had to confront the vehement objections of his detractors
in Ohio, Ludwig was well prepared for the new irrationalism that
developed in the last months of the war and which would continue
in the years after its conclusion. This new hysteria left little room for
objection to the ruling mentality, and if no single enemy could be found,
perhaps it was just as well. A wider net could then be cast across a far
broader spectrum of dissent. If the challenge to the status quo could be
amorphously defined as “a state of mind,” then surely everything from
violent revolution to pacifism could be labeled a threat and set upon in
proper fashion. And if the voice or name had a German sound to it, then
disloyalty could become an easier suspicion to cast upon its owner. As
political analyst Lewis Allen Browne warned in the June 1918 issue of
Forum: A Magazine of Constructive Nationalism,
American Bolshevism has no legally formed organization, it has no charter,
headquarters, officers, by-laws or constitution. Bolshevism is a state of
mind—a most unhealthy state of mind. There IS an American Bolshevism.
It is on every hand, it speaks largely with a German accent, its adherents
are defectives, defective as loyalists, defective in politics, defective in hu
manity, defective in a sense of justice. The man who shouts “Down with
government! Down with everything!” is a Bolshevik. The man who burns
crops, who destroys, is a Bolshevik. The man who vilifies the name of our
President, who by word or act tries to hamper our prosecution of the war
in any manner; who foments strikes; who speaks against the Liberty Loan;
who shouts “Death” to this or that, is a Bolshevik; for all these things are
but the spirit of Bolshevism that is today infecting democracy with the virus
Page 237 - [see page image]
236
Ludwig Lewisohn
of a vicious propaganda that has come across the seas and seeks to organize
revolution against law, order and patriotism. 63
Even the “Progressive” ideas of Wisconsin’s U.S. senator were
branded by Browne as “La Folletism.” Dissent, from wherever it came,
no matter how mild or constructive, was finding itself besieged. Sounding
the alarm at war’s end, Senator James Read of Missouri, in the un
thinking manner of a vote-conscious politician, disregarded the truth of
events and ideologies, confused Bolsheviks with anarchists, and warned
America of the worldwide epidemic of revolution that threatened to
destroy it:
The astonishing, the sinister fact exposed by the European conflict is that
the doctrines of anarchy have taken root in every country of the world.
For years they have been securely taught. The evil seed has fallen upon
the fruitful soil of ignorance and criminality. The extent of this propa
ganda and its marvelous secrecy are difficult of comprehension. With an
almost diabolic skill it played upon the prejudices, hopes, and fears of vast
numbers of people. ... It is not too much to say that a world conspiracy,
looking to overthrow all governments, has been in process of formation for
many years.* 4
Nonetheless, the armistice of November 11,1918, gave Ludwig a bit
of hope for a new beginning. As with his father’s final flight from worldly
care and suffering, Ludwig again felt a sense of release—the nightmare of
war had at last receded from his world. But the feeling was not without
reservation, for on that very day in November, bathed as it was by the
sun’s brightness, he had already sensed that the coming struggle for true
freedom would be a long and costly one. As he stood watching the
jubilant faces celebrating victory to the accompaniment of New York’s
innumerable church bells, a shudder of coldness passed through him.
Suddenly, “the sunshine seemed drained and empty. Heaven knows I
was glad the war was over. But the joy of the people in the streets was a
thing so alien to me—the joy of physical triumph, of being sure that you
can hurt your adversaries and make them suffer, the joy of your knee on
the other fellow’s chest. Never did men seem so like Yahoos to me as in
that hour.”
The child who had loathed the rough-and-tumble of competitive
sports had matured with his fight against the extension of its ethos into
the marketplace and the political arena; but not the delirious crowds
who too sharply reminded him of the people he had known in Charleston
and Ohio. And so he fled into the subway, where, in the darkness that
would not be his sanctuary, he encountered what he had hoped to escape.
Staggering toward him came the father of a slain American soldier,
a German immigrant torn between his son’s sacrifice for a country
Page 238 - [see page image]
237
First Blood
that would never fully accept him, and his homeland now humbled in
defeat. He had been drinking, and as he looked at Ludwig, tears burst
forth drowning the German songs he was singing to soothe his pain.
If the Yahoos had brought Ludwig back from Ohio and given him a
new life and a cause for which to fight, the scene in the subway had
unleashed memories of his parents and of the dark days of his own life
in Charleston. The fears that he, like the old man, had tried to hold back
with the sweet song of hopeful dreams had again appeared before him as
a vision of a world so utterly broken in spirit. “I thought of Charleston.
And of this man’s dead son. ‘Stoop, angels, hither from the skies.’ The
same old deadly lies were torturing the world. The same old handsome
murderous lies. The new world, Dreiser’s and mine? Would it ever rise?
We would work for it, strive after it, even though without hope.” 65
The war’s end had ironically brought an even greater sense of ur
gency to this call for change, as if a crucial moment might suddenly be
lost forever, as if the dream of tolerance, humility, and the nobility of a
truly democratic spirit now faced its final struggle for survival, its one
final chance for victory. A visit to a Broadway melodrama some weeks
later served to confirm his fears and to strengthen his resolve.
The honest gentleman beside me noticed nothing of all this. He had come to
see Vice discomforted and Virtue triumphant. He saw it. He hadn’t paid his
two dollars for art or reality, for a beautiful or an intellectual interpretation
of life. He wanted the good red blood to course through his veins and it
courses! He might. . . have responded to something finer and subtler. But
he left confirmed in all his pinchback prejudices, his second-hand morals,
his arrogant limitations. 66
As the weeks passed, Ludwig’s feelings of urgency and anxiety
deepened. He knew that inactivity would accomplish nothing. Art, and
particularly literature, had always been a creative force. This much
would never change. Perhaps it could again heal scorched souls and
lead humanity into a new world. Certainly Dreiser’s plan for a society
of writers, organized to support the work of the dissident and censored,
seemed an important first step. In full agreement with Dreiser’s proposal,
Ludwig assured him of his support and assistance now that “life presses
somewhat less heavily.'"' Dreiser’s thoughts about this project had pre
dated the armistice, and when war ended he was prepared for the battle
ahead. A meeting was organized for January 8, 1919.
To Dreiser’s two-room Tenth Street, Greenwich Village, apartment
came Hutchins Hapgood, Horace Liveright, Lawrence Gilman, George
Bellows, Nina Putnam, George Jean Nathan, John Cowper Powys,
George Luks, and, of course, Ludwig. Dreiser would have invited Max
Eastman, who strongly favored the idea, but he feared that Eastman’s
Page 239 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn
radical identification would dissuade more cautious donors at a time
when money was sorely needed. Mencken had also been invited, but he
had declined Dreiser’s appeal for help. He thought poorly of Dreiser’s
attempt to “save the national letters from the Baptists,” but politely
excused himself by saying that he had always suffered from a “tempera
mental lack” which prevented him from joining in any concerted effort,
whatever its direction. “I am against Puritanism to the last gasp, but
when anti-Puritanism comes to a program and a theory I find myself
against it almost as strongly.” He counseled Dreiser to work alone if he
was to avoid becoming a “stalking horse” or a symbol for the human
“lice” to parade about as a martyr. Set apart from the others, they were
“the only men in America whose suffering[s] at the hands of the Puritans
are worth discussing.”"
Dreiser chose to disregard Mencken’s warnings, and as his guests
settled into their seats or scattered about the floor, he spoke of the many
“geniuses in America who are so poor that they can’t go ahead with
what they’ve got in them and who need help. Unless they get help,
these geniuses, so far undiscovered, will never be heard of. It’s my idea
that what we all ought to do is to go around and try to interest rich
men in these geniuses and get them to subsidize them.” The appeal was
not for himself, though he could have used the financial help. (Nathan
later recalled that Dreiser “was miserably hard up and was existing on
something like ten dollars per week.”) Rather, he had raised his voice in
support of those who had been silenced. Some were skeptical of the plan.
Luks, a painter, was the most vocal among them. Fortified by drink, he
challenged Dreiser to name just one genius in such a state. When the shy
Dreiser failed to respond, Luks shot back, “Well, I guess the meeting’s
over. Let’s get the hell out of here!” But Dreiser regained his composure
and was able to hold the group’s attention long enough to make one last
appeal for support. 69
Ludwig responded two days later, repeating his previous evening’s
assessment of the “magnificent meeting.” He felt there was a need for
the group to have a motto and a name that announced its purpose to the
world, and so he offered Dreiser a choice—either Goethe’s “The World
Spirit is far more tolerant than we think,” or, what he considered more
profound, the German poet Christian Hebbel’s “Art is the highest form
of life.” As its name, he suggested the “N.A.L.A.—National Association
for Life and Art.” 70
Little happened over the next five weeks as Harold Hersey, Dreiser’s
chosen assistant, remained unable to raise even two hundred dollars,
through no fault of his own. But in his impatience, Dreiser blamed
Hersey for the lack of response. Disagreements over fundraising methods
238
Page 240 - [see page image]
239
First Blood
soon degenerated into distrust, as Mencken’s warnings made Dreiser
increasingly fearful that Hersey was using his name to further his own
literary career. Dreiser’s enthusiasm for the society soon faded, and a
second, seemingly more plausible, idea began to take shape in his mind.
As editor in chief, he would start a new journal, to be brought out
by the avant-garde publisher Horace Liveright, with Mencken, Powys,
Hapgood, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ludwig serving on
its editorial board. Under Dreiser’s editorial control, there would be
no hesitation over the question of including radical writers like Emma
Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Bill Haywood. But when Metron Yewdale,
who was to do the copyediting, was refused permission to do so by his
new employer, Harpers, the future of the American Quarterly became
doubtful. By May, Dreiser would abandon this second and last attempt
at leading a new generation of writers. ' 1
Ludwig, despite his enthusiastic support for Dreiser’s ideas, had little
need of assistance or leadership. His own reviews were already being
published, and several new articles and a short story had appeared
in respected journals by this time. In the past he had been forced to
choose between his stomach and his art, but the terms of life for him
were now changing. Rather than dissipate his energies with work he
despised, he had found it possible to satisfy both demands. He was
particularly proud of his “controversy” with Amy Lowell in the Book
man. Its editor had given him another opportunity to speak out against
the prevailing literary tradition. Having taken the novel to task in his
previous outing, he addressed “The Problem of Modern Poetry.” It was
almost as if he had found it necessary to attack each and every mode of
literary expression, no matter how innovative, as a means of defining his
own position and of giving his own work a new direction. “I’m not—
as I see you are not—an extreme modernist,” he had told Mencken
the previous spring. “But I’m pretty well convinced that English verse
must come down from the traditional stilts and grapple with life.” 72
As always, he would seek a mix of artistic traditions and trends com
patible with his ideas of nature and life, and with his sense of literary
aesthetics.
“Every revolt in literature is a revolt against the alienation of poetry
from life,” he began the essay; “every reaction raises the cry: Back to
Nature!” English poetry had centuries before abandoned this natural
tie, favoring instead the learned and the aristocratic. In so doing, it
had stemmed the artistic flow of the past. Caught in a closed sphere of
rigid formalism and esoteric allusion, it had forfeited one of the few real
opportunities for human enlightenment and the promotion of spiritual
growth.
Page 241 - [see page image]
240
Ludwig Lewisohn
All this had begun to undergo severe change with the end of Vic
toria’s reign. The artists’ reaction to the war only emphasized the fact
that this “historic, neo-classical tradition . . . [had] faded from the field
of our imaginative life” and had been replaced by a growing democratic
consciousness. This “world in unheard-of upheaval” would not accept
the traditional English poetry of those whose real life experiences had
not adequately been translated into art. 74
Unfortunately, most contemporary poets now in revolt had missed
this mark as well. The realists had ended their experiment by subor
dinating the true rhythms of life to the overwhelming desire to tell an
exemplary tale, while the free-verse poets seemed determined to stress
the image and emotion of their experiences to the detriment of this
same rhythm, without which the consciousness of the listener would
be deafened. “Even the simplest human conversation is rhythmed,”
Ludwig noted. While applauding the efforts of both groups, he thought
they had failed to capture the “psychology of Modern man”; nor had
they allowed it to “spin the plot.” What was needed was a “finer, sim
pler, more natural verse music” which alone could truly liberate poetry
from the timeworn shackles of sterile tradition and make it “worthy of
the Muse.” 75
There were, however, a handful of poets who had accomplished
this task, poets whose “passion is faultlessly communicated, and so
becomes your very own.” He admired their use of simple language
and structure, and their “constant intensity of movement and high
spiritual energy.” Drawn from the poets’ own experiences, the “tonic
and intellectually virile verses” of A. E. Housman’s “Shropshire lad”
and “the recorded realities of our American life found in Leonard’s best
poems” were among the first fruits of these labors. By adding their own
conflicts “to the significant sum of human life and suffering,” they had,
“with sheer poetic power,” advanced our understanding of the “epic of
modern life.”''
The Bookman’s editor, not quite as unknowing as Ludwig had
thought, realized a response to his essay was needed. Amy Lowell,
whose work Ludwig had criticized in the article, was invited to comment
upon it in the same issue. She characterized Ludwig as “urbane and
condescending,” and maintained that he had deprecated the work of
most modern poets, only to replace it with “the debris of an old and
crumbling structure... a reconstruction of a venerable, classic pile,
with all the new, strange stones and their potentialities discarded in the
background.” His obvious bias, masked by the “camouflage of judicious
inquiry,” had caused him to speak from a lack of understanding of the
enterprise of modern poetry. As if there were not as many natures as
Page 242 - [see page image]
241
First Blood
there were poets, he had posited an unacceptable and unreal notion of
nature to which these poets could not have adhered, and from which he
then proceeded to condemn their work.
Lowell was most angered, however, by Ludwig’s emphasis on the
need to democratize poetry. He had long believed that separation from
folk traditions had greatly harmed the work of the English poets—
witness the achievements of their Irish counterparts who had maintained
close ties with the lore of their people. Lowell, while desirous of experi
menting with the innovative poetic techniques of her day, remained close
to her more elitist Boston roots. Ludwig’s emphasis upon the folk and
upon the need to bring poetry back into their world through the use of
a simpler language capable of expressing the natural, shared rhythms
of their lives offended her sense of proper literary taste. Misreading
his plea as a manifesto for the ascendance of “primitive races” (when
what he sought was a combination of Horace’s classicism and Heine’s
realism), Lowell argued that the best English poetry could grow only
from “borrowing, adding, luxuriating ... in the line of the great English
tradition,” and not from the “peasant-born.. . . Art is a part of nature,
but raw nature is not art.” 77
Ludwig, fascinated since childhood with nature, even in its rawest
state, saw both it and poetry as expressions of the greater World Spirit,
and not of Miss Lowell’s variously cultivated English natures. He had
long ago abandoned a tradition that had proven far too removed from
life to ably portray it. In its place, he would celebrate the true poetic voice
of the people, and plead for their return to the natural world of their
origin, misguidedly abandoned by them for a handful of false promises.
He had dedicated himself to this task, and had resolved to use whatever
means were available to promote this spiritual rebirth.
To his critique of the novel and of poetry, he hoped to add his
thoughts on the new drama that had begun to flower at the turn of
the century, and which had now found added support in the tragedy
of war. The opportunity was quick in coming. In June 1919, Ludwig
happily informed Mencken that he would soon join the Nation’s staff as
drama and fiction editor. After months of often anonymous reviewing
for this and other publications, he had earned his own column. Mencken
was pleased with the Nation’s choice, and counseled his friend to enjoy
his good fortune for once, having begun to resemble a character in a
Eugene O’Neill play. While the past few years had admittedly left a rather
saddened expression on his face, Ludwig disagreed with Mencken’s
assessment. “I swear I’m not what the Americans call an O’Neillian
man,” though O’Neill’s work had touched something in his own life,
leaving him “with a spiritual despair.'"’
Page 243 - [see page image]
242
Ludwig Lewisohn
O’Neill’s plays had sharpened Ludwig’s own demand for a truly
dramatic theater in America. Looking forward to the day when “the
crudities of the pop theatre” would give way to “a bare room and three
people and a human difficulty that tugs at our hearts and compels our
participation,” they were a welcome sign of the possibility for change. 79
“Placid people in college towns consider these plays painful,” he had
noted in a theatrical review for Town Topics in March 1919, comparing
the pap of Broadway to the work of Ibsen, Hauptmann, and O’Neill.
Such people preferred to escape the “pity and terror” of their own lives
through “day-dream dramas” of “eternal romance that swells the bosom
of shop-girls, typists, all the young womanhood of an industrial civiliza
tion,” finding solace in “the mishaps of noble and mythical personages.”
Job-like in their view of the world, they believed that suffering was self-
imposed as the wages of sin owed to the transgressor of some immutable,
though not always discernible, law. With the convenience of a packaged
morality, with right and wrong clearly defined and given an otherworldly
sanction, there was no need to question further. Nor did they see a need
to reorder society, for clearly the pain, suffering, poverty, and injustice
that befell them was of their own making.*"
War, prejudice, ethnic dominance, and marital bondage had all
convinced Ludwig that a redefinition of tragedy, and of morbidity, was
needed if one were to account for a “suffering as sharp and constant
as his own.” As he noted in reviewing a dramatic presentation of The
Book of Job, “there is in it fundamental conceptions which have grown
questionable, to say the least. The eternal mysteries are still the same, but
we envisage them upon different terms.” In place of an eternally fixed,
God-centered, but societally engineered order of right and wrong, he
called for a worldly, man-centered definition of human suffering based
upon the individual’s freedom to act and to realize his uniqueness in an
open society. Compassion, and not accusation or vengeance, was to play
the key role in understanding that human tragedy was born of “man’s
mistakes and self-imposed compulsions,” and not of his sin. 81
In Ludwig’s worldview, “ultimate and absolute guilt is in the blind,
collective lust of mankind for the formulation and indiscriminate en
forcement of external laws,” laws alien to man’s true needs. To such
arbitrary judgment was linked “the identical instinct which in war causes
men to blacken the enemy’s character in order to justify their tribal rage
and hate.” Surely such injustice could not long endure the growing cry
for change. With uncharacteristic optimism, he proclaimed,
The bars of the absolutist cage are not so bright and firm as they were
once. The conception of unrelieved guilt and overwhelming vengeance has
just played on the stage of history a part so monstrous that its very name
Page 244 - [see page image]
243
First Blood
will ring to future ages with immitigable contrition and grief. And thus in
the serener realm of art the modern idea of tragedy is very sure to make its
gradual appeal to the hearts of men. Guilt and punishment will be definitely
banished to melodrama, where they belong. Tragedy will seek increasingly
to understand our failures and our sorrows. It will excite pity for our
common fate; the terror it inspires will be a terror lest we wrong our brother
or violate his will, not lest we share his guilt and incur his punishment. It
will seek its final note of reconciliation not by delivering another victim to
an outraged God or an angry tribe, but through a profound sense of that
community of human suffering which all force deepens and all freedom
assuages.
Page 245 - [see page image]
244
9
Fear of Death
“Endlessly sorrowful, yet endlessly unsentimental, with no past,
no memory, no future, no hope.” Such was the era of disillusionment
that came of a failed peace conference and the frustrations of an America
that had not been accorded the international role it thought was now
its prize. And so, in fear and anger, America quickly turned upon itself.
Inflation and unemployment, labor agitation and the Red-scare, nativism
and patriotic societies, race riots and the resurgence of the Ku Klux
Klan, Prohibition and the ascendance of organized crime, Henry Ford’s
talk of the conspiratorial “International Jew” and the spread of anti-
Semitism, the craze of mah-jongg and the celebration of Lindbergh’s solo
flight to Paris, censorship and the deportation of selected aliens, and the
inevitable ritualistic sacrifice of Sacco and Vanzetti—all symptoms of the
postwar descent into madness that would ultimately find its catharsis in
another war. In writing of these immediate postwar years shortly before
this next debacle, Ludwig noted how for so many living as if “under a
slight anaesthetic,”
all actions and all sufferings, work and amusement, sobriety and drunken
ness, friendship and the exchange of thought—all, all, including sunset. . .
or the first faint buds on the trees . . . had lost relief and overtone and value;
all had withdrawn into the flatness of its mere existence in which there was
left no resonance nor power nor vital spark nor lift nor even pain.. . . Thus
everyone was avid to feel again. But the stimuli were few; they were always
the same; even what was once known not so long ago as vice began to reveal
with an accelerating swiftness its unendurable monotony.. . . Fiercely a
sting, a sensation was sought. 1
Page 246 - [see page image]
245
Fear of Death
But despite its horror-filled years and the tumultuous aftermath
that it spawned, the war had left some reason for hope among those
steadfast in their quest to remake the world. They were convinced
that the worst had already happened. However heavy the weight of
repression, it could not silence them, as it had so many others, outraged
as they were by what Ludwig would soon identify as “the sense of
alarm and estrangement with which the authentic American, whatever
his descent, saw his country abandon the liberties which had been the
source and essence of his pride.” In their heightened state of expectation,
this very repressiveness became a sign of imminent change. They would
rebuild the world after “another pattern of thought. . . [for] the very
sources of man’s emotional responses needed to be changed and nearly
all fundamental traditions to be reversed.” 2
There were others, of course, who believed reform impossible, and
sought more radical solutions, political and personal. But Ludwig had
not yet abandoned the dream of peaceful change. He had been among
the handful whose unyielding demands had begun to move America
forward in the early years of the post-Victorian era. They had plowed
new fields then, and had sown seeds whose fruits were now ready for
harvesting. Rather than retreat, or blindly destroy, it was time to push
onward.
Fiction and poetry had been Ludwig’s earliest expressions of revolt,
but a new day demanded a new voice and a new direction. In a time of
madness, it was the progressive critic—“far more necessary to human
civilization than steam or petrol”—whose sacred task it was to lead
others in the pursuit of a new order, free of “those superstitions, the
subtle as well as the gross, which lead to cruelty.” 3 It was this newly
conceived critic, he wrote in his August 1919 “Introduction” to A Book
of Modern Criticism, who would serve as “the universal guide through
the mazes of art and life.”
A small group of “young men, or men who do not grow old,” had, in
fact, already begun to work tirelessly, and with some measure of success,
toward this spirited renewal. Sensing the danger they posed, society had
just as quickly set its Goliath-like hands against them. It had not been
difficult to find supporters of that older “vision of a static universe” to
which these Davids were opposed. Men like Irving Babbitt of Harvard
and his disciple, Stuart Sherman, were favored by society with a place of
respect within its “inner shrine,” so that they might more authoritatively,
and in a seemingly reasonable fashion, defend “the eternal fixities” by
which all others had been asked to live unquestioningly.
Like the idolaters of the past, those who accepted these ideas as
divinely ordained were doomed, forfeiting their futures by shackling
Page 247 - [see page image]
246
Ludwig Lewisohn
themselves to the past. But the reign of these Philistines, leaders and
led, would be short-lived, Ludwig promised himself and his readers.
The “troup of shivering young Davids—slim and frail but with a glint
of morning sunshine on their foreheads,” were now fully prepared to
engage them in mortal combat. Their chief weapon in the struggle
against this ruling class and its narrowed vision of life would be the new
literature and criticism, using these forms of expression as instruments of
cultural transformation. As artists and analysts of the multitude of varied
human experiences—“the echo of their discords and the companionship
of beauty and terror for their troubled souls”—their true roles were
as forces of freedom in the war against those self-righteous moral and
economic formulas that “inflame the tribal passions and retard the
process of psychical differentiation among men.” Only then would
literature serve its true social function—the liberation of the human
spirit through the search for eternal truths. “The poet of the Christian
age [who] wrote not to discover or interpret reality but to illustrate a
superimposed theory of right and Holy living” had to be overcome. The
puritanical life would be challenged and destroyed. 4
Everywhere he looked in 1919, he saw conditions ripe for dissent
and change. Now that America had reached the nadir of its existence,
the people appeared destined to turn from the path they had misguidedly
chosen, from those thoughtless prejudices and preconceptions, those
self-serving, static visions with which their lives were ruled and de
stroyed, as if these visions had the force of eternity behind them. Change
was afoot, slowly but persistently marching its way from the spiritually
starved and questing heart across the entire human landscape, certain to
transform it forever. The pendulum, now at its lowest point, was about
to make its upward swing.
The humane, the expansive things of life are threatened on all sides. The
driving forces of the day are seeking to erect a world that shall be hygienic
and uniform, sinless and featureless, successful and dead. I shall make little
of the fact that a storm is sweeping over the earth even though the breadth
of it is upon our faces. For the renewal must come from within, and the
instinct of self-preservation in humanity of which Arnold spoke cannot be
extinct in a people so numerous, so powerful and, happily, so multiform
as ourselves. The day must come when a sufficient number among us will
awaken to our perils—the peril of cutting ourselves off from the historic
culture of mankind, the deadly peril of suppressing all the normal instincts
of life except business and baseball. It is inconceivable that the American
of the future is to be a Puritanic savage, ignorant of beauty, incapable
of joy, building huge hives in which his bustle multiplies sterile matter,
achieving swifter transit on the dreary road to business conventions and
soda-water counters.. . . From the very darkness of the moment in our
Page 248 - [see page image]
247
Fear of Death
American life even a mind not given to fatuous hope may infer that a
reaction is at hand. 5
Or so Ludwig desperately hoped as he began his work as drama critic
at the Nation late that summer, with little to cling to but expectation. Life
at the Nation in those early years proved to be as exciting for him as he
had hoped it might, primarily because of his colleagues, “a very charming
and gay and brilliant group,” all of whom had reached a similar point
in their analysis of the world’s problems—though their individualized
solutions were at times incompatible. The Nation, once a haven for the
Babbitts of America, had undergone a radical transformation in 1918
under its new editor and publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard. Though
largely of old Yankee stock, as the grandson of abolitionist William
Lloyd Garrison, and an uncompromising defender of free enterprise and
its attendant political system, Villard had opposed the vices of imperial
ism that had made the Great War inevitable. He remained outraged
by a seemingly endless parade of human indignities unleashed by it
upon the world, and in the years ahead would pledge his support to
immediate disarmament, an end to conscription, the abolition of tariffs,
the establishment of international judicial and legislative bodies, self-
determination for all peoples, a “democratic organization of industry”
(collective bargaining, unionization, workers’ compensation and un
employment insurance), tax reform, liberalization of immigration (to
remove restrictions against non-Western Europeans), and the cessation
of all flagrantly un-American “official lawlessness” that had manifested
itself as Red-baiting, censorship, property confiscation, deportation of
aliens, and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Having outraged the
government with his attack upon the Wilson administration’s condem
nation of the Bolshevik regime, Villard had won for the Nation the
mark of censorship by having its mailing rights revoked. The dispute
that ensued, and the rescinding of the postmaster general’s order by the
White House itself, boosted circulation and gave the journal a far greater
readership than Villard could have hoped for.
Not surprisingly, the Nation’s long-standing conservative readership
felt betrayed, and questioned Villard’s loyalty as an American. But to
the many isolated dissenters stretched thinly across the vast puritan
expansiveness of America, his journal “was like a draught from a life-
giving spring,” as Villard reflected in his memoir of these Fighting Years.
“This was our substantial contribution to the need for public discussion
of what was happening abroad, of the host of new and difficult problems
confronting our country, and of the possibility of international co
operation and unity.”
Page 249 - [see page image]
248
Ludwig Lewisohn
And so he persisted, believing in the application of “old-fashioned
Americanism” to new situations, “the old principles modified by the
facts of today.” There was, he concluded, an unequivocal need for
substantial change, but change that was rooted in the old verities that
would put America’s house back in order, not destroy it. They alone
were the building blocks of “a new order from which special privilege
will have disappeared with resultant contentedness and a wider and
juster distribution of wealth.”
Yet Villard’s staff, including Ludwig, criticized him continuously
for not going far enough in repudiating the status quo, particularly
with regard to economic issues, where their ideas tended to be far more
radical than his. While he sought justice within the given framework,
for “the preservation of our institutions,” they hoped to create a totally
new social structure that would preclude injustice of any kind. Years
younger than Villard, they had reached their ideological maturity in
the shadow of a war that was for him but an aberration of the norm.
A mere listing of their names reads like a who’s who of liberal and
radical journalism, and of the new literary and dramatic criticism of
this postwar period—William MacDonald, Henry Raymond Mussey
(Villard’s chief critic on economic issues and a staunch socialist), Albert
Jay Nock, Lewis S. Gannett, Hendrik Van Loon, Arthur Warner, Ernest
Gruening, Arthur Gleason (whom Ludwig would replace as associate
editor in 1920), Joseph Wood Krutch (who replaced Ludwig in 1924),
Norman Thomas, Freda Kirchwey (who became editor and publisher
after Villard’s retirement), Suzanne La Follette, Stuart Chase, and the
Van Dorens—Mark and Carl (whom Villard saw as bringing to this
rather jaundiced bunch “a mid-western freshness, optimism, realism,
and cheer” that greatly contributed “to the sanity and gaiety of our
editorial councils”) and their wives, Irita and Dorothy. 6
Villard could afford to give his excellent staff the unprecedented
freedom to say exactly what they wished. Energetic, zealous, and rarely
patient with the pace of change (and its more frequent absence), they
quickly developed a deep and lasting appreciation for Villard, who
trusted their judgment and sincerely believed that his opinions were no
more important than theirs. The Nation was, as Carl Van Doren recalled,
“the newspaper of a passionate minority clamoring for justice,” making
“war on the peace-makers who had made no peace.” 7 “We were all
Liberals,” Krutch said of his fellow disputatious “gay crusaders,”
but even more conspicuously Libertarians or Libertines—in the Eighteenth
Century sense of the term, as well as, frequently at least, in the modern
sense also. “Brave New World” was not yet an ironical phrase and we
tended to feel that nothing stood between us and it except traditions,
Page 250 - [see page image]
249
Fear of Death
prohibitions, and inhibitions of a happily moribund past. Since we were
in fundamental agreement insofar as this most general of general attitudes
was concerned, we were in it together and it made comparatively little
difference whether we called ourselves Anarchists, Communists, aesthetes,
Social Critics, Nietzscheians, or Quakers. 8
Villard had created an atmosphere in which Ludwig could be himself
for the first time, fighting without fear of reprisal their common enemies
of “Puritanism, Provincialism, and the Genteel Tradition.” He saw
Villard as a man of uncompromising integrity, and treasured the freedom
of expression that Villard’s “magnanimous editorial policy” had given
him at every turn. Like Krutch and Van Doren, Ludwig looked back
upon his years at the Nation with fondness and deep appreciation: “He
respected the conclusions he could not accept, and I record, with a lively
sense of the rare mental and human qualities involved, the fact that in
the many hundreds of articles I wrote for the Nation not a syllable was
ever changed or expunged.” 9
By November 1919, circulation had jumped to more than fifty-three
thousand copies per week, giving the Nation a far greater influence than
Villard could have wished for even after the notoriety of a year earlier. In
this way, Ludwig’s role in the attempt to transform meaningless literary
and theatrical enterprises into the means of social and political change
quickly grew. His was a voice “indispensable to the growth of a mature
criticism in America,” as Alfred Kazin would assess in the early days
of the next war. 10 “Immediate fame” allowed Ludwig to move into
new areas of concern and later to promote the work of unpopular and
unknown writers (some experienced, others not) who would turn to
him and the Nation “as to a critical friend.” For many, it was their only
hope of reaching the vast readership that lay beyond the limited world
of small presses and obscure literary magazines. Sherwood Anderson,
Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, and Edgar Lee Masters were among
those whose early works he helped to publish by interesting publishers
who came to value his judgment. Of Ludwig’s critical acumen, of his
achieving “Goethean serenity when he wrote about literature,” despite
the heat of his passions, Van Doren later wrote in his memoir:
Night after night he went patiently to the theater, enduring bad and medio
cre entertainments for the sake of an occasional play worth writing about in
his weekly notice. Almost every week he wrote a review of a book, generally
a novel. He was no less a journalist for being a scholar and an artist. Hardly
any excellence eluded him.. . . Lewisohn was as alert as a hawk, seeing
better because he lived naturally in the upper air. He touched nothing that
he did not elevate. In a play by Eugene O’Neill or Susan Glaspell or many
a less thoughtful dramatist he would unfailingly discover some idea, some
Page 251 - [see page image]
250
Ludwig Lewisohn
issue, and enlarge it as with a microscope. Even if the thing were small
in itself, and had to say so, he could mount it, somehow, in a setting of
greatness, and a clear light would fall on it, and it would be seen to belong
in the company of eternal ideas, immortal issues. 1 '
Each essay or review Ludwig wrote for the Nation became an
opportunity for promoting these ideas in the service of a better world,
ever refining what he identified in a letter to Leonard that December
as his “dramaturgic philosophy. . . blooming in modest blushfulness
far beneath outward view.” If few others knew of this larger plan,
the seriousness of his weekly efforts soon brought him the respect he
believed necessary for his assault upon America through one of its more
meaningless institutions, the popular theater. Not that Ludwig was alone
in his critique of this magnet for the masses. George Jean Nathan, already
noted for his drama criticism, spoke of it as “an art in handcuffs . . . too
primitive, too greatly curtailed, too insufficient.” But he wanted less
from its change than Ludwig, only that it be an honest reflection “of the
typical American people." 1 -'
Ludwig, however, insisted that the American theater become much
more than “the archetype of this people.” Of the many articles he wrote
that fall, none was as clear or as sharp, as succinct or as blistering, as
his attack upon Edward Gordon Craig’s well-received book The Theatre
Advancing. Here was that old mythological shibboleth of God, world,
and man, that mainstay of the Puritans, revived and enlarged as a cure
for the ills of the postwar world and its theater. It was, for Ludwig, as
offensive as it was incredible to read, a retreat from the world’s realities
that had grown too prominent to ignore. Rather, the theater existed “to
serve mankind” as a guide through the drama of daily life, bringing
the individual “ever closer and closer to the concrete realities of man’s
struggle with himself and with his world.... It is the way of all art
which, sometimes aiming after the illusion of the real, sometimes by
a synthesis of the elements of experience, clarifies and interprets our
world for us, shows forth its hidden meaningfulness and beauty, and
thus, by persuading the individual to rise, through the contemplation of
the concrete, to a larger vision, takes from him the burden of the pain
and confusion of life.”''
But clearly, the English-speaking theater had failed to aid mankind
in this way. Where, asked Ludwig, were its masters of naturalistic
expression, playwrights like Moliere, Goethe, Ibsen, Hauptmann, and
Schnitzler? Who in England or America was fulfilling the need for
serious drama? The “cult of prettiness,” and an overbearing “moral illu-
sionism,” Ludwig claimed, had prevented it from developing naturally.
Craig’s wish to resurrect a world of myth and to build glorious palaces
Page 252 - [see page image]
251
Fear of Death
for its staging, particularly after the debacle of war and the unquestion
able uncertainty of the future, was unconscionable and symptomatic of
this continuing foolishness. The times called for honesty, not escape. The
aesthetic that appealed to the barbarian, and to those writers who had
helped lead the world to war, could not be entrusted with the search for
truth. “We like to think of ourselves as a nation of kindly, proper, good-
looking, romantically virile people. Between the mirror of the stage and
ourselves, we hold up for reflection that comfortable and sentimental
dream.” It would no longer do, this “Cult of Prettiness.””
Nor would “The Cult of Violence,” as he called the American melo
drama, “structurally stupid,” “openly bankrupt,” “monotonous and
heavy.” Even “people of no startling intelligence . . . are not unaware”
of these qualities, though they would go again and again, making them
safe commercial ventures. There was no great mystery to this, Ludwig
asserted with biting criticism, for the answer
lies in the extreme psychical gregariousness of the average American. Spiri
tual isolation has no bracing quality for him. To be in a minority makes
him feel indecent to the point of nakedness. His highest luxury is the
mass enjoyment of a tribal passion. War, hunting, and persecution are the
constant diversions of the primitive mind. And these that mind seeks in
the gross mimicry of melodrama. Violence, and especially moral violence, is
shown forth, and the audience joins vicariously in the pursuits and triumphs
of the action. Thus its hot impulses are slaked. It sees itself righteous and
erect, and the object of its pursuit, the quarry, discomfited or dead. For
the great aim of melodrama is the killing of the villain.. . . The villain,
whether tribal enemy, mere foreigner, or rebel against the dominant order,
is always represented as an unscrupulous rake. He attacks the honor of
native women, and thus—especially if his skin is a tinge darker—there is
blended with the other motives of pursuit the motive of a vicarious lynching
party of the orthodox kind. The melodrama of this approved pattern brings
into vicarious play those forces in human nature that produce mob violence
in peace and mass atrocities in war. Nations addicted to physical violence
of a directer and simpler kind have cultivated the arena and the bull ring.
Those who desire their impulses of cruelty to seem the fruit of moral energy
substitute melodrama. 1 '
There were, however, a few notable exceptions on the American
stage. Of these, the more socially marginal Yiddish and black theaters,
even when less than dramatically excellent, would be supported in his
attempt to remake America by weakening the continuing grasp of those
older, effete cultural forces of unreality. He had already discovered
the first of these, the Yiddish stage, contributing to its literature with
his Pinski translation. Before he left the Nation in 1924, he would
come to look upon the black theater with equal respect, in part, as
Page 253 - [see page image]
252
Ludwig Lewisohn
an attempt to overturn the twisted ideas of his own early years in
the South.
The idiom of the Yiddish stage was strange to the standard Broad
way reviewer, he noted without surprise. He, on the other hand, under
stood it well. “The Yiddish theater’s linguistic medium made the reviews
in the daily press a little breathless, and the new theatre may be said,
so far, not to have been criticized at all.” It was his self-appointed task
to see that it received the exposure it rightly deserved. “In its ideals
and intentions this is, quite easily the noblest theatrical enterprise now
existing among us. It stands aloof from all the pressure of commerce
and popularity; it has an audience that will respond to high passion
and grasp the force of tragic events.. . . Compare the blank little supers
of Broadway with these spontaneously tragic and comic masks which
the ages themselves seem to have modified.” The tragedy it portrayed
and the social marginality it so graphically represented were realities that
Ludwig himself had witnessed time and again since his arrival in America
more than three decades earlier. “To the [Jewish] immigrants in the early
years of the century, the [Yiddish] theatre was the one center of social
intercourse,” Harold Clurman would later recall from his youth. “Here
the problems of their life, past and present, could be given a voice; here
they could get to know and understand one another.” In praising David
Pinski’s Dumb Messiah that December, Ludwig spoke of how the play’s
authenticity had quite naturally emerged from that deeper meaning of
the Jewish experience which he himself had already begun to make a
part of his own identity. Because of the use of a naturalistic technique,
he hoped that other American playwrights would take its example to
heart. It was, he noted, “a nobly imaginative play in which the historical
fate and the historical inner conflict of the Jewish people are set forth in
an action that has the gravest beauty of aspect and the profoundest truth
of spirit.... By virtue of this single production the Jewish Art Theatre
should delight and deeply instruct all to whom the stage is the home of
an intenser, a clearer, and a heightened vision of life.” 1 '
Such a vision had made even more tragic the cooled sparks of an in
telligent young Jewish playwright he had once known in an earlier time.
After years of struggling to find an audience, the playwright had traded
his dramatic soul for the “half-murky, half-garnished world of vaudeville
sketches and small collaborations, with tinselled semi-celebrities of the
stage.” Broadway success possessed him, Ludwig commented with sad
ness; little else seemed to matter. He had risen from New York’s Lower
East Side, only to abandon the source of his dramatic insight for the fame
and wealth that came with “writing down to the taste of the largest and
least discriminating public.” And yet this sensitive playwright had not
Page 254 - [see page image]
253
Fear of Death
been blinded by the lights of his new world. Adulation and material
rewards became bitter contrasts to the promise he had forsaken as he
“shivered amid the heat of success.” His face appeared “scarred here and
there,” Ludwig remarked, “its kindly eyes passed from satisfaction to
melancholy.” Success had meant self-betrayal. The source of his art lay
back on the East Side where human drama could “arise, like prayer, from
the lonely chambers of the soul.” And yet the playwright knew that de
spite this melancholy prospect, he could no longer change his course. He
had already forfeited his birthright. Ludwig gazed with self-recognition
upon the ruins of this unidentified playwright (was he a fictional pro
jection of his former self?), and sighed with the sadness that comes of
witnessing real tragedy. “He will pass, in all likelihood, from one loud
success to another, and amid the plaudits of the crowd and the wealth of
the years, hide ever more guardedly the undying ache in his own soul.” 17
But Ludwig knew that a ruined playwright and a few ethnically
marginal theaters could not have the effect upon the future of America
that he sought, no matter how well they might have performed their
self-appointed tasks. In his desperate search for some naturalistic voice
on the English-speaking stage, he turned back to the “little theaters”
he had first discovered during his trips from Ohio. The first of these in
New York had emerged out of the efforts of a small group of political
dissidents, social outsiders, and avant-garde artists who, in the years
just prior to the war, had begun to meet informally at Polly Halladay’s
basement restaurant on MacDougal Street, next to Albert and Charles
Boni’s Washington Square Book Shop (and occasional library) at number
137, in Greenwich Village. Like their fellow revolutionary John Reed,
the group had hoped to smash the ways of their fathers and build a world
true to the “laws living in your heart.. . . Upset the force of things that
are your menace,” Reed advised them, so that the “great, new day”
might come, “with white winds washing” away the old in preparation
for the new. 18
First organizing the Liberal Club as “A Meeting Place for those Inter
ested in New Ideas,” they explored several possible means of spreading
the message of imminent change among the masses, whom they were cer
tain would join the coming revolution. Inspired by the realism of the new
European playwrights, now becoming more readily available through
English translation, they decided to stage a theatrical performance for
the club’s opening. In keeping with their need to satirize all accepted
modes of behavior, they chose to burlesque “the earnest Bohemian of our
little world.” Other plays followed, with each new undertaking helping
to solidify the group through joyful criticism of society and a healthy
dose of deprecating self-examination. “We ourselves were too interested
Page 255 - [see page image]
254
Ludwig Lewisohn
in ourselves to achieve much beyond that enjoyment,” explained Floyd
Dell, one of the group’s playwrights and directors. “But where these
productions fell short of dramatic art, they did succeed in being gay
communal ritual. In them the Village laughed at itself and relished the
mockery.”''
In the winter of 1914, John Reed joined his fellow editor at the
Masses, Max Eastman, Eastman’s wife Ida Rauh, Hutchins Hapgood
and his wife Neith Boyce, Robert Edmond Jones, Lawrence Langner,
and a handful of others to begin a more serious effort at theatrical
propagandizing under the name of the Washington Square Players.
The following February, the company presented its first off-Broadway
production at the Bandbox Theater on Third Avenue and Fifty-seventh
Street. Two years later, the Washington Square Players would stage
Mary Lewisohn’s pacifist drama The Pawns of War, but by then the
more radical members of the group had broken away to form the
Provincetown Players.-"
They had previously spent a number of summers together on Cape
Cod, retreating to Provincetown when the heat of their tiny, poorly
ventilated Village apartments became too oppressive even for those
whose lives had been otherwise “quaintly enriched by our poverty,”
as Dell later spoke of their genteel pauper’s existence. During these
first summers away from the city, they had “amused themselves with
private theatricals,” but as the war grew more ominous they had begun
to take more seriously their earlier vow to spread revolution as quickly
as possible. If by the summer of 1916 the Washington Square Players,
of which they were a part, had not yet succeeded in doing this, then
they would undertake the task themselves. Under the leadership of
George Crane Cook, they turned “aside from the broad highway to
make new paths through the wilderness.” Joining Dell, Reed, Dodge,
and the Eastmans in 1916 were Michael Gold, author of the now long-
neglected novel Jews without Money and future editor of the communist
Daily World; playwright and Cook’s wife, Susan Glaspell; poet and
future defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay; Maxwell
Bodenheim, the poet whose lifestyle was the very embodiment of the
post-Victorian break with social convention; and Eugene O’Neill, whose
early works had their opening in the Provincetown Players’ renovated
carriage house at 133 MacDougal Street, including Bound for East
Cardiff, the troupe’s first New York performance in the fall of 1916.
Ludwig had been there that night, cheering on this new effort. Twenty
years later, Susan Glaspell would inscribe a gift book to him, “never
forgetting what he said, at the close of the second act, that first night in
the dear old Provincetown Theatre." 1
Page 256 - [see page image]
255
Fear of Death
Vying successfully for Ludwig’s attention during these early years
and after his return to New York was another type of “little theater,”
a hybrid of the English-speaking and Yiddish stages that actually had
emerged on the Lower East Side two years before the founding of the
Liberal Club. With the backing of Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement
House, Adolph Lewisohn’s daughters, Alice and Irene, had begun experi
menting with a new kind of theater in 1912. Alice had earlier been struck
by the socialist ideas of George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, and
under their influence had left the uptown comforts of her father’s world
to help Jews less fortunate than herself. But her efforts toward social
improvement had proven less than satisfying in her search for “a leeway
of the spirit.” In creating and developing the Neighborhood Playhouse,
she had found the “channel... to those fundamental chords out of
which culture unfolds”; in short, she had discovered her ethnic identity.
For several decades, the playhouse would serve as both a training ground
for young performing artists and as a forum in which unknown novelists,
playwrights, and composers, Jewish and non-Jewish, American and Eu
ropean, could share their political, social, and artistic ideas, and watch
many of them pass into the mainstream of American life. To them, as
Ludwig would write in the Nation, “the form and content of the art of the
drama is an immediate and a native experience of the mind and heart.”'-
Ludwig moved with ease among all three theatrical groups. He was
of them all, and each was a part of what he had become by 1919.
Through those members he had known earlier, he had met the others
and formed ties that remained unbroken over the coming decades in
America and abroad. With a clear vision of the theater’s central role in
the changes he hoped to see, he used these ties, as he had his position
at the Nation, to create a role for himself upon the broader stage of the
American cultural landscape. Whether as a critical promoter, as reader
and adviser of material for production, or as translator and adapter of
European novels and plays for American presentation, he worked his
own ideas into these fringes of American life, hoping to see them filter
inward through the increasing influence of the marginal theater upon
the whole of the dramatic world.
All of these elements—his criticism of the popular American theater,
his love of the European naturalist playwrights, his participation in the
little theater movements, and his high praise for the Jewish and black
stage—were to be used in the service of a new “dramaturgic philosophy.”
By December 1919 the work was well under way, with a promise from
a new publisher, Horace Liveright, to publish the book as soon as the
manuscript was ready. Writing to Leonard in confidence (“unter uns”)
at year’s end, he spoke with gratitude for the opportunity Villard had
Page 257 - [see page image]
256
Ludwig Lewisohn
given him to fully develop his ideas in the weekly Nation column. “I
owe the existence of the greater part of several books ... to Villard,”
he would repeat publicly some years later. 23 But it was Horace Liveright
to whom he gave the greater credit for having supported his attempt
to organize his thoughts on the theater as a force for change in the
postwar era. 24
They had first met in the fall of 1919, when, with his promotion
to associate editor at the Nation still nearly a year away, Ludwig again
began to search for additional work. Money remained much the problem
it had always been, forcing him to continue writing reviews for Town
Topics. To supplement this, he had accepted editorial work from the
publishing house of Boni & Liveright. Liveright, like Huebsch before
him and a host of other publishers in the years to come, had found
Ludwig to be an astute reader and editor. Ludwig himself had found
this arrangement quite satisfying, and thinking that his friend Mencken
would be interested, passed along the suggestion that he, too, might
establish such a relationship, if only for financial reasons: “Confidential:
Liveright is a first rate man to deal with—intelligent, quick in decision,
prompt in payment. I made the mistake for years of having only one
publisher. Ben [Huebsch] is still my beautiful ideal of what a publisher
should be personally. I shall always love him and write for him. But two
publishers are better than one.... Be a polygamist. It pays.” 25
Though glibly reflecting upon this arrangement, Ludwig took the
work seriously, seeing each assignment as another opportunity to share
his dreams and commitments with those he respected. His insatiable
need to play an important role in shaping the future compelled him to
take on more and more work, hoping, in the process, to involve those
whom he believed shared his vision of a better world. In writing to
Mencken that October, Ludwig offered him the opportunity to write a
volume in “a brief series of authoritative books” then being considered
by Liveright. “The series is to be known as THE NEW WORLD. Five
volumes are projected: The New Religion which will be written by John
Haynes Holmes, The New Morality which W. L. George has undertaken
to do for me. There remains for the present: The New Art, The New
Education, the New State. I herewith—note the solemnity—invite you
to write for us the volume on The New Art. I hope very much indeed
that you will come in with us.” 26
Ludwig’s ties to Liveright would last for many years, as he, far more
than Huebsch, understood and empathized with his author. Excluded
as a Jew from the sanctuaries of genteel publishing to a degree that
Huebsch would never experience, Liveright had found himself within
the artistically and socially marginal world to which Ludwig and the
Page 258 - [see page image]
257
Fear of Death
many other outsiders he published belonged. Huebsch, though having
similar interests, did not care for Liveright, whom he thought “cunning
and tricky in the way that business men in a competitive line are.”
He attributed Liveright’s success to showmanship and to the selection
of “astute associates,” though Huebsch did wonder whether his own
“instinctive dislike for him was not in part due to my envy.” 27 Liveright
had attracted to his own house some of Huebsch’s most important
writers, among them James Joyce and Ludwig. But what may have
concerned Huebsch more was his fear of being seen in the same light
as Liveright, whose image as a brash Jewish publisher appeared as a
threat to his own carefully nurtured reputation. Huebsch need not have
worried, for even men like Cass Canfield of Harpers, who at the time
felt quite comfortable with the anti-Semitism in his profession, 28 saw
Liveright in a curiously positive way, a man of “great flair” with a
“brilliant list” of authors, a “lone wolf” whom he admired as “the most
colorful of the publishers in New York during the twenties. '
Ironically, it was this colorful lifestyle that ultimately caused Liv
eright’s undoing, as his career became a reflection of the excitement
and demise of the 1920s—its meteoric rise with the postwar tide, its
foundering on the empty glamour of Prohibition-era Broadway, and its
untimely end in the Depression that was to follow. By 1933, he would
be dead. But the years that led to his financial ruin and early death were
like the era in which he played out his life, filled with unending frenzy
and the thrill of giving talent and near-talent a chance to express itself.
Liveright, after knocking about as a purveyor of stocks and bonds
and of a cleverly named toilet tissue known as “Pik-Quick Papers,”
had met Albert Boni, whose Village bookshop had recently failed, at an
advertising agency where both were employed as copywriters. Pooling
their borrowed resources, they resigned their unwanted positions in
the fall of 1916 and began to map a strategy by which they hoped to
change the course of American letters. They would simply circumvent
the firm grasp of those exclusionary “cultivated Christian gentlemen”
who controlled the publishing world, and appeal to the tastes of a
different audience through a unique list of authors. It was an idea that
had been moderately successful for Boni while on MacDougal Street.
Renaming the “Little Leather Library,” they expanded its initial series
of reprinted classics over the next several years to include contemporary
radical and avant-garde writers whose works, as part of the “Modern
Library of the World’s Best Books,” seemed fairly certain to sell—
O’Neill, Dreiser, Shaw, Wilde, Strindberg, Wells, Ibsen, Barbusse, Hardy,
Latzko, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, and, of course, Ludwig (including his
translation of Latzko’s Judgment of Peace in 1919).
Page 259 - [see page image]
258
Ludwig Lewisohn
Their well-calculated risks, despite the war’s censorious atmosphere,
had brought them a comfortable profit within the first year. But by 1918
they had reached an impasse over Liveright’s desire to gamble their
earnings on books by little-known or previously unpublished writers
whose potentially unprofitable works he admired. They tossed a coin to
see who would sell out to the other. Boni lost and went to Russia to study
the revolution firsthand, only to find himself imprisoned for a time as an
alleged spy. Liveright continued past the armistice and into the new year
under their old imprimatur. Free to go his own way, he soon brought
out John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (a title suggested by
Arthur Garfield Hays, Ludwig’s future attorney and co-legal counsel in
the Scopes trial), which sold nine thousand copies within weeks of its
publication and earned for its author the admiration of Lenin. (“Tell
Horace the big chief thinks my book the best,” was the word Reed sent
back to the States through his lover, Louise Bryant.) This easy success
was quickly followed by an expansion of the Modern Library to more
than 120 titles. Over the next five years, he would add to his list works
of Pound, Eliot, Cummings, Anderson, Hemingway, Sinclair, Gauguin,
Jeffers, and Faulkner, as well as the first authorized translation of Freud,
whose nephew, Edward Bernays, handled promotion for Liveright.
Of equal importance to the struggle for this new order, and for
Ludwig’s own sense of participation within it, were the daily daytime
gatherings of writers who would descend upon Liveright’s row-house
office in search of a friendly face and good, drink-filled conversation.
So, too, were the innumerable and infamous parties that would often
last until dawn, some formal and some not, some attended by invitation
only and others held with an open door. Both were a part of Liveright’s
contribution to whatever sense there was of an artists’ community in
New York during these years. Those he published, and those who either
sought his press or were a part of the city’s literary or theatrical scene,
would stop by to add their wit and sparkle to the cast of characters that
gravitated toward his flamboyant personality—bootleggers, chorus girls,
would-be Broadway producers, newspaper people, and an occasional
civilian from the street whose curiosity about this army of revelers had
gotten the better of him. For his trouble, he might run into the acting
genius of John Barrymore, or perhaps the exotic beauty of Anna May
Wong, or be favored with a small concert by the brilliant black performer
(and future political radical) Paul Robeson, introduced to this setting by
the music critic who had done so much to promote his career, Carl
Van Vechten. 30 Of these, Robeson would help Ludwig explore the black
theater, and Van Vechten would later provide him with the passport to
Gertrude Stein’s Paris circle of writers and artists, some of whom he had
Page 260 - [see page image]
259
Fear of Death
known years before following them in his own attempt to escape the
maddening pace of his own life, of which Liveright was both a symptom
and a cause.
Bennett Cerf, who joined Liveright’s editorial staff in 1924, spoke
of his love for this man who “ran a crazy office”; 31 and Lillian Hell-
man, whose association with the publisher began shortly after Cerf’s,
remembered “that the sympathy and attention given [by Liveright] to
writers, young or old, was more generous than had been known before,
possibly more real than has been known since.” Echoing their thoughts,
and Ludwig’s own assessment of him as “a first rate man to deal with,”
was Sherwood Anderson’s epitaph for the man who had kept faith with
those who shared his vision and his search for remedies to the scandalous
institutions and unnatural moral posturings of his age: “It was all rather
crazy, rather splendid. Horace was a gambler and if he believed in you
would gamble on you. I have always thought since the man’s death, that
too much emphasis has been put on the reckless splendor of the man
rather than on his never-ending generosity and his real belief in men
of talent.” ■
The final word about this largely forgotten publishing giant, in an
era of larger-than-life characters, properly belongs to Liveright himself.
When asked at the peak of his success (his house having topped one
million dollars in earnings in 1924) if he thought of himself as a “radical
publisher,” he responded that “if you mean by radical, getting at the
root of things, I cheerfully plead guilty”; and with the same boundless
enthusiasm that could as easily conjure up an endless stream of masterful
gatherings as it could discern a masterly work amidst the pages of a
roughly hewn manuscript, he added rhetorically, “Motivating impulses?
First, to maintain an open forum and to publish books so long as I believe
they are good, no matter what side of any question they take; no matter
how frank they may be in their expression of the life of yesterday, to-day
or tomorrow; to fight the good fight for freedom of the press.. . . Above
all, to make our home on Forty-eighth Street a place where young and
unknown authors may bring their books or their ideas." ,J
Though older than many, and already enjoying an admirable repu
tation by late 1919, Ludwig found Liveright’s to be the sanctuary and
catalyst that its builder had hoped it would become. Like the Nation,
Greenwich Village, and the theater, it was for Ludwig one of the four
corners of his feverish world as the decade of the twenties descended
upon him. But as sheltering as this circumscribed world could be, there
remained at its pivotal core his troubled marriage to Mary and his fa
ther’s worsening insanity, and all the memories of his life and of Minna’s
death. Each served as a daily reminder of the inescapable realities that
Page 261 - [see page image]
260
Ludwig Lewisohn
threatened to invade his cloistered domain, in the final weeks of 1919,
when all of this seemed suddenly to be pushing in upon him again.
Feelings of imminent success at changing the world and of finding some
direction for his life in the process began to weaken. He struggled on
with greater determination and energy, driven by fear, anger, and hope,
and the memories of pain and exaltation that now made it ever more
imperative for him to find the greater peace and fulfillment he began to
suspect as the underlying motive behind all he had tried to achieve.
To ward off the furor within, he chose to remain a part of the
unending round of literary and social activity typical of those writers
and theater people with whom he still hoped to accomplish this spirited
cultural transformation. Only as an intimate part of their world could
he have the impact upon them, the theater, and society that he desired.
Not that the prospect was altogether unappealing. After the isolation
of Ohio, the hectic pace and involvement of New York’s literary scene
was a welcome change. If he told Leonard in December that he had been
“tearing my last few sad grey hairs at the thought that your letter . . .
lay here unanswered,” such delays had apparently become a fact of the
life he had willingly accepted. “The plays, remember, have to be seen,
the novels have to be read. The H. C. L. [Liveright] compels me to do a
certain additional amount of editorial and advisory work. Our regular
bed-time is 2 a.m. We get up around 11. At noon I start in at my desk.
Before I know it, it’s time to go to the theater. Free evenings have to be
spent largely in reading and thinking and keeping in touch with a few
friends. You can see how the weeks slip by.” 34
As a metaphor for all the world, the theater continued to seem an
ideal place from which to stage his assault. The world, after all, was
“the theatre of a class and an economic condition from which we must
free it for the service of noble and more human things.” As the one who
“must grasp his bright, brief, transitory pageant. . . with the imaginative
innocence of a child, the austere detachment of a philosopher, [and]
the rich sympathies of a man,” 35 Ludwig wrote in the Nation late in
December 1919, his role as a drama critic had been most compatible
with his need to express a prophetic voice. He had chosen a monumental
task for himself, one that had forced him to shift his energies from old
friends and interests. At so great a personal cost, he was determined
to transform the theater into an instrument for change, as much for
society’s sake as for his own.
Almost until he broke with this maddening pace, he remained largely
unaware of just how precarious his life had become, of how the cen
tripetal force of the times had pulled him into itself, nearly obliterat
ing his own highly individualized search from which alone his inner
Page 262 - [see page image]
261
Fear of Death
peace could come. “The weeks slip by,” he complained to Leonard that
December, but it was the complaint of one whose life was filled with
“Algonquin lunches” at the Round Table, Liveright’s “terrific punch
[that] made the lights spin like wheels,” meetings with the Theatre
Guild’s board, Broadway opening nights, and the writing of articles
having a “moral element,” articles that “were mentioned and quoted
and gave me a position of some influence and authority in New York.” 36
The frenzied pace had for the moment taken possession of him, as it
had Liveright and so many others. Its hold upon Ludwig was as strong
as it had become for the most intoxicated reformers of his time. And
because he so deeply needed to wrench the social fabric, he saw little
of what was happening to him as he grew more and more blinded
by the frenetic life that seemed a sign of radical change. There ap
peared to be little choice for him but to help speed along the process
through his own participation in its gathering whirlwind. “That tight
and intricate web [of the past] is in tatters,” he wrote excitedly in
February 1920. “Here and there—in Boston and Charleston—small
groups treasure frail bits of it like frayed remnants of old lace.” To hold
on to this past, in the theater or in the larger world, was a fatal flaw
which in “our free and fevered world, leads to nothing but incurable
unreality." r
And then, almost as suddenly as he had been caught up in this
whirlwind, he was released. Some inner voice broke through the shrill
music with the sounds of a higher song. The carousel continued to
spin, and the bright lights shone as brightly as ever into the night, but
in a moment the glare and the noise overpowered them both until he
found himself seated atop its darkest horse. The weeks and months had
passed in a steady, if frantic, stream of movement and writing, marred, it
appeared at the time, only by his growing rift with Mary, from whom he
had sought temporary relief in “a certain Rebecca,” as he had referred to
her in answer to Leonard’s “very just suspicion." ’* Through it all, he had
continued to convince himself of the centrality of social reform to his life,
hoping that it would give him the deeper meaning he had been seeking
since his youth. It was his father’s death by stroke on March 1,1920, the
sixty-first anniversary of his birth, that finally “made a hole” in all of this.
“I have felt seedy,” he told his friend Joel Elias Spingarn (“the literary and
financial backer of Harcourt, Brace, and House”) nine days later as he
thanked him for his kind words regarding A Modern Book of Criticism.
Despite Jacques’ having been an invalid for seven years, his death “hit me
hard and brought back to me in full force a singularly strange and tragic
life” to which Ludwig himself had been so intimately tied for nearly forty
years. Twenty years later, after reciting the traditional Jewish prayer for
Page 263 - [see page image]
262
Ludwig Lewisohn
the dead as a part of his Yahrzeit (anniversary for the dead) observance,
Ludwig would think back upon his father’s tragic life, as he had “a good
deal lately. Bright, energetic sayings of his came to me. I realized again
the broad range of his intellectual and artistic interests.... So fine a
soul,” he concluded, “so dark and meagre a life.“ '
Ludwig had thought earlier that the moment of Jacques’ bodily
death would not leave him nearly as distraught as he had been after
his father’s final maddening descent and loss of contact with the world
around him. But Jacques’ second death came as a shock of even greater
magnitude than his first. Ludwig was stunned by his reaction to his
father’s passing, as old and terrible thoughts, long ago laid to rest,
returned ghostlike to haunt his waking moments. As with Minna’s death,
he would never fully recover from Jacques’. Yet as devastating as hers
had been, there was something far more terrifying in this new loss. For
Jacques, living on past Minna, had witnessed the failure of his son’s
marriage and the way in which his once valued America had entrapped
Ludwig into an unhappy life. The knowledge that he had encouraged
their marriage, that he was “surely not wholly faultless,” had only added
to Jacques’ depression and eventual escape into madness. “So single and
so honourable,” Ludwig wrote of him in Crump, he “had shrunk from
the moral corruption in which ... his son dwelt,” and in his insanity,
had nearly abandoned him.
Ludwig had visited Jacques every other day throughout the seven
years of his confinement, watching as he grew steadily less commu
nicative, saying little beyond his constant objection to his son’s wast
ing money “to keep me comfortable here” (Ludwig having ultimately
assumed Jacques’ expenses, as he had previously in Ohio). He wished
only to die. “Don’t do it any longer,” Jacques would protest each time
Ludwig came to visit in these last years. “I’m not worth it. I’m no good,
and you know it. Why don’t you just bring me a bottle of poison?"' 1 '
On rare occasions, Jacques would send a brief message, written with an
erratic hand on a postcard pre-addressed by Ludwig: “My condition not
much changed and that is all I can say.” 41
Yet while Jacques lived, he served Ludwig as a bond with a past
whose fading memory could still offer some comfort. With his death, he
had severed the last physical link to this past. Ludwig knew there was
no chance of ever again experiencing this tie to his earlier life. Only the
psychic scars remained as guideposts along the many roads he was yet
to travel toward “those last mysteries which lie in wait even for those
who . . . have not only created life, but transcended it.” 42 As a student of
Latin, he knew that the ancient Romans marked an adolescent’s ascent
to manhood at age forty. In his heightened emotional state, Jacques’
Page 264 - [see page image]
263
Fear of Death
death became for the thirty-seven-year-old Ludwig a sign that some new
rite de passage was imminent.
No longer could the excitement of the hour, or the pleasure of
achieving fame and social acceptance within progressive circles, mask
the deepening disorder in his private life. The full measure of joy that he
might otherwise have felt quickly dimmed as his father’s death forced
him to admit to this self-deception. “Distress. . . brought over from
earlier confused and tragic years literally tarnished my sunlight and
withered for me the very leaves of spring.” The unhappy memories
of a marginal life, and a sense of helplessness before the emotional
and cultural forces driving him from Mary, shattered Ludwig’s last
hopes for himself and society once Jacques died. Forces that could
not so easily be overcome raised serious and fundamental questions in
his mind, questions that neither he nor his friends and associates had
raised in the past, questions of how one lived “from within outward,”
of how one made an appropriate response to an “apparently empty
universe” filled as often with death as it was with life. His unique
past and the troubled present that had given rise to these thoughts had
forced him now to seek his own counsel, and to look for new ideas
within a vastly different cultural heritage from that of his colleagues
or his wife—“for my friends had both love and children and were
identified not only by landscapes and speech but, in spite of their radi
calism, by fundamental instincts with the American fold and its ways,”
while “he had insight into a region where those virtues had not yet
been reached. And that region, from which Anne [Mary] had arisen,
was one of chaos and of spiritual death. ”* 1 Some new direction was
needed if he was to set a different course for the years that remained.
New questions had to be asked, and a new set of answers, bearing
some meaning beyond the illusory importance of the moment, had to
be found.
Much of this began to spill over into his dramatic criticism. The
theater, seen before as a mirror of society and as a tool for social change,
now revealed its deeper dimensions to him. Like all authentic art, it
seemed suddenly to be reaching out to the individual soul with the
intensity of a prayer or an act of love. True drama, he believed, could
spring only from this same source of human aspiration, beginning as
“a personal vision of the mystery of life which burned away all other
visions, darkened for the hour all other light, opened new vistas into
the land of the soul. Without that there is no art, no literature, no
drama.. . . Nothing can justify the creative act today . . . but personal
vision and that requires character, not in the current sense of technical
blamelessness or as assent to common standards, but in the higher sense
Page 265 - [see page image]
264
Ludwig Lewisohn
of daring to experience in order to transmit experience into ripeness,
wisdom, beauty."'"'
Neither great form nor technique (“the patter about learning one’s
craft”) truly mattered in the creative act. It would render its own inherent
shape in due course, as he had realized earlier when first reading Dreiser’s
work, for the true artist could not remain silent once he had seen “his
bit of life with sudden insight, brooded over it in long vigils, and finally
projected it in dramatic, not theatrical terms. ' u< The creator’s impulse
alone was needed to give voice to this personal vision. “It’s resistless, or
it is nothing." 4
Ludwig was cut from this same artist’s cloth. In the weeks and
months that followed Jacques’ death, he continued the old routines,
barely missing a beat of its pace. To the world he presented an unchanged
image, but within himself he brooded over this “sudden and impassioned
insight.” He needed to conceive life in terms of a larger scheme of
existence, to search for some “coherence” amidst the madness of it
all, and to project his own experience, in some dramatic way, as a
representative of this coherent vision. 47 But he lacked the confidence
in this new perception that would come with time and an irresistible
urge to cry out. Unsure of himself and a bit frightened by thoughts that
seemed the antithesis of so much of what he had long professed, he
tumbled into a slowly deepening depression as repressed thoughts and
emotions brought on new and threatening anxieties.
He saw himself falling into an abyss again, but remained determined
to go on, keeping it all to himself as best he could, hoping to be able
to free himself from its seemingly infinite depths. Not even Leonard,
his oldest confidant, was privy to these thoughts, though some of his
closest friends had already perceived his worsening emotional state. Yet,
if before most others Ludwig managed an unchanging visage, inside
the turmoil twisted him about as if caught in a maelstrom. Up Stream,
as he would ironically title the final draft of his earlier “Confessions,”
began to take its lasting shape under the influence of the spiritual terror
and psychic restraints of these days. And in the process of finishing the
book, he would begin to recover, ultimately forgetting how depressed he
had been and how much he had needed to find something positive in the
landscape whose examination he had returned to in that darkening hour.
Yet some of this terror would be recalled in his “Introduction” to the
1926 revision of Up Stream, written during a happier time, memories
of how
early in 1920 ... it seemed to me that my American world was showing
certain symptoms, faint but definite, of a happy change, that there were
Page 266 - [see page image]
265
Fear of Death
stirrings here and there of an impulse to re-examine the character of hu
man experience, of American experience, above all, of that catastrophal
experience through which mankind had just passed. Partly inspired by
the perception of this change and partly to strengthen and accelerate it,
I went on, still slowly and hesitantly enough, with the composition of this
book. Now came a period of some months during which I occasionally read
detached passages of the manuscript to carefully chosen friends.. . . They
seemed to be very much stirred or even troubled by it. 48
Harris saw none of this when he arrived unannounced in New
York for outpatient medical treatment at St. Vincent’s Hospital less
than three weeks after Jacques’ death. Not once in any of his letters
to his wife did Harris mention Ludwig’s depressed state or even note an
unusually saddened expression. Ludwig had evidently made a success of
masking his true feelings from his old mentor. Harris had first chanced
upon Ludwig at a theater on the evening of March 23, a week before
contacting him. From a distance he watched his now famous student,
and with the eye of a once promising writer, drew a rather detailed, if
not totally accurate, portrait of Ludwig and his world—and, perhaps,
of Rebecca:
Another highbrow caught my eye, as I looked down over the balcony rail
into the well nigh empty pit. He was a well dressed, small but rather heavy
set man, with very black massy falls of hair from the middle parting, an
intellectual face, manifestly a person of quiet, easy assurance in his opinions,
repose of expression, decisive but well-controlled animation of gesture with
wrist and fingers. He was with a rather large, and I think a handsome
woman, very tastefully dressed, and, I am pretty sure, not his wife, for I
remember very well the look of Mrs. Ludwig Lewisohn. I will wager that
he had free tickets as learned and expert writer on the performance for the
week’s Nation. I shall later in the week buy a Nation and see. I felt as if I
could give him some points for his write-up, but I didn’t waylay him as I
came out. 49
Three nights later (“invited by Lewisohn’s review in The Nation”), so
Harris saw John Barrymore’s performance of Richard III. Four days
later he contacted Ludwig, who was, of course, thrilled to hear that his
“old, old friend . . . not seen for eight years"' 1 was in town at this critical
moment in his life, for here, suddenly, if only for a moment, was that
much needed link to the past. Ludwig did all that he could to please
his guest, happy just to have him nearby again, though unwilling to
discuss what so deeply troubled him. He had long ago learned to keep
his thoughts from Harris, who remained unaware of the significance of
his visit. To his wife, Harris wrote on March 30, 1920,
I found that he expected me to go out to dinner with him, and, though
I had had dinner, I was glad to ask to be allowed to sit by while he and
Page 267 - [see page image]
266
Ludwig Lewisohn
Mrs. Lewisohn dined. So off we went to a very attractive little club of
playwriters—cozy little rooms lined with bookcases and comfortable with
sofas and easy chairs. Mrs. Lewisohn is the club member: She has written
performed plays, expects to have one staged presently in London, has met
and corresponded with Galsworthy, whom she finds genial and very helpful.
Both L. and she were as cordial as can be, and the evening was to me both
easy and extremely interesting. 52
Ludwig was the perfect host. On April 1, Harris told his wife that his
days had become so exciting that he was staying on in New York for a
brief while longer, hoping to meet more of Ludwig’s literary friends. “He
knows everybody that writes—Frank Harris among them.... I don’t
want to miss Sunday dinner with the Lewisohns.”' 1 She was pleased with
the reception her husband had received from the “Jew” poet. “Lewisohn
lacks some fine instincts,” she wrote Harris, “but I’m so glad he has
shown his really sincere devotion to you.” 54
They met again the following day, and in a letter to his wife that
evening, Harris commented how, throughout their many visits together,
Ludwig had remained “an exceedingly stimulating talker.” He seemed
quite content, Harris went on. With an income of fifty dollars a week
from the Nation, supplemented by articles for Town Topics and the
fifteen hundred he was to receive from Harcourt, Brace for the transla
tion of Jakob Wassermann’s two-volume novel Christian Wahnschaffe
(“which sort of work he can now do with little effort”), he felt certain
that all of Ludwig’s worries had vanished. “I have never seen him so
cheerful,"' Harris added, unaware of Ludwig’s deeper concerns and
of his continuing financial difficulties. Hours later, Ludwig would write
Leonard complaining of having had no real choice but to accept Sp-
ingarn’s offer “to translate the blooming 400,000 words! ... I swore I
wouldn’t, told him he was a damned fool in his opinion of the book,
tried in every way to avoid temptation. I’m sick to the soul and marrow
of translating. But finally my poverty—you have no idea what it cost
to live in New York—prevailed. So I fill every nook of spare time with
endless streams of Wassermann’s mannerized prose.” 56
Harris saw Ludwig for the last time on the evening of April 4,
visiting the Lewisohns in their comfortable home “at the top of an
apartment house wilderness” overlooking the Hudson River. Impressed
by the view, but far from the Ashley and Cooper Rivers of Charleston,
he felt out of place in a part of the world he could never make his own.
Their lifestyles had diverged too radically over the years. What remained
between them was an affection and an empathy that each had for the
other because of their common past, old bonds strengthened by Harris’s
growing respect for Ludwig’s grasp of literature, and by his continuing
Page 268 - [see page image]
267
Fear of Death
need to appropriate much of the credit for this accomplishment. Harris’s
retelling of that final evening with Ludwig and Mary reveals much of
this, as it does the accuracy with which Ludwig had already drawn his
portrait for Up Stream:
There was a young pair—a former professor of German at N.Y. University
and his wife, who promptly left. Lewisohn said they found me to be what
they expected. It seems they had read the “autobiography,” in which the
full length portraits are Leonard . . . and myself. I owe Lewisohn much . . .
on this visit to N.Y. Both he and Mrs. Lewisohn pump up my tires and
clean out my clogged gearing. What I don’t know about present goings on
in literature is prodigious but Lewisohn is perspicuous . . . and the essential
meaning comes from him straight and live; and I found I could talk naturally,
easily and put questions when I wanted them. An unmistakable friendliness
and sympathy withal. 57
How poorly he had judged Ludwig; and how well Ludwig had
shielded himself from the critical eyes of someone who had once guided
him to near ruin. He had detected none of Ludwig’s sense of the unreality
of his life that had already begun to set him aimlessly adrift. He had been
surprised to see Ludwig’s apparent lack of “elation over his success,”
but failed to lend it any meaning. 58 He knew nothing of how Jacques’
death had finally pierced the present and brought back the past with a
forcefulness that had shaken loose Ludwig’s always tenuous grasp upon
life, leaving little besides painful reflection and an uncompromising need
for redirection in its wake. The articles, the parties, the ever-revolving
doors of his existence, so attractive to Harris, had become for Ludwig
mere traps from which he had to find a lasting escape. “Longings for
things both in time and beyond” consumed him. He no longer lusted
after fame in worlds competing for his energy and his talent. He needed
to find his own place in the larger scheme of which these worlds were
a part. And as each day passed, his depression would deepen. Within a
year he would fall to the bottom. Aware of the return of these familiar
symptoms, he had already confided to Leonard on April 3, the day before
Harris’ last visit, just how profoundly his father’s death had loosened
his own ties to the world around him:
After seven years of mental darkness shot with such lucid gleams as made
his fate the more tragic and piercing to me, my poor, dear father died.
I was very glad for his sake. But it seemed somehow to snap the last link
between my present self and that original past of myself compared to which
all adventures and human relationships since have an almost dreamlike
unreality to me. I don’t know whether you, whether anyone shares that
feeling. To me the first nineteen years in my parents’ house have a reality, a
nativeness that is lost. I haven’t had since then any direct touch with things.
They glide from me.
Page 269 - [see page image]
268
Ludwig Lewisohn
“I don’t regard this as fortunate,’'" he concluded, and so, slowly
and cautiously, he returned to his memories of former days in search of
some deeper understanding. If “a definite Freudian explanation” had not
adequately accounted for the “feeling of estrangedness that has deepened
around me,” then he would look elsewhere for an image of himself at
home within the larger continuum of time and space. Beyond that last
door to which Freudian analysis had taken him some years earlier, he
perceived the existence of a realm of meaningfulness that still eluded him.
With a new set of questions to guide his search, he looked back
upon Jacques and Minna and their incurable sadness; upon his youth
spent and misspent in Berlin, St. Matthews, and Charleston; upon the
years of struggle in New York and Columbus; and upon the small
measure of fleeting success he had come to enjoy, before his descent
to this fated moment. He saw more clearly than ever before how a sense
of “coherence” was missing in his life. Somewhere, it had been lost.
And somewhere, amidst the generations and the worlds out of which
he had come, he believed that it lay waiting to be recovered. Was he
not, he reflected in despair, the incarnation of something larger than
himself, something that linked him with a definite past and present, a
common strain of thought, experience, and memory, developed “in time
and beyond,” that alone could bring him into the future—something
whose force had now exposed his self-betrayal?
Ludwig later realized how truly critical this moment in his life had
been. He had spent his years seeking solace in the creative process, and
had found it temporarily among his friends who “steadied and uplifted
him by their quiet assumption, which did not exclude criticism, that
he counted definitely in the permanent world of art.” 60 But the shallow
wellsprings of his earlier years, fed from an alien stream, had finally
dried—while those from which he, in his new life, might have drawn
the sustenance that so many of his friends enjoyed, were blocked by
something deep within himself. He had been as much a part of his
time as any; but even as a youth, he had possessed a need to find that
greater meaning in life whose possible existence his friends had long ago
dismissed as a mere illusion.
I saw the people upon my scene of life in the guise of puppets going through
the vain and awkward motions of a show that had no aim, no aspiration, no
binding to God or man, no coherence or meaning or health or wholeness.
Some day the bones of each puppet would be thrust into a wooden box. A
fear of death came upon me, not of death as a cessation of life but as loss,
emptiness, futility. ... I was persuaded that the lives of most of my friends
and also my own were lives that had no form in the sense in which we use
the term in art. There was chaos, because there was neither trend nor bond
Page 270 - [see page image]
269
Fear of Death
nor any shaping inner principle. Ambition was not enough, nor skill, nor
pleasure, nor even a devotion to good causes. The coherence I wanted lay
deeper. Something to dwell with in hours of utter stillness, something to
free the mind from a too complete slavery to fortune, something to sustain
me if all the lights of Broadway were to go out and no more printed matter
were to appear and all our wanted trades and excitements and rivalries
and petty triumphs were to be engulfed by some unimaginable wave of
darkness. An old old cry, doubtless, this cry of mine after a principle of
coherence. Yet I come back to that phrase as to a sane and philosophical
one. For what I wanted could not be religious in the older sense of a fixed
faith in anything extra-mundane. It could not be, at least from my point
of view, a passionate adherence to any economic or sociological doctrine. I
thought I knew whither the world process was slowly tending. But even if
that process required my doubtful aid it could not fill. . . the eternal needs
of the human heart. What was it that I sought? What was my lack? 61
Page 271 - [see page image]
270
10
Against the Tide
That summer, Ludwig’s shaky world nearly toppled as the postwar
economic depression caught Villard and the Nation at the worst possible
moment. Frances Neilson, a former member of the British Parliament
and the dissident author of How Diplomats Make War, had promised his
financial support (in excess of thirty thousand dollars annually) to the
Nation shortly after Villard’s purchase of the journal. In return, Villard
had agreed to add Alfred J. Nock to his editorial staff as an adviser on
economic policy. But things had not gone as well as Neilson had hoped.
His socialism (capped by promotion of the single tax) was simply incom
patible with Villard’s faith in the ability of a benevolent capitalism to
counter both the excesses of the free market and its opposite, the abusive
interventions of corrupt socialist regimes. By mid-1919, Neilson had lost
patience with Villard’s intransigence and had taken his money and his
editor to Huebsch. Under Nock’s editorial direction, a new journal was
to appear the following spring. Villard would welcome the Freeman,
but Nock, still angered by his year at the Nation, would widen the rift
between the journals with an unfriendly response, declaring that while
“you make your appeal to the Liberals, we make ours to Radicals.” 1
Whatever its readership, the Nation’s voice now seemed dangerously
close to being silenced forever. Facing financial disaster in the midst
of a depressed economy that spring of 1920, Villard saw little choice
but to accept the survival plan offered by his new adviser (and soon
to be managing editor) Ernest Gruening (“a person I suspected... at
sight,” Ludwig noted at the time). The journal’s size was to be reduced
Page 272 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
by eliminating the international news that had been a weapon against
isolationism, and two junior members of the editorial staff were to be
dismissed—Carl Van Doren and Ludwig. Distressed by this sudden turn
of events, Ludwig explained to Huebsch on July 1 how Villard was
“faced—brilliant as my work had been and publicly successful—by the
necessity of warning me that he would probably not be able to continue
this fall the arrangement between us, etc.” 2 Ludwig was devastated,
for only three months earlier, Villard (“melancholy, noble, nervous,
frightened soul”) had agreed that “at the end of the dramatic season
I [would] write instead of the drama article, editorials and articles on
literary topics.” 3 Now, instead of the considerable raise in salary he had
been promised for this promotion, he was facing dismissal. Coming so
soon after his father’s death, and only a few weeks following his most
recent resolution to look beyond the moment for that greater truth that
lent it some meaning, the possibility of looking for new employment
brought the already mounting sense of desperation crashing down upon
him. He felt as though he were reliving all of the horrors of the past.
It was only natural that he should again turn to Huebsch for so
lace and a new position. “You know—now after everything I’ve gone
through—it knocks the ground from under my feet again.” On merit
alone, he deserved a better fate. Single-handedly, he had built up the
Nation’s dramatic department, working hard to develop a press agent
list and garnering the favors of scores of theater managers, directors,
and actors. All of this had not only added significantly to his work as
a critic, but had also measurably boosted the Nation’s circulation. “My
dramatic criticism really made a great hit,” he protested, adding, with
a touch of vanity, that “being turned out makes me look like a fool, all
more serious considerations aside. 1 "
Yet Ludwig’s situation did not really appear all that hopeless, as he
had earlier established good rapport with Nock, while also retaining
a close relationship with Huebsch, despite his defection to Liveright.
Ludwig had thought well of Neilson (“a Man!” as he told Leonard in
December 1919) and had sincerely looked forward to seeing the new
journal. 5 Yet this latest appeal to Huebsch was marked in equal measure
by sincerity and ambivalence. He would have welcomed the chance to
be the Freeman’s drama critic at the end of 1919. But now he felt reticent
to join its staff in that role, even if he felt little hesitation in making the
financially motivated offer of his entire critical apparatus; for not only
had his interests shifted to larger questions, but he had only recently
admitted to himself that he was, quite frankly, running out of things
to say about the theater and needed to move on to something new. “It
will not be long before I shall have said everything I have to say about
271
Page 273 - [see page image]
272
Ludwig Lewisohn
drama. My contribution to dramatic theory, such as it is, will have been
made. Nothing will be left but to repeat.” He thought it dishonest to sell
“original bits of good material shredded and rewoven. My good liquor
is poured out; I can’t take more money for the endless rinsings of my
cup.” 6 But now that he faced the loss of the cup itself, he felt compelled
to trade such higher thoughts for the realities of unpaid bills.
In my days of slavery in Columbus I used to dream of you as some day
running a periodical. Well—you start one and I’m in the hands of a friendly
rival and lose my chance which you would have given me, and Nock, too,
I have reason to be quite sure. And now I am out. My natural impulse is to
appeal to you. Perhaps you people could and would make me some sort of
an offer, however modest. I could transfer my whole organization—press-
list opportunities etc.—since this is all built up through me personally. I
don’t, of course, insist on the drama. I don’t insist on anything. I’ve got to
have some sort of a regular basic job—that’s all. 7
And then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the Nation’s crisis began
to pass. By July’s end, Villard reversed himself and rejected most of
Gruening’s plan. In its place, he fired those whose talents he himself
deemed less essential, while promoting Ludwig to associate editor and
Van Doren to literary editor. In the interim, Huebsch had extended
Ludwig an invitation to join the Freeman, which Ludwig continued to
seriously consider, even after Villard’s unexpected decision to promote
him. With the Nation’s financial problems still unresolved, Villard had
been able to keep only a part of his April agreement with Ludwig. If there
was to be a raise for assuming the position of associate editor, it would
be minimal at best. Nor could Villard free him from the theater, though
the dismissal of the others would provide Ludwig with the chance to
write on matters beyond it.
After several weeks of weighing both offers, Ludwig elected to
remain at the Nation, complaining nonetheless to Leonard of being
overworked and underpaid, in need of finding “additional things” to
keep out of debt:
The damn plays have been happening at the rate of five to six a week.
Simultaneously proofs snowed me under. But it is useless to wait for a
breathing spell. Have you ever been a journalist—even on a weekly scale?
The issues seem to race after one, the day for copy comes around before
the last one is fairly gone. There is not time to read, write, think.... I,
for instance, still do the plays for [Town] Topics, lecture a bit—at Yvette
Guilbert’s School of the Theatre this winter, read for and advise publishers
(Liveright, Harcourt, Brace and Howe) etc.
He dreamed of being able “to retire sometime, somewhere, for a little
while with no theater nearer than a hundred miles and no book avail-
Page 274 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
able that isn’t a hundred years old.” Still, he was not unappreciative
of the advantages of his new position—he had experienced far worse
circumstances. “Here, at least, there is a certain freedom within the
activity.” If time and energy constrained him, little else did. “I can
speak out a little, both in my own departments and now and then . . .
in the editorial columns.” Despite the continuously hectic pace, and the
difficulty of finding a peaceful moment for more meaningful reflection,
he was convinced that he had made the right choice. “I nearly went to
the Freemanhe told Leonard on September 19, 1920, “but I dare say
my decision to stay where I am was wise.” 8
In his new role as associate editor, he wasted little time in firing
off a series of shots at his favorite targets. Even before his new status
had been made public on August 7, he began to attack the corrupt
politicians who ruled his world, using Governor Cox of Ohio as a prime
example of one who “talks very concretely on the questions that affect
bread and butter—the bread and butter of himself and his class.” ' Of
greater concern, however, were his fellow writers, especially the new
poets. Repeating much of what he had said in his earlier controversy
with Amy Lowell, he refuted her response to his Bookman article by
stressing how useless it was “to deny that a great deal of free verse misses
the passionate concentration of speech that makes poetry memorable.”
True “achievement and the hope of the new poetry lies ... in the new
kinds and the new sources of experience that are ours, in the modern
capacity to strip both the objective world and the soul of myth and ritual,
to feel the edge of things and approach the nakedness of thought.” 10
What he wished for poets he hoped would be shared by everyone,
particularly those unknowingly oppressed women of the middle classes
whom he had met at teas and lectures through the years. Locked by
convention into failed marriages, they had been left alone to suffer
acute repression, with little more for comfort then “their pitiful false
graces and furtive looks and drained souls and terror of the years to
come.” There was no reason to remain bound to that theory of conjugal
exclusiveness which derived from man’s “deep-rooted sense of property,
[by] which ages of open or concealed slave-holding have left” women
dependent and fearful of socially, financially and emotionally insecure
futures—at least no more reason than there was to continue “obeying
the tribal taboos of our remotest ancestors.” Such enslavement was
ultimately tied to the Puritan notions of good and evil—convenient to a
capitalist society, but damnable in an age seeking a world returned to its
nakedness. This new age had made a fundamental “discovery, that what
‘in the Christian sense’ is ‘evil’ in her contributes no less than what is
‘good’ to ‘make her alive’ and an individual and a truly human being." 1 '
273
Page 275 - [see page image]
274
Ludwig Lewisohn
Yet as exciting as his new position at the Nation proved to be, the
threat of unemployment and the near move to the Freeman had given
him cause to reflect upon his compatibility with that group of younger
writers both drew upon, and with whom he still felt a spiritual kinship.
He was no less iconoclastic than they, only after a different set of idols,
among them the idol of iconoclasm itself, at whose feet, it seemed to him,
they too often worshiped. He was no less a radical in his vision of past
and future, but his radicalism had turned a different corner than theirs.
He had had similar thoughts in the past, often occasioned by writers
who seemed thoughtlessly cut off from the traditions out of which they
sprang, but now this thoughtlessness seemed no more excusable than
the prejudices of the traditionalists.
Mencken’s open attack in mid-1920 upon the Nation's literary
criticism as too severely conservative and academic—particularly its
emphasis upon the need to retain the best elements of the older liter
ary traditions—afforded Ludwig the needed opportunity to express his
counter-critique. Much of what displeased Mencken that summer had
appeared in Ludwig’s articles. Ludwig willingly accepted the challenge.
They had been on friendly terms with one another for years, and would
be again in the future, but Mencken’s glib dismissal of much that Ludwig
took seriously put a chill upon their relationship that never completely
thawed. Ludwig lacked the ability to laugh at the irony of it all, and
Mencken, the ability to concede an inch. “Mencken came with his
gentle, blue-eyed belligerency, bubbling with cheer over the imbecility of
mankind,” Ludwig later wrote of their controversy. 12 Ludwig, of course,
rarely bubbled with such cheer—more often, he seethed with anger as
he failed to find humor in those hidden recesses to which others at times
escape while in the thick of serious struggle.
Accepting the challenge in an anonymously written column on
September 4, he argued against those who would discount all of the past
in favor of the moment. If the “moment” was absolutely necessary for
the creative process, its importance had clouded other elements of equal
importance. In their obsessive rejection of all tradition, these writers and
their supporters had similarly rejected the long tradition of rebellion
within which Ludwig and his Nation colleagues stood. While he, too,
attacked the academies for distorting the past and its achievements for
purposes of social control, he saw in the ivory towers of America one of
the few remaining sanctuaries for the great works of humanity. Those
few enlightened contemporaries who, like Leonard, preserved them for
a better day were the true carriers of the artistic spirit, he asserted,
serving no other mistress than their muse. A place beyond slavery to the
past and bondage to the moment had to be found. It was the task of
Page 276 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
truly revolutionary spirits to use their predecessors as links in the long
struggle to liberate humanity, and not to reject them, as Mencken and
other writers of the moment were doing. 13
Mencken was angered by the column and protested to Carl Van
Doren that his real objection was limited only to the hallowing of those
“bogus classics” that served no real purpose in the struggle. Perhaps,
but Ludwig saw Mencken’s criticism of his work as an attack upon
much more, and, rightly or not, placed him among that coterie of
younger writers who were seeking a clean break with all that had come
before them. When Mencken discovered in late October that Ludwig
had written the article, he was livid, but gave his adversary credit for
cunningly disguising himself through a change of prose style. “The news
that Ludwig wrote the Ivory Tower piece surprises me. The artful fox
well concealed his tracks. A superb piece of hypocrisy. Tell him I say he
would be more at home in a Bierkeller than in an Ivory Tower.”"
Had Mencken read Ludwig’s earlier writings more carefully, he
might not have been quite as shocked by this discovery. Throughout
the years, Ludwig’s vision of an effective rebellion, grounded in certain
naturalistic intellectual and artistic traditions capable of liberating the
morally enslaved, had been slowly emerging, step by formative step,
informing all that he wrote. As he concluded in “The Ivory Tower,”
It is well to possess the moment. It is more than well, it is necessary. Not to
possess it is the common fault of the academic critic and betrays him into an
hundred absurdities. But to be possessed by it is a misfortune almost equally
grave. Thus, while we are nearly always in agreement with the radical critics,
our reasons are but rarely identical with theirs. For in our reasons and in
the procession by which we arrive at them, the ardor of the moment is
tempered and corrected by certain larger views and memories.. . . We are
not, fortunately, creatures in a void. To cut ourselves adrift from the past,
in this sense, is but to repeat all errors, reassert the thrice discovered, and
thus retard the advent of the liberties we have at heart.''
After a brief late-summer vacation, filled with repeated interruptions
from “the office [that] in a way tagged along and stood hungry for
copy,” 16 Ludwig was ready to press for these liberties. Up Stream would
be his chief weapon. The months that would lead to its completion
on May 22, 1921, would be spent in sorting out those things about
which he was determined to speak freely from those of which he could
not yet speak—his deteriorating marriage and the increasing role of his
Jewish consciousness. These were matters even Leonard knew nothing
about, thoughts that dwelt beyond the reach of all, for fear of losing the
very audience he most wanted, and of breaking the bond of empathy
he shared with his old friend. Though the years as “a close student
275
Page 277 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn
of Freudian psychology” had not provided the final answers to all his
questions, they had helped him to better judge the world and its people,
and to discover that “life has its depths within depths, its subtleties
within subtleties which can’t be written down.” 17
Nearly everything he wrote and spoke of during this generative
period had some bearing upon his brief against Puritan America. What
had to remain silenced served to inform the rest, giving his slightly
muffled voice a deeper resonance than it might otherwise have had,
and certainly deeper than that of most of his fellow critics. If tradition-
minded in matters of artistic form, he was, in the end, one of the few truly
untraditional critics in his challenge to those more basic assumptions of
society by which many of his fellow critics still lived.
Earlier that year, he had chosen the Broadway musical as a worthy
target; “execrable,” he called the genre, filled with vulgar (“not even
coarse”) jests and the barest outline of a story, “always idiotic beyond
belief.” Even the music had failed to redeem the best of them (“fee
ble, trivial, and stale” at that), made more palatable for some by the
introduction of “dancing girls in provocative costumes”—not unlike
the performances in ancient Babylonia. As elsewhere on Broadway, the
musical stage had made no attempt to elevate the mind, or to strike a
chord of inner truth. The very sense of beauty itself had been forfeited
to the unnatural demands of a perverted puritanical ethos, and replaced
by the lust and desire for attendance. “The spangles are the same and
the little limbs and the smiles that are a little cool and soundless. And
the same also are the men who after endless generations still watch with
the same eyes these dancers in whom throbs all they know of beauty or
vicarious ecstasy amid the dimness of their tarnished lives.”'*
By mid-September 1920 he had found something in the popular
culture of America even more tragic and frightening. Like Broadway, of
which it was an extension, the cinema interpreted life with “intimately
stale sugariness,” relying for its financial success upon “hectic appeals”
to those social taboos shared by audiences of “shivering and unthinking
slaves.” But the cinema, because of its wider impact, had taken the
thoughtless entertainment of Broadway a step further, and made it a
far more serious cultural “menace.” Never before had such massive
numbers been led by their masters to support the very gangrenous
notions of morality that had enslaved them—“stiff as granite and as
merciless . . . powerfully calculated to tighten thongs that even now
often cut to the very heart, and to increase the already dreadful sum
of social intolerance and festering pain.” Before the power of this new
tribal expression used to silence “the primordial forces of the earth”
that dwelt within each human heart, the work of liberation seemed all
27 6
Page 278 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
but doomed. “Ten thousand people, an hundred thousand people, will,
sooner or later, leave a theater after this picture and go out into the world
determined to make the ideals of Mr. Griffith prevail. Woe to a neighbor,
a friend, a kinsman who shall choose to lead his life upon another plan!
Against this propaganda poets and philosopher are as powerless as a
child trying to batten down a door of oak.” 19
For the first time, he realized that whatever hopes he had had of
finding one “seriously good play of native origin” were being crushed
under the enormously damaging weight of that “gigantic and unblushing
simplicity of mind” that ruled the “underworld of the theater,” both
stage and screen, in quest of capital and not spiritual gain. This new
loss of faith now found its reflection in his abandonment of the English
spelling for “theatre.” Retained throughout the years, as if it were a link
to that Anglo-American world he had continuously hoped to change, he
finally dropped it, in favor of the contemporary spelling of “theater.
Perhaps unconsciously done, the change seemed to symbolize his further
break with the aspirations and affectations of youth.
In October, Ludwig turned back to fiction in search of that catalyst
for mass change he had hoped the theater might become. He now began
to promote works like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, helping to make
them best-sellers among those who failed to recognize the attack upon
their way of life. “Our literature and our civilization need just such
books,” Ludwig had said in praise of Lewis’s novel. Sensing a closer
affinity between himself and Ludwig than he had previously assumed,
Lewis immediately sought him out. “Slightly drunk on both liquor and
triumph, he sketched the Babbitt saga” for Ludwig, who sat patiently in
his office, listening to Lewis seeking advice on his new project. 21 Ludwig
had charged Lewis with a new “responsibility” in the review, and Lewis
had accepted the imperative as if self-imposed. He put aside the serial
he had agreed to write before this unforeseen success, and set to work
describing bourgeois American life as a “menacing heresy hunt,” with
“its narrow-eyed (and damned capable) crushing of anything threatening
its commercial oligarchy."'
In November, Ludwig spoke again of the artist’s need to grasp “the
concreteness of life. Nature must be his teacher and his norm,” or else,
like a faulted actor, too taken with himself to imaginatively draw out
the universal from within the particular, he would lose sight of the larger
human experience, which was filled with “spiritual perplexity, sardonic
mirth, bleak despair, and dumb confusion.” 2;
In the final months before Up Stream was laid to rest, Ludwig began
to worry that he, too, might be losing sight of this larger dimension, that
his vision might have become clouded by having so consciously assumed
277
Page 279 - [see page image]
278
Ludwig Lewisohn
the central role in a universal drama of spiritual struggle. Had he overly
heightened his commonplace experiences, making too much of the part
he had carefully laid out for himself within the larger struggle for human
liberation? He needed to differentiate between the two, and to be able
to say of his life, as he could of Goethe’s, that “It transmuted passion
into vision and business into wisdom; it steeped itself in the concrete
and found the universal there; it achieved the triumph of personality
within the cosmic flux and came upon all aspects of time eternal in the
necessary employments of our human day.” 24
And he needed, as much as anything else, to go beyond the Puritan
baiting that had filled his life for so many years; but “not because I love
Puritanism or the Puritan spirit.” Who, he asked, had suffered at its
hands as much or more than he, even among his friends? For them, it
had been an internecine struggle; but he was not “directly of the folk”
from which the attacks against him had come. Because of this, it had all
caught him by surprise, over and over again. “To me the whole thing
is utterly dark. My suffering has been blind.” His unalterably marginal
relationship to an alien culture that had repeatedly rejected him had left
him with the need to make a statement that was more than a mere plaint
or reaction against it. Instead, he needed to make a positive declaration
of something that reached beyond this particular instance of spiritual
enslavement. Through the sharpening of his vision in this one struggle,
he was prepared to look past the narrowed concerns of many of his
contemporaries. He resolved to aim at bigger targets, if he could. As he
commented in his diary,
Most of my contemporaries and I have a dreadful secret: it is this: Our
intellectual life is the creature of a reaction against something limited and
changeable and even perishable. We are like reformers whose occupation
is gone when the reform they advocate is accomplished. I don’t jeer at
reformers. He who lessens by one lot the pain and injustice of life is the
highest of us all, nor has any really great writer been without his measure
of the reformer’s love and zeal.. . . But as artists and thinkers we operate
upon too low a plane and are the fools of time. Dreiser, Mencken, Lewis,
Anderson, Masters . . . how will their work look in an hundred years? . . .
Human types come and go. The artist always delineates the types of his day.
True. But have not the creative motives of our group been too monotonous
and too narrowly directed? Isn’t our literature almost stuffy? Its figures
do not stand against the sky. This human adventure is an eternal thing.
Of this overwhelming fact I find no hint in all our writing. Not that I am
capable of altering any thing in my own small activity today. The pressure
is too heavy and the tension too great and the involvement too complete
and I shall go on—Heaven knows for how long—taking my share in the
liberating game of baiting the Puritans. I may have to go on to the end of
Page 280 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
my days. But I record a perception here, if only for myself. To me, at least,
there is something profoundly awry in this whole business. I have a vision
of an American work, which, no less exact than the books of my friends
and contemporaries, shall be severer in character, more timeless in form,
more deeply guided by a sense for those values that remain. 25
Up Stream became, in its rewriting and completion, his first attempt
at such a work. Motivated more by this search for permanent values than
by the need, as real as it was, to fight American puritanism, he longed
to touch those immutable qualities that could give lasting meaning to
his lifetime of struggle. Deeper fires, fed by sparks from an earlier day,
were changing his orientation to the world as the glow of their cleansing
flames lit his way to an island that few others could inhabit.
The journey had begun for him, as it had for his friends, “amid the
heat, the turmoil, and the moral malignities of society.” They had turned
to naturalism, a “philosophical impulse” born of an unsullied and imme
diate contact with reality, and in it had found an answer whose “creative
faculty . . . heightens and enriches . . . the consciousness of mankind.”
It, too, had served Ludwig well as a critical tool, “a reaction through
the particular to the sum of things, a vision of totality applied to the
concrete.” But culturally adrift, he was in need of a more fundamental
anchoring than they, and in this naturalistic impulse he found only a
temporary haven. If ideas could offer a sense of coherence and “a vision
of totality,” they could rarely become one’s home. Something deeper
within himself had to be satisfied than rebellion and the need for a ratio
nalistic reconstruction of society. In imagery echoing his youth, he would
speak in March 1921 of seas yet to be crossed, of a ship that carried no
outcasts, and of life as “a voyage of discovery” wherein one was “always
setting out for unseen shores and coming upon unchartered waters.” In
his voyage upon the ship of naturalism, he had made contact with the
outer shores of a largely unfamiliar Jewish world. Brief, exploratory
visits inland had already begun to reveal unforeseen treasures and the
possibility of finding the lasting refuge he sought as a replacement for
the temporary shelter he shared with his colleagues. 26
Ludwig’s more astute critics had already detected an alien sound
to his voice, unknown in those of his colleagues whose roots lay in the
very world they attacked. Stuart Sherman, literary critic and champion
of Anglo-American culture, had rightly perceived that Ludwig’s Book
of Modern Criticism had challenged far more than the dominance of
a literary tradition. After a year’s delay, Sherman felt compelled, in
October 1920, to launch his attack upon those whom he characterized
as filled with “self-approbation” and overwhelmed by “their satisfaction
at having emancipated themselves from the fetters of tradition, the
279
Page 281 - [see page image]
280
Ludwig Lewisohn
oppression of classical precedent and standard, the burden of patrimo
nial culture,” those who, like Ludwig, had made the greatest effort to
redirect the society in which they lived. With unswerving confidence,
Sherman predicted failure in their ultimate attempt to create a new
literature out of some amorphous universal sympathy so vastly different
in character from the one truly authentic American revolt, that of the
American Puritans in their challenge to the British Crown. 27
But this was merely an introduction to the more crudely drawn
Red-baiting charge of alien roots laid by Sherman against Ludwig and
his fellow critics, some of whom, though born of old American stock,
had clearly come under the influence of an easily identifiable alien
force. For here also were the same old charges made against Ludwig
by Harris and the others over the years, claims of the Jew’s insincerity
and incapacity for appreciating the spirit of this American consciousness
and of the danger to it which lay within their alien nature. “The Jews
are the intellectuals of the new immigration,” Samuel Orth wrote in Our
Foreigners, part of the Chronicles of America series, published that same
year by Yale University (and available into the 1950s). “Among them
socialism thrives,” he warned his readers.
They invest their political ideas with vague generalizations of human ame
lioration. They cannot forget that Karl Marx was a Jew: and one wonders
how many Trotzkys and Lenins are being bred in the stagnant air of their
reeking ghettos. It remains to be seen whether they will be willing to devote
their undoubted mental capacities to other than revolutionary vagaries to
gainful pursuits, for they have a tendency to commercialize everything they
touch. They have shown no reluctance to enter politics; they learn English
with amazing rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push
with characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this liberal
land. 28
“Connected with the house of Jesse,” Sherman wrote, the Jews could not
be expected to hear any profound murmuring of ancestral voices or to
experience any mysterious inflowing of national experience in meditating on
the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Emerson, Franklin,
and Bradford. One doesn’t blame our Davids for their inability to connect
themselves vitally with this line of Americans, for their inability to receive its
tradition or to carry it on. But one cannot help asking whether this inability
does not largely account for the fact that Mr. Lewisohn’s group of critics are
restless impressionists, almost destitute of doctrine and with no discoverable
unifying tendency except to let themselves out into a homeless happy land
where they may enjoy the . . . purring insincerity of that profession of
universal sympathy. 29
Such an attack was hardly “the sovereign mark of good breeding”
that Sherman claimed for the advocates of proper literary tradition. In
Page 282 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
such blatantly hypocritical remarks, Ludwig was quick to recognize
the charge of another time and place in his life, and in the lives of
his ancestors. Anti-Semitism, heightened by the growing nativism and
isolationist sentiment that fed easily upon theological traditions not
unconnected with those of Sherman’s literary universe, had already
begun to rear its ugly head by 1919. As the beginning of a nationwide
tide, it would rise to new heights of hysteria during the Depression years
of the 1930s and beyond.
Two months after this anti-Semitic attack, Ludwig wrote Sherman
that “When I first read your article in the October Bookman with its—
shall we say a little ungenerous—phrase ‘purring insincerity’ and its
hostile use of the fact that I. . . am of Jewish blood—my immediate
impulse was toward a stinging rejoinder. But force and anger are futile
even in a good cause. Hence I wrote the article Tradition and Freedom."
Ludwig’s rejoinder, however, was far from gentle. In joining this “new
battle of the books,” he spoke of the need for a reasoned response
to the “traditionalist who is busy rationalizing his emotional life. . .
[and] in whom a set of aesthetic perceptions had become interwoven
with ancestral pieties.” Believing “the customary to be true, he can
sustain the harmony of his inner life only by vast exclusions. As the
world grows more turbulent and surges nearer to his quiet threshold, he
begins to fear for his inner security and becomes petulant and bitter.. . .
The speech of those who seek a contact with the wild totality of things
sounds harsh and strident to his ear.” Never once mentioning Sherman’s
name, Ludwig spoke of the decorous misuse of Emerson, Whitman, and
Twain, and of the appeal by many critics to the idea of a degenerative
period of Puritan history in their attempt to buttress a besieged and
weakening fortress. Appropriating Sherman’s cultural heroes for his own
use, Ludwig cleverly pointed to Emerson’s philosophy of “fluxions and
mobility,” Whitman’s “dauntless rebel” who “leaves peace and routine
behind him,” and Twain’s dictum that “a man’s first duty is to his honor,
not to his country”—to which he added Milton’s rebellious puritanism
as support for his own challenge to those who maintained the “anterior
assumptions of the [William Bradford] Puritan tradition [that] must be
broken.” Theirs was “a slothful and intolerant world.”
“The truth of human action” lay squarely within man’s soul, Ludwig
assured his readers that December 1920; cruelty and injustice stemmed
from the imposition of external moral absolutes. A new direction had to
be taken. “The American spirit must be liberated for a new contact with
reality.” To accomplish this essential task, “the light of free criticism
must be turned on values that no longer work.” Clearly, “the house has
been rent.” 31 Up Stream would offer further suggestions for its repair.
281
Page 283 - [see page image]
282
Ludwig Lewisohn
Before long, Ludwig would have a chance to liberate one such Amer
ican spirit, and see in this act an example of what he might accomplish
once his larger work was completed. In January 1921, Villard assigned
him the unpleasant task of accompanying a learned woman of New
England ancestry to the theater. “Severity is here. . . partly a matter
of defense,” he wrote describing her spirit, drawn to fit the physical
characteristics of a “faintly agreeable precision and purity of lines, but
no curves.” He reacted with annoyance (“hates duties imposed from
without,” he said of himself, “hard enough to meet obligations dic
tated from within”), but accepted the assignment with the promise of a
“surprise” for her. Villard responded with a “wintry” smile, but Ludwig
pursued his plan nonetheless, and took the woman to a Broadway review.
Well aware of its many imperfections, he used them to stir what had
been silenced within her by the rigors of scholarship and a puritanical
upbringing. She found the Jewish comic particularly crude, but Ludwig
quickly pointed out that despite his “monstrously Semitic nose,” he was
of the same stock as others in the theater whom she greatly admired—
the famed Max Reinhardt “of whom the cultured patter, and the divine
Sarah [Bernhardt] whom they glory to have seen.” It was, as he reminded
her, merely a matter of appearance and perception.
As the performances passed before her, she began to experience an
uncommon ease, and when a company of scantily clad dancers pranced
about the stage late in the show, she dropped “all her defenses” and
gave vent to “the moods of ordinary pleasure and liberation that we
meet upon our dusty road.” He took her home after the show. “She said
goodnight with a strange swaying forward of her body. The lines had
become curves.” He had worked his own magic and felt encouraged by
its effect.'
Not that he was convinced of there being anything particularly
Jewish to this magic, neither his nor that of the performers. Far from it.
He was still uncomfortable with the notion of a culturally defined Jewish
character as currently proposed by some prominent Jewish intellectuals.
Judah Magnes—rabbi, social activist, Soviet sympathizer, and later pro
ponent of a binational state of Jews and Arabs in Palestine—had been
at work throughout this period on an attempt to bring together Jewish
intellectuals of various stripes to discuss issues that affected Jewish life
in America and abroad. Among those whom he had contacted were
Huebsch, the Yiddish writer and Ludwig’s old friend David Pinski, the
avowed communist Moissayen J. Olgin, the creator of the left-wing
Jewish Reconstructionist Movement Mordecai Kaplan, and Ludwig.
Though their first meeting, on May 13, 1920, had failed to yield a
common ground for further discussions, Ludwig wrote Magnes the
Page 284 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
following January of his continuing willingness to participate in future
meetings. He did, however, note that Kaplan’s conceptualization of the
Jews as a separate people with a unique civilization was particularly
troublesome. Identification and affiliation “with my fellow Jews in all
ways that my self-respect seemed to demand” had nothing to do with
a conception of “the Jews as a distinct entity” possessing a distinctively
“Jewish soul.” For Ludwig, Kaplan’s idea seemed too reminiscent of the
Anglo-American tribalism that had been used against him over the years.
Instead, Ludwig vigorously maintained that his soul was a composite of
all that had been given to him culturally—“a Kultur-deposit left by the
languages, literatures, music, philosophy amid which I was born and
to which I grew up.” If anything, he was, as he proudly proclaimed,
an Aryan. Yet despite this unwillingness to admit to a distinctively
Jewish cultural pattern of thought and action, he did acknowledge a
close kinship with Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian Jewish writer, “all
of whose thoughts and perceptions seem to find an immediate echo in
my soul.” 33
Ludwig was as yet unwilling to openly admit, at times even to
himself, that his own distinctively Jewish consciousness was emerging
out of this welter of cultures and experiences. Throughout the years,
he had carefully nurtured and enjoyed a life of varied friendships and
eclectic tastes, but this pattern had now begun to change. Perhaps,
imperceptibly, he had grown more selective. Writing to Harris on March
7,1921, he complained, as he had the previous year to Leonard, of how
little time he had for writing old friends, and of how deeply he wished
they could keep in closer touch with one another. Ludwig had not yet
realized that it was his own movement away from Harris’s world that
had made Harris’s last visit so enjoyable to his old teacher, as if he
were encountering in Ludwig and his world some exotic creature from
a strangely enchanting land. By Ludwig’s own admission to Harris, he
now saw himself as an outsider in circles they had once shared—“me
bein’ the notorious radical I am.” 34
Even Leonard now seemed to be drifting away. Ludwig continued to
seek a publisher for his friend’s poetry, as he had in their shared youth on
Morningside Heights. He still thought Leonard’s work unsurpassed “in
seeing the visible world and the things that fill it... in thinking about
those things largely and nobly and under some aspect of eternity."And
Leonard, in writing to Mary, noted how “I have been comforted ... by
the weekly critiques of one Ludwig Lewisohn in the Nation which are
an education in philosophy." '* Yet despite the continuing and never-
ending mutuality of affection, they were moving further and further
apart. They would write with decreasing frequency in the decades that
283
Page 285 - [see page image]
284
Ludwig Lewisohn
remained before Leonard’s death in 1944, but they would never again
see one another. Different paths in different worlds awaited them both.
Nor had Ludwig’s growing cultural distance from the currents of
accepted radical thought gone unnoticed by other dissidents. The popu
lar novelist and student of Southwest Indian lore, Mary Hunter Austin,
had privately charged him with assuming a clearly Jewish position in
his writing. He thanked her on March 11 for the “frankness” of her
letter, noting that “in this dreary world few reactions [were] to be had
like that.” However sincere or sarcastic his response had been, it is clear
that her letter had touched something troubling within himself. As in his
January reply to Magnes, Ludwig told Austin of his long involvement
with non-Jewish cultures and friends. Admittedly, he often differed with
them on basic issues, but neither he nor they had ever attributed these
differences to his Jewish birth—or so he told Ms. Austin, hoping that
his spirited defense would preclude Up Stream's dismissal as a book
too distinctively Jewish in tone and thought. “I have talked the nights
away with him [Leonard] and with so many others like him. And these
friends have not always agreed with me. But they have never attributed
either the quality of my experience or the nature of my opinions to my
race. Neither did I.” He had been accepted by “100 percent American
Men,” taken into their confidence, placed on their boards, and made
to feel “the quality of many American homes.” True, he had sensed a
“sadness, restlessness, dissatisfaction” which he laid at the feet of “the
hideous straight-jacket of Judaeo-Christian, specifically Pauline, moral
dualism.” But certainly, he protested, there was nothing distinctively
Jewish in his having had “no ‘spiritual traffic with God’ in my mature
years,” except “in a very tenuous philosophical sense.” On the contrary,
his was a thoroughly un-Jewish posture, “characteristic of those masters
whose sense of quality of experience seems to correspond to mine—
Goethe, Nietzsche, Shaw.” 37
In truth, however, Ludwig knew that he differed significantly even
from them, that in a very definite way, his life and his perceptions had
been transformed by this emerging Jewish consciousness. Yet he knew
also that he could not publicly admit to this deepening identity, nor to his
growing commitment to this alien culture—not if he wished to have the
greatest possible impact upon those he most sought to influence. Though
in Up Stream's “Prologue” he had foresworn such acts of “amoral
stealth” and had proclaimed the need to chance a “new and mad revolt”
of his spirit against itself and to “master life [with truth] or it will end
by destroying us,” 38 he saw little alternative but to don the “decorous
mantle of civilization we wear in public” while searching for that truth
which only “grows in the still chambers of the soul.” 39
Page 286 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
Throughout this final year’s work on Up Stream, the weekly col
umns, the “endless streams of Wassermann,” of which he was “sick
to the soul and marrow of translating” as fast as he could read and
type (“poverty . . . prevailed,” he told Leonard on April 3, 1921), 40 and
the daily tension of his life with Mary had added to the emotional
strain of searching for that deeper, more truthful meaning to his life.
Each had taken a part of his energy and time, and had prolonged
the arduous process of self-analysis and selective exposure, aggravating
his always tenuous emotional stability to the point of breaking. Too
exhausted to accept Henry Hurwitz’s repeated invitation to join with
Arthur Schnitzler and others in writing for the Menorah Journal, he
sadly declined the opportunity to discuss there what he could not in Up
Stream, the place of the Jew “in relation to the general currents of our
time.” 41 Only the nearing completion of the book and the psychiatric
assistance he once again sought from A. A. Brill had kept him from
tumbling back into the abyss, perhaps for the last time.
Aside from work—infinite theatres, infinite scribblings—we’ve had a rather
tough winter. Because, well, because I’ve developed phobias—a sharp and
pretty constant anxiety-neurosis, an even more constant and more trouble
some sense of vacuity, of the emptiness, tastelessness, flatness, staleness of
life. Suppose all food tasted like earth. Suppose nothing interested, stung,
awakened you. It’s indescribable. We leave the theatre. I drop into a black
gulf. A funnel opens. I slide into nothingness. I take a drink of whiskey. It
helps a little. I’ve no talent for taking more. And always, always, the utterly
torturing conviction in flesh and brain that only one thing can help me and
that one thing I have so far—for my dear Molly’s sake—resisted and shall
resist until all means are exhausted. Hence I have on Tuesday my fourth
session with Dr. Brill. 42
Not that his work on Up Stream had suffered from this deterioration
in his emotional state. If anything, he had pushed on in a passionate
frenzy, determined more than ever before to make his statement and to
outrage those whom he felt had brought him to this point—to put it all
into print as forcefully as the editorial censors and his own unspoken
reservations would allow. Disjointedly, he told Leonard in April 1921,
“My book, by the way, my autobiography, which will be done, so help
me, on or before June 1, will be published on or before Sept. 15 and—to
the scandal of all decent and reticent folk—will bear my name.” 43
On May 21 the writing was finished. “Not much of a book, as
I see it,” he confessed to Leonard, somewhat disappointed now that
the passion that drove him to write it had spent itself, word by word,
throughout the long process. All that he wanted to say, despite his desire
to shock, could not be spoken. (“The erotic—my God, what a tale I
285
Page 287 - [see page image]
286
Ludwig Lewisohn
could unfold—totally omitted. “I 44 But what he had decided to say had
been said clearly. He had survived the depression that had accompanied
him throughout the process, and now hoped to gain the approval of
friends for what he had created. 45 “So small was my confidence in its
value or in the wisdom of publication that I was unwilling to decide
the question myself.” They cautioned concerning his social critique and
personal revelations, and urged him to use a pseudonym if he insisted
on being so frank. But their fears “satisfied me” that the decision to
be that open had been correct. He challenged their advice, refusing to
hide behind a mask of another’s making. The one that he had imposed
upon himself was burden enough. There was to be no mistaking his
attitudes toward society, its culture, or its norms. Simply, if incom
pletely, Up Stream was, as he told Leonard, the “story of a Christian
gentleman’s conversion to anarchism. The blood of Jesus, as Carl Van
Doren remarked, quite mopped up. Or, more correctly, a narrative of
the experiences leading to the conclusion that moral absolutism is the
root of all evil.”
“Whoever is mad knows well that I suffer,” Ludwig reminded
Leonard, a victim of phobias far more debilitating than his own. “You
have your own inner information, but what a world.” 4 ' Ludwig’s in
tention with Up Stream had been to transform this world for himself
and for Leonard, and for all those who suffered from its dispiriting
and unnatural ways. “Life among us is ugly and mean and, above all
things, false in its assumptions and measures. Somehow we must break
these shackles and flee and emerge into some beyond of sanity, of a closer
contact with reality, of nature and of truth. ” 4 ' His plan had been to regain
his own stability, his own sanity, by pursuing it for all the world. Like the
naturalistic writers he most admired, he had rearranged and selectively
emphasized the events of his life “to produce an illusion of reality,” a
“sort of polemics—novelistic autobiography,” as he characterized it to
Mencken. 48 He wanted Up Stream to be a shocking, pedagogical weapon
in the fight to advance humanity. If, as we have seen, he transmuted
time and places, people and events, it was not without the deliberate
and conscious purpose of portraying a far more rapid change in his
thinking than was, in fact, the case. Without the illusion of a sudden
awakening after years of unthinking acceptance of the world as it was,
his work would have lost the dramatic and revelatory effect he had
hoped it might have.
And had he not downplayed the early and deepening, if still unclear,
role of his Jewishness in this process, he would have assigned the book
to an early death. It was not an illusory fear. During the same period in
which Ludwig was at work on Up Stream, Albert Einstein, when ques-
Page 288 - [see page image]
Against the Tide
tioned about the reception he might receive from his fellow Europeans
because of his groundbreaking theories, noted that if he was correct,
“the French will call me a citizen of the world, and the Germans will
claim me as one of their own. But if I’m wrong, the French will call me a
German and the Germans will call me a Jew.” How much more cautious
Ludwig needed to be when analyzing the very space and time in which
he lived, without benefit of abstractions.
When the “timid and easily subdued . . . [poetic] pathos of youth . . .
for all its intermittent arrogances . . . [had] not built up a philosophy to
sustain and justify its impulses,” Ludwig diverted its energies and the
plaints that had once produced his poetry, and turned them toward this
new, more powerful autobiographical tool with which, as a more mature
writer, he could demand for himself and others the right to “inhabit freely
a native world of the spirit.” In a universe as “wild as a hawk’s wing,” he
had challenged those forces working to keep him from soaring upward.
As he wrote in “The Poet and the World” three days after completing
Up Stream, it was the duty of all to preserve the “freshness and the vigor
of the incomparable soul. Let us admit the noble madness of poets and
allow for it.. . . We stand in bitter need of a glow, however faint, of the
Dionysian, the unsubdued." ,u
Released from the provincialism “which belongs to the habits, con
ventions, and beliefs of a particular age,” he had sought answers “in a
spiritual order” that he himself had not yet fully conceived, but which
he knew “belongs to such a being as man in his permanent character.”'"
There was no midpoint between the two. Either the bittersweet taste
of eternal truths found in the passage of a lifetime, or contentment in
a world of seeming permanence and false meaning. Heaven or hell—
the choice was clear, metaphorically, if difficult for one so strongly tied
to the world as he. For if he sought more than the rush of moments,
sacrifice might follow—even the little joy he had known might be lost.
The stakes were high, but so, too, were the rewards. With faith in himself
and in his ancestral heritage, and with an unshakable determination to
uphold the eternality of the cause he defended, it seemed a gamble worth
taking—no matter how dreadful the consequences that might follow.
All or nothing. That’s my trouble in life and in literature. I want clean
situations always, ultimate decisions, the edge of eternity. I want God—
the absolute. There is none. Very well. Then something to take his place:
permanent values somehow embodied and so to be served. And it is for this
reason that man should have children to perpetuate in the world the values
created by his ancestors and by himself. Is there not any one busy building
a Civitate Dei—a city of God? I would rather black the boots of such a one
than have the highest-paid editorial job in New York. I mean that. Yes, the
287
Page 289 - [see page image]
288
Ludwig Lewisohn
trouble with me is that I do indeed mean it. Hence I shall probably always
be poor and in hot water. 51
“Literature is life grown flame-like and articulate,” its visions as
varied in character and direction as are its practitioners “in that great
process of change that we call the world.” Beginning his fortieth year
in the summer of 1921, he had much to look back upon in his life and
work, and much reason to realize that he now had to raise his own voice
within the void of time before it, too, was silenced forever, like the echoes
of parents now mourned, like the ways of ancestors lost to the past, like
the stillborn cries of the children he would never have. It was his only
legacy. “This moment, this sensation, this pang, this thought—this little
that is intimately our own is all we have of the unique and precious and
incomparable. Let us express it beautifully, individually, memorably . . .
it is all we can do.” 52
Page 290 - [see page image]
289
11
Suffering
Unjustified
Though Ludwig expressed himself “memorably” in Up Stream, the
memorable proved difficult to publish. His close association with several
radical publishers made them no more understanding of his effort, nor
less demanding in asking for changes to the manuscript. He had stepped
outside the boundaries of acceptable ideas, and they feared serious
financial losses if they published his work without substantial alterations
throughout. But however severe their threats or enticing their promises,
he would not be swayed. The mask he wore to cover his growing Jewish
consciousness was as much of a compromise as he could bear.
In his July 1921 “Introduction” to Ernest Howard Culbertson’s
Goat Alley: A Tragedy of Negro Life, Ludwig wrote of the protagonist’s
struggle to maintain his “spiritual integrity,” that “tragedy does not
reside in pomp and circumstance, but in the profound realities of. . .
human suffering.” Covertly speaking of his own struggle to break new
ground as a Jew, he noted in anger that “the Negro cannot yet hope,
like the white man, to transcend common standards.” Society would
not readily permit such transgressions. But like the central character
in Culbertson’s story, Ludwig was determined to valiantly pursue the
“losing fight.” He was moved by Culbertson’s work, a naturalistic
drama, serious, intelligent, and “sensitive to the character and quality
of what makes tragedy.” 1 In its portrait of the black as a marginal figure
in America, it spoke to him as strongly as any work could. He felt the
same “kindred” sense of identity with Culbertson’s heroine as he had
when, fifteen years earlier, he had read John Bennett’s Treasures ofPeyre
Page 291 - [see page image]
290
Ludwig Lewisohn
Gaillard, and had found in this tale of black life in the South Carolina
Low Country “the literature that I value most highly ... in which the
bright winds blow, and men, whose souls are not warped or morbid,
play heroic parts.
It had taken those fifteen years of change to produce Up Stream—
fifteen years of experience and understanding, such as it now was, before
he could hear the universal voice that spoke of the “real sanctities of
life.” He refused to compromise this image of struggle, or to weaken
the message he hoped to convey, merely for the sake of propriety or
profit. And when those of his friends and associates who first read
the manuscript responded with one ethnic bias or another, he became
even more determined to find someone who could transcend such fears.
By July 8, 1921, Mencken, however unlikely a candidate for the task,
seemed his only hope. Or perhaps he had sought Mencken’s opinion
because he, out of all whom Ludwig counted as friends and colleagues,
had been honest enough in his writings to openly use negative, if not anti-
Semitic, images of Jews with some frequency. If Mencken’s response was
positive, then Ludwig could believe that such feelings might not cloud
the judgment of others of a similar mentality.
I have written a book fundamentally different in character from all my other
stuff ... a sort of polemics—novelistic autobiography. I am too close to it
to judge it. Spingarn and Huebsch—mark the combination—independently
arrived at certain criticisms. Carl van Doren and my wife—note the social
affinity again—independently do not allow the strictures of my fellow sons
in Israel. A Daniel is needed. Badly needed—by everyone involved. Will
you be that gent who came to judgment? You will really be doing me an
immense favor and helping to clarify a very intricate problem ... a case of
peculiar difficulty, appealing to judgment that is, here and now and in this
matter, a transcendental judgment.. . . When you see the Ms. you will see
the problem and see, too, how deeply I shall be indebted to you for a frank
impression. 3
Still without a response on July 16, Ludwig sent Mencken a second
appeal for assistance, and then fled New York for a week’s stay in Boston,
hoping to find the moment’s anxiety (made more unbearable by the pres
sures of a worsening domestic life) somewhat lessened upon his return. 4
Mencken’s supportive comments, far more favorable than he had hoped
for, were waiting for him when he arrived home on the twenty-fifth.
Ludwig seized upon the letter as absolute proof that the problems raised
by the earlier readers were merely their own, and not inherent to the
book itself. If Huebsch thought it too Jewish to publish unchanged,
then Ludwig would find another publisher. Mencken had vindicated
this stiff-necked determination with his unqualified approbation, and
Page 292 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
Ludwig, sensing ultimate victory in this struggle, responded in equal
measure. “If I could write legibly with pen and ink I would thank you
both elaborately and with the tongue of men and angels! You’ve done
me a very genuine service.” 5
Ludwig’s popularity had risen sharply in the two years since coming
to the Nation. An article appearing in America that August had classed
him with Mencken, Cabell, Anderson, Cather, and Millay as one of the
“American authors whose books are most in demand at second-hand
bookstores.” 6 Though gratified by this attention, he was prepared to
sacrifice it all, even those aesthetic qualities of literary art that some
of his fellow critics saw as the “tests by which the worth of a piece
of literature can be established.” Above all, he had wanted to create a
work that would help others to better understand their lives. He hoped
that Up Stream would clarify “some vital and widespread experience of
the men and women who live today so accurately and so closely that
life itself is a little changed and its difficulty a little mitigated.” Most
people, he wrote that month in the Nation, cared little for the problem of
aesthetics. Far more compelling for them, as for himself, were questions
raised by living from day to day. “They do not want to die before they
have learned to live.” Life was in flux, eternity was in the moment, and
in this transitoriness lay the root of truth and of the true values by which
people live. Life is journey—or it is death. “No shore is visible. I refuse
to suppose a shore because I am weary at moments. Life and art create
their values from within. Here or nowhere is eternity.” 7
As if determined to prove his own dictum, he left Mary in New
York and went off alone to the Berkshire Mountains of western Mas
sachusetts, away from the interference of human hands in the larger
scheme of his life. There, in the flow of nature, amid the sounds of the
primal world, he hoped to find the healing he needed. Instead, that all
too familiar American setting and those all too familiar American voices
rose up around him. “Landscape and speech conspired against me,” he
later recalled, “this landscape which was all that I knew of home, this
American variety of the English tongue which had become interwoven
with the very texture of my thoughts, the very processes of my soul.” 8
The contours of well-worked hills and valleys and the flat resonance of
the people’s speech symbolized for him, in his reflective mood, that “ab
surd identification of nature and freedom with evil” that had scarred and
shaped his own interior landscape. Thoughts of Mary, and of the loveless
marriage from which she would not release him, heightened his feelings
of entrapment within this alien world and convinced him that “when one
came in contact with the only really evil thing in the world, that is to say,
a thoroughly bad heart, the Christian Symbols seemed to meet the case.”
291
Page 293 - [see page image]
292
Ludwig Lewisohn
There was no doubt in his mind that these external forces had played too
dominant a role in shaping his inner life, imprisoned by its own “inner
events,” but crying out now for some lasting act of liberation. 9
He began his drive back to New York more depressed, but more
pensive, than when he had left. He thought again of how at the midpoint
of his life he still had not found the peace that should have been his; of
how he had suffered through so many years not because of the “acuteness
of my susceptibilities,” but “through a long conspiracy of events.” Alone
with only his thoughts and the vision of a spiritually destructive future
to his journey’s end, he pulled off the road and stepped out to view the
prospect that lay before him. It was then that the landscape suddenly
brightened and new voices were heard. “On a brown deserted road
beside the Housatonic River I stopped and listened to the rumour of the
woods, to the stirring of the quick wind in the leaves, the sudden solitary
piping or trilling of a bird, the muffled roar of distant waters. I stood
there and with a triumphant lifting of the heart knew—knew that there
awaited me love, wisdom, inner power, freedom, a creative rebirth, even
though in that year I was still so chained.”"
Had this awakening come at an earlier point in his life, he might
have spoken of it in terms of Paul’s revelatory experience on the road to
Damascus. But having decided to openly pursue the implications of his
Jewishness, reinforced now by this roadside revelation, he interpreted
the power of nature upon him as an eternal presence entering his life
and leaving him changed forever. The clarity of the moment promised,
as it had for Paul, a new life of fulfillment, but only if he could gather
the strength and resolve to act on what had been revealed. For Paul, the
road had led to asceticism and celibacy as ideals; for Ludwig, artistic
and sexual renewal lay before him. “I knew that this was not my all of
life, nor this my entire sharing of mortality. 1
He resolved to seek the aid of his muse, to be found incarnate in
another woman—but first, he had to take the long-feared step and make
a final break with Mary. Such change would require a new setting, as
each major change had in the past. The retreat to their old haven in
Washington Heights had been a last, desperate attempt to rekindle the
love they had once shared there. But there was no real chance of this
ever happening again. Mary may have sensed some grave disruption in
the offing when Ludwig suddenly announced at the end of August that
he intended to buy a home in Greenwich Village. There was, however,
no way to have perceived his intention of using this home as part of a
divorce settlement. As he recalled in Crump, he believed then “that by
providing a home for them all [Mary and her children] which it was in
his power to take away again, he was laying hold of a fairly solid weapon
Page 294 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
in his fight for freedom. Perhaps he would barter.. . . Perhaps he could
promise to settle the house on her ... if she would pledge herself to leave
him alone."
Greenwich Village in 1921 seemed the place best suited for explor
ing the possibilities he had raised in making these decisions. As the
postwar period developed into an era of freedom-seeking, the Village’s
earlier reputation as the place in which to seek it had developed still
further. New cafes, publishing houses, theaters, and galleries had added
to the already progressive artistic and intellectual atmosphere that had
dominated this dissident corner of the city, attracting a new generation
of dissenters and their admirers, while re-attracting a number of those
who had abandoned the area a few years earlier. For this latter group,
it seemed the only means for redirecting their energies, now somewhat
dissipated after a frenetic period of disparate efforts. Surrounded by the
city that would come to symbolize the creativity and chaos of twentieth-
century America, the Village was characterized by Carl Van Doren as
“fabulous and remote,” blessed with “city standards of privacy,” yet
“precisely as if this were a small town.” 13 In its way, the Village was the
small-town world of Ludwig’s youth liberated at last, “a byword. . .
a shrine to which the gold youth of America still makes pilgrimages
from prairie towns,” as Floyd Dell described it five years later. This
was the Greenwich Village “whose gay laughter was heard round the
world," 14 whose disestablished community gave sanction and support
to those who came in search of themselves, and, for some, of a way
in which to reconcile those few still-viable creative traditions with an
ever-changing world in which the very notion of tradition had become
justifiably suspect.
Though many of its residents never knew each other, there was
in the Village a common, ardently shared need to find one’s unique
place amidst the cultural and psychological ruin left by war and by an
overwhelmingly industrialized society that demanded uniformity from
its masses. Behind all of the frivolity that was pointed to with criticism,
there was a deadly serious search under way within its borders. Harold
Stearns caught its spirit in the 1920s when, in Civilization in the United
States, he demanded “an entirely new deal of the cards in one sense; we
must change our hearts. For only so, unless through the humbling of
calamity or scourge, can true art and true religion and true personality,
with their native warmth and caprice and gaiety, grow up in America to
exorcise these painted devils we have created to frighten us away from
the acknowledgement of our spiritual poverty.”' -
A revolution was taking place throughout the country, not in eco
nomic terms, as had earlier been hoped for, but a moral and social
293
Page 295 - [see page image]
294
Ludwig Lewisohn
rebelliousness that was remaking the cultural life of America. In this
upheaval, the Village became a focal point and a meeting place for
individuals of varying ages and backgrounds. They danced to the sensual
sounds of jazz, made love and drank together, shared ideas and values
and tastes, and offended the sensibilities of those who maintained or
aspired to an older set of norms. The Christian Endeavor Society thought
it all “an offense against womanly purity, the very fountainhead of our
family and civil life,” but to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age rebels, This Side
of Paradise was peopled by “a new generation . . . grown up to find all
Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." |A
This new era, with the mix of nihilistic rebellion and construc
tive response to the spiritual wasteland of America, matched a part of
Ludwig’s personal revolt and struggle for self-expression. He was, as
usual, skeptical of it all at first, finding particularly troublesome the
superficiality with which many of these younger nihilists considered
important ideas. “There’s a good deal of psychoanalytical messing in
Greenwich Village,"' he had written in April 1921, while still resisting
the area’s pull. But by that summer, as the emotional strain of Up Stream
gave way to the revelation alongside the country road, he put aside his
intellectual distrust and admitted the possibility that something in this
youth-charged Village atmosphere of freer artistic and sexual expression
might prove liberating to him as well. His search for a younger woman
with whom to share his life and his struggle, someone who could of
fer her comfort, her love, her sexual desire, and her self as the latest
incarnation of his muse, made this admission all the more imperative.
He had already shared several close friendships with younger women
(“lonely and dejected, he had to have some psychical refuge”), and
perhaps a sexual liaison involving someone whom Mary referred to
as a “hideous little kike,” as he later noted in Crump." The coming
year would demonstrate how acute this need could become. Art, as a
means of free personal expression, and sex, as an avenue to discovery
and inspiration, would join forces in him as strongly as they would in
many of his younger contemporaries, male as well as female. The Village
had become a magnet for the more socially imprisoned women who were
seeking the personal freedom that he, too, searched for. Floyd Dell spoke
of these days of Love in Greenwich Village as a time when “there were
girls by the score, young and lovely and eager; wanting to write, to paint,
to act, to see life and to live it. An exciting young world, full of high
purpose and serious endeavor—and that may have been why its play
was so golden and its love so lovely." 1 '
Harris, in New York late that August and early September, found
himself disagreeing with Ludwig on the need for complete individual
Page 296 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
freedom as a means toward self-fulfillment and social renewal. He was
critical of Ludwig’s unorthodox views, in part because of his own con
servative nature, but also because his vision of Ludwig as a Jew made
him see such ideas as a threat to the established pattern of social cohesion
and its foundation of individual self-control. Harris’s anti-Semitism had
hardly diminished over the years, evidenced by his comment during
this stay regarding a Jewish salesman in Bloomingdale’s who reminded
him of the “slick and smug Hebrews that oil the way to a profitable
sale.” 20 It is likely that he saw Ludwig’s thoughts as a “slick” way to
achieve personal gain from “Mrs. L’s sufferings” in her relationship with
him. 21 Though Harris may have understood Ludwig’s need as an artist
to feel the warmth of his muse, he could not condone this aberration
of accepted behavior from one so firmly entrenched on the margins of
society. Writing to his wife on September 2, Harris noted that “L. and I
seemed to take issue fundamentally only when it came to my holding to
the crucial value of control—social as well as individual—in the long-
run interest of the individual himself as well as the collective average;
while he seemed to hold that the soul must resent the exercise of any
force from without, particularly now, at the peril of its own integrity."
Harris was pleased, though not surprised, to find Mary concurring with
his ideas, in opposition to her husband’s. Dinner at the Lewisohn’s on
September 18 had been followed by what Harris described to his wife
the following day as “good talk.” “Lewisohn read bits from a Ms. [Up
Stream] he is going to publish as a concise statement of his position over
against mine and Mrs. Lewisohn’s—a statement worded admirably, but
which, much to Mrs. L’s delight, I called ‘intolerant.’ She liked the word
because L’s animus is all against any form of intolerance.” 23
Ludwig, feeling as “chained” as ever after these encounters, wrote
Leonard on September 22 of his plans to move to the house in Greenwich
Village he had purchased together with Oliver Sayler at 6 Jane Street.
Conveniently located around the corner from Huebsch’s office, it would
enable him “to see people, now that I won’t be living half a day’s journey
from everybody.''’' 1 But repairs were still under way, and the endless
parade of workers needed to convert the tenement back into a pleasant
living space still meant weeks of “infinite bother,” forcing him, as he
told Joel Spingarn, to “live in mid-air—rushing from 180th Street to the
Village, half-packed, half-unpacked.” 25
As a part of his plan of escape, Ludwig had allowed Mary to furnish
their home and to feel as though she were driving him further into
debt, and into her trap. She could not have known that he had already
secretly set aside funds for his eventual flight. Yet this satisfying feeling
of deceptiveness had all too quickly begun to cost far more than he had
295
Page 297 - [see page image]
296
Ludwig Lewisohn
anticipated. Not wanting to reduce his reserves, he found it necessary
to produce more for the publishers, while the “theatres, The Nation,
etc. [continued] wildly on my track.” The renovations, he felt, were
relentlessly devouring him “bit by bit,” while those who employed him
seemed constantly to “gnaw and nibble,” making it impossible for him
not to ask Spingarn for partial prepayment for the work he was doing
for Harcourt. Week after week his life had been filled with an unending
“daily effort to raise the money to pay these people.” Still, there was
no doubt in his mind that his plan would bring the freedom he sought
after this “diabolical” period had passed. “My judgment tells me that
the whole move was, from every point of view, wise and right and
thrifty in the end,” he commented to Leonard, reassuring him that
the “spiritually sordid tone” still present in his voice was due to the
continuing, but diminishing, “ugliness and slavery of life” from which he
would soon be free. The “loathsome romantic delusions by which people
live” were being stripped away—violently, perhaps, but irretrievably.
The memories of his early years with Mary, clinging to one another in
fear and loneliness, had held them in a state of strangulating mutual
dependency throughout the desperate years that had followed. But no
longer. The decision to make a final break from her had been reached.
The move to the Village would in time help him to accomplish this
desperate act. 26
And then, as preparations for his flight continued, Up Stream at
last found its publisher. Mencken’s positive reading of the manuscript,
corroborated by Carl Van Doren’s worried assessment, had strengthened
Ludwig’s resolve to leave the text as it was. “If you and C.V.D. hadn’t
been sufficient midwives,” Ludwig would gratefully write Mencken the
following June, “this particular offspring might never have had the
pluck to spring off.” 27 Van Doren had admired Ludwig’s ability in
Up Stream to “utter the pain and rebellion in his heart, raising it to
something universal.” He himself had been raised to endure and to hide
his pain “with an Indian silence.” With his Anglo-American heritage
and stoic training so deeply ingrained, he knew there was no chance
of his ever producing so piercing a critique of the culture which he,
too, had found so discomforting. Some fourteen years after Up Stream’s
publication, Van Doren looked back upon Ludwig’s work as “a beautiful
and troubling book by a foreign-born American who, for once, was not
complacent about how quickly he had changed his native colors for red,
white, and blue, not flattering toward the civilization which had tried to
make him what he was not.” 28
Harcourt had considered publishing it, but instead had deferred to
Spingarn, who, fearing the clarity of statement and purpose, had sought
Page 298 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
to remove that “element of the essentially ignoble” that ran throughout.
Ludwig acknowledged its presence, but felt that as a legitimate part of
his psyche, it could no more be removed than could the experiences and
emotions of a lifetime from which it was derived. All deserved a voice.
“These facts are inherent. So why, I asked myself finally, should I be
uncomfortable and seedy trying to escape the fate which is mine?” He
didn’t elaborate on this fate, nor point to the recent conclusions about
himself and his place in the world, as he would that same day to his
more distant confidant, Leonard. He simply told Spingarn that “no man
can revise his book till he has revised himself. That, too, can possibly
be done. But I’m not young enough nor do I care enough to do that.”
He was saddened by the thought that they hadn’t been able to work
out their differences, leaving him little choice but to go with Liveright,
“excellent fellow that he is.” 29
“Liveright, poor, dear man, swallows me whole and will do his
utmost.” There was little reason not to accept his offer to publish the
book as it was, he told Leonard in late September, detailing Spingarn’s
“Jewish neurosis” as the motivation for his demand for revisions. But
“men as well as books” had their unalterable fate. What Spingarn
had defined as an ignoble element, Ludwig saw as its innate, fated,
Jewish protest. He could not mask it effectively enough to assuage
Spingarn’s fears that the Jewishness of his protest would damage the
book’s marketability or endanger the chance for other Jews to seek
acceptance within the gentile community. Ludwig had already masked
the Jewishness of his vision as much as he could without destroying
the intent of his work. There was no possibility of changing it further
merely to suit someone else. “I couldn’t rewrite without re-living.” 30 He
was determined to be honest and to be accurate. Both were needed if
his message was to have any lasting impact. The lack of these elements,
he noted that November in a Nation critique of Eugene O’Neill’s work,
had caused the playwright to write “memorable fragments but [not] a
memorable play. He interferes with fate. He helps it out. He must learn
to be more passive and vigilant. He must keep closer to the humble truth.
In it are power, greatness, permanence.
While they debated their decision on Up Stream, Harcourt had
brought out a collection of Ludwig’s Nation essays under the title The
Drama and the Stage. Ludwig was pleased with the volume assembled
under Spingarn’s guidance. “It would be an affectation to say that I
wasn’t.” Here were the results of his attempt “to illustrate ... a theory
of both the drama and the theatre that is coherent and that is profoundly
implicated with permanent qualities of life and art,” that the theater was
either a mirror to be held up critically before us, or it had no value. Yet
297
Page 299 - [see page image]
298
Ludwig Lewisohn
he had to admit that neither the desire to express great ideas nor the
wish to achieve immortality had been the sole motivation behind his
efforts. The desperate need to escape from a life otherwise “too dull and
beastly” to endure had pushed him to produce so much within so short
a space of time. It had all been little more than a diversion, he thought, a
shadow of reality that so rarely satisfied the real needs he felt from day
to day. “Literature, old man, is no substitute for life,” he admitted to
Leonard. 32 If only he had known that years before, he would have lived
more honestly.
Christ, to be young again and know a little—oh, only a little! What a
damned ass and sentimentalist I was. I was going to write—one was.. . .
And my next birthday is my fortieth. You’ve passed that agony and, despite
phobias, I gather passed it serenely and triumphantly. Not 1.1 confess it to
you. My spirit cringes and whimpers. Not because it goes downhill.. . . But
because there’s nothing to look back on—nothing but cowardliness which
men call doing your duty. Well, I’ve done my duty. But I’ve never done MY
duty. And the result is that I’m bankrupt—innerlich [inwardly]—and envy
the bums in Bryant Park. Literally, literally. 33
He looked to Up Stream to right these failures. Past debts had been
paid—to his parents, to Mary and her family, to the society that had
turned against him, to his own misguided notions of life. And by January
1922, so too were those owed for the renovations on the house into
which he and Mary had moved on September 30. He was now able
to refuse the translation and editing assignments that had driven him
for years. When “a spell of intestinal trouble, next of rheumatism—old
age!” kept him from fully recovering from the physical and emotional
strain of the previous months, he thought it time to tell Spingarn and the
others that it was enough. In place of this dissipating work, he would
take on more congenial and less demanding assignments. “Hence I’ve
accepted a position as play-reader to the Theatre Guild.’”'
Settled and no longer in debt, he looked forward to hiring a full
time maid and a part-time secretary. With both himself and Mary busily
writing each day, there was little time and even less energy for these
chores. The reception accorded Up Stream, now scheduled for February
15 publication, would ultimately determine such matters. Though hope
ful, he readied himself for the first bad review and the first disappointing
sales report, 35 quieting his fears by remarking in the Nation that most
living American writers and artists thought “of ‘success’ above honest
work.” For applause and profit, they had traded “hope and liberty.”
This was not their proper role. Nor was it to uphold some aesthetic,
however highly borne. Rather,
Page 300 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
it must be his object to trouble the waters of American life and thought. That
is the sufficient reply to those who accuse the liberal critics of America of
being propagandists, partisans, sociologists. They must be that or they are
nothing—propagandists of moral tolerance, partisans of liberty and peace,
analysts of the inhibitions and self-torments that resist experience as sin
and beauty as a lure. For it is their function to liberate in American life and
set into activity “the ideas and feelings of which art has been made.” The
problems of artistic form and execution will take care of themselves once
they have a proper and congenial milieu. *'
To this, at least, he had been true, if at a price he believed himself
willing to pay. Art, as he would write a week later, was hardly a means
toward financial well-being. Its virtues lay elsewhere in the order of
human affairs. “It is not activity for gain—there is none to be had—nor
even for reputation, but springs from the profound though often feverish
desire to grasp the world anew and to find forms in art that are to be
expression and salvation at once.” 37
The first major review of Up Stream to appear was Brander Mat
thews’ in the New York Times of April 9. For two decades, Ludwig had
engaged in periodic literary battle with his former Columbia professor,
the most recent confrontation having occurred in 1919, when he had
written in the Nation that Matthews had “not helped the American
theatre itself as powerfully as, given his station and influence, he might
have.” 38 The publication of Ludwig’s controversial Up Stream now
gave Matthews a chance to retaliate, particularly after finding himself
portrayed as one of the least attractive characters in the book. Call
ing Ludwig a “fraud” and an “Emotionalist,” Matthews questioned
the critical ability of his former student. “I was put to shame at my
lack of acquaintance with the works of one who was acclaimed—by
his own publisher, too—as a ‘great’ critic,” Matthews bitingly began
his essay, before excusing his ignorance of such fine accomplishments
with the explanation that their author lacked the basic “indispensable
qualification” by which critics’ credentials were measured—“insight,
equipment, disinterestedness, and sympathy. ” Did Ludwig ever possess
one of these, Matthews asked? If so, why had Up Stream left him so
“untransformed” ?
Despite the display of verbal jousting, the real issue for Matthews
remained what it had been twenty years earlier. Simply put, Ludwig
was part of a different race than he and his fellow guardians of Anglo-
American culture and society. Other foreign-born men of learning had
come to America and had found their place within its academies—albeit
outside the field of English studies. Ludwig, however, had not been
similarly content to apply “the mental alertness of his [Jewish] race”
299
Page 301 - [see page image]
300
Ludwig Lewisohn
elsewhere. Failing to penetrate this sacred Anglo-American fortress, he
had unjustly and improperly questioned its defenders’ right to repel his
invasion.
Upton Sinclair, in making specific reference to Up Stream later that
year in his own book The Goose-Step, would characterize this discrim
inatory practice as “The Academic Pogrom,” but Matthews and his
colleagues would never concede this point in the struggle to maintain
control of their world. To them Ludwig was an “alien by birth” who,
because “he did not learn our language at his mother’s knee,” was
incapable of expounding on “the spirit of this literature as the natives of
that speech want to have it expounded.” Little wonder, Matthews would
add, that “those who vainly tried to secure for the author the [teaching]
position to which he aspired did not try as hard as they might. . . [hav
ing] vaguely perceived in him an alien spirit, an incomplete acceptance
of the ideals of the English-speaking peoples.”
Such diligence was crucial, and increasingly so, to those whose
hegemonic wall had been breached, and not only by Jews. Non-Anglo-
Saxons of all kinds had of late challenged more stridently than ever
this mythical past of transitory absolutes, offering differing visions of
the world they shared together. Mencken, in reviewing Stuart Sherman’s
book The Americans in March of the following year, would offer two
possible solutions to this “anguish,” and with his usual sarcastic bite,
hold up Ludwig as an example of one, before lashing out with his own
critique of Sherman’s tradition.
Two courses lie before him, if he would avoid exhausting himself by chasing
his own tail. On the one hand, he may join the Ku Klux openly, and
perhaps become its Literary Grand Cyclops or Imperial Kritik. On the
other hand, he may undertake a conquest by peaceful penetration, as he
has already attempted, indeed, in the cases of Sinclair Lewis (a Hun at
heart) and Dr. Ludwig Lewisohn. But neither device, I fear, will really
achieve much for the sacred cause of the Anglo-Saxon. If he adopts the
second, that cause will be swallowed up. And if he adopts the first, he
will simply get himself laughed at for his pains. For what distinguishes the
American Goths, Wops and Kikes above all other barbarians, as Dr. Sher
man himself accurately argues, is their defective respect for the purely
spiritual inheritance of their Anglo-Saxon compatriots. On the material
side they are less contumacious. They respect and even venerate the Amer
ican bathroom; they esteem the ease with which money may be cadged
in America; they admire the professional efficiency of bootleggers. But
they regard James Russell Lowell, alas, with much lack of reverence; they
snore over Irving and Cooper; they find Emerson too often windy and
the rest too often bores. Ignorance? I doubt it. Certainly the gems of
the Yanko-Saxon heritage have been on display enough during the past
Page 302 - [see page image]
301
Suffering Unjustified
eight years for all literate men to be aware of them. But awareness is
not always translated into admiration; sometimes it may be translated
into snickers. 40
Though others of these “barbarians” troubled Sherman and his
cohort, the Jews were the most disturbing. “I may be wrong but I feel that
they are a menace at this moment not because they are vicious but be
cause they do not know what America means. They have no understand
ing of our background or our traditions,” Hamlin Garland argued in a
letter to U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge a few weeks before Matthews’
review appeared. “Don’t you know when you’re not wanted,” Robert
Cohn, Ernest Hemingway’s stereotypical characterization of the Jew in
The Sun Also Rises, would be asked, though Hemingway would by 1926
have known a great variety of Jews—Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, the
painters of Montparnasse, and Ludwig among them. 41
Harris proved far less self-defensive in his reading of Up Stream
than Matthews and the others, having come to greatly admire his former
student who now so publicly credited much of his own literary talents
to those of his mentor. Others, however, felt quite differently about
Ludwig’s portrait of him. Harris’s sister Agnes, reflecting his wife’s
comments, wrote to Harris before she had even read the book, telling
him how she “should like to see the portrait of you in ‘Upstream,’ and
also the many things he said of you, but not those which hurt Carlotta
[Harris’s wife], for I should have no patience with them. I imagine I
should not like Lewisohn at all.” 42
One of Harris’s former students, admitting to “very mixed emo
tions” regarding the author of The Broken Snare, a book he had once
admired before deciding “to deny myself some of the privileges mere
animals have. . . [and] practice monogamy,” leaped to the defense of
the man whose teaching had provided “the greatest joys in life.” He
credited Ludwig’s disappointments to his own antisocial and humor
less nature. 43 Nevertheless, Harris remained convinced that Up Stream,
despite his own disagreements with it, was a highly creditable work, to
which he publicly testified in his “not insincere” review in the Charleston
Courier.™
Mencken, though less of an outsider than Ludwig, sympathized with
his old friend, and spoke of him “as a betrayed innocent.” In his June 21
Nation review of Up Stream, titled “Dream and Awakening,” he rated
it as a “far more searching and profound” critique of small-minded
America than any other that had recently been published. By arousing
“the ire of the New York Times, the American Legion, the Rotary Club,
the Sulgrave Foundation, the Ku Klux Klan, and other such eminent
Page 303 - [see page image]
302
Ludwig Lewisohn
agencies of correct thought,” it seemed far more “likely to leave deeper
and more florid scars.”
Mencken’s positive reaction was due, in large measure, to his own
experience of the same anti-German sentiment that had sent Ludwig
back to New York in 1917, though Dreiser, himself a witness to this
prejudice, would tell Mencken that year of his displeasure at seeing so
many Jews sharing his city. “New York to me is a scream—a Kyke’s
dream of a Ghetto. The hot tribe has taken the island.” But social
marginalization had left deeper scars on Mencken’s already cynical
psyche. He found himself most appreciative of Ludwig’s discussion of
the “colossal disillusionment” visited upon all who had watched “the
normal decencies and amenities of life sacrificed to an ignoble and idiotic
[anti-German] hate,” and had been left to feel it “a downright disgrace”
during the war years to be an American.
Perhaps because of this, he was quick to understand Ludwig’s jour
ney toward his Jewish identity. As “a German Jew of sound and civilized
stock,” Ludwig’s story of involvement with the Methodist Church, and
his break from it, was to Mencken “a story of gradual recovery from that
supreme storm of spiritual measles—with a dash of major surgery at the
end,” Up Stream itself. Without this process, the poet caught “inside the
plaster Methodist” might never have emerged. Undoubtedly, Mencken’s
iconoclastic attitudes added to this analysis. But as Ludwig himself had
finally come to understand, Mencken, too, saw the breaking of this mask
as an act of ultimate necessity if he was to affirm his own identity.
Yet Mencken recognized in this act not only the cause of “great joy,
to be sure, but also of difficulty and disillusion—poverty, the iron face
of prejudice, struggle, heartburning, doubt, dismay,” and rejection by
those schools possessed of “an immovable passion for Nordic blonds.”
Mencken, still capable of empathizing with the Jew as a fellow outsider
in America, knew that for much of Ludwig’s life, “it was the Jew rather
than the German who had all these dragons to face.” Still, “there were
compensations,” he noted, even in this period of increased bigotry. “One
of them is before us: Lewisohn is cured.” 4 '
Ludwig was more than pleased with this “gorgeous review,” and
thanked Mencken for his continuing support, first displayed by his
“services last summer” when reading the final draft. 46 But it remained the
task of a fellow Jewish author to write the most fully appreciative review
of Up Stream. Two weeks after Matthews’ acerbic critique, the New
York Times, apparently uncomfortable with his unbalanced approach,
sought to right the scales by printing the reaction of Anzia Yezierska, a
Jewish immigrant from Russia who had come to literary prominence two
years earlier with the publication of her collected autobiographical short
Page 304 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
stories. Among other themes, Hungry Hearts had dealt with assimilation
and the problem of retaining one’s identity in the face of countering
pressures. Yezierska knew from her own experiences how difficult it was
to overcome the false promises of success. Matthews, she protested, had
expressed the opinion of those who present such lures, while restricting
the lives of those led astray by them. These same older Anglo-Americans
were now destroying the true America, limiting its growth, blocking
the “new color, new music, new beauty of expression” offered by those
whose “surging leaven of youth” had broken their control and had given
vitality to a New World aging under the weight of vested prejudices.
Among Up Stream’s other positive attributes, it had thrown all of this
into the public arena and had given encouragement to those suffering
under this burden.
To us newer Americans, Up Stream is not merely a book. It is a vision,
revelation. It is our struggles, our hopes, our aspirations and our failures
made articulate. It is the cry of young America to old America not to confine
literature, education and thought to the formula of a small group. Up Stream
is a dynamic protest against the sanctification of a priestcraft in education,
a revolt against the existence of an Anglo-Saxon intellectual aristocracy in
a country that is the gathering together of a people from every corner of
the earth. 47
Yet, as pleased as Ludwig was with so many of the reviews he
received, he was particularly anxious to win Leonard’s approval. They
had known each other for so many years, had lived through each other’s
troubles for so long, and had known how desperate each had been so
often in the past. Leonard’s expression of assurance to Ludwig that his
pain had given birth to a truly important and lasting work of art was the
most satisfying of all responses. It was one of the few letters of the period
that Ludwig retained until his death. Two weeks after his friend’s fortieth
birthday, Leonard sent his unqualified approbation: “I myself have read
it twice—truly a beautiful book, a deep book . . . the justification of your
many tribulations and long struggles. You once said to me, if you only
could believe there would be any results out of your miseries. Well. . .
here are the results, adequate, permanent.’’”"
Controversy and well-placed advertisements aided Up Stream in
becoming an overnight publishing success. But Ludwig was far from
convinced that he had gotten his message to the people who most needed
to hear it. “I dare say our minds need a shaking up,” he wrote in
May as he pressed onward with his attack, even while reviews were
still being written. Repeating old themes, he pushed harder than ever in
the Nation that spring and summer for an acceptance of socialist causes
(including a fair hearing for the Industrial Workers of the World I, 4 * while
303
Page 305 - [see page image]
304
Ludwig Lewisohn
emphasizing more stridently than before the stranglehold that a Puritan
ethos had upon marriage and the individual’s ability to find a life of
meaningful love and sexual expression. “Thickly and darkly romantic,”
such fulfillment was judged sinful by “those who seem never to have
tried it at all,” those who, in their self-deprivation, had fantasized and
found titillating what they had condemned out of habit. “They were like
children saying bad words,” fascinated enough to act only marginally, to
have a bit of a taste, enjoying the morsel too discomfortingly, and taking
“good care to repent and be shriven after they had had a very good time. ”
Believing “in the blasphemness of their blasphemies,” fearing them and
condemning what they dared not repeat, lest such acts loosen the very
underpinnings of their lives, they crucified the objects of their desire.
“They took woman as the fountain and symbol of evil and drove the
glittering nails of their own morbidness and terror into one. . . after
another. Cleverly turning the ancient anti-Semitic Christian charge
against Judaism as a religion not of love but of a law to which the Jews
were bound in some perversely destructive way, Ludwig reminded his
readers that “man, in brief, was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sab
bath made for man. This is the great Christian truth that Christendom
has quite forgotten."''
It was time for change, time to put this “long tradition of austere
devotion and profoundly dedicated lives behind them.” Such repression
had perverted life itself and all that should have been joyful and good and
creative. For such men as these, Ludwig argued, “their bodies are almost
disembodied and will and achievement have become identical. To such
ends man will dedicate himself for generations. His efforts toward higher
ends are sullen, sporadic, feeble. He does not know how to love, nor how
to govern or be governed, nor how to avoid war or want.” 52 “Conflict
smolders or burns in nearly every house,” he asserted triumphantly in the
midst of the reviews piling up from around the country. Such rebellion
as there was “is natural enough,” he promised, “humanly embodied”
as all “crises in the history of human civilization must be.” Do not fear,
but embrace it, he insisted. It was generational and never-ending. A
sheathed sword should not be mistaken for an illusion of peace. Today,
as in the past, “the conflict, amid its varying terms, [is] the same: the
old stand for dogma, compulsion, security; the young, denying dogma,
denying that compulsion makes for security, demand reason, freedom,
the experimental life.'”'
Ludwig had come to believe, with others in his circle, that socialism
and sexual freedom were but different aspects of the same struggle for
truth and liberation. The former he could handle more in the abstract
now that he had ceased being a wage slave; the latter, however, was
Page 306 - [see page image]
305
Suffering Unjustified
less easily dealt with, for when he returned home from his office or the
theater, there sat a woman far different from the Mary of Up Stream,
confronting him as a constant reminder of his marital enslavement, of its
tightening chains and the spiritual malaise that only his proposed course
of change could relieve.
That summer, in a brief tale for the Nation titled “The Clown,” he
spoke of this interconnection of society and marriage, and of the control
exercised by the state upon the individual. He talked of the sadness that
had been his fate, as “for any soul under the sun,” of how he had been
“slung to the spokes of some vast wheel” from which there was need
and possibility of escape. “I have been shaken by other woes on other
days.” He had survived the spectacle of friends betraying friends, of
individuals self-consumed by desires, of “lovers slay[ing] lovers.” He
would no longer be overwhelmed by the sadness of it all. If he had once
felt immobilized by circumstances, momentarily unable to go on with
the struggle as he sadly danced the “dance of sorrowful forgetfulness,”
donning one mask or another, enduring but not living, he was no longer
willing to do so. This had been his past. It would not, it could not, be
his future. Recounting his tragedy for all to see, he told how once a
house was mine and patriotic opinions and, though you may not believe it,
love. The house became a prison, yet I had nowhere else to go; patriotism
became a sentence of death, yet I thought there was still wine left in my
goblet; love talked tirelessly of unselfishness and asked my soul to be a
slave. I went to wise men and to wise men’s books, for I was a modest and
tractable fellow. The wise men nodded their heads and spoke many words.
And the sum of their wisdom was this: Everything seems to be true and
its contrary seems to be equally true, and what right have you—this each
wise man added in an angry voice—to doubt that my system rationalizes
the universe and dissolves all discords into harmony? ... At length I fled
forth from my house that was a prison, from the state that was a murderer,
from love that was a slave-driver.
Flight, if yet only imaginary, had given him the strength to search
his life anew, to fight against that fate imposed from without. By the
intervention of some greater force, something stirring within himself
that could not be silenced or assuaged, he had been spared this numbing
of the mind and senses. He would recapture those earlier rapturous
moments once known in the warm embrace of a lover, or at his mother’s
side. In his desire to experience such moments again, his dance had
been transformed from the “mimicry of futilities” into a movement of
renewal, of love, faith, security, and redirection. The past and the present
had been violated by the world’s perverse demands. But here he was,
feeling again as he had in his
Page 307 - [see page image]
306
Ludwig Lewisohn
youth, an orchid in blotch, and two soft lips,
A book of verse in the grass, warm finger-tips
Upon my hand, and something in the wind
That could bring balm to hearts unmedicined
Forever by all other healing things.
Or else a night of vision filled with wings
And wonder, when the secrets of sea and land
Pulsed like a living bird within my hand;
Or gently twilit moments undefiled:
My mother, at her window, with her child.' 1
The break was long in coming, delayed and avoided in the past
whenever possible. Mary and her children had for years been an un
ending drain upon his physical strength, his emotional stability, and
his meager financial resources. If Huebsch had not saved him while at
Ohio State, he would probably have left Mary or gone mad. “Where the
children are concerned,” he had complained to Huebsch in September
1915, “she loses all sense of justice. The world including myself was
made for them to use!” To those unfamiliar with his domestic situation,
all had appeared happy. But he had been forced to sacrifice the greater
rewards of scholarship for the unjust task of supporting frivolities, with
little more than callous insults “in return for the ruin of my whole
life and career."' 5 The war had exacerbated their conflict when Mary
took on a decidedly pro-Allied position. As Ludwig’s former student
and contributor to the Sansculotte, Susan Jenkins Brown, later recalled,
the war had served to accentuate their personal differences, political
and ethnic, hastening the demise of their marriage. “It created a tension
between them . . . that could not be overcome. She could not help hating
everything German, including its culture, to which Ludwig had given his
professional life."”
There is little doubt that Ludwig’s emphasis upon the suffocating
nature of Anglo-American culture was tied as much to the political and
social state of his world as it was to his deteriorating marriage, the latter
merely proof to him of its perverse nature. Whatever temporary ac
commodations had been worked out between himself and Mary during
their years in Ohio had quickly crumbled under the lessening of external
pressures in New York. By January 1918 he had already begun to express
his thoughts on the unsatisfying relationship he shared with her, believing
himself a victim of a society “afflicted with the moral allusionism of New
England . . . something rather sweet and hazy which will scarcely stand
the hard test of the daily sensitivities of human life." 5 '
Mary, too, had felt this estrangement, felt it growing with the years,
and mourned the loss of what they once had shared in the “wild spring”
Page 308 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
of their past. “O long walks together in the sweet spring weather; we two
a-Maying,” began her poetic lament, “Wishes,” published in April 1920.
You whistled a tune and I flung the shutters wide, flung the
Shutters open to let the little new moon come and peer inside.
And my heart was glad and sang a little tune. It sang like a
Bird, sang in my sleep all night long, a mad little song . . .
You wished adventure. All men do. I wished the old wish.
Your wish came true. Spring is later. May is colder. The
New moon is paler. All the world is older.
She saw the pain that each had caused the other, and knew, as did he, that
neither had really wanted to hurt the other. But he wanted the freedom
she could not offer, and with society’s institutions to support her, she
had demanded her due. It seemed to her, after all that had happened,
that only he had found fulfillment in their relationship, and that she had
been misused and abandoned to a shadow world under an “Evil Old
Moon.” In some retributive sense of just accounting, there was a price
owed that was hers to exact. “There was a tune he used to whistle . . . /
I forget the tune . . . / Close the shutters. It’s a long time—a lifetime.""
Ludwig had tried to be circumspect in dealing with their conflict,
keeping it from public view as much as possible, though his father and
closest friends had become aware of its seriousness as it worsened. Even
Up Stream contained nothing of their problem. “There are things too
difficult, too intricate, too full of pain to others for much speech,” he
had told Mary Austin without specific reference in March 1921. 59
Fiction became his only public outlet during the years before Up
Stream’s publication. In 1919, “The Story Ashland Told at Dinner,”
with its oblique reference to Puritan America as a land of witch-hunts
and fiery executions, had told of a Ludwig-like Tom Frye, “a sensitive,
delicately balanced sort, even at college . . . [who] had lost his mother
early and had married young. He had been hustled about and dominated
and battered spiritually—as he put it—all his life.” Though fully aware
of his fragile emotional state, and perhaps because of it, his wife had
pursued him, relentlessly, seeking to control through intimidation.
She’s the restless, temperamental kind—one scheme today, another tomor
row and at each scheme with a sort of hectic intensity. Always, too, and this
is the point, blindly self-centered. . . . One week she’d keep him out every
night till three; next week she’d shut herself up with her writing—she did
poetry of a kind—and scream at any interruption. But that was no relief to
him. Because when she came out she’d torment him to the quick with her
jealousy and make him account for every minute of the time.
Frye fled into the comfort of another woman’s arms, seeking there
the peace he needed if he was ever to create his art. But when his wife
307
Page 309 - [see page image]
308
Ludwig Lewisohn
returned unexpectedly from a trip to Europe, he took his life rather than
endure the pain she was certain to inflict. 60
Like Frye, who “wrote it down deliberately, over and over again”
in an attempt to work out a solution, Ludwig was to retell his tale many
times, in Don Juan and Crump and the others, always giving it a different
ending, as if trying to find the most suitable conclusion. At a particularly
desperate moment in June 1921, he would write,
The world is stale. We common folks
Have much more work than fun.
I think I’ll slit your throat, my dear,
To see the red blood run. 61
By the summer of 1922, with his marriage to Mary growing ever
more unendurable, Ludwig began to openly seek the comfort of his
friends. Mary had already appealed to others for support and sympathy,
first in relative privacy to Harris, and then to those before whom she
could embarrass Ludwig, believing that this approach would shame
him into correcting his behavior. She would follow him around the
city, or have him shadowed by private detectives (at his expense!), and
then interrupt his business luncheons with horrible scenes of misplaced
jealousy and threats. Or she would approach Ludwig’s female friends
individually, and tell them, as he recorded one woman’s retelling of the
visit in Crump, that “she [herself] was a terribly passionate woman,
that she had just saved you from the toils of a designing adventuress,
that you were a very sick man, and that your sickness had taken the
form of a sexual inhibition against her.” Of such incidents, Ludwig
added that “Her sole purpose seemed to be to slander her husband and
blacken him in the estimation of his friends. She accused him of sexual
perversity, of attempting to attack her daughters, of habitual dishonesty
and untruthfulness. Under such circumstances, he felt little need to
remain silent. On June 30, after assuring Upton Sinclair of his “deep
sense, beyond all disagreement, of your wisdom and sincerity and—
again in my sense—goodness,” Ludwig related “a story . . . never been
told before.” With striking parallels to “Ashland” and “The Clown,”
he presented Sinclair with a detailed accounting of the “desperateness
of my case”:
A bookish, morbid young idealist, aged twenty-four, whose interests were
utterly alien to those of the girls he knew, married a woman many years
his senior on the basis of an almost passionate sense of her understanding,
sympathy, etc. He realized almost at once that the sexual adjustment was
imperfect, to be frank, that his wife didn’t appeal to him enough. But so
long as he was below thirty, the situation dragged along well enough. Now
the man is forty and he lives in hell. He is almost completely anaesthetic to
Page 310 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
his wife. She, pardonably jealous, exacting, sensitive from the first, has now
raised her jealousy to the point of mania and sinks into it all natural honor,
kindness, tolerance. Since, some two years ago, the man gave her some
cause—mild and futile enough—the situation has become insupportable.
Unless all their actions, their comings and goings, coincide precisely in space
and time, the woman is in a state of agony which pierces the man, who bears
her a true and deep affection, to the marrow. Thus through his compassion
he is enslaved in all the practical matters of life. Totally deprived of any
normal or satisfactory expression of his sex-impulse, he has sunk into a
limbo of misery, all-pervasive misery, which neither success nor friends nor
any of the normal stimuli of life can pierce. (That is why he is terror-stricken
at the thought of not being able to get a little drink now and then!). I need
not tell you that in this hectic situation a thousand psychical cruelties have
been practiced on both sides, that the man, who is morbid—his father died
mad—and melancholy by nature has had excesses of unendurable despair
often masked as rage. But it is also clear to you from this letter that the
man isn’t ruthless, that, though he has gone over the situation in his mind
ten-thousand times—yes, ten-thousand—and found his suffering unjustified
and unjustifiable on any natural or reasonable basis, he has preserved that
poor technical and physical fidelity which, according to his wife, is necessary
to her life. 63
Despite his past determination to be free of feelings of guilt, betrayal,
and dishonor, he had been left nearly paralyzed by her demands and
those of society. But fears of another round of depression, or, far worse,
of the possibility of a descent into a state of madness not unlike his
father’s, had ultimately worked away at whatever reservations remained.
Greater still were his fears that the spiritual denial of so many years might
have begun to irreversibly atrophy his soul, so that his days would soon
become little more than a death-in-life ritual. Such terrifying thoughts,
he recalled in Crump, had freed him and restored his teetering sanity.
His mind was sane and clear. He attributed to her no more than tireless
vigilance and inexhaustible energy and complete treachery in her pursuit of
the aim of keeping him—object, thing, chattel, slave—to herself. His will,
needs, agony rebellion; his writhing in pain and disgust; his perception of
something like decay eating into his brain and soul, contaminating his whole
universe, making leprous the face of man and of nature—all these things
were as nothing to that old woman.. . . Under the aspect of eternity ... it
was not likely that such a thing should prevail. 64
An endlessly trying summer on Long Island with Mary and her
family, at times spent alone “in a boat out on the Sound or walking
on the wild, hauntingly primeval dunes at the very end of the island,'” ’
helped to confirm this understanding. In his first novel of their failed
marriage, Don Juan, he recalled how “during a sunset over Long Island
Sound, a sunset of almost preternatural splendor, clarity and glow, he
309
Page 311 - [see page image]
310
Ludwig Lewisohn
had sat on a rock as the sea darkened . . . and had heard the pounding
of the untiring waves. Even so, even so, all creation pounded toward
its strongest desires, its most fundamental yearnings.” Why then, he
wondered, shouldn’t he? 66 Was not this “untamed world of reality,” this
spiritual dimension of life, the true measure of judgment? And as in life,
so, too, in art; for true drama, as a mirror of man’s existence, “commu
nicates a sense of the necessarily tragic character of human life, of its
necessary and inevitable defeat upon any but spiritual terms, of the fact
that its single spiritual victory consists in compassion, in understanding,
in abstention from force, from moral fraud, from judgment and the
execution of judgment,” he wrote in the Nation that July. 67
Yet most people would never know this “spiritual victory.” For
them, “life is lived by a fundamental fear” of dissent from the “me
chanical civilization” to which they are bound, a fear that any attempt
to overthrow that “system of morals with which the will can no longer
identify itself” would lead only to defeat and exile. 68 A month later, in an
essay “Concerning Faith,” he would again attack this lack of spiritual
will, proclaiming that “struggle, crisis, resolution are the essence of the
life-process itself.
A surprise visit to the city by Harris that September of 1922 served to
further solidify his determination to leave. Ludwig had already decided
that the price was too dear to pay for the kind of peaceful “activity
without desire” 70 that most others were only too willing to accept.
Harris’s presence, and his unswerving support of Mary, made this all
too clear. Ludwig, of course, continued to mask his true feelings from
Harris, who found him “most cheerful” as once again former student
and teacher shared pleasant conversation, the theater, and excellent
dining. “Went to a foreign-aired cafe in Little Italy, and had a good
Italian dinner with chianti and Benedictine under canvas in the open,”
he wrote his wife. “Very interesting talk until 11—L. full of information
of great interest to me . . . amused at the excitement of the waiter on
arrival of Valentino, the movie hero (‘Blood and Sand’), who sat near us
with his friends.” 1
But Mary, less willing to disguise her despair, disturbed their final
visit with open talk of mental problems. “Mrs. L. has many troubles
and is somewhat tragic,” Harris recorded after his last evening with
the Lewisohns. 72 Ludwig could take no more of this degradation and,
once Harris had left, announced his intention to divorce. She pleaded,
promised to change, alternately grew angry or asked his forgiveness,
but it was too late—and she knew it. He was determined to go, and she
could do little but try to force him to stay. Whatever emotional hold she
had once exercised over him was now gone. “Years and years ago he
Page 312 - [see page image]
Suffering Unjustified
had been trapped and imprisoned with creatures of whom his soul had
no knowledge,” he would write in Crump. “They had tried to wrench
him away from himself, his instincts, his appurtenances, his true life and
make him melt into their miasma.. . . But pillars had stood to uphold
his own world, the spiritual universe into which he had been born.” 73
The guilt he had once felt could no longer withstand this inner
command to follow his own path, alone. He had now gone “beyond
the notion of guilt or blame” in his relationship with Mary. Neither
could change what they were, nor alter the tragic consequences of their
incompatible natures. What sense was there to a relationship that was
so naturally destructive? “Unless they, being what they were, could be
happier, more fruitful, more blessed in their lives together than apart,”
he wrote in Don Juan, “he could see no reason in all the universe of
things and thoughts why they should be together.” Nor could he any
longer take solely upon himself the debilitating guilt from which he had
suffered in the past. “What guilt there was belonged to both or neither.
What guilt was now being incurred was incurred [by Mary]. . . who
refused to act on the assumption of guiltlessness, parity, freedom. It was
she who strove to create guilt and build a prison”—neither of which he
could any longer accept. 74
Instead, he would find in the love of another woman freedom from
marital bondage and the means toward spiritual renewal. The two were
inextricably bound, one to the other. Together, they would satisfy his
search for greater meaning. That fall, in an “Introduction” to Gustav
Frenssen’s Jorn Uhl, Ludwig wrote that “we must be saved through and
within life. Our concrete experiences must somehow hold the spiritual
values that are to satisfy reason and the heart.” He had long ago rejected
the Pauline antithesis between the flesh and the spirit that he believed to
be the backbone of American puritanism and the root cause of so much
of his pain. Salvation, he now wrote from a Jewish perspective, could
be found only where “the flesh is made beautiful and spiritualized” and
each individual “reconciled in spirit to that universe of which their lives
are a part."" ’ None of this could fit some preconceived pattern into which
a society tried to force the individual life, in violation of its uniqueness.
“Action in life has no symmetry. If there is a pattern, it is too extensive
for our vision." "
Ludwig knew this all too well, for soon after his return from Long
Island, he found himself caught up once again in the thrill of a new
theater season. Despite his wish to be free of this frantic pace, he could
not escape the feeling of enjoyment in its whirlwind. To be in New York
was truly a blessing. No longer did he look upon the city as Babylon.
“For all its merely material hardness and corruption, it has a high and
311
Page 313 - [see page image]
312
Ludwig Lewisohn
soaring note. It has a note, too, that possesses something of the innocence
of the skeptical modern soul. For New York is not America. It has
no persecution mania and therefore, left to itself, would not persecute.
There is no smell of incense there and no memory of blood.""
Yet, all the while he knew that neither she nor the success he had
earned there were mistress enough. He wanted more than to react to a
world that was not quite his. Though his friends criticized America, they
still enjoyed her rewards, even those found in this most un-American of
cities. But it was different for Ludwig. He loved New York for not being
of America, and he loved the fast-paced life of her arts, but she did
not hold the future he wanted. Her illusory promises of fame, wealth,
security, and public approbation, like the role society had preordained
for him, had always hindered his search for self. Like the past illusion
of a still workable marriage, New York’s promises had proven hollow.
The life he wanted lay elsewhere, in regions far from the commonly
acceptable. “Life is largely a matter of renunciation,” he wrote his cousin
on December 16,1922. “If I had a son, I would rather wish him simple
happiness and contentment than reputation or being in the public eye
or most of the things that the world calls success.” '
With the power of New York’s “deceptive refreshment and forget
fulness” slowly passing away that fall, he would awaken to the shadows
of domestic chaos after an evening of excitement, only to flee to “a
dusty little square on the lower West Side of New York ... a triangular
bit of asphalt enclosed by an iron fence.” There, in Greenwich Village’s
Sheridan Square, he would sit, imagining his life far from a home whose
“moral atmosphere. . . was allied in its more ignoble way to that in
the old Greek tragedies.” His escape, “long prepared through dragging,
peaceless, unblessed years . . . [seemed] no more avertible than death.”
Until that day, there was nothing left but to await, with hope, the next
incarnation of his muse, come to help him complete his journey. “Time
seemed to stand still and a petrified world to tower grey under the steel
ball of a hard, unstirring sky. And on a certain day, in the twinkling of
an eye, the stone of the world melted and the ball of heaven began to
sway. Thelma had come.” 79 “I met a girl,” Ludwig wrote Upton Sinclair
in early November. “No ‘affair.’ We need each other profoundly and in
all ways. To be her husband for ten years I’d be willing to give up the
rest of my life."’"
Page 314 - [see page image]
313
12
A Younger Woman
“A rather frowny little head nestled against his bosom and two eyes
looked into his that had in them neither question nor compulsion nor
reproach nor discontent nor a provocative pathos nor any appeal nor any
desire to draw anything from him or change anything within him.” They
were the eyes of nineteen-year-old Thelma Spear, as Ludwig described
them in Don Juan, “eyes ... of pure delight, pure yielding and giving
and contentment.” 1 Having shown musical promise in her hometown of
Burlington, Vermont, she had come to New York in the summer of 1920,
hoping to begin a career as an opera singer. When not attending voice
classes or an audition, she would write poetry and send it to famous
writers whose work she admired and whose opinions of her own work
she sought, in part, as an entree to the world of the arts. Not ungifted
as a beginning poet, she attracted some attention from those whom she
approached. Havelock Ellis, poet and psychologist, was appreciative of
her kind words regarding his work, though more thrilled to hear from
her as the first young American to seriously address his ideas about love,
sex, and marriage. Wrote Ellis after complimenting her efforts as a poet,
“I quite agree with you that it would be a good thing if experiments
in living could be carried out more in the way that experiments in a
laboratory are, so that when they failed (as of course they often must)
people were sympathetic and sorry, instead of rejoicing.” 2 She herself
had undertaken such experiments, having as lovers during this period
an orchestral conductor and a stockbroker, to whom she was engaged
before meeting Ludwig.
Page 315 - [see page image]
314
Ludwig Lewisohn
The manner in which she and Ludwig met, and her willingness to
experimentally break with convention, were in keeping with this devel
oping image of herself as an artist and free spirit. Seventeen years later,
after the experiment had failed and their relationship had ended, she
would recall, in a Living Romances article titled “Dangerous Paradise:
My Love Life with Ludwig Lewisohn,” that in September 1922 she had
written to him, praising Up Stream and speaking of how much the book
had meant to her. To her note she then added some of her own poetry,
hoping to receive his opinion of her work. Ludwig was taken with her
poems, and undoubtedly appreciated her kind thoughts. Unaware of her
youth, he invited her to his office at the Nation.
I never shall forget that moment when I walked into his office, a rather
timid girl, nervous and excited to be in the presence of this famous man. He
rose from his desk, his brown eyes hypnotic in their fire, his massive brow
a mark of the fine intelligence which was to give the world such powerful
novels and other literary works. Then he smiled, and all my nervousness
left me. It was as though a peace had descended over my spirit. “I sent for
you,” he said, “because your poetry interested me. There is great promise
here.” Then he looked at me quizzically. “I am surprised to see such a young
woman. Won’t you sit down?” 3
Ludwig wrote in Crump of his first meeting with the “dainty, shapely
little figure with a mass of deep golden hair,” and of how he had
been immediately struck by her, though neither “the child-like purity
of the complexion, nor her firm little nose, nor the ripe and generous
sweetness of the lips” had really “smote upon . . . [his] heart.” Rather,
her “breath of earnestness and of devotion” had reached out to him
from her “lovely mortal vestiture” and, in a moment of extreme need,
filled his imagination with visions of a new beginning. “This girl was
eager for the consuming flame—for great sacrifices, for heroic giving,
for worlds well lost. She met him with a frank warmth.. . . They talked
about herself and about music and books. She thirsted for the fullness
of life. All she had known or experienced hitherto seemed to her meager
and thin.. . . She took his hand and pressed it impulsively to her bosom.
Then she flitted out and left him dazed." *
Thelma’s memory spoke similarly of these events. She had talked
to Ludwig of her dreams as a singer and had showed him more of her
writing, including a “musical novel” she had begun. The hours passed,
and as she rose to leave he asked her to dine with him that evening at
the Cedar Inn. She accepted this second invitation without a thought to
the fact that he was married, as she knew from Up Stream. Over dinner,
he told her of his own work and of his future plans, finding her to be the
sympathetic listener he had longed for in his loneliness. Flattered by his
Page 316 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
attention, she agreed to meet him once more, and then again, until over
the next several weeks their meetings became a daily event for which
each was grateful. 5
He had hoped to keep the relationship one of close friends, but
by mid-October he felt certain that the bond between them was truly
spiritual and eternal; so much so, that he chose to share with her his most
intimate problems concerning Mary. With the end of their marriage in
sight, he grasped at the sweet possibility of a new life with Thelma,
and made her the central focus of his existence, whatever the final
cost to himself might prove to be. 6 As she wrote in a second article
after their breakup, their “attraction for each other became more than
friendship and blossomed into a love which transcended all material
considerations.” 7
A first affair three years earlier had made him realize how great his
need was for someone like Thelma, someone passionate and “dream
like” who could touch the inner realities of his life. In Don Juan, he
spoke of how, in that earlier love,
he had not known that it would be a quest or how it would end when,
at a sultry moment of a rather mad party he . . . had felt a little flame
spring up between Harriett and himself. They had talked at once with a
morbid and dangerous understanding; their hands had clung; her whole
tiny, distracted self had seemed concentrated in a low, quick, breathless
moaning sound. Without words or explanations or plans, they had plotted
to be together.. . . She had touched him so: her restlessness, her reaching
out, the immitigable core-deep melancholy of her, a central honorableness
and veracity that burned through her wild moods. He felt passion for her but
she seemed to him first of all a fellow pilgrim toward some unknown goal. 8
He spoke again of this earlier affair in Crump, and of the meaning
it had held for him as he grew more assertive in his search for “an
immediate and liberating act,” likening this relationship, in its attack
upon convention, to that of a white southern man’s open love for a black
woman—a social metaphor that he undoubtedly found particularly
pleasing to draw.
She walked into his office . . . quite the most beautiful creature he had ever
seen. Her eyes were blue.. . . Her hair as much like wheat. There was a
strength and a distinction in the features. There was a glow through her
fairness that one associates with the darker women of the south. She knew
[his] works well and discussed them with a penetrating personal enthusiasm.
He watched her. Was she girl or woman? Virgin or adventuress? One could
not tell. And that certainly had a troubling charm. Not for the heart, but for
the nerves and the senses.. . . After luncheon they went into the park.. . .
For the first time in his life he felt as though his self-control was slipping
away.. . . [She] was the type of woman over whom a man might go to
315
Page 317 - [see page image]
316
Ludwig Lewisohn
pieces. He didn’t care. Better to be destroyed by a beautiful adventuress if
she was one, than to decay with [Mary]. 9
Now, after three years, and several intervening lovers, he had found
these same qualities in another woman. But he found in Thelma some
thing more. Almost at once, he recognized in this “child-like” woman an
element more striking than her youthfulness with its promise of escape
and liberated sexual expression. In her he found a new personification
of the muse whose absence he had felt so deeply since his early years
with Mary. Born of a Jewish father and Christian mother, she perhaps
represented a halfway stop on his road to fully accepting himself as
a Jew.
Before long, he created an image out of Thelma that was at once
lover, muse, and mother, an image that allowed him to see beyond the re
ality of his physical and psychological attraction to her, and to strangely
reverse the natural role that their age difference might otherwise have
created for him. “Life never gave you a chance to be young,” he has her
saying to him in Don Juan, before adding in a motherly tone, “You’re
my boy.” But unlike his mother, Thelma did not appear “ambitious for
me with a great ambition—intense and unsparing.” She seemed to want
nothing from him that he himself had not wanted to accomplish either
for himself or for her. He could not fail her, as he was convinced he
had Minna. 1
In playing this three-part role, Thelma helped him to escape the
professional and personal chaos in his life. “I loathe disorder,” he wrote
her shortly after they first met. “I am trying to gather my mind to
reconstruct at least the practical life. I’ve written a long article, dictated
forty letters. My head swims. I think of you and thank God—if there
is a God—for you.” 11 Again and again in the months that followed,
he would register his frustration at having to live with this quickening
pace and unending disorder. “The telephone is ringing. It has rung twice
before. Everybody tugs at my nerves,” he complained on December 16; 12
and three days later, he spoke of how there had been “not a moment to
myself all day. The wheels of life whir,” though “all through, my soul
has been with you—has been you.” 13
Thelma became his refuge from all this frenzy as their walks among
the sun-tipped trees that first autumn became a time of healing in his
life. In his letter of October 13, he asked her to meet him the following
day, hoping for fair weather, so that they might enjoy the bounties of
a purifying nature—a clear attempt to recapture that cleansed feeling
he had experienced in past moments of emotional stress, most recently
during his solitude on Long Island.
Page 318 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
You don’t know how dusty and confused life has been. By devices half
absurd and half depressing, I’ve succeeded in freeing myself for a few hours
tomorrow. Could you spend a little while with me? If the day (Tuesday) is
fair—we might see trees and sunlight on the grass together. Will you meet
me at the North West corner of Gramercy Park at 9:30? It is the up-town
westside corner. Is it asking a good deal? Well, life is so like dust and grit
and I need a little sunlight so. 14
Months later in Don Juan, he spoke of her tenderness and of how
an unfathomable sense of well-being had come to him—a long lost erectness
of body and of mind. Once, they had, by common consent, strolled deeper
and deeper into the park. The day had been hot. They stopped in a grove
of trees. They stood facing each other. He looked at her very steadily.. . .
Except for the wistfulness in her eyes, everything about her was of a grave,
simple, beautiful honesty. He did not want to break the harmony of the
moment by kissing her. He was about to take her hand when, looking up
at him, she caught sight of the moisture on his forehead. She opened her
bag, took out a small, white kerchief and wiped his forehead and his eyes.
Her gesture had been very simple—an immemorial gesture. But it was new
to him: the eternal woman’s gesture of tenderness for her man who is also
her child—uncalculated, inevitable, deep as life. He bent down and kissed
her hand. 15
As the weeks passed, he became more dependent upon the escape
she provided. They would meet in the lobby of the Martha Washington
Hotel where she resided, or in the Nation building, or at Brentano’s
bookstore, and would wander through New York, “you beside me there
with your hand against my shoulder. Bless you my dear, my dear.” 16
Thelma, too, remembered these December days as a special time in their
lives, made more intense by the unexpected recognition of someone as
famous as he. “We took long walks up Riverside Drive. Ludwig adored
my blond hair and loved to see the sun playing upon it. ‘It looks like
molten gold,’ he often told me. Then when the snow fell that first Winter
he would delight to see the snow flakes nestling in my hair as we went
for walks together, two happy and contented people."
But their happiness was not as unmixed as she had remembered,
nor as he, at the time, had hoped it would be; for Mary’s presence hung
over them without abeyance. Life, he feared, would become far more
chaotic and disruptive once Mary discovered that not only his soul had
been with Thelma. He was filled with the fear of domestic battles yet
to come, imagining how awful the scene would be once Mary began
to suspect the true nature of their relationship. He cautioned Thelma
not to address her letters to his home—“At present I am unprepared for
war”—instead, she was to write to his office, where his secretary was to
forward his mail home in a Nation envelope. “I’m sure that she is decent
317
Page 319 - [see page image]
318
Ludwig Lewisohn
and discreet,” he said of Miss B., the secretary whom he assumed had
“her own thoughts” about their courtship, as did others at the journal. 18
It was, in the end, a fair assumption, and not only for the Nation staff. So
notorious would Ludwig’s amorous adventures become, that in 1924,
when a passageway between Liveright’s two adjoining buildings was
opened, and a false bookcase installed as a door, its shelves held among
their humorously titled, imaginary books a thick volume of The Love
Life of Ludwig Lewisohn. 19
Though hopeful that an eternal bond had been cast between himself
and Thelma, Ludwig remained throughout these early months morbidly
fearful of the likely impermanence of their relationship, having experi
enced a similar fate with the many others he had known. And so, he
pursued her almost at once, with the desperate single-mindedness of a
man looking at his last chance for life. Four years later, in Crump, he
recalled these moments of joy and fearfulness:
When the black curtain seemed to have fallen forever upon the tragic farce
that was his life, it appeared . . . that in the vast and incalculable economy
of things a compensation had been meant for him. This compensation was
the three months that followed his meeting with [Thelma].... He knew
despite hours of faint hope or voluntary forgetfulness what force, like a
strong circling bird of prey, hovered above. He knew that he could not
protect either himself or her whom he loved. All the more avidly he pressed
upon his tongue the grape of every moment. 20
Aware of how precarious her involvement with Ludwig was, Thelma
looked to her mother for reassurance; but she was less than encouraging
about her daughter’s disturbing relationship, pressing again and again
for some commitment from Ludwig. He himself suffered a deeply trou
bled conscience, admitting to Thelma that “with so little hope, I ought
not to see you, to unsettle you, to rob you of peace.” Despite needs so
strongly felt, he was still too terrified to confront Mary and, thereby,
secure for Thelma the kind of married future her mother had raised her
to expect. For her own sake, he urged Thelma to forget him. “Don’t see
me if it will hurt and uproot you and if you are on the road to peace and
quietude.” Caught up again in a romanticized image of his life, he truly
believed it better that he suffer alone than that she be made to endure
the agony that was surely to come. “I should be the damndest wretch to
have any other thoughts,” he protested openly. Yet he simply could not
let her go. “I love you so and want you so and have no right today to love
and want you.” Instead, he put his future in her hands and told her on
December 15 to do what was best for her alone, though he wanted her
to realize that if she left him, he would remain forever with “the agony
of the thought that you found it so easy to part from me.” Promising
Page 320 - [see page image]
319
A Younger Woman
an undiminished love no matter what her decision, he nonetheless had
created a situation from which she could not easily extricate herself
without experiencing loss and guilt, and perhaps fear for the future of
her career. 21
And so, despite his advice that she leave him, he persisted in his
pursuit of her. So all-consuming was his need for her that the mere
thought of her absence became inordinately painful to him. On Saturday,
December 16, the day after sharing these thoughts with her, he told
her how much he feared that her return to Vermont for the Christmas
holiday might be the end of their relationship. Would she ever come to
New York again? Would her mother, more cautious than she, destroy
the feelings she held for him? He had been “up the greater part of
the night. . . with a thundering headache and a killing heart-ache”; he
planned to leave a friend’s Sunday-evening dinner party early, he told
her, and find a taxi so that he might see her one last time before she
departed, perhaps forever. 22
The approach of Christmas itself had made her intended absence
even more unbearable for Ludwig. Despite his renewed sense of Jewish
identity, the day had retained its uniquely personal meaning for him.
Throughout his early years in Germany and America, Christmas had
been a happy, secularized family occasion. As he grew older and ex
perienced the shadows of a clouded cultural imagery, paid homage to
by those who had made him feel unwelcome, he had transfigured the
day into something that was clearly unacceptable both to Christians
and to Jews, something of an Easter and Christmas reworked with
Jewish undertones. For Ludwig it had become a day symbolic of his
own emergence out of the darkness of a societally imposed spiritual
death. As paradigm for his own rebirth, he had come to use the imagery
of a Jewish Jesus, born on this day, as a symbol of his martyrdom at the
hands of those same Gentiles who centuries before had put his spiritual
brother to death. Thelma’s planned absence on this day heightened
his awareness of the continuing role played by these persecutors in
determining his present and future. With her by his side, it seemed
possible to recapture the happiness he had known as a young child,
and to achieve the spiritual renewal he knew to be essential; without
her, he feared, the future held only defeat. “Christmas is ahead of me—
difficult and dismal beyond words. For the simplest humanity demands
of me some apparent calmness, at the very least, here. And I am filled
with the sense of the futility and horror of it all and close my eyes
and dream of a Christmas with you, my dearest dear, a Christmas that
would renew all the magic of past years, all the loveliness there is in
the world."''
Page 321 - [see page image]
320
Ludwig Lewisohn
At their meeting the following day, and again two days later, she
assured him that all was not lost, that she would indeed return to him,
that nothing said by her mother would keep them apart. Filled with joy
and exhilaration, he wrote her the next morning that “I think constantly
of our last two meetings. How sweet and precious beyond words they
were.” There was hope in his world; he would be redeemed by her as
his link to that natural life he had sought to recapture since first being
wrenched from it in his youth. Using the imagery of Christmas, he told
her that she was the star by whose light he would regain the happiness
and balance he had once known in his youth among the recuperative
elements of nature. As his link to these eternal forces, she would, as his
muse, give new life to things, spiritual and worldly.
This is going to be the happiest Christmas that I have had since I was
a child—since a sense of the difficulty of life stole into my mind. A star
from the sky has dropped into my heart. It burns there all day and all
night and burns through me and makes the whole world radiant. The star
is you, my darling. It is true, so profoundly true. Yet I hate to use this
literary verbiage to you. I’d like to speak to you with an utter simplicity—
with the simplicity that earth has and trees and common flowers, to com
municate to you the depth, permanence, of my love of you—its saving
element to me, its redemption of me from bitterness and desolateness and
hopelessness. 24
Barely another week passed before he again pleaded with her to meet
him for lunch when she returned to New York on January 4. “Blessed
days if you will.” 25 Impatient for her response, he wrote again on New
Year’s Day 1923, asking when they would see each other again. “I am
hungry for you as one is hungry for bread, thirsty as one is thirsty for
water—the bread and water of life.” He told her how she had inspired
him to write free verse for the first time ever; it was, he added, a clear
sign that she was, indeed, the incarnation of his muse. Sending her a
sample of his new work, he bid her to “Keep all the verses.... I shall
have them all published some day—these ‘verses for Thelma’ as they
should be called."-'"
Until then, they, too, would be a part of their secretly constructed
lives. Consumed by a well-grounded fear, he had little choice but to
try even harder to prevent the disastrous consequences he knew would
result from Mary’s discovery of the true nature of their relationship.
Even phone conversations now became occasions of real concern, for
which he worked out a scheme by which Thelma could contact him
at the Nation without anyone’s suspicion being aroused. Using a script
Ludwig had provided, Thelma was to call and engage him in a formal,
businesslike conversation:
Page 322 - [see page image]
321
A Younger Woman
This is Miss Spear.
How do you do, Miss Spear?
Thank you so much. I have been awaiting it anxiously. And where shall I
be at one today?
At such and such a place.
I shall be there without fail.
Very well. Goodbye.
Goodbye, so glad to have heard from you. 27
But no matter how clever he may have felt, the need for such devices
was terribly upsetting. By his own sense of morality, the truly immoral
parties in this charade were Mary and the society that had forced him to
commit such acts of deceit. In time, he would dispense with all generally
accepted notions of marital fidelity and claim that Thelma was, in a
moral sense, the only real wife he had ever had. “What a mean and
ridiculous and utterly perverse world it is to be sure,” he wrote Thelma
of their dilemma. “When I think of what you are to me and what, I trust
and believe, I am to you, these subterfuges seem not only absurd but, in
the deepest sense, morally repulsive.”
Months later, he spoke more openly in Don Juan of how this need
for deception had robbed him of the opportunity to perform the truly
virtuous acts of thinking and feeling and committing himself to what
was actually in his own heart and mind:
He had to stay and yet there was no virtue in his staying. Virtue! People
were always using that word. What was it that they meant? Here he was
where he did not want to be. In doing this thing that he did not want to do
he found no beauty, no inner grace. He found rather that the result of it was
a great bitterness and a hardening of his heart.. . . He knew people who
would have said that this fact was to be attributed to some moral perversity
in himself. A word again. Did it change the habitual moral climate of his
soul to call him perverse? 29
Being constrained by “invisible forces” to stay with Mary was surely
more perverse, more morally debilitating. How much less bitterness he
would have felt had he been allowed to leave her for Thelma. More than
ever, he realized “how the martyrs felt and conscientious objectors and
men imprisoned for the sake of their opinions.” Like them, “he knew
better and the world knew nothing.” And like them, he would be made
to pay a price for his beliefs and for his fidelity to the one who had
restored his life by giving worldly substance to them. But there was, “at
last,” no choice but “to break the unnatural fetters and save myself." "
When they met again on January 5, he felt his spirit soar above the
“grimy occupations and preoccupations” that otherwise filled his life,
showing him a glimpse of what one day might be his. As he worked away
Page 323 - [see page image]
322
Ludwig Lewisohn
at his various assignments throughout the next day, “the blessed image”
of the previous night appeared before him as salve and sustenance for
the present and beyond. “To see you opposite me in the restaurant—it
wasn’t much of one, was it, darling? All glorified by you, though; I see
you next to me in the theatre. How healing that was to me you can’t
possible know. And I sustain myself with the knowledge that I shall see
you Tuesday.”
But thoughts of a lengthy schedule of lectures scattered throughout
the Northeast and Midwest in the coming weeks renewed feelings of
anxiety that always lurked below this healing surface. Yet there was
little he could do if he was to meet the mounting expenses of evenings
with Thelma and for the diversionary expenditures he allowed Mary. “I
curse myself for this abominable lecture tour,” he told Thelma, for “it
separates us again.” He promised that once he had earned his fourteen
hundred dollars, he “wouldn’t budge from town as long as you are
here.” There he would remain, awaiting a second miracle, the permanent
removal of Mary from his life. “There must be another miracle by that
time. There must. Since one did happen, I rise to inquire of fate why
another shouldn’t. Don’t you?” he added, reflecting the doubts that still
plagued him concerning the permanency of Thelma’s commitment. 31 It
was for this same reason that he would chide her for closing her first
letter to him while on tour that January with “faithfully,” adding that “I
am—please do take notice—not faithfully, but devotedly and adoringly
and tenderly."
He had to contend with these doubts all through his trip that first
month of 1923, knowing that he would face the real test when he
returned. “My mind is not on my lectures. It’s on you—on us! ” he wrote
from Philadelphia on January 14. 33 Earlier that week, following a day
with Liveright’s family after his lecture, he had written Thelma that his
thoughts of her were “without ceasing. I pray and hope for us. I know,
literally for the first time in all my life, what happiness and blessedness
are like. I love you and need you with all I am.” 34
Traveling westward the next day, he looked out at the natural set
tings that passed before him, and at the hills and mountains rising off in
the distance. Each brought another element to his curious mix of hopeful
images, a combination of the Nietzchean Zarathustra descending with
his religio-naturalistic message of redemption for a Pauline-weary world,
and of a transformed Thelma made into the mother of his own spiritual
rebirth as the Madonna of his Jewish-Jesus self in this post-Christmas
period. “Here begin the hills of central Pennsylvania; they make me think
of your mountains, which we must see together, dear little Madonna of
the Mountains—from which you came down one fine day in September
Page 324 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
to save me, to pass to me forever, world wearied and disillusioned as I
was, what life can hold of true beauty, peace, hope, benediction.”
True, they “were still in the grip of passing circumstance,” but
he could foresee a time beyond this deluge, as he painted it for her
with infectious enthusiasm, a time when their world, cleansed by the
oncoming flood of oppression, would awaken to a brightening dawn
filled with “nothing but rainbows.” At the end of each would be “little
pots of gold,” and Thelma, “her gold hair streaming” as she ran, would
place “her blessed little hands” under them as they fell from the heavens.
In such imaginings more romantic than he dared incorporate into his
fiction, he spoke of a time, “some day,” when he and Thelma would
be together without fear of separation. Then would he bend to kiss the
“lips and eyes and throat, with [the] adoration and tenderness and love”
which one reserved only for that woman who was at once Madonna and
muse and lover. 35
From Chicago, where he had arrived and begun to lecture three
days later, on the seventeenth, he wrote Thelma thanking her for the
“infinitely precious letters” that had awaited him there, letters that had
left him with renewed hope that his pursuit had not been in vain. “One
engagement treads on the heels of another! ” he noted, before going off
to another luncheon and then to one of the weeklong series of talks he
was giving in that city. Despite the “extraordinarily gay and wet time,”
and the parties with their “endless flow of champagne which seems to
characterize Chicago” (“Chicago is evidently far more open than New
York”), 36 he assured her of the constancy of his devotion and of his need
for her as the one who saves and redeems him, “a light to my eyes, a
guide to my soul, a springtime in my heart.” There could be no rest for
him until “I put my arms around you and hold you . . . close until we
blend and are utterly one and utterly happy and at peace." 17
But this hope of a peaceful union with Thelma was already be
ing compromised. Mary, through means equally surreptitious, had first
uncovered their relationship in early November. After she exacted a
promise that it was merely friendship that had brought them together, her
fury and threats of suicide had abated. 38 But not her suspicions. Now
she awaited his return with new evidence of perfidy. Unaware of this
development, he completed the remaining eleven days of his furiously
paced schedule, going from Chicago to Detroit and Milwaukee, back
to Chicago, on to Cleveland and Youngstown, and then to Cincinnati
by January 27, carrying with him the vision of a happy reunion with
Thelma. In a letter written shortly after his arrival in Cincinnati, he
repeated how she was “the very center around which my life revolves . . .
[giving] meaning to everything that was meaningless and fill[ing] with
323
Page 325 - [see page image]
324
Ludwig Lewisohn
kindness and beauty all that was so desolate so long.. . . You are light,
love, music, youth! " w
He promised to relate his many adventures to her when they met
at eleven on the morning of Tuesday, January 30. For the moment, he
would only hint at the excitement he had felt throughout most of his
journey, despite his fatigue and the need to repeat himself again and
again. But there was one extraordinary discovery he would reveal at
once. For the first time, Ludwig had witnessed himself as a powerful
and persuasive speaker, able to move his mostly Jewish audiences with
his ideas and emotions—and, in turn, to be moved by their response and
the warmth they extended to him as one of their own. “This tour has,
upon the whole, been successful beyond expectation. I have felt very
glad and very humble. I have spoken in all to about twelve-thousand
people and their enthusiasm has touched me very much. Hundreds and
hundreds have come with copies of my books begging for an autograph;
hundreds have come to touch my hand, to tell how I had, by some
passage, chapter, sentence, helped to clarify and liberate their minds.”
In touching so many, he himself had been transformed. He felt grateful
to his listeners, as he did to Thelma, whom he believed had enabled him
to experience this phenomenon by opening his spirit to what awaited
him in his travels. But if she had created the possibility of this spiritual
renewal, it was his own fellow Jews who had given breath to its spirit. 40
Ludwig was, however, influenced not only by the Jewish reaction to
his lectures, but by the non-Jewish as well. Among his papers is the re
sponse of Henry Ford’s scurrilously anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent,
dated January 27, 1923, to Ludwig’s talk before the Jewish Women’s
Club of Detroit earlier that week. “The ‘Persecuted’ Mr. Lewisohn” ac
cused Ludwig of having failed to admit, in that “overwrought book,” Up
Stream, that whatever hardships he had faced had been “self-caused . . .
a perfect example of the ‘persecution complex’ in an educated mind.” It
was his own failure that had created the “conspiracy of enmity” cited
as the reason for his “sacred sufferings,” a phenomenon identified by
the editorialist as a further manifestation of the “Jewish Question.” (“I
hate his damned suffering,” Hemingway has Robert Cohn’s attacker
announce, i ■"
In 1920, a collection of articles reprinted from Ford’s paper had
appeared under the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost
Problem, in which it was written that “not only does the Jewish Question
touch those matters that are of common knowledge, such as financial
and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of
necessities, and autocratic direction of the very news that the American
people read; but it reaches into cultural regions and so touches the very
Page 326 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
heart of American life,” threatened, in Ford’s conception of the world, by
“the International Jew and his satellites, as the conscious enemies of all
that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.” Using the forged Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion as evidence, the writer then accused the Jews
of everything from controlling international finance to being the impetus
behind Germany’s declaration of war and the Bolshevik Revolution—at
once both supreme capitalists and ultimate Marxists/-'
Ludwig, with his “rather profitable book” Up Stream, was accused
by Ford’s editor of being one of those Jews whose actions had “much
affected . . . ‘radical’ circles.” Quoted as saying “that the heresy of today
is the religion of tomorrow, and the blasphemy of today is the truth of
tomorrow,” and thus, “we must teach our children heresy and blas
phemy,” Ludwig was pictured as upholding the nihilistic view that all
that is must be destroyed. Not unlike the medieval accusations of the Jew
as helpmate of the devil, Ludwig was portrayed as being “headed in that
direction. In other words, it is not the doctrine of the progress of the next
generation; it is the doctrine of the destruction of the sanctities of this
generation. It is not the doctrine of present good becoming future evil by
comparison and because the good has grown to be a greater goodness; it
is the doctrine of present evil becoming future good—which is a doctrine
of devils.” 4 '
Nor was Ludwig free from similar, though more “educated,” crit
icism originating from academic circles. Even before his tour began,
his reputation had made it impossible to secure a forum at some of
America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, among them
the University of Wisconsin. In December 1922, Hohlfeld had attempted
to schedule a lecture for his old colleague during his upcoming tour,
but had failed because “a great majority” of the English Department
were “too hard down upon you” to support such a visit. Furthermore,
Hohlfeld added, there was “much in doubt about what the attitude of
even the rest of our own [German] department would be.” Even Hohlfeld
himself, while hoping to see Ludwig, and believing him to be deserving
of a platform from which to voice his opinions and accept the challenge
of his critics face-to-face, was less than totally supportive of Ludwig’s
efforts in Up Stream, and therefore not altogether without sympathy
for those of his colleagues who, in extremes to which Hohlfeld himself
would not go, sought to silence him.
You no doubt know only too well with what reception Up-Stream has met in
academic circles here as elsewhere. Some of the expressions of denunciation
of the book that have come to me at least indirectly would not be fit to be
put on paper without seriously hurting the delicate sensibilities of the post
master general.. . . My feeling is not so free from some disturbing elements.
325
Page 327 - [see page image]
326
Ludwig Lewisohn
Of course I admire the frankness, and fearlessness, and forcefulness with
which you reveal what is in you, and know only too well how much all of
us could and should learn from such an example. Nevertheless, I cannot get
away from the feeling that here you are still too close to a terribly galling and
spiritually humiliating experience.... If I could, I should wish for you that
without losing one iota of your independence, and veracity, and strength,
life might grant you to grow somewhat in what for lack of a better term let
me call Goethean calm and control. 44
Ludwig’s growth, however, was in directions other than those Hohl
feld and the others had hoped for him. The overwhelmingly positive
reception he received at countless Jewish meetings served to strengthen
his personal identification with his Jewish heritage and to encourage him
to rebuild his life around it, much as the negative response of non-Jews
to his lectures on “The Jew and the World” that January 45 had made
him painfully aware of just how marginal he was to the larger American
society/' As one lecture followed another, he found himself drawing ever
closer to that final step toward private and public self-affirmation as a
Jew, not simply as a weapon against society, as he had used it in the past,
but as a positive statement of what he had become and of how much
further he had yet to travel. As he would later write in Mid-Channel,
I cannot think of Detroit towering with her face toward the North, nor
of Chicago, turbulent and menacing but capable of radiance too, nor of
Cincinnati with her hills and touch of earlier grace, without the feeling that
these cities hold a strong hope for the future of mankind. But the important
experience that awaited me in these cities was the Jews who live in them
and whom I met on terms of singular freedom and intimacy. Here were
groups of people—many of them of very high and aware intelligence—
who were not sustaining their lives wholly by acts of opposition. They
did not like the neo-Puritan regime either. But it was not theirs; they felt
no responsibility for it. . . . They had their own perplexities, their own
problems, a problem so intricate and profound that many of them were
still groping for a more or less adequate statement of it.. . . The conclusion
then which my contact with Jews justified and confirmed was this: to rise
from my lack and confusion into a truly human life ... it was necessary for
me to affirm in quite another fashion than I had yet done the reintegration
of my entire consciousness with the historic and ethnic tradition of which I
was a part. 47
Yet, as buoyed in spirit as he was by these revelations, he knew
full well that, at the end of his tour, he would have to deal with the
world from which he was emerging. Still, in spite of this realization,
and the long months that had been filled with the fear of discovery, he
could not have anticipated what awaited him. Without forewarning,
Mary “suddenly, ferociously” attacked him moments after he entered
Page 328 - [see page image]
327
A Younger Woman
the doorway of his home on the evening of Monday, January 29. “Why
do you come to me after you’ve been with your mistress?” he recalled
her first words of confrontation before she laid out the evidence she
had gathered. He had thought to wait until he was certain of Thelma’s
feelings toward him before engaging Mary in this struggle. But “life was
always leaping from some ambush and smashing the pattern of one’s
wiser will,” he lamented in his recollection of the event. “He had meant
in a calm hour to reason and plead,” but caught off guard, he found
himself shouting back that “She’s not my mistress! I love her. I want you
to divorce me.” 48
“His horror deepened,” he recalled in Crump, as she alternated be
tween attacking him—“You’re caught this time. Does that fact penetrate
your mind? I have proof”—and pleading with him not to desert her—
“Can I help it if I love you so? The thought that you’d touch any other
woman is enough to kill me.” She begged him not to abandon her, and
agreed to let him do as he liked, as long as he stayed with her. But when
he said he wasn’t sure what he would do, certain only that he would no
longer be her slave, she retorted with the threat of using whatever means
she could to protect herself. “You happen to be my husband and both
the law and society have something to say about it all.” 4- '
“The world—our world—is seething,” Ludwig wrote Thelma on
February 5, one week after his confrontation with Mary. Since his
meeting with Thelma several days earlier, he had learned from Mary
that at the apartment house near Riverside Drive to which Thelma
had moved in late fall, a woman had been watching them, and had
related her findings to another woman at Henry Holt, who, feeling
that Thelma was “in danger and must he protected,” had sent two
special-delivery letters to Mary describing many of their outings in
some detail. Mary had convinced him that such was the manner of her
discovery. In fact, as it was later revealed, she had long suspected that
their “professional” relationship, as he had characterized it, was far
more than that, and had hired a detective agency again to uncover what
was actually going on between them. Mary cunningly told Ludwig that
she had reassured these women that he and Thelma “were pledged to
a three months’ period of absence, silence, [and] waiting.” Exacting a
similar pledge from him, she agreed that if he found it impossible to
keep such a promise, he could invite Thelma to their home, placing
her under the “social protection” her own presence would provide.
It was a clever plan of self-defense and social face-saving, offering to
monitor her husband’s activity and still appear to be the suffering but
understanding wife, patiently awaiting her husband’s recovery from a
passing infatuation. 50
Page 329 - [see page image]
328
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig was capable of acting just as stealthily, though he hadn’t
the slightest inkling as yet of the ruse being played upon him by Mary.
Experienced in establishing covert ways of making contact with Thelma,
he now set up an even more elaborate set of signals to ensure the secrecy
of their meetings. “We are ... on the edge of scandal and I must not let
my rashness or my yearning hurt you. We cannot meet uptown. That is
certain. If you think it safe, stroll into the Evening Post Building on Vesey
Street, on Thursday at 12:45. At all events, write me, posting your letter
on Wednesday, so that it reaches the office on Thursday—here! Do that!
To see you—if only for a moment! But you must be safe.” To reassure her
of his love “in this rather grave situation,” he begged her to reread the
inscription he had written in her copy of Up Stream, and to look often
at the ring he had given her before Christmas, a ring made by melting
his parents’ wedding rings into a single symbol of his devotion. “Reflect
on that, oh my most dear, remember me.” 51
Almost childlike, he hoped that somehow they could go on as before.
Thelma, too young to know how to conduct herself in such matters,
became worried over her involvement in so complicated and threatening
a relationship, while pressure from her mother grew steadily as Ludwig
applied his own, using everything he could to keep their relationship
intact. Not that Thelma had cooled to his expressions of love in any way.
On the contrary, she remained as willing a partner in their affair as he.
It was a blustery March day and the whole city seemed to be waiting for
the fresh warmth of the coming spring. Ludwig met me at my apartment.
For a while we talked. Suddenly he leaned toward me and pressed his lips
to mine. When his love-making became more ardent, I was frightened. But
softly he murmured that he worshipped me and that he wanted a woman
who was all and completely his, and I, young and innocent as I was, could
not deny him. I loved Ludwig with all my heart and soul. Loved him more
than life itself.'
But Ludwig knew life more than to expect such love to last under
these conditions, and in the three months following his return to New
York, the uncertainty began to take its toll. “My affairs are in confu
sion,” he told Leonard on April 20, having watched his personal and
professional lives steadily deteriorate. “I have no history,” he said of
this period. “I have neglected everything.”'' With “recurrent pangs of
conscience,” he had repeatedly declined Hurwitz’s request to publish
something in the Menorah Journal. u So, too, had he neglected some
of his assignments from journals other than the Nation, '- and a good
many of his appointments, including those with Dreiser. 56 Even Don
Juan, the story of his struggle for Thelma, had not progressed beyond
“where it was last summer,” though he could hardly have finished it
Page 330 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
without some final resolution to his own real-life story upon which it
was loosely based. “It’s a curious fact that crisis of the most absorbing
kind seems to be the texture of my life.” And each crisis, he assessed,
had been caused by “that Judeo-Christian, especially Pauline, system of
morals, the fruits of which are war, slavery, the very decomposition of
life,” and to whose destruction “I shall henceforth dedicate myself even
more eagerly.” 4 ’
Some work on this had already begun. Weeks earlier, his anger had
boiled over, and in an article for the Nation, he had pressed ahead with
his attack by again praising the culture of Germany as truly representa
tive of man’s “inner searching,” finding “beneath the creative impulse”
of its literature “the practical impulse to recreate a muddled and stricken
world."' 4 Two weeks later, he had broadened the base of his comparative
critique by writing in his preface to John Cowper Powys’s Suspended
Judgments that “we seek ourselves and our relation to the sum of things,
not in the shape of philosophic formulas, but in the shape of the peculiar
sense of the quality of the universe communicated through the beauty
of art.” By understanding this link between ourselves, the world of man
and nature, and “eternal rhythms,” one could live a life of true “beauty
and wisdom and freedom."
On April 4, he carried this plea to Cincinnati in a talk before the
Germanistic Society. Not unexpectedly, his continuing praise of German
culture drew sharp criticism from the city’s American Legion. “It is easy
to see that Lewisohn is following Bismarck’s idea and that German
propaganda is again rearing its head,” the chairman of the Legion’s
Americanization Committee told the New York Times in attacking Lud
wig’s address as an affront to all who had fought and died in the Great
War. If America hoped “to remain the best nation on earth, they can do
so by stopping such propaganda,” particularly the notion that German
culture, as the highest expression of human ideals, should be taught
to everyone. Referring to the enthusiastically applauding audience that
had greeted Ludwig’s talk, the leader of the Disabled Americans asked,
“Are their hearts with Germany or America? Have they forgotten what
German ideals and German Kultur meant a few short years ago?” 60
Ludwig was incensed, and told the Times that he had been grossly
misquoted and misrepresented by his detractors. Their reprehensible
distortion of his talk, in substance and in spirit, was, of course, not
unexpected. The exclusivity of the Legion’s Americanization Committee
was too clearly reminiscent of those who had repeatedly tried to penalize
him for exercising his right to live what they considered an “alien” life.
So, too, were they now attempting to silence those German Americans
whose greatest contribution would be the transference of the best ideals
329
Page 331 - [see page image]
330
Ludwig Lewisohn
of German culture into an American society sorely in need of a strong
corrective for its mass, corporate mentality. Repeating ideas he had spo
ken of and written about for many years, he appealed to his audience to
retain not Germany’s militarism, but its emphasis upon the self-creation
of the unique “personality” as the key element in the generative process
of each society and in the development of the whole of civilization:
What I resent is that the American Legion is trying, by innuendo, to identify
me with the German militarists. That is perfectly ridiculous, because first of
all, I am a pacifist and no more in sympathy with German militarism than I
am with Russian or French militarism. The German influence that I plead for
as contributions to American life are all liberal, all poetic and philosophical
and liberating. I have nothing to do with Generals, Kings or politicians.
What I want to see the German-Americans contribute to American life is
the spirit of Luther, Kant, Goethe and Nietzsche.' 1
But none of these articles or lectures, nor any he might have brought
before the public, could have mitigated the private tensions that fos
tered them, nor lessened the crises that were nearing their moment of
resolution. “I told you about the dear girl who loves me and whom I
love and whom everybody and everything hastened, in that moral fury
which is the negation of life, to separate from me,” he wrote Leonard
in search of understanding and empathy that April. For months now,
he and Thelma had “defied the forces that were, circumvented them”
until they had finally reached the point in their relationship where they
had given themselves “to each other, man and woman, utterly.” Thelma
knew that there was no foreseeable hope of marriage, yet had stayed by
him, “knowing that I would give all that I have and am—career, position,
the little money I earn—for the blessed privilege of being her husband.”
She was “too noble to chaffer with me over the question of legality.”
Such nobility, however, was not shared either by Mary or by
Thelma’s mother. Despite past moments of steadfastness shared by Lud
wig and Thelma in their “double life,” they now found themselves poised
warily upon an “isle of bliss midmost the beating of the steely—God
damned steely—sea,” awaiting some imminent defeat. In his analysis of
the situation, a joyful resolution was impossible. Mary knew all about
their days and evenings together, down to the very last detail; yet she still
refused to divorce him, in spite of his offering her all that he owned. “She
is not to be moved,” he declared to Leonard in frustration. On the other
side, Thelma’s mother, “a granity Vermonter” upon whom her daughter
remained dependent for financial and emotional support, had issued an
ultimatum with which Ludwig himself could not argue. He was to prove
his intentions honorable through a pledge of marriage, or Thelma was
to break with him. Otherwise, she promised to “disown and disinherit
Page 332 - [see page image]
331
A Younger Woman
the child if this keeps on.” Since Mary refused to end their marriage, his
future with Thelma seemed all but doomed.
And then, while Ludwig was still in the midst of desperately trying
to find some workable solution, Thelma’s mother suddenly insisted that
she return to Vermont. From there, she was to go on to Milan for a year
of vocal training. It was too shattering a prospect for Ludwig. “Here
I am, about to be forty-one, desolate,” he wrote Leonard on April 20.
“I feel like raving, raving, old friend, like a love-sick youth.” Though
a bit embarrassed by this uncontrolled emotional display, he could not
dismiss his feelings of desolation, not only at the certain loss of his lover,
but at the thought of once again being separated from his muse now
that he had felt the warmth of her spiritual presence after so many
years of chilling absence. To lose this “Eternal Woman” would mean
the catastrophic defeat of all that he had held sacred—the emotional, the
physical, the spiritual aspects of individual and communal life—and the
victory of those corrupt, unnatural forces against which he had fought
unceasingly for a quarter of a century. “I know at last what I have never
known before: das Ewigweibliche, the devotion, the passion, loveliness,
spiritual sweetness that is at the bottom of the Madonna legend. We
ache for each other; we ache for the child we dared not have. Age, death
and morality have won out.” 62
Ludwig’s anxiety, particularly over the spiritual aspects of this seem
ingly imminent defeat, became heightened a week later after his return
from a trip to Harvard University, where he had addressed the Menorah
Society. Villard was also to address the society at its anniversary banquet
on April 27, and during their ride to Boston and their stay in the ho
tel, they vigorously discussed Ludwig’s personal entanglements. Villard,
though understanding, was uncomfortable with Ludwig’s repudiation
of accepted social mores, no matter how much he himself was troubled
by them. Ludwig was certain of Villard’s continuing support, but sensed
that his would-be mentor would “prefer sin to a new righteousness,
compromise with wanton evil even to the new good” of which he secretly
approved but would not promote out of personal inertia and the fear of
too great a social upheaval. Ludwig knew that Villard, like so many
other liberals, would rather “grasp after the snug brief comforts of
some compromise” than take to the moral barricades of real change.
“A man of your artistic temperament will always be in hot water,” he
advised Ludwig, hoping to lessen the pain. But Ludwig was piqued by
this comment, never happy to be categorized and so easily dismissed.
His life had not followed the artistic, temperamental pattern of popular
myth, but rather had been uniquely his own in his search for self and a
meaningful life.
Page 333 - [see page image]
332
Ludwig Lewisohn
When Ludwig rose to address the young audience of Menorah
members, he pleaded with them “to be themselves, to follow their inner
law as human beings and as Jews, to consider profoundly what each
was meant to be and to be that—that and nothing else.” To do so, they
would have “to kill the fear-born ape that lives in almost every human
breast and to follow the absolute command of inner oneness.” Moved
by the speech, Villard congratulated his friend, fully expecting that
Ludwig would not follow through on his own pleas for freedom and self-
directedness. 63 Ludwig was pleased with the audience’s response, as he
was with the speech itself. Aroused emotionally and intellectually by the
circumstances of the moment, he had made declarations about the course
of a Jew’s life that he had never before made in public. The inner self
had finally been heard, without reticence, without reserve. “It was a real
pleasure to be with the Menorah Society, ” Ludwig wrote to the society on
May 5, “quite as stimulating to me, I am sure, as it was to its members. ”''
Of all the consequences that would arise from his appearance on
the Menorah program that April, his meeting with Kurt Blumenfeld,
the German Zionist leader who had come to Boston to hear him speak,
would prove most fateful. Impressed with Ludwig’s oratorical ability and
his message, Blumenfeld invited him to dine when they returned to New
York. Ludwig thanked Blumenfeld for his kind words and his invitation,
but hurriedly left to return to Thelma. Nine days would pass before
meeting with Blumenfeld and, through him, with Chaim Weizmann, the
head of the World Zionist Organization. 65 Other personal affairs would
intervene to distract him in the days immediately following his return;
but throughout this disconcerting period, thoughts that had come to him
that night in Boston would persist—that Jews had organized themselves
into an international body to engage in acts of self-help and communal
rebirth; that survival as Jews was a decision voluntarily being entered
into by Jews of various stripes, with room enough for diversity, including
his own personal stance; that he had ideas worthy of attention and
dissemination among those Jews who wished to be Jews without hy
phenating their identities, without excusing themselves, without feeling
embarrassment or a sense of debilitation, without experiencing reticence
of any kind, and without apologies to the world or to themselves. In the
months that would follow, as his domestic situation worsened, he would
fall back upon these thoughts for support, and ultimately embrace the
Zionist movement as his own.
Ludwig’s return to New York found his affairs in an even more pre
carious state than when he had left two days earlier. His absence, brief as
it was, had compounded Thelma’s anxiety over her mother’s ultimatum
and made her more distanced than she had been since those trying days
Page 334 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
in December. When she failed to meet him at their prearranged spot
that Sunday, April 29, and then refused to answer his phone calls, he
grew desperate. On the evening of the second day he sent her a note
explaining how, having spent the day writing Don Juan (“our novel”),
he could no longer endure the wall of silence she had built between them.
Knowing that something beyond her control was at work, he forgave
the chill she had imposed upon their relationship. But he had to see her
(“sweetest girl in the world”), or he could not go on much longer. “This
is the first time that you have failed to keep any kind of appointment
with me. I have no doubt that you had an excellent reason. But I’m so
heart-sick promising myself that for two endlessly dreary days—well, it
nearly made me faint."'"
When they met the next day, he put on a mask of gaiety for her,
“behind which were tears” that welled up as he felt her “dear and gentle
and blessed clinging.” He wrote after they parted, wanting her to know
how much he clung to her (“O my most dear and precious, with all of
me”), despite “shadows of some sort. . . [that] seemed to flit between
us.... I want, at least, this note to tell you this, to tell you once more that
you are first, alone, all—all.’" But Thelma informed him the following
day that she was to leave for Burlington on Friday. They saw each other
again that evening, and he implored her, “if ever your dear thoughts of
me are clouded, [to] think of my devotion, my tenderness for you . . .
both without end.” 68 Thursday was spent together, preparing emotion
ally for her departure the next day. And as her train left the station,
Ludwig broke into tears, realizing that she was “indeed gone. It was like
a nocturnal plunge into cold, black, desolate waters.” He walked away
with a mutual friend who had come to the station, and, after an hour
of talk about Thelma, went home to “a kind of drugged sleep.""’
The following morning Ludwig wrote Mrs. Spear, asking that she
“exercise at least a friendly tolerance” toward him and his relationship
with her daughter. Perhaps she hadn’t realized “the utmost definiteness
[of] my hopes and intentions,” nor the depth of “our feelings for each
other. In his letter to Thelma the next day, Sunday, May 6, he asked if
she had had “a new vision” of their future together, now that the “strain
is related.” Often, he told her, perceptions “of our own inwardness”
come at such moments. If so, he prayed that he was a part of them,
“missing so sorely the little hands, the dear golden head, the voice and
love and soul of you which have given me the only true, deep, unclouded
happiness and blessedness I have known in all my life.”
Not that he was totally immobilized by despair. “Plungfing] in
to work. . . [during] my hours of gloom,” he had “gratefully]” ac
cepted Kurt Blumenfeld’s invitation to lunch that Saturday at the Hotel
333
Page 335 - [see page image]
334
Ludwig Lewisohn
Commodore with Chaim Weizmann (“the great Zionist leader, really a
commanding mind and personality whether you agree with him or not”)
and others, among them Louis Untermeyer and Waldo Frank. They had
gathered for a discussion of issues of broad Jewish implication, some
of which were not unrelated to what he had been made to endure by
a society whose power over him he no longer considered legitimate or
binding, issues that he himself had raised at Harvard ten days earlier.
But he was too distracted by present trauma to allow discussion to salve
his wounds. “I sat through it, talked, discussed, acted quite natural, no
doubt. Deep at the core of me my heart was crying, whimpering—for
you.” 71 Only months later, as the future began to clear, would he fully
appreciate the importance of this meeting.
The weeks passed slowly from late spring into summer, and on a
“dark and rainy” Sunday in June he wrote Thelma of his progress on
Don Juan, and of how “it will have a certain power, truth, eloquence.”
Enough of the manuscript had been completed to allow Liveright to
prepare for its printing and marketing. It was Liveright’s belief that,
following the success of Up Stream, the novel would sell extremely well.
Ludwig asked Thelma to pray that it might provide the wherewithal to
be victorious in his present struggle for freedom and a new life. “Money
is your great liberator,” he told her, now that he saw no other means of
triumph. “When you cannot persuade the world by reason,” he added
with a deepened measure of cynicism, “you can often buy it off.” He
again counseled patience and perseverance, as if trying to raise his own
martyred spirits. “We must be wise and patient on the road toward our
goal.” If he could not adhere to his own advice, he hoped that she would
see his “pathos . . . with the eyes of your blessed love for me” and remain
constant in her heart and mind.
What a spring. But I’m not sorry. It answers my mood. Here I am uncom
forted, depressed. All I love in the world, all that has anything to give me
is ... in Burlington. Why? It’s the loathsome injustice that eats into my
soul. Irrational powers deaden life. I can’t beat anyone into divorcing me
tomorrow. You are a respectable young lady, the daughter of a respectable
older lady. Therefore, I can’t even come to you and look into your eyes. The
thongs eat into flesh and soul. People want the letter not the spirit; if anyone
lives by the spirit—he is likely to be dragged to the stake. Never forget that,
my darling! See, at least, how things really are. See the vile indecencies that
prevail in the name of morality. You give me health, light, hope, beauty.
You are far away. Here is bitterness, moroseness, emptiness, futility. Bless
you, dear heart, for saying that you need me and love me. I love you so I
love you so; I need you with heart and mind and nerves.
As Ludwig’s depression darkened, so, too, did the imagery through
which he saw his world, likening it now to a ship dashed upon the rocks,
Page 336 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
“her bottom’s fouled, her sails rags and her masts in splinters. Most of
the passengers are dead,” he wrote in the Nation, “the rest and the crew
are rotten with scurvy.” Yet they chose to continue to follow these same
charts, claiming in the face of reality and experience that “their charts
are as near an approach to absolute truth as man can reach. Let no
one rock the boat,” they inveighed, “pouring over the old charts while
the ship goes utterly to pieces and the rest of the passengers and the
crew die in agony.” Clearly it was time for a newly charted “voyage
of discovery.. . . We have followed the old charts. We have built up
institutions and enacted codes and compelled obedience. And we are on
the rocks. Two-thirds of mankind is sick in body. All of mankind is sick
in soul.” Only “a study of human nature as human nature really is”
could draw charts “fit and beautiful for such a being as man in such a
world as the present. But myth and superstition and the cold touch of the
dead who knew less than we” were hampering all efforts “being made
today . . . everywhere.” He would add his to these few others, but the
storm winds and the darkening clouds, and the sea voyage out, images
of uncertainty and fear from his childhood, were dashing his resolve. 73
Ludwig’s deteriorating emotional state had not gone unnoticed by
friends and colleagues that spring. In a note written several days later,
in which he asked Thelma to forgive his latest “impatient letter” (the
thought of which “still sticks in me”), he spoke of how “some friends
realizing that I was looking blue under the eyes and white around the
gills—overwork, darling, and worry—have come with their car ... to
take me out for the day.” That she might better judge his state, he added
that he had had “almost no natural sleep,” filled as he was with the
“love and fear and nervous wear and tear” that had left him “tortured
by daily headaches” since early May. 74
Shortly afterward, near “nervous collapse,” he wrote again to
Thelma of his need to see her. “I have centered my heart on you.. . .
If you have centered yours on mine—then everything will be added unto
us.. . . My eyes are weary for the sight of you, my hands for the touch
of you.” Their love, he asserted, was “as near being a real good as life
offers,” but not near enough for Thelma to extend an invitation against
her mother’s wishes, and, perhaps, counter to her own best judgment. 75
Still, he persisted. Hoping to secure her love, he worked harder than
ever to enhance her singing career, busily arranging for new promotional
material, and for auditions and possible concert dates to lure her back to
New York. On May 9 he again promised to help her achieve the artistic
success she wanted. “Going into the Blue Ribbon late last night for a glass
of beer I ran into an old, old friend of mine who turns out to be the bosom
crony of ever so many years of Ziegler of the Met. Delicately I pumped
335
Page 337 - [see page image]
336
Ludwig Lewisohn
him. The result is that he and Z. and I will have a party together later
in the summer and—since I know how all such matters are invariably
managed in N.Y.—I think it will not be difficult to make sure that your
interests are at least not disregarded.” 76 When three weeks later she was
offered a contract for a concert tour of the United States, he dissuaded her
from signing, characterizing its organizer, Mr. DeFeo, as “illiterate” and
the offer “shabby” and “unprofitable” from a professional perspective.
She needed to wait for better opportunities, he advised. “I want you to
live yourself out in the deepest, richest, fullest sense," and not listen
to “slippery fish” managers. “You don’t need anything immediately;
you’re not dependent on earning anything,” he wrote her on June 1.
“You can take care of yourself; you can avoid the vulgar and shoddy
and distasteful. I couldn’t in my early years. It’s a bitter thing,” he added
mournfully, hoping to solicit her pity and steadfastness while being
of help. 79
This pressure of offering professional assistance, mixed with guilt-
producing vows of resolute self-sacrifice for her benefit, continued with
out end throughout the late spring and early summer of 1923. One day he
would write that “I’m pretty desolate for you,” 80 and shortly afterward,
that “I’m not a bit sorry that you have to stay home during at least
the month of June.” 81 Desperate for pleasant and soothing company, he
told Thelma in early July that he had fled Mary and had “staid [stc\ at
C.G.V.’s home at Dobbs Ferry until late yesterday,” only to add that her
staying home had not saddened him unduly because he had seen how
her “nerves were worn to a frazzle.” Concerned about her health, he
counseled rest, and pleaded that she find the inner quiet that had eluded
him. “It just touched and worried me to the very soul to see you who
are always so splendidly and beautifully strong and fresh and resilient in
that condition. Be quiet for a while, my darling—be quiet from within.
You gain nothing by wild striving and crying in this world.
Thelma withheld her response to many of these letters, but would
occasionally, and with some increasing frequency, send an “adorable,
heart-warming ‘diary-letter’ ” which, as Ludwig told her in mid-June,
so greatly helped him “that straightway I sat down and hammered out
at one sitting 2,000 words of the novel [Don Juan]. . . cleaving fairly
deep into the inextricable material of life.” He grasped at every favor.
The very thought of her and of her few letters, interpreted as signs of
her constancy, made it possible for him to return to the “weary and
dreary business warmed, cheered, uplifted to the soul.” 83 As he would
declare on July 8, with the book nearly completed after only four weeks,
“It’s the best thing I ever wrote. You are its inspiration—you alone . . .
Madonna.’" 4 Thoughts of the “quiet heavenly parties we have had” 85
Page 338 - [see page image]
A Younger Woman
and the continuing hope of a future together had helped him to add his
own voice to those whose works “are drenched with free and genuine
humanity."-'
As summer wore on, Thelma’s thoughts began to turn in Ludwig’s
favor. Perhaps she could not live without him, after all. Or perhaps it
was the isolation of Burlington and her desire to pursue her art. Slowly
the pressure and the promise began to overpower her mother’s influence
and threat of disinheritance, and by early July, Thelma was ready to
see Ludwig again. But Mrs. Spear had other ideas, and moved quickly
to finalize plans for her daughter’s year of operatic study in Milan.
Receiving word from Thelma that she was to leave for Italy on July
28, Ludwig pleaded with her to appeal to her mother on their behalf.
He himself had carefully avoided Mary’s goadings to argument
and misdeed during these past months, hoping to dampen her ardor
for battle. He had even written an approving “Introduction” to her
collection of one-act plays, Humble Folk, that June, praising them for
dealing with the “tang and edge of life, the power and pathos of reality.”
Here was “a small body of dramatic work that expresses life directly,
that has the priceless quality of bleeding where it is cut, that is full of
human voices and human woes.” 87 If only Mary had seen her marriage
and the imprisonment of her husband in this same way, Ludwig must
have thought as he wrote these words.
He had done all that he could by way of compromise. In time he
would be free of her, even from her legal entanglements. “Fight for us,”
he implored Thelma, hoping that she could dissuade her mother from
going forward with her plan. If not, then he would follow her to Europe.
There was nothing to keep him from seeing her now.
Understand this, sweet, sweet lamb—there are no strings left to me. I shall
be able to be with you during any and all time, every day, every hour of
every day, that you can spare me or manoeuvre.. . . Tell your mother that
I leave for Europe on February 1 [1924] to be gone till October, never to
return to this house or any of its ties, but using every effort from that time
on to break the last or legal tie, that I am, even now, without deceit but
openly end frankly emancipated from all but the last legal bond. 88
Not at all certain that he could unsteady the more formidable resolve
presented by Mrs. Spear, he had, in fact, begun to make plans of his
own for Europe. He would accept Weizmann’s proposal, made after
their New York meeting, to undertake a mission for the Zionists to
write about Palestine for the Nation, a mission that would bring him to
Berlin, from where, once he was able “to smash my official schedules
and steal time,” he would visit her in Milan. He urged Thelma not to tell
her mother of his intentions, nor to disclose his designs to the Madame
337
Page 339 - [see page image]
338
Ludwig Lewisohn
under whom she was to study. He would merely visit and take her out
to dinner and the opera, posing as an old family friend. “What, after
all, could Madame do if I suddenly drop in?” But in the interim, what
was he to do when she was so far away, without a chance to see her
for months, and without an outlet for his intense feelings? Would he be
able to suffer another six months of her absence? “What will I do Aug,
Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan? Wait for my weekly letter! And between the
waits ... I writhe at the thought. People as intense as I am ought to have
been strangled in their cradles. Fast. All joking aside.
In mid-July, Thelma returned to New York in preparation for her
passage to Europe. Ludwig, hoping to solidify their relationship against
the threat of an ocean’s separation, was anything but encouraged by
their first meetings. The intensified anxiety that followed each of these
ended finally in another bitter fight between himself and Mary, further
adding to his distress. “I haven’t slept at all,” he told Thelma in search
of understanding and compassion. “I’m a nervous wreck this morning. I
provoked a gruelling scene last night which lasted for hours. What that
is like you simply don’t know. I hope you never will.”
But Thelma, seeing the reality of what truly lay ahead, began to pull
back, as Ludwig had always feared she might. “Can’t we at least have
luncheon together?” he pleaded after several days without her, asking
that she drop him a note so that he wouldn’t feel so deserted. “Don’t
threaten to throw me over every time something ‘disagreeable’ happens
that is inherent in the situation. I thought we had agreed thoroughly . . .
what our plans and hopes and possibilities were.... I merely plead with
you not to make me suffer unnecessarily.” All would soon be resolved in
their favor, he tried to convince her. “I need you so,” he wrote in closing
his letter. “And you, don’t you need me a little, too—enough, surely, to
transcend temporary annoyances?"’
And then, when all seemed lost, July 28 passed and Thelma remained
in New York. Years later, she would relate how he had come to her to
plead their case, and she, “madly” in love with him, had agreed to live
outside of society’s sanctioned boundaries, “knowing how he felt and
what it was doing to him.”
Then one night he said to me, “Thelma, you know I love you. You know
that I cannot get a divorce because my wife won’t divorce me. Do you love
me enough to marry me in your heart and soul, if not in the eyes of stupid
laws?” I knew there was but one answer to that. I loved him madly and
I knew that any marriage we might make would be one of heart and soul
and I thought it would be right. “Yes, Ludwig,” I answered him. “I love
you and I will marry you any way you wish.”
Page 340 - [see page image]
339
A Younger Woman
Mrs. Spear, hearing of her daughter’s surrender, had capitulated as
well. Ludwig and Thelma found an apartment where they could be alone,
away from the spying eyes of knowing neighbors, and, with luck, from
those of private detectives. “With loving care and joy we furnished it
together,” Thelma recalled. Ludwig became “like a happy boy, his whole
expression changed like any lover and new husband,” while she glowed
from the warmth of his embrace—“in his arms, then, my perfect haven,
the place where I felt I belonged,” the place to which Ludwig could steal
whenever he could free himself from Mary’s knowing eyes. 91
Ludwig’s remembrance of that time was very much like Thelma’s.
“Thelma and I islanded ourselves in our happiness amid the turmoil of
New York,” he wrote in Mid-Channel, recalling how they hid from the
“hostile forces [that] were lying relentlessly in ambush.” “I have a happy
feeling of wanting to be alone, a little isolated with you and so I had a
kind of vision of some place, a little remote, far uptown,” as he would
record years later in Altar. For a time they seemed protected, immune,
as if somehow, by hiding, they had willed these forces out of their lives.
After so long a fight to win her, Ludwig “felt quite simply as though
I were healed and free and young again.” Thelma, perhaps similarly
relieved, seemed to understand his feeling of rebirth as he “brought her
a heart as unwearied as though we had been of the same age.” Mrs.
Spear apparently saw all this as well, or merely realized there was little
she could do. She was, at least, thankful for their discretion, and gave
“her countenance and support,” which Ludwig credited with saving
their relationship “from a painful discord. "
But Ludwig’s promise and will toward discretion could not over
come the internal forces that were pushing him toward openly affirming
his relationship with Thelma and all that she represented to him. “Half-
Jewish by blood,” she, too, it seemed to him, “was instinctively seeking
that part of her spiritual heritage.” Their sharing of this search, he
recalled in Mid-Channel, “covered us with wings . . . [and] welded us
together as in an unseen fire. w 71 The very struggle for Thelma, and against
Mary, was nothing less than the struggle for his essential self. Mary, a
symbol of all that he abhorred in Puritan America, had to be replaced
by Thelma—one way or another, even if it meant violating the privacy
of their life together and the implied promise he had made to preserve
it. Such was the extent of his deeper need for vindication.
Page 341 - [see page image]
340
13
Guiltless and Free
The next ten months were filled with one attempt after another to be
free of Mary so that he might live openly with Thelma. Ludwig quickly
realized that discretion for the sake of Thelma’s personal and profes
sional well-being was truly beyond his ability to maintain indefinitely.
“All these phenomena are wholly alien to me,” he wrote of that “fairly
fixed type of moral life” that so grossly violated his “inmost self” as a Jew
and an artist. The pressure to destroy truth for the sake of some public
notion of morality had proven unendurable. 1 If discretion meant toeing
the unnatural mark of Puritan America, then he would have none of it.
Rather, he would free himself of such discretionary restraints and follow
his own “inner command ... to break completely with evil custom or
corrupt authority.” 2 He had tried that summer in Don Juan to teach
others what he had concluded for himself, that “We think too much of
what people think; too little of what we really ought to do.. . . What
do they know? And what does it matter? What can they do to you in
the end? A man must learn not to shrink from condemnation when his
own soul is guiltless and free. If you condemn yourself it doesn’t matter
whether others do or not. And if you don’t, then their opinion should
have no power to touch you at all.” 3
“I’ve known for years that I was very unhappy,” he had remarked
in Don Juan, knowing how the causes of this unhappiness had re
mained constant no matter what he had done to ameliorate them. 4 Even
Charleston, despite his years of absence, remained unforgiving. Dubose
Heyward’s letter of August 1923 to Lancelot Harris made this clear
Page 342 - [see page image]
341
Guiltless and Free
enough; had not a discussion of the “Lewisohn complex” precluded
Ludwig’s speaking before the South Carolina Poetry Society? 5 Why then,
when faced with far more menacing and intractable forces, should he
yield his inner-directed sense of propriety and commit the truly evil act
of denying his own notion of morality?
If he and Thelma were to be outcasts regardless of their actions,
then why not live as openly as they wished? Surely this would be best
for Thelma as well. They had already “drifted into a world of their
own,” as “both his house and his office [became] dim and withdrawn
from him.” With greater frequency, they attended the theater or saw
a movie, or dined out alone, afterward strolling about the city’s parks
or through its streets, window-shopping arm-in-arm, retreating to their
apartment for a few hours of intimacy before he would go back to what
he could no longer think of as his home. “At ten o’clock they returned
and went upstairs,” Ludwig recalled of one such evening:
With that same subtle smile [she] closed the old-fashioned green shutters and
lit one soft light only and then, after rummaging in a drawer, disappeared
in the bathroom. [He] felt a glow and heard his heart thump. Presently
the door opened and [she] was before him. She had draped about herself a
Spanish shawl, black with heavy golden embroidery. Except for the shawl
she was naked. She danced. She hummed a tune, a monotonous and yet
speaking strain, full of echoes of Negro folk-music and danced a dance . . .
that had in it both beauty and all the lure of the flesh and also a touch
of wildness and of savagery.. . . She swayed within a little space before
him, so that he could lean forward and stretch out a hand and lay it upon
her thigh.’
At other times, “they dropped into a speakeasy and met a crowd of
writing people and theatrical people who were amusing,” or attended
a party at the home of a friend or social acquaintance. Susan Jenkins
Brown vividly recalled one such evening in her Village apartment at 30
Jones Street when Ludwig brought “with him (after getting telephonic
approval) a young woman to whom he referred as ‘my little Thelma.’ ”
She remembered how Ludwig had so wished to impress Thelma with
his affinity for her contemporaries as a demonstration of their own
suitability. It was a “young party,” with some whose reputations were
already developing—Brown’s husband James Light (known to Ludwig
from his involvement with the Provincetown Players), Malcolm Cowley,
Kenneth Burke, their wives, and others of their group, possibly Hart
Crane, William Slater Brown, Allen Tate, and Matthew Josephson. 7
Ludwig was the only member of the “older” generation. I have never
forgotten it. He was so pleased with and proud of “my little Thelma” who
may have been as young as the rest of us.... I doubt that we asked her to
Page 343 - [see page image]
342
Ludwig Lewisohn
sing, though that is possible. Ludwig obviously wanted Thelma to observe
that he was liked by “young” people. So we played jazz records, danced
around my spacious floor-through apartment, drank a little wine. All the
men danced with Thelma, and Ludwig danced, too. Dancing with me, he
said something to the effect that he had “emerged from hell,” that he had
“regained confidence in himself,” and it was all due to “my little Thelma”—
who, he said, and kept repeating: “really likes me. It’s so wonderful to be
‘really liked’—isn’t it Sussie?” 8
This same youthfulness, this same sense of being reborn, played
upon his self-image throughout that summer of 1923. He and Thelma
would speak of the future that lay before them; consumed by visions of
fulfillment, each according to his or her needs, they would purposefully
immerse themselves in “lovely spontaneity and unworldliness.” They
were, as he had admitted in Don Juan, “like two children” who believed
that all would be as they wished once “they truly had each other.” And
when they were able to, they contrived to steal an entire day, seeking
to experience, if only for a moment, the future they were certain would
be theirs. “Now and then their days came—burnished autumnal days
now, days of strong, golden, but well-tempered light.” They would ferry
across the Hudson River, drive to the Palisades’ wooded hills, and “at
last. . . [have] their chances of being truly alone with each other” to
walk and speak of the years ahead. He would spread his overcoat and
take “her in his arms and kiss her mouth and eyes and hair” and “in
his passion for this girl” make love to her. Their day would end with
dinner at a nearby roadhouse and the return passage to New York, while
a “darkness . . . creeping mist-like into [his] soul” would overtake him
as he contemplated his return to Mary. 9
But a day finally came when he was no longer content to wait for
change, no longer willing to have but a few hours, or even a single day,
alone with Thelma. He needed to be rid of Mary. Yet Mary, increasingly
more determined to keep him for her own, had grown ever more un
willing to concede the impossibility of her efforts to thwart his. He had
tried in the past to convince her privately of her inevitable defeat, and
when she still refused to yield, he had tried again through Don Juan.
What did she hope? That he could remount the river of their lives to its
ultimate source, relive the past, re-envisage their experiences, retrospectively
change the press that a thousand perished hours had left upon his soul and
then, through a complete psychical reversal of the past, come to see her, as
she put it, as she had truly been, as she really was. Thus he might come
into a realization of her deservingness of his love.... It was, at all events,
a summons to him to be born again ... to change the whole outlook of a
man and his whole vision of his past. The hope was utterly fantastic; it had
no relation to any possible reality.
Page 344 - [see page image]
343
Guiltless and Free
Yet “nothing, he feared, could ever make that clear” 1 " to Mary; and
so he was left to contrive again, and if his contrivance was deceitful,
what choice had he? “If there is over you an authority which neither
your soul nor your mind nor your heart can possibly recognize; if that
authority has power on its side—what can you, being human, do but
seek to evade it?” 11
He half-convinced Mary that he was breaking with Thelma and
offered a letter he had addressed to Thelma as proof. Having discussed
the possibility of a Zionist mission with Mary on several previous
occasions, he now told her of his plans for their joint trip abroad,
even asking her to study Hebrew. The trip would be of many months’
duration, as he described it in an attempt to persuade her to go to
California to say farewell to her son.
Confident that legal sanctions and the continuing vigilance of the
Schmittberger Detective Agency would protect her interests, she agreed,
providing Ludwig with the precious time he needed to deepen Thelma’s
commitment. While a continent away, Ludwig sent Mary one concilia
tory letter after another, filling each with false promises of better times
ahead. 1 -’ Mary, however, continued to doubt his sincerity, and before
returning to New York, detoured to see Harris in Charleston in order,
as he told his wife, “to confide her troubles with Ludwig, which cer
tainly are very acute.” During their two-and-a-half-hour conversation,
she spoke of Ludwig’s affair with Thelma, not yet twenty-one years of
age. She blamed it on his untamed sexual needs, 13 misperceiving what
Ludwig himself in Don Juan had identified as “the very source of life and
light,” * and the root cause of his discontent. “He is terribly abnormal
(sexually)—something like brain storms,” Harris noted in repeating her
assessment. “This element I didn’t know of, and my sympathy with her
is very great,” he wrote, though he advised Mary not to publish her still
unfinished Don Juan’s Wife, fearing that together with Ludwig’s Don
Juan, a series of acts “in the bad mad vein” would be set off that “may
all become public.” 1 '
Mary had read Don Juan in manuscript, and though she had con
sented to the West Coast trip, she knew that some misdeed might be
afoot, some plan that was more in keeping with his recent conduct than
with this sudden reversal. Why else, then, would she have continued
to employ the Schmittberger Agency? Why else had she spoken of
her doubts while in conversation with the California writer Gertrude
Atherton, telling Harris during her Charleston stopover that “Gertrude
would ‘be damned’ if she would endure it”? 16
Her suspicions would soon prove well founded, for in her absence
Ludwig had moved out of their house on September 1, and into the
Page 345 - [see page image]
344
Ludwig Lewisohn
hotel apartment that he and Thelma had found months earlier. All of
this Mary discovered upon her arrival at the train station in New York
when she telephoned her youngest daughter. Always close to Ludwig,
Mary’s daughter may actually have encouraged his departure, as he later
claimed. Hours after Mary’s homecoming, she received a phone call
from Ludwig’s attorney threatening an end to all financial support if she
refused to grant him a divorce, the settlement to be twenty-four hundred
dollars and full ownership of the house. She refused and temporarily
moved into the Prince George Hotel on Fifth Avenue at 28th Street. On
September 30, she offered Harris “the sequel of my story”: “On my
arrival here I called up the house and learned that Ludwig had already
removed his belongings and had refused to leave any address. A good
friend tells me that the girl... is seen with him every night at the theatre.
Apparently there is nothing I can do except drive him out of my heart,
keep a clean conscience in the matter and look to the future."'
Ludwig never denied that it had been a trick. Years later, in the
heat of legal battle, he willingly acknowledged her charge of deception.
She had left him little choice. “I admit quite freely that I sent you to
California under false pretenses and wrote you insincere letters to keep
you away a reasonable time. You had proved yourself much stronger
than I; I had tried every other means of obtaining that freedom to which
every human being is entitled and every other means had failed." 1 ' As
the days passed and the full weight of these developments became clearer
to Mary, her understandably wounded pride made it impossible for her
to accept her earlier decision of quiet renunciation and acceptance. Nor
did Ludwig anticipate an easy victory, particularly over the legal forces
at her command. In the face of this inevitability, he determined that
before that final, awful moment of legal conflict, he would grab all the
joy and comfort he could, living as though he were free of Mary forever,
as though he and Thelma were already beyond all of the unpleasantness
that was the one certainty he could foresee. If only for the moment, he
allowed himself to feel triumphant over his jailer and victorious over the
conventions she had used to imprison him.
On October 26, while lecturing in Pittsburgh and being feted as an
honored guest (“I am the lion today and they insist on my roaring before
the lecture and after it”), he would write Thelma how “all through it. . .
the blessed thought of you has been burning in my mind and heart.”
At last he could feel certain that she would be there for him, bringing
the pleasure, the inspiration, the comfort, and the peace he had long
missed in his years with Mary. From Pittsburgh he wrote of their last day
together, “The light from it, the glow of it. . . with me at every moment.
I am so grateful to you, my darling; I am so grateful for you.” Soon they
Page 346 - [see page image]
345
Guiltless and Free
would be together. “There is Monday! Monday is in the world—you.
What more, for the day, for the hour, do I need to turn all darkness into
light for me?” 19
By Christmas Day 1923, Ludwig, despite the widening conflict with
Mary, could tell Leonard that “I am inwardly serene, I can write any
where and I have Thelma.” With his break nearly complete, he chose
to gloss over the many moments of uncertainty that had dotted the
year. “We have . . . been standing to each other in the closest of human
relationships, under conditions that would have tried the poise and
wisdom of a mature woman. This little girl has shown a dignity of soul, a
devotion to me, a profound wisdom of heart and mind, a loving-kindness
that exceed anything I ever hoped to find,” qualities of an artistic tem
perament that had sparked his own and transformed his life. Thelma’s
mother, “in the little apartment next door . . . getting luncheon for all of
us,” had been a major contributor to these moments of tranquillity and
renewal. Ever since she had intervened, he had worried that she might
prove to be “the one shadow that might, through Thelma’s natural grief
over an alienation there, have fallen on us.” But quite unexpectedly, she
had reversed her decision of the previous Christmas and had come to
New York to give them her blessing, explaining “that she had never
in reality been deceived as to the nature of our relations” and would
“stand by us whatever came.” With the symbolism of Christmas Day
still a meaningful part of his imagery, he spoke of how these two women
had given him the rebirth he had longed for throughout the many wasted
years. He hoped “by some means” to marry Thelma by the following
spring, though precisely what “continuation of a practical kind . . . [his]
story” would have was as yet uncertain. Instead, he could only tell
Leonard that “after years of consorting with vagabond natures, I am
healed inwardly and outwardly by the fine frugality, steadiness, [and]
human dignity of this blessed woman. ; For the moment, it was enough.
These months were for Ludwig the most peaceful since childhood,
as Thelma busily made a home for them “with that unfailing touch of
hers which can turn a hotel room into a haven and a temple” 21 (though
Thelma later credited Ludwig with having more equitably shared these
homemaking efforts while she continued her singing and writing). Mrs.
Spear, knowing that they “were deeply, irrevocably in love, a marriage of
souls as well as hearts,” shared the financial burden of supporting two
residences, while friends, “those who knew us and loved us,” joined
them as they “entertained some of the best minds of the time.” Thelma
later reported how she always thought of herself as Ludwig’s wife,
“never as [his] mistress,” as did “the crop of intellectuals with whom
we travelled."-’-
Page 347 - [see page image]
346
Ludwig Lewisohn
Inspired by this new life, Ludwig composed his best poetry in years.
“Great drama arises precisely when one order of moral concepts is
beginning gradually to yield another,” he wrote in a Nation article titled
“First Fruits,” a month after they settled into their new home together.
“You and I by this lamp with these / Few books shut out the world,” he
began anew in a widely disseminated poem. “In this simple scene there
is / The essence of all subtleties, / The freedom from all fret and smart,
/ The one sure sabbath of the heart.” But Ludwig was not content with
such isolation. He insisted upon opening a window to the wider arena
of human discourse and having their relationship serve as an example
in the struggle to transform his world. If they could not conquer it,
“Nor change the mind of fools one whit,” they could create “beauty
and peace inviolate” and “build a high impregnable tower” out of their
love “Whence may shine, now and again, / A light to light the feet of
men.” 23
The marriage of life with art had long been Ludwig’s goal, as he be
lieved that his personal experience could serve as a didactic and redemp
tive tool for others. Such, at least in part, had been the motivation behind
Don Juan. Written feverishly in a period during which “I could think of
nothing else” but “the conflict [that] absorbed me,” 24 it appeared late
that October of 1923. Favorable reviews added to his sense of well-being
and to his hope that he was, in his small way, aiding in the transformation
of society. Its positive reception seemed evidence that some measure of
support might be found once the final engagement with Mary in the
courts and press began. The New York Times review of October 21
praised Ludwig for an “excellently done” story, “distinguished from
other novels of the time by its cold analysis of sentiment and character
and the staccato riveting of the ideas and purposes he wishes to bring
out”—a book whose greatest merit perhaps lay in the fact that “it deals
not with the exotic and abnormal but with plain people."-"
Ludwig, hoping to strike a blow across America, was pleased that,
having successfully “stripped it... of the very special elements of my
own case,” 26 he had been able to achieve this wider appeal. Joseph
Krutch knew how hard he had worked to make it a novel of ideas and a
challenge to convention, 27 and in the Literary Review of November 1923
he favorably noted that Don Juan, “as fresh and interesting as naked
sincerity always is, is a triumph of simplicity. Discarding all long-winded
dissertation, stripping plot and setting to the barest essentials and thus
reducing his book to about half the usual length, he has achieved a most
illuminating discussion of marriage and divorce through the sheer logic
of the situation.” ' In a less flattering way, H. S. Canby seconded this
view the following month in the Nation. “As a pleading before the bar
Page 348 - [see page image]
347
Guiltless and Free
of a stupidly conventional world it moves me deeply.” So moved was he
by this “excellently written, poignantly argued, dramatically conceived
book” that he had come to see it “more as a treatise that must be praised
as a pamphlet. . . [than] as a novel.
Ludwig had perceptively anticipated this latter view two weeks
earlier when, in a self-analytical article for the Nation of November
21, he spoke of how those who knew him or his work as a critic would
find it difficult to conceive of him as a novelist. His poetry, drama, and
fictional prose had come so many years before, helping him to earn the
reputation he now enjoyed. But colleagues had urged him to stick with
the one form of writing at which he had more recently succeeded in
doing so well. So, too, had some whose reviews of Don Juan were now
so positive. But he had refused to be typed or silenced by their concerns,
no matter how well-intentioned. As he remembered several years later
when writing Mid-Channel, the experience seemed to demonstrate just
how hard it would be for him to establish himself as a serious novelist
trying “to gain a hearing for what I conceived to be my true business” 30 —
the translation of “first-hand experience into creative form and vision,”
as he had written in his November Nation article titled, simply, “Ludwig
Lewisohn.” In it, he had carefully tried to explain the similarity in his
approach toward the writing of both fiction and criticism, how, “as a
radical in my notion about life and a classicist in my notions about
literature,” he was bound to the use of reason in all his writings. It
alone could stop the “continued privilege of spreading ruin and feeling
righteous” so readily enjoyed by the oppressive elements in society. 31
There was far more at stake here for Ludwig than mere questions
of literary aesthetics or theory. Art was to be a weapon against those
who would subjugate others and, thus, were far “too preoccupied to
be held by anything that approaches the decorative.” He was now far
less concerned with achieving some higher form of artistic develop
ment than ever before. In June he had suggested to Thelma that her
interest in aesthetics, “the science of beauty,” was of little importance
compared with the search for truth, about which art must be more
deeply concerned. “Let us create beautifully and live beautifully,” he
had urged. “Let us provide the material for the metaphysicians. That is
better and more fruitful.” A few years later in Mid-Channel he would
write how, “as time goes on, I care less and less for art in its more
abstract forms and more and more for life,” promising to engage his
fellow sufferers in a calm and rational discourse concerning the causes
and destructiveness of the oppression under which they labored in search
of personal fulfillment. Though so much else had been taken from him,
he could not be silenced—nor, he pleaded, should his readers remain in
Page 349 - [see page image]
348
Ludwig Lewisohn
a state of quiet desperation. If such an approach made him appear the
pamphleteer even in his fictional work, so be it. 32
It is the remediable moral suffering in the world that crowds my vision—
the remediable moral suffering, remediably by a little hard thinking, a little
tolerance, a little more goodness, a little less righteousness. If I write a
criticism it is to further that supreme end; if I write a novel it is to further
the same end. Is that bad criticism and bad art? It may be because I am a
bad critic and a bad artist. It is not because my method and my aim are at
fault. For the same aim and method were and are the aim and the method
of Isaiah and Euripides, Hauptmann and Shaw. The greatest art has always
sought to lessen the evils that are under the sun. But I am only I and this
city is only this city and from the great choices being taken from me I have
a little choice left. If that little choice is indeed all I have I do not hesitate.
Shall I be a fairly accomplished aesthete or a pamphleteer? Pamphleteer, by
all means.' 1
Toward this end, he gathered many of his best previously published
essays that December 34 and prepared them for republication in the spring
of 1924 under the title The Creative Life. It was to be both a summation
of his thoughts on literature and social change, and a prologue to the new
life and art he could now dare to imagine for himself. No longer fearful
of abandonment or of certain defeat at society’s hands, he contentedly
dedicated the collection “To Thelma, Who is to me the most dear and
precious force.” For the volume’s first essay, he chose the apologetic
“Ludwig Lewisohn” in order to portray himself as both pamphleteer and
artist; and as a final statement, he concluded with his highly personalized
treatment of Goethe, hoping thereby to bring Faust’s creator to the
consciousness of his own many readers. In “Goethe and Ourselves,”
he stressed the “vigilance of soul” needed to end the “futile conflict
and intolerance” that was preventing mankind from achieving, as had
Goethe, “the highest and clearest consciousness.” This, too, had long
been Ludwig’s vision for his own life. In effect, he had used Goethe,
as years earlier he had Heine, as the medium through which he could
portray his own life, in fact and in dream. “For that life was truly self-
governed, tolerant, whole, and free. It transmuted passion into vision
and business into wisdom; it steeped itself in the concrete and found
the universal there; it achieved the triumph of personality within the
cosmic flux and came upon all aspects of the eternal in the necessary
employments of our human day.” 35
Yet despite such hopeful posturing, enough remained to tarnish the
bright hope of life with Thelma, of which Mary and the legal forces she
was certain to bring down upon him were only a part. Old memories of
pain and frustration for himself and his parents still haunted him. Even
Page 350 - [see page image]
349
Guiltless and Free
the city he had been so thrilled to again call his own now seemed to add
to his need for escape. “New York is full of a number of things,” he
wrote in the December 19 Nation, “something for every taste, from the
avidly sophisticated to the crudest.” It was “a wild jumble of stimuli”
that after seven years had grown too difficult to handle; at the very least,
they had further unsettled him, much as they had Liveright a few years
earlier. “He who is subjected to them all, unless his aesthetic skin can
somehow combine sensitiveness with reasonable thickness, is likely to
be lost.” 36
It was time to leave, time to find a place where he could build a new
and uncluttered life with Thelma, where his art could be pursued in an
attempt to transform society, and where he could dig deeper into the soil
in which his most ancient roots were planted. It was time to go back to
the Old World where the ghosts of his past could find their rest.
Through the years, the thought of such a move, if only for a mo
ment’s escape, had often crossed his mind. In 1920 he had written
Leonard that “I want, enormously, to go to Germany and now and then
I see the gleam of a chance of being sent.” 37 The chance never arose, in
part because of Mary’s dogged insistence that she not be left behind. But
now there was little to hold him back, and much that favored his flight.
He was even willing to give up his editorial position to accomplish this
change. “How futile . . . were the triumphs of the world, even its nobler
triumphs, to a heart oppressed and desolate and in fear,” he noted in
Crump, recalling the thoughts that led to his decision. “He would simply
flee. To Europe. To the uttermost isles of the ocean." : ' He had insisted,
in Don Juan, that he needed to live “among people whose minds were
free on the central subject of his preoccupations (the problem of sex, of
human relations . . . the actual experiments in life), that he would find
it healing to go about among them, live with them, watch their thoughts
and their experiences, draw thence a general hope.” He was “bent upon a
very personal thing,” he had told himself and his readers—“upon saving
himself, finding a way of life, freeing himself for the sake of attaining
that inner harmony, that oneness with oneself without which life is a
blunder and a shame.” Before more time passed, before it became too
late, he had to escape the prison that America had become for him if he
was ever “to rebuild his inner life.” 39 At last, the moment was at hand.
“To stay at home is to embrace too low a view of human nature,”
he wrote in The Creative Life. “Adventure is to be found. . . along
the road.” The “unescapable coteries” among whom he lived, even
the tight circle of best friends, existed “on the edge of a reserve that
is near neighbor to unveracity.” Only a journey abroad could release his
“long-curbed passion ... for self-communication,” allow the masks to
Page 351 - [see page image]
350
Ludwig Lewisohn
fall away, and replace the “too dispiriting . . . flatness of life” with “a
homelikeness in the world . . . long sought for and sought in vain.” 40
This need to find his true home now took Ludwig back to his search
for meaning and belonging within the Jewish world. He renewed his
contact with Kurt Blumenfeld, who in turn arranged a second meeting
with Chaim Weizmann. With them, Ludwig discussed the possibility of
an unannounced fact-finding mission to Poland, Austria, Italy, Egypt,
and Palestine, an idea to which Weizmann gave his unqualified support.
He was to report privately to Weizmann, but also to write several series
of articles for the Nation 41 and the New Palestine, the official organ of
the Zionist Organization of America. They realized that Ludwig could
bring much to the movement, and openly welcomed him to their ranks.
There were few among them of equal stature or literary facility within
either Jewish or non-Jewish intellectual and artistic circles. In fact, as
Maurice Samuel, a Zionist official during this period, would later note in
his memoir, “Jewish intellectuals at large despised” the movement, as did
“classical socialist” and pro-labor Jews, and most who were members
of Reform Judaism. Nearly all other Jews remained “inert to Zionism,”
leaving Ludwig to go “into the wilderness” when he became a Zionist. 4 -
Of the man whom he thought “in appearance . . . closely resembled the
portraits of Goethe,” the New Palestine’s editor, Meyer Weisgal, later
wrote that
at that time, the early twenties, Lewisohn was at the height of his career. He
was the literary editor of The Nation and famous for a number of books,
particularly Up Stream. He was, however, remote from the Zionist ideology.
I sent him to Palestine for a series of impressionistic articles, and he returned
with a song of Zion on his lips. Like all converts he burned with a bright
new flame which outshone all the older lights, and as a writer he brought
to us not only his distinguished name but as felicitous a style as was known
in America. 4
However remote from Zionism Ludwig may have appeared to Weis
gal, to his non-Jewish colleagues, far more “unaware of the history
of my mind” and of his long search for his Jewish self, this move
became “a source of astonishment.” Their very reactions confirmed for
Ludwig the appropriateness of his earlier decision to keep private the
“many memories and many experiences and many thoughts during the
years . . . before I met Blumenfeld and Weizmann.” Even Leonard must
have been surprised to learn of Ludwig’s intention to sail in March in
order to conduct a Zionist mission and to write his thoughts for public
dissemination. “Though more and more aware of the fact that I wrote as
a Jew, I had no special occasion to write on Jewish subjects,'' 44 Ludwig
later claimed in Mid-Channel, his selective memory again saving him
Page 352 - [see page image]
Guiltless and Free
from self-criticism. For whatever reasons he had declined offers from the
Menorah Journal and other organs of Jewish thought, he had determined
by early 1924 to publish his first major public statement regarding his
Jewishness in a book, “a sort of Judisches Weltbild [Jewish View of
Life],” which he would call Israel. 45
All that stood in his way now was the impending struggle to end all
legal obligations to Mary. He again offered the house, plus two thousand
dollars a year as a settlement; but she refused to accept it, and brought a
separation suit designed to solicit the aid of the newspapers, with their
“profoundly untrue, scandalously malicious . . . ugly publicity.” She in
tended to destroy his reputation and his earning capacity in America,
while painting Thelma as the harlot who had stolen her husband.
The day after Christmas, a group of his friends—Villard, Irita Van
Doren, Lewis Gannett, and Freda Kirchwey—went to see Mary. Ludwig
had assured Leonard a day earlier that if their pleadings fell on deaf
ears and she went ahead with her suit, then “Thelma and I shall leave
the country and M. will have nothing.In the weeks that followed his
friends’ failure, extensive negotiations ensued between Mary’s attorney
and Ludwig’s. Ludwig finally interceded and tried to convince Mary
that she herself would be hurt by going through the courts. Why not
“part in freedom and in peace,” he pleaded. She at first appeared to
agree with him and promised to stay any further legal action for six
months, after which, if he still wanted to leave her, she would grant
the divorce. But Mary’s attorney, notorious as a divorce lawyer, pressed
her to go forward with the suit, and within a few weeks they were in
court. 47
It would be only the first in a series of battles to span the next
fifteen years as Mary relentlessly pursued the husband who had left her
and had scorned the conventions of a society he no longer accepted
as binding upon him as a Jew. “The laws of the state of New York
are based on the Christian assumption that marriage is a sacrament
whereby the corruption of nature is curbed and bridled, that it ought
to be permanent,” and that only “moral turpitude” could dissolve this
heavenly union, he would write in Mid-Channel. 48 Ludwig’s union had
been more earthly than most, and though he no longer felt bound by
this non-Jewish way of life, the society that had sanctioned his vow
to Mary in 1906 still held him accountable. On January 25, 1924, the
Supreme Court of New York ordered him to temporarily pay Mary
seventy-five dollars a week plus attorney fees, pending the final outcome
of her separation suit. It was “more money than I could spare,” he
later protested, though he had made a similar offer just prior to this,
which Mary had declined because of its stipulation that Thelma not
351
Page 353 - [see page image]
352
Ludwig Lewisohn
be included in these legal matters. Mary insisted on holding her rival
culpable for the demise of their marriage. As reported in the New York
Times, “Mrs. Lewisohn alleged that her husband told her he needed the
inspiration of a young woman." *'
“A brief period of more intense haggling set in” as Ludwig imme
diately appealed the decision, attempting again to convince the judge
that Thelma’s name be stricken from any further proceedings. Mary
argued that she was not seeking vengeance upon those who had wronged
her, but that to withdraw her charge of alienation of affection against
Thelma would seriously damage the potential sale of her forthcoming
book, Don Juan’s Wife. Ludwig’s attorney, Charles Recht, argued that
his client wished only to be free of further molestation by Mary and to
protect Miss Spear, whose reputation was being gravely injured by these
public allegations. Recht proved the more persuasive, and on February
1 the order was amended, restricting Mary from any further mention
of Thelma’s involvement, while having “the irrelevant matter expunged
from the records of the court.” The judge further ordered that Mary
return Ludwig’s library and “other personal property and relics” within
five days, among them the urn containing his mother’s ashes. To Ludwig,
the order seemed a vindication of his charge that the suit had been
brought “in terms so vulgar and untrue.” Angered by this reversal, Mary
“kept anything [from his childhood] the loss of which would annoy
him,” as Thelma would relate to one of Leonard’s former students fifteen
years later.'"'
The newspapers, however, did not concur with Ludwig’s opinion or
with the judge’s wishes. The Times reported these rulings in rather mild
terms compared to the more sensationalized efforts of other newspapers
in New York and elsewhere. Ludwig feared that in the months ahead,
as the proceedings moved into the trial stage, the press would give
their lives “a splattering from the gutters of the world.” A similar
case involving a Columbia University professor and his young lover
had recently been dragged through the press. “Tall headlines blared
in the New York newspapers . . . [and] trampled on the man’s soul,”
he recorded in Crump. The poor man had been thrown to the mob,
and “the mob, half lecherous, half envious, sinister, revengeful, unclean,
triumphed. " 1 Ludwig worried that this might happen to him, and, even
worse, to Thelma. To avoid such pillorying, he offered Mary an even
greater sum to settle out-of-court. Unable to pay if she accepted, he had
found friends who were willing to guarantee a portion of it. But again
she refused his offer, and in response distributed copies of her pleadings
to the press without following the court’s order to expurgate the more
salacious portions. Cold and uncaring like the society they reflected, the
Page 354 - [see page image]
353
Guiltless and Free
newspapers, as he feared, printed the most damaging passages: “It was
curious to observe how the writers on the papers, through no hostility to
me, but through their own corruption and that of their publics, managed
to cover the whole matter with a thin layer of slime. Men evidently with
dead hearts and defiled senses who conceived of human relations only
as legal and lifeless or as undisciplined and vulgar." 1:
The court’s action and the press’s mistreatment of his relationship
with Thelma ultimately forced Ludwig to break his silence sooner than
he had anticipated. “Two worlds confront each other and two ways
and two approaches to life,” he wrote in the first widely disseminated
statement of his position as a Jew. Published on February 20, 1924,
“The Jew Meditates” presented his personal dilemma much as he had
in the past—a mirror image of that puritanical illness that had always
afflicted American society. But for the first time in print, he posed the
more natural, worldly Jewish ethos as a way out of this constricting box.
Ludwig saw his fight as a twofold struggle against those elements
within Christianity that pervaded the soul of all they touched, precluding
the healthy, natural development and fulfillment of the individual and
of the larger society in its internal and international dimensions. As a
Jew, it was his sacred duty to overcome this error and to demonstrate
the way toward a life of wholeness and well-being. And if it became his
fate to be martyred in this holy cause, then he was prepared to suffer
for this truth, as had the generations before him. Why fear retribution
for such a course of action, he asked, when anti-Semitism, irredeemably
grounded in an illusory and immutable notion of the Jew and his ways,
would abound regardless of what Jews would do? “Jew-baiting has
nothing to do with Jewish characteristics, ” Ludwig reminded his readers.
Instead, this martyrdom, he maintained, had meaning that could only
be found in the acceptance of one’s fate as a Jew for whom the task
of leading the world back to reason, sanity, beauty, and peace was an
acceptable burden.
When your Christian neighbor preaches war. . . preach peace; when he
preaches nationalism, preach internationalism. When he preaches the sup
pression of art and vital impulse, do you preach reason and tolerance and
liberation? If your temples are stoned, let them not be stoned for some
ridiculous superstition, such as that the Jews killed Christ or conspired
for power. Let them be stoned because your temples are the dwelling-
places of peace and of reason where every new truth is first received
and proclaimed, where there is first uttered the heresy which is the faith
of tomorrow and the blasphemy that is the truth of tomorrow. Then,
perhaps, a day will come when of those stones will be built a temple
wherein the nations will gather to acknowledge Israel’s gift and mission
of peace. 53
Page 355 - [see page image]
354
Ludwig Lewisohn
Such thoughts renewed his earlier self-comparison with Heine,
though now his portrait of the German-Jewish poet was far more sophis
ticated. For Ludwig, Heine was the quintessential modern man—a realist
with a touch of the romantic in him—and a writer whose works, because
of this unique combination of characteristics, were “so pregnant with
the significance of Europe’s essential life that seventy years of change, of
industrial revolution, of catastrophes in the mind and the world have not
robbed them of their native life.” He was, as well, an important example
of the Jew as “outcast” in this Christian milieu, of which Ludwig’s
own experience was another, if somewhat different, manifestation. Like
Heine, Ludwig had been charged with having “neither character nor
conviction.” In self-defense, Ludwig denied these charges through his
defense of Heine.
Not that he defended all that Heine had done. He could no more con
done Heine’s conversion now than he could decades earlier. If anything,
it “profoundly offended” him more than before. Nor was he overly im
pressed with Heine’s relationship with his mother; though “beautiful,” it
was “characteristic of every Jewish home.” As the years had passed since
Minna’s death, Ludwig had gained a different perspective on his own
relationship with her, casting a new light on Heine. But he was impressed
by Heine’s ability to reconcile the European and the Jew within himself,
and by the art this reconciliation produced, for “art is expression of the
self and of the experience of that self in the world, and the nature of
that self is ultimately identical with the nature of the art product.” The
epitaph Ludwig wrote for Heine was one that he might have wished read
at his own funeral:
He was what the impact of his particular world upon his particular spirit
necessarily made him. Praise and blame are mere babbling here. The same
forces that molded his character also molded his work. That is all we know,
all we can know. The man and the work are one—full of pain, warped by
wrong, the reverse of Olympian, of noble and serene, but also possessing a
somber glow, less beautiful than portentous, drawn from the fires of certain
central problems of both art and history and as radiant today as on the day
he died. 5 "'
A lecture tour that spring confirmed Ludwig’s perception of his place
in America, and of America as a society that had lost its founding vision
of individual freedom in “a plexus of phenomena” marked by “Mr. Ford
and the Klan and the oil Pirates.” Editorially disavowed in the March
29 issue of the Dearborn Independent, they were words nonetheless
deemed important enough for publication as “an interesting presenta
tion of a fundamental problem by a foreign-born Jew of unquestioned
intellectual integrity.” Searching for America in Montgomery, Dallas,
Page 356 - [see page image]
355
Guiltless and Free
Wilkes-Barre, and Shreveport, he had found only mean-spirited bigotry,
a lusting after capital gain, and a misguided “deploring, [so] that even in
Charleston and Richmond family no longer counted.” Ludwig’s America
was dominated by the “romanticism of passing orders . . . superstition
and persecution . . . the scramble for possessions and the bitterness of
the possessor fearing loss.” He argued against these skewed visions of the
present and future, imploring his audiences “to start where we should,
not with property but with man.” But his pleadings fell upon ears deaf
ened by greed, prejudice, and fear—a fear that precluded his becoming
the missionary to “these native dwellers in America [who] would have
to be converted to Americanism somehow.” He became more certain
than ever that he would be accused of attempting to “Judaize America.
And that cry will render my words ineffectual among the people who
need them most.” 55
One day, he would write a book to illustrate the nobility of the tradi
tion of reason and “the law of the free spirit” in American letters. But not
yet (though he was already putting together an anthology of poets who
represented this tradition). The urgency of the moment required other
efforts from him which only a different course of action could effect.
As “a humble foreign-born. . . second-class citizen like myself” who
would not be heeded by the native-born American masses—despite “that
power of imaginative identification that belongs to my race” because of
its own “continuous tradition of spiritual and moral freedom”—he felt
compelled to urge those few remaining “ultimate Americans,” all of New
England ancestry and descendants of transcendentalists and abolitionists
(Leonard among them), to give voice to the Emersonian notion that
“nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.” Only then
would it be possible to counter the “neo-American machinations of brute
power,” manifested at the moment in the curtailment of immigration,
the imprisonment of political dissenters, and the multiple claims of
society’s institutional leaders, supported by “a truculent majority,” that
the world had grown too complex and too fragile to allow the needs
of the individual “free spirit” to prevail. This latter charge was “an
ancient fallacy” used by conservatives throughout history to thwart
change. “To trust the idea, naked though it may sometimes seem, to
trust it against the clutterings and swathings and complexities of the
world—that is man’s only hope,” and the only hope left for destroying
the “imperium” that had come to prevail over the real America and
its people, himself included. “The exercise of liberty and justice among
men is positive and creative,” Ludwig repeatedly told his audiences that
spring, but
Page 357 - [see page image]
356
Ludwig Lewisohn
the attainment of liberty and justice is today, as it has always been, a negative
process.. . . The world is not a finished system; its essence is not static being
but dynamic becoming . . . the things we fight—economic injustice, wage
and sex slavery, social intolerance, and war—have become clear evils.. . .
Life and truth nourish us and sustain us. There is the community of human
fate, the compassion direct and vicarious, the understanding that brings
power and peace. 56
The experience of this trip, and the confirmation it gave to his
thoughts about his life in the land he had come to as a child, added
to the “corroding anxiety [that] seemed to possess him that spring” of
1924. Throughout the tour, he had spoken with an uncharacteristic “pas
sionate abandon, an emotional emphasis” brought on, as he recalled in
Crump, by a premonition that behind Mary’s show of patience in quietly
awaiting a final separation judgment there lay some greater trouble yet
unperceived. His return to New York proved the accuracy of his fear, for
while in Pennsylvania Station he was greeted by a process server bearing
fresh charges against him, “not for divorce but for separation on the
grounds of cruelty and neglect.”' The new pleadings contained Mary’s
account of their life together, as well as her latest financial demands,
which, on May 10, Ludwig characterized for Leonard as “slander, scan
dal, insane exactions,” the ultimate consequences of which, he assured
his friend, would be “on her own head.”
Despite this latest assault, the anticipation of a new life together
made it possible for Ludwig and Thelma to continue in their pursuit
of a “cheerful. . . and happy” future. He had for years “erred on the
side of over-discipline, of under self-esteem, of foolishly and uselessly
suffering for and through others who, as I knew long ago and as the
event has shown, were never—if there are human values—worthy of any
sacrifice on my part.” Never again would he so misjudge the situation,
he promised Leonard. For the first time now, he felt truly married;
experiencing this true union of two souls, he would never relinquish
his hold upon it. “To be married from within” was a “bond that unites
us . . . far beyond my utmost hopes.” To live the remainder of his life
with Thelma, and to “die with her still beside me,” would render his
entire life, even the worst of it, “not wholly futile.” All that stood in
his way now was the “grand bomb” that had burst upon his return,
and the final scenes yet to come. “What weighs on me is the monstrous
injustice. We want a home; we want a child; we have everything with
which to further the cause of life—life—and we are held up by one
whose unwisdom and lack of essential sanity and character made her
own motherhood a blunder and a shame and who now had nothing to
give the world but the barrenness of her venom." ' 5
Page 358 - [see page image]
357
Guiltless and Free
The pleadings, written purposefully by Mary’s lawyer to arouse
the public’s base prejudices against him and Thelma, left Ludwig with
little choice but to make one final, in-person appeal to her. But Mary
mocked his every effort to reason with her, informing him that these new
pleadings, like those of the previous winter, had already been given to the
press. Whatever ruinous effect they would have upon his and Thelma’s
lives, she promised to multiply with future publicity. And should they
contemplate flight to Europe, her vindictive hand would stretch as far
as it had to until they would come to curse the day they had met. 59
Ludwig fled this encounter in a terrible state. What more could he do
but play out the drama that awaited him, a drama that involved not only
himself and Thelma, but, in his need to see the larger implications of his
life, the very “honour of God—if there was a God.” Neither of them truly
mattered for much in the world’s final accounting; or so he tried to con
vince himself by giving these events a cosmic gloss, righteously declaring
that only “Justice mattered.” For this reason alone, and not for motives
of personal vengeance, “that stupid, treacherous and ferocious creature
must not triumph.” If, as he posited in Crump, “the universe strove, like
man himself, for values beyond the dust,” then by his own striving for
the freedom to be fully human and expressive of his spiritual needs, his
actions “had helped to re-establish the shaken moral equilibrium of the
world, to save the cosmos from chaos, to make justice prevail.”" 3
With four years and an ocean separating him from Mary, he would
still refuse to admit to that small degree of desire, then or earlier, to
avenge this “barbarism,” as he called the almost unbearable weight of
social custom and legal stricture of which he felt a victim. Instead, he
would speak of how “we weathered the muddy storm as best we could,”
dwelling on these events again and again “not to defend Thelma and
myself, for we need no defense,” but in the hope that by demonstrating
how their hardship was but a “symbol of an order and a society wholly
objective and alien to my mind and instincts,” he could play a part in
creating a new way of life for all Americans that “no longer disgraces
their land.” 61
Others among his circle and beyond, finding themselves in circum
stances not wholly unlike his own, had managed to find some “island
of grace” to which they clung “by a technique of prudence and discre
tion” long practiced through wartime silence or quiet divorce or bootleg
liquor. “Quiet collusion,” however, had never been within his capacity.
“I have never been able to divide conviction from action, since I have
been impelled to live a life of wholeness and of continuity between the
inner and the outer processes.” Silence and discretion were forms of
“involuntary respect” that he could not give. The price was too high.
Page 359 - [see page image]
358
Ludwig Lewisohn
Rather, he would face, time and again, “the anger of the ocean and its
strong, lurking monsters.”
It seemed only a matter of time now before these “iron waves”
would once again rush in upon him. Certain of being vanquished in
any such confrontation, he began to wonder why he should await the
court’s final decision, why he should subject himself and Thelma to an
ordeal in which there “would be nothing rational, nothing not plainly
absurd, nothing inherent in the true order of the world.” Neither the
sensationalist press nor the vengeful apparatus of the state—“specks of
mud on the surface of the old and patient earth”—could or needed to
be endured much longer. 62 Nor should his art have to suffer the “hectic
inner involvement,” forced upon it by a tortuous society, that had turned
his writing into pamphleteering, even if this work had an important role
to play. He needed to “cultivate indifference,” to put some time and
distance between himself and his world if he was ever to look at America
“with that detachment which draws an interpretative order out of reality
and recreates life by making it intelligible.” 63
Unable to hide or to find the peace he wanted for himself and Thelma
and his art, he grew steadily more impatient to flee; only then would he
be able to put some order to his life. “So we made ready for our exile."' 1
A “sun, brilliant enough despite a touch of melancholy, fell into those
[days],” he would write ten years later, on the eve of their return to
America. “Three half-packed trunks with gaping lids were to be seen
and open boxes half filled with books; many pages of manuscript lay
on top of the desk and the beds in the inner room were covered with
underwear and frocks.” They “moved in and out of this miniature chaos,
he armed with a hammer, she at times with a dust-cloth, both eager, both
excited, both deeply and strangely stirred, both lifted above the prosaic
level of dull dissatisfactions on which they lived for so many months. A
wind of adventure was on their cheeks and also in their hearts.. . . They
had found each other."'
Pooling their resources, they had enough to set out “with a plan of
life that would make the money they had last as long as possible and give
[Ludwig] a chance—instinctively [Thelma] had dropped any question of
her own art or career—to produce work that was to be both fine and
saleable."’ - Earlier, when finishing Don Juan amidst the “heat and dust
and hate” that had thrown “shadows against the sky” and made it all
but impossible for him to “grapple with the secrets of his fate,” he had
imagined how his lonely escape would come on a day that
broke cold and clear—a brilliant New York winter day. . . . The strain was
so intense that he felt a tautness in every nerve, every muscle, in the very
skin of his forehead and cheeks. How much falseness there had always been
Page 360 - [see page image]
359
Guiltless and Free
in his life.... All the perplexities of his life were still upon his tracks like
hounds. Visions haunted him.... At last the ship plunged into the ocean;
at last the wind of the sea swept over him.... He was alone with the wind,
alone with himself, alone with the eternal forces.. . . His mind grew calm
at last. 67
But now, more than a year after this cathartic exercise, events had
transformed the loneliness and near desolation of that imagined time
into a reality of hope and promise. June 18 was to be the moment of
realization, the day of departure, with Thelma at his side. 68
Once this point of resolution had been reached, the days that fol
lowed sped by, quickened by the anxiety attendant to all of Ludwig’s
beginnings, and by the wish to fulfill his commitments—Nation assign
ments, the translation of Ber Hoffmann’s The Count of Charolais for
Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut of the Theatre Guild, editorial advising
for his publisher, and the preparations necessary for his Zionist mission.
Yet, despite the rush of events and the optimistic picture he now drew
of the future, troubling questions remained. Even more than the unre
solved litigation with Mary, thoughts of the future with Thelma seemed
suddenly to make him uneasy. Though her “youth and innocence” had
been so healing, he worried that they might prove less so in the years
ahead. Between the lines of his final letter to Leonard from America lay
foreboding hints that this future might be less than wholly peaceful.'”
If earlier, in Don Juan, he had sadly envisioned his escape as a lonely
voyage, made nearly joyless because of Thelma’s absence, he would, six
years later, in the knowing retrospect of Roman Summer, fictionalize the
journey as a time made more healing because he had undertaken it on
his own. “Psychically in mid-air” during these final “days full of small
agitations” that alternated with hours of almost “empty brooding,” he
thought of how he might have found the peace for which he had searched
had he journeyed alone; only then might he have “felt that freedom
which comes from all travel when one is released from definite place and
definite time and thus from those responsibilities that are the creatures
of place and time and the resultant circumstance." "
But if at such moments of quiet self-examination he could admit
such doubts, the purpose and hope at the root of his actions never
wavered. And if absolute peace might be beyond his grasp, even in
Europe, longer periods of quiet were certain to follow these last few
remaining moments that were forcing him to angrily protest against
a society from whose shores he was being sent into exile—a decision
he later characterized as “a question of that or of madness or sui
cide." 1 Feeling the need to artistically universalize these concluding
moments, he seized his last assignments and made them hostages to
Page 361 - [see page image]
360
Ludwig Lewisohn
his need to transmit, as always, some greater truth. A review of Eugene
O’Neill’s All God’s Children, a play made more impressive for Lud
wig by Paul Robeson’s “extraordinarily sincere and eloquent” perfor
mance at the Provincetown Theatre, allowed him to again attack “the
immemorial, ineradicable character of race prejudice” that had stood
at the center of his own troubled years. On June 4 he wrote in the
Nation that
The case of Negro and White is a terrible case, an excessive one, a case
surrounded with myth, fear, terror. But it does not stand alone. All deep
divisions or supposedly deep divisions have a like effect. A Gentile wife
at some moment of crisis muttering the word Jew under her breath, a
French wife, in 1915, the word Hun—these are other symbols out of
which comparable tragedies could have been built.. . . The problem he has
selected cleaves so near the bone of human life itself that it possesses a
transcendent symbolic character. There are not many such themes in the
world; this is one of them. 72
When the court failed to complete the adjudication of Mary’s sep
aration suit as scheduled, Ludwig found it possible to make one final
statement in his own defense in the case of America vs. Lewisohn. In dis
cussing the work of the German philosopher Richard Von Coudenhove-
Kalergi, founder of the highly criticized Pan-European Union (a program
of democracy, socialism, and pacifism offered as an antidote to that faith
in feudal power, material wealth, nationalistic pride, and Manichean
morality which he had claimed to be the true cause of the Great War),
Ludwig noted how a non-Jew had yet seen in the union of “Lenin, son
of the minor landed nobility of Russia, and Trotsky, Jewish intellectual,
reformer, and internationalist,” something “symbolic and prophetic of
the world of his vision”—a polity in quest of “beauty and practical
goodness.” Heartened by this unique image of a new age to come,
Ludwig looked upon those who criticized Coudenhove-Kalergi much
as he did upon those who for years had more viciously attacked him.
“The robbers and warriors of the world will call him an unpractical
fool, the myth-mongers a blasphemer, the anti-Semites a traitor to his
blood.” Such attacks, he wrote in “A Philosopher of Liberalism,” were
but an indication of their victim’s “creative and prophetic character."''
This was to be the last message Ludwig would send to America from
within its restrictive borders until his return a decade later. On the day
of its publication, July 2, 1924, the court, as if by some manipulative
hand of fate, rendered its final decision, having finally begun to hear
concluding arguments on June 25. The prior, tentatively agreed upon
separation was given greater legal weight by the addition of a compen
satory element far in excess of Ludwig’s earlier out-of-court offer—and
Page 362 - [see page image]
361
Guiltless and Free
far beyond anything he was willing to pay. 74 There was, however, little
choice but to accept the terms of the settlement; compliance would be
a later question. As unfavorable as the settlement was, he could at last
take leave of it all. This alone was enough.
Hours later, he and Thelma were on their way to Montreal, where
they were to meet with Mrs. Spear before continuing to Europe. Weeks
earlier, they had readied themselves by placing their valuables in her care,
among these the photographs and mementos of his parents’ “frustrated
lives and too early death,” those “shadows of the past” whose darkness
seemed by this very act to be slowly fading, “as though I had rescued
their shades from the hostile and cruel atmosphere in which they had had
to dwell for years.” Now, on board a northbound train, bathed in the
brilliance of an early summer’s day, “the dreadful shadows of the past
faded, all and forever.” Feeling “safe from the enemy and . . . the babble
of fools,” the shadows gave way to joyful visions of a dream that might
soon be fulfilled. Confirming these recollections made in Mid-Channel,
Thelma later recalled how, on the train to Montreal, she, too, had sensed
that their life together was really just beginning. “The sun was shining
in full glory, as though giving us its benediction. We left the grayness of
New York and soon sped out into the country. I could see the lines of
care lifting from Ludwig’s face. We were on our first adventure, seeking
life and freedom together—with all the world before us.” 75
They had left behind not only America, but also their Village world
of dissidents. But the loss seemed less disturbing than it would have
years before, for the Village had been changed forever by those whose
success had destroyed their own rebelliousness, and by the legion of self-
absorbed newcomers who sought only the gaiety and not the jarringly
painful search that had made their merriment possible. “It was their
Village now,” Floyd Dell thought as he walked its cold streets the
December following Ludwig’s departure. “Dead and gone” was how
he described that earlier Village and the generation of “friends and
comrades and sweethearts of those lost happy years,” those who, in
their youth, had found that the world had suddenly gone “blank of
meaning.” Of those who were continuing the search, many had already
made their way to Europe, still looking, still touched by that “miraculous
naivete ... a faith, happy and absurd, in the goodness and beauty of this
chaotic universe." '* They, too, had realized that some fertile element was
missing even in the progressive soil of New York’s Village hothouse. As
the dissident essayist Paul Rosenfeld had said of the Port of New York
in 1924, it was a shadowed, fragmented world where “things were very
definitely outside you, apart from you,” where you were, “at bottom,
alien . . . even to those of the people you were supposed to know best of
Page 363 - [see page image]
362
Ludwig Lewisohn
all and with whom you had spent years.. . . Nothing came in to relation.
The seed inside did not take root.” 77
Ludwig felt certain that his ancestral homes, warmed by an un
eclipsed sun, would wrap him in their fertile embrace and bring forth
new fruit out of the seeds he had borne within himself for so long.
Made always to feel a misfit in America, he was now ready to voyage
back across those same unsettling waters over which he had come as
a child, ready to put aside “the sordid fury and relentless greed / The
poisoned malice and the obscene mirth,” and go on to where, with his
muse (“Wife, mother, artist, priestess at the shrine / Of immemorial
sanctities now mine”), he could stand “with all earth’s fields before us”
and together experience “the wind of Paradisal seas” and the “stars that
never shone on us.” 78
They sped by rail toward Montreal as he wrote these lines on July 2,
1924. There, in the company of Mrs. Spear, they spent the evening at the
Mount Royal Hotel toasting their “freedom and happiness.” The next
morning, they continued on to Quebec, 79 from where they would take
leave of Thelma’s mother and sail on to England aboard the “Empress
of Scotland” the following morning. By then it was the Fourth of July,
independence day “At Last!” In his letter to Leonard written during
those first shipboard hours, he coolly detailed their plan to be abroad
for eighteen months, first in “Germany, Poland, Austria, Palestine and
then—sometime in November—settle in Vienna where she will continue
her work and I write a book.” But when he thought of how, for the
first time, he was to have these two basic desires met, he became filled
with a sense of mystery at the sudden discovery of a seemingly boundless
future. Throughout the countless, dissonant years, he had dreamed of
this moment. Now, confronting it, he felt strangely “humble at what
at last. . . has come to me: This trip with what it means in the way
of opportunity and with the only woman I’ve ever loved." 10 He was
determined to seize this precious gift, and in using it to re-create himself
and his world, prove himself worthy of this sacred trust.
Page 364 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn as an infant.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Lewisohn, age three.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
\
Page 365 - [see page image]
Lewisohn, Berlin, c. age seven (no later than 1890).
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Lewisohn and his mother, Minna, Charleston, S.C., c. 1891.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Page 366 - [see page image]
Lewisohn, age thirteen. (Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Lewisohn’s graduation picture from the High School of Charleston, S.C.,
age fifteen. Lewisohn is seated in the second row, second from the left.
(Courtesy of the College of Charleston.)
Page 367 - [see page image]
The College of Charleston, S.C., c. 1900, where Lewisohn
enrolled in 1897. (Courtesy of the College of Charleston.)
Lewisohn, age eighteen.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Page 368 - [see page image]
George Sylvester Viereck, c. 1904.
William Ellery Leonard. (Courtesy of the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, WHiX32370.)
Page 369 - [see page image]
The Broken Snare, published in 1908.
Oswald Garrison Villard. (Courtesy of the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, WHiX323671.)
Page 370 - [see page image]
Lewisohn, c. 1922.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Thelma Spear.
Page 371 - [see page image]
Don Juan, published in 1923.
on Juan
£udw)Cj £eibi$ohn
Quthovx^ Up (Stream
Page 372 - [see page image]
Passport photo, 1924.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Lewisohn, late 1920s.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
'A
Page 373 - [see page image]
THE CASE of Mr. CRUMP
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
EDWARD W. TITUS
<1 Ike tifn Ike Black Manikin,
4 Rk Dclaabic, Moiipiiaute
PARIS
M C M X X V I
The Case of Mr. Crump, published in 1926.
Edward W. Titus.
Page 374 - [see page image]
The Island Within, published in 1928.
mil
=THL ISLAND!
pVIThlN=
LUDWIG LLWttOIIN
A noteworthy
memorable narrative.”
— THE LONDON TIHK*
HARPER tBROTHERS
ESTABLISHED 1617
Page 375 - [see page image]
Lewisohn, c. 1930.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Page 376 - [see page image]
Lewisohn on the Riviera, c. 1930.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Lewisohn in Paris, c. 1930.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Page 377 - [see page image]
.X
3,
*
Sisley Huddleston, author of Paris salons.
Page 378 - [see page image]
The Golden Vase, published in 1931.
Ludwig Lewisohn
THE
GOLDEN
VASE
By the author of*‘The Island Within’
HARPER •- BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
Page 379 - [see page image]
Lewisohn and Thelma Spear, c. 1930.
(Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin.)
Lewisohn, c. 1930. (Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Page 380 - [see page image]
Mary Lewisohn, June 1937.
(Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin.)
Page 381 - [see page image]
SLTAn 7
E FIELDS
A NOVEL
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
IIAKI’JiB BROTHERS - ESTABLISHED 1817
An Altar in the Fields, published in 1934.
Passport photo, c. 1934.
(Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives.)
Page 382 - [see page image]
Part 3
Thelma
Page 383 - [see page image]
Page 384 - [see page image]
365
14
Journey East
Is it because the season is waning and grows a little weary that I am asking
for the moon? But in truth I am not asking for the moon. I have tried
to explain from the analogy of music that there is something well-nigh
intolerable in the present situation. There is a closer analogy, one, at least,
that will strike home more. Consider the desolate and unfurnished mind of
one who reads no books but those hot off the press and whose ears are filled
only with the debates and interests of the hour, one who never withdraws
with story or poem or essay into those cooler and serener chambers of the
past where striving and trying are over, debate has long been hushed, and
beauty and the life of beauty take on something of an eternal semblance. 1
Europe, Ludwig’s imagined “serener chambers of the past,” was to be the
portal through which he would flee those years of “striving and trying”—
and he leapt at the chance to enter its “eternal semblance.” In bitterness,
he had spoken of America’s inability to “restrain its enthusiasm . . . every
time some particularly dangerous superstition is confirmed and some
particularly civilized truth discredited.” 2 For too long he had strained
to create a more open society, prodding it with “cries in a howling
wilderness” (an expression ironically echoing that last Puritan, Jonathan
Edwards). He was now tired—and desperate for a moment of rest, some
respite from a “Philistine world” where even its critics were its allies. 3
Ludwig shared this desire for flight with those many other Americans
who, for a host of personal reasons beyond the spiritual, had sought
the escape Europe offered in those years. By the early 1920s, the de
spondency of the immediate postwar period had given way to some
semblance of renewal—though the rush and clamor for joy seemed to
the more perceptive observer, even then, but a mask behind which to
hide a continuing and deeply seated feeling of hopelessness. Perhaps it
was this little-spoken, private admission that had made the passage so
memorable. Waverley Root, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune's
Paris edition throughout these years, ably captured the unreality of this
voyage from the past and its continuing obligations when he wrote, some
years later, that
Page 385 - [see page image]
366
Ludwig Lewisohn
The great charm of ocean travel in those days was its complete detachment
from the world and its worries. From the moment you lost sight of land,
you belonged to a self-sufficient universe within which nothing could go
wrong. You experienced, suddenly, a great lightening of heart, a feeling
of complete liberty, unthinkable on land, where you could move in the
direction of trouble and were frequently forced, by one pressure or another,
to do so. At sea you were being moved inexorably toward your destination
with no possibility of exchanging it by the exercise of your volition. It proved
pleasant to give volition a rest. No matter what disaster might occur behind
you, on land, you could do nothing about it; you were therefore relieved of
all responsibility. 4
Not that Ludwig wished to withdraw permanently from this world’s
challenges, whatever the consequences foreseen or imagined. It was not
his nature. “I discount the possible dangers at once,” he had boasted
only weeks before the Atlantic crossing. “There is nothing 100 per cent
safe in all human experience.” 5 He would soon return to the fray, as
he knew he must, to play out his life upon a public stage. But it would
be in a new theater and before a new audience, playing the role of an
American critic seemingly transformed by the ethics of an older world.
“What an unusual situation. For the past hundred years, at least, it has
been both the pride and the chief business of every reputable European
critic to be torch-bearer and intermediary, to tilt against the brutishness
or indifference of the world, to provide an atmosphere in which genius
which is always strange and new and estranged, can live and flourish.” 6
But for the moment he would tilt his pen primarily to defend himself,
for if the soil of his ancestors held possibilities of intellectual candor
and critical acceptance, so, too, did it encourage his hope of finding
the spiritual comfort and domestic peace of a “true marriage.” Now
that he had coursed through the baptismal Atlantic waters, the promise
of separation and of union surely lay ahead. Thelma’s youth and partial
Jewish ancestry appeared as the elements of personal renewal for himself
that he had found in no other woman. He would have her as his
wife, no matter how costly the struggle, justifying his decision with
a volley aimed squarely at those institutionalized ideas that had long
held him captive to Mary and which now militated against his imagined
joys with Thelma. “Current notions of monogamy are, I use the word
advisedly, insane,” he wrote not long after his arrival on the Continent.
The “exquisite absurdity” of marriage had become all too clear in the
months preceding his flight—“namely, that it is put on like a shirt or a
coat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean, or
dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue.” Marriage,
he proclaimed that November in “New Morals for Old,” must be a
Page 386 - [see page image]
Journey East
“precise blending of passion and spiritual harmony and solid friendship
without which. . . the close association of a man and a woman is as
disgusting as it is degrading.” His own efforts to end what had become
mere “dust and ashes” had proven equally dehumanizing. But little else
could be expected from a society willing “to sacrifice honor to a fetish
and vitality to decay,” a “vulgar world” that wished to maintain social
control over private matters through the instrument of ignominious
divorce courts peopled by men more eager to reduce “their partners to
the role of disagreeable prostitutes and unsatisfactory servants” than
to set them free. In a world where “safe and ultimate escape” was
impossible, only the “inherent witness” of fidelity to self, as evidenced by
his spiritual marriage to Thelma, could provide a sense of rebirth. “Love
is like religion, a matter for the individual soul,” 7 he asserted in those
early weeks, adding two years later that “by every moral consideration
[Thelma is] not only my wife but the only wife I have ever had.” 8
Neither the New York courts nor, ultimately, the U.S. State Depart
ment would agree, as the cost of his decision slowly mounted in the
years ahead. It was a price he had been quite willing to pay at first, “a
question of that or of madness or suicide,” he would recall in 1930. 9
Even Mary’s threat of seeking a criminal indictment under the Mann
Act (for transporting Thelma across state lines for “immoral purposes”)
could not dissuade him. 10 The only risk, it seemed to him, was Thelma
herself, given her “strict New England” background. Would she be able
to adjust to new lands, new languages, new friends—to a new lifestyle?
“The beginnings were not easy,” he told Stephen Wise in 1930. 11 They
disembarked in England and quickly made their way to London, where
they were to conclude arrangements for their trip across the continent
to Palestine. Meetings with Chaim Weizmann and Georg Halpern of
the Jewish Colonial Trust (its financial arm) brought Ludwig the funds
he needed 12 and a letter from Weizmann to Dr. Josef Meisel, general
secretary of the Jewish Community of Berlin, introducing him as “one
of the great American Intellectuals, being in the last years one of the most
positive forces in the Solution to the Jewish Question." 1 ' With these in
hand, they made their way to the Channel crossing.
Fifteen years later, Thelma would accusatively remember that Lud
wig had been “eager to get to Berlin so in a few days we left,” 14 never
quite understanding the reason for his quick departure, neither the push
nor the pull he felt. His last lecture tour in America had convinced him
of the ultimate uselessness of all attempts at assimilation. “Slights, ex
clusions, [and] humiliations” had filled the countless personal anecdotes
of those who approached him after he spoke or with whom he shared
cocktails and dinner. “Everywhere I found minds touched with anxiety
367
Page 387 - [see page image]
368
Ludwig Lewisohn
and a deep though rather helpless preoccupation with this persistent
problem: this problem of the Jew’s relation both to the world and to
himself.” But nowhere in America had he met “the fury of assimilation-
ism” that he found among the affluent Jews of England. Two centuries
of legalized civil inequality had ended but fifty years earlier, and they
wished now to place their families’ earlier hardships far behind them,
preferring instead “gardens of innumerable flowers, flowers as perfect,
as precise as jewels.” With gates now opening, why force them shut
through self-assertion? Ludwig and “horrid persons like myself” who
insisted upon the Jews’ unique heritage and its value “in the society
of nations” (and thus the need to preserve and proclaim it) found
themselves accused of “forcing all self-respecting English Jews to change
their religion.
To Ludwig, his birthplace (and that of Thelma’s father) seemed all
the more inviting. The trains from London to Berlin could not carry
him fast enough. It was there, he believed, that “by virtue of some inner
relationship . . . Jewish emancipation first became spiritually effective
[and] that the Jewish genius had expressed itself most richly in terms
of Western civilization”—and he ached to be a part of this expression.
In retrospect, he would admit that its appeal had been to the heart,
and not to the head—“That land and that civilization lure us into
love and productivity and self-betrayal more than any other”—and he
would guard against the danger it presented, vowing to transcend its
entrapments “by such acts of self-emancipation as I am trying to urge
upon the Jews of America. " 1 '
But at first it all seemed ideal, “unexpectedly charming and cheap,”
as he wrote to Weizmann’s secretary on July 24, shortly before he was
to begin his mission to the east. 17 We are both charmed with Berlin and
regret the necessity that takes us away so soon,” he reported to Viereck
two weeks later when responding to the receipt of several poems from
his old friend. “They read admirably,” he assured Viereck, as he did of
his and Thelma’s intent to “certainly visit here again.'"' For here, as
Elias Canetti recalled, “the animal quality and the intellectual quality,
bared and intensified to the utmost, were naturally entangled in a kind
of alternating current.” Here, “the taboos, of which there was no lack
anywhere, especially in Germany,” were explored. Chaos seemed natural
in this “pungent, corrosive . . . stimulated and animated” atmosphere.
Most of all, it was a setting in which all voices could command a hearing,
in which “the “incompatibility of all things” was celebrated, no matter
how divergent. One “had validity as soon as he was heard.” Few cared
“where all this was leading.. . . The results were books, paintings, plays,
one against the other, crisscross, zigzag.”"
Page 388 - [see page image]
Journey East
Ludwig, the romantic dreamer in flight from America, could have
remained purposefully myopic, like so many others who had crammed
the confines of this fragmented, illusory world. The first note to Spingarn
in early August 1924 was filled with a similar desire to overlook what
lay just beneath the surface of postwar German society. “We find Berlin
altogether charming. Contrary to all reports great, courteous, pleasant.
Barring certain elements in the public and political life—the Country of
Countries."But barely a week passed after sending his laudatory letters
to Spingarn and Viereck when the luster of his birthplace suddenly began
to grey. To Weizmann’s secretary he wrote on August 13, “In the midst
of our pleasant stay here something quite beastly happened to us. Our
large trunks, containing not only very many irreplaceable things, but all
our fall and winter clothes were stolen. ” 51 Here, in the seat of dreamlike
childhood memories, in the land to which he had returned in search
of a new life with Thelma among the people he believed would most
welcome him, he had found signs of underlying social disorder. The
loss of “all we had brought with us, including manuscripts (. . . nearly
all my verse) and family mementos” was soon intensified as Thelma,
“a delicately nurtured girl,” nearly suffered a nervous breakdown. 22
Six years later, he would characterize the circumstances surrounding
the theft as “mysterious,” seeing them as symptomatic of Germany’s
ongoing descent into disorder at the hands of “certain elements." 2 '
Thelma would later recall this same period without the tensions
that filled them. There is curiously no mention of the theft, nor of her
emotional collapse—and certainly no indication of social or political
unrest. In their place were images of beauty and joy-filled gatherings, of
intellectual heights and quiet moments at day’s end.
I had never been abroad and Ludwig had not been back to Europe since
he had been brought to the United States as a child. We were like a couple
of children. The bright, clean streets, the music, the flower-boxes in the
windows, were things of joy. And Ludwig was happy because there in
Berlin he found companions who were congenial to him. There began the
first of our salons which were to attract some of the best-known authors,
philosophers and musicians of our time. For hours I would sit and listen to
the outpourings of such brilliant minds as Arnold Zweig, Alfred Kerr, and
Kurt Blumenfeld. It was as though I were sitting on Mount Olympus with
the gods. When they tired of conversations and discussions Ludwig would
turn to me and say, “Liebchen, some music please.” Then I would sing for
them. Finally our friends would depart and we would be alone, safe in each
other’s arms, and happy to be shut away from the world. 24
Ludwig also spoke of the flowers and the parties, but he recognized
the troubling signs as well—of “terrible monetary inflation,” just then
3 69
Page 389 - [see page image]
370
Ludwig Lewisohn
beginning to subside; of the “taught order and scrupulous neatness” that
masked the continuing disrepair present everywhere in the wake of war
and the peoples’ “nerves . . . still badly on edge”; of being welcomed by
a coterie of well-known Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals admired
beyond their own borders yet “viewed with suspicion, dislike, and dis
dain by the vast majority of the land . . . isolated and shunned.”*’' Posi
tive childhood memories seemed at odds with present experience. Had he
and his family mythologized the past? Clearly, “things had changed”—
or had they, he wondered aloud that summer of 1924. “Conditions
are worse... if not ‘in kind’ then ‘in degree.’ ” Would the recently
murdered Walter Rathenau, German-Jewish government minister, be
the ultra-nationalists’ last victim? Jews in “small numbers. . . [were]
still sufficiently influential even outside of those artistic and intellectual
pursuits which they tend to dominate”—but for how long? And did they
exclude themselves from areas where the absence was notable, or were
they still being excluded? 26
Walking through “this dear but somehow hostile city,” he expe
rienced the rush of conflicting emotions. “Revulsion . . . nostalgia . . .
hollowness. . . bewitchment” were felt at every turn, suddenly trans
forming Berlin into a symbol of the Jews’ experience in those many
lands that had “lured us on and given us hopes and brief honours and
always broken us in the end.” 27 Reading these signs as early as 1924, a
year before the publication of Mein Kampf, he worried that perhaps it
was all beginning again. Nearing the end of his stay in Berlin, Ludwig
would record in his “pilgrimage” journal that
Germany is the classical land of Jewish assimilation; it is the classical land
of anti-Semitism. Here, in truth, anti-Semitism was invented.. . . Here, if
anywhere, the Gentile invitation to assimilate, to become part of the nation
and of the national culture was accepted.. . . And in this land arose the
modern anti-Semitic movement and theory which, for the obvious pur
pose of excluding Jewry from the work and the councils of the nation,
substituted the Aryan or Nordic for the old-fashioned Christian State.
Between the fear that the Jew will damn the Christian soul and the fear
that the Semite will contaminate the Aryan mind the difference is small. . . .
Who wounded our whole civilization beyond measure and healing? The
Jews. Pan-Germans and Awakening Hungarians are at one with the co
horts of l’Action Fran^aise, with Ku-Klux-Klanners in Kansas, with lead
ers of business and society in New York and Chicago. The Jews . . . the
Jews . . . financiers, Reds, millionaires, Bolsheviks, patriots, profiteers—
whatever they are, say, do.... It is the Jews. Hitler, Daudet, Belloc, Ford
send out the word among victors and vanquished: not our sins, follies,
superstitions have wrought destruction. It is not we who are guilty. It is
the Jews.'”
Page 390 - [see page image]
Journey East
But no sense of foreboding, however deeply felt, could have en
gendered images of what was to come, certainly not in the Weimar
days of 1924, days filled with cultural experimentation and political
change in a society whose doors seemed finally to have been flung open
to a marginal people already in residence some sixteen centuries, doors
through which, in unprecedented numbers far beyond their demographic
proportion, Jews had entered with so much pent-up energy. Peering
through the darkening veil of Weimar Berlin, Ludwig tried to understand
why so many “creative exiles” continued to give their gifts to Germany,
willingly putting their greatest energies and unfaltering faith into “an as-
similationist policy [that was] obvious nonsense.""' “Our loftiest minds
see the vision of [its] end,” individuals like Albert Einstein, who spoke
to Ludwig of “observing the unhappiness of the assimilatory Jews . . .
[who] cannot live with any degree of spiritual dignity in a position so
wrong and contradictory.” Germany, Ludwig concluded, had been the
laboratory for this necessary experiment in “propitiatory assimilation,”
but it had failed. The idea was bankrupt. It was time to move on. 30
On August 13, Ludwig notified Weizmann that he and Thelma were
readying themselves for the next part of their journey eastward, adding
that the loss of their possessions and the expense of life in Berlin had
drained much of the advance he had received in London from the three
thousand dollars he was to earn by trip’s end. More would be needed
upon their arrival in Vienna following their upcoming trip to Poland. 31
To secure the necessary visas from the Polish consulate in Berlin, Ludwig
and Thelma found themselves having to pose as legally wed husband and
wife. The events surrounding this conscious act of perjury (by Ludwig’s
own admission) 32 remain unclear. The State Department records have
been destroyed. Mary’s account of two years later claims to quote the
department’s letter to her in which Thelma was said to have applied for
an amended passport on August 5, changing her name to Lewisohn
in recognition of her alleged marriage to Ludwig on June 25. With
Ludwig’s confirmation of the marriage, Thelma’s passport was amended
the following day. 33
Ludwig never denied this falsification, but he regarded the cir
cumstances as beyond his control. By his own retelling of the events,
Weizmann’s emissary was in Berlin pressuring him to begin his work
before a Jewish wedding could be arranged. The Polish consulate would
not grant a visa to an unwed woman accompanied by an unrelated
man. Thelma, “ill, ignorant then of German, young, a stranger in a
strange land, wholly dependent on me,” could not be left behind. There
seemed no solution but to doctor Thelma’s passport and to lie on the
necessary Polish applications. Whether Ludwig told the American consul
371
Page 391 - [see page image]
372
Ludwig Lewisohn
they were married, as he wrote in 1926, or suddenly found it being
taken for granted, as he related in 1930, he filed an affidavit to that
effect, thereby gaining the State Department’s support in his request for
entrance into Poland. Ludwig would later maintain that Thelma was
never present at either consulate, assuming total responsibility for this
maneuvering. 34 (The State Department, soon to be alerted by Mary as
to their extramarital indiscretion, would assess the blame more broadly
and unyieldingly than he could ever have anticipated.) 35
After a three-day passage through Austria, Ludwig and Thelma
arrived in Warsaw on August 18. If Poland could offer no final answer to
his search, it would provide further evidence that the anti-assimilatory
direction he had chosen was valid. The country appeared “flat, rough,
primitive yet decayed,” its “mired roads” traversed by barefoot peasants
who work the “desolate . . . plain of Poland.” More impressive, if nega
tively, was the “moral atmosphere . . . [of] wrong, violence and supersti
tion [that] soak into hill and plain.. . . War and persecution, hunger and
hate, tumult and terror are native” in this “House of Bondage.” As “the
melancholy of slaves long dead” still colored Carolina rice fields, so,
too, did the age-old cruelty of Poland dim the sun’s brilliance. Here “the
harvest field has no richness and the stubble of autumn is submerged
in gloom. ”
Yet more than the meanness of the past, the assertion of power by
the new postwar government cast a widening shadow. “Force broods
over the land—the force of the state that is alienated from man and
his life, that is not expression but imposition from without, that alter
nately whips into submission or inflames into violence the people of
the country.'”' Everywhere the military seemed to be asserting itself,
“drunk with power. . . masters of minorities . . . [and] determined to
remain masters. “ ; '
Among these minorities, the Jews occupied a special place. The
insult, poverty, injustice, all in full measure under their former Rus
sian oppressors, was ably being carried forward by the Poles who had
replaced them. Though “a little bowed,” he found the Jews of Poland
continuing their own tradition of resistance, unwilling to sell “their most
fundamental right... to be themselves.” The price of self-betrayal was
too high. Unlike the Jews of more open societies, “they remained a
people.” If he could not personally support the “citadel of orthodoxy
[that is] a ruin today,” no longer capable of answering the needs of a
changing community, he yet credited it with helping the Polish Jewish
masses to persist and endure.
But what of their future now that the power of the state and the
increasing force of anti-Semitism were being felt in this still blackened
Page 392 - [see page image]
Journey East
postwar period? Would such forces permanently damage this Jewish
resolve? Could a middle way be found, by “Poles of Mosaic faith” who,
thrown crumbs of civil and political rights on occasion, appeared lost
between two worlds? The only viable alternative to this conflict between
Orthodox Jewish life and assimilation, he asserted, lay within the secular
Jewish movements of the Haskalah, that new beginning focused upon
Yiddish or Hebrew cultural expression. From Orthodoxy into Haskalah,
“both are Jewish worlds,” 5 ' the one giving birth to the other by ne
cessity. Clearly, “the contents of this tradition are changing, [but] the
tradition itself should stand firm.. . . The symbols of the imperishable
are intact.” 4 Even without adherence to the religious elements of their
cultural heritage, the Jew’s “legends and traditional wisdom . . . [still]
express his innermost self; they are today, as they have been in the past,
the exact image of his innate character and modes of thought.” 4 '
Yet he worried that even this solution could not secure the per
petuity of Polish Jewish life. Like so many others elsewhere, the Jews
of Poland seemed engaged in a “hopeless battle” against the rising
force of fascism throughout Europe and a “war-psychosis” that saw
all others as a threat. The state was developing a menacing ability to
convincingly justify its control over its majority population through
the imposition of “needed” measures and “the enforced regimentation
of national minorities,” or, where such measures had failed, the out
right elimination of these populations—witness the charge of “hostility
to Magyars” perpetrated against the Hungarian Jews, and the Young
Turks’ “slaughter of the Armenians.” Perhaps only flight remained as an
option. 42 Ludwig’s stay in Warsaw and his trip through the countryside
to Vilna convinced him that the Jews of Poland were now vulnerable to
a similar fate, that “after sharing their air and earth and bread for nine
hundred years,” their future in Poland was almost certain to be short
lived. “The Polish state, moreover, has a clear memory. It knows that
the four million Jews within its borders cannot be ‘improved’ into being
Poles, but demand the right, guaranteed them by the League of Nations,
of being themselves. Hence that state has determined to boycott, to
starve, to degrade the Jews, to crush them to utter subservience or to
actual death." 4 5
Four years after completing this analysis for Israel, Ludwig wrote
that it had been less a personal statement than a call for action, “a public
message. . .to arouse, to persuade, to convince.” 44 But if so, it had
come out of deep personal feelings and the unwavering conviction that
European Jewry was in danger. From Warsaw, he had written Leonard
on August 19, 1924, that “Last night we saw the entrainment of 200
families for Palestine. Had I not been hardened by life, I should have
373
Page 393 - [see page image]
374
Ludwig Lewisohn
done as Thelma did—burst into tears."' 1 ' Moved by this experience, he
sent the story to the Nation as his first message back to America. “Today
there is no telling when that historic pastime [the killing of Jews] will
begin again,” he noted in setting the article’s tone. “All Jewish Warsaw is
here in body or in spirit tonight.” Ten thousand applicants a week were
applying to go to Palestine. It was they, the “idealists . . . [who] have seen
an unheard-of vision and had the hardihood to break through a thousand
shackles,” who no longer will be counted among “the outcasts and the
hunted and the oppressed.” But financial constraints had severely limited
this emigration, as it had the night that Ludwig watched and imagined
himself making the journey with them. “Slowly the train pulls out of the
dim station. A single sob is heard from a woman on the platform. Then
no more. Only the strains of the Hatikvah, only the restrained melody
of the song of hope, and here and there a final word of both farewell
and salutation, the best word, the only word—Shalom.”’’
Following a three-day visit to Czechoslovakia, Ludwig and Thelma
went on to Vienna for the first of several extended stays over the next
two years. On September 6 he received two notes from Weizmann’s
secretary that had been forwarded from Poland. He then notified her of
his plans to leave for Palestine on the seventeenth and of his need for the
remainder of his “stipend” before then. Weizmann’s tentative plan to
sail to Palestine on the same boat was pleasant news, but Ludwig could
only hope to travel with him after his funds had arrived in Vienna. If
not, they would have to meet either in Egypt or Palestine. 47
Just when the money became available is uncertain, but Ludwig was
still at the Grand Hotel in Vienna when he sent a postcard to Leonard on
September 27. 48 “I had always wanted to go to Vienna,” he later wrote
in Mid-Channel. “Perhaps every American nurses a dream of some city
far away which shall answer his favourite moods.” 4 ’ He had invested
so much of himself in Berlin and Warsaw, and they had been so terribly
disappointing. Vienna, promising far less, might possibly prove more
fulfilling. Good music, cafes, and the thoughtful world to be found in
Arthur Schnitzler’s novels became a respite from the questions Berlin
and Poland had failed to answer—and for those they had raised. Like
the musician protagonist in Schnitzler’s recent work The Road to the
Open, the young poet still alive in Ludwig had come here to rest before
confronting his demons once again. “He made the resolve to use the . . .
days which still belonged to him as sensibly as possible ... to rest himself
fully and recuperate for new work.... A gentle farewell was taking
place within [his] soul, of much happiness and much sorrow, the echoes
of which he heard as it were in the valley which he was now leaving for
a long time; and at the same time there was within his soul the greeting
Page 394 - [see page image]
Journey East
of days as yet unknown, which rang to his youth from out the wideness
of the world."''
Entree to the Viennese cultural world proved far easier than Ludwig
had anticipated, as “talk turned easily and naturally to permanent issues,
to ultimate matters, to the foundations of politics and literature and
life.” Soon, he and Thelma were at home within a growing circle of
friends—Schnitzler, Jakob Wassermann, the Beer-Hofmanns and the
Hofmansthals, Max Reinhardt, Alfred Adler, Franz Werfel and Karl
Kautsky, among so many others, including Sigmund Freud, with whom
he hoped one day to begin analysis.' 1 A handful of “Gentile artists [who]
evidently live in sullen withdrawal” completed the circle, including the
visiting Gerhart Flauptmann, whom Ludwig had long wished to meet. 52
Among his new friends was the Hungarian Jewish attorney and
aspiring writer Joseph Bard, recently married to the celebrated American
journalist Dorothy Thompson, with whom Mary had earlier accused
Ludwig of having an affair. (Like Ludwig some years before her, she
would attempt unsuccessfully in 1931 to alert the world to Hitler’s
designs, but would be accused as late as 1939 of hysteria.) John Nef,
an American economist on his honeymoon in Vienna that fall, recalled
attending a spirited gathering at the Bard home, the list of guests in
cluding Ludwig and “his pretty young wife.” 53 If Ludwig had been
at all reluctant to introduce Thelma as his bride in London or Berlin,
such reticence was now gone, a result of his deepening ethnic identity
over these passing weeks. As a Jew, he felt free of the premises upon
which the American courts’ marital judgments were predicated, and
bound only by the laws of his own people regarding such private affairs.
However mixed his motives may have been, the impetus to proceed with
a rabbinical divorce and remarriage while in Poland 54 came as much from
this deepening sense of Jewish identity as it did from his growing feelings
for Thelma. Within days of their arrival in Vienna, Ludwig had two
diamond wedding bands made as a further sign of his fidelity to both. 55
Six weeks later the Lewisohns were on their way to Palestine. “The
change from West to East is abrupt and complete,” he noted for the
Nation’s readers on December 31, in what became the opening portion
of Israel concerning this final leg of his pilgrimage. From Vienna to
Trieste by train, and then shipboard to Alexandria, with a stop in Crete,
he had discovered “that old, old Mediterranean world . . . which saw
all the beginnings of history, which gave birth to all the acts, to all
the wisdom by which man lives, which has changed little, careless of
milenniums, deaf to tumult.” On board were Germans seeking profits
in foreign lands and British colonials en route to a new posting, American
tourists who would one day recount their Innocents Abroad adventure
375
Page 395 - [see page image]
376
Ludwig Lewisohn
before a “woman’s club in Sedalia,” and young Zionist pioneers, the
halutzim, whose “souls must melt into a new earth” if they were to
triumph. But from among his fellow travelers, Ludwig’s greatest affinity
was for the Bronx clothier who had “slipped away from his assimilated
family” to see the Holy Land from whose spirit life had separated him,
and for the “stern bearded Jews” ofEastern Europe for whom Jerusalem,
though never seen, was as familiar as the shtetl in which they had passed
their whole lives. “To them dream and reality were never divided.""
Ludwig’s own attempts to mix the two in years past had often
ended disastrously. But he, too, had been persistent, the dream ever
changing in response to the reality. He would try again, and if he could
not follow the model of his fellow passengers, he could still attempt
to experience a taste of their lives’ wholeness. Everywhere now he saw
not only the present and historical past, but the living biblical world
of tales and ideas. Gradually they were becoming his own. When he
visited the Egyptian antiquities, he thought less of their grandeur than
of the Israelites’ enslavement, of how their prosperity and contribution
had soured under the growing fears of their majority host, and how
that “classical cry against a minority was sounded for the first time in
recorded history, and a blank unanimity and uniformity was announced
as the ideal of the political and warlike state.” This same delusion of
necessary conformity had been at the root of so much destruction in the
last war, and, as he feared rather perceptively, would be again. 57
The journey further to the East continued to hold this same reso
nance of ancestral experiences mixing with present realities. From Cairo
to the Suez ferry at Kantara, and then across the Sinai and Gaza to the
Judean hills, he arrived in Jerusalem as if in a dream, he noted in October,
“a forty years’ journey . . . made in a day.” The desert crossing helped
him to understand, as it had his ancestors three millennia earlier, that
neither conquered walls, nor temples sanctified, nor cities constructed,
held the true essence of Judaism. It was in this very sense of being exiled,
each one from his home and himself, and, in the need to treat the other,
the stranger, justly and in a loving manner, that Judaism had made its
greatest contribution, though it was a “lesson that mankind still waits
to learn.'"'
Yet for all such talk of spiritual centering in the religious truths of
Jewish tradition, the physical needs of an endangered Jewry remained.
Both clearly had their place—both needed to be understood, appreciated,
and fulfilled in turn. In the days that followed, Ludwig and Thelma
toured the Jewish settlements scattered throughout Palestine, beginning
with a thorough exploration of Jerusalem’s ancient and burgeoning
quarters. “Jerusalem, never abandoned in spirit by us, is ours in fact
Page 396 - [see page image]
Journey East
once more,” not as a place for burial and prayer, but as a center for
the settlement where Jews had now come to live and rebuild, “a new
Jerusalem ... of houses and parks and theaters and seats of learning.”
Here Jews, deprived of access to physical labor for two thousand years,
were quarrying the stone and constructing new quarters from plans they
had themselves conceived. Christians, Muslims, and those Jews who
awaited the Messiah still focused upon the ancient holy sites of their
respective traditions. But to the pioneering Zionists, “our holy place is
the earth of the land and our city the city that we are building; our rock
is the rock of work and vision.’’ 1 ''
All else radiated from this center. By automobile, Ludwig traveled
Palestine’s hills and valleys to newly created agricultural colonies and to
the ancient cities, long inhabited by Jews and non-Jews alike, and now
newly populated by Zionists from Europe and America. So, too, did
his touring take him to sites of historic importance and to unchanging
Arab villages. Swamps had been drained, and desolate stretches had
been turned into fertile lands capable, one day, of supporting this new
Jewish homeland being born. “The imagination itself is staggered,” he
declared upon seeing the landscapes in which this transformation was
being accomplished. 60
Yet, ever perceptive to social conditions, Ludwig was aware of those
others who were unwilling participants in this adventure. He tried to
reassure Christians and Muslims of the security of their holy places
under a Jewish majority, hoping to avoid future conflicts by encouraging
Arab enthusiasm for what was taking root all around them. Pointing to
the wealth of Dead Sea minerals as an example of a new future for all,
he speculated upon this resource’s ability to support not just the Jewish
community, but a “decent wage” for the Arabs as well, and even the help
of “our physicians and nurses . . . [to] heal the eyes of their children and
keep them from going blind.” All would benefit “some day,” though
for now the Arabs appeared “fanatical and hostile” in their desolate
spaces, resentful even of “the trees that are in this land the symbol
of the Jew.” And because of this deep-seated resentment, how much
more important it was that, ultimately, a constitution would have to be
drafted guaranteeing equal rights for all who desired “to possess the land
creatively and not in terms of power and force and dominance,” Jew,
Christian, and Muslim alike. Such was the Jews’ moral obligation and
their historic right, as “natives of the land who never wholly abandoned
either a theoretical or a practical claim to its possession.”'''
Ludwig had traversed the countryside with Thelma for two weeks,
observing and questioning all that he saw, before returning to Jerusalem
for a brief period of relaxation, reflection, and writing. “We had seen
377
Page 397 - [see page image]
378
Ludwig Lewisohn
the desert cities and the Dead Sea; we had seen the trees of Mertulla,
farthest north of our colonies from the hill-top of Safed.” It was, he
realized, “a small land and a poor land,” but one that “can harbor a
few millions of our people,” and “as in ancient days . . . give birth to
ideas that mankind will not willingly let die.” 62
Yet he remained torn between the conflicting appeals of the ancient
teachings, nurtured in exile, and the negation of that experience by so
much of this new venture. Throughout the centuries-long Diasporan
experience, return and resettlement had been undertaken for religious
reasons. But “the growing conviction that, in various alien and often
hostile civilizations in which the Jew has dwelt, there has been a loss of
both human dignity and national creative power” was now challenging
the value of these past millennia. Had life before this latest effort not
been normal? Could only the building of a national culture on their
own land, with their own native language, and out of the physical toil
of their own people, “liberate” the Jews from their minority status and
exile mentality, and, thereby, produce a new and spiritually healthier
individual and people? Ludwig was too much the classicist, too much the
product of the Diaspora, to readily affirm such notions, reserving final
judgment until after a more sustained look at the new Jewish peasantry
of the collective settlements, though convinced from the outset that the
Jews, by virtue of their unique “functioning upon the scene of human
history,” were “a peculiar people” meant for something other than the
life common to other nations. 63
On October 23, Ludwig wrote Leonard that after spending a “re
markable week” in Jerusalem, they were about to set out for “the agri
cultural colonies through which the land of Israel is to be reclaimed.''"'
His several days’ visit left him impressed with the earnestness and spirit,
indeed, with the transforming work of the Zionist pioneers upon the land
and upon themselves—as well as with their hope that, in the manner of
the biblical prophets, their light would go forth to illuminate the world.
“He has been here for forty years,” he wrote of one settler he met.
He is gnarled and hardy. A Jewish pioneer who has fought the wilderness
and won the fight.... He is pioneer, farmer, thinker, too. He speaks Russian
and German and, of course, Hebrew. He has been through much—through
the Turkish conscription of his sons, through the Arab attack of 1921. An
intrepid and yet quiet spirit. He has literally turned the wilderness into a
garden; he has reclaimed a portion of Eretz Israel and set an example to the
generations to come. Now he tells us has come the age of a Jewish and a
quiet life in the old land. As a Jew, he has conquered his piece of earth, but
he does not dream of power or force. He dreams of the creative activities
of the Jewish spirit for his posterity, for his people, for mankind. 65
Page 398 - [see page image]
Journey East
Everywhere Ludwig found a spirit that touched the old romantic and
the developing Jew within himself. “Heroic suffering, heroic endurance,
often heroic failure,” these were the elements of highest human drama,
played upon a stage built by his own people, “proof of the possibility of
the upbuilding of Palestine ... in the homeland of our race.” 66
Yet ultimately he remained unconvinced that normalcy for Jews
should be based upon a Western Christian model of physical labor
and peasant folk culture, “romantic notions of folk, solidarity, loyalty,
which did not arise until the heathen, the primitive peoples of the
heaths and forests of Europe had completely drained Christianity of its
Jewish content, divorced it from its Jewish origin and substituted a new
Pantheon of gods for the last of the Prophets. '' Could a civilization
so constructed, so drained of its Jewish origins, provide a desirable
blueprint for the Zionist experiment of Jewish rebirth? Was the Diaspora
experience, lived outside of this vision of normalcy and in ideological
opposition to it, necessarily self-defeating and uncreative? To wipe away
the centuries of Jewish life with a “high and noble and generous vision
that has cast its spell upon many of the finest spirits of the movement”
was clearly, for Ludwig, an error of gravest proportion, both for the
direction of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) and for what
it legitimized in a Europe that now threatened the safety of those who
would not be emigrating.
I see life in soberer colors. I distrust that vision because I suspect its
origin. That origin is romantic; it derives from the same sources and the
romantic muddleheadedness, the false cultivation of the primitive which
is characteristic of the honest anti-Semite and patriotic nationalist in all
countries. The primitive epic and folk-lyric are forever charming, forever
precious. But they grow out of a society and a social consciousness of myth
and religion and war and barbaric dreams and virtues from which humanity
must slowly liberate itself if human life is to be worth living at all. 68
Far too many Zionist leaders had fallen under the spell of the
“Central European folkists and nationalists,” many of whom were anti-
Semitic, and had continued to claim, despite all the efforts in Palestine,
that Jews were unproductive and parasitic. The overturning of age-old
barriers to land ownership and the wielding of building and farming
tools by the Zionists had not silenced these vehement detractors any
more than they had helped to make reasonable those “radical Zionists”
who similarly held the labor of one’s hands to be honorable and that of
the mind ignoble. To have accepted this analysis would have required
them to admit that the Diasporan experience held much that remained
essential. To these Zionists, Ludwig offered a reminder that a modern
civilization could only be built upon the labor of both. “To reproach
379
Page 399 - [see page image]
380
Ludwig Lewisohn
us for not being farmers and tinsmiths is the last refuge of impertinent
stupidity. To accept the reproach is to share the romantic muddlehead
edness which gave it birth.""'
The Jews in Palestine, as elsewhere, were not meant to be a “folk like
other folks . . . [but] to be ourselves,” centered in those ideals which no
other people had so fully developed or so uncompromisingly maintained,
even to the point of martyrdom. 70 “Our uniqueness is due to certain
original moral qualities which history has preserved and intensified.
We are still rebels, destroyers, seekers of abstract justice, hostile to
the sacredness of the state, passionate for a Messianic kingdom on
Earth."' 1 The Jews were either “on the side of liberty, tolerance, peace,”
or they were nothing. To abandon the life and history that had sustained
these ideals was to abandon the Jews’ function and greatest service to
mankind. One more folksong, regardless of its beauty and authentic
ity, could not replace this core expression nor ensure the future of its
composers. Quick to praise those who were “destroying Ghetto and
exile . . . not by futile argument but by the creative act of an heroic life”
capable of saving lives and renewing the spiritual life of the Diaspora,
he yet insisted that these halutzim acknowledge that the transference of
thoughts and cultural patterns from one milieu to another had supported
their efforts and made them more meaningful. It was this baggage of
ideas and mores that would liberate Jews wherever they chose to live as
Jews, and not disembodied notions of alien origin. “For it must never be
forgotten that the men and women in these Kvuzoth are not hardened
and insensitive peasants. They are city-people, students, thinkers, with
nerves made sensitive by generations of persecution, with minds made
acute by two thousand years of study and meditation, with senses that
cry out for beauty and music and modulated speech.”
How ill-conceived, then, were these agricultural collectives whose
needs had subordinated the individual wills of its members, however
willingly they had entered these communities. And even more so the wills
of those sons and daughters who had not voluntarily determined this
course for their own lives. “Suppose among the children there are artist
natures—creatures born to think, to write, to make music,” he queried in
obvious self-projection. “But I need hardly suppose. Are they not Jews?”
He might be viewed as a “vulgar anti-Bolshevik,” but he could not desist
from openly questioning what he nonetheless praised as a “magnificent
singleness of purpose in the pursuit of an end embraced.” For was there
not the real possibility that so all-consuming a vision might easily foster
“the contamination of our life by the supiness, the mass-life, the morbid
and dangerous submersion of personality” so characteristic of czarist
and Soviet Russia, which so many of these settlers had fled? “To me the
Page 400 - [see page image]
Journey East
creative individual is the aim, fruit, goal, meaning of human life. And are
we not a people of individualists, protestants, moral revolutionaries?”
Had the kibbutz builders lost sight of this fundamental tenet of the
Jewish enterprise in their quest to re-create themselves?''
For this reason he felt a far greater affinity for the moshav, those
settlements where each family owned its own parcel of land, shar
ing common necessities only, combining communal cooperation with
the opportunity to go to one’s own home at day’s end, a “liberty. . .
fundamental and important in any healthy human society.” The slate
of Jewish life—individually, familially, and communally—could not be
wiped clean, nor should it be, Ludwig believed. ' Yet even the moshav
seemed to lack an element of Jewish authenticity, cut off, as it was,
from its more urban roots. In this newly emerging Jewish world, Ludwig
insisted, the older forces of the ghetto dweller, dreaming of a spiritual
Jerusalem forever at an unbridgeable distance, had to mix with the spirit
that had brought the halutzim to Palestine to build this earthly Zion.
Where else but in Tel Aviv, begun only fifteen years earlier, would he
find what he had come to see? “Not a city of refuge, a city of denial. . .
[but] a city built by men who wanted this city, who built it to express
themselves,” a Jewish city where “every spadeful of earth has been
turned by Jews, every brick has been laid by Jews”—where “the mass-
life of the people [was] expressing itself in the true folk way,” singing
and dancing to Hebrew melodies, and honoring the achievements of
their prophets and philosophers, poets and political seers, by naming
the streets for these cultural heroes. 75
Tel Aviv had stirred Ludwig’s emotions as no other site had, touching
something beyond his desire to celebrate this rebirth of his people. The
very physical setting itself seemed to draw out deeply rooted Jewish
sensibilities with which he was only now feeling at ease, sensibilities that
were tied to disturbing memories of his childhood, of his parents’ am
bivalence toward their origins, and of the struggle he had waged between
a discomforting knowledge of this Jewish past and an equally discom
forting desire to become what he never could. A visit with Ahad Ha-am,
with whose ideas concerning nonpolitical cultural Zionism Ludwig felt
most comfortable, had brought these memories of an earlier city and
time in his life rushing back into the present. Here was “the small white
house with its graceful arches and general air of dreamy amplitude,” set
among a variety of palms and other semitropical vegetation, all bathed
in the light of a Mediterranean sky with the “feel [of] the magic of the
ever-present sea” filling the air. 76
The images of Charleston that Tel Aviv had conjured as he searched
for a new spiritual center, the exact role played by this new Queenshaven
381
Page 401 - [see page image]
382
Ludwig Lewisohn
in solidifying his thoughts about Zionism and the Diaspora, were left
unrecorded. Yet clearly he carried from it a stronger vision of the Jews’
future and of his place within it. For the first time, he had seen a
community of Jews creating a new homeland and a new culture, living in
an unreservedly assertive manner and with “an indomitable confidence
that somehow the stars in their courses, the energies that shape the
historic process, are on the side of that self-recollection on the part of the
Jewish people of which the upbuilding of the land is both the expression
and the symbol." ~ Tel Aviv, he maintained, was not “a treatise on Jewish
apologetics.” The Jews’ need for self-defense through assimilation was
passing. Indeed, all of Jewish Palestine was proof of this—and Tel
Aviv, its highest expression, even more so. No debate, no argument, no
reasoned rebuttal, no further discussion with gentile detractors would
ever again be necessary or tolerated. By “their spirit and the spirit of
their work,” the halutzim (whatever theoretical errors they may have
committed in some quarters) had added “to the permanent possessions
of all men and are becoming part of our lives’ unalterable good.” 78
One day, assimilatory posturing would belong to the past. Those Jews
still living in its shadow could take courage from the example of this
new adventure and assert, not request, their right to be Jews, freely
expressing themselves and their unique perspective through their own
cultural devices. “Everywhere else in the world we live and labor as
German Jews or English or Polish or American Jews. Here we are Jewish
Jews.” 79 Why not, he proposed, in the Diaspora as well, particularly in
America, where the physical oppression experienced by Jews in Europe
had all but disappeared (though fear of it had not)?
Young and old people strolled along the streets in groups and chatted
and sang and the sound of their speech and song came in with the mild
air through the wide open windows. Speech and song were in Hebrew,
occasionally in Yiddish. And in those singing and speaking voices there was
a freedom and a spontaneity that went straight to the heart. I had never
heard Jews speak so or sing on summer nights on either Riverside Drive or
Second Avenue. But suddenly I knew that they wanted to do so, that it was
natural to do so, but that in New York they dared not do so because they
knew that hostile ears would hear them and hostile lips would say: Vulgar,
noisy Jews.. . . The virtue of Tel Aviv is that the Jews can be noisy there
without hesitation. The highest virtue of Tel Aviv is that its example may
teach Jews to be noisy everywhere in the world.'
Born of the need to arouse within himself and the Jews of America “a
higher degree of solidarity and so of freedom and of self-respect,” Israel
served as Ludwig’s first polemic against assimilation and its root cause,
“indiscriminate munificence” toward non-Jewish, even anti-Semitic, in-
Page 402 - [see page image]
383
Journey East
stitutions fostered by an attempt “to buy toleration and respect.” If many
in the Diaspora felt “grateful for the freedom in the life of economic
competition, [and] for not having their houses mobbed and their temples
desecrated,” he demanded more. 81 “The Palestine experience completed
in me a process of imaginative dissociation.” Never again would he
consider defining himself by “imaginatively and emotionally substituting
Gentile history for [his] own.” Though assimilated Jews would continue
to “be scholars and masters of speech and will bear beautiful Nordic
names,” he warned that “an element of grotesqueness will cling to their
Gentile correctness,” as it had to the southern Christian gentleman’s
mask he had once worn. And like his own, their facade would one day
be torn away by the “grins and whispers behind their backs” of those
whom they unacceptably aped, and by “an element of strain, of excess,
almost of hysteria,” that would invade and begin to destroy their souls. - J
Here was the “deeper and subtler message” of Palestine for which he had
long searched elsewhere. And though he was never to make it his home,
this Holy Land would remain forever the one fixed, spiritual center of
his life.
Here, at last, was my earth. I felt it at once. I knew. Never, I dare say, shall
I be able to dwell upon that earth. It does not matter. At last I know, no
longer as a theory but as a living fact, the ultimate meaning of Galuth, of
exile, and the element which constitutes that exile for us by our lack of
it. Man is a memoried being. He is allied to his kind by the imaginative
reconstruction within him of the history of his people upon a given soil.
But wherever we dwell in the diaspora we have been the objects not the
subjects of the historic process. No forest, city, tower, no hill or stream or
monument, no work of nature and no work of man has a creative memory
for us. . . . Even the pure unhistoried earth of America is not wholly mine.
Deeply as I have loved it, I am an alien there too. So as soon as I express
the inmost me—not the economic man or the mere man of knowledge—I
come into collision with folk-ways and beliefs and laws as alien to me as
the notion that my ancestors poisoned the wells.. . . But Jerusalem is not
quaint to me nor the hill-country of Ephraim nor Carmel by the sea nor
Tiberias, though founded by a Roman, nor Safed on her hill. The earth is
mine—is ours. Between this soil and these stars we became what we are;
here we created our image and our God who is the projection and symbol
of that image and our law which still commands us when both our minds
and our hearts have forgotten it. 83
Page 403 - [see page image]
384
15
Teshuvah
Ludwig and Thelma began their return from the East as they had
ended it, boarding the westward train from Jerusalem to Cairo on
November 8, 1924. Arriving in Cairo that evening, he sent a note of
thanks to Gershon Agronsky, Jerusalem journalist and that city’s future
mayor, asking that he pass along their appreciation and thanks to all
who had befriended them during their visit. Having failed to meet
Colonel Frederick Kisch, a former British soldier now serving as head
of the Jewish Agency’s political department in Jerusalem, he further
asked Agronsky to send him the title of Kisch’s well-received Hebrew
textbook. 1 Ludwig’s life had, indeed, been transformed. “Every Jew
can find himself,” he wrote in concluding Israel. “I have done so. Not
everyone need go on so long a pilgrimage,” though, clearly, his journey
had had an inestimable impact upon him. “But everyone can come home
to himself and to Israel.” 2
Two days after leaving Jerusalem, they disembarked in Trieste, then
passed through Austria (perhaps briefly visiting their new Viennese
friends), and arrived in Czechoslovakia on November 12. 3 After an
unrecorded period of further travels, they came to Rome to visit historic
sites made obligatory for Ludwig by his journey to Jerusalem. “There
are three ways of life in the Western World: the Pagan, the Christian, the
Jewish,” 4 he wrote four years later when tracing the spiritual progress
of those days. He had seen the land in which the latter was rooted, and,
as if to confirm the vision of himself within it, now sought out what
he believed to be the most authentic expressions of those two other
traditions he had once tried to make his own.
Page 404 - [see page image]
385
Teshuvah
That Ludwig again recalled his Charleston days while in Rome, as
he had in Tel Aviv weeks earlier, was not surprising. How else might his
imaginative powers have reconciled his past without somehow placing
himself within it? Thirty-five miles north of Rome, while passing through
the town of Orvieto set along the Tiber, “there stole into my mind a
forgotten and now suddenly recovered hour of long ago. I saw a bright
Queenshaven college classroom; I saw the faces, blurred and a little
featureless as in a dream, of my classmates and heard across the years the
high slightly hoarse voice of our professor: ‘Credat Judaeus Apella!’
Here were all the elements for a breakthrough of Freudian proportions—
Queenshaven, the city of his mother, the one person who provided his
only link to an otherwise discarded tradition; the college, opening West
ern civilization to him for study, but not as a place in which he could re
side; his classmates, who recognized his brilliance but found him socially
unacceptable; and the professor, whom he held in highest regard but who
looked upon the best student of his teaching years as a challenge of re
creation, remaking the Jew into a higher Christian form. And finally,
there were the words of Horace, whose writing Ludwig had chosen and
had so ably and conscientiously translated as his high school valedictory
presentation—words that now cut deeply, as he recalled they had when
at the age of sixteen, already facing so much rejection from the world that
“was not mine,” he had “winced inwardly” at Harris’s repetition of Ho
race’s repudiation of an alien religion, “Let Apella, the Jew, believe that! ”
Ludwig further recalled the speed with which he had “expelled” this
reaction from his thoughts, practicing the “imaginative dissociation”
necessary to his hopes of belonging. With the passage of those many
years, he had come to understand what had happened to him and why
the crises he had faced since then had ultimately brought him back to
what was his by birth, by rejection, and by choice. “Is that situation alone
not enough to warp the psychical development and health of anyone?
You are immersed in a given civilization and you must fear any voice
from that civilization that concerns yourself, your fathers, your blood.
Worst of all, you come to believe those voices.” 6
But no longer. All of this, and most sharply the long Western tradi
tion of anti-Semitism that predated Christianity (“and may easily survive
it”), he felt in Rome. No matter how splendid or decadent the period
or place, Jews had forever been objects of fear and hate, dissenters
“opposing the spirit to the world.” Rome proved recuperative from the
psychic damage he still carried within himself, despite the healing that
had already occurred in Palestine. “It is well for a Jew to go to Rome
and on the Forum ... or on the Vatican to survey in imagination that
pageant of history.” 7
Page 405 - [see page image]
386
Ludwig Lewisohn
Small wonder, then, that the sites of Rome which earlier in his
life would have been spellbinding, now left Ludwig uninspired and
wondering if others “intelligent in their way like myself” had found
the Sistine Chapel and similar works equally wearisome, if magnificent
in execution. “We saw all the obligatory things in Rome. But these were
only details in the historic vision . . . that reaches neither my heart nor
my mind.. . . What they are saying is archaic and alien to the point
of meaninglessness.” Would he be thought “barbarous” for such a
reaction?* It seemed no longer to matter.
Time had come for Ludwig to finish Israel and for Thelma to pursue
the singing career for which she had come to Europe. Of the cities they
had visited since leaving New York, Vienna, with its circle of friends and
lively cultural setting, had seemed most conducive. Here they hoped to
find the understanding and restfulness they needed to carry on their lives
together and to engage in the work they had planned. They had made ar
rangements to return even before leaving for Palestine. In late November,
friends lent them an apartment at the Pension Franz, Wahringestrasse
12. Aside from occasional trips to Germany and Czechoslovakia, they
would remain there until November of the following year. 9 On December
3, 1924, Ludwig sent a brief message to Leonard: “We are now settling
down for a few months in Vienna, I to write a book of some sort, Thelma
to give a concert."' 1 '
Awaiting them in Vienna was a letter from Edgar Lee Masters
thanking them for their note from Palestine and for Ludwig’s positive
review of his New Spoon River. He and others, Masters noted, looked
forward to Ludwig’s “safe return to these shores, where if the chances for
the free spirit are not so abundant there are still friends here to welcome
you.” 11 But Masters knew nothing of the problems such a return would
present. Waiting in Vienna as well was news of the entangling marital
web that Mary had continued to weave during Ludwig’s time in Pales
tine. Contacting a number of Zionist leaders, she was now vigorously
attempting to disrupt his professional life, thereby hoping to destroy the
peace that he and Thelma had come to find among their Viennese friends.
Mary had first approached Stephen Wise on October 14, requesting
a meeting with him to discuss a “personal matter of great importance.” 1:
They had met sometime over the week and a half that followed, during
which time she had asked that Wise intercede on her behalf and stop
all funds being paid by the Zionists to Ludwig because of his breach
of the separation agreement signed before leaving for Europe. After
investigating the circumstances of Ludwig’s mission, Wise reported back
to Mary that neither he nor anyone else in the Zionist Organization of
America (ZOA) or the World Zionist Organization (WZO) could stop
Page 406 - [see page image]
387
Teshuvah
this payment. The trip had been privately arranged by Chaim Weizmann,
and only he could act on her behalf. ; ' Anticipating an unfavorable
response from Wise, Mary had written a second appeal to him on the
very day that he had answered her first. Pleading her case more forcefully
than before, she pointed to the sacrifices she had made on Ludwig’s
behalf, to the generosity she had shown him, and to the desperate
situation her failing health had left her in now that he was withholding
money that was rightfully hers. Should he not soon pay what was owed,
she would seek her revenge.
It is difficult to pack the tragedy of a lifetime into a half hour session.
Let me add, except for the direct need, need which in view of my present
physical condition may easily culminate in my death, I would never have
put my case at all. It was wholly within my power to have blocked my
husband’s way to citizenship [granted on June 25, 1924] and to have held
him here in this country under bond. I chose to be magnanimous. Despite
his cruelly dishonest dealings with me in his obsession for Miss Spear, I
believed that my generosity would touch a core of ultimate rectitude in him
and would awaken in him some sense of his life obligations to me. I was
the more deceived. In the words of his favourite Nietzsche: He is not “to
be redeemed from revenge.” 1 '
By her own accounting, Ludwig owed her some $850. Out of
sympathy or impatience, Wise advised Mary to contact ZOA chairman
Louis Lipsky through Henrietta Szold, who was acting in that capacity
during Lipsky’s trip to the WZO office in London.'' Mary visited Szold
on November 12, the day of Ludwig’s arrival in Czechoslovakia. She
presented her case, asking that Weizmann exert sufficient pressure upon
Ludwig to force his compliance with the court order. While neither
taking a position nor offering any suggestions, Szold agreed to relate
the matter to Lipsky, writing him that Mary appeared to have no other
source of income but this defaulted alimony, having claimed that ill-
health prevented her from seeking employment. "
Lipsky’s reply, if made directly to Mary, has not survived. Perhaps
it was at his impetus that she ultimately wrote directly to Weizmann
on December 2, the day Ludwig had written Leonard of their return to
Vienna. Mary began her “bare act of justice” by naming Ludwig as the
cause of her “painful situation which has arisen out of this European
adventure on which you have sent my husband.” Rehearsing the events
and grievances of the previous fifteen months, beginning with her trip to
California and Ludwig’s departure from their home during her absence,
she spoke again, as she had to Wise, of her generosity toward Ludwig,
adding that he was “a sick man, not a wicked man,” toward whom
she had long acted with “tenderness and compassion” in an attempt
Page 407 - [see page image]
388
Ludwig Lewisohn
“to protect him from the results of his own rash mistakes.” But near
starvation and in need of hospital care, and without the means to
remedy either, she could no longer afford silence and understanding.
Asking Weizmann “to adjust this matter with my husband,” she ended
by threatening wider consequences, certain that “it cannot help the cause
of Zionism that the man you have chosen to plead for the starving
Jews is, meantime, starving his Gentile wife.” She had already written
to Villard at the Nation, she told Weizmann. Wishing to deflect any
appearance of anti-Semitism, she added that “The Jews themselves,
among whom I number many of my dearest friends, would be the very
first to resent it.” 17
However inaccurate her assessment of Jewish concern over Ludwig’s
private affairs might prove to be, the Zionists could ill afford to ignore
her threat of moral wrongdoing by association. Gentile support was
too crucial to their efforts. Weizmann had little choice but to intercede,
however mildly, and on December 11 wrote to both Mary and Ludwig.
Grieved to learn of her problem, he assured her that he had been unaware
of these “private arrangements,” his knowledge of their affairs being
limited only to what the press had reported before Ludwig’s departure
for Europe. With his mission now over, it had become more difficult “to
interfere usefully in a matter of this kind.” Yet, Weizmann assured her
that he would do all he could, promising to communicate with Ludwig
immediately. 18
Weizmann’s letter to Ludwig took on an almost apologetic tone in
contrast to the more sympathetic nature of his response to Mary. “I
am extremely sorry to have to write to you on a matter which is really
entirely your private concern,” he noted regretfully. He wished only
to call Ludwig’s “attention” to the situation. Having intervened rather
“unwillingly,” he urged Ludwig to do what was most “desirable” under
the circumstances through an “adjustment” of some kind. 19
Ludwig’s exact response is unknown, but given Mary’s continuing
pursuit of the matter, it could not have been what either she or Weizmann
had hoped for. With an ocean and a strengthened sense of his identity as
a Jew between them, Ludwig felt freer from Mary and the courts than
ever before. There was no reason to renew his bondage to her or to the
system that had supported these claims upon him. “Even that did not
mar our Eden,” Thelma later recalled. “The moment we settled down
there we felt at home.” 20
For Thelma, Vienna represented the chance to study and to perform
the music she prized. Here, too, she could look forward to setting up
their first real home since their rabbinic marriage in Poland some months
earlier. Ludwig himself was anxious to see her career blossom (he had
Page 408 - [see page image]
389
Teshuvah
already arranged for her first public recital in Jerusalem), but was less
at ease at first than his new bride. “I felt a constant unrest during the
first six or eight months of our residence there,” despite the presence
of all things cultural and social that he cared about, and “in greater
measure than I could hope to have it in America.” Was it homesickness,
or thoughts of exile that plagued him?
After each day’s writing, he and Thelma would walk through Turk-
enschanz Park and stop for tea at a cafe. Chestnut trees were in bloom
that spring of 1925, and in the distance the sound of an orchestra could
be heard. As he sat enjoying the moment one afternoon, he suddenly
realized that it was this very relaxation, and the differing rhythm of
life in Vienna, that had so unnerved him. Years of struggle on so many
fronts had left him unable to manage the peace. But this realization
itself now brought the release he had needed for so long. With Thelma
beside him and friends awaiting his company, and with a vision of
himself firmly rooted in the Jewish experience, he sat back and merely
enjoyed thoughts of work and Thelma. “The striving and crying ... in
futile directions” had given way; “an entirely new rhythm” had come
to dominate his life. 21
It would, of course, have been totally foreign to Ludwig not to feel
some measurable degree of uneasiness, even in the “infinitely congenial”
atmosphere that Jewish Vienna offered him. I “could not be blind to the
fundamental resistance to [Jews] of the people of the country,” he wrote
in Mid-Channel. 22 Clearly, Vienna’s anti-Semitism had fixed itself upon
his consciousness as it had upon the activities and thoughts of his friends.
It was, after all, during this same period that Ludwig underwent analysis
with Freud, ending it abruptly when, after only a few sessions, he feared
the loss of his anxieties and, thereby, the destruction of what had driven
him as a writer. 23 If Arthur Schnitzler and the others could create a
“special Vienna . . . [as] a defensive Jewish dream and wish fulfillment”
in which to reside, he could not. Nor could he agree to accommodate
himself to social realities, as Freud may have suggested. 24
For it was his anxiety as a Jew in an alien world and the “psychical
difficulty” 25 caused by it that had carried him through the worst years
and enabled him to find the meaning and success in life he now enjoyed.
In Vienna, at work on Israel as an expression of his own experiences
refracted through those of his people, he could not chance losing what
had mistakenly brought him to Freud. Instead, he eased the day’s writing
tensions with walks through the park and by listening to Thelma quietly
singing their favorite lieder, until the evening’s distractions of friends and
theater readied him for the morning’s work that followed. And when
Page 409 - [see page image]
390
Ludwig Lewisohn
more rarified air was needed, he and Thelma would escape to the Alps
and the small villages that dotted them.
By March 7, 1925, Israel was taking final shape. Parts of it had
already appeared in the Nation, Menorah Journal, and Harper’s while
they were still in Palestine, and would continue to do so until days before
the book’s publication. “I have been hard at work on ‘Israel,’ ” he wrote
Spingarn, “a long and complicated book, touching all the shores of
thought—now rapidly approaching completion."''' The work had led
him into unfamiliar territory, requiring him to study Jewish history,
its classical texts, and the language in which they had originally been
written. “During the greater part of our stay in Vienna I was busy with
the composition of Israel—I studied very hard,” he recalled in Mid-
Channel, “since I felt deeply my lack of the knowledge I most needed.”
He wished that he had been taught this material as a child, and that he
had not wasted so many years on “quite needless things. Yet, if he was
saddened by the realization of time squandered in areas of study that no
longer mattered to him, he did not grow despondent, as he might have
“in those old, evil, restless days” before Europe and Palestine.-'
Other thoughts came to Ludwig as he spent these months in and
around Vienna completing Israel, thoughts that could not wait for
the book’s publication, concerns over the spreading despair of Central
Europe that seemed far worse than the postwar reaction to destruction
and the inflation that had followed (and was now dissipating). A search
for order and peace through romantic nationalism and dictatorship
was under way which, if unchecked, would lead to certain destruction
for Western civilization. Those first postwar years of open protest had
passed, replaced now by an eerie calm, a “miasma of white terror . . .
in the air,” which could provide “neither equilibrium nor revolution . . .
peace nor war.” Weariness and exhaustion, and the shaking of heads in
despair—these were evident everywhere. “There are evil years ahead,”
Ludwig wrote the Nation from Munich on April 10, 1925.
And everywhere there was an absence of new ideas, of new writers
seeking solutions. “The pre-war masters are touched, of course, by the
general weariness, the universal lack of tone and hope . . . [but] some
thing of the old bloom, the old aroma, is gone” from their work. They
seemed inadequate to the task of responding to this “sordid, troubled
life of men,” while “no new men” appeared able or willing to speak out
in print “against the vulgarities of force and nationalism.” Only silence
was present as a possible protest against the younger generation who
were largely “either red or white, Communist or Fascist—cultivators
of ‘discipline and order,’ by which they mean force and fraud.” Liter
ature, which had traditionally liberated the oppressed and dispirited,
Page 410 - [see page image]
391
Teshuvah
served only as tired analysis or escape, not as warning and path-finder.
Europeans who sought a new voice had begun to look beyond these
traditional sources for some liberating expression, dangerously turning
for direction and hope to the promises of a new order.
Literature is no isolated thing. It expresses life and is guided by life. And
life, on the entire Continent today, is sterile. It may be, though I doubt it,
that from these ruins a new civilization will arise with new impulses and
new forms of life and therefore of literature. But where liberty is a by
word and flexibility is viewed with suspicion and liberalism is powerless,
there can be no hope for literature in that great tradition which from Isaiah
and Plato to Dehmel and Whitman has shaped the art of the Western
World. Fascism and Leninism are re-medievalizing Europe. The individual
is silenced; the free personality is forced to the wall. Neither Camelots
du Roi nor Hakenkreuzler nor Blackshirts nor Awakening Magyars nor
Communist Puritans are likely to continue the tradition of the literature of
the free spirit of man.
“Who remains?” Ludwig asked as he looked out over the clouded
horizon. “A few isolated liberals. A few Jews. These avert their eyes.
Wistfully they look toward America or Palestine. The rest is silence.”
While the masses were turning toward these false messianisms, this
anxiety-ridden minority, knowing little about America, was mistakenly
mythologizing it in their desperation for “a source of some new impulse
toward a clearer and more beautiful way of life.. . . Liberals hard-
pressed between the dictatorships of the right and the left dream of
the valiant democracy overseas . . . [and] for the name and way of sal
vation.” In comparison, their needs were so much greater than Ludwig’s
own insistence upon those “small, seemly liberties” that had made for
a more “decent personal life.” Even Ludwig readily admitted to the
difference between a society imposing the Mann and Volstead Acts and
those seeking to deny the basic liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
“I find myself, curiously enough, defending America. Upon the whole,
the government leaves us alone, except to collect the income-tax.” And
because of this, the preoccupation with economics and politics, central
to the life of Europe’s writers and artists, was mostly absent in the work
of their American counterparts. Instead, they had sought “to break up
the mechanical, imitative mass-life, to liberate the individual, to urge
American men and women to live by their taste and their intelligence,
not by their prejudices and their tribal passions.”
Yet, as positive as Ludwig was of this fundamental difference in
personal freedom, he sounded a warning to those Americans reading
his analysis: “The infection is spreading.” It was already in England,
and on its way to America. “There are Americans who begin to take
Page 411 - [see page image]
392
Ludwig Lewisohn
the tone of mystical Nordics and, in their comparative innocence, are
trying to drag into our midst the romanticism of race myths and hate
and blood,” out of which this restrictiveness was developing. He had
met these nativists among the critics of Up Stream and among the
“ultra-academics” whose ideas were, “however unconsciously, in league
with its most evil consequences.” And then there were those legislators
who were politely restricting immigration, or, in their more activist
incarnation, becoming fervent members of the Ku Klux Klan. 30
That same month a portion of Israel's first chapter was published
in Harper’s under the title “The Art of Being a Jew.” In a subsequently
unrepeated opening paragraph, Ludwig pointed to the Jew’s need to
wear “psychical and social clothes” of his own choice, according to his
own conscience, and not those the world would have him don. “Every
act of living for him is an act of deliberate and difficult choice” between
two ways of being, and in the choosing, the Jews’ experience had taken
on “a significance that quite transcends the Jewish problem. . . [and
is] open to our entire civilization at its crossroads of choice.” Despite
Ludwig’s claim that Israel had been written for the American Jew, he
had thrown a wider net, hoping to have an impact upon Europeans, Jew
and Christian, among whom he had come to live. It was to be a warning
for all against an Armageddon yet to come. “Two courses are open to
civilization: to cease to identify nationalism with power; to co-operate
in the division of the world’s food and coal and oil; to practice peace and
achieve tolerance. In that case every minority, including the Jews, will be
safe. If on the other hand competitive arming, annexation, international
rapine lead to still other wars—the doom predicted by Spengler will
inevitably fall upon Christendom and the Jewry of the dispersion will
go down with its few friends and many foes in a common disaster." '
While never doubting the book’s importance, Ludwig hoped to move
on to new work that spring and rushed to complete the manuscript. On
May 12 he wrote to Spingarn that “the book on the entire Jewish ques
tion ‘Israel’ is completed and has gone off to America.” During these last
weeks, he already had begun to advise the publishing house of Tauchnitz
(“more for fun than for the pay which is minute”) on contemporary
American writers’ works of possible interest to European readers. He
had agreed, as well, to compile an anthology of contemporary American
poetry and essays, “in the course of time.” As he noted in a Saturday
Review article that month, European publishers, “like many people here,
[have] a dim but definite suspicion that something is going on in America
that has importance beyond America,” a discovery that he and Sinclair
Lewis, together with their wives, had discussed with incredulity during
their recent visit together in Vienna.
Page 412 - [see page image]
393
Teshuvah
But neither advising publishers nor compiling anthologies could
fulfill his increasing need for more creative expression. “Even while I
was absorbed ... in the writing of my book, I felt the old pull toward
more strictly creative work, toward the freer play of the imagination,”
he later noted in Mid-Channel. “I wanted to tell a story with a meaning,
but still a story."’ 1 His first attempt was a short fictional piece titled
“Holy Land,” written for T. B. Wells of Harper’s for inclusion in its
forthcoming December issue. As with much of Ludwig’s fiction, “Holy
Land” was an allegory of the recent transition in his life, an element
that probably remained undetected by Wells. The references, however,
are clear. Lew Morrison (Lew-ison’s earlier self), “the blond man across
the table from me,” travels with his “frankly middle-aged, tall, thin,
wistful” wife (Mary) to Palestine by boat from Alexandria and then
overland by rail to Jerusalem. For the first time, Ludwig portrayed Mary,
however guardedly, as aged and somewhat unkempt, and wearing the
kimono he would later make infamous in his portrait of the slovenly
wife in Crump. The Morrisons were from Albion, Wisconsin, American
Protestants of English descent from the Midwest on tour in the land of
Jesus; but at every turn signs of Jewish life appeared. It was simply not
how they had imagined it would be, particularly not Mrs. Morrison,
daughter of a Methodist minister, who grew increasingly disturbed by
the Jewishness of her surroundings. Though “some of her best friends in
Albion were Jewish,” they were “nice Jews” like the story’s narrator, to
whom she described the Jews of Palestine as “awful outlandish people.”
Disappointed and frightened by so many different peoples in addition
to these Jews, she decided to gather up her husband and leave for home
as soon as possible. 14
I can’t imagine anything anywhere. ... I want to get away; I want to get
out of this terrible dago country.... I just somehow don’t seem to feel right
here. I guess things have changed a lot since our Lord’s time. I can think
of Him better at home. Do you know what I’m going to do? . . . When we
get home I’m going to take a trip to Liberty, Wisconsin—that’s the place I
always remember from the time when I was a girl. And I’ll go to the little
church where my father used to preach and have a good prayer and a good
cry and try . . . to find my Saviour again.”
On the morning of their departure, seated before a bowl of oatmeal not
quite measuring Lew Morrison’s standard, he exclaimed, “I tell you . . .
we know how to live in America. I don’t care what anybody says. I’ll be
glad to get back to the good old U.S.A.” 36 In the “Holy Land,” Ludwig
had said his final good-bye to the world of his assimilating youth and
to the woman with whom he so clearly identified it. Never again would
either appear so benign.
Page 413 - [see page image]
394
Ludwig Lewisohn
Dispatching the story to America, Ludwig and Thelma, now busily
studying and preparing for several recitals, accepted a physician friend’s
advice of a month’s rest, exercise, and dieting at Marienbad. “Here was a
real vacation, time to play with, to waste, if need be.” But this stay would
be far shorter than his memory recalled in Mid-Channel; he simply could
not waste so much time in one place, nor diet as instructed. On May 21,
Ludwig had written to Leonard describing the previous winter as “full
and interesting,” though the book had been “very laborious.” They were
scheduled to leave for a two months’ vacation on June 1, after which
they planned to return to Vienna for several weeks before going home
to the States, “I hope.” 37 But on June 6 they were still in Vienna, from
where he sent a postcard to Upton Sinclair, informing him that Israel was
finished and would reach him in the fall, and that Thelma had given “two
successful song-recitals.” He closed by adding that Sinclair himself was
“very famous in this part of the world,” Ludwig often having discussed
his work with friends. M
Thomas Mann’s visit to Ludwig and Thelma further delayed their
departure, 39 but on June 19 they left Vienna, retracing their earlier trip
to southern Europe with “a little jaunt to Venice and Rome after a
busy winter and spring,” as he related to Leonard on their first day
out. Following a visit to Verona, they made their way to Trieste, where
on July 3 Ludwig wrote Leonard of his visit to the home of Catullus,
whose libertine poetry they had once shared, “a message of affection
and of memory of our old and common direction.
Unaware of Ludwig’s precise plans, and not yet having received his
letter of the nineteenth, Leonard wrote Ludwig on June 24, complaining
of not having heard from him since May. Congratulating his old friend
on the completion of Israel, and Thelma on the successful recognition
her recitals had received, he then went on at length about Mary’s con
tinuing pursuit, before noting how the sympathy he had once had for
Mary’s position had been eradicated by this latest series of vindictive
acts. “The Dragon, still breathing fire, threatens the Mann Act in the
press, should you return; and you are supposed to be divorced and
properly (and respectfully) remarried.. . . Please give me some facts.” 1 ''
Ludwig’s reaction to this news, if he sent one, has not survived. Perhaps
it was too old a request by the time he returned to Vienna, or too
upsetting.
From Trieste, he and Thelma traveled north into Germany, stopping
in Strasbourg, a city of “great charm and intent. . . and excellent beer
and low prices,” and, yet, “no tourists,” before going on to Paris for
a brief stay. Ludwig was learning to take photographs, and already
thought himself more accomplished than Thelma, who apparently had
Page 414 - [see page image]
395
Teshuvah
some prior experience. In the end it was all so quick, he later told
Leonard, “a short outing before settling down to do writer’s work.” 42
On July 14 they crossed into Czechoslovakia to begin a lengthier stay
at the spa in Marienbad where they were to receive the rest and good
food prescribed weeks earlier. He had planned to merely sketch out a
great novel there, hoping that the ills of “careless modern living” would
be flushed away by the pure waters and the exercise and the healthy
portions of proper meals. “The high joy of the ascetic, the discipline of
the body, [and] the at least apparent athleticism of the mind set free from
any sense of the clogging flesh” were aspects he dreamed of experiencing,
believing them missing from his life. Instead, he worked away at what
became Roman Summer, using notes he had begun to take weeks earlier
in Rome while reading Mann’s Magic Mountain. Though Ludwig had
not yet fully sampled the expatriate’s life, he felt comfortable writing
about their adventure in the context of his own, seeing it as a way of
achieving a liberating perspective on life in the States. When completed,
the novel would serve as an explanation and justification for his flight
from Puritan America. 43
He was pleased with its progress by the time of their return to Vienna
on August 8, “invigorated in body and mind,” and anxious to go home
to America. They planned to leave by late fall, and in thinking through
their return to the States, Ludwig placed much of the hopefulness he
felt into the novel’s conclusion: “Then, perhaps at the first touch of
another spring-time, the house that he was planning would be built and
he would take Louise into his arms and his barrenness and tenseness
would be healed, and the falseness of his life gone from him forever."' 1
If Europe and Palestine had offered an opportunity to settle his nerves
and sort through the pieces of his changing life, only a return to his own
world could afford the chance to fully play out the role set before him.
Two weeks after settling back into their Vienna apartment, Ludwig
wrote T. B. Wells that he was “very much pleased” with the reaction to
Holy Land, “the reason being that I am having a sort of creative rebirth,
which needs, at first, a little tenderness of treatment,” but apologized for
not having completed the new manuscript, explaining that he had “been
interrupted for an entire week by the Zionist World Congress here which
has proved to be both humanly and politically—and I mean world-
politically and transcending us—a most thrilling event.” He would now
return to his writing and deliver half by mid-September and the remain
der on October 15, all “written in the fundamentally rather gallant key
it requires. ” 1 '
Yet a flurry of other work, once again begun before the novel was
completed, continued to delay its progress that summer and fall. Ludwig
Page 415 - [see page image]
396
Ludwig Lewisohn
agreed to translate his good friend Jakob Wassermann’s novel Wedlock,
having five years earlier rendered his Christian Wahnschaffe into English
as The World’s Illusion. The contract was signed with Liveright in
August, and by December, Wassermann would send a long letter of
appreciation to Ludwig for the “beautiful” work he had done. Ludwig
worked quickly on the book, “sometimes translating] six or seven hours
a day,” he would recall a decade and a half later, and “on the last day of
it, 46 pages,” hoping to move on to more personally satisfying work. 46
Drawing in September upon themes developed in Israel—of the
hopeless situation of European Jewry and of Palestine as the only so
lution to centuries of persecution, particularly in the aftermath of the
War—Ludwig sent a strong letter to the Nation opposing the Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee’s decision to raise fifteen million dollars
for Russian Jewry, arguing that far more meaningful work could be
accomplished in Palestine with these funds. “Wherever the Jews must
remain a small minority among a European people, there is no security
nor health nor hope. The excuses of the majority differ from century
to century. The Jew is not a Christian. The Jew is not an Aryan. The
Jew is not.. . . The Jew is.. . . An inextricable mass of lies and self-
deception. The Jew is in a minority. The Jew is a Jew. He has been
murdered; he is being murdered; he will be murdered. There is no hope.
No hope—except in Palestine.” All else was folly, clear enough to anyone
who knew the situation well, Ludwig maintained. “If the Jews of today
are not slaughtered, buried alive, crucified, shot, their children will be
tomorrow. To spend one penny on keeping a Jew in Eastern or Central
Europe is to subsidize murder."'" So disturbing were Ludwig’s thoughts
on this issue that Seven Arts, the news feature syndicate, asked Felix
Warburg, a leading American Jewish philanthropist and chairman of
the Joint Committee, for a response prior to the letter’s publication.
None was provided. 48
Ludwig began, as well, to reassess his own position on America,
in part because of the underlying unease he sensed among his Central
European Jewish friends. America now seemed more comfortable than
he had earlier felt it to be. A week after his letter attacking the Joint
Committee, he asked in the Nation, “Can an Artist Live in America?”
Going abroad was enriching, he acknowledged. “Europe is delicious;
Europe is adorable.. . . And your European friends talk art and phi
losophy with a richness and grace that comes of long, inherited, easy
familiarity with the things of the mind.” But it was an alien life, one that
could not touch the American’s unconscious, instinctual artistic sense,
which only extended exposure to its culture could provide. “Life and
landscape strained through language have soaked into your marrow in
Page 416 - [see page image]
397
Teshuvah
one country only. I know the German language as well as most Germans.
It does not matter. I know life here only from without and with my
mind. I know American life with physical antennae, with the tips of my
fingers; I know it through little tones and odors; I know its inarticulate
meanings. I see man in that landscape, against that sky, with those
sounds on his lips.” The expatriated had cut themselves off from their
source, he now realized. Even the most talented could not produce their
finest work in a medium not their own. “Mr. Pound rewrites a minor
Latin poet and Mr. Eliot produces macaronic verses.” Those of lesser
abilities ended by merely “play[ing] with letters.” Not that it was easy
to be an artist exercising a sense of morality in America—but he knew
now that it was possible to “liberate his soul from the heavy pressure
of the fundamentalists, the rabid moralists, the stupid censors.” The
decorousness of European life could not substitute for this victory, nor
provide the idiom the American artist needed for his personal expression.
“Our spirits are housed in bodies and our bodies are dependent on
time and place and circumstance. All artists everywhere should visit
the countries of their dreams. But they must live at home.” 49 Sinclair
Lewis, in agreement “with every remark one hundred per cent,” wrote
Ludwig that “Vastly though I have enjoyed Europe and vastly though I
hope always to return to it, particularly to Germany and Austria, I feel
at present here in New York a grasp of the materials of life such as I
certainly would never have in Europe, even in England." "
In a small book, Modern German Poetry, edited and translated that
summer for Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Book Series designed for home
study, Ludwig stated his hope that his rendering “strikes immediately
upon the heart and mind and musical sense of the well-attuned reader.”
If not, the fault was his, not that of the poets, for “In a hollow room /
Dark with an alien ache, /1 labored at this task,” as he wrote to open
the collection. “Here by these shores that we land on / Piercing desires
give me no rest,” were the lines by Stefan George chosen to close it. 51
They had been to Germany in mid-September, with a ten-day stay in
Berlin “where Thelma gave a recital and repeated her Vienna success.” It
had been a wonderful visit to the city of his birth, with noticeable changes
over the year that had passed. “Berlin struck us as very brilliant this time
and full of interesting and pleasantly disposed people.” Yet they found
it “horribly dear,” since the economy had not yet fully rebounded/-’
France, as they and so many of the expatriates from America had already
discovered, was far more reasonably priced. The family from whom they
had borrowed their Vienna apartment would soon be returning, leaving
them with the unappealing prospect of moving to a hotel. Friends had
encouraged Ludwig to spend more time in Paris, 53 and he himself had
Page 417 - [see page image]
398
Ludwig Lewisohn
not wanted to leave Europe without some further exposure to the “silly
youngsters who are trailing at the tail-end of Da-Da. ” Accommodations,
finances, and the arts all seemed to pull him and Thelma toward the
Left Bank. They would leave Vienna in November, he told Viereck on
September 30 (in a letter thanking his “dear old friend” for the laudatory
preface to the poetry volume), “and probably stay for a while in Paris
before going home.” 54
Ludwig did not know then just how long a stopover Paris would
become. From Leonard and others he had learned of Mary’s continuing
search for some satisfaction, her inexcusable claim that he was the father
of an illegitimate child, as well as a bigamist. Ludwig would discover
some months later that when all else failed, she had approached the
State Department’s immigration section seeking some redress through
their efforts. On October 12, the American consul general in Berlin was
directed to obtain proof from Thelma of Ludwig’s divorce from Mary,
or to restrict her passport to an immediate return to the States. 55
Thelma, of course, could not have produced evidence of a divorce
acceptable to the United States government. Rabbinic divorces held no
legal weight in America. Nor could Ludwig have managed a second
maneuver to bypass the Immigration Act, as he had the previous year.
But living in Vienna, far from these machinations in Washington and
Berlin, he and Thelma continued as before, holding parties in their home
and pursuing their careers, 56 all the while unaware of what awaited them
in the months ahead, or of how much their openness would exacerbate
the situation.
On September 30, Ludwig had written to Henry Hurwitz of the
Menorah Journal suggesting that he include Thelma’s poetry in one of
his upcoming issues. Hurwitz suggested that they place one of her
pieces at the end of Ludwig’s forthcoming article on Martin Buber, in
whose retold Hasidic tales Ludwig had discovered the “psychological”
elements of “inner unity . . . [and] salvation through action,” reasonably
argued as the essence of Judaism and the instinctual response of a Jew to
the idolatrous worship of things, ideas, places, and institutions—what,
in sum, had been Ludwig’s own response to the puritanism of America
and to the dangerous pagan nationalism of Europe/ ' Ludwig selected
Thelma’s “The Secret,” in which she spoke of striking out on “my natural
road . . . [as] a Jew,” first illuminated for her by Ludwig “in his guise /
half ancient memory, half fresh surprise.” 5 ’ More damaging, still, were
two poems they had written to each other, both titled “Portrait.” In
the November issue of the Harp, Ludwig spoke of Thelma as “fleet,
beautiful and bright / . . . your heart tender as a hearthfire’s glow,” and
she of him as “tender to the core /. . . stark, free, and unafraid. ” w
Page 418 - [see page image]
399
Teshuvah
On November 14,1925, they said good-bye to friends and boarded
the train to Salzburg, where they would spend several days with Stefan
Zweig, anxious “to discuss Germany and Austria with you at length.”
Zweig was enthusiastic about the future, convinced that it would “bring
about a very interesting change.. . . The artistic and spiritual life will
improve,” he insisted. “One can feel the vibrations already of what is
coming.How myopic this must have appeared to Ludwig, who was
himself determined to avoid such interesting change. Moving on through
Germany after the twentieth, they arrived in Paris under a sky they would
remember as grey and cheerless, without the “gay intimacy of Vienna,” 62
an image appropriate to the last leg of their journey home.
Page 419 - [see page image]
400
16
Exiled to Paris
With the arrival of a host of young veterans of the Great War era
(some of whom had gone abroad during the fighting), Paris, long home
to American artists and writers, had become a refuge from the social and
artistic strictures of a society not yet at ease with its loss of Victorian
trappings or with its new role as a world industrial and military power.
So, too, had these expatriates come in search of literary success and
fame. Greenwich Village, and other lesser-known encampments, had
grown in popularity and had become ever more costly with the spread
of prosperity and the growing desire of America’s youth to break the
bonds of the past. The imposition of Prohibition had quickly added
to the country’s declining attractiveness at a time when the French
economy’s collapse, as a result of the war, had brought the cost of a
month’s bread down to a dollar. Passage to this financial Mecca was
but eighty times that amount, and while the French economy began to
recover, that of America continued to outpace it, making the expatriates’
stay, particularly for those with incomes or allowances from home, ever
more pleasurable. Thousands more without artistic goals or pretensions,
hoping merely to catch a taste of this golden age of liberated Paris,
poured into its hospitable streets, as they might have done at an earlier
time in Greenwich Village. “The Left Bank was a surging mass of talent,
romance, heartbreak, defeat, and great dreams,” one observer noted,
“which in the end outdistanced the shattered marriages, alcoholism,
drug addiction, and debauchery that was also a part of its history at
this time.” Only a few would stay on after the debacle of 1929 brought
Page 420 - [see page image]
Exiled to Paris
the party to a crashing halt. 1 But until then, as Waverley Root wrote in
his memoir,
Paris was the capital of nonconformism. I had been brought up in the
middle-class bourgeois society of New England, where the only way to
dissent with impunity was to become the village eccentric. The pressure
to conform was constant, and it made me unhappy. Then I moved to
Paris and suddenly the pressure disappeared. Paris was a city in which
the expression of all ideas was permissible, at least in the part of its
society that I entered. There was no dominant body of public opinion so
sure of its own standards that it dared tell everybody else what to think.
This nearly complete tolerance and freedom often led to extravagance,
but extravagance was more interesting than well-worn ruts. Everything of
intellectual importance was happening in Paris and I was privileged to be
occupying a ringside seat at its immense cultural circus. Paris was open to
all ideas, to all opinions, to every mode of thinking: That is why we were
all happy there. And that is why the idea of being exiled from its freedom
was translated by me into a series of nightmares. 2
The war only broadened America’s awareness of what had been
taking place for some time among the many Parisians, native and adop
tive, who had already begun to gravitate toward Montparnasse by 1905.
Among these refugees was a large group of eastern and central European
Jewish artists, impatient with the slow pace of change within their own
communities, urban or rural, Jewish and gentile. They had found in Paris
the freedom to express changes within themselves set off by access to the
new ideas, but not to the institutions, of their homelands. In Paris, the
fluid world of art had opened its doors to all who dared enter, allowing
them to contribute and redirect their energies beyond anything their
dreams had prepared them to expect or hope for.
Yet by the early years of the American presence, the decade-and-
a-half-long influence of these Jewish outsiders upon French art had
begun to engender reactions only slightly beneath the surface since the
Dreyfus Affair of 1895. The 1915 lecture “On the Influence of the Judeo-
German Corporation of Parisian Art Dealers in French Art” signaled
the beginning of this attack by the nativist Ecole Frangaise against
those they derisively named the Ecole de Paris. Ten years later, their
continuing assault upon these Jewish artists would appear in the pages
of the Mercure de 'France, replete with references not unlike those issued
by anti-Semites elsewhere in the Europe of Ludwig’s recent experience.
Nor would it shock him to read the 1928 condemnation penned by
an assimilated Jew, Louis Vauxcelles, born Louis Meyer. In his striking
attempt to find acceptance, Meyer would warn his readers that “a
barbarian horde has rushed upon Montparnasse.. . . These are people
from ‘somewhere else’ who ignore and in the bottom of their hearts look
401
Page 421 - [see page image]
402
Ludwig Lewisohn
down on what Renoir has called the gentleness of the French School—
that is, our race’s virtue in fact.” 3
Ludwig had planned a short stay in Paris, but legal problems would
ultimately force him to remain long past the time when America’s eco
nomic depression would force so many others to return home. The
world he found upon his arrival in Paris in 1925 would continue to be
accommodating and receptive, and filled with elements of ambiguity and
hypocrisy in sufficient number to fuel the fires of creativity throughout
his more than eight years in Montparnasse. In the beginning, however,
he wanted only to be an observer. Vienna had freed him from so many
previous entanglements, but a year’s residence there had brought others
in their place, voiding the peace he had sought. “I found myself by
natural sympathy of speech and tradition and friendships, by appeals
made to me and advice asked of me and problems pressed on me, almost
as hotly involved as I had been at home.” 4
At first Paris would free him from these as well, and for a time would
allow him to remain at arm’s length from most others. “The life of France
is outside of me like a charming picture ... a work of art in a highly
esteemed but radically alien tradition,” he would comment in 1929.
There was beauty, taste, pleasure, but “French civilization lacks the note
of ultimate spiritual intensity” that would otherwise have disruptively
engaged his soul. In its place, France had sworn a “pact with mortality
and its limitations,” permitting its visitors to chart their own course.
Though he acknowledged the presence of chauvinism and anti-Semitism
among the native and the newly arrived, their basic moderation had
made France appear to be a “country of freedom and humanity.. . .
The refugee from the disgrace of Fascist barbarism is safe in France,” he
noted without the prescience he had displayed elsewhere. Here the artist
and writer could be “self-contained at last,” able to give himself “wholly
to contemplation and productivity” and “to cultivate [his] garden,” he
would remark after three years of retrospection. Even after the best days
had long passed, Ludwig could still add during his final months in Paris
that “One could live delightfully for really next to nothing and in an
atmosphere that made artistic production almost take care of itself." :
Within these first years, he would achieve a state of peace that would
allow him to calmly reflect upon the life he had fled. It was a process
common to the American expatriate, a “transplanting” characterized
by Ernest Hemingway “as necessary with people as with other sorts of
growing things.” 6 In a passage written a dozen years after Ludwig’s own
analysis of the writer’s need for a dream city in which to temporarily
reside, Gertrude Stein observed that in Paris, “everybody who writes
is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside
Page 422 - [see page image]
403
Exiled to Paris
themselves. That is why writers have two countries, the one where they
belong and the one in which they really live.” 7 For Ludwig, Paris rapidly
proved itself to be the one place where he could think and work and re
create himself with minimal disruption, a need he had never before been
able to so fully meet.
It was uncharacteristic of Ludwig to feel such contentment, to find
his world so “objective” and himself so detached from it as to feel little
desire to engage it in debate or to challenge its assumptions. Was Paris
that accepting of him, or merely uncaring about the assumptions upon
which he based his life? “I was a little reluctant to admit the fact even
to myself. It didn’t fit into my scheme of things.” 8 Nor would it after
this period of withdrawal and consolidation had ended. By 1929, much
that he wished to say would be said, and life would begin to return to
its darker pattern of normalcy. But before these more troubled years set
in, he would write without hesitation in Mid-Channel of the peace he
had found, as if it was already slipping away. “No wonder that Paris
began to do me good almost at once. Objective, cool, ordered, tolerant,
this remarkable and admirable civilization is rest, background, contrast,
refreshment. It has taught me the use of the pleasant things of life as a
release from the fierce preoccupations of the spirit; it has made it possible
for me to pursue certain ends in thought and art, in peace.. . . My chief
tribute to France must be the work I have done here—work long planned,
long deferred, executed at last here.” 9
It began the moment they arrived. Even under the grey autumn
skies, they were charmed by what Waverley Root had found so blinding,
“the brilliance of a city that presented itself like a rapid succession of
explosions of light too bright to illuminate the objects on which it fell.” 1
After their first night in a hotel, Ludwig and Thelma began to hunt for an
apartment, determined not to live in hotels even for the few months they
planned to be in Paris. Hotels were not homes, nor were they the most
economical arrangement. Situated on “a blind alley, though broad and
airy . . . [and] very tranquil,” the small apartment they found consisted
of a “studio-room . . . high enough to be exhilarating whenever the faint
sun shone,” a bedroom and a kitchen. With furnishings “quaint and
comfortable,” their new home at 12 Rue Saint-Didier gave them “a
sense of being sheltered.” 11 No sooner were they settled than Ludwig
found himself being whisked away by Pierre Loving to the Restaurant
les Trianons to meet the American literati, and, if fortunate, its frequent
and most famous patron, James Joyce. Ludwig later recalled Joyce’s quiet
manner that evening, barely responding, “infinitely tired and repressed.”
In time, they would draw closer, sharing thoughts about the writer’s
craft and the notoriety of authoring books banned in America. But for
Page 423 - [see page image]
404
Ludwig Lewisohn
now, polite introductions and brief generalities would suffice, as would
this first long evening of dining and the hours of talk that followed in
the Cafe Select. As dawn approached, he stole away, hailed a taxi, and
rushed back to Thelma, alone in their new home awaiting his return. 1:
In the coming weeks they spent nearly every moment together.
Evenings were filled with visits to the Odeon and Comedie Frangais, but
the performances were weak. “There was no use going to the theatre
in Paris.” Nor to the concert hall or opera, or the Folies Bergeres or
Casino de Paris. “Handsome and amusing enough . . . [but] not really
adequate.” Even Ziegfeld’s Broadway productions, long condemned by
Ludwig, seemed possessed of a “more subtle touch.” But it really didn’t
matter to him. There was so much else to enjoy. Bookshops and stalls
along the Seine offered up fine old editions of classics they both treasured,
and a new interest was developing between them, antique collecting.
Thelma scoured the shops for articles of pewter, familiar to her from her
New England childhood, while Ludwig, following the example of his
friend the Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch (himself only recently arrived
after a flirtation with Poland), hunted for his own misplaced past in
Jewish objects from previous centuries, a search that yielded one of his
most prized possessions during these years, an eighteenth-century silver
kiddush cup with which he could usher in the Sabbath by reciting its
traditional blessing over wine. 13
But exploration and diversion filled only a part of their day as they
pursued throughout the morning the work for which they had come
to Paris. Ludwig had long been a disciplined writer by training and
economic necessity. With so many distractions before him, he followed
his daily routine even more rigidly, hoping to avoid the trap in which so
many American writers had fallen, the life of the cafes. The successful
completion of his first major project in Paris, Crump, would reinforce
this daily pattern. When later queried by his neighbor, the American
artist Myron Nutting (“a vague amiable perspicacious man”), as to why
he began his work each day at eight in the morning and ended it at noon,
he explained, 14
I have trained myself to that through the years. I knew that if I had to earn
my living with writing and teaching, I had to budget my time. One thing in
my ambition to be a creative writer was not to depend upon inspiration, but
rather to depend simply upon doing a certain amount of work. I find that
it works; that is the way to do it. Very often I’ll go to my typewriter full of
ideas, thinking that I’m going to have a wonderful morning and everything
is going to be fine, but when I get through, I’ll throw everything I’ve done
in the wastepaper basket. Another day I’ll go to work without an idea in
my head, feeling perfectly lousy, hating the whole idea, but I start doing
Page 424 - [see page image]
405
Exiled to Paris
something and, likely as not, that will be one of my best days’ work. So I
don’t bank on how I feel or what ideas I have in my head, but I have great
faith in doing something. By continually doing it, a certain proportion of it
will be something that I’ll want to salvage and it will be part of my oeuvre,
part of my work. 15
Much had been salvaged in those first four and a half months as
he moved quickly to finish Crump. Beginning on November 30, he
had turned out page upon page of manuscript, allowing the story, long
bottled up inside himself, to flow through his pen. After an enjoyable
afternoon with Ludwig and Thelma, a writer for the Boulevardier would
note how in their book-filled apartment, with walls decorated by au
tographed photos of noted contemporary authors, Ludwig had found
“sufficient calm to go back to his cherished method of writing out all
his manuscripts in long hand.. . . The script gets smaller and smaller, he
says, as the tension of the narrative increases in his mind.” 16
The author of “In Defense of Our Literary Exiles,” an unsigned
article published in the Bookman, confirmed these observations. He had
known Ludwig in New York during those last bad years and was struck
by how relaxed Ludwig appeared in his new surroundings. Pleased with
his work, Ludwig was willing to share the unpublished material with
old friends, and without hesitation. Such uncharacteristic self-confidence
was worth noting.
I met Ludwig Lewisohn, author of such serious books as “Israel” and “Up
Stream,” walking down the Rue de la Paix with one of those funny baskets
on his arm, in which he was carrying a first edition of some forgotten poet
that he had picked up on the Quai. Later I took tea with Mr. Lewisohn in
his furnished apartment just off the Avenue Kleber, where he sat in his shirt
sleeves and read the latest he had just written on his new novel, “The Last of
Mrs. Crump.” The last time I had seen Mr. Lewisohn previously had been
in New York, where he was fretting and fuming over his worklessness, the
Siberian condition of American literature, and all the rest of it. Now he was
purring and scratching off pages of manuscript like a Cheshire cat. 17
And while Ludwig wrote, Thelma prepared for the recitals he had
begun to arrange for her, as he had in Vienna, Berlin, and Jerusalem.
Thelma was clearly talented, and Ludwig, recognizing her gifts, nurtured
them as well as he could. After the breakup of their marriage, after
artistic ambitions greater than her talent had turned into jealousy and
resentment in the shadow cast by his, Thelma would claim to have
“given up any serious study of music in order to devote my time and
energy to Ludwig." '* But the evidence indicates otherwise, including her
own published statement that she had supplemented their income with
money earned from concerts, 19 appearances confirmed by the numerous
Page 425 - [see page image]
406
Ludwig Lewisohn
programs and fliers that have survived, and by the critics’ reviews that
showed, as Ludwig noted in Mid-Channel, “a profound appreciation of
Thelma’s art despite her specialization in German and Jewish music.
The Boulevardier spoke of Thelma’s musical talents and of her pursuit
of them that first winter of 1925: “While Ludwig Lewisohn is busy in
Paris on his new novel, his wife, Thelma Spear, is preparing for a series of
concerts.. . . Her preparation for opera has equipped her to sing in half a
dozen languages.” Handel, Schoenberg, and African-American spirituals
were but a part of her repertoire, the columnist noted, to which she
had added her own published musical renderings of several of Ludwig’s
poems. Further encouraged by Ludwig, she was now at work as well
on a book titled How to Sing for Haldeman-Julius’s series of Little Blue
Books. 21
“You will outstrip the Wandering Jew of tradition, tho not as he,
unaccompanied,” Leonard wrote in December, having learned from
Ludwig that he and Thelma were in Paris building a life of greater
happiness than either had ever before enjoyed. 22 “We were busy and
happy,”- ' Thelma would recall long after those years had become a
pleasant, if clouded, memory of creative activity, intimacy, and the
friendship of many of the artists and writers of that time and place whose
fame would pass with the turning of that age into a darker time. For the
moment, though, they fulfilled Ludwig’s need to be with others for whom
“life [had] lost some of its urgency.. . . They too seemed untouched by
any feverishness, and hardly interrupted the current of one’s thoughts
and visions.”
How perfect and complete it all was. “The soft grey sky of a Paris
winter shut me in.. . . One could wander about the streets and along
the book-quays on the Seine or sit at a cafe-table out of doors even in
winter and cultivate inner quietude and revery.” 24 Here Ludwig could
exercise the “vigilant nobility” of spirit he had praised that December
when writing of Thomas Mann’s life at age fifty; here he could “give
a reasonable accounting of himself and so of the creative artist in
human society,” as had his friend over the years. 25 Up Stream and Israel
had been such accountings, praised by some and condemned by those
who disputed or feared his vision. (Reviews of Israel, both positive
and critical, had begun appearing in late November 1925, and would
continue throughout the winter and early spring. ICrump was to be a
continuation of this retelling, and so he pushed onward at a steady pace,
a thousand words each day, permitting nothing to interrupt “the story
as it flowed . . . unpremeditatedly from my pen.” 27
As the year ended, Ludwig received a letter from Mann thanking
him for his kind words. He hoped to visit Ludwig while in Paris for a
Page 426 - [see page image]
407
Exiled to Paris
lecture at the Carnegie Institute that January, and to share this kinship
of purpose. 28 Ludwig was certain that he would still be in the city (and
did meet with Mann on several occasions), " though, like Thelma, he
had already begun to think of his return to the States, refreshed and
now ready to confront whatever lay ahead. “I don’t know yet what
our precise plans are. But in all likelihood we shall get back home late
this coming spring,” he wrote Spingarn on January 2, 1926. His old
friend would see a significant change, Ludwig promised, crediting it
to the perspective that distance and absence had afforded him, and to
Thelma’s loving care. “I suffered so much and so long from the most
fundamental of human maladjustments that I lost sight of a normal
state of mind. Those long years of terror, depression, easelessness are
fading into a memory thanks to Thelma’s charm, sweetness, loveliness
and essential wisdom in the management of our lives.” More at ease
now than ever before, and with the trials America had forced upon him
receding into memory, he, like so many other expatriate writers, had
begun to think through a book-length study of American society and its
culture. “Abroad one feels more keenly the necessity of keeping up with
American literature,” a product of feeling strangely and unexpectedly
disconnected, he confided to Spingarn. “I am quietly planning to write
something on that subject someday—something rather solid.”'" These
first thoughts would, in five years, become his major work of literary
criticism, Expression in America.
By now Israel had sold ten thousand copies, and with Crump well
on its way to completion, Ludwig could begin to think of making one
last trip to Palestine before going home. The cost from America would
be prohibitive. He wanted to see how the increasing immigration of the
last eighteen months had begun to transform the Yishuv, and he wanted
“to see the country in Spring ... in a leisurely fashion” and “to write
something leisurely, colorful but quiet and without propaganda—the
column of sketches we talked about, with illustrations,” as he told his
Palestinian journalist friend Gershon Agronsky. 31
The strong market for Israel was taken by Ludwig as proof that
a second book would likely do well. Reviews of the first had been
largely positive, with most negative comments coming, not unexpectedly,
from anti-Semites and assimilationists, both of whom, ironically, felt
threatened by such overt Jewish self-assertion. In Palestine itself, the
book had raised the spirits of many immigrant pioneers. The American
author Meyer Levin later recalled how he and his fellow settlers on a
kibbutz had felt Israel’s confirming message, while Hannah Hoffman,
the Barnard-educated daughter of an American rabbi, had recommended
it to her skeptical father for its realistic portrait “of the attitude of the
Page 427 - [see page image]
408
Ludwig Lewisohn
workers here.” Agronsky, aware of these responses and the important
role the book was playing in the Yishuv, supported Ludwig’s proposal
before the Zionist leadership, encouraging Meyer Weisgal and others in
New York to pursue it. 32
Ludwig planned to raise funds for the trip by writing portions of the
volume as he moved about Palestine, selling them to American journals,
as he had with Israel. But he was now somewhat concerned by what he
sensed as a growing reluctance on the part of a number of liberal editors
to publish this material. On March 10 he wrote Mencken, asking why
he was no longer mentioned in the American Mercury, which Mencken
edited. Three books since Up Stream had appeared but had received
no notice or review, not even Israel, “an opus on which the Mercury
should discourse in some way. ” Would his next work, “that all-American
murder and mystery novel: The Case of Mr. Crump,” receive as little
attention? 33
Ludwig’s attempt to find a market with Mencken was a partial
success. Mencken explained that Don Juan had “failed to lift me” and
that Israel was “outside my range of interest,” the scheme of the journal
being “to stick very tightly to the American scene.” He would be happy
to read Crump and to receive articles from him, but not about “foreign
politics,” as Mencken characterized Ludwig’s Jewish concerns, “or new
Danish poets,” a cutting reference to his old friend’s eclectic literary
interests. “Haven’t you got something to say about the Americano?” “
Ludwig, of course, had much to say on the subject, much of which
he had poured into Crump with “a certain tone of severity, [and] a
tonic strictness” meant to instruct and to heal. Over the years he had
offered analysis and criticism, but had never felt as free as he did at
this moment. “So I had played with the idea of someday, very far away,
writing a fictional account of certain people and events both in order,
perhaps, to cleanse my own bosom at last of that perilous stuff, but
also and more definitely to project people and incidents which, though
universal enough in ultimate moral significance, could in these forms
and after this fashion be met in America alone." 1 s
Though artistic play could be transformed into text, he was dis
covering by early April that it could not mollify the ongoing war with
Mary and her proxy, the U.S. State Department. Nor could it satisfy his
fear and anger. Before long, both his planned second visit to Palestine
and his fundraising efforts would prove academic. On April 5, Mary
broadened her attack and wrote to Stephen Wise, informing him of
her contact with the government and of her offer “to go to France,
and there to give him a Paris divorce” if Ludwig would counter with
“any reasonable settlement.” Once completed, “an adjustment could be
Page 428 - [see page image]
409
Exiled to Paris
made, and both might return to this country.” But Ludwig had refused,
a decision which she thought “inconceivable,” given his continuing
status as a fugitive “criminal.” Yet, with “insanity on both sides of
the house, I am convinced he has a sick mind,” or so “a well-known
alienist who consulted with me concerning my husband’s condition in
1921” had left her to believe. She was certain that so grave an issue
would be of deepest concern to the Zionists, and was surprised and
disappointed that Wise had failed to inform them of the matter at the
recent Zionist Congress in Vienna. Ludwig had undoubtedly “abused
your confidence most foully.” How else could Wise have written such a
“glowing eulogy” for Israel's book jacket? It was in his capacity “as an
ethical leader and an ardent Zionist” that she felt compelled to seek his
assistance in forcing Ludwig’s hand, or that of the Zionist leadership to
abandon him.
Surely, no material advantage to the cause of Zionism through the widest
sale of even so brilliantly written a book as my husband’s book, “Israel,”
can atone for the gross insult offered to a great spiritual movement by the
author of the book. And you can not but agree with me that to take to
Palestine as his wife, Miss Thelma Bowman Spear who was not his wife,
and to pose meanwhile as an august apostle and interpreter of Zionism, was
a gross insult to and a lasting offense against the very cause he professed
to serve. Or am I mistaken in assuming that Zionism concerns itself with
personal conduct? 36
Wise, in a brief response, advised Mary to seek the counsel of his friend
and her minister, John Haynes Holmes, after which the two men would
discuss the issue further. To Holmes, Wise wrote, “It is good of you to
take over the Lewisohn Affair. I really do not know what I can do with
and for her. It is, as you know who know her, a very difficult situation. ” 3
“Evil machinations at home in America,” 18 was Ludwig’s outraged
response to the actions of the U.S. government, which, at Mary’s prompt
ing, was suddenly making it impossible for him and Thelma to return
home without having their passports confiscated upon arrival. Having
failed to comply with the State Department’s order to revise their docu
ments for immediate return to America the previous fall, they now found
themselves threatened. Abruptly cut off from home until the issue could
be resolved, they were marooned in Europe indefinitely, unsure of when
they might be able to see the States again.
There were, of course, worse scenarios to which they might have
been subjected, as they themselves would ultimately acknowledge, for
here he was with his major work nearly completed, living with a woman
in whose “dear hands I lay /. . . my heart and hope and being,” as he
wrote that spring. 39 And here Thelma, too, had begun to find fulfillment
Page 429 - [see page image]
410
Ludwig Lewisohn
as a singer and writer. By April, Paris had worked its magic on them, as
it had for Hemingway in these same years.
With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until
a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes
the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would
never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was
the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to
be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the
trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry
light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river
would flow again after it was frozen. 40
Resigned to a lengthy struggle and a protracted residency, and with
Crump nearly finished, leaving more time to entertain friends, they
decided to find larger quarters in which to better enjoy their springtime of
forced exile. The “absurdly small salon” was just too cramped, 41 and too
expensive, as Ludwig told Thelma’s mother on April 18. “This minute
we are flirting with the thought of an other apartment which is at once
larger and cheaper.” There was still some hope of getting home by the
following winter, though he wondered if it would be sensible since Mrs.
Spear planned a worldwide trip and Thelma’s only reason for wanting
to go home was to see her. “Thelma is frankly homesick for you. Not
for America.” It was their hope that she might stop to see them in Paris
during her journey to the East. 42
Ludwig asked Thelma’s mother that day if she had seen the February
28 New York Times article on the exhibition of sculptor Roy Sheldon’s
work (for which Ludwig had written the catalog’s introduction). A
photograph of his bust of Ludwig had been featured in the review. “The
bust is very fine and we’re both proud of it,” he added with his usual
candor. (The bust would later be used for the frontispiece of the first
edition of Crump, providing its readers with an idealized image of its
author. A photograph, complete with pince-nez glasses, adorned those
few copies that were privately distributed.) He was happy as well to be
sending her an antique Arabic chain produced several centuries earlier,
a sign of their appreciation for the help she had rendered them in the
past, both financial and moral. It would arrive together with a quantity
of worthless “trifles,” “samples without value,” as he would write on
the customs declaration to help her avoid an import duty payment. 43
In an interview given to the column “With Latin Quarter Folk”
soon after this mid-April letter, he proudly told the reporter that his
desire to go home could not take precedence over the financial benefits
of remaining abroad, as so many others had discovered. The lifting of
economic burdens that might otherwise have forced him to continue
Page 430 - [see page image]
411
Exiled to Paris
“editing and lecturing and reading manuscripts and advising publishers
and being [an] all around mental acrobat in order to live” in America,
had allowed far greater productivity in the work that he cared about.
“Tomorrow at noon [May 16],” began the column, “Ludwig Lewisohn
is scheduled to lay aside the fine handwritten pages of his new novel, ‘The
Case of Mr. Crump,’ and draw a good breath.” For the first time, “I can
actually live on the proceeds of the writings of an unpopular author.”
Ludwig might better have characterized himself as controversial, for
his books had sold well for some time now and his reputation as a critic,
essayist, and novelist had grown accordingly. After reciting a long list of
well-received titles in various genres, the columnist added that “Those
of us who have heard parts of the ‘Case of Mr. Crump’ feel that it is in
many respects his best work.” As Ludwig himself commented, “I think
I shall stay in Europe until what seems to be a rejuvenation of whatever
creative ability I have is exhausted.” There was little likelihood now of
surrendering “his new Quarter studio,” there being “such a large and
pleasant American colony here that Paris combines the advantages of
being at home and abroad.” 4 ’
By early May, Ludwig and Thelma had moved into their new home
at 11 Rue Schoelcher, Montparnasse, an apartment recently occupied
by the Philadelphia artist George Biddle, some of whose furnishings
they inherited, including several notable pieces of “Norman peasant
furniture" 4 ' upon which they drew in decorating their own home in
these sublet quarters. Though a new building, it was a walk-up. Myron
Nutting recalled meeting Ludwig over a tumbling box of books, sur
prised that its owner was not the harried author he had imagined from
the serious work he had read.
This fellow had gotten this box of books up to the top of the stairs and
almost to Lewisohn’s door when it fell off his shoulder and burst, and the
books were scattered all up and down the hall. Here was this man, who was
rather fat and who looked like he might be quite a jolly sort of person, with
this very distressed look on his face as he saw all of his books on the floor.
Then I realized it was Ludwig Lewisohn. Well, that was quite a surprise to
me, because I had pictured him from his writings, especially Upstream, as
an overworked, thin, worried-looking man. I could imagine his thin face
and maybe some little whiskers. But the exact opposite of this person was
standing there wondering what to do about his books. So that was Ludwig
Lewisohn. 46
The Rue Schoelcher apartment gave Ludwig something he had never
previously enjoyed—a room of his own. Above the main floor of the
apartment was an unoccupied maid’s room that Ludwig quickly turned
into his private domain. Early each morning he would ascend the narrow
Page 431 - [see page image]
412
Ludwig Lewisohn
stairway, and by nine o’clock Nutting could hear his typewriter going
(years of writing by hand had left him increasingly unable to use a
pen), though as Nutting later commented, “I know perfectly well that
he didn’t feel very much like working at nine o’clock. But it never
seemed to faze him in the least."' Fourteen years later, this life having
grown into memory, Ludwig would record how the apartment had
immediately “appealed to me because it’s right across from the cemetery
of Montparnasse where Beaudelaire is buried.. . . There was an unused
maid’s room on the 6th floor with a marvelous view of Montmartre
and the Sacre Coeur. I rigged it up for a writing-room and bought this
desk [a Louis Phillipe secretary] and a chair and a couch on which to
stretch out.. . . Gosh, how I worked in that place. With the day’s
work usually finished by noon, he was free to pursue the social life of a
literary man, which he enjoyed far more than much of the work itself.
The salon and the cafe could not be missed, even in exile, and especially
now that he had settled into an area of Montparnasse that was within a
short walk from the boulevards, where everyone would start to gather
by midday.'*
Ludwig soon proved a welcome addition to the building and the
Quarter. He was, by Nutting’s account, “in so many ways ... a man of
wide culture and most interesting in his talk.” As a “warm friend . . .
very hospitable,” Nutting repeatedly enjoyed “the pleasure of his com
pany,” and never more than when the house was filled with the talented
and the notable. Ludwig “loved to have people around him,” and Nut
ting loved to be among them. Paul Robeson (“He and Lewisohn seemed
to be quite warm friends”) and Carl Van Vechten, writer and promoter
of African-American musical performers, were frequent guests when in
Paris, as were a host of African-American writers then living abroad.
So, too, were the influential Viennese architect Josef Hoffman and the
psychologist Otto Rank, whose theories had separated him from Freud
and whom Ludwig would champion in the years ahead. “Constellations
of people” filled Ludwig’s world. Of all the salons Nutting had visited
in those years, including Joyce’s, “Lewisohn represented more of that
sort of thing to us than anybody else, because he seemed to have many
more people at his evenings, not only the ones who were living in Paris
but those who happened to be passing through."'
It was his eclectic interests in the arts and in the people who created
them and worried over their meaning and direction, both his own
contemporaries and those of the younger generation less attached to
being expatriates for its own sake, that distinguished Ludwig from so
many of his countrymen then in Paris, and brought him the kind of praise
Nutting and others have offered. Like Nutting, Sisley Huddleston, the
Page 432 - [see page image]
413
Exiled to Paris
English novelist and journalist who covered the Montparnasse social and
artistic scene, spoke warmly of the many evenings spent in the Lewisohn
home, surrounded by a vast array of artists and writers. 51 Huddleston’s
list paints a vivid picture of the international scope of the circle drawn
to Ludwig, “then at the height of his artistic power,”
capital parties which gathered together the French, the German, the Jewish,
and the American elite of Paris.... It would fill pages to set down their
names. At random I recall Sholom Asch, Marvin Lowenthal, Sinclair Lewis,
Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Wells of Harper’s, Mala Boschka,
the Czecho-Slovakian singer and pianist, Yvette Guilbert, and her husband
Dr. Schiller, Roy Sheldon, the young American sculptor, Myron Nutting,
Paul Burlin, Jan Hambourg, the violinist, Regis Michaud, the French pro
fessor who gave up his post in America to spread the fame of American
writers in France, Thomas Mann, Ernst Toller, Lee Simonson, Cyril and
Evelyn Scott, George Frederic Hummel, Manuel Komroff, and other Ger
man and American novelists, the Franco-Jewish composer, Leon Algazi, the
musician Albert Jarosy, Horace Kallen, the Jewish-American philosopher,
Ivan and Clair Goll who write in several languages, Paul Robeson, the
negro singer, Ladislav Medgyes, stage-designer, Padraic and Mary Colum,
Joseph Bard, Freda Kirchwey of the Nation, Irita Van Doren of Books, Leon
Bazalgette, translator of Whitman, Oko, the great Hebraist, Elmer Rice, the
playwright.... I forget half of them. 52
For Huddleston, however, the high point of any evening at the
Lewisohns’ was Thelma’s singing. “She has a golden voice, intelligently
trained; and she held us spell-bound when she consented to sing Ne
gro or German or Jewish folk songs."" Nutting also commented on
the contribution Thelma’s performances made to these gatherings. He
admired her talent and in the early days as neighbors had invited her
to sit for a portrait, a copy of which he kept throughout the remainder
of his life. But it was Nutting, as an observer of Ludwig’s domestic
life, who first brought his new friend together with the psychoanalyst
Otto Rank when Thelma agreed to seek therapy at Nutting’s suggestion.
Nutting’s growing enthusiasm for Ludwig soon paralleled his increasing
unhappiness with Thelma, whom he found “disagreeable” and quite
often subject to tantrums in front of guests. “If it hadn’t been for
Thelma, our life would have been extremely pleasant,” Nutting stated
quite emphatically nearly a half century later. “I am sorry to say that
Thelma could at times be embarrassing to her husband—and to the rest
of us—especially after an extra drink.” Still, Nutting retained a degree
of sympathy for Thelma, who “tried quite hard in Paris to make an
impression.” But being “a rather impossible sort of a young woman,”
she became a burden on all who knew her, especially Ludwig, according
to Nutting, whose perspective was not that of someone in love with
Page 433 - [see page image]
414
Ludwig Lewisohn
her. For his good friend, he felt sadness and remained even after so
many years rather mystified at how Ludwig could have made so poor a
choice after Mary. To his credit, Ludwig continually exercised enormous
understanding and restraint. “Lewisohn was very patient with her and
rather wonderful, but how in the world he made such a terrible boner in
his marriage the second time is something I could never quite understand
because they were not in the least compatible.” Nutting, after all, had
read Crump. 54
The completion of Crump on May 16 was marked by a special
celebration to which many of Ludwig’s friends and acquaintances were
invited. 55 It was a watershed in his life. “With the composition of The
Case of Mr. Crump I had for the present released and made objective
the experiences and observations of American life that beat against my
consciousness.” He had “wrought experience into art,” 56 transforming
his own story into a psychological novel of epic proportions. This, as
Ludwig explained to Huddleston, who thought the book “indubitably
one of the great stories of our time, ranking with the most important
productions of the Russian giants,” was the direction that all good fiction
would have to take in the years ahead if it was to be meaningful and,
thereby, appeal to a readership worth seeking. “The novel is in my opin
ion developing on autobiographical lines. It is becoming epic,” Ludwig
asserted. “Autobiographical it must be, in that deep impressions can only
be born out of deep experiences. Epic it must be, because slight works of
fiction can no longer satisfy the serious reading public: they demand that
the elemental things shall be adequately treated. Philosophical it must
be in its content, because if it does not seek to interpret life in terms of
modern thought it is merely an elegant amusement for idle hours.”'
Europe had afforded Ludwig the degree of separation from the
passions of his past that had allowed him to turn his energies toward
shaping these events “against the implied background of eternal issues.”
To Paris he had brought “things that had been working themselves
out and ripening primarily in my subconsciousness for years.” He had
reworked and transformed them until “as life” they were “gone, disap
peared forever,” so that “as art. . . [they] belonged to the legendary, the
detached, the universal.” At last, “the umbilical cord had been cut.” 58
In Ludwig’s mind, the demarcation signaled by Crump’s completion
now freed him to work on matters related to his ever-widening concerns
as a Jew. “I had written, as a Jewish mind and character, of course, a
wholly American book. I now felt profoundly that henceforth my activity
must lie largely in another direction.” His nearly complete “immersion
in American Gentile life” had left him “unhappily cut off from my own
people."'' The last two years had permanently ended this isolation. In
Page 434 - [see page image]
415
Exiled to Paris
the three decades remaining to him, he would keep the promise to which
he had committed himself, beginning immediately after Crump with the
planning of a new novel concerning the emptiness of assimilation in
American Jewish life, an epic drawing upon the full sweep of Jewish
history, first conceived in Poland and Palestine where he had begun
to realize how “from this wealth of material. . . the substance and the
inspiration of memorable works will someday be drawn. '’'
Ludwig was not alone in this redirection of energies and concerns
toward the Jewish world during the 1920s. Even the great Russian Amer
ican socialist and early supporter of the Bolsheviks, Emma Goldman, in
her further disillusionment with Russia, had come to realize the depth
and implacability of anti-Semitism despite the radical transformation
of its society under the Soviets. In early May 1926, she wrote Ludwig
merely to make his acquaintance, possibly after having read Israel and
been impressed with its mission. But later that month, she appealed to
him “in a most urgent case.” Symon Petlyura, organizer of numerous
pogroms throughout the Ukraine in the years after the revolution, had
just been assassinated in Paris, allegedly by a kindly, quiet friend of
Goldman’s, Sholom Schwartzbard. She herself had seen evidence of
Petlyura’s work and had talked to many of his surviving victims, among
them Schwartzbard’s relatives. Ludwig’s role in Sholom’s defense could
be twofold—securing as much material relating to these pogroms as
available, and raising a legal-aid fund through contributions from Jewish
societies in Europe and America. 61 Ludwig’s response has been lost, but
given his retention of her letter among his papers and his focusing upon
Jewish concerns, it is likely that he gave her plea whatever assistance
he could.
The response of Liveright, and then of others, to Crump’s possible
publication in America could only have intensified Ludwig’s desire to
make such a turn toward a fuller Jewish life. “Life is imperious in its
demands,'" he noted in an article that October. As he was quickly
discovering, Crump would not be an easy book to publish. After a wait
of several weeks, two friends came from New York to discuss Liveright’s
response to the manuscript, inviting Ludwig to dine with them at Larue’s.
Unsuspectingly, he accepted. While dining, they explained their lawyer’s
certainty that Mary would sue both author and publisher for libel, and
was likely to win a large and damaging settlement. Though she had no
idea yet of the manuscript’s existence, and thus Liveright’s lawyers had
no real substantiation for their fears, the risk was too great. Regrettably,
they could not publish the book. 63
Angered by Mary’s vengeful persistence and by Liveright’s refusal
to confront her possible threat, Ludwig turned to others for help. There
Page 435 - [see page image]
416
Ludwig Lewisohn
was too much at stake to allow the project to die, or to revise the text.
The book had been in his thoughts for too long. In early June, Ludwig
wrote to the London publishing house of Butterworth, hoping to attract
their interest. They in turn wrote Harpers in New York. 64
With advice from W. A. Bradley, a friend at Harpers to whom Joel
Spingarn had written on Ludwig’s behalf, Butterworth and Harpers
acknowledged Crump's literary worth, but again stressed its potential
legal problems. Reluctant to abandon the book, they proposed, “after
long and largely futile negotiations,” to bring out American and English
editions after a Paris edition had appeared. The libel law in both their
countries had a one-year statute of limitations. This would not spare
Ludwig the possibility of litigation, but it would exculpate the two pub
lishing houses, who would be unconnected to the original publication.
Seeing this as his best chance, Ludwig accepted.'
Of the few small English-language presses in Paris, one had recently
announced its search for manuscripts. Edward Titus, a rare and fine-
press bookdealer and the husband of Helena Rubinstein, had established
his shop at 4 Rue Delambre in 1924 as a gathering place for those
concerned about good literature and art. His initial stock was nearly
all sold by mid-1926 when he decided to use the profits to begin a
publishing house—“At the Sign of the Black Manikin,” as the press
would come to be known. Like all of Titus’s literary ventures, it would be
subsidized by his wife’s cosmetics. She, of course, thought that all of her
husband’s authors were “meshuggah” (crazy), 66 but whatever Ludwig
thought of her, he would come to regard her husband as among the
great literary people he had known. A dozen years Ludwig’s senior, Titus
represented, “despite his fine taste in modern and ultramodern letters . . .
another and, perhaps, a better time.” For Ludwig, never quite at home
in the cultural milieu of the younger generation, Titus embodied much
of what Ludwig himself had sought to live by. “His elegance and reserve
of bearing; his insistence on scholarly accuracy; the general tenure of
what was once known as ‘the scholar and the gentleman’—these may
seem archaic in the recollections of many,” Ludwig wrote in his New
York Times “Tribute to Edward Titus” following his friend’s death on
January 27, 1952, but they were to “be commemorated as part of a
distinguished and fruitful life. Few men of his period deserved more of
literature and learning than my old friend.’"’'
Thelma’s mother, visiting Paris during these difficult weeks, had
offered the loan of enough money for Ludwig to privately print a small
number of copies for distribution, in accordance with the Harper/Butter-
worth plan. Appreciative of her unexpected offer, Ludwig had neverthe
less decided to seek out a publisher similar to the one who had brought
Page 436 - [see page image]
417
Exiled to Paris
out Joyce’s work several years earlier. “I saw no reason why my book
should not, like Ulysses, utterly different in kind and character though
it was, be published by an American publisher in Paris.” When Ludwig
approached Titus with the manuscript, the novice publisher immediately
recognized its merit as a literary work and assessed its value to his
nascent press. “It was a very great service,” Ludwig later said of Titus’s
agreement to bring out a limited edition of five hundred artfully printed
copies. “For I would have felt with the utmost keenness the failure of my
manuscript to reach the finality of a permanent record.” Promising that
the book would be ready for distribution by early winter, Titus began
preparations at once. Though he had already published Ralph Cheever
Dunning’s twenty-two-page Rococo, a slim volume of questionable lit
erary worth, Titus looked upon Crump as his first real effort. 68
Settling the matter by early June, Ludwig and Thelma said good
bye to a few close friends (her mother having abruptly departed for
Asia) and left Paris for a short rest in the Maritime Alps and along the
Mediterranean coast. “After months of rather severe work we are taking
a little jaunt in the South of France,” he wrote Leonard from Avignon.
“A copy of ‘The Case of Mr. Crump,’ novel of 140,000 words (probably
Harper and Brothers) will reach you in the late summer or very early fall.
I needn’t tell you how profoundly I rejoyced [sic],” Ulysses apparently
still subconsciously in his thoughts.'' 1
Yet, for all that Ludwig wanted to rest, such unproductively spent
time was truly anathema to him. “All the while, amid these beautiful
and varied and refreshing scenes I saw deep, deep within me the old
synagogue at Vilna and saw again the square Hebrew letters written
by devoted scribes,” and a host of other historically drawn characters
whose slowly developing story would one day be told in The Island
'Within. “The entire feeling of the fable came to me in gestures that I
saw in my mind’s eye, in silent words that never took on tone, in the
atmosphere of seen and unseen places."' 1
They returned to Paris in late June, only to find Mary once again
pursuing them through the State Department. As Ludwig had written
Leonard only a few days earlier, “I see, for many reasons, little chance of
returning to America.'" But there was an opportunity for retaliation,
or justice, depending on one’s perspective. Bennett Cerf, founder and
publisher of Random House, and a former editor under Liveright, had
secured Ludwig’s permission to bring out a new edition of Up Stream.
Before leaving on vacation, Ludwig had agreed to read the proofs and
offer revisions. In spite of his declaration to concentrate on new work
of mostly Jewish themes, he would take this opportunity to respond in
kind to Mary’s relentlessness. He promised to begin work as soon as
Page 437 - [see page image]
418
Ludwig Lewisohn
the proofs arrived. “The revision of the book is a matter of great moral
and literary importance to me and I shall be only too glad to cooperate
with you in every way,” he informed Donald Klopfer, Cerf’s friend and
marketing director, on June 26. 72 Less than three weeks later, on July
17, the revised proofs and a new introduction were on their way back to
New York. “The revisions, as you will observe, are far from extensive,”
Ludwig wrote. “But they are of the utmost importance and I shall be
most grateful if you will watch personally and closely over their precise
embodiment in the text.” 73
Written while he was still living with Mary, the first edition of Up
Stream had been laudatory and filled with references to “we.” Both
the praise of Mary and her inclusion in positive ways had now been
removed. A German edition (Gegen den Strom: Eine Amerikanische
Chronik) published in late 1924, though dedicated to “Meiner Geliebten
Frau, Thelma,” had allowed the original text to stand. ' June 1926 had
marked the first time he had reread the book, and as he explained in
the new introduction to this second edition, “I can view it objectively
now, because I dwell in another moral world. I have proceeded on from
Up Stream to the necessary continuation and expansion of it in Israel—
a spiritual and intellectual rather than a literary process—and I have
emerged from that old moral world of pain and sordidness into which
an overwhelming accident of life plunged me, into one of unhoped
for peace and beauty.” His aim was to set right that “small number of
passages,” now “changed or expunged,” wherein he had deliberately
falsified “one element in my life . . . and one character.” Where veracity
and frankness had otherwise ruled, he had let “a mistaken kindliness
and shame” over “the all but unbelievable physical and moral facts” of
his misguided and faltering marriage set the tone in these “passages.”
He owed himself, his readers, and Thelma, “the light and inspiration
of my new and other life,” the chance to draw a truer portrait of this
sordid chapter."'
Admittedly, Mary had once been his muse, but by 1921 she had lost
this place in his life. If he had spoken earlier of their finding one another
during “September days full of a soft grey drizzle” and of an October
filled with “the rustle of leaves under our feet. . . with all the stars of
heaven for our own,” of fatefully sharing those few “days and hours . . .
that were given to us” before “we were defeated” by an uncaring world
that had forced him “to seek refuge at home,” 76 a far different account
appeared in the revised telling of their first encounter.
Then I met Mary. She was forlorn and so was I. What seemed to me the
pathos of her fate harmonized with my own misfortunes. And out of similar
tastes and similar temporary emotions there arose a passionate friendship
Page 438 - [see page image]
419
Exiled to Paris
which, for a time, hid from me the unbridgeable chasms of character and
origin which were always so fatally to divide us.. . . Bread meantime came
somehow. I wrote stuff for the Review of Reviews and articles for the Times.
I hardly knew what to do and so, all through a lovely autumn, I let both
time and thought stand still. Yet every now and then there smote upon
me a sense of Mary’s foolishly conventional outlook and terror that I was
bartering away my youth and life.... I made less and less effort to earn
money; the weather grew colder and more inhospitable. I hoped that later
and alone the madness of any further common adventure on our part would
reach Mary’s mind.. . . She took me to the boat.. . . Deliberately I sought
refuge at home. 77
Similarly, the first account of Mary’s appearance in Charleston spoke
of Minna’s “womanly and solitary yearn[ing] over Mary,” of their
mutually agreed upon marriage, and of the romantic view from their
first home’s windows, where “Mary and I watched the horned moon
float over the silken swell of the dark waters and listened to the tide.” 78
But no such blissful beginning appears in the retelling, where Mary takes
excessive advantage of her weaker and inexperienced husband, and of
his parents’ generosity. If there remains anything heroic in their lives, it is
not their struggle to create a life together, but Ludwig’s own forbearance
of Mary’s abusive behavior and his determination to survive under the
weight of such unfortunate circumstance.
Mary, furthermore, insisted that we must be married to save her honor and
her very life. I was a gentleman still and a Southerner. I was sorry, helpless
and confused. I tried to hope that my mother would be less lonely. I tried to
hope many things to still the fatal monitions within me.. . . We all settled
down together in an old house overlooking the bay. I think that, in spite of
youth and inexperience and their faults, I tried to make the best of things.
But Mary’s responsibilities to her family had robbed her of the power, even
though she had had the will, to be my wife or—despite her age, the daughter
of my parents. It was perhaps not all her fault that she was a burden and
unhelpful; it was absurd that, under these circumstances, she had neither
humility nor true kindness, but was as exacting as a bride of eighteen. She
was a middle-aged woman who had insisted on marrying a man not much
older than her oldest child. She acted like Dora Copperfield.. . . Something
indomitable must have been in me that I did not go under... a strength
and a faith.. . , 79
Other damning passages were added to prove that Mary was as
domineering and selfish as Ludwig now claimed. Whatever positive
role she had played in the earlier edition (as in the raising of money
from friends and relatives during a particularly difficult period 1 4 was
now absent in the 1926 rewrite. On occasion, Ludwig even lapsed
into unbecoming sarcasm, noting, for example, that his 1911 trip to
Page 439 - [see page image]
420
Ludwig Lewisohn
Charleston had “luckily for me” been made without Mary, 81 or that
her response to the news of his mother’s fatal illness had been “careless
at heart.” 82
Mary, ever willing to engage Ludwig and his supporters at every
turn, would challenge these emendations in the months ahead. Ludwig,
however, did not anticipate a problem. He was satisfied that the record
had been corrected and that this more accurate picture of their life, only
mirrored in Crump, would finally appear without its fictional veil. If
Crump was temporarily barred from publication at home, at least the
revised Up Stream would serve much the same purpose. All now seemed
in order. Relaxed, he and Thelma set out on a second trip that summer,
returning to central Europe in late July for a two-week visit. 83
Awaiting their return to Paris was Cerf’s positive response to the
changes and additions Ludwig had made for the new edition of Up
Stream. On August 12, Ludwig wrote Cerf expressing his relief that at
least one project was being received in America without complications:
“I’m at the moment in an apparently inextricable jam concerning my
magnum opus [Crump]. Everything is gummed up. Well, the revised Up
Stream will be a comfort. Glad you liked the introduction. ' >J
Hoping to secure the novel’s ultimate publication in the States, and
perhaps a new publisher for his other work, Ludwig thanked Spingarn
on September 6 for his help in bringing Crump to Harpers’ attention,
thereby opening the door for future possibilities. He was relieved to
finally be “escaping from the gambler’s den at the mercy of which I have
been too long,” a reference to his continuing dispute with Liveright over
royalty payments. Dependent upon this income, he was pleased with the
prospect of changing publishers.
But there was an even greater favor that Spingarn might perform,
one not unrelated to his assistance with Crump. Returning to Paris,
Ludwig had realized how much more he would have preferred to have
gone home to America, to be with old friends, to see familiar places, and
to be able to deal with Crump’s publication at close range. This, however,
had been rendered impossible. “With her rancor,” Mary had finally
succeeded in winning the State Department’s full support in her effort
to cripple her wayward husband and his lover. The U.S. consulate had
sent notice that their passports would not be renewed, effectively leaving
them unable now to even go beyond French borders. “We are, therefore,
for the present imprisoned in France and without the protection of our
government,” a situation Ludwig characterized as “legally untenable
and morally monstrous.” Playing the political card he held as a result
of his work for the Zionists, Ludwig asked Spingarn to speak with
influential friends within the movement, naming Albert Einstein as a
Page 440 - [see page image]
421
Exiled to Paris
possibility. “We are ‘in bed’ with the Department,” he noted in a gross
understatement of their situation. “Please help us! I think we have been
made to suffer enough.” But there was little they could do now but allow
events to take their course, and enjoy their exile in the “City of Lights,”
days to come that would be filled with some of his best work and the
company of good friends.’'
Page 441 - [see page image]
422
17
A Man of Letters
Not everyone who visited Ludwig in Paris thought his company
flawless or his complaints totally warranted. Certainly not the American
philosopher Horace Kallen, who had known Ludwig in New York and
saw little change in his old acquaintance despite the good years he was
having in Europe.
An evening with Lewisohn still leaves a faint savor of distaste. It is hard
to believe that such defects can go with such virtues of literary style, but
they do. The man’s a bounder of the first order with a paranoic tendency to
regard anyone that won’t give him his own way and see him as a heavenly
perfection as a scoundrel. This time it is Liveright, to whom he had sent a
book about his first wife, so libellous Liveright wouldn’t touch it. Result:
Liveright is a blackguard, holding back royalties, given over to iniquity, etc.,
etc. Faugh!'
But most did enjoy their time with him, and as Ludwig awaited
the appearance of his two latest volumes, and a change in the State
Department’s disposition, he began a new fall season of entertaining.
Dreiser was in Europe that August and on the sixteenth had written
to Ludwig from Berlin asking if he was in Vienna. 2 By then, Ludwig
had returned to Paris, where Dreiser finally caught up with him in mid-
September. Writing to her mother on the eighteenth, Thelma spoke of
the weeklong visit they were in the midst of at that point. “Theodore
Dreiser is here for a week with his latest lady, and we dined with them last
night, and are giving a cocktail party for them this week so that some
of our friends may meet.” He seemed to Thelma a rather quiet man,
Page 442 - [see page image]
423
A Man of Letters
maintaining a low profile in an attempt “to keep out of the papers.”
Still, he could be excellent company, “unspoiled by his success and as
jolly and hail fellow-well-met as ever.” Thelma was pleased to see such
an old friend as Dreiser still caring for Ludwig, particularly as troubles
were beginning to mount once more. “Ludwig has oceans of friends,”
she boasted to her mother, “and they always stick to him thru thick and
thin somehow—perhaps because he has such a lovely disposition and
character.” 3
Nutting agreed with Thelma’s assessment of Dreiser. “I never heard
Dreiser really talk to any great extent,” though he had met him on a
number of occasions during this and subsequent visits at the Lewisohns’
and elsewhere. He had found no sign of Dreiser being the engaging
conversationalist that Joyce was; nor had he seen evidence of an alcohol
problem, as he had with Sinclair Lewis, who, while visiting Ludwig, had
“disgraced himself abominably.” Rather, Dreiser proved to be merely a
pleasant, quiet, and uncomplicated man, and as a guest, more observer
than participant in the activity around him, as if gathering material for
a new story. Nutting was, therefore, caught off guard when Dreiser, the
novelist of realism, expressed his passion for Asian art and an interest
in seeing Nutting’s paintings because of their romantic themes. “That’s
why I like them!” Dreiser declared during a tour of Nutting’s studio,
having wandered away from the party being held in his honor. Ludwig
suddenly realized that Dreiser was missing and came down the hall to
retrieve him, the entire crowd of guests in tow. 4
It was, perhaps, this reluctance for public disclosure that caused
Dreiser to cancel a sitting with the sculptor Roy Sheldon that Ludwig
had arranged for him, and not the sudden need to return to America,
as he claimed. The boat was not scheduled to leave for fifteen days. 5
To Ludwig, he “had grown greyer,” though his conversation in private
had not lost any of its bite “against the stupidity of things and the
swinishness of mankind.” He was at the height of his popularity and
fame, but “a harsh inner weariness, a dark blunt quiet wretchedness
seemed to possess him.”
Ludwig watched his old friend “closely . . . [yet] more detachedly”
than ever before, as he had watched Sinclair Lewis in his “unmistakable
unhappiness.” Despite success at home and in Europe, Lewis had found
no peace, “no inner certainty, no balance, no serenity, nothing between
heaven and earth to which he could withdraw for quietude or heal
ing.” “That terrible American restlessness and essential aimlessness that
wounded” his friends’ souls had found a more lasting solution in his. 6
Yet the smaller and often more immediately troubling concerns of
day-to-day life still had not. With the delayed publication of Crump in
Page 443 - [see page image]
424
Ludwig Lewisohn
America, financial matters were again becoming difficult. The loss of
potential income was further compounded by Mary’s recent success at
having a lien placed upon his earnings from Israel. Liveright’s failure
to fully explain why checks were not being sent had left Ludwig railing
against him to anyone who would listen. But not all were as sympathetic
as Thelma’s mother. Aware of their problems by mid-September, she
offered a loan against future earnings. Ludwig thanked her, but hoped
not to need her help. Rather, he was making every effort to recover from
Liveright “the great deal of money which they have not yet paid,” and
to sell the special printing of Crump by subscription, five hundred copies
at ten dollars each. To be assured of so high a volume of sales, he would,
however, need to advertise heavily, and for this the loan might be needed,
temporarily. 7
So, too, would the help of old friends in the States, to whom he
now sent an urgent appeal accompanied by a card Titus had printed to
announce the book’s forthcoming appearance.
Mr. Edward W. Titus, publisher, of 4, Rue Delambre, Paris XIV, France,
invites subscriptions to the autographed de luxe edition, limited to 500
copies for America and not to be printed there, of
THE CASE OF MR. CRUMP
by
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
Author of Up-Stream, Israel, etc.
a work that enlarges the boundaries of imaginative narrative and exhibits
the writer’s mind and style at a new and unforeseen height of culmination.
Ten dollars the numbered copy.
To obtain a copy mail your check to the above address to-day.
On September 27, Ludwig sent Cerf one of the earliest requests,
uncertain whether “any rumors concerning the peculiar fate of my latest
and (ahem) greatest opus have floated your way.” He explained that this
plan had been conceived by “lawyers, publishers, all sorts of wise guys”
and that without better counsel available to him (“I wish I could have you
here”) he had agreed. Having always expressed “a very friendly attitude
to me,” he was hoping that Cerf would purchase a number of copies for
himself and for “friends of yours who care for my work.” Beautifully
printed in so limited a number, the book was destined, he assured Cerf, to
increase in value. But beyond this, it would probably be the only chance
anyone would ever have to acquire the “integral text,” doubtful now that
it “will ever—literally ever—be reprinted anywhere” in its unexpurgated
form. (In fact, no American or English edition has ever included the entire
Page 444 - [see page image]
425
A Man of Letters
text.) The letter concluded with an appeal to Cerf to spread the word,
and for some news concerning the revised Up Stream. 8
Cerf was quick to respond on October 15, informing Ludwig that
he had already ordered two copies of Crump, while requesting one
hundred advertising leaflets to enable him “to spread the fame of the
book hereabouts.” The new Up Stream would arrive from the printers
in two weeks, he told Ludwig, and copies of it would be sent immediately.
“Have you given any further thought to the American Book of Prose that
we discussed when I last saw you?” Cerf added—a reference to Ludwig’s
major work of American literary history and criticism, Expression in
America, still a number of years away from its inception. 9
Ludwig sent a similar appeal to Henry Hurwitz, reminding him of
his earlier promise to place a notice about Crump in an upcoming issue
of the Menorah journal, alongside a brief announcement of Thelma’s
book Five Songs, to be published in Vienna “with lyrics and versions by
L. L.” “Here I am—as the enclosed cards show—with my little scheme,”
he told Hurwitz, hoping to “soon have a notion of how this particular
cat is likely to jump.” In the meantime, he had begun to work on several
essays, “which, I am sure, will interest you,” among them a stern warning
against the rising tide of fascism in the West (“Culture and Barbarism”)
and a study of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s struggle against those illusions
of progress that were keeping man “from nature and God.” 10 Ludwig
further assured Hurwitz that his nascent “Jewish novel” would be of
interest to the Journal, though it was momentarily delayed by the need
to involve himself personally “in the problem of publishing ‘Crump,’ " '
an oblique reference to Harpers’ sudden request that he substitute a
collection of previously published essays, to be titled Cities and Men, for
this “new full-length novel,” contracted for in place of Crump. Ludwig
had already received an advance on the novel and was now obligated
to honor this change, for which he had not been previously consulted.
With obvious annoyance, Ludwig informed Bradley on October 12 that
Harpers’ continuing unwillingness to risk litigation over Crump in any
form forced him to authorize his attorney in New York to seek a different
publisher for “the popular and expurgated edition."''
Events now began to move more quickly as Bradley had arranged
a meeting for Ludwig with Harpers’ chief editor, Cass Canfield, during
his current European trip. Meeting in October, they established a rela
tionship, at times stormy but always mutually fruitful and respectful,
that would last throughout Ludwig’s long association with the press.
In his later years, Canfield would remember Ludwig as a difficult but
important writer whose best works, The Island Within and Expression
in America, had been written during their years together.
Page 445 - [see page image]
426
Ludwig Lewisohn
On the eighteenth, Ludwig received a request from T. B. Wells
that he allow “Holy Land” to be reprinted by a fine small press “as a
Christmas gift booklet” for Wells’ friends in publishing and journalism.
Though the booklet would not be for sale, and therefore would have
no monetary benefit to Ludwig, Wells spoke of the “publicity value” it
could potentially have in promoting his future work. 14 Ludwig agreed to
the printing of one thousand copies by the Haddon Craftsmen, 15 though
the irony could not have escaped him as he grew more deeply involved
in Jewish life, “studying Hebrew and . . . keeping up the Jewish cele
brations,” as Nutting often observed. 16 As Ludwig would soon note in
Mid-Channel, this “great study has been the chief intellectual experience
of my recent years." 17
In the midst of all this activity, Ludwig suddenly found himself
called upon by Joyce to help in the fight against Samuel Roth’s pirating
of Ulysses, serialized since July in Roth’s new journal, Two Worlds
Monthly. (Despite the protest, it would run until the July 1927 issue.)
The story broke in the New York Evening Post on November 1, eliciting
a cable to the newspaper from Sylvia Beach (owner of Shakespeare
8c Company, bookshop-library-literary center of the Left Bank, and
publisher of Ulysses after its American banning in 1922 on grounds of
obscenity) informing the public that its publication was “unauthorized,
unpaid for, and the text. . . altered,” a reference to Roth’s removal
of the offending material. Beach followed this cable with a letter to
sixty other newspapers throughout the States. Joyce, however, thought
her response ineffectual and sought the help of others. But when Ezra
Pound suggested “a gang of gunmen to scare Roth out of his pants,”
Joyce reconsidered the plan to publish a strong condemnation over the
signature of prominent writers and others with international reputations
in their fields and deputized Ludwig to draft the statement.' 1
Since moving to Paris, they had seen each other often. “I used to
meet him at the Restaurant Des Trianons,” or at the homes of mutual
friends—Huddleston, Nutting, and others. “Then of course he used to
come to my house,” Ludwig would later tell his third wife. “He was
always very pleasant, usually sweet, well and conventionally dressed
and capable of very sweet actions; not at all arrogant.” Clearly, he
was “a man of great genius and learning, but,” as Ludwig judged, “a
sick man . . . very, very thin, thin to emaciation,” with “blondish hair
and full beard,” a patch over one blue eye, and “tortured lips, bitter
and repressed. A very writing of bitterness petrified. And in almost
amusing contrast,” he recalled, “a golden tenor voice in both speaking
and singing.” What “whole forces of his subconscious being” did they
veil, Ludwig wondered as he thought back on “the meaning of his
Page 446 - [see page image]
A Man of Letters
voluntary or involuntary unintelligibility” of the book Joyce had asked
him to defend. 19
In completing the draft protest on November 23, Ludwig had iden
tified the issue as “a matter of grave import not only to all writers but to
all honest men.” Whatever one thought of this “esoteric masterpiece,”
the principle of an author’s right to the “security of the works of the
intellect and the imagination, without which art cannot live,” had to
be protected. In this case, because the book appeared “strange, revolu
tionary and dreadful to the conventional mind,” the justice system, as
an expression of this repressive mentality, had withheld its protection.
Denied copyright and banned from distribution in the United States by
Post Office authorities, its author was now subjected to theft without
legal recourse. 20 (Ironically, Crump would one day face a similar fate,
though the ban against Ulysses would be lifted fourteen years earlier.)
After changes to Ludwig’s draft were made by the American writer
Archibald MacLeish, a graduate of Harvard Law School who gave it a
more legalistic tone, and by Joyce himself, it would be issued in English
and French on February 2, 1927, Joyce’s birthday, and distributed to
the press in both hemispheres. Accompanying it were 167 signatures,
many gathered by Beach throughout the preceding December and Jan
uary. Curiously, neither Beach’s nor Pound’s signature appeared on this
“International Protest.
A week after completing the draft for Joyce, Ludwig wrote Liveright
a long letter in an attempt to mend their relationship. The practical issues
of money and exile had softened his resolve to be forever finished with
his former publisher. Ludwig offered his apology, explaining that he
had been misled by contradictory reports. If only “someone had sent
me an occasional post-card with a few figures.” He explained that the
sudden drop in Israel's sales had “unnerved” him, and that “a very little,
judiciously planned” to coincide with the Zionists’ renewed efforts that
winter, would have prevented the loss of income. “All my plans and
expectations have failed,” he emphasized; even his hopes of going home
were being blocked by “that unspeakable criminal.. . . I’m imprisoned
here.” Admitting that he had “forfeited all rights to ask a favor,” he yet
asked if all royalties earned in the second half of the year could be sent
immediately after January 1. “You can do no worse than refuse.” '-'
Ludwig’s translation of Wedlock was about to appear, so he asked
Liveright to send a few copies in time for Wassermann’s visit in January.
Ludwig must have known what nearly all the American reviewers would
report, that the book itself was leaden and poorly conceived, more an
extended essay than literature. But the concluding line had most certainly
touched a resonating chord in his own life as the protagonist turned to
427
Page 447 - [see page image]
428
Ludwig Lewisohn
his beloved, declaring, “you have placed me in the midst of so radiant
a springtime of life.” Thelma, by Ludwig’s accounting to Liveright, had
made life “dearer and dearer” for him, and in spite of the economic and
legal problems, he had regained his edge as a writer. “The curious part
of it all is that I have never written better, which is no doubt due to
the happiness of my personal life.” Without being specific, he referred
to several new projects as “big things planned and in my mind.” And
for the first time since the years before the Great War, he was hard
at work “trying to do some short stories to keep the pot boiling."- '
These would never reach completion, nor would Liveright respond to
Ludwig’s apology and appeal, prompting a recapitulation of the letter
on December 18. 24
“Sometimes we didn’t have much . . . and it was pretty hard going,”
Thelma later recalled of these months. Concerts were a small but
additional source of income for them, as well as further exposure for
her career. By September she had begun rehearsing for a December 9
performance at the Salle Comoedia in Paris. 26 Occasional publications,
including the musical compositions already published in Europe, were
of some further help. Ludwig had also sent a few of Thelma’s poems
to Mencken, who had read them “with immense delight” in November
after his return from Los Angeles (where “all the morons west of the
Mississippi collect”); but he made no promise to publish them, and
never did. Instead he asked Ludwig why nothing had as yet come
from his pen for the American Mercury, not knowing that Ludwig
had spent most of his uncommitted time working out the plan of his
new novel. On December 7, he would take pen in hand in his small
upstairs study and begin the book with an appeal to his readers to “tell
wiser, broader, deeper stories—stories with morals more significant and
rich.” His would be a tale of the passing of the truly democratic spirit
in America and of the cultural sacrifice made by so many immigrants
to those assimilatory forces of an oligarchy unworthy of emulation.
How dared they display such “poisonous disdain and contemptuous
aloofness” toward those whose lives they would control, he asked with
an old anger rekindled. “Until the other day we Americans lived as
though we had no past,” as though “the world [began] all over again
with Lexington and Bull Run and Valley Forge and the Declaration
of Independence. Would that those happy and innocent days could
have endured!” Instead, “old families in Eastern cities who worshipped
ancestors and played with heraldic devices” had strengthened the state
through “blood and war” and left it “brazen, remote, implacable, except
by stealthy magnates.. . . Democracy lived a feeble life, but it lived.”
But no longer. In its place, “the duped and stupefied populace—no
Page 448 - [see page image]
429
A Man of Letters
more a people—dances about fundamentalist preachers, [and] baseball
pitchers,” without ever demanding “the gesture of democracy.” It would
be a tale Mencken would appreciate, with “something of an epic note”
of that “constant sense of the streaming generations, of the processes
of historic change, of the true character of man’s magnificent and tragic
adventure between earth and sky” that would speak of the struggle to
restore individual freedom and self-determination according to one’s
own lights—a wake-up call in the shape of a tale that would touch “all
but the utterly child-minded . . . their lives, their mortal difficulties, their
station and their moment amid the sum of things."- '
But the novel was still more than a year away from completion
and publication, and each of Ludwig’s and Thelma’s other efforts that
fall would have only a minimal effect upon their financial problems.
Only the successful sale of Crump's five hundred copies could change the
situation. By mid-December 1926, the first few gift copies were ready
to be sent with a solicitation for usable approbations, to be used in
an advertising campaign early in the coming year, prepublication an
nouncements having yielded but a handful of orders. Mencken, Dreiser,
Leonard, Carl Van Doren, Janet Flanner, Krutch, Hurwitz, Lewis, Freud,
Mann, Wassermann, and Huddleston each received an advance copy of
Crump before the new year, and all but one quickly sent a response. " 1
Ludwig’s appeal to Mencken for a review in the Mercury carried the
strongest wording. “The fortunes of this book are, from every point of
view, of crucial importance to me as a man and as a writer. What I have
suffered from Neo-Puritan barbarism is no common or light matter. This
book, objectively and philosophically molded, is record, reply, life and
art.” Knowing that Mencken shared his distaste for the hypocrisy and
shallowness they had both found in America (“Most of our American
friends, mostly very literary gents and ladies, are so vague about the
difference between Franz and Jake Schubert”), Ludwig told him of his
first thoughts for the book that would become Expression in America, “a
re-creating, re-valuating account of our national past and present in life
and letters.” Much of this, he promised Mencken, would fit nicely into
his journal, as he hoped his next submission, “American Memories,”
would. " The piece never appeared in the Mercury, but may have been
an early draft of a portion of Mid-Channel, a second memoir, upon
which he would begin to work in the coming year.
The new year was quickly approaching as the American novelist,
playwright, and screenwriter Elmer Rice, resident in Paris since 1921,
summed up the past twelve months for them in his year-end greetings:
“I hope that 1927 will repair for you all of 1926’s shortcomings, or
that if you look upon the dying year as pure gain, that you will learn to
Page 449 - [see page image]
430
Ludwig Lewisohn
look upon the gestating one as even purer.” 31 Accomplishments had been
diminished by “that inconceivable hag and the strong weapons of law
and society,” Ludwig had complained to Liveright on December 18 in his
second appeal for funds, needed by January 2. 32 And though the calendar
was changing, Ludwig’s problems, real and imaginary, were not.
On January 5 he thanked Liveright for his encouraging letter and
cable informing him of a balance in his account that would soon be
sent. Ludwig hoped that payment for the subleased Paris apartment had
already been sent by Liveright to Biddle, who had returned to the States
and was now demanding his money. The rapid decline in Israel’s sales
remained something to which “I find it hard to reconcile myself.” If
only he could be in New York to aid in its promotion and to mend their
relationship face to face, he told Liveright. From so far away, “I can
only ask you to forget our difficulties and remain my friend.” He was
under great pressure, working on the novel and wanting now to begin
his American study, but concerned that, like Israel, a nonfiction book
would have a quick but limited success in the market. It was a book “that
is necessary and essential, that is bound to be written: the time, the stars,
the stage of American national consciousness demand it.” Without past
royalties, he could not undertake so massive a project. And if sales were
poor, how were he and Thelma to survive? “I think I could write it. But
it would take a couple of years. How are we to live? And then?” 33
Having just finished reading Crump on January 6, Dreiser quickly
sent off a lengthy note to Ludwig filled with questions concerning the
text and his friend’s ability to write of such recent events “with the
clear, uncolored, unemotional viewpoint which any writer must have
when fictionalizing that which lies nearest his heart.” Dreiser advised
that he wait several years, and then rewrite the book when it could
be approached more objectively and honestly. There was no doubt in
Dreiser’s mind of “the strife which so embittered you,” but as a close
witness to Ludwig’s early years with Mary, he knew that the portrait
painted was skewed by the latter period, so that the companionship
they had once shared could only be viewed as part of Mary’s planned
entrapment, which from Dreiser’s perspective it had not been. Still, he
praised Ludwig’s writing, “the vivid incisive style ... its intensity—its
facility—its compelling interest.” But to win a less qualified endorse
ment, “the harshness, the vulgarity, the bitterness, the one-sided-ness,
the psychological astigmatism” would have to be “eradicated." '
Ludwig, upset with Dreiser’s reaction, disregarded his suggestion
(indeed, never changed his mind regarding Mary) and continued to
promote the unrevised text, using only the positive portions of the
letter in Titus’s advertisements, altering it to read, “The vivid, incisive
Page 450 - [see page image]
431
A Man of Letters
style... its facility, its compelling interest are undeniable. The work
must prove arresting to many—very many.” 35 A month later, in a letter
to Liveright, Ludwig strongly voiced his disagreement with Dreiser’s
assessment, noting how his other friends had been better able to look
beyond their personal knowledge of the case and see the book for its
own sake as a work of fiction—an apparent attempt by Ludwig to
have his way on all levels. “He’s just written me about ‘Crump.’ Praises
it glowingly for some qualities. But lectures me on the ground of the
autobiographical assumptions which is, of course, unfair. The book was
shaped for the world. My intimate friends have no business to intrude
this knowledge into it. Sinclair Lewis sees that and so does Joe Krutch." 16
As other responses began to arrive, a curious note from Mencken
appeared among them. Having received Ludwig’s note of December 16,
but not the book it spoke of, Mencken wrote on January 16 of its failure
to arrive. “I certainly hope that the polizei have not grabbed the book.”
Two days later, Crump appeared at his door and Mencken wrote again,
promising to read it at once. The news that Ludwig was to undertake
his American study excited Mencken, who offered whatever assistance
he could, convinced “that almost any portion of the MS will inevitably
fit into The American Mercury." Such a history “certainly yells to be
done,” and if anyone could do it, Mencken was convinced that Ludwig
was “precisely the man who could do it best.” 37
Pleased with Mencken’s support of both projects, Ludwig thought
little more about why this one copy had been delayed while others
had not. It seemed unusual, but not necessarily indicative of anything
irregular, particularly since it had ultimately reached its destination.
Undoubtedly, Sinclair Lewis’s highly encouraging letter of the same
day, complete with self-drawn caricature, distracted Ludwig from any
suspicions he may have had. Lewis was the most straightforward of the
ten whose comments were composed strictly for the purpose intended.
“ ‘The Case of Mr. Crump’ is to me very remarkable in its strength, its
lucidity, and that nobility which distinguishes authentic literature from
the simply clever.” He promised to send his copy to a few publishers
who might be interested in an American edition, though he held out
little hope “for reasons which will be thoroughly evident to you” 38 —a
belief already seconded by Janet Flanner of the New Yorker in her “Paris
Letter” of January 5. 39
Several days after Lewis’s letter arrived, Cerf sent disturbing news
that quickly dampened the positive reception Crump was receiving
on both continents. “Your legal wife has decided to sue the Mod
ern Library for libel.” The “Revised Edition” of Up Stream, with its
many negative reflections upon her character, had brought a quick and
Page 451 - [see page image]
432
Ludwig Lewisohn
threatening response. Cerf was not yet ready to recall the volume, but
he was worried. “Regardless of how big or how little a chance Mrs.
Lewisohn has of ever getting a verdict in a case of this sort, here is
the thing staring us in the face, and it must be met.” He needed a
long and greatly detailed explanation of the troubling insertion con
cerning Mary’s alleged insistence that he marry her in order “to save
her honor and her very life.” Cerf stated his confidence in Ludwig’s
integrity and his certainty that the explanation offered “would be sat
isfactory.” 40 But fear of litigation soon forced Cerf to destroy most of
the stock (only a few copies have survived). In their place, a reprinting
of the 1922 edition was issued and litigation momentarily avoided. 41
By April, Up Stream, “corrected to correspond with the original text”
as stated in a disclaimer printed on the opening page, had once again
become a best-seller. 42 The American reading public remained unaware
of the deleted changes and of their fictionalized account in Crump,
which the United States government would soon bar from entry into
the country.
Not long after Ludwig learned of the delayed receipt of the copy
sent to Mencken, rumors from Baltimore and St. Louis concerning the
Post Office’s interception of Crump began reaching Paris. Confirmation
soon arrived in France that the book was indeed being considered for
possible violation of the obscenity statute embodied in Section 211 of
the Federal Criminal Code, and, therefore, might be “unmailable.” 4 ’ If
found to be violating this law, it would suffer the fate Joyce’s Ulysses had
eight years earlier. 44 The hoped-for sale of all five hundred copies, mostly
in America, now seemed more doubtful than anyone had anticipated.
Within a few weeks, Crump found itself placed on the list of books
banned by the U.S. Post Office from distribution through the mail,
effectively restricting it from the country at large. Attempting to console
his fellow writer, Thomas Mann wrote Ludwig on February 6 that “It
must be a real satisfaction for you, that this book, which was frowned
upon by prudish America, could finally get out into the daylight in such
a beautiful and dignified form. I use the word ‘dignified,’ because the
first impression that I get leafing through the pages is, that its spiritual
value absolutely matches the luxurious production.” Mencken soon
joined the growing chorus of outrage at this blatant act of censorship.
With the book not yet totally prohibited from importation by the U.S.
Customs Service, he hoped to reassure them that “the present volume . . .
is by no means a collector’s item for pornographic Methodists”; only
“a few passages in it. . . would probably shock an old lady who had
not yet had her hair bobbed.” 4 ' In his own defense, Ludwig would
later assert that the “landscape, speech, gesture, incident, above all
Page 452 - [see page image]
433
A Man of Letters
character, are American,” though “the particular quality of the fusing
moral passion . . . [was] doubtless Jewish.”' 1 '
Against the background of these developments, advertisements
placed earlier, along with other brief notices, began to appear by late
January. More than others, Hurwitz’s “generous” reference to Crump in
the Menorah Journal was of special importance to Ludwig, appearing as
it did alongside the announcement of Thelma’s book of songs. “I thank
you for both most cordially,” Ludwig wrote Hurwitz on February 1,
and offered in reciprocation “an episode or two [of his Jewish novel in
progress] that stood pretty much four-square on its own feet.” It was all
he had to propose at the moment, financial necessity and “this creative
spring that is bubbling” being what they were. “The trouble is I simply
haven’t had the time to write miscellaneously,” as he had earlier told
Hurwitz he would. If the first episode was to his liking, Ludwig assured
him that a second could be sent upon receipt of payment. In June, the
first of these “episodes” appeared in the Menorah Journal. 47
This, however, was not the first to be published. “Specimens,” as
Ludwig termed them, had already been printed in the inaugurating issue
of transition, “which some rather interesting and, I can’t help thinking,
courageous chaps [Elliot Paul and Eugene Jolas], are starting here. Joyce
and I are their initial star performers,” he proudly wrote Liveright on
February 8. 48 Joyce’s “Opening Pages of a Work in Progress,” a republi
cation of a portion of Ulysses accompanied by the first public appearance
of the “International Protest” under the title “Stop, Thief!,” opened its
first issue, while Ludwig’s selection from his nearly completed novel The
Defeated (The Island Withtn's original and English publication title)
closed it. 49 Robert Sage of the Paris Tribune praised the “tolerance and
good judgement” displayed by transition's editors in their first effort,
and predicted a promising future for the journal. “In range it extends
from the advanced writing which represents the latest stage of James
Joyce’s evolution to the conservative but richly woven prose of Ludwig
Lewisohn. Each narrative and poetic contribution represents a personal
tendency caught at a high degree of perfection. This insistence on uni
form quality rather than uniform style is the most reassuring sign that
transition is well immunized from arteriosclerosis.” 50
On February 9 the long and impatiently awaited first review of
Crump appeared. Joseph Wood Krutch, who had filled Ludwig’s vacated
position as literary critic at the Nation, called it a “hideously powerful
novel... of good against evil,” told with “a beauty of form which only
throws into sharper relief the hideousness of its material. . . [the] phys
ical decline and increasing meanness of [Anne Crump’s] soul” and the
survival of Herbert Crump in the face of this “most chaotic situation.”
Page 453 - [see page image]
434
Ludwig Lewisohn
In Ludwig’s hands, she became “a symbol of that mysterious evil of
the universe which nothing can reach or placate.” Her killing was not
murder but a part of the universal “struggle of evil against good” which
“gives to the hero his dignity and lends to his story something of the
elevation of tragedy.” Yet, there is no despair in the author’s voice, for
“the world which it describes is something more than sound and fury.” 51
Mencken’s equally positive, if more qualified, treatment appeared
within the month. If somewhat more critical of the story (“the actual text
pushes so close to the ridiculous that all the skill of the author is necessary
to drag it back”), he praised Ludwig for “a capital piece of work,” seeing
in Anne “a portrait of an indelible reality and poignancy.” For Mencken,
Crump afforded an opportunity he could not easily let pass, pouring out
his own feelings as if he himself had experienced something touching
upon Ludwig’s marriage to Mary.
One is never in any doubt about his terrible lady; she takes on all the colors
of life. Such women, alas, are to be found in the world. They inhabit many a
Christian suburb in our own glorious country, and are to be found, too, on
higher levels, not to say on lower. There is a variety of female that is hard to
distinguish from a bird of prey. It converts the symbiosis of marriage into a
sort of cannibalistic parasitism. The worst of it is that many of these gals are
genuinely virtuous at bottom—that their deviltries issue out of the loftiest
of intentions. Even Lewisohn’s Jezebel is an assiduous and even almost
immolating mother. She wrecks her husband that her atrocious children
may survive. It is like killing an ox to feed a litter of rats.
Ludwig, too, failed to escape Mencken’s rapier-like pen as he commented
that Roy Sheldon’s bust of the author had done “more than justice to
his pulchritude.” He went on to add that Ludwig, “a well-informed and
shrewd critic of the arts, and especially of literature,” was contemplating
a much needed history of American literature, a book that “no man
could do . . . with sounder information and better sense.. . . Lewisohn
is a man of fine talents, and I believe that his best books are ahead
of him.” 52
Ludwig was quick to acknowledge Mencken’s assistance in the
book’s promotion, and thanked him “heartily for your fine, witty and
generous review of Crump and not least for the last paragraph thereof.”
With a pen no more a stranger to sarcasm than Mencken’s (if less often
in print), Ludwig spoke of the review as “striking proof” of Mencken’s
“justness and generosity to your contemporaries.” He went on to tell
Mencken that he would soon begin work on the American study now
that he was “finishing one more strictly impersonal piece of fiction.”
Ludwig was, in all seriousness, anxious to begin the project for which
“my whole life has, in a sense, been a preparation.” Still, it would be a
Page 454 - [see page image]
435
A Man of Letters
formidable task, stretching beyond the scope of his vast knowledge of
a subject that had grown steadily since his earlier study of “Books We
Have Made” nearly a quarter of a century earlier. “Certain definite jobs
of study must be done and redone.”
Ludwig’s note to Mencken that March ended with an invitation to
visit him and Thelma in Paris. “Do you ever run over?” he asked. It
would be their pleasure to entertain him among a gathering of friends
he believed would be of interest. And if not the company, then certainly
the fare offered would be to his liking, for despite protestations of near
impoverishment, the Lewisohns had an excellent chef in their employ,
whose talents Cass Canfield would recall more than a half century later.
“We rejoice,” Ludwig boasted, “in the possession of a remarkable cook
and can offer something most estimable in the way of food and drink,”
adding, “not to speak of music. “' 1 Sherwood Anderson and his wife had
recently shared “some very pleasant times, and in March Liveright
was planning to meet with Ludwig to discuss the possibility of publishing
his American study (not yet knowing that Ludwig had already bolted
for HarpersI." So, too, would Sinclair Lewis be stopping by that month
as a part of his escape from the furor caused by Elmer Gantry's recent
publication. Such visits were “almost becoming a custom” among their
American friends.' 1
With a new season of visits and social engagements moving in upon
them, and the need to escape the grey Paris winter with its continuing
pressures of Crump and of Mary’s pursuit, Ludwig and Thelma, like so
many others in Paris with time and a little money to spare, set off on a
three-week tour of Tunis. It was the closest they could come to returning
to Palestine. “A slight feverishness, a desire for wandering came over
us both. What came to us in waking dreams in this city of grey silk
was the East.” 57 With the loss of their passports, they were restricted to
territories under French control. “We are for the time being outcasts—
we, not Anne Crump—and have no passports,” he would tell Spingarn
that June, and therefore “delighted (curious reflection considering one’s
political views) and grateful that the French empire extends from the
Rhine to the Congo. Nice old French imperium!” 58 Yet even without the
need for passports, the lack of necessary funds might have thwarted their
plans had Liveright in January not sent the few hundred dollars owed to
Ludwig, with which he could now purchase the half-price fares offered
by the French Line’s president after their chance meeting one evening.
In Carthage, Sfax, Kairouan, and Gabes they found “that adven
turous difference” which only the East could provide. Here, the ruins
of an ancient civilization, the masculine culture of Islam, the mysterious
beauty of its contemporary life, and the incomparable desert all promised
Page 455 - [see page image]
436
Ludwig Lewisohn
a momentary escape from those demands at home which had too often
compromised his desire for a firmer grounding in life. “One who seeks
ultimate values will do well to flee for a space from the turmoil, the con
flicts, the social. . . disintegration of Western life ... its haste without
direction, its confusion on eternal and fundamental facts and issues.” As
during his first journey to the East, the days spent in North Africa gave
him the perspective he had begun to lose in the heat of struggles large
and small. “In the desert and alone a man speaks with God.” 59
They returned to Paris in early March to what he later described
to Leonard as their “rather gay life with many—at times too many—
friends and acquaintances.” But he returned resolved not to be consumed
by either Crump or Mary—life was, in balance, far better than it had
ever been. “The good so prevails over and outweighs the evil,” he wrote
Spingarn on March 20. “We are letting that whole matter slide for the
present, trusting time, the hand of God,” and, in case neither could
resolve the issues, “a change in the administration.” He still suffered
“undercurrents of thought and black moments” over the injustices pre
vailing against him, but so much else made them bearable. “Dear friends
and certain bits of landscape” were all that he missed of America now,
and though he could earn far more there, where but in Paris could he
have found a comparable apartment for six hundred dollars a year, or a
marvelous cook for seventeen a month r ' "
Several days after writing Spingarn, Leonard’s letter of March 12
arrived, breaking his unusually long silence with a lengthy discussion
of Crump. Of the two reviews that had already appeared, he believed
Krutch’s to be far better than Mencken’s. Though “immensely quick and
clear, with a fearless eye for social and intellectual fraud and flatulency,”
Leonard found Mencken to be “not a deep man, not a temperamentally
wise man.” Yet Leonard, unlike Krutch, qualified the praise he offered
for what he saw as “much your best” work. Raising an objection similar
to Dreiser’s, he suggested that if Ludwig were to revise the text for
a popular edition, he should “consider a little touch here and there
to bring out moments of companionship as well as more elements of
humor, intelligence and kindliness (when Mrs. C’s sex, parasitism, and
selfish aggressiveness are not involved.)” These “few strokes” would
make her less “hideous” and “more grippingly real.” Not that he didn’t
understand the motivation behind Ludwig’s portrayal, or disagree with
the tenor of his characterization—for unknown to his friend, Leonard
had himself attempted to thwart Mary’s vengeance in the courts.
Nobody else, I believe, can appreciate quite as I can what a process of living
and of creation underlies this great book, and what a sublimity of victorious
spiritual control of the past the book reveals. O for many, many years your
Page 456 - [see page image]
437
A Man of Letters
marriage was one of the saddest things in my life—tho I spoke to others
little, and to you still less, about it. And when it ended with an attempt to
blacken and ruin you before the world, I wrote (keeping as much gratitude
as I could for M’s kindnesses to me at the time of Lottie’s suicide) a letter
to an influential man in N.Y., giving the facts of the long, strange struggle;
and he passed it on to the judge. I don’t know that I told you ever, or should
tell you at all. Consider the matter private—as you will.
Leonard’s only concern now was that Ludwig not thwart the joy that
should be his. “Do you anticipate trouble for the book?” Leonard asked
in ending his letter. 61
“I shall always treasure [your letter]... as my justification as a
man and as a man of letters,” Ludwig wrote Leonard on April 10,
adding that negotiations were under way with Liveright, Harpers, and an
unspecified “Philadelphia firm” concerning a limited edition of Crump
for America. The real problem, however, was not censorship, but the
“possible or even probable suit for libel” that would “fill the pockets of
the book’s heroine. ? Regis Michaud’s chance encounter with Mary at a
PEN Club dinner in Berkeley, California, the previous week, would later
confirm Ludwig’s fears. In notes recorded by the defense in 1930 for a
lawsuit she had filed against Ludwig and others, Michaud related how by
innocently asking the woman seated beside him, whose placecard read
“Mrs. Lewisohn,” whether she was related to Ludwig, he had unleashed
“a torrent of words” concerning her role as the “inspiration for all or
various of his works.” She went on and on from there, detailing how
Ludwig had wronged her after all that she had done for him. Without
knowing either Ludwig or the details of their marriage at that time,
Michaud later recalled being overwhelmed by Mary, a “large, tall, ugly,
painted and repulsive creature” whose appearance and conversation
had revolted him to the extent that Ludwig had instantly won his
sympathies. 63
Only to Leonard would Ludwig admit that his portrait of Mary
as Anne Crump might have been too one-sided. Still, what “wavering
recollection of kindlier moments, flickering as they were, in far-off years”
did remain had been “stamped out by her mad and obscene actions since
I left.” Leonard knew “not the half,” he assured his old friend on April
10. Above all else, Ludwig could not forgive her for the turmoil that “has
kept us childless . . . [when] she knew how profoundly I have wanted a
child and . . . how passionately and devotedly anxious Thelma was to
give me a child.” Throughout much of their time in Europe, Thelma
had failed to menstruate, and then only intermittently during periods of
reduced stress, though some nonpsychologically induced physiological
problem may have contributed to her problem. Because of this most
Page 457 - [see page image]
438
Ludwig Lewisohn
unpardonable malevolence, he had felt justified in the portrait drawn,
“serene in the thought that if I am at all remembered among men that
portrait of her will be remembered too.” 64 Leonard wrote back in early
May that he was now in complete agreement with Ludwig’s use of the
“material of that ‘marriage,’ ” having been made more fully aware of the
scope of her effect upon them. “I certainly feel that her performances in
these last critical years have given you a free hand.... I’d advise firmly;
go ahead and have a child.”' '
With no other chance of returning to the States over the next several
years, Ludwig had proposed a final cash offer to her that spring. She
would either agree to his terms right now, or he and Thelma would sign
a three-year lease for a new apartment and cut her off from any access
to his royalties (certain that such a move was possible). “Perhaps the
thought of getting nothing for another three years will shake her. . .
perhaps it won’t. I don’t know.” 66
Over the next several months, the reviews of Crump made their way
into the literary journals and newspapers of two continents. If critical
of one minor element or another, nearly all were generous with their
praise. So ably had Ludwig demonstrated his craft that Anne appeared
to one critic, unfamiliar with Ludwig’s personal life, as “one of those
creations which a novelist achieves only when he goes from probability
into possibility, that high dire region of the imaginative mind.” 67
The “specimens” of The Defeated (along with a full-page adver
tisement proclaiming that “Nothing Could Have Stopped The Case of
Mr. Crump”) began to appear in transition during this period. No one
had as yet seen a sampling of the novel. Alex Small commented in the
Paris Tribune of April 10 that “the opening pages of Mr. Lewisohn’s
latest contemplated novel, in which he shows that he is a real story
teller,” stood out from among all of transition’s prose offerings. Of
particular interest, Small added, was its “old-fashioned preface, for even
when he is telling a story, Mr. Lewisohn is fundamentally a moralizer.” 68
The Defeated would continue to be serialized in both transition and
the Menorah Journal until its appearance some months later, helping to
create a waiting readership and assuring its sales.
These were, indeed, eventful months for Ludwig’s work. Alongside
reviews of Crump and the publication of portions of The Defeated,
Roman Summer now found its way to the bookshops, and to the critics,
who proved merciless in their attack. “An agreeable (I hope) trifle,”
as Ludwig described it to Leonard, 69 Roman Summer had been hastily
written and would now suffer the fate of a work deprived of the time it
needed to deepen and mature. The New York Times of May 1 praised
“its charm of phrasing and occasional bits of insight,” but found it to be
Page 458 - [see page image]
439
A Man of Letters
a series of arguments rather than a work of fiction that put its “characters
through the paces of life.. . . His people remain sketches. They dwindle
to abstractions when the novel is laid aside.”' Few critics were more
charitable in their treatment.
Uncharacteristically, Ludwig emerged from the critical onslaught
relatively unscathed. The book had been taken off the shelf and sold to
Harpers after a hasty dusting, simply to supplement his income. Not a
single word had been changed during the interval between completion
and publication, a period of a year and a half. In Mid-Channel he would
acknowledge that in trying to write a novel of ideas and social analysis,
he had learned to never again pass over what he knew to be the “secret
of sound fiction: if you want your characters to live with a more than
papery life, let their actions, manners, habits, speech and gestures be
perfectly known. Let their interior processes be inferred or surmised.” '
If the book remains unremarkable, it is ironic to read of the protag
onist’s choice of Louise as his final mate. As the book ends, he dreams
of the new life that was to begin with her beside him after a lifetime of
struggle:
He got into bed. He stretched his limbs luxuriously between the cool, fresh
sheets. How beautiful a thing it was to be near home after long wandering,
after wandering nearly all one’s life! A few months would yet have to pass.
But only a very few. Then, perhaps at the first touch of another spring-time,
the house that he was planning would be built and he would take Louise
into his arms and his barrenness and tenseness would be healed and the
falseness of his life gone from him forever. He slipped off into sleep with a
final vision of that house with Louise downstairs and himself working in his
study and interrupting his work for a minute to run down into the dining
room or kitchen to refresh his soul and mind with the sight of her face and
the touch of her hand or of her soft young lips against his own. 72
Ludwig’s fourth wife, with whom he would at last find some true inner
peace, would be named Louise.
Perhaps Ludwig’s failure to react more negatively to Roman Sum
mer’s poor reception was, in part, the result of his far greater interest in
The Defeated and in the vaguely proposed American study. “Disgraced
by most of our American colleagues,” he had grown more “tempted by
the notion—shekels aside—of the book on American literature.” As he
described it for Leonard in mid-April, it would be composed of “brief
though sound sections on the successive colonial periods leading up to,
blooming forth in the modern period of national self-expression with
full-length portraits (personal and literary. I know them all personally)
of all the representative figures. Think of the fun and fury.” Some details,
however, would be left unspoken, as in the case of Sinclair Lewis,
Page 459 - [see page image]
440
Ludwig Lewisohn
“whom I nearly threw out of our house the other night; he was so
drunk and ribald and vulgar and swinish at a party which Thelma was
good enough to give for him.” Rather, he would speak of “the amazing
astuteness, staggering virtuosity, immense kulturbistorisch importance
of Elmer Gantry."' 1
Leonard advised that he “hurry up with it,” anxious himself to read
the study. ‘ At this early stage, Ludwig was equally anxious to get under
way and tried to let little else interfere. “The very serious plan of my
writing a one or two-volume, very revolutionary, History of American
Literature,” he told Cerf on April 16, would have to take precedence
over his request for an anthology of American prose for the Modern
Library. “I expect to begin work this coming August and not quit till
all’s done,” making it impossible for him to contract for what much
later would become, in its expanded configuration, a companion volume
to the American study.'' Certain of its quality and marketability, Cerf
wrote back that he was willing to wait. 76 With the quantity of research
and writing needed for so massive an undertaking, Ludwig rushed to
complete The Defeated, finishing it on May 16, 1927. With only a few
scattered pieces of business over the next few months, he hoped to begin
work on the American study later that summer.
Two weeks earlier, the rights to a French-language edition of Crump
had been bought by the house of Plon and Nourrit in Paris, 77 the first
of some half-dozen translations to be published over the next few years.
And then, in early June, the final judgment of the American censors
reached Paris. Crump was to be banned as “unmailable” by the U.S.
Post Office. Though Horace Connelly, the Post Office’s attorney, agreed
in principle that “the views of men of letters, contemporary or otherwise,
are entitled to due respect,” he maintained that his “office must be
governed” by the “views of the Federal courts as to what constitutes ob
scenity.” 78 In the New York Herald Tribune of June 12, Lewis Galantiere,
while acknowledging that “certain passages in this novel are too ‘re
alistic’ for publication in New York,” condemned this “anonymous
censorship [which] once more deprives the American reading public of
a master work.” 79 Titus, however, remained unconcerned, as sales only
improved after the banning, while the value of each copy and, thus, the
income for himself and Ludwig increased as well. 80
After completing a final article condemning the new French poets
for their conservative response to the war and the industrial society that
had fueled it, “feeble . . . conceits” of reactionaries within the Church
and politics,'' Ludwig set out with Thelma for a month’s rest in southern
France, as so many American expatriates did during those years when
fleeing the hundred thousand American tourists who would descend
Page 460 - [see page image]
441
A Man of Letters
each summer upon Montparnasse in search of its mythic paradise. “And
that’s a lot of Americans, whichever way you look at it!” wrote Jimmie
Charters of the Jockey Cafe. 82 Viereck had planned to see Ludwig in
Paris that June, after many years of silence between them, 83 but Ludwig,
too exhausted “to foregather with my oldest and best friends and so to
complete the circles of life,” had apologetically canceled in favor of rest
before beginning the American study, the contract for which had now
been signed.''
Ludwig had gone south for a rest, but while there, an “article came
of itself, was scribbled down in note-books and is now in final form,”
he wrote Wells on July 17. It was “just as well” that he had gotten
his ideas out on paper while away, “since I am pretty much absorbed
building the structure of the magnum opus on American literature.” He
had, in fact, already started on the American study while away. If tired,
his mind could not rest. Nor could he be content to work on merely one
project, despite his claim that all else would be cleared from his board.
Another article was already gestating, with a working title of “A Plea for
Sensibility.” Its theme would be one to which he would return several
more times—a generational issue manifesting itself socially, culturally,
and morally in ways that Ludwig could not condone. “It would in fact
and substance be a firm yet perfectly gentle calling to account by analysis
of the hard-boiled action of the latest generation in both art and life, the
‘hell-we don’t give a damn’ attitude, the deliberate flight from beauty,
feeling and an intelligent concern with conduct.”''
Appearing in the January 1928 issue of Harper’s under the changed
title of “The Politics of a Man of Letters,” Ludwig’s article warned
against the growing dangers of fascism and its insidious appeal to the
need for order felt by so many, even after nine postwar years. Fascism,
he maintained, destroyed individuality and diversity, key elements for
creativity and general happiness among a people. Imposing itself against
the natural will that grows organically with time, “the Fascist regime is
an image of disorder, if order means harmony and peace, if it means that
a people’s political institutions must be a development and projection
of its character and needs.” The control such a regime would gain,
however, would inevitably be overthrown by the oppressed, “because
history teaches . . . that revolutions of the oppressed have always in the
long run succeeded.” This was not simply a Bolshevist notion, but one
deeply seated in Christianity and its Jewish origins, though these roots
have all too often been disregarded, leaving the man of letters “appalled
at the unbelievably gross contradiction at the very core of Western
civilization.” And if this man of letters comes out of the democratic
traditions of America, his attack upon the “root of evil” will be that
Page 461 - [see page image]
442
Ludwig Lewisohn
much more fervent, for “in the whole body of early American tradition
he finds a taking for granted of his central political truth that the State
exists for man, not man for the State, and that the highest vigilance to
preserve an anxious individualism is necessary lest the citizen, losing
himself in a mechanism, a slogan, or a flag, identify his personal good
with power and prestige and conquest even to the lust for murder and
the endurance of death.” Such danger was, for this man of letters, a
call to lift his pen against the evil that cast its shade of momentary and
illusory respite over the burning light of truth. The man of letters’ task,
born of learning and insight, was to teach mankind the true ethical order
rooted in his biological and cultural diversity. Only then would he fulfill
his moral obligation as lifegiver and peacemaker.
Freedom is order; variety of experience and character and culture and
opinion is order. Uniformity is a relapse into the primitive and the savage
when a man was stoned for not keeping the Sabbath or killed by his tribal
fellows for either marrying or not marrying a girl from a tribe across the
river. The course of all development, it was pointed out long ago, is from
homogeneity to heterogeneity. All nature and all history are at one on that
point; all the great sages and saviors have proclaimed the freedom of the
disciplined will—disciplined not by rods and uniforms or public opinion
but by the still small voice within. And that is why the man of letters, the
man of some knowledge and some scruples, is always the parlor-Bolshevist
of his age, is always on the side of liberty, always the enemy of reaction and
uniformity. For he knows these alternatives to be not two possible modes
of more or less equivalent action. One is, in such a universe as this for
being such a man, the way of life and peace; the other, of present war and
ultimate doom. 86
Ludwig had seen much evidence of this “other” alternative in the few
years he had been in Europe, and days after filing this article with Wells,
he witnessed it again while on a brief visit with friends in Strasbourg,
Germany, “an indescribably charming city and the seat of one of the
severest problems in Europe which France is trying to settle with much
good feeling and a total lack of good sense."' He would one day
look back upon such evidence as a sign of Western civilization’s illness
and of the approaching conflagration that few others envisioned at this
early date.
It was this same message which lay at the heart of The Defeated,
albeit with a special emphasis on the greater danger he perceived facing
the Jews as the least assimilable people in the West. In a promotional
piece written that summer for Harpers’ edition of the novel (renamed
The Island Within by its editor, Saxton Commins), Ludwig spoke of
deteriorating political and economic conditions resulting from a reac
tionary climate worldwide. Such a state, “as always in the course of
Page 462 - [see page image]
443
A Man of Letters
history. . . means persecution not only of the Jews, but primarily of
the Jews as the historic scapegoat hidden for such times and uses in
the subconsciousness of the Western world.” The Jews’ rush to be as
German as the other Germans, or as French as the other Frenchmen,
had strengthened the reactionaries’ hands by legitimizing their demands
for uniformity. The only hope he saw came from those Jews who had
now begun to abandon this attempt at self-denial, and instead “were
determined to be themselves, to practice their own ethics, to live their
own lives, to cooperate with their fellow-citizens as Jews, to resist in all
peaceful ways the demand after cultural uniformity and herd standard
ization.” It was their only hope, and the only hope of all peoples, for
whom the Jews struggled as well.
“I am a Jew serenely, gladly, almost with a sense of consecration”—
and as such, he had drawn the portraits of self-deprecation and self-
assertion that filled The Island Within™ For both aspects of the contem
porary Jewish personality had been mirrored in his own, and because
of it, he had suffered enormously. If this was his latest novel’s theme,
it was the unspoken message of Crump, as he confided to Spingarn
in mid-September. “What I could not tell. . . and what is for your ear
alone is that she succeeded on account of my assimilatory fear of the
world, strange lust for ducking under, subtle shame, young helplessness
in the face of the world which I wanted in a wrong sense and which
did not want me.. . . Thus and not otherwise did that story begin.”
All of this had now changed. “Thelma’s house and mine is, without
religious hocuspocus, a Jewish house; if a child is given us, it shall be a
serenely conscious Jew.” And the work for which he yearned “to save
both my talent (is it worth saving?) and my usefulness” was really not the
American study, but that which would give renewed life “to my people
(I cannot leave that unsaid, though you may disagree with me; it’s the
deepest thing in me).” 89
Page 463 - [see page image]
444
18
To That Island Within
Throughout the fall of 1927, Ludwig awaited the publication in
England of The Defeated, while pushing onward with preparation for
the American study. But not all of the work was as pleasant or as
personally rewarding as he once thought it might be. Mixed feelings over
expending his energy and talent on a non-Jewish project now stood in
the way of the enjoyment he might once have experienced through the
pure exercise of scholarship.
To prepare the study required an enormous amount of reading and
review of texts. In his abrupt flight from 6 Jane Street, Ludwig had
left the extensive library he had begun accumulating years before in
Charleston, including many contemporary texts that had come from
friends and fellow writers as autographed first editions and presentation
copies. Mary was to have sent all of this material to Thelma’s mother
as a part of the court-ordered separation agreement. But the inventory
Mrs. Spear now sent to Paris confirmed Ludwig’s worst suspicions—
nearly a thousand volumes were missing, among them, these special,
monetarily valuable copies. “All stolen!” he cried in a letter to Liveright
on September 10, angry and frustrated at his inability to right the
situation from afar. Could he, Ludwig asked, send complimentary copies
of all he had published of Dreiser, Masters, George S. Kaufman, O’Neill,
and Anderson, as well as “all modern poetry and essays,” plus whatever
he might publish within the year (believing it would take only that long
to complete the study), “[if] you will personally be so sweet.” In return,
Ludwig promised positive exposure and an increase in sales, convinced
Page 464 - [see page image]
445
To That Island Within
as he was “that the serious treatment... as entire personalities will or
ought in many cases to do these authors real good with the public.”
Confidentially (“I don’t want this plan bandied about too soon in literary
gossip”), “I can promise that my book will be given the very widest and
most generous publicity.” 1
To Canfield that day he sent a second plea for material from Harpers’
list, including Twain, Millay, Countee Cullen (“I like him,” Ludwig
wrote in the note’s margin), and a small number of contemporary poets
whose work has largely been forgotten today, but who, together with
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, were to end the study. He was con
vinced that Knopf and Huebsch would also provide their authors’ works
without charge, but that he himself could not approach Harcourt. “So
get me all of Elinor Wylie’s poetry. (NOT HER DAMN NOVELS.)”,
he implored Canfield “from the fathoms deep down,” comparing “the
labor of re-reading an entire literature . . . [to] the labor of slaves at oar.”
The project was already propelling him. He felt consumed, as if the book
would swallow him, “its maw wide open.” 2
Already made to feel suspect by Ludwig in his earlier appeals for
royalties, Liveright, no longer his publisher, was reluctant to supply
these titles gratis. Ludwig’s further suggestion, in that same letter, of a
one-dollar edition of Israel by the Modern Library only served to make
him further suspect to Liveright. Advice from Liveright’s own editorial
department was mixed, noting the potential sales advantage but feeling
that with Ludwig no longer one of their authors, a 40 percent discount
was more than generous. 3 Liveright concurred, answering the memo by
saying that “I think his publishers should buy books. I’m getting a little
tired of these impositions.” 4 On October 3, Liveright offered Ludwig
a 50 percent discount, explaining that the book’s publisher, mistakenly
identified by Liveright as Albert Boni, should pay for his materials. 5
The response could not have been a total surprise, coming from a
publisher whose actions Ludwig considered “heathenish and incurable
unreliability.” Delayed royalties were understandable, he told Cerf on
July 30, but being left without word of all financial matters was inexcus
able. “If you’re on good terms with your publisher mutual forbearance
and adjustment can obtain. But to leave a fellow in utter darkness as
to where he stands and then cripple him in all his plans is criminal.” 6
Cerf was sympathetic, and promised to do what he could concerning
Ludwig’s payment for the Modern Library Up Stream, having first to
move through Liveright as owner of its copyright. 7
Ludwig wrote Liveright that his curt refusal of free material had
“hurt me because it is clear from it that dishonest people are making
mischief.” He was under contract to Boni not for the literary history,
Page 465 - [see page image]
446
Ludwig Lewisohn
but for Crump, with Boni’s option expiring at the end of the year. Only
if Crump appeared would Boni be given another manuscript to publish.
Harpers was to publish the study that would have been Liveright’s had
he not turned it down. Only because of “my continuing personal regard
for you” did he wish to “be clear on fundamentals.” This, he stated, was
his primary objective in writing. “Send the books or not, as you damned
please.” Rather, he asked two things of Liveright now—that he read
The Defeated (which could have been his) when it appeared in America
as The Island Within, and that all royalties be sent for the second half
of 1927 as soon after January 1 as possible. In turn, Ludwig promised
to abide by Liveright’s decision in this matter for the sake of an old
friendship, grown more important to him “as the years go on and my
exile which, despite certain compensations, is still exile continues.” 8 On
the twenty-ninth, Liveright wrote that, understanding the “Boni matter”
more clearly now, he was sending along the material at no cost. “You
know, of course ... I have never meant to be small about this, but feeling
that I had a grievance, I took the attitude that I did.'”'
Ultimately, Liveright’s suspicions that Ludwig’s interest in the study
was more than scholarly had a strong basis in fact. Money had remained
a problem, and the American study, whatever else it would fulfill, was
conceived by Ludwig as a means toward paying the bills. “My gorge
rises at it,” he had written Spingarn in mid-September, upset that the
book was preventing him from tackling two new projects—a novel
tentatively titled “Stephen Escott, a book on the spiritual traditions of
Judaism for the Jewish youth of America,” and an “epic narrative” of
Rabbi Akiva and the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman domination, “the
greatest ethical legend in human history.” But strapped to “the wheel
of the publishers,” he had no time to pursue either. Instead he was now
obligated to do a translation from the German of Hanns Elvers’s The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice and, for Mann, an essay discussing the English
translation of his Magic Mountain, as an “antidote against the critical
stupidities which have been perpetuated” in America, as Mann assessed
the problem. If only someone in America could provide funding for two
years, Ludwig thought, then he could “rejoyce” in doing “my work in
my own fashion, to serve the cause ... of the spiritual rebirth of my
people. . . and not the publishers,” a second unconscious allusion to
the writer who had spoken in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
of setting forth to re-create the soul of his people in the “smithy” of
his own. 10
By October 20, Harpers had agreed to a monthly stipend for work
on what was now titled Expression in America, money that would
allow Ludwig to pursue other work as progress slowed, postponing
Page 466 - [see page image]
447
To That Island Within
its completion for two additional years. At the time, however, he was
unaware that this was to be his course, but in the end, it was all he
could do, incapable as he was of treating even the most minor project
as inconsequential. “Oh, I shall probably pull through and produce
something creditable (I’ve got a lovely new theory),” he wrote Huebsch
as a part of his argument for copies from his list. 11 Despite the “sodden
drudgery necessary for the early chapters,” the rereading of later authors,
which proved “rather an expense of spirit in a waste of futility,” and the
desire “to think and write . . . [and] to test new stuff,” he would give
Expression his best effort. “I’ll do my damndest—too old a hand now
to slack,” he confessed to Leonard two days later.
Harpers was not, however, his only source of funding. While on his
last lecture tour in America, Ludwig had met Louis Asher of Chicago, a
wealthy patron of Jewish causes and culture who, in the coming years,
would assist him financially and with a number of personal matters.
“A quite unexpected present sent me by a rich Jewish admirer,” he
told Leonard that October, 12 had added handsomely to the support of
his publishers and made possible the work he would accomplish over
the next few years, including Mid-Channel, which Ludwig dedicated to
Asher for his “most sensitive appreciation” of the work he was doing,
and for his “sagacity in things of the world” that had been “a source
of help and counsel." 1 ' Two weeks before the gift arrived, Asher had
visited Ludwig and Thelma in Paris, bearing flowers and perfumes and
feeding them “till we had indigestion.” He was, quite simply, “a lovely
spirit and a very rich man [who] buys dozens of copies of my books to
give away.” 14
Nor was Asher Ludwig’s only patron. The soon-to-be-published
Cities and Men was similarly dedicated to Charles Recht, for his ongoing
support in providing thousands of dollars of free legal services, including
court appearances against Mary, contract negotiations with publishers,
the recovery of royalties, and his struggle for the return of their passports.
For all of this, Recht sought nothing more than Ludwig’s well-being.
“And this is all I can do for him,” Ludwig noted sadly when requesting
that Canfield add this dedication to his “Wisest of Counsellors / Best of
Friends." 1 ■
By the time Asher’s gift arrived alongside word of Harpers’ decision
to provide an ongoing stipend, the introduction to Expression had been
completed. In the face of frustration and complaints about the project,
he had, by October 3, produced a seven-thousand-word essay of which
he was quite proud, noting in letters to Canfield that fall that his vision
of the development of American culture was unique, based upon ideas
not previously applied to the subject in the manner in which he was
Page 467 - [see page image]
448
Ludwig Lewisohn
using them. He was certain that these efforts would replace the long
outdated theoretical base employed by others. “Literary History is a
department of knowledge that is still practiced as though we were
somewhere around 1820 in Tory circles in England or elsewhere, for
that matter,” he complained to his editor on September 10 while writing
the piece, “as though neither Saint-Beuve—not EVEN—nor Goethe, nor
Taine nor Darwin nor any body else you like up to Freud—had lived.”
(In a different context the following month, he would admit to having
“the necessary prejudice of a complete Freudian.”) 17
Ludwig suggested to Canfield after its completion that his “Introduc
tion to a Projected History of American Literature” might be published
in one of the literary journals, but that wherever it was placed, it “ CAN’T
BE CUT.” The process of preparation and writing had been long and ar
duous, and something revolutionary had emerged—an interdisciplinary
approach that would pervade the entire study. With a further return to
the sea imagery of his youth, he spoke of the journey yet to be traveled:
Here I am up for a breath of air. I have already read enormously and am
appalled at the huger enormousness of the reading still to be done. But I
have succeeded in writing the general introduction. However long it may
take to execute, the book is built; whatever may be the weather, the voyage
is charted. I have, more or less well and clearly, set down a theory and a
program which should revolutionize the quite monkish notions of literary
history entertained by nearly all practitioners of that Wissenschaft and bring
the aforesaid Wissenschaft into reasonable line with other contemporary
disciplines, such as history and psychology. ! 8
Canfield’s highly favorable response to this beginning elicited Ludwig’s
declaration on October 31, that, “By those central ideas I stand.” !i
While Ludwig had worked long and hard in his Rue Schoelcher stu
dio throughout the late summer and fall of 1927, life beyond Expression
had not altogether ceased, as it might have for others. Wells, thoroughly
enjoying Ludwig’s “Politics of a Man of Letters” (“such darn good
stuff”), encouraged him to write more for Harper’s, despite his being
“occupied in building up the structure of your magnum opus." 10 And
Canfield, though far more aware than Wells of the task before Ludwig,
nevertheless wrote asking him to advise Harpers on the possibility of
publishing Gerhart Hauptmann’s latest novel. 21
With the possibility of the Book-of-the-Month Club adopting the
forthcoming Island as its monthly selection, Ludwig argued for a second
change of title to The Torch, believing it more representative of the
content. In confidence, he told Canfield that “subtle harmonies and
antagonisms, deep rooted in outlook and temperament,” existed be
tween himself and Heywood Broun of the Book Club that might prevent
Page 468 - [see page image]
449
To That Island Within
its being selected. Perhaps, he suggested, the more progressive Literary
Guild would welcome it, having on its selection committee old Nation
friends like Carl Van Doren, Joseph Krutch, and Zona Gale, people who
would look more favorably upon “a Jewish novel, half-way decent, by
a more or less representative Jew.” 22 Neither suggestion was acted upon
by Canfield, however. 23
Crump continued to make progress in Europe, if not in America. By
mid-August, a German translation was being prepared, with Thomas
Mann commissioned to write its foreword. 24 In October, a review ap
pearing in transition placed the book among Ludwig’s best writing, a
clear and uncompromising “expression of the shocks his naked sense of
injustice has suffered from an environment against which he is constantly
in rebellion.” Ludwig’s rebellion, Robert Sage maintained, was against
the “nay-commanding” world of the philistines who moved swiftly
to prevent all freedom of thought, feeling, and action which violated
their sense of morality, priority, and etiquette. To Sage, Ludwig repre
sented the “yea-saying world’s” search for beauty “through sensuous
adventure, aesthetic enjoyment, free mental exploration, uninhibited
and unrestrained living.
We can only guess Ludwig’s reaction to being transformed into an
image of the American in exile along the Left Bank. Though he had
long struggled against these unnatural forces of denial, it is certain
that the attainment of beauty was not Ludwig’s primary goal, nor
did he favor a life without restraints. He was too much a product of
an earlier period, and in too great a need to do meaningful work, to
allow for the unproductive use of the one resource of whose finite and
diminishing limits he was most conscious—time. Ludwig’s impatience
with the younger generation’s apparent squandering of this treasure is
clear. In his conclusion to a lengthy accounting of his recent years sent in
late 1927 to Harris (from whom he requested a copy of “Books We Have
Made”), he wrote of those “adorers of Proust and Joyce and Gertrude
Stein and Ernest Hemingway who sit on the terrace of the Cafe du Dome
and tell each other what masterpieces—of two pages of shredded prose—
they’re going to write when inspiration comes. Only it doesn’t come.”
Nor was he alone in his critique of these idlers, but rather shared these
thoughts with “James Joyce, poor dear man, who is a friend of mine here
and looks at me with the pathetic eyes of an animal. . . [and] wants me
to speak out. And I can’t.” 26
Rarely silenced, Ludwig as yet felt too close a kinship with those
he criticized to offer public support to the “nay-commanders” against
whom they all were struggling. Yet he condemned the lack of restraint
of these younger writers who, along with the slowly-aging and the ever-
Page 469 - [see page image]
450
Ludwig Lewisohn
aspiring, thought themselves clever and perceptive in their own critique
of the older generation. To Ludwig, their minds were filled with “nothing
but envy and bile from the neck up.” In the streets, in the journals,
and particularly in the cafes of Montparnasse, he saw time passing and
efforts wasted, theirs and his, and in turning his own disappointments
and frustrations with the past outward, had complained that July to
Sinclair Lewis, himself no great admirer of Montparnasse life, 27 of feeling
“overrun at this moment by youngsters who exude nothing but the
vapors of their own intellectual feebleness and artistic constipation. They
have published one pamphlet of shredded prose or one novel about the
pains of masturbation and then set up as arbiters of the serious work of
serious people.” 2 *
Clearly, he had begun to grow tired of what had drawn so many
others to the area. Though he had yet to break with them, he was
beginning to find “little in common with the ‘expatriates.’ ” Instead,
he grew to question their moral nihilism (“as in the hard but very
able delineations of Ernest Hemingway,” the one American on the
scene whose writings Ludwig respected), and to condemn those still
mired in the search for a personal style, “whose books are all ahead
of them.” 29 Had Hemingway written A Moveable Feast in these years,
Ludwig would certainly have appreciated the author’s advice to would-
be authors: “You shouldn’t write if you can’t write. What do you have
to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don’t talk
about it. You could never write.
Hemingway later recalled that at the Dome, Montparnasse’s most
heavily trafficked cafe (and the spot most preferred by Ludwig after a
day’s work that first Paris year), 31 “there were models who had worked
and there were painters who had worked until the light was gone and
there were writers who had finished a day’s work for better or for worse,
and there were drinkers and characters, some of whom I knew and some
that were only decoration.” 12 Here, at the cafes, was the true life of
the Quarter, Hemingway wrote in 1930. “Montparnasse . . . means the
cafes and restaurants where people are seen in public. It does not mean
the apartments, studios and hotel rooms where they work in private.” It
was here, in public, that the tired artist and writer would go to rebound
from a day’s lonely pursuit of his art, wishing no longer “to think about
it until the next day but instead see people and talk about anything that
is not serious and drink a little before supper. And maybe during and
after supper, too, depending on the individual.” ''
Waverley Root confirmed this assessment, adding a positive note
on the role played by those about whom Ludwig thought so negatively.
“It is true that there were a good many loafers in Montparnasse whose
Page 470 - [see page image]
451
To That Island Within
conversation dealt largely with the great books they were going to write
or the great pictures they were going to paint as soon as they had finished
their beer.” But he saw the others, those “practitioners of the dolce
far nientemore positively than did Ludwig, for “as they exalted the
pursuit of art and literature whether they understood much about them
or not, they furnished a propitious background for the artists and writers
who actually were working and achieving." : ’ Even Ludwig’s good friend
Sisley Huddleston would write as well of that “mad bad glad sad place,
where there is, in all the cafes and all the studios, much stirring and
striving ... a place in which attempts are made to accomplish something
personal, something original, something great in the arts.” 35
But Ludwig saw all of this so very differently. Impatient and growing
more intolerant of the less gifted, Ludwig began to think again of what
separated him from these idlers, and even from those who were hard at
work on meaningful projects. “Bourgeois responsibilities . . . order and
dignity” 36 were not qualities necessarily to be disparaged. Nor was he
alone in this as the Joyces themselves became harder to find in public,
treasuring instead the quiet of their privacy. 37 After a while, he, too,
began to seek anonymity and solitude rather than the crowds, preferring
those quiet times at midday when so many others had yet to rise from the
previous night and he could sit at the cafes for a few private moments,
privately with his thoughts. He would later record in Altar how
He wandered down the Boulevard Raspail to the terrace of the Coupole.
It was almost deserted. No prying or impertinent eye would see him at
his solitary meal. He didn’t want much anyhow. A club sandwich—they
weren’t so rotten here—and a large cafe creme would suffice. After that he
could at least smoke with more satisfaction. But he didn’t want to linger
here. Soon people would begin to gather, Americans whom he knew, more
or less, and they would begin to talk and he knew now, more deeply and
passionately than ever before, that all they said and thought and stood
for was of an immeasurable falsity and shallowness, was vain justification
and warped excuse for inner inadequacies, feebleness, ultimate disloyal
ties which they strove thus to deny to hide. At the thought of them he
almost fled. 38
Ludwig could not abide those Montparnassians whom Elliot Paul
described as daytime sleepers, awakening only in the evening for a night
(and, often, an early morning) at the Dome or one of its neighboring
cafes. “They have dark circles under their eyes, have read parts of
Ulysses, and are likely to be self-made Freudians. They speak most
impressively when they are vague and most erratically when they seek to
be specific,"qualities Ludwig found even among mature writers whose
work was clearly of a superior nature—those of “my acquaintances
Page 471 - [see page image]
452
Ludwig Lewisohn
at the Cafes Select and Dome who were busy destroying speech itself
as a method of communication.” 40 Only Mann’s Magic Mountain was
worthy of lasting attention, he told Harris privately, most everything else
by his contemporaries being “temporary eddies [which] die and are lost
in the waters and only the great, sane, humanitarian and fundamentally
philosophical things remain and time will sweep away soon enough even
such things as Ulysses,” 41
Rather than seeking to play a part in Montparnasse, he wished to
bind himself to “our special exile,” as he referred to the shared historical
experience of the Jewish dispersion (Galuth), which was now more a
force in his life and work than it had been in America. Most of his Left
Bank neighbors, even some of the Jews among them, knew nothing of
what he had identified in his own life as “our ‘binding,’ our ‘religio,’
our ultimate country and our people’s history and aspiration in our
breasts." 4 -’ By that fall of 1927, he had begun to think of the time after
Expression’s completion, when he would sail to Palestine “to see the
country historically again” in preparation for the Bar Kochba/Rabbi
Akiva novel and the telling of the story of “the Talmud whereby a
nation was to be taught to be eternally a nation without land or war
or power.’**’
In the meantime, an easier and more immediate move to larger
and less expensive quarters several streets from Rue Schoelcher would
offer temporary satisfaction for Ludwig’s need for change. “Moving is
moving!” he wrote to Huebsch on October 20 as he began the search
for an apartment. The sublet period was ending and they could not
afford to pay the new, more costly lease offered. 44 “Oh, damn!” he half
complained to Canfield once a place had been found, adding that it was
“a blessing in disguise, since we got for the same rental [as before] an
infinitely better apartment.” The packing and carrying was much the
nuisance it had been before, but now the lease was theirs for three years,
could easily be sold if they chose to move on before its termination, “and
no one can annoy us.” They hoped to settle in at 14 Rue Campagne-
Premiere by mid-November. 45
The creative life throughout this period of minor disruption contin
ued on as always. Thelma busily prepared for a November 14 concert
at the Salle Comoedia, to consist of materials receiving their Paris de
but, including Yiddish folk songs, Jewish liturgical music, and African-
American spirituals. 46 Ludwig, though deeply involved in the “enormous
and back-mind-heart-breaking job” presented by Expression (“Gosh,
I’d rather write three novels. No, four or five.”), 47 found time to write
two articles highly critical of contemporary French literature, “the stuff
of dreams” and not the work of a single author “so balanced, so fully
Page 472 - [see page image]
453
To That Island Within
self-achieved as to grapple with reality”—“utterly and for long... in
the trough” as he wrote Harris that season. 48
This varied work was, as always, a sign “of the immediate necessity
of keeping, like the Indian juggler, too many balls simultaneously in
air.” 49 Cities and Men was to appear in early November, and Ludwig
made certain that friends and critics, as well as Thelma’s mother, received
prepublication copies. He need not have worried about its reception,
as advance orders, based upon his reputation as a critic and essayist,
exceeded seven hundred; “not at all bad,” Canfield informed him on
October 26. 50 Reviews from throughout the States over the next eight
months would be positive, even when the reviewer dissented from Lud
wig’s liberal political and social commentary. 51
As he had tried to orchestrate the book’s promotion, and, earlier,
that of Roman Summer, from afar, so, too, did he now actively engage
himself in the marketing of The Island Within. The Book-of-the-Month’s
rejection had raised new fears of lost income, and with them a host of
suggestions, including the use of favorable quotes from his previously
published fiction. Shouldn’t he, like lesser authors, enjoy the “cumulative
effect out of my stuff” ? he asked Canfield in early November. 52 More
important, Ludwig insisted that Island not be cast as a Jewish novel.
Butterworth, in releasing it as The Defeated, had played this angle in
response to the blatantly anti-Semitic Jew Suess that had recently created
such a stir. 53 The ploy had been successful in England, but Ludwig, aware
of the extensive anti-Jewish sentiment of 1920s America, feared that such
an approach would destroy the novel’s appeal and sales. (Henry Ford,
following the loss of a suit against him, had just recanted his publication
of The International Jew [based upon the infamous Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion], widely read in an atmosphere where the Ku
Klux Klan had gained new ground throughout the country, i' 4 “There
should be no direct attempt to play to the Jewish gallery. That would
be the gravest psychological mistakeLudwig cautioned Canfield. In
stead, he laid out a campaign that, if followed carefully, would still
speak effectively to the Jewish community, one that would include book
reviews in the New Palestine, Menorah Journal, Reflex, and the Yiddish-
language Jewish Daily Forward. He would have personal copies sent to
their respective editors, and would try to have Stephen Wise deliver a
sermon involving the book’s theme, for which Canfield was to arrange
press coverage. “But all this in addition” to broader exposure in the
Nation, Saturday Review, and other journals whose reviews Ludwig
promised to secure/’
“I haven’t, as a rule, tried to watch so carefully over the handling
of any book of mine,” he wrote Canfield less than two weeks later,
Page 473 - [see page image]
454
Ludwig Lewisohn
“but I confess to you that a certain anxiety is beginning to creep into my
mind.” So many authors had received far greater recognition than he for
work of inferior quality, regardless of his unending efforts throughout
the “creeping years” that had brought him to middle age. Having “had
a hand in the making of practically all the first-rate contemporary
American reputations,” and those of many foreign writers as well, he
felt cheated and wished to correct the wrong, “Not as a matter of pride,
I’m beyond that; nor primarily of money, though heaven knows one has
to live. But as a matter of moral satisfaction.”
Early positive reactions to The Defeated, just in from England, “have
cheered me,” he told Canfield on November 12; so, too, had the book’s
recent arrival and appearance. If he was increasingly insistent that it be
properly produced and promoted in America, it was in part due to his
satisfaction at how well his efforts had already turned out. “Though I
say it who shouldn’t, it does read better in book form than I had dared
hope.” Proofs for Island had also just arrived, and he promised to send
them back within three days. Charles Recht, then visiting Ludwig, was
surprised by the book, not having previously known of its existence.
Recht found himself deeply moved, and was convinced that “thousands
of Jewish intellectuals in America” would be affected by it “with equal
force,” an opinion that only added to Ludwig’s anxiety and excitement
over its forthcoming reception in the States. “I again sound the warning
not to stress the Jewish note unduly,” Ludwig added with heightening
insistence."
The British journal New Age had noted on November 10 that
while “Virginia Woolf pens impeccable prose, but gets nothing said,”
Ludwig offered “the discriminating [English] reader” a “novel worth
the reading.** 57 The next day, London’s Jewish Guardian said of The
Defeated that it “contained] much that is true, and even more that is
vraisemblant” in its demand for “attentive reflection” concerning the
failure of assimilation in the search for identity. 58 On the fourteenth,
Weizmann, impressed by these notices, wrote Ludwig of his plan to take
the book with him on his upcoming trip to Central Europe, anticipating
“much pleasure from it.” 59 And a month later the Times of London called
it “a noteworthy, even a memorable narrative” told with “quiet, but
incisive characterization . . . emphatic but never exaggerated realism,”
a work “worth reading and even re-reading . . . [an] epic in its massive
gloom, lit up as it were with appalling lightning flashes of slaughter and
terror.''’
As 1927 approached its end, Ludwig sent his usual appeal to Can-
field and Liveright for year-end royalty checks, along with a proposal
to the latter for a one-dollar edition of Israel, similar to the Modern
Page 474 - [see page image]
455
To That Island Within
Library’s Up Stream, should Island prove popular. Liveright disregarded
the suggestion but instructed his staff to forward the last six months’
royalties by January 5, “in order to keep some sort of peace.” M
And there was, of course, the continuous flow of visitors to the
Lewisohn salon during those closing weeks, among them his old the
atrical friend Paul Robeson (whose opening night at the Salle Gaveau
Ludwig and Thelma attended with the Joyces), coming on tour from
London to Paris, seeking new ideas and materials from within the
African and Jewish communities. Myron Nutting fondly recalled the
gathering amidst his recollections of the “Negro writers who were either
living in Paris or passing through . . . [and] very often . . . would spend
an evening with [Ludwig]. " L
Sinclair Lewis and his bride-to-be, Dorothy Thompson, became a
constant part of Ludwig’s life at this time as well. In June, Lewis had
taken up residence in Paris with a friend’s mistress and had invited the
Lewisohns to a housewarming. Lewis was clearly in trouble, drinking
heavily. The relationship lasted but a few weeks before Lewis fled to
Berlin where he met Thompson, sent a note informing his current wife
of his intention to divorce her, and ultimately married his new love. In
October Ludwig sent the news to Canfield. “Won’t Hal and Dorothy
be a pair of overwhelmers? He’s mad about her which shows his good
sense; whether she can keep him sober is another matter.” Thompson’s
former husband, Joseph Bard, also dined at the Lewisohn home with his
new companion, 63 and Henry Hurwitz visited in mid-December, sending
along a note of thanks that included an offer to Ludwig to translate Franz
Werfel’s Paulus unter der Juden for the Menorah Journal. 64
Friends near enough to the Lewisohns were invited to their New
Year’s Eve housewarming. Most attended the huge gathering, for eve
nings at Ludwig and Thelma’s were never dull, perhaps because Ludwig,
now more observer than participant in the cafe scene, put so much
of himself into the world he created at home. After passing through
a gauntlet of parties thrown by the many other Americans living in
Ludwig’s new apartment house, Nutting came finally to Ludwig’s.
His party, of course, was not as riotous as the ones that I had been passing
up coming to his. The first thing I remember about that evening was Ludwig
taking me up to a splendid ham. He said, “Have some ham, Myron. I think it
is a most estimable ham. ” I thought that was a funny word to apply to a ham,
especially at that time. He’d been raised an Episcopalian [sic], but he’d gone
back to the faith of his father quite vigorously. He was studying Hebrew, and
I think that he was keeping up the Jewish celebrations. And to be offered an
“estimable” ham by him struck me as rather quaint. What I remember most
vividly about the party was Elmer Rice. Elmer was there and full of fun.
Page 475 - [see page image]
456
Ludwig Lewisohn
During the evening, he got in the middle of the floor with a lot of people
sitting around him and started singing. And it was amazing the number
of American songs that he knew, words and music, all the way back—it
seemed to me—to Civil War days. He would lead the singing of song after
song. A good many of the people there knew most of them or knew some of
a song or at least they knew the tune. It was a lot of fun. Thelma Lewisohn
was having one of her tantrums in the next room. I am sorry to say that
Thelma could at times be embarrassing to her husband—and to the rest of
us—especially after an extra drink. Anyway Elmer, completely oblivious to
anything but his songs, kept us absorbed through it all. 65
Ludwig awoke the next morning happy to be in his “charming new
apartment, at last a home of our own with our own things in it,” as
he characterized it for Liveright. He thanked his former publisher for
the books he had sent and for the check covering the remainder of the
first half of 1927’s royalties. Both, in their own way, were contributions
to Expression, which itself would return the favors shown him by
publishers such as Liveright. “I think I can promise that no author who
rises to the dignity of being treated in the book will regret it.. . . My
book is one in which all good publishers have an interest for the sake
of their authors.” He then went on to remind Liveright of his idea to
market a one-dollar edition of Israel for the fall of 1928, not willing to
let the possibility die that easily. 66
Greetings for the new year came from friends stretched across two
continents, with particularly warm wishes arriving from Thomas Mann,
who spoke at length of his writing plans for the coming year and of
Ludwig’s “wonderful” contributions of the last. 67 On January 1, 1928,
Mark Van Doren responded to one of the Lewisohns’ two hundred
Christmas cards by sending special praise for Thelma’s poems, judging
that in “character both human and artistic” they were superior to
Ludwig’s. “I found them interesting throughout, and more and more I
incline to think that that is the only test of poetry.”''’ (Some months later,
Van Doren would publicly thank Ludwig for the use of his translations
of French and German poetry, and for his “generous and helpful letters”
while editing his own Anthology of World Poetry. 69
The winter weeks that followed were filled with attempts at arrang
ing for the maximally effective marketing of Island, and with work
on Expression. In his appeal to Upton Sinclair for copies of his writ
ings that January, Ludwig assured him that the book would include
the “most rational account of. . . economic factors . . . hitherto pro
duced . . . [breaking] with all academic traditions in both spirit and
method completely.” Ludwig knew how central this element was to Sin
clair and stressed how only with the generosity of friends and colleagues
Page 476 - [see page image]
457
To That Island Within
could the task be accomplished. His only wish was that he could have
reciprocated by sending along a copy of Crump in exchange, but “our
beautiful Post Office authorities forbade its transmission.” 70
As a spinoff from his research, Ludwig was now prepared to begin
the prose anthology he and Cerf had discussed the previous year, offering
to have a manuscript ready, with Thelma’s typing assistance, by the
summer, should Cerf still be interested. “So much water has run under
the bridges, that I want you to say the word before I actually start.” Cerf
responded by requesting a delay, promising to be in Paris in late May,
by which time “both of us should have a pretty definite idea of what
should go into this volume."
The letters to Sinclair and to Cerf on January 8 were accompanied by
one to Mencken. “I have written to almost no one,” Ludwig wrote after
a long period of silence between them, during which “I have been making
hay rather busily, while this belated creative sun has been shining.” He
reported being “fathoms deep” in the American study, and having made
a good deal of progress, feeling more positive about it than he had
months earlier. It was “a terrific job but an amusing and, I believe, a
grateful one.” All of this was a lead-in to a request for his complete
works and for an inquiry regarding Mencken’s interest in publishing
“my account of the origins of American-ism in Puritan pathology” in
the American Mercury. Mencken’s curiosity was piqued by the topic,
and on February 19, Ludwig sent “the article of the venerable fathers
and what they did to us,” along with news of the appearance of Cities
and Men, The Defeated (which “just caused the British brethren ... to
forego their habit of damning American books”), and the forthcoming
German and probable French translations of Crump. 1
To Canfield on January 21 he proposed another project, this time
an offer to write “the Goethe book for the English-speaking world” in
honor of his death’s centenary in 1932. (The book would not appear for
another two decades.) For the moment, however, he would send along
the second part of Expression (“The book is going, has steam up!”),
happy to be done with “the least interesting and alive part of the entire
subject,” that same portion he was offering Mencken for the Mercury.
With this “hardest and most thankless” part of the study out of the
way, he was convinced that the remainder would move along far more
quickly, perhaps three chapters every two months. But this could happen
only if Island's sales reached sufficiently high levels. “I am on principle
and by temperament averse from even making suggestions of this kind,”
Ludwig assured Canfield, as he again suggested using the British reviews
in journal and dust cover advertising in the States, but he “needjed] the
encouragement and the financial hope.” All he wanted was the “hitherto
Page 477 - [see page image]
458
Ludwig Lewisohn
missed . . . advantage, a very solid and tangible one, of having the press
reception of books brought to the attention of the public . . . [which]
every hole and corner publisher does for every Tom, Dick, or Harry.”
There was a hint of spring in the air that day as Ludwig sat near his
partially opened window, accompanied by “Siki, the cat, who always
sits on my desk when I work,” and who that day “sniffs and sneezes”
at the breath of seasonal change. 73 But spring and change came slowly
into Ludwig’s life that winter of 1928, and when inflammation of the
eyes caused by excessive work forced him to stop writing a week later,
he was left with little else to do but continue to pressure Canfield, lest
his “house of cards” fall. Why, he asked on February 2, hadn’t Roman
Summer been properly advertised and re-advertised with positive press
clippings as others on Harpers’ list had? “You can have no idea how
it pains me to raise such questions,” but how else was he to try to
avoid bankruptcy, “not only in money but in hope”? His suggestions
concerning Expression’s promotion were not groundless, he emphasized,
his familiarity with publishing dating to his time as “one of Doubleday’s
bright youths in the year 1.” Expression would sell, Wells and others
had told him, but Ludwig, playing all the cards in his hand, assured
Canfield that he couldn’t finish it without the help of Island’s successful
marketing. Though he could not tell Canfield, Island, not Expression,
was his greater interest, the latter but a yeoman’s task which, however
rewarding, interrupted the “creative work” that truly expressed “the
inner man: my heart and hope,” without which “I’m through!” At a
time when “Europe begins to wake up to me,” when Regis Michaud
was to devote a chapter to Ludwig’s work in a forthcoming study of
modern literature, when an anthology of selections from his writings
(Verite et Poesie, translated by Michaud for Boivin) was to appear
in the series “Penseurs Americains d’Aujourd’hui,” and the German
translation of Crump was nearing publication, it seemed absurd to have
to argue his case for “the ordinary treatment [accorded] second-raters.”
Uncomfortable with his own insistence, he promised never again to raise
the issue. “I don’t nag. I’m not capable of it.” 74
The following day, Leonard’s memoir of his emotional illness, Two
Lives, arrived, and Ludwig, several letters behind in their correspon
dence, sent a long response, his extended silence the result of heavy
writing chores (“I click out bread and butter here day in and out”) and
his “rather heavy business correspondence ... in order—all publishers
being incompetent—to guard my interests.” The “enforced continuous
absence from America” had made it harder than ever to deal with
publishers. Ludwig told Leonard of his and Thelma’s desire to return to
the States one day in order to lend support and comfort to him, and to
Page 478 - [see page image]
459
To That Island Within
reconnect with “the land and habits and speech of [my] youth and work
and love for which nothing could act as a substitute.. . . But America,
as a national, above all, as an official entity, has not been just or kind to
either me or mine and Thelma and I have no desire to return unless the
future brings a change.” Rather, they were content to remain in Paris in
their “humble but. . . delightful” apartment, he “clicking indefinitely”
on the typewriter (“I haven’t had a cent pour mes vieux jours” [for my
old days]), though tired of being “confined by the scrupulous structure
of scholarship” Expression imposed and yearning for “the freer ranging
of the imagination.” 75
A similar plaint was addressed that day to Hurwitz, whose check for
a chapter of Island had recently arrived “like manna,” helping to pay for
the new apartment’s furnishings. He had “designs” for work he wished
Hurwitz to publish, but they would have to take a backseat, “tied down
to a long, sullen job” as he was. For now, he had but one favor to ask—a
review of Island in its entirety, perhaps one that would occupy “a good
deal of space.” He was convinced that a full reading would warrant
such treatment in Hurwitz’s own opinion. As he had told Canfield, not
only the sales but the reception of the book itself was “indeed crucial
to me at this moment”—but for reasons other than those he mentioned
to his editor at Harpers. “Have we another American Jewish novel with
an historical and philosophical background? We have Shmus [informal
talk, chatter] about mishpoche [family]—some of it good. But if my book
isn’t good, it is at least first. And what I want to do, what would make
me a happier man than, thanks to Thelma, I am already, is if I could
devote myself, after my present task, entirely to the ‘matter’ of Jewry.
Hence I ask for as kind treatment as editorial and critical conscience
will permit.” '
Crump had helped Ludwig to put the emotional baggage of youth
and the early adult years behind him. Island, the story of Arthur Levy,
successful psychiatrist, assimilated Jew, and scion of a rabbinical family
who abandons his comfortable middle-class American life and gentile
wife to undertake a Jewish mission to the Balkans before searching
out his ancestral roots in the world of the Hasidim, now served to
imaginatively post the demarcation between these earlier years and the
future to which Ludwig was now committed. As such, he was anxious
for a wide readership. Hurwitz was only one of the many to whom
Ludwig had written by early February, when he sent Canfield his list of
names and journals for receipt of review and gift copies.
Ludwig’s eyes began to heal after a brief rest, and he pushed on,
once again “fathoms deep” in his work for Expression. “An enormous
chapter on Emerson and Thoreau” was almost ready to be sent when
Page 479 - [see page image]
460
Ludwig Lewisohn
he wrote Canfield on February 19 of his exhaustion with the project
and the need for “a longish week-end off.” As usual, Ludwig was
handling several tasks at once, and had been feeding Canfield’s assistant
editor German books for possible publication, including the Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou), a book Ludwig
accurately called “a permanent classic which, therefore, will not make a
fortune today or tomorrow but will sell for a century. ” "* Canfield rejected
Ludwig’s suggestion and asked, in its place, for another of Buber’s works
“which might have a more general appeal."Nine years later, Scribner
would bring out an English translation that would go through numerous
printings, followed by a second English version in 1970. As Ludwig
predicted, the book remains a classic.'"
March 1, 1928, saw Island’s publication in America. Within a few
weeks, Ludwig would see his many promotional efforts bear fruit beyond
his greatest hopes. Freud was quoted in the promotional materials as
judging the book to have “something important to say to humanity
concerning its motivations,” as was Einstein, who found it of “profound
interest and real delight. . . appealing] to me particularly, in the first
place, because it is written in such a masterly style, secondly, because
it seems as though you had been chosen in some holy way to teach a
lesson or communicate a message."' 1 Ludwig could not have hoped for
better material. So well orchestrated was the campaign put together by
Ludwig and Harpers that by March 3 the first reviews were beginning to
appear. By mid-May, most large and a great many medium-sized cities’
newspapers had published reviews. The content and thrust of the story
had struck a responsive chord throughout the country, which, like the
enormous volume of sales it generated within so short a period, shocked
and delighted both author and publisher.
The first word came from Buffalo, New York, characterizing Island
as a “worthy companion” to Up Stream “that should rise easily by
its own force and perfection above the welter of the year’s fiction.. . .
[It] is that rarity, a book that lingers in the mind for days after the
last page is finished, intruding itself even when it should be dismissed
in favor of work at hand.” Even those readers whose “experience and
better judgement” militated against agreement were certain to find their
objections overwhelmed by the compelling force of its argument and
narrative, the critic asserted.' •
Devoting two separate columns to the novel, Henry Hansen of the
New York World offered the first New York discussion on March 7,
and again on the ninth. “Courageously published here by Harpers,”
Island marked “a milestone in American books.” The hope of a melting-
pot America “without pain and suffering, without great spiritual stress,
Page 480 - [see page image]
461
To That Island Within
nor without certain admirable racial and national traits being lost to
the world,” was mere illusion and less than desirable, Hansen argued.
Rather than applaud efforts to accomplish this American creation,
he, like Ludwig, wished to see America preserve those varied cultures
brought to it. Not “by yielding to a dominant culture. . . [but] by
bringing certain rich treasures of Jewish life into the pale and colorless
civilization of those who came from the northern lands” would America
benefit. As a strong spokesman against assimilation, sensitive to its lures
and faces, Ludwig had won Hansen’s praise for a book “every bit as
interesting as ‘Upstream’ and intrinsically much better,” one whose
narrative had left him wondering about the fate of the protagonist’s
little son and what he would make of his father’s belief in “his people’s
greatness . . . [and] the tradition of their idealism and courage” that
would become his own inheritance. 83
The New York Evening Sun’s reviewer seized upon Island to speak
out against the growing atmosphere of prejudice in America. Lawrence
Morris perceptively saw in it Ludwig’s attack against those who fueled
the problem of anti-Semitism, the root cause of Jewish assimilation. As
an outsider speaking “with diffidence,” he applauded Ludwig’s “wis
dom and insight” into the “psyche of the modern Jew.” Moving be
yond the personal resentment of Up Stream, Ludwig had provided a
“courageous and delicate and intelligent statement of the predicament
of a sensitive Jew in an environment overwhelmingly non-Jewish. . .
a brave and subtle discussion of a problem which appears to have no
satisfactory solution.” In such an environment, Morris found Ludwig’s
“remarkably dispassionate” portrait of a Jew coming to terms with
his cultural inheritance “the only way in which he can live sanely
though in exile.... In a world ruled by prejudice [Island] may perhaps
add by so much as a hair’s breadth to the scanty store of intelligent
understanding."' 1 *
Similarly laudatory reviews had, by March 20, stretched across
America, from the Galveston News’s assessment of it as “a thoroughly
mature work . . . absorbingly interesting,” a work from which the reader
“will emerge . . . enriched by an active contact with an extraordinary
intelligence . . . [and] an altogether distinguished production,'”' to the
San Francisco Chronicle’s recommendation that it “should not go unread
by any devotee of letters nor by any citizen concerned for the peace and
good will of all mankind. - ’” Carl Van Doren, writing in the New York
Herald Tribune under the title “Pogrom in Manhattan,” praised Ludwig
for his ability to “touch nothing that he does not enlarge . . . [creating]
each character and each situation as items in a general pattern which is
bounded by nothing less than time and space.” Because of his capacity
Page 481 - [see page image]
462
Ludwig Lewisohn
to communicate what was humanly common to all with “authenticity
in every line . . . both Jew and Gentile may take an equal pleasure in a
book which is at once a document so penetrating and profound and a
work of art so solidly constructed and so brilliantly written.''’'
Within the Jewish world, Henry Montor’s review of March 9 in
the New Palestine spoke first. Noting Ludwig’s “metamorphosis” since
“castfing] his fate irrevocably with that of his people” with the publi
cation of Up Stream, Montor judged Island to be the American-Jewish
answer to The Education of Henry Adams, though it touched upon
problems “more complex, their solution less accessible.. . . His critical
faculties have been sharpened, his powers of analysis have become more
profound.” Showing more restraint than Up Stream and without the
“personal sharpness” that judged all values “by their pertinence to
his individual fate,” Island was “an excoriating attack upon all the
disintegrating forces in Jewish life . . . evident as the American Jew sur
renders to his environment... to be an American like other Americans. ”
Jews had discarded their “own distinguishing qualities” in favor of
“inferior cultures and narrower minds” and the creation of a hybrid
that “is not Jewish, though it may have an outward semblance of
Americanism.” Against such “uniformity and standardization,” Montor
saw Ludwig struggling in a work whose merits deserved to make it a
best-seller. 88
Some, like Nashville’s Banner, saw Ludwig’s vision as “too dark,
at least of the present situation,” or questioned his “rather intense
pessimism,” as did Cincinnati’s Commercial Tribune. But almost all
praised it as “a great book,” deserving the recognition “it is certain
to command,” the work of “a realist who has the vivid imagination
to describe with brilliancy and beauty what his keen eyes have seen
of today."”
Ludwig, finding himself “in a very hopeful state of mind” on March
20, sent Canfield a note about the progress he had made on Expression.
Though recovering from the recent removal of a benign eye tumor
that had again temporarily slowed, but not stopped, his work, he had
nevertheless completed two more chapters that month. “I’ve got to go
on pegging away at Whitman who was a very queer little fellow,” he
wrote. Ludwig had never spent so much time on any single project,
and the desire to finish it and move on to what could offer “real
satisfaction” was now quite evident. 90 Ten days later, Canfield (now
thinking of Ludwig as “a brilliant writer”), answered with a cable: “Sales
of Island Ten Thousand Congratulations.” 91 Despite the predictions of
at least one newspaper—“it will probably not become popular—it is
too full of wisdom and truth" v; —the book was selling at the rate of
Page 482 - [see page image]
463
To That Island Within
two thousand copies a week. With reviews still appearing nationwide
and the advertising campaign only beginning to hit full stride, Ludwig
set off with Thelma to Rouen for a three-day celebratory rest. “Worn
out with a long winter of work . . . the change itself,” he believed, “will
have helped."''
Page 483 - [see page image]
464
19
On Course
Throughout these last months, Anne Crump had quietly continued
her pursuit. Having failed to win sympathy from the Jewish leadership,
she had turned to Ludwig’s friends for their help in pressuring him to
pay for her support. On February 18, Ludwig thanked Upton Sinclair
for his note concerning the “lady’s” visit, and for the “wise and kind”
response he had given her. He assured Sinclair that if he knew the full
story, he “would be stirred and deeply moved to write an accusation of
the processes by which capitalistic society is on the side, instinctively,
of all that is rotten in the personal, moral life of mankind and, equally
instinctively, the sworn enemy of health and hope.” Ludwig promised
to relate the entire history of the relationship when Sinclair was next in
Paris, adding that he and Thelma (“the only wife I have ever had unless
that word is to become a stench in the nostrils of all decent men”) were
“virtually exiles” with little likelihood of their being able to return to the
States. 1 “There isn’t much chance of my returning,” he wrote Mencken
that same claustrophobic grey, wintry Paris day. “I’ve done my bit in
and for America: I should like to go on.. . . And the officialdom of the
Coolidge imperium, carefully guarding the interests of Anne Crump,
practically tells us, meine Wenigkeit [your humble servant] and my gifted
and charming wife, a native-born American and, on her mother’s side,
a New England Brahmin, can go to hell.”-'
Earlier that month, Ludwig had learned that Mary, having gone
from one judge to the next, had won the sympathetic ear of a prominent
Jewish jurist. Ludwig was not at all hopeful that his own side of the
Page 484 - [see page image]
465
On Course
case would receive so favorable a hearing, for despite the judge’s Jewish
beginnings, he was, as Ludwig wrote Spingarn on February 11, “so
Americanized in outlook, that he sees—though not without personal
sympathy for me—only the official point of view.” It was all so disturb
ing, as the notes to Sinclair and Mencken of a week later attest, but not
as upsetting as it might have been in the past. Too much that was good
had come Ludwig’s way in the last several years. “It is embarrassing,
chagrining; often it hurts. But the hurt does not go, as former hurts went,
to the deeper sources of life.” 1 On April 14, 1928, Mary succeeded in
securing a judgment in the New York Supreme Court against Ludwig
for past alimony in the amount of $10,640. 4 Ludwig, of course, had
no intention of paying anything, leaving Mary with but one option, to
return to court seeking a lien on his royalties from The Island Within,
now promising to be substantial.
Added to this mixed promise for Ludwig of a first solid economic
footing was a surprise offer from Hollywood to buy the film rights
to Island. News of this interest in the novel and of Harpers’ desire
to negotiate the sale for him arrived in Canfield’s letter of April 6.
Island itself was “selling steadily,” Canfield reported, along with an
acknowledgment of the wisdom of Ludwig’s marketing suggestions,
“and we are excited about its possibilities.” 5 Ludwig’s response was
filled with surprise, caution, and sarcasm. He couldn’t imagine why such
interest had developed, though he agreed that there was “a film in the
book.” And if the one-in-a-thousand chance of selling it came to pass,
he wished the news to remain “private till I give the word." Yet, though
willing to pursue the matter, he had little faith in the studio heads and
in the industry as a whole. Given his feeling toward Jews who sought
the quickest route to assimilation, his comments about their choice of
subjects, the damage wrought to other Jews by their mistakes, and the
generally low level of cultural interest they exhibited were not at all
surprising. “I haven’t the least notion of course that grandeur can be so
close to my dust, as to sell film rights. But. . . since the film people—all,
alas, of cloak-and-suit Abe-and-Morris origin have just been in boiling
water at the actual incitement to pogroms in European showings of
the King of Kings, they might want something like this” (a reference
to Abraham Zukor’s Paramount Studio production, complete with a
portrayal of the Crucifixion). 6 Ultimately, Island would not be filmed.
It was, perhaps, too soon for the Jewish filmmakers of Hollywood to
deal with the anti-Semitism they feared—for even the positive handling
of the New Testament, as they had now discovered, was fraught with
danger for all concerned. All of which seemed to Ludwig to justify his
efforts during these last years.
Page 485 - [see page image]
466
Ludwig Lewisohn
With Island doing so well, and new possibilities for sales and a
film contract presenting themselves, Ludwig returned to his search for
collateral rewards, once again approaching Liveright with the prospect
of bringing out “a cheaper re-issue of Israel.” Ludwig thought it a rather
“sagacious move,” but Liveright was not as yet ready to commit himself,
in part because he had already lost a considerable amount of capital on
Broadway and was attempting to rebuild his publishing business as a
base from which to launch another theatrical foray.
Ever restless, leaving his fortunes to neither chance nor the workings
of publishers, and wishing to begin something more personally meaning
ful than the steady but plodding history of American literature, Ludwig
sat down in the first few days of April and began a second volume
of memoir, his personal story since Up Stream, stripped of fictional
turns and masks. In a confidential letter to Hurwitz on April 5, Ludwig
wrote of this change in direction which Harpers as yet knew nothing
about, but which he wanted to discuss because of the possibility of
a “cooperation between us” that could succeed only if an immediate
decision on Hurwitz’s part could be reached. “I suddenly stopped what
I was doing the other day and am steadily writing: ‘Mid-Channel.’ Being
the second part of the American chronicle begun in ‘Upstream.’ ” It
was to consist of one hundred thousand words, equally divided into
ten chapters, to run as monthly installments in the Menorah Journal
from June 1928 through March 1929, when the work would appear
in book form. Encouraged by Up Stream's reception and the news of
Island’s success, he assured Hurwitz that the appearance of this new
work would boost the Journal’s sales. The price of the offer to Hurwitz,
however, was two thousand dollars, twice the usual rate, proposed not
out of greed, but from necessity. If the terms were agreeable in principle,
he would send a first part within a few weeks for Hurwitz’s final decision.
“I am not asking you—to use a very unjewish expression—to buy a pig in
a poke.” 8 Ludwig’s offer received an immediate affirmative reply, though
financial arrangements were not yet settled. 9
Hurwitz need not have maintained the silence Ludwig had asked of
him, for three days later, unable to postpone a response from Harpers,
Ludwig sent word of the project to Canfield. Following a lengthy and
effusive note of thanks for “your personal friendship, concern, encour
agement, [and] cabled information” regarding Island’s sales, Ludwig
related the “piece of news” he had sent Hurwitz. There had been a
prior arrangement with Harpers to publish a short novel titled Elegy,
but Ludwig was now abandoning that work for Mid-Channel, being
written “in necessary intervals of the history.” (Greatly enlarged, the
novel would later appear as Stephen Escott.) This second volume of
Page 486 - [see page image]
467
On Course
his “American Chronicle” would be “a better book . . . calmer, more
incisive, more significant—infinitely happier ... or I’ll eat my hat,” a
possible response to the many critics who, in praising Island, spoke of
its demeanor and thoughtfulness as superior to the churlishness and
grousing of Up Stream. What, Ludwig asked Canfield on April 8, did he
think of having the work serialized before publication in book form? 10
Even before receiving Canfield’s response, Ludwig wrote again two
weeks later to say that he was “hard at work on the history and at
Mid-Channel, which, Deo Volente, ought to come out next spring so
as to continue the hold on the reading public which the Island seems to
be gaining.” 11 On May 4, Hurwitz cabled Ludwig concerning the first
installment’s publication—“Expect June Copy Now”—followed that
day by a lengthy letter detailing his thoughts on the serialization and
a guarantee of fifteen hundred dollars, plus additional compensation if
the edited portions published exceeded that amount prorated at two
cents a word. He thanked Ludwig for an opportunity that was certain
to increase circulation and “bring prestige to The Menorah Journal,”
and thereby strengthen the Menorah movement to which his writings
truly belonged. Hurwitz found Ludwig’s Island to be the voice of an
emerging group of modern Jews seeking a new Judaism out of what
was best in the Jewish and humanistic traditions through which they
had come of age, the “first portrayal of modern living Jewish life (as it
seems to me) since Zangwill wrote. Of course, you have gone beyond
Zangwill as is necessary.” Having so well delineated their dilemma, he
was hopeful that Ludwig would now “go beyond” his own analysis and
offer some guidance to others for a life of remediation and fulfillment.
“After all, our real problem today is what to think and do after Arthur
Levy returns from Roumania, as Edman points out in his review. There,
I conceive, is the real problem for those of us who are in Menorah—
that is, for all candid, thinking, humanistic modern Jews, who are at
once citizens of the modern world and carriers and further creators
(in desire) of Judaism, that is, the spirit and expression of the historic
group of human beings known as Jews. I hope you will deal with this in
‘Mid-Channel.’ ”' ;
Hurwitz had not been the first to express these thoughts. In a talk
presented at Carnegie Hall on April 15, Stephen Wise spoke of Island
as “the belated answer” to Zangwill, a pointed response to those few
critics who had begun to raise issues both ideological and artistic, from
denial of anti-Semitism in America 13 to a lack of emotional detachment
and the need for “the really great novel of the Jew ... to be written by
one who is not himself one.” 14 Before the large audience filling the hall
that evening, Wise proclaimed it the great American Jewish book:
Page 487 - [see page image]
468
Ludwig Lewisohn
’’The Island Within” is not a story of intermarriage; it is much more than
that. It is the finest study of Judaeo-Christian relations that has appeared
up to this time. To me “The Island Within” seems the third and last of
what is destined to have a place as a classic trilogy. “Up Stream” was really
the downstream flight of a self-pitying refugee from Israel. “Israel” was
the summons of a renascent Jew to his kind to build, outwardly though in
Judea, a compensating collective life. “The Island Within” is the tale of a Jew
manfully, tragically, withal triumphantly, facing his innermost problem—
that of belonging to himself instead of being possessed by the world, which
will have him only to break him. 15
Two weeks later Wise wrote Ludwig: “I have read it, and reread it. I
think it is a great novel. I like it much the best from all the things from
your pen. There are great passages in the book.” 16
The public call for the next step in Ludwig’s writing spoken of by
Hurwitz appeared not in Wise’s speech but in Jews Are Like That!,
written by Wise’s son James Waterman Wise under the pseudonym Ana-
lyticus. The younger Wise challenged Ludwig to provide some direction,
to take his critique beyond analysis to prescription as an aid to all those
seeking to mesh the two cultures out of which they had come.
How shall a solution be found which is neither one of self-surrender and
of self-belittlement, nor yet of the separatism of a self-created ghetto mind
and temper? As yet Mr. Lewisohn has not answered these questions. The
seer, says Emerson, becomes always a sayer. But the prophet is not always
a statesman, and the mystic rarely charts the thing he feels. Still it is not
too much to hope that Mr. Lewisohn’s singularly courageous and intelligent
understanding of Jewish life may yet prompt him to face the profound ques
tions which he has raised—that, blazing the intellectual and spiritual paths
he has descried from afar, he will complete the epic cycle he has begun.
Ludwig had touched the lives of many like Hurwitz and the Wises,
two generations who now found their experience and needs echoed in
his portrait of Arthur Levy. By May 13, Island had made the New York
World's best-seller list, 18 and the following week Ludwig was identified
in the Pittsburgh Press as a “Leading Author."'" The New York Times
spoke of the book as being “surprisingly enough . . . among the seven
books that shoulder up from the muck.” 20 Thirty-six thousand copies
had already sold by June 30, 21 and in late August, a half year after its
publication, Island was still on the best-seller list, with orders coming
from as far away as Japan. 22
Yet royalties had still to exceed advances in late spring before Can-
field could send Ludwig a check. Not having seen a “Southern springtime
in years and. . . knowing] how delicious it can be,” 23 Ludwig had
planned a trip with Thelma to the foot of the Pyrenees. But unable to
afford the journey, they went instead to the village of Barbizon that
Page 488 - [see page image]
469
On Course
May, “an enchanting bit of earth” some forty miles southeast of Paris
amidst the Fontainebleau woods and Millet’s landscapes. 24 In the weeks
following their return, before the first royalties could be sent and the first
installment of Mid-Channel could generate additional income, the daily
expenses of keeping food on the table, compounded by the housekeeper
who prepared it, the trip, and the continuing task of decorating a new
home, had left Ludwig little choice but to sell the Crump typescript
through Titus in his role as a manuscript dealer, 25 a decision that proba
bly saved it from the loss and destruction that awaited most of Ludwig’s
other book manuscripts in the years ahead.
The first part of Mid-Channel appeared not in the June issue of the
Menorah Journal as planned, but in July, complete with the “Prefatory
Note” written on May 31. As he had told Nino Frank of the Parisian
journal Malles et Valises, “I have assembled the material needed to
write a History of American Literature, but it no longer interests me.” 26
As promised to Hurwitz, Ludwig was turning out ten thousand words
a month in which, according to his “Prefatory Note” concerning the
nature of autobiography, he, as the speaker, was “less a person than a
symbol, or, rather ... an inextricable blending of a person and a symbol,
of a man and mankind, of the concrete and the universal.” Hurwitz was
overjoyed at having a piece of such “absorbing interest” with which to
begin the next volume of the Journal. “It should certainly be the feature
of [the] entire American magazinedom this summer,” he assured Ludwig,
urging him to send as much as quickly as possible to guarantee its con
tinuous appearance throughout the year. 27 Payment, of central concern
to Ludwig, was to be made, as promised, with each installment. Checks
were to be routed through Recht to avoid any liens Mary might secure
through the courts. Despite Ludwig’s wish to have her out of his life, she
remained a driving force whose veiled presence appeared throughout the
book, beginning in the opening sentences published that summer.
The landscape of youth is eternal in the mind. True love of country, which
evil forces turn to evil issues, arises from that early establishment of a
harmony between the soul and the world. Thus my thoughts turn, with
an affection over which time has no power, to American autumn forests,
to the more than Italian blue of those western skies, to a magnolia tree
dark behind an old Charleston wall, to groves on the Hudson uplands, to
frosted branches glittering beside a Wisconsin lake, to precipitous roads
traveled by a car winged and immortal—for were not you there with me,
Thelma?—among the mountains of Vermont. '
“We have had a terrific stream of visitors,” Ludwig wrote Canfield
on July 31. 29 Carl Van Doren, the Krutches, Thelma’s voice instructor
from New York, “etc. etc.,” a never-ending summer parade of Americans
Page 489 - [see page image]
470
Ludwig Lewisohn
who had made their way to “our, though I do say it myself, hospitable
board.” ' All of this entertaining had been costly, prompting an invi
tation to Liveright as a part of Ludwig’s request for all first-half-year
royalties—to be sent through Recht, as usual. By the thirtieth, Siki the
cat had recovered from a life-threatening bout with bronchitis, and a
third of Mid-Channel was completed. A break in the round of visitors
allowed them to escape into the Alps for a ten-day rest. After “vigor
ously” returning to his writing, they were to have a second vacation
in Vichy before the fall chill set in. 31 Sometime in the future, Ludwig
told Huddleston after a particularly “hot and madly crowded week”
that July, there would be a “mental house-cleaning in the North African
desert” to which he and his wife were invited. “I intend to sit cross-
legged on the edge of the desert and contemplate eternity. Not even a
pencil will be in the luggage!"
Ludwig and Thelma set out for the Alps during the first week of
August, but if he left Expression in America and Mid-Channel behind,
he took along a new project, a “sermon” on pacifism upon which he
would “meditate within the next week or so” for a collection of essays
on this theme proposed by Wells.' 1 The subject had long been a concern
of Ludwig’s, appearing throughout Israel and, soon, in Mid-Channel. He
welcomed the opportunity to discuss the issue in a book of potentially
wider appeal than either of his works could enjoy.
Awaiting Ludwig’s return from the Alps to Paris was a long letter of
praise from Hurwitz, who had found the second part of Mid-Channel
“better than the first, and that is saying a good deal.” Not only he, but
many of the best of Hurwitz’s own younger generation, first inspired
years earlier by Ludwig’s “vigor and clarity” at the Harvard Menorah
dinner, were now finding their voice in his.
I am constantly stirred by its depth and strength and beauty. What mag
isterial prose! I confess I was somewhat afraid in anticipation of your
personal intimacies. But you have exquisitely portrayed an honest, suffering,
reflecting, triumphant modern soul. It is, I think, a lasting contribution
to American literature—far more significant and beautiful, to me, than
Upstream. The universal shines in the personal—you are piercing the hearts
as well as minds of some of the best men and women I know. They have
spoken to me of your first chapter which they have read; I tell them: that is
not all; wait and see the second!
Hurwitz again urged Ludwig to send the chapters as they were com
pleted, and spoke of his own plan to be in Paris at the beginning
of September after a visit to Palestine “to wipe out the disgrace of
not having set foot in the Homeland during all the centuries of my
life hitherto.” * 4
Page 490 - [see page image]
471
On Course
Hurwitz did indeed visit Ludwig that first week of September as part
of the flow of foreign and resident visitors that often proved disruptive.
“I do have to fight off people a good deal, ” he told William Seagle, author
of To the Pure, for which an advertising blurb was being sought. Ludwig,
as he often did, accommodated a fellow writer whose ideas he wished
to promote, in this case the “bad joke” of what was called civilization,
filled with “teachers, clerics, righteous angry people and members of all
leagues of whatever kind for suppressing what they cannot understand.”
Accompanying the quote was an inscribed copy of Crump, 35 The French
translation’s forthcoming appearance had already been announced, with
favorable commentary by Regis Michaud in the Parisian press (“one
of the saddest novels written by an American”)," and Thomas Mann
was just then completing his “extraordinary preface” for the soon-
to-be-published German-language edition, as he characterized Mann’s
contribution for Viereck some weeks later. 37 Ludwig was justifiably
proud of this wide acceptance, and pleased to share his work with a
sympathetic ear.
Long-awaited news of royalty payments from Liveright reached
Ludwig in mid-September with a note of congratulations from his former
publisher regarding Island, “which you had sent to me and which, I
blushingly admit, I haven’t as yet read.” 38 The relationship between
them had vastly improved over the last year now that their dealings
had become more formalized and obligations clearer. Liveright could ask
Ludwig to comment on a new publication for promotional purposes, and
Ludwig, in turn, could request copies of new titles from Liveright’s press
and others. “Your request gives me courage to ask for a few books,”
Ludwig wrote on October 28, “fresh American books being the one
thing that we outcasts and jail-birds over here lack,” plus “anything
else that your generous heart and good taste may dictate,” all of which
Liveright shipped on November 10. 39
If Ludwig still saw himself as an outcast, he was at least growing
accustomed to expatriation and exile. Surrounded by their own things
in a larger apartment capable of accommodating guests, he and Thelma
seemed “well settled.” No longer did they feel the same need to return to
the States, Ludwig wrote Viereck on October 12, as part of an invitation
to visit them in France. “Even when we do go to America for a visit
someday, we shall keep our place here.” For the moment, Ludwig had
found contentment enough within the confines of France, its colonies,
and its neighbors. After returning from the Alps, he had decided to
postpone the Vichy trip until Mid-Channel was completed; but once
finished they would go south, where he could find “a much needed rest
and reflect upon things in general." 3 "
Page 491 - [see page image]
472
Ludwig Lewisohn
Perhaps it mattered not at all where he lived at this point in his
life, so long as he was able to express his thoughts without the dis
ruptiveness of government interference in his private life. All peoples
appeared to suffer some illusions, and all were victims of their own
self-destructive willingness to wage war, against which he had written
the “sermon” for Wells. Canfield, upon the essay’s arrival in December,
wrote that it was among the best received for the volume, carrying
a message “so forcefully put. . . that [it] must be broadcast on every
occasion. ' - " Joining Bertrand Russell, G. K. Chesterton, and ten others
of contemporary prominence in If I Could Preach Just Once, Ludwig
set forth as his task the rooting out of “The Pagan in the Heart,” those
“primitive emotions, useful perhaps in primitive ages” where physical
survival itself was constantly in doubt, which had remained central to
Western society, whether Christian or secular. Opposing their massively
destructive tendencies toward greed, injustice, and, ultimately, war was
an asceticism that wrongly demanded the denial of personal needs in
this world by holding out as the ideal the removal of one’s self from
it and its ills, rather than their transformation as called for by the Old
Testament prophets and their rabbinic successors over the last two and
a half millennia.
Cleverly making use of the teachings of Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel,
the son of the teacher of Christ’s propagator, Paul, Ludwig built his
argument of comparison by discussing the “three things upon which the
world rests”—justice which “leans always to the side of the defeated,
the disinherited . . . exercised in creating a moral balance,” a justice that
is at once equity and lovingkindness; truth that is not metaphysical
abstraction, but those “ultimate values upon which all men can rely
in their souls’ last need”; and peace, the third pillar upon which all can
rest, but a peace that is far different than any notion of redemption, or
of being saved, as offered either by Christianity against some conception
of an imagined “original taint” plaguing humanity, or, in its secularized
form, by the state against a common enemy, either internal or external,
both requiring physical and emotional self-denial and sacrifice without
room for deviation. 42 For too long, such an ethos, rooted in ancient
pagan ideals of brute force and forbearance of pain, and of denial of self,
had continued to hold sway over the Jewish teachings that Jesus, not as
Paul’s Christ, had sought to teach. It was an ethos that at once fostered
the acceptance of asceticism and excessive self-abusive behaviors as
natural and unavoidable products of human depravity, while validating
the pain and suffering imposed by earthly powers in the name of some
nonexistent higher good to which all were to pledge allegiance, no matter
what the cost in personal happiness or human life, or how much the
Page 492 - [see page image]
473
On Course
institutions of a society became subverted to its purposes. “Excess and
emasculation, drunkenness and the Volstead Act,” were part of a way
of life that “never touches the center. . . never touches justice, truth,
and peace. ' 11
Christianity with its silly contempt for the body has left him [John Smith,
Ludwig’s Western Everyman] utterly pagan.. . . The regimentation of the
industrialized master-state, aided by church and school. . . reduces poor
Smith’s virile expressiveness in work, in play, in love below a tolerable
minimum. He roars for the flag and feels elated; he sees battleships maneuver
and feels their gray strength added to his pitiful weakness. The oligarchs
know how to take him and how to turn him into cannon-fodder. Then when
pain and danger come the poor fellow is helpless. In his childhood he was fed
on stories of Indians bearing torture without a complaint and was taught
that this poor quality of the Stone Age savage was worthy of imitation,
was in fact the very mark and sign of manhood. And in his instruction
in school and Sunday school the Jew Jesus is transformed for him as far
as possible into a Nordic knight, not a gentle man but a gentleman or, in
America . . . into a go-getting man of business like the boss of his concern.
Belligerency is bred into the very bone and marrow of poor John Smith,
but never a belligerency for his minimum rights to freedom, love, play,
sunlight, but belligerency for a flag, a figment, a vision of fancied danger
and unnecessary solidarity behind which crouch his masters, who send him
to prison if he criticizes the mad system by which he is enslaved and ordered
into the trenches to protect the sources of their power."
The peace of the prophets was something wholly different, a peace
that was life-affirming in all its aspects, this-worldly, valuing only the
moral and the intellectual, suspicious of what ran counter to these con
cerns, questioning the true motives of those who would deny happiness
and life by a call to arms, to force and killing, to some exercise of strength
and conquest against foes not personally one’s own. The prophets’ goal
was to promote a different set of values, anchored in the daily needs
and aspirations of the individual and unencumbered by agendas set
out against him by others, so that he might see those whom he loves,
and those whom he ought to care for, prosper and find fulfillment and
wholeness in their lives. Such was the meaning of the Hebrew word for
peace, sbalom.
Levy [Ludwig’s Jewish Everyman] believes in peace and does not think
it a fine thing to be hurt or maimed or to incur the danger of it, and
always has the shrewdest of suspicions that the quarrels he is asked to
enter are not his quarrels or those of any of his ordinary fellow men at
all. Furthermore, in Levy’s consciousness—here is his great advantage—
peace has never been entangled with a repudiation of nature; it has, on the
contrary, been implicated with a resistless love of life. He is no monkish or
Tolstoian lover of peace and barrenness. He is passionate son and husband
Page 493 - [see page image]
474
Ludwig Lewisohn
and father. If his wife’s or his child’s or his own finger aches he runs to his
physician. He loathes the thought of hurt, of death, of war, of confusion,
he loves life and peace, food and drink, music and sunshine, study and
reflection. The dead or the embattled have none of these. In a thousand
pogroms he has shown that he can bear the inevitable with dignity. But he
gets no “kick” out of contention and danger. That pagan possibility has
completely died out of his nature. He wants literally and passionately to be
left in peace in order to pursue the goods which seem to him the true goods
of human life: love, children, knowledge, charity, good health, old age. 45
If Smith and Levy were incompatible, it was because they came from
different worlds, with different historical experiences and different ap
proaches to personal conflicts, adhering to a different set of values and
a different truth.
[Levy] often seems contemptible to John Smith. The mimic battles of Smith’s
games, Smith’s pseudo-knightly ideals and gestures, are not for him. He is
serious; he reckons with reality. He has been up against reality a long, long
time. He sometimes, in the light of Smith’s apparently gay, brave world,
feels a trifle contemptuous of himself. Smith runs amok or kills himself;
Levy sighs and goes to a psychoanalyst. Smith has all the fine gestures; Levy
manages to conquer life. For Levy never experienced the knightly tradition
or the Christian Middle Ages. Abstract sociological loyalties play no part
in his life. He is not thrilled by the flutter of any flag nor taken in by any
symbol. Life is too serious and too dangerous for that. He does not want his
sons to be killed, however handsome the name of the cause. He wants them
to live and be healthy and learned and to beget sons in their turn even more
healthy and learned, and in this thought is his final affirmation of humanity
as well as his share of immortality. He is eager to practice charity, for pain
and want hurt and he does not think that being hurt is either a fine thing
or a discipline; he has infinite respect for the best truth he can find, being
rarely taken in by quackery of any sort, but relying on science; he wants
peace above all things, peace without which none of the ends of the good
life can be served. 46
How then was paganism to be curbed now that “danger is great and
imminent [and] civilization is on a knife’s edge”? 47 The hope, paradoxi
cally, was with Smith, not Levy—but only if Smith could learn from the
teachings Levy had followed and Jesus had sought to spread. Only then
could “the pagan [be driven] from his heart.” Tirelessly, the followers
of the prophets and the rabbis would go on living according to their
teachings and promoting their ideas “until a day comes when, if the
masters call to war, no one answers the call, but men, quietly disregarding
flag and drum and the paid lies of the press, go about their business
of peace.” Only this peace was the true salvation of humanity. “Upon
justice and truth and peace our world rests,” he wrote in concluding his
sermon. “The pagan has raged against these pillars of the world for ages.
Page 494 - [see page image]
475
On Course
They are near to toppling. We must save them and so ourselves and our
world from crumbling back into chaos.
Years earlier Ludwig had defined the poet as the true teacher of
mankind. If he had since that day redefined himself ethnically as a Jew, he
had remained ever as much the poet. What he had to say he said with the
demeanor and passion of the poet he had always been. Sidney Wallach,
an anti-Zionist writer for the Jewish Tribune, had sensed this in Ludwig’s
writings over the years, and had found it confirmed in the published
portions of Mid-Channel. That November he traveled to Paris to meet
with Ludwig and test his observations. From the start of the interview,
Wallach was struck by Ludwig’s “intense absorption in his present
enthusiasm.” Wanting to hear Ludwig’s response to his impressions
regarding the poetic nature of his work, Wallach commented to him
that he seemed more poet than prose writer. Ludwig responded that the
distinction was an unfortunate one brought about by the arbitrary nature
of the English language, but that he was correct to a degree in keeping
with the German notion of a Dichter, or poetic writer, as distinguished
from the writer who shied away from lyricism and emotion in his prose.
Wallach’s search for confirmation was not without motive, for in
it he found grounds upon which to justify doubting the sincerity of
Ludwig’s concern for the welfare of Jewry. To Wallach, it all seemed self-
serving. True, Ludwig was studying Yiddish and Hebrew, and reading
Talmud with the accompaniment of a variety of commentaries in French,
German, and English; but all this activity, Wallach maintained in “The
Case of Ludwig Lewisohn,” was not for the sake of the knowledge
contained in these texts. Rather, they were a part of his search for a
people who would accept him and to whom he could direct his need
to polemicize against the ills of the world, “a people to sing about and,
what is more, to sing to. He must have an audience and he wants to know
his audience intimately.” Wallach disparagingly referred to Ludwig as
“the assimilationist turned Jew,” a Zionist and a Hasid by conversion,
against whom the rabbis had issued their warning of caution that all
converts were “more ardent than the original believers.” Ludwig’s voice,
Wallach concluded, was not truly representative of the contemporary
Jewish world, but merely a reflection of his psychoanalytic profile, a
man repeatedly rejected by all other groups in which he had sought
membership, returning ultimately to his own people despite having
earlier rejected them in favor of those who would not have him. “Pushed
by circumstances,” he now found himself “welcomed like a prodigal
son.” Wallach did not at all doubt Ludwig’s literary gifts. “But the
reasons for his singing are subconscious. If he is a singer in Israel, it
must be said, however, that he is not, he is emphatically not, a guiding
Page 495 - [see page image]
476
Ludwig Lewisohn
voice in the maze of problems that the modern Jew must meet and the
many adjustments he must make.” 49
Ludwig would have to hear this charge against him for the rest of
his life, one which, though disturbing, would not dissuade him from
pursuing the path he had legitimately come to after a far greater period
of inner struggle than he would ever make known to his readers. Too
many others would agree with his analyses in the future, as they had
over the last few years beginning with Israel, for him not to sense that
he had indeed found his true voice at last.
“The German Crump is out,” he had written Canfield on November
18, “an exquisite piece of book-making,” complete with Mann’s preface,
which had made him, “modest man that I am, blush fierily.” Because
of its success, the German rights to Island had now been sold, and
he was planning to offer Mid-Channel to the same publisher, having
already received highly favorable responses even before the final chapter
had appeared in the February Menorah Journal or the book had been
published. 50
Bertrand Russell, in an article written the previous May for the “Eng
lish Section” of New York’s progressive Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward,
had spoken of the impression that Island had made upon him, though
he was neither Jewish nor American. “I have not for a long time read
any novel which impressed me so much, both by the penetrating quality
of its psychology and by a certain epic sweep which links distant ages
in a continuous development.” Though he disagreed with Ludwig’s call
for stronger ethnic ties as a response to anti-Semitism, believing that all
differences between peoples should be removed as a means of ridding
the world of such tensions, he expressed his understanding of the present
need for strengthening these bonds in so hostile a world. : 1
On November 22, Russell wrote Ludwig to tell him of his own agree
ment with much that Ludwig had written in Up Stream regarding life
in America: “I have just finished reading ‘Up Stream,’ having previously
read ‘Mr. Crump’ and ‘The Island Within.’ I feel moved to write and say
how extraordinarily sympathetic your outlook is to me. All that you say
about America, about the connection of sadism with sexual virtue, about
the absence of intellectual & artistic standards, & so on, expresses just
what I feel; the only difference is that Americans (with the exception of
my first wife) have never been in a position to make me suffer.” Nor had
he been in a position to experience the anti-Semitism which others in
England had recently intensified. Slightly modifying his earlier position
on ethnicity because of what he was witnessing, Russell argued that the
Jews’ strengthening of ethnic ties was an error in judgment—if not in
the short run (as he had maintained that past May), then in the light
Page 496 - [see page image]
477
On Course
of the human progress that was certain to come in the decades ahead.
There was evidence in his world that such ethnic differences mattered
little, that more universal concerns were overshadowing the pettiness
of the past and rooting out this age-old hatred. He felt certain, even
in the face of his experience to the contrary, that anti-Semitism was on
the wane in all but a few circles of hate. “The Jewish problem does not
exist in England. I know many Jews; we have several at our school; but
nobody notices that they are Jews.” 52 To Russell (if not to many others
of his station, witness Bloomsbury, despite the membership of Leonard
Woolf), Jews had become nearly invisible—but to Ludwig, who had
tried invisibility and had experienced the shock of its response, such a
statement was proof that assimilation and the muddled good wishes of
the well-intentioned were equally dangerous.
News from Canfield reached Ludwig in mid-December that Island
had sold nearly fifty-four thousand copies by the end of November. 53
As 1929 approached, all seemed to be on solid footing for the first time
in his life. Mid-Channel, “irrevocably my last (though suprapersonal
too) book,” as he had characterized it for Huebsch on November 25,
was now complete. After “drawing a long breath,” he would begin
two long novels, but at a leisurely pace. “The success of the Island has
made that possible.” So, too, would the recent appearance of Crump in
German. Helping its sales was Freud’s comment that it was “undeniably
a masterpiece, ranking with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I have known this
virago type of woman,” Freud continued, “and consider your handling
to be sound, and psychologically perceptive. The French translation
of Crump was due out in March, while German, Hungarian, and French
translations of Island were already in preparation. “Did you ever?”
he remarked to Canfield, noting that Up Stream, still among the top
ten best-sellers of the Modern Library list, was, in its seventh year
of continuous publication, “the steadiest selling of American books
uninterruptedly. “ ’'
Ludwig couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. It had been a year of
greater fulfillment than he had hoped. “I rub my eyes. Can it continue?
Is it true?” he asked Canfield on December 21. Island was selling briskly.
Mid-Channel had won Harpers’ approval for publication in the spring.
Thelma’s recent recital in Paris had achieved “a most charming and
gratifying success,” and Mrs. Spear was there to watch her daughter
perform and to share their “very busy and very pleasant holiday season.”
Joseph Bard had also just arrived from Vienna for an extended stay,
and he and Ludwig were having “great times settling the affairs of the
universe.” And even Expression, passed over for so many months in
favor of more compelling and meaningful work, was being dusted off
Page 497 - [see page image]
478
Ludwig Lewisohn
for completion, “finding it more decent than I had feared.” In such
fine spirits, he could face even this task, for which money alone had
long seemed the only motivator—though there were, of course, new
projects which “I am planning and sketching just now,” projects, like
the unforeseen events to come, that would once again divert him from
Expression in the year ahead. 56
Page 498 - [see page image]
479
20
In Self-Defense
The optimism with which Ludwig ended 1928 would slowly fade as
one problem followed another throughout a year that would forever
change the course and shape of the world. Nineteen twenty-nine began
much as the previous year had ended, filled with activity, work, and
continuously growing income. The success of Thelma’s recent concert
brought further engagements and she busily readied herself with new
materials, among them the Jewish classic “Eili Eili,” whose complete
orchestral score Canfield shipped on January 7. 1 In late November,
Ludwig had learned from a friend, Chicago Daily News columnist and
poet Paul Scott Mowrer, that three years earlier the U.S. Congress had
approved full income tax exemption for Americans residing abroad
whose income did not derive from property held in the States. Having
“no direct business connection” there (royalties from Harpers being paid
through their London affiliate, Butterworth, and other monies being
processed through Recht), he asked Canfield to see if he could recover
the 5 percent that had been deducted in the past, as well as cease all
further payments. By January 17, the tax refund was in his hands. 2
Work, too, was flowing just as readily. Proofs for the first two
chapters of Mid-Channel were already on their way back to Canfield,
along with advertising copy that Ludwig was “hastening to send” so that
promotional materials concerning his last few books, to be included on
the final two pages of Mid-Channel, would not delay its publication.
Three-quarters of the space provided was to be filled with quotes from
Island's reviews. “No book of mine has ever had quite such a reception.”
Page 499 - [see page image]
480
Ludwig Lewisohn
He was hoping that this “stuff [would]. . . sell a good many more
copies.” 3 The remaining portion was to be dedicated to Crump in an
attempt to sell the small number of copies that were left from Titus’s
initial edition of five hundred. Quotes from Michaud’s notice in the
Mercure de France and Mann’s foreword to the Munich edition were
to be included. “The book stands in the very forefront of modern epic
narrative,” he had written. “Its style is manly, sincere, precise and strong;
there is in it a high determination after compact and direct truth and one
is impressed and enchanted at once.” 4 Ludwig had by now developed a
feel for the American market, at least that portion concerned with issues
that pertained to him. Despite legal restrictions, most of the remaining
copies of Crump were sold by year’s end. The price from Titus was fifteen
dollars, but with the aid of the U.S. Post Office, resale in the States was
bringing fifty or more. With only a few remaining on December 4,1929,
Titus would send one “by registered book post” to H. K. Croessmann in
Illinois, a collector of contemporary literary manuscripts, “but at your
own risk.” 5 With a waiting market, Ludwig continued to harbor the
hope that Crump would one day be published in America.
The new year brought with it as well a contract from Butterworth for
three books beyond Mid-Channel and Expression in America. Signing
“with a great sense of pleasure and security,” Ludwig felt a degree of
certainty that Crump would be among them. “You remember the old tag
of the logic text books,” he noted with reference to the real obstacle in its
path, Mary. “All men are mortal. I leave you to complete the syllogism.”
She, however, would prove far more durable than he anticipated, adding
to the chill of that “coldest winter since we’ve been here,” as he remarked
to Canfield that January, complaining about the poor quality of French
heating systems. And with all of this activity about him, he still found a
few moments to work on his newest project, The Memories of Stephen
Escott, tentatively proceeding with the expectation of inspiration from
some divine source—a change in muses now that he had found his place
within a different tradition and needed to frame his thoughts within more
than the passing scene in which he struggled. “Just beginning, groping
forward slowly on hands and knees, so to speak, but with a clear enough
idea of the light that should burst if the God-unconscious will let it.” 6
A month later he was “fairly swimmingly” at work on Escott,
though it was too early in the process to be able to judge its quality.
No one had seen any part of it as yet, though he was considering
showing a portion of it to Thelma and Bard. But perhaps not. He
was still thinking through the next stage of Expression—“not wholly
forgotten,” he told Canfield on February 16, though not resumed either.
He would write again soon and explain the “little scheme” he had
Page 500 - [see page image]
481
In Self-Defense
for its completion, though it had but a marginal place in his already
full schedule. Of greater concern was the poor German translation of
Island that Paul List of Leipzig was threatening to issue, and which
Ludwig’s extensive correspondence was attempting to improve upon or
stop. From Canfield he asked but two things—news of any kind to lift his
spirits “during the vile process of littry [s/c] composition,” and advance
copies of Mid-Channel for Thelma’s mother, Louis Asher, Leonard,
Freud, Russell, Hugo Bergmann of the Hebrew University, Hans Kohn
of Jerusalem, and Robert Weltsch of Berlin’s Judische Rundschau, the
latter two as review copies. 7 Favorable reviews based upon the edited
Menorah Journal text had already appeared in the Judische Rundschau
and France’s Nouvelles Litteraires, which Ludwig hoped to capitalize
on with translated editions. 8
Ludwig’s focus upon the ills of assimilation, and the need to warn his
people against them—seized upon with the enthusiasm of the “convert”
that he was—had not yet played itself out, nor would it ever completely.
More than anything else, it was this need to express his aversion to all
he had tried and vowed allegiance to in his youth, and which he saw
tempting so many others along the same ill-conceived path, that had
made Expression and other proposals appear of little importance. If
he could turn down assignments that he would gladly and easily have
fulfilled in years past, when all of literature was his concern (as he now
did with Saturday Review’s request for an article on Eugene O’Neill’s
latest writings), 9 he could not forgo a single opportunity to speak out
on what had become the central concern of his life. For the March 1929
issue of the New Palestine, he tackled this relationship of “The Jew and
the State,” subtitling the article “About Privileges and Rights of Civilized
Life.” He began by criticizing those nineteenth-century theorists who
had proposed the possibility of accepting their Jewish neighbors as fellow
citizens once they had been reeducated and “improved,” that is, once
they had shed those qualities, customs, and ideas that were not a part
of the Christian majority’s culture. If these unfortunate elements had
arisen and become dominant, it was, in the mind of the more progressive
Germans, French, and others, the fault and result solely of oppression.
Lift this, educate the Jews in the ways of their Christian countrymen,
and they would be fit for citizenship.
Far too many Jews had agreed to this adjustment when allowed to
and had sacrificed themselves as Jews in the process. Examining “the
doctrine of the nationalistic master-state and its pretensions by which
the majority of American Jews still live,” that the state can and ought to
abrogate an individual’s rights “unless the citizen shares the tastes, opin
ions, memories, even superstitions of a majority,” Ludwig concluded
Page 501 - [see page image]
482
Ludwig Lewisohn
that its sole motivation was to assure control through uniformity, as
evidenced by the ascendant fascist governments of Italy, Hungary, and
elsewhere. The future, if there was to be one worth living, had to be built
upon “economic co-operation and cultural pluralism,” needed for the
construction of a “pacifist state.” The true “liberal and forward thinker”
was not the communist, nor the fascist, nor the leveling democrat, all of
whom had pledged themselves to uniformity through means more or less
offensive, but the advocate of diversity and cooperation between peoples
and their differing ideas—of pluralism, not only in terms of cultural
practices, but as regarded culturally differing notions of ethical conduct
as well. “Ethical and cultural rights” were inviolable and inseparable,
and the state, “a voluntary association of free men,” was everywhere
and always without justification in abridging or canceling these rights.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the state’s demand for full
participation in the slaughter it glorified by ennobling allusions to war
as honorable, heroic, and in the name of self-defense. As a pacifist and
a Jew, Ludwig saw this as the clearest example of how governments
“outrage [the Jews’] ethical instincts,” against which the Jew must
protest wherever and whenever the drums begin to beat and the flags are
once again unfurled. “If the state forgets its serviceable and cooperative
function and bids him murder his fellowmen, he must disobey the state
for its own sake and for the sake of mankind. He must, especially if he
is a Jew, seek to hasten the advent of the pacifist pluralistic state which
is seeking, amid much travail and sorrow and resistance, to be born
everywhere in the world today.”"'
An invitation to submit a memorial of his own to a volume of
essays marking the twentieth anniversary of the death of Theodor Herzl,
founder of modern political Zionism, became for Ludwig another op
portunity to promote “The Collapse of Assimilationism.” Here, more
deeply and more succinctly than ever before, he offered an analysis of
the younger generation’s own spiritual “conflict,” a conflict found “in all
groups of all lands that marks the definite end of the age of Assimilation. ”
They could not themselves articulate this struggle, but as he watched
the “stiffening and resistance” among those gathered in a “fashionable
Jewish drawing room” to hear him speak on this issue as part of a weekly
series sponsored by the Consistoire Israelite, he was convinced of the
need to serve as analyst and teacher. And not merely in Paris, for he had
seen their faces in London and Berlin and Chicago and New York.
When the hearts of men begin to be troubled, the crumbling of their
defenses has begun and the walls they have built against the light begin
to be undermined from within. They may and often do still furiously or
stubbornly deny the great change on the edge of which they stand. But their
Page 502 - [see page image]
483
In Self-Defense
very fury or their very stubbornness betrays them. Yet they are commonly
quite sincere in their protests, because many of the processes that lead
up to the ultimate inner change are unconscious and many of the outer
experiences that lead to it are promptly repressed. So that the change, when
it comes, has all the appearance of a conversion, a sudden turning, and is yet
in fact but the last link in a chain woven perhaps through months and years.
After a certain age the individual molds of life are so hardened that the inner
change cannot struggle through nor the heart be broken of its habits. Thus
there will be, for many years to come, unhappy persons among us who try
all the vain old ways of life. But all the younger generations are ours or, if
here and there they are not wholly so, it will be our fault. For the winds of
the spirit all blow to fill our sails.
Nineteenth-century notions of the perfectibility of human nature, of
the possibility of altering basic individual and social characteristics in
order to create world peace, belonged to a past romanticism whose root
fallacies had been exposed by the light of experience, and no more so
than in the trenches of the last war. A more mature science, no longer
generalizing upon insufficient data as the Utopians of the last century
had, but reasoning with sharper attention to “the deeper instincts and
needs of the human spirit,” had proven that “the union of race or
group—call it what you like—with psychical character and historic
experience is one of the primary facts of human life on this planet.”
Yet, rivalries and wars need not be a permanent part of nationalism, he
maintained, and would be eliminated by the application of reason, that
is, of the use of what the repeated instances of conflicts, large and small,
had demonstrated—that toleration and the fostering of differences were
preferable to the attempts made by oppressive regimes and well-meaning
social engineers to remove them.
“Since the obliteration of differences between men and peoples is not
only impossible but odious, it follows that the affirmation and toleration
of differences is the only possibility left.” All but the Jews have known
this, have lived according to this precept, Ludwig noted. “Our unique
and tragic situation in the world” had caused the Jews to grasp onto
the “dream of a featureless and scientific abstract man,” leaving them
as “half Nordics or half Latins and so, in fact, neither flesh or fowl.”
Like all other peoples, the Jews’ task, indeed, obligation, was to make
their contribution to the human community not as shapeless members,
but as Jews with a unique message, a unique gift which could only be
maintained and shared through self-assertion and the preservation of
singular cultural elements that alone could render this possible. This,
if anything, was the meaning of chosenness in Jewish life—selection by
volition and circumstance to be a particular voice among the many,
creatively adding to the march toward a positive spirit of nationalism
Page 503 - [see page image]
484
Ludwig Lewisohn
which the Jews’ suffering had taught them was the next step in human
development.
We are a chosen people as every people is a chosen people: chosen by
the world-trend to certain characteristics, activities, thoughts, aspirations.
Perhaps we have talked so much about being chosen because there lurked
in us the temptation to escape our election. All other peoples accepted theirs
with satisfaction and joy. We are at last once more doing so likewise. The
end of assimilation does not mean revolution; it does not mean upheaval;
it means a return from sickness to health, from romanticism to the light
of reason, from evasion to creative activity.... It is we who know that the
affirmation of nationalism in a spirit of love and peace through economic
co-operation is the only rational idea of the next few centuries. 1 '
At nearly forty-seven years of age, Ludwig was still a relatively
young man, but the years had already begun to take their physical
toll. Severe eye problems had twice slowed his work, and partial hand
paralysis had forced him to abandon the handwriting of manuscripts,
his preferred method of composition. Notebooks and the occasional
postscript to a letter demonstrated the clear need for the machine he
despised. His seeming popularity among readers, despite increased in
come and recognition, ironically provided more reason for work rather
than less. He could not abandon this enlarged opportunity to preach
his anti-assimilationist message. Amidst the fevered pace of his writ
ing, he proudly wrote Canfield that Crump was soon to be translated
into Czech and Dano-Norwegian, noting that it was “amusing how
a practically unpublished book can make its way in the world.”A
week later he was put to bed, ordered to rest without book or pad at
his side. 13
While he recovered from exhaustion in early April, the literary
and ideological worlds around him continued on their whirling course,
beginning with a cable from Hurwitz requesting a “European Literary
Letter covering recent books, plays, etc. on or by Jews” as a monthly
feature in the Menorah Journal. 14 Advance copies of Mid-Channel had
been sent to all those from whom quotable approbations were being
sought. “Judging from the advance sale we have had on this book, the
public is eagerly awaiting it,” Harpers would add to each request. ,s
Leonard was the most helpful. “Eloquent wisdom on life, nature, the
races and dwelling-places of mankind, and friendships with master
spirits, integrated by exquisite art with the deep and gracious story of his
vita nuova with Thelma, his wife, and with Israel, his people. It is a noble
and earnest call for clean living and fearless thinking."'* With the quick
addition of several authors’ comments to the book jacket, Mid-Channel
reached the public on April 7.
Page 504 - [see page image]
485
In Self-Defense
Ludwig felt well enough that day to respond to Hurwitz’s cable,
explaining that his illness had not left him in a “critical mood,” though
“with astonishing and unanswerable vividness a dramatic work—the
first in my life” had come to him while confined to his bed. Unable to do
anything else with the impulse, “I got up out of bed and started to write
it.” He feverishly went on to tell Hurwitz that it had been completed
in a few sittings, that only Thelma knew of its existence, and that if
he agreed, it could be his for the September and October issues of the
Menorah Journal, for a prepublication payment of four hundred dollars.
The play was written “ daringly—too daringly?—original in form, Jewish
in subject, sweeping, in a sense, the world,” composed of a prologue,
seven scenes, and an epilogue, and titled Adam. 17
Ludwig was soon telling others about the play. He was long overdue
on a promised visit to Sisley Huddleston in the south of France, and, in
mid-April, excused his continuing delay by blaming his recent illness and
the extended wait for delivery of a new Citroen. If not for “that wretched
car,” he and Thelma might have taken the train. These annoyances
were made somewhat bearable, he told Huddleston, by the immense
advanced sale of Mid-Channel and by the play that had unexpectedly
begun to take shape during his illness. To his “utter astonishment,” he
had written Adam as if it had fallen “from the sky. [Things] always do,
you know, when you give them a chance,” he added with uncharacteristic
optimism. s
After years of critically examining one play after another, he had
come to see the dramatic form itself as “ultimate artifice,” abandoning
any desire to use it in his own work. But then suddenly, as he wrote in
Adam’s preface, “the other day, during a brief illness, a drama leaped,
precise scene by precise scene, commandingly into my mind.” 19 On April
19 he offered Canfield “the great symbolical legend of contemporary
Jewry.'"' It was Ludwig’s hope that this format had enabled him “to
embody what I had imagined with an ardent and continuous ease” so
that the reader or playgoer would “receive as powerful and lasting an
impression as though he had spent several days in the reading of a long
narrative.” It was, in keeping with his other work of the moment, an
attempt to more dramatically and, for the masses, more accessibly speak
out again against the error of assimilation. “Stranger things than the
production of a play of mine have happened."^
Ludwig had spoken often of a projected epic novel involving the
Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire in 131 c.E., of the ultimate
defeat of the Jews and the execution of their leaders, Bar Kochba and
the man who proclaimed his messianic identity, Rabbi Akiva. Since his
return from Palestine, Ludwig, though a pacifist, had admired the will
Page 505 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn
of these two men who faced certain death for the sake of God and the
truth of his teachings. They, like the pioneer settlers in twentieth-century
Palestine to whom Adam was dedicated, had died as martyrs in armed
struggle against those attempting to destroy their homeland and its spirit
of Torah, that spirit which, though often removed from its source by acts
of assimilation, had remained the central element of Jewish culture.
Even those Jews who no longer chose to remain a part of this
holy people were nonetheless imbued and motivated by this spirit—and
one day would suffer because of it without understanding why. Rabbi
Tarphon, in speaking to Akiva in Adam’s “Prologue,” passionately cried
out against “the sons and daughters of the merchants of Alexandria and
Rome [who] change their names, consort with the heathen, applaud at
the vile circus.” “Let them,” Akiva responded, fully confident that they
would return to the ways of their people. “I, too, have been in Rome.
I, too, have seen their marble and their gold and their games. All the
goyim, the nations, fall under that spell. For that spell proceeds from
their nature.” But Jews were different, “a goy kadosh—a holy nation,”
he argued. 22 And if in some distant time “the wisdom of the Greeks
[philosophy and science] will have changed the earth and the life of
man,” the Jews would still survive as a people guarding the divine truth,
however it might be reinterpreted to address this new age.
Let our people follow the ways I teach, which are the ways of the Torah,
which are the ways engraven from the beginning on their hearts. Then, in
that far phantastic age, they will have become so unalterably themselves—
they and the Torah will be so utterly one, that each will live the Torah
even though he knows it not and that the very apostate in his apostasy
will practise the law. And if his apostasy is so great that he cannot, even
without knowing it, live the eternal Torah, he will die, not knowing whereof
he dies. 23
Adam, itself another retelling of Ludwig’s own experience and inner
struggle, was the story of a young assimilated Jew in twentieth-century
Europe and America whose gentile wife, because “we’re too different,”
finds it impossible “to give him a home in my heart, in my soul, in my
senses.” 2 ' “We ought to stick together and stand by our own against
all these foreigners—especially Jews,” 25 her brother declares in an out
burst that reveals to her Adam’s identity as a Jew. It was a sentiment
again expressed by a clerk in Adam’s own company, who, when being
fired for insubordination, makes known his long-standing intent to seek
employment in “an American Christian firm.. . . Damned kikes stealing
our American industries and corruptin’ our women." 2 "
What had caused Adam to attempt so ardently to deny his Jewish
self, to so wound “his soul unendurably,” that “he was determined that
486
Page 506 - [see page image]
487
In Self-Defense
it should be crushed, that self of his which was so capable of being
hurt?" • Combining the attack he had himself suffered in the Charleston
schoolyard with his experience of well-meaning, genteelly anti-Semitic
teachers throughout his schooling, Ludwig told of the beating Adam
had endured because of his teacher’s betrayal in cautioning his students
against the dangers posed by “hidden Jews.” Set upon during recess,
“the mark of the Covenant upon his flesh” uncovered, they jeered and
pummeled him to the ground, until finally growing “weary of their
sport.” It was then that his teacher interceded and “helped him to order
his garments and go slowly home.” 28
But the trauma of that day, and all that it symbolized thereafter,
could never be fully “ordered” for either Adam or Ludwig. Adam’s
solution to the unbearable conflict within himself, however, was not
Ludwig’s, though Ludwig had thought of it often enough in his earlier
years. And so, while being flown across the English Channel on his way
to Germany in his private plane, Adam leapt to his death. 29 Rejecting
suicide, Ludwig had searched for an understanding of his heritage and
had come to realize that the roots of his profound unhappiness lay in
the self-denial he had carefully practiced most of his life. Discovering the
fullest expression of his quest for Jewish self-affirmation in the efforts of
the young Zionists he had met in Palestine, Ludwig once again gave voice
to his inner thoughts through the words of a young woman, with echoes
of his earliest relationship used to portray the world he had consciously
left behind.
We’re seeking a new way of life. Since we’re Jews it must be a Jewish way of
life. Other new ways may be just as good. They wouldn’t be ours. Somebody
else’s body or even clothes may be better than ours. They wouldn’t fit us.
And a new Jewish way of life can be sought and created only here. . . .
Our children—our grandchildren—it’s for the land of their day that we’re
working.... I even had nice Gentile friends; a goyish boy proposed to me:
they swore political conditions would improve. But it all seemed useless.
Better conditions, worse, war, peace—one is a football. I wanted my children
to be people on their own in a land of their own. If they have troubles, they’ll
be their own troubles; if they incur guilt it’ll be their own; if things go well,
no one will steal their satisfaction. It’s so simple. "
Ludwig’s own life, however, would never be that simple. His own
past could never so easily slip away from the future as it had for
Adam’s Zionists, nor the problems of the wider world appear to have
so little impact upon him in the present. For all his advocacy of a life
in Palestine for others, his own was tightly bound to a more diversified
Diaspora. Unswervingly committed to a program of Jewish renewal, he
nonetheless treasured his ties to the larger world. In mid-April, only days
Page 507 - [see page image]
488
Ludwig Lewisohn
after completing Adam, he and Joyce exchanged autographed copies of
Crump and Ulysses, 31 Ludwig inscribing his with “profound admiration
and cordial personal regards.” 1 - They had met for dinner with their wives
and other friends at a cafe, “eating caviar and drinking Chablis.. . . We
were all in a merry mood and the evening passed only too quickly,”
Thelma would later record. “Joyce treated the men to cigars and all of
us to champagne. So all inhibitions were released and the goose hung
high.. . . We discussed music, America, the suicide of [Harry] Crosby
(the rich young patron who was so kind to Joyce), and, of course,
literature.” It was a particularly, almost uncharacteristically, pleasant
evening (“I’ve never seen Joyce so human before”), far more so than on
a number of other occasions when “he sulked in a corner . . . and cast a
damper on the entire room.” As the conversation wore on that evening,
“Ludwig made the observation that one begins to learn to live at forty.
Joyce agreed, but added that one no sooner acquired wisdom than one
began to lose it.” 33
If Ludwig could not agree with his friend on a personal level, surely
the events that were about to unravel their world over the coming years
would confirm this cynical view on a global scale. The previous year had
brought unprecedented prosperity to the lives of Ludwig and Thelma.
Never before had so much of his work been in print. But sales were
beginning to decline in the early months of 1929, due in large part to the
underconsumption of goods already plaguing the American economy,
the result of policies which, throughout the 1920s, had concentrated 59
percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of 1 percent of the people,
while 87 percent of the country’s population held but 10 percent of
its wealth. Sixty percent were now living on or below the government-
defined subsistence level. 14 Fewer and fewer people were finding them
selves with disposable income at levels that would allow for the purchase
of even the one-dollar editions of Ludwig’s earlier works; his newest
publications at several dollars each were fast becoming unaffordable
to much of his previously enthusiastic market. And as this national
situation worsened throughout the summer and early fall of 1929, book
sales continued to decline. The crash of “Black Tuesday,” October 29,
1929, would once again plunge Ludwig into economic depression and
force him back into the write-to-eat potboiling pace whose absence from
his life he had just begun to enjoy.
Hints of this reversal were already present when Ludwig wrote to
Huddleston again on April 29, though Ludwig could not have known
how long-term this development would become. If not for wanting “to
save car expenses to the last moment” (and the difficulty of finding “a
chauffeur without obvious inclinations to murder and suicide”), they
Page 508 - [see page image]
489
In Self-Defense
would have visited long ago as promised. But monetary considerations
were once more determining his actions. The advertising machinations
of Harpers were no longer proving effective, nor were the positive
reviews he had received. In such an economy, only the ongoing monthly
advance for Expression and royalties from Europe were keeping him
from financial collapse and emotional panic. Suddenly, he was once
again seated at his typewriter at work on a project he continued to find
personally unfulfilling. “The bottom is out—never worse; conditions in
America are so ghastly.... As for me? I’m banging away at the history
of beautiful letters in the U.S.A. and hope to have the job finished by
October 15 or thereabouts. And I, after all, get a good bit of myself into
it; but even that—mark this well—wasn’t enough for the soul’s health.”
After his recovery from illness while completing Adam, the daily
regimen of Expression again proved claustrophobic. Despite diminish
ing monetary resources, he found the means late that winter to flee
southward to Nice for a bit of sun and a chance to work on a story
that could renew his spirit. “I let myself slide and in exactly thirty days
wrote, poured out a tale, for which I had brought only the meagerest
germ with me and which wrote itself.” Neither rest nor illness had ever
stemmed the creative flow for Ludwig. He had apparently worked on
Escott while completing Adam, and in Nice, had allowed the muse he
had hoped for earlier in the year to offer her direction. The results, a
book “which is—or else I’ll eat my hat—almost my high water-mark
and which, strictly after the fact, I’ve taken psychologically to pieces
and find beneath its manifest meaning a latent expression of all that just
now I most wanted from the innermost depth of me to express.”
With the passing years—and the help of Brill, Freud, and others
whose work and conversation had provided further insights—Ludwig
had developed a rather astute ability to analyze his motivations and
to look back at his own writings with a psychologically critical eye.
“Something of an analyst without having my brains muddled by it,”
as he told Huddleston. Ludwig knew enough about himself to realize,
and to prescribe for others with artistic needs, that periodic “creative
debauches” were minimally necessary “to keep the damned psyche in
shape.” Pouring out words “to conceal and not to reveal yourself”
would lead only to “a case of psychical constipation.” Having failed
to deal with the two most fundamental issues of a person’s life, “the
will to personal persistence [and] the will to biological persistence,”
one’s work could have no permanent literary value. “Aspiration [and]
reproduction” were at the heart of what was truly important in human
life, and without involving these elements, all efforts at meaningfully
creative work were doomed. Even at the cost of greater income, these
Page 509 - [see page image]
490
Ludwig Lewisohn
themes, wherever they would take the artist, had to be pursued. Other
concerns could only follow after the creative thrust had run its course.
Now back from Nice, with the bills for his longer-than-planned
stay significantly affecting his worsening financial situation, he was faced
with the task of converting this product of creative inspiration into cash.
Escott was only thirty thousand words long, “a lovely length artistically
but too short to sell in book-form to any extent and, of course, too high
brow for any American periodical.” He hoped only to recover his costs
for the trip, but was not at all certain that he would, though in April
1929 he was still confident that in spite of darkening signs, he would
“continue to pick up a living, as I’ve always done.. . . What do I care?
I had the fun of writing it and I have the fun of having written it.” 35 But
by mid-June, he would be less sanguine about the project. Back from
another holiday and feeling the tightening pinch of monetary concerns
and the mounting pressure to fulfill his contractual obligations for a
new novel, he would have to face the many difficulties presented by
this “curious story, different from any I’ve written and presenting one
problem after another.’"'
By this time, he had been apprised as well of being charged, along
with Harpers, for libel in a new suit brought by Mary. Since January 7,
Harpers had attempted to ward off all such actions by her. While still
in galleys, Mid-Channel had been scrupulously read by their attorney,
Alexander Andrews, who believed that only a few changes would be
necessary to avoid liability, notably the deletion of expressions such as
“towering ogre,” “cheap, morose, impure,” “no self respect, no shame,”
and “insane.” So cautious was Andrews that he even questioned several
innocuous references to Bernard Shaw and Dreiser. He further advised
Canfield to continue acquiring Ludwig’s work through the arrangement
they had with Butterworth in England, with whom Ludwig was under
contract, thereby continuing to avoid the seizure of royalties for back
alimony. 37
Four days later, Canfield returned the galleys to Andrews for a
second “editing.” He had been particularly concerned about references
to Anne Crump, given Mary’s awareness that it was her portrait Lud
wig had drawn. “The portrait was so damaging that we felt that the
book could not be published without grave danger of incurring an
action,” Canfield explained to Andrews, preferring the lawyer’s scissors
to his own in cutting whatever passages might even marginally appear
offensive."
But on May 6, Mary’s attorney, Le Roy Mandle, filed suit in the
New York State Supreme Court against both Ludwig and Harpers,
alleging that in publishing Mid-Channel, they were “contriving wickedly,
Page 510 - [see page image]
491
In Self-Defense
maliciously, recklessly, and wrongfully intending to injure the plaintiff
in her good name, fame, and credit, and to bring her into public scandal,
infamy and disgrace, and to destroy her honor and hold her up as an
object of hatred, ridicule and contempt.” Mary further alleged that the
trauma of reading such defamatory material had made it impossible for
her to work as a writer, and that the scandalous image of her perpetrated
by Mid-Channel was now, only weeks after its appearance, preventing
her from finding a market for previously written works. Because she had
been “injured in her reputation, fame, health, credit, and standing,” the
demand being made was for $200,000. 39
Unaware of Mary’s having filed suit against his client the day before,
Henry Briggs, Ludwig’s New York attorney on holiday in Paris, wrote
to his brother William at Harpers regarding Ludwig’s other major legal
problem, the continuing issues of passport violations and threatened
revocation of United States citizenship. As a naturalized citizen, Ludwig
was legally obligated to return to the States within five years of his
departure. The period was about to expire, and with it his citizenship
and passport. The alternative to returning was an application for French
citizenship, but given that “government circles here are anti-Semitic,
especially in the Paris Prefecture,” and that “naturalizations to Germans
are being given grudgingly, if at all,” there was a strong likelihood
that it would be denied. Furthermore, to remain in Paris as an alien
required annual registration for which “a passport in good standing”
from the country of one’s citizenship was needed—something Ludwig
would be without as of July 9, 1929. Henry Briggs had obtained the
assurances of the U.S. consul in Paris that if Ludwig returned before
this date and explained his circumstances to the State Department in
Washington, the passport would be renewed and his citizenship not
placed in jeopardy. After vigorous argument, Ludwig agreed to take
this route. He was to arrive either in Boston or New Orleans, thereby
avoiding the jurisdiction of the New York courts and the unpaid alimony,
now amounting to twelve thousand dollars. Thelma, however, feared
that his passport might still be revoked, leaving them separated with her
stranded in Paris. 40
But before Briggs would allow his client to set sail that June, he
sought the reassurance of other legal minds as to the soundness of
this advice. Consultations with attorneys in Paris quickly led Briggs
to reverse his decision. It was conceivable that Mary could have him
arrested for violating the court order and that “an immediate, inevitable
and nauseous newspaper campaign, aided and abbeted [s/c] by my
own tireless enemy,” would likely be mounted, making his task in
Washington impossible. Of even greater concern, Ludwig wrote on
Page 511 - [see page image]
492
Ludwig Lewisohn
May 11, was his fear that Thelma would once again be “dragged through
the press.”
Rather than appeal directly to Washington, it was determined that
Harpers’ attorneys would approach the State Department, armed with
physicians’ certificates attesting to Ludwig’s and Thelma’s ill-health as
reason for their inability to make a personal appearance. To this ef
fort might possibly be added one or more letters from Stephen Wise,
prominent attorney and Jewish communal leader Louis Marshall, noted
poet Louis Untermeyer, and Federal Judges Julian Mack and Joseph
Proskauer. Because each of their reputations extended far beyond the
Jewish community, it was hoped that their emphasis upon the loss to
America from the revocation of Ludwig’s citizenship would be influ
ential. The attorneys further planned to reassure the government that
Ludwig, having been brought to America at the age of eight, was not
harboring any “previous political allegiance” which the law concerning
naturalized citizens had been intended to guard against, and that as an
artist he was a “damned fool but harmless,” something that Ludwig
could not have brought himself to plead on his own behalf had he been
able to go to Washington. “I can’t. I repudiate that point of view. My
actions have been overwhelmingly moral. That’s that.” In the meantime,
while awaiting results from New York, he encouraged his friends with
consulate contacts in Paris to pull whatever strings were available. 41
Word from New York was sent to Ludwig on May 31. John Larkin,
a law partner of Alexander Andrews, had spoken with Washington,
and now advised Ludwig “to rebut the presumption of expatriation”
by filing a “Declaration of Intention to Remain an American Citizen”
with the American Embassy in Paris. Ludwig was to state his reasons
for leaving the States—domestic instability making literary work impos
sible, causing too substantial a loss of income to be able to remain in
America; impossibility of finding a place in the States where he would
be free from personal and judicial pursuit and from arrest; search for
peace, as well as subject matter for a contracted project abroad. He was
to further state his reason for remaining outside the country, chiefly, the
continuing need to gather information for a forthcoming work of Jewish
history involving documents in Europe and Palestine. The anticipated
result would be the retention of citizenship, but the denial of his request
to renew his passport, except for the purpose of returning home. On
the other hand, it had already been arranged that a French permit
would be issued for travel to Palestine that would allow Ludwig to
return to Paris. Under the circumstances, it was the best offer Ludwig
could hope to receive. Larkin further warned against any continuing
pursuit on Ludwig’s part of a more favorable decision from the United
Page 512 - [see page image]
493
In Self-Defense
States government. “At the present time it is hopeless to urge the State
Department to change their attitude and by persistently hammering at
it only makes conditions worse. " 4:
Before Ludwig could decide on the offer, his passport was canceled. 43
It was a severe blow, but not the only setback in his ongoing struggle
with Mary. On the previous day, June 11, he and Harpers had lost the
first legal skirmish, a motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state
a cause of action. New York State Supreme Court Justice Schmuck, who
had five years earlier ruled against Ludwig in Mary’s suit for a separation
settlement, found little problem in ruling her new claim potentially
actionable. In so doing, he rendered his own literary assessment of the
book, reprinted the following day in the New York Times:
Although for the most part the book is the gibberish ego of a selfish
sentimentalist, and, as the excerpts quoted in the complaint indicate, the
feverish exhalations of a perverted and disappointed conceit against an
individual in particular and society and law generally, and cannot seriously
affect the opinion of rational individuals, yet the words are patently libelous
per se, and obviously refer to the plaintiff, despite the adroit generalizations
used, and because a publication is made at the publisher’s peril and risk,
the motion is denied. 44
An adjoining column in the Times that day quoted the advice Dr.
Hugh Black of Union Theological Seminary had given to the young
women graduates of Wells College: “Accept your limitations and moder
ate your desires if you would find happiness in life." 5 ' It was as if the find
ings of Robert and Helen Lynd, in their classic study of American culture,
Middletown, already in its fifth printing since its publication that January
of 1929, and highly praised in the leading journals of the time, had made
no impression upon a vast segment of educated America. “The ways of
living of any people at any time is that they are in process of change,” the
Lynds had written. “We are coming to realize, moreover, that we today
are probably living in one of the eras of greatest rapidity of change in the
history of human institutions.” 46 Yet their findings indicated anything
but a willingness to accept these changing circumstances and a conscious
evolution of norms and structures to manage wisely and successfully the
change in a way that would retain only what was positive and useful from
the past. Being honest and “civilized” was still synonymous with “being
a Christian." 4 ' The “ordered industry of importing and learning facts
and skills,” education, had as its purpose civic loyalty and the fitting
of the male populace into the existing needs of industrial employees,
while young women were being further acclimated to replicate their
mothers’ roles as homemakers to whom these workers could return at
the end of each day. 48 And despite the resulting global upheaval that
Page 513 - [see page image]
494
Ludwig Lewisohn
had followed the world war—and, probably, because of it—the students
were taught, and the vast majority believed, that “The white race is the
best on earth.. . . The United States is unquestionably the best country
in the world. . . [and] every good citizen should act according to the
following statement: ‘My country—right or wrong!’ ” Concomitantly,
three-quarters of the students surveyed by the Lynds disagreed with the
notion that an American citizen “should be allowed to say anything he
pleases,” the same number that believed “the Allied Governments in
the World War [were] fighting for a wholly righteous cause. ' 1 ' America,
“reluctantly conscious ... of discrepancies in its institutional system,”
labeling changes as “social problems” for which “the younger genera
tion” and the “willfulness of individuals” were to blame, felt compelled
to seek and apply a “‘remedy’... a logical extension of old categories
to the new situation, or an emotional defense of the earlier situation
with a renewed insistence upon traditional verbal and other symbols,
or a stricter enforcement or further elaboration of existing institutional
devices.'" 11 In such a moral climate, Schmuck’s decision could not have
surprised anyone, least of all Ludwig, whose sense of dread at the hands
of America’s institutions had never appreciably dissipated.
All of this legal maneuvering, on both issues, had quickly begun to
strain Ludwig’s declining financial resources. Responding to his earlier
inquiries, Liveright wrote in early June that the Stratford Company’s
offer to produce the dollar edition of Israel was workable, if he was
agreeable to the terms—$250 advanced on 10 percent royalties for a
first printing of twenty-five hundred copies. 51 Ludwig had no choice but
to accept these terms, expressing his belief that such “broad dissemina
tion ... in cheap editions is a good thing for a writer’s reputation . . .
apart from the money.” All else was going well, he wrote on June 14,
except for “still being pursued by the professional fury.” In the shadow
cast by this latest legal setback, “there seems to be no end to it and
no let-up. Unless some kind friend[s] hire assassins I sometimes wonder
what the end of it will be.” 52 On June 25 Liveright asked Stratford to
send a contract. 53 But ultimately the arrangement would falter, and a
“cheap edition” would appear in 1930 under the Boni Books imprint of
Liveright’s former business partner, with the hardcover printing priced
at half a dollar and the paperback for less. 54
During their correspondence that June, Liveright had congratulated
Ludwig on his continuing run of well-received books. Ludwig, hoping to
enhance Liveright’s efforts with Stratford, was anxious to assure him that
the critical reception of his work would be matched by market approval.
But Mid-Channel’s reception was, in fact, mixed. Mencken, who began
his review by noting that “Life in Christendom bears harshly upon
Page 514 - [see page image]
495
In Self-Defense
every man who ever sits down soberly to think . . . [and] must bear with
special harshness upon intelligent Jews,” had disagreed with Ludwig’s
substitution of the “more ancient claptrap of his own people . . . [for]
the whole claptrap of Christian civilization.” To Mencken, “the worst
of Christianity, in point of fact, is largely Jewish, and so is some of the
worst of Americanism” (an idea just then gaining ever widening ad
herence among certain segments of the European, particularly German,
population). Yet, he thought Ludwig’s call for an end to the “falcefaces”
of assimilation sensible and deserving of an audience. 55
F. K. Frank’s more positive reaction would appear in the New Re
public on July 10. “Ludwig Lewisohn has reached his most mature and
poetic expression. The book is an eloquent restatement of his conviction
that the deracinated modern Jew can find peace only by a return to
the impulses of his tradition—but beyond that it is a plea for cultural
pluralism, divorced from nationalist ambition, and a scholarly analysis
of the Christian and of the Jewish ethos."' ' Perhaps Irwin Edman of the
Nation, who thought it “too intensely personal a document,” stated it
best for a number of other critics when he concluded, “One may argue
with Mr. Lewisohn. He provokes argument. But one must read him, and
with admiration.
Ludwig’s harshest critics, though leveling some of these same points
against him, were far less admiring. Among them was Haldeman-Julius’s
niece Alice Marcet Haldeman-Julius, scion of colonial Dutch, English,
French, and German families, with a more recent Jewish mix. Mid-
Channel, she wrote, was “still another rehash of what are getting to
be his two pet themes: his racial tribulations and those two women.”
She further accused him of “trying with his musical prose to lure all the
young Jews he can into the dark realm of racial narrowness,” many of
them “my young Jewish friends, liberals, all of them without exception.”
She had even less sympathy with Ludwig’s domestic struggles, and while
unsure “why any woman will insist upon technically holding a man
against his will,” was “tired of hearing about it,” 58 hoping, in private,
that Mary would win her latest suit against him, though believing that
all claims of libel against Harpers should be dismissed.''
Charleston’s News and Courier, if more patient with “one of the
boys who was brought up in our home town,” took Ludwig to task
for again subjecting “the city of his youth to most merciless tongue
lashings.” Though the writer admitted to shortcomings in the city’s
“civic life . . . educational system . . . ecclesiastical life . . . [and] moral
viewpoint,” and to an unknowing state of pride, complacency, and
laziness, “the very fact that so many of our proteges have attained fame
in fields of important endeavor is proof of the worth of that which came
Page 515 - [see page image]
496
Ludwig Lewisohn
to them right here.” Of these many who “fared forth into the world to
become a brilliant light,” only Ludwig had denied his indebtedness. Still,
the Courier asked that Ludwig not be condemned, but that he receive
“a new heart... in which there shall be no cynicism and no malice and
no futile beating of the wings against the iron vault of the universe.”'’ 1
Ludwig would receive further mention in Charleston that year
through the South Carolina Poetry Society’s Yearbook notice of his
inclusion in Jews Are Like That, 61 as he would elsewhere around the
country in dozens of reviews of Mid-Channel. But a discernible turning
away from him was now beginning, and would accelerate in the years
ahead as his work became more overtly concerned with the fate of
Jews everywhere. Often under the cover of objections to his endless
passionate “whining” about the laws and mores of American society, or
of accusations against his illiberal racial “narrowness” that encouraged
ethnic identity in place of more universalist sympathies, critics would
attack him for his frank analyses of the Jewish condition at the hands
of non-Jews, whether physically endangered or spiritually threatened.
However strongly the book market had responded to Island and to the
reissue of Up Stream, that portion of it, Jewish and non-Jewish, which
objected for different reasons to his forthrightness was proving less
enthusiastic about Mid-Channel and, ultimately, about Ludwig himself.
From across the Atlantic, Ludwig could do little but concern himself
with the growing need to find an increasing income in a declining market,
part of whose decline was fueled by a receding economy that appeared
beyond everyone’s control. Life that summer in Montparnasse, however,
still appeared to many as unchanging, even to its longtime observers.
The painters’ model Kiki, recently released from prison, saw only what
the many outsiders saw in the Quarter—“the land of liberty . . . [where]
what would be a crime anywhere else is simply a false pass. . . [and
where] all the people of the earth have come . . . [and] have stayed there
all there lives.” If, as Kiki believed, “You get into it you don’t know just
how, but getting out again is not so easy,” 62 changing times would soon
force open the doors to flight. And if cafe terraces still filled with friends
and tourists in the warm months of 1929, a chill would be detected
in the conversations of its longtime habitues as the seasons changed
that fall.
Morley Callaghan, a young writer of fiction whose recently pub
lished first book had met with critical success, had come to Paris in
1929 in search of what so many others had come to find, and had
quickly moved into a circle of both prominent and unknown writers
whose gatherings Ludwig would occasionally attend. In his memoir of
That Summer in Paris, Callaghan recalled how
Page 516 - [see page image]
497
In Self-Defense
by ten in the evening the whole corner would take on the fullness of its
own life with the terraces crowded and the well-known drunken poets
or painters, celebrated for their stupor rather than their art, wandering
across the road from cafe to cafe, making the taxis dodge them.... In the
neighborhood was an American Jewish writer named Ludwig Lewisohn,
who had written a successful book Upstream and had gone on to do novels.
He looked like an important elderly professor. His friends, so I heard, had
persuaded him to “show himself to the people,” so now he would come
slowly along the street. 63
They finally met at a party organized by Ford Madox Ford, when “that
important, middle-aged and humorless writer named Ludwig Lewisohn”
approached him with an invitation to join him at the Coupole the
following day. A third person joined them that afternoon, and after
quietly listening to these two well-received authors discuss nothing but
the financial fortunes of their books and the means by which they were
being promoted, spoke up in disappointment. “I was present when you
two met last night. Well, I was a businessman, myself. I wanted to be here
when you great artists talked. I thought it would be intellectually stim
ulating. You know what you sound like? A couple of businessmen.” 64
Wall Street had not yet crashed, but signs were everywhere that trouble
lay ahead. Ludwig had reason to concern himself with the business of
writing. “The first sting of depression that would soon grip America and
the world” was already sending the expatriates home. 65
These same concerns increased Harpers’ attention to Mary’s suit,
causing Canfield to call upon the assistance of one of his more trusted
editors, Eugene Saxton, with whom he had long shared ideas and
problems. 66 While the attorneys prepared to file their appeal of Judge
Schmuck’s dismissal on June 28, Saxton began to “excise” the offending
portions of Mid-Channel, hoping that Mary would voluntarily drop
the suit. Ludwig’s friend and personal attorney, Charles Recht, had
read through the book, sending copious suggestions to Saxton on June
19, which were then forwarded on to Ludwig. 67 On June 21, Harpers
withdrew Mid-Channel from the bookstores as an act of good faith
and in anticipation of quickly producing a more acceptable substitute.
Ludwig followed this development by advising Saxton on June 30 “to do
exactly as you like, without consulting me further, in taking all proper
measures to keep the book on the market,” pointing out, however,
that Mary’s failure to sue the Menorah Journal, Mid-Channel's original
publisher, was proof that her suit against the wealthier Harpers was “a
mere blackmailing attempt.'
Ludwig followed this note of instruction with another three days
later, in which he further advised Saxton to ask Harpers’ attorneys to
Page 517 - [see page image]
498
Ludwig Lewisohn
contact him concerning factual errors in the papers Mary had filed,
among them the absence of any mention of her oldest daughter, now aged
forty-three, or of the fact that her youngest was already in her thirties
when Ludwig had walked away from the marriage—hardly a case of
abandonment. Furthermore, these children were from a former marriage
that had taken place two years after Ludwig’s birth, another fact about
which Ludwig believed the “egregious Schmuck” to be unaware. When
known, it would tip the case in his and Harpers’ favor. “If it comes to a
suit we should win it so triumphantly as to give us a good advertisement
for the book.” 69 Canfield thought these points of no “particular value”
to Ludwig and his associates, 70 but Saxton, believing the attorneys better
able to judge the usefulness of this information, passed it along to
them, as he told Ludwig in a letter of August 1 in which he spoke
of Mid-Channel's reappearance, in its newly edited form, within the
week. 71 Though displeased with the idea of editing out passages to
placate Mary, Ludwig was even more concerned that it quickly return
to the bookstores if he was not “to face the possibility of no money on
May 1, 1930.” 72
Nor was this the only suit brought against Harpers and Ludwig
because of Mid-Channel. The owners of the film rights to Arthur Pinero’s
play of the same name had filed suit to enjoin Harpers from further using
it, believing that the book’s notoriety would damage their own property.
But for once, the court ruled in favor of Ludwig and his publisher, noting
that “a motion picture belongs to the domain of theatricals, a book to
the field of literature,” and, therefore, the use of a title in one genre could
not preclude its use in another. !
In the middle of this legal and editorial maneuvering, Ludwig de
cided to disregard his attorneys’ warning against persistent and strenu
ous attempts at regaining his passport, and, on July 9, wrote to Louis
Marshall, “out of an almost hopeless despair.” A leading voice against
Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent, Marshall seemed best
suited for the task. Having never previously met, Ludwig spoke of their
shared interests, those “certain causes which you, too, have most warmly
at heart.” He told of how his “illicit relation” with Mary had led to a
forced marriage, years of bondage, government entanglement, thwarted
activity, and the inability to establish a permanent home in which he and
Thelma could raise a child. Having “darkened the best years of my life
and hastened the death of both my parents,” she now “hounded [him]
uninterruptedly,” while he was, at her instigation, being “libeled by the
gutter-press.” Neither attorneys “nor influential friends who profess a
devotion to me and my work” had been able to protect him or Thelma
from Mary’s “pursuit, terror, contumely.” ' 4
Page 518 - [see page image]
499
In Self-Defense
Marshall, after meeting with Recht as Ludwig suggested he might,
was sympathetic, and on July 30 addressed a long letter of support to
Secretary of State Henry Stimson, the subject being one “of a peculiar
nature.” While not in any way criticizing the decision of the State De
partment, he wished to bring certain facts to the secretary’s attention—
that Ludwig was “a great litterateur . . . [with] a marvelous command
of the English language”; that a number of his books were “of a very
high character,” garnering audiences in excess of seventy thousand for a
single title (Island); and that he was “exceedingly temperamental,” but
had “an extensive literary following.” Without a passport, he would be
unable to leave France in pursuit of the research needed for his work, for
which he was under contract to Harpers. Though without legal sanction,
he and Thelma’s “relations are those of husband and wife”; only an
inability to pay alimony and to secure a divorce had kept him from
returning to the States and from marrying. Marshall then added a special
appeal for understanding based upon the unique nature of the artist,
particularly since, as Marshall mistakenly believed, Ludwig’s work had
been consistently inoffensive.
It has long been the tradition throughout the world that temperamental
literary men who are regarded as geniuses, and who concede it, are not
generally judged by the same standards which apply to ordinary mortals.
A long list of these men will at once suggest itself to you. This man is a real
stylist. What he has written possesses merit. So far as I have any personal
knowledge, nothing that he has written would be objectionable to the most
confirmed purist. The books which he is now engaged in writing relate to
subjects which possess high merit.
Certainly, Marshall concluded, it would be “in the interest of literature
to enable this American citizen to travel on a passport issued by his
Government,” the results of which would assuredly be “of permanent
value.
The State Department, of course, disagreed with Marshall’s request
for special handling. “I cannot quite accept that Mr. Lewisohn should
be judged by standards any different than we are accustomed to apply to
others,” the acting secretary wrote in Stimson’s absence on August 13.
There were, he added testily, “facts in the records of this Department”
that were not contained in his letter that bore upon this case, facts of
which Marshall was obviously unaware. 1
Shortly after sending his letter of July 30 to the State Department,
Marshall had set sail for Europe and the Sixteenth Zionist Conference,
held in Zurich that summer. He had long been neither a Zionist nor a
non-Zionist, as he had explained a few years earlier to leaders of both
groups who had sought his assistance in drawing up an agreement to
Page 519 - [see page image]
500
Ludwig Lewisohn
work together, not for the creation of a political entity in Palestine, but
for the building up of a Jewish community for those who wished to seek
refuge there. By 1924, the Johnson Act had virtually closed America’s
doors to the vast number of Jews and others from southern and eastern
Europe in search of relief from oppression and poverty. Marshall, long
active in the fight to protect Jewish life and rights everywhere, had grown
increasingly concerned as the decade wore on, particularly in the light
of Arab attacks against rural and urban Jewish settlements in Palestine.
Setting aside differences between himself and the Zionist leadership,
as a result of the masterful work of Weizmann as peacemaker, he had
agreed to a leadership role in an “enlarged” Jewish Agency, that body
recognized by the British Mandate as the official communal structure of
the Yishuv. Consisting equally of Zionists and non-Zionists, it was the
agency’s chief responsibility to ensure the social and economic viability
of this Jewish refuge in the ancient homeland. The meeting in Zurich
in August 1929 was the culmination of these efforts toward unity of
purpose and support. As Marshall had declared during preliminary
negotiations two years earlier, “I am not a Zionist and never have been
one. I have always felt that I am something better than Zionist or non-
Zionist; I am a Jew. I can stand on that platform.. . . The time has
come when we should forget everything but the fact that this problem
of Palestine is a Jewish problem. ’’
The meeting in Zurich adjourned on August 10. Marshall remained
behind in Europe for an extended rest, out of touch with the State De
partment and its decision regarding Ludwig. Ludwig, similarly unaware
that this latest attempt had already failed, thanked Marshall on August
27, assuring his supporter that the struggle to regain his passport was
“not wholly for the sake of the normal flexibility of our own lives,” but
to counter “the imprisonment in France [which] threatens to make me
stagnate ... as a Jewish writer.” So, too, was he “distressed” at being
unable to actively engage in the efforts for which Marshall and others
were now dedicating their energies. His plan to attend the conference
in Zurich, like those for research elsewhere in Europe and in Palestine
for his “epic ... on the double theme of Akiva and Bar Kochba,” had
been frustrated. Nor could he return to the American podium in support
of the Yishuv. “My queer misfortune . . . has made me feel particularly
ignominious during these past few days. I could be neither in America
giving what strength I have to our people there nor yet in Palestine acting
and, if need be, suffering with them.” 78
Ludwig would soon learn that Marshall’s efforts to free him for this
work had proven fruitless. All further steps contemplated by Marshall
would end abruptly when, on September 11, he died following emer-
Page 520 - [see page image]
501
In Self-Defense
gency surgery. 79 Ludwig was now, once again, without the influential
access he needed in Washington. For the next several years, until a second
campaign in Washington could be mounted, he would remain on French
soil, unable to pursue interests that might otherwise have taken him back
to Palestine and changed the course of his life.
Page 521 - [see page image]
502
21
Vision of Terror
Unable to move about the world freely, Ludwig remained determined
to make as much of his situation as he possibly could. No matter what
had happened over the years, nor where they had taken him, he had
continued to find a voice, some means by which to make sense out of
this passage and through which he could attempt to share his thoughts.
There was surely much left to do.
That summer of 1929 in Paris was no exception. With legal flak
flying in all directions, Ludwig stayed the course, pushing onward with
several projects, even reviewing and preparing the first portion of Ex
pression in America for presentation in the revived literary journal
This Quarter, purchased by Edward Titus that spring after a two-year
publication hiatus following the death of its founding co-editor, Ernest
Walsh. Ludwig would look back nearly a quarter century later and
declare it Titus’s “most notable achievement... [in a] distinguished and
fruitful life . . . [whose] unostentatious liberality” had so deeply touched
his own years of exile. 2
In presenting the journal’s first issue in the spring of 1925, Walsh and
his collaborator, Edith Moorhead, had announced its purposes as “pri
marily to publish the artist’s work while it is still fresh . . . detach [ing]
the artist from his group,” his work but “an expression of. . . himself.” 3
Filling the pages of this inaugural issue were contributions from Gertrude
Stein, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, Hilda Doolittle,
William Carlos Williams, and others of lost prominence. Man Ray’s
photograph of Ezra Pound, set out like an icon, preceded even the
Page 522 - [see page image]
503
Vision of Terror
publishers’ opening statement, as if to acknowledge his omnipresence
and the indebtedness of those whose work followed.
The third and last issue of This Quarter's first incarnation appeared
in the spring of 1927, after Walsh’s death, and contained a long counter
attack against the revived New Masses’ characterization of Walsh and
Moorhead’s efforts as “a cannon shooting butterflies.” Moorhead had
been left to fight on alone. “I want to tell the New Masses that the only
emancipation worth having is that of being freed from being policed
by our neighbors.” This attack from the Left against This Quarter,
she claimed, was nothing less than a clear instance of “evil” by those
who would propagandize against the artist’s right to total freedom of
expression, advocating in its place a world of “universal brotherhood”
which sought to silence dissent. This was to be condemned and fought.
With true freedom, Moorhead continued, “one can talk freely of an
interesting race, ” a certain people clearly at the center of this policing and
propagandizing effort, employing the notion of universal brotherhood
as a deceptive cover for universal control and personal gain.
The Jews. Who from first to last in spite of their wanderings and mixings
with other races have succeeded in keeping their own noses, mouths, and
eyelids. After looking at the other races difficult to catalog by their features,
it is wonderful. I have never seen a Jew with a frivolous, light-hearted nose.
When discovered, such a one ought to get a prize from universal brother
hood propagandizers. Because he is at last flying the signal of Community
features. For to keep up their aristocratic and capitalistic desire for a certain
caste of nose, mouth and eyelid, is to wear on one’s face the contradiction of
this great principle of Communism. ... In the exercise of his cunning and
ancient methods,—denounced by the one great exception, and for which he
suffered crucifiction—the Jew in his wanderings has begotten and amassed
to himself the riches of the world. And O beware of a Jew leading revolution,
policing, and teaching others how to be poor. O let him be policed by a Jew. 4
Included in this issue of This Quarter was Sylvia Beach’s letter concern
ing the pirating of Joyce’s Ulysses by Samuel Roth, for which he “has
not paid any money.’"
While admiring “the courageous editorship of our predecessors,”
Titus two years later openly expressed his reservations regarding their
editorial policy. Though in print he held to the ultimate “irrelevancy
of that question,” 6 in private he vowed to give This Quarter stronger
leadership and a new direction. Clearly, he would have no currency with
the anti-Semitic sentiments of the woman from whom he had purchased
the long-deceased journal.
Morley Callaghan later noted his surprise at discovering, during
that summer of 1929, that so well established a literary figure as Titus
Page 523 - [see page image]
504
Ludwig Lewisohn
had never met Pound or Hemingway or Fitzgerald or McAlmon or
Wyndham Lewis. “I used to wonder if there was a lot of anti-Semitism
in the Quarter.” 7 They were, in fact, individuals with whom Titus had
spent occasional evenings at cafes or salon gatherings. But if Callaghan
thought otherwise, it was because Titus was not of their circle. Perhaps
Morley was right regarding their attitude—certainly the writings of those
whom he had named had not been without their negative comments and
Jewish stereotypes.
Still, members of their circle were among those whom Titus included
in what became, until he abruptly ceased his efforts and left Paris in De
cember 1932, the only small literary journal of its type published during
the early years of the Depression. 8 But as if to give it a countering balance,
he included among its first articles a discussion of Count De Gobineau’s
racial and anti-Semitic theories, then enjoying a widening acceptance.
So, too, did he select for that initial issue Ludwig’s “Introduction to
a Projected History of American Literature,” these opening pages of
Expression themselves being an extended critique of the cultural world
out of which Moorhead, Pound, and the others had descended. 9
Along with Expression, Ludwig was again at work on Escott, “bang
ing away” at what he believed “ought to be an interesting book,”
though his usual pessimism “during the process of composition” left
him able to speak only “quantitatively.” Half of the manuscript was
completed, and with fall being his most productive period, he promised
to have the remainder in Saxton’s hands before too long. It was to
be his “farewell to the contemporary and the problematic.” Despite
ongoing “troubles,” he found himself “bursting with still other and
further plans,” projects of more lasting value, “historical and more
universally valid: the things that are already sub specie aeternitatis,”
something that might survive past his own remaining years. There was
still the hope of children, “if ever our troubles come to an end,” but when
that day would come was beyond speculation. Thelma’s performances
with several orchestras that year would “lay up merit for the future,”
something which she could “look back on” when the work of raising a
family would take her away from the stage. But for Ludwig, despite his
deeply felt desire for an heir to the legacy he was building as a writer and
a Jewish activist, the work of his pen would always stand foremost in
this bid for immortality. 10 There was, as he characterized it to Canfield
in early September, a sense of spiritual paternity between himself and
the progeny born of his spiritual concerns. “I love Adaml” he wrote of
the play that had sprung full-blown from his pen some months earlier.
“Adam is my favorite child. Don’t call it mere paternal vanity,” he added
regarding its possibility for theatrical success, “I have a hunch, a deep
Page 524 - [see page image]
Vision of Terror
and mystic hunch. And my hunches about such matters are usually not
wholly wrong.""
Ludwig had hoped to return to Expression and to fulfill his obliga
tion to Harpers as quickly as he could, but his heart had directed him
elsewhere. He now needed to work out “matters” extending far beyond
that earlier and narrower desire to critique the America out of which the
book had come. Rather would he offer further guidance to his fellow
Jews whose increasingly precarious situation he so clearly foresaw. In
notes dated August-September 1929 he mapped out a presentation of
the “Crisis,” tentatively titled both “The Jews and the World” and “A
Kingdom of Priests.” Using an “objective tone,” he thought to frame
the Zionist solution for those endangered with a discussion of Jewish
history and persecution, laying out the “moral-political claims” and the
“Aspiration for State,” and ending with a message “To Anti-Semites
everywhere.” Yet this was not to be a standard Zionist analysis. Included
would be a discussion of Arab aspirations, and an approach that would
emphasize the “Nonegation of diaspora,” of which Ludwig felt so vital
a part, and it of him.
Over the next two months he reworked these themes in his notes,
adding and subtracting pieces of the discussion—“spiritual antinomy,”
the “Biological” claim to “Palestine and Transjordania and Mesopota
mia,” “Arab Self-determination.” And each time he would end with a
statement “To Anti-Semites. ” Even the series of Letters he proposed (“To
a French Pessimist... a Young Poet... a woman of 25 [Thelma?]. . .
A Young Intellectual Contemplating Marriage [to the person he had
been?]”) contained one “to an Anti-Semite.” 12 His awareness of their
presence in his own life had heightened his awareness of their role
in history and in the events unfolding in Europe and America. “Even
granting the quality of the official mind, I am being treated with pecu
liar harshness,” he wrote his attorney on September 12, believing his
situation with Washington to be “an irritation produced not only by
what I have produced but by what I am.” He was, however, ready to
make “an arrangement with the pursuing Fury,” though “it would not,
I suppose, solve all problems,” among them the notoriety and loss of
proper status Thelma was suffering, and the wall he faced in attempting
to “visit home.” 13
There was, at least, some comfort in Saxton’s assurance the follow
ing day that the six pages of material edited from Mid-Channel had
not “materially affect[ed] the text insofar as the interest of the reader
is concerned,” while making it easier to keep the work “alive” in the
bookshops, 14 and in his favorable response to Ludwig’s request for an
advance against the next royalty payment, despite the growing need
505
Page 525 - [see page image]
506
Ludwig Lewisohn
for publishers “to watch their cash situation.” Canfield was pleased
that September to be able to offer this prepayment, but not without a
reminder that “the American literature book” was eagerly being awaited
in New York. 15
This concern over income continued to be shared by everyone that
fall, not the least by Ludwig. On October 12, following Arab rioting
against Jews in Palestine, he wrote Canfield, “In view of tragic events
in Palestine our people are in a very sensitive and wrought up condi
tion. . . . Hence, get out this play [Adam] not later than December 15
and announce it in the New Palestine, Menorah Journal etc. as a ‘creative
re-affirmation of essential aspirations of the Jewish people on the part
of Ludwig Lewisohn and the most fitting Chanukah gift for the year
5690.’ Unaware of the events unfolding on Wall Street, he wrote
Liveright on “Black Thursday,” October 24, how only the favorable
monetary exchange rate was keeping food on their table. “What saves
our bacon, if I may use so un-Jewish an expression, is living on a
franc basis."'"
By the time news of Liveright’s failure to conclude an arrangement
with Stratford for an inexpensive edition of Israel reached Ludwig
during the second week of November, 18 the Crash was already casting its
shadow over two continents. In Montparnasse, the change appeared to
take its toll overnight. Jimmie Charters later noted how it had marked
the turning point for the Quarter. It had already begun its descent as
an artists’ colony earlier that year, but news of the financial debacle in
New York proved to be its undoing. “Many Americans, panic-stricken,
rushed off home, leaving the bars of Montparnasse in a sad way from
which they never recovered.” 11
Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age” had come to its end as “the utter confidence
which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt.... It didn’t take
long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward.” Living on “borrowed
time anyhow . . . certain and unworried,” few had cared about money
while it was “in such profusion around you.” But once the “upper tenth
of a nation” from whose fountain so many expatriates had drunk had
gone home, it suddenly became “a struggle to pay one’s share.” One
by one the many writers who were “geniuses on the strength of one
respectable book or play” left for smaller French villages or returned
home as well. 20
For Ludwig, the change only heightened the world’s tenuousness,
though for years he had largely been his own source of bounty or thirst,
and things at this moment were not all that bad financially. Reports from
Germany told of Island's selling three thousand copies, and by October
28, Adam had been printed and Escott was on its way to Hamilton for
Page 526 - [see page image]
507
Vision of Terror
publication in England. Thelma and Titus had both found it “tense with
broad human interest,” and had predicted a large market. Had they not,
he would have sent it along nonetheless. He would accept suggestions
about a title change, perhaps, but not to the text itself. It just wasn’t
his nature. “I’m inwardly rather rigid.... I can’t reverse. A thing is as
it is.... I know that inner inflexibility is rather a fault in me, at least in
the proportion in which it exists.” To alter his text to satisfy the market
was unthinkable, regardless of how difficult the course ahead appeared.
Perhaps it was this inflexibility that had always made it impossible
for him to truly find a period of rest between projects, though he was
again in need of a break from the pace he had set. “I’m haunted by my
Five Legends,” of which Adam had been the first to find full expression.
Driven by it months earlier during his illness, he was no less driven
now by thoughts of the remaining four—a sign, he believed, that the
“intimately personal life is the most important.” When balanced, “every
thing else is bearable.” Despite financial concerns and Mary’s challenge
barring him from America (“I’m rather sick of Paris,” he declared after
five years of exile), he had never before enjoyed so extended a period
when “the creative ideas chase each other’s tails.'" 1 Thelma’s presence,
he realized in “this second summer / When frost bit at the root,” had
much to do with his ability to focus his energies in disregard of the
distractions that had pulled him in so many directions in years past.
“Under the warmth of you there ripens / The unexpected fruit /. . .
New buds and second bloom,” he wrote in dedicating Escott to her. 22
Under her gaze, the scenario for yet another new novel was suddenly
and unexpectedly beginning to surface. But it would have to wait as he
began to plan the second of his legends, The Last Days of Shylock,
knowing that his inability to rest “gracefully” would soon find him “at
work on something.” Shylock promised “to be a rather amazing story,”
attempting for the first time to tell Shakespeare’s tale “in connection with
the actual facts of [Shylock’s] time.” This story of Jewish persecution was
to run for fifteen thousand words—just perfect, he told Canfield, for a
two-part serialization in Harper’s. 23 The story, however, would never
appear in Harper’s, for once he began to tell it, Shylock, like Escott,
would grow into a full-length novel. Its theme, central to his own life,
would not allow so brief a treatment.
In mid-October, Ludwig had been contacted regarding the inclusion
of some of his early short stories in a contemplated anthology. Though
he needed the money, he attempted to discourage their use, telling the
editor that he “very seriously” doubted whether any of his stories should
be reprinted. Such work, he noted rather disdainfully, “represents my
involvement with a world of thought and feeling that was never really
Page 527 - [see page image]
508
Ludwig Lewisohn
mine and which now seems of an extreme ghastliness to me.” He had
long feared “that these works would be dug up,” and now that they had,
he insisted that somewhere in the volume they be carefully dated and
that a note be included concerning his “philosophical repudiation . . .
of these scribblings of my earlier years.
Among those few he recommended was “The Story Ashland Told at
Dinner,” written in the last year of his life with Mary as he searched for
a new center of identity and concern within the Jewish world. Escott,
like all of Ludwig’s fiction, autobiographical in origin and cast, didactic
in purpose and, often, in tenor (“a regular Waltzer,” a heavy, ponderous
novel, as he told Viereck early in November), 25 dealt again with his
early years in sexually repressive, puritanical America, and with his
entrapment in an unhappy marriage (despite his opening disclaimer,
for obvious legal purposes, that “this is a work of fiction, and all
characters in the book are drawn from the author’s imagination,” with
any apparent resemblances to “living persons” purely inadvertent). 26 As
part treatise, he offered the therapeutic example of a Jewish marriage as
he ideally conceived it, free of sexual abnormalities, open and accepting
of each other’s natures and needs—an example to be followed in curing
the ills of American society. But such curatives were not appreciated
by all, and in the telling of this American tale, blind loyalties and
anti-Semitism played their inevitable roles, as Ludwig believed they
had in the numerous judgments rendered against him, in and out of
the courts.
Escotfs story “cut to the core of American life.” At its center was
the murder trial of Paul Glover (the Christian imagery all too obvious),
a man whose “ardent idealism,” shattered by his wife’s “unfaith and
treachery,” had brought him to the abandonment of his pacifism in that
passionate moment in which he took her lover’s life. In the heightened
feverishness of America’s entrance into the Great War during which the
trial began, there could be little doubt that justice would not be served.
Had not the defendant written for a journal known to be “subversive,
defeatist, pro-German”? Had he not licentiously advocated the “liberal
treatment of divorce” and “the dissolution of the American home, of
all that we hold sacred, of all that we are willing to shed our last drop
of blood for?” the prosecutor argued in a pitch of emotion to match
the times. 27
Here, in brief summation, were the arguments that had been leveled
against Ludwig in Ohio and New York, in legal proceedings and in pub
lications throughout the country, literary and otherwise. So, too, were
they the thoughts that had played so vital a role in driving away from
America those many who had spent the postwar years as expatriates in
Page 528 - [see page image]
509
Vision of Terror
Paris. Yet the war itself was not the cause of this deepening intolerance,
only its catalyst, helping the dominant voices of American society to close
its ranks against any suspected deviance from the norms it promoted,
and against which Ludwig and the others had been waging a war of their
own. “It is most clear to me now that the war had a tremendous effect
upon all the problems of the personal, of the intimate life of mankind.
But it is equally clear to me that the seed of the changes which the war
brought to such rapid and rank fruition were sown in the years that
preceded the catastrophe.” 28
Clearly, the “war-madness” had made the quest for justice “quite
hopeless.” But in just such a climate, the Jewish defense attorney found
his role more crucial. “To get justice for his clients. . . had been his
only motive during his professional life.”-"' David Sampson (the Jewish
imagery here, similarly obvious) was determined to “save Paul.” It was
his religious duty, the ethical thrust of his people’s central concern
over the many centuries. “I am by instinct and religion, by reason
and knowledge opposed to this final orgy which this country has now
joined.” Yet, he was concerned that client and friend would “be made
to suffer from the fact that... I am a Jew.” Throughout history, it had
proven costly. “My opinion is always the unpopular one,” and those
who held to it, or found comfort from those who did, had been cast out.
David Sampson feared that because “my justice is always mercy,” those
who were not of the “party ... of the wronged” would be blinded to
the issues by his very presence, and in the balance would exact payment
from the accused. 30
The results of the trial exceeded Sampson’s expectations. Through
his efforts, he was able to wrest a mistrial from the proceedings. “If
he and his world aren’t capable of justice, I’ll create a little for him,”
Sampson had pledged. 31 But this victory was not enough to convince
Sampson that in such an atmosphere of war-fed resentment, court justice
was possible. Instead, like Ludwig, he sought an immutable law in
which to find justice exercised, discovering it in the religious tradition
that had been central to his private world, that had “sustained [him]
in the meaningless welter of our modern life... a tradition, a sense
of continuity, a conviction of belonging to a community that stretched
across the ages and annihilated space. '" It seemed to Sampson, as it now
did to Ludwig, even more than when he had made his initial mission
to the East five years earlier, that “when the war is over, all Western
mankind will have an evil conscience on account of the magnitude and
horror of the war, and there will be people in all countries who will need
a scapegoat for their sins. The scapegoat, as always, will be the Jews.”
There was much to be done to ensure justice and survival for those of his
Page 529 - [see page image]
510
Ludwig Lewisohn
people who would be faced with charges wrongfully placed and without
recourse. “I’ll have my hands full. Never fear.” 33
Ludwig wrote Canfield on December 1 that he was relieved to learn
that from “a literary and practical point of view,” Escott had been well
received at Harpers. Always “frightfully dissatisfied with my stuff” at
the moment of completion, such news was comforting. He went on to
apologize for not having finished Expression as contracted, “the first
time in my life, honest to God, that I ever fell down on the job.” Honoring
his commitment, he had repaid the four thousand dollars advanced
on the project during the preceding years. Weeks earlier, Canfield had
encouraged him to return to “this splendid project,” and Ludwig, now
without the weight of contractual expectation hanging over him, was
beginning to “envisage the problem with a quiet mind and a clean slate.”
All of his work, he hoped, would be written on such a blank tablet. 34
But none of it could, despite Escott's opening denial of real-life par
allels in answer to those hundreds of “idiots [reviewers] who insisted in
every corner of the U.S.A.” that he and Thelma were present throughout
his fiction. “I thought I might put a stop to that. But the silliness of people
is probably unchangeable.” 35 For whichever reason, legal or literary, that
Canfield had included this disclaimer, Ludwig could not possibly have
so deceived himself as to believe that nothing of his own life’s story was
present in Escott, or in the other tales he had told. Early on in Escott he
himself had spoken to the contrary:
No, I shall not tell in detail the story of my childhood and early youth.
Such is the nature of man that no one can tell with truth and precision the
story of his earliest years. An accident [his first marriage’s ending] gave me
insight into certain facts and processes. And I value insight for the sake of
the perceptions to which it led not only concerning my own character and
my own adventures, but those of the friends of both my youth and of my
later years with whose fate my own is so inextricably intertwined. That
tragic coil to which ultimately I am coming would never have unwound
itself for me but for the researches which I began to make into my own
mind and past. 36
Such researches had led, as well, to his newest tales. Ludwig was
already far into the telling of Shylock’s story by December 1, feeling
more positive about it than he ever had about Escott. Of course, it had
to “contribute its quota toward keeping the little pot boiling,” but it
was not meant solely for that purpose.'" Expression, steadily reduced
to that function during the period over which he had labored on its
first three sections, had been set aside once more because it served no
other. Shylock’s role as a source of income was secondary to its true
purpose. Above all else, it had to serve as a way into Ludwig’s own
Page 530 - [see page image]
511
Vision of Terror
experiences and thoughts as a part of his people’s collective past and
future. By removing himself in time from the story’s setting (as he had
not been able to do with Escott), he found himself better able to tell his
Jewish tale of persecution without signs of his own life so obviously, and
self-consciously, grafted onto it.
Still, monetary concerns could not be overlooked, and if he now
seriously contemplated the completion of Expression, it was for this
reason that the project appeared to hold much of its importance. The
events on Wall Street could no longer be avoided. “I hope that the
financial crash at home will affect only furs, jewels, Rolls-Royces and
not the harmless, necessary book-trade. ’’ !> But he knew better, and when
presented with the opportunity to write “a shortish story” for Titus, to
be issued in a finely printed limited edition of 535 copies for which
he would be paid “a handsome price,” he accepted. Completed on
November 25, only weeks after Escott and in the shadow of Shylock’s
opening chapters, The Romantic fulfilled his need for meaningful Jewish
expression while adding to his financial well-being. 39 “Makes Christmas
easy,” he reported to Mrs. Spear on December 22. Only the continuing
economic downturn in the coming year could force him back to work
on Expression, and though he had already begun to work on “odds
and ends of one kind or another,” as he characterized the literary study,
he continued to work with far greater interest on Shylock, “another
rather shortish story. . . which is developing under my hands into a
shortish book.” 40
On hindsight, The Romantic was Ludwig’s most unsettling work, a
story he should only have been able to write in retrospect. Prescient or
not, he offered, in fictional form, a near blueprint of what was to come
under the Nazi reign of terror. Still more than three years away from
the abdication of moral responsibility that led to their assumption of
power in Germany, The Romantic grew out of well-entrenched analyses
and fears that Ludwig had harbored since his trip through Central and
Eastern Europe five years earlier. At a time when the future of Nazi
influence was certainly far from assured, he was convinced that only time
separated them from the Jews who were to be their principal victims.
The Romantic was the story of a highly assimilated Jew, baptized as
a child, who, though fearing “to make a gesture that could only betray
his origins,” continued to work for the salvation of his postwar Central
European country. On the verge of willfully accepting a dictatorship, his
fellow countrymen “wanted neither him nor his defense nor his criticism.
They wanted their will and their way; they preferred destruction at their
own hands to salvation at his.. . . They wanted to prevail on their own
terms or go under, leaving only a legend and a name.” 41
Page 531 - [see page image]
512
Ludwig Lewisohn
When the Terror came, he fled into exile, but was troubled by this
flight, and in time believed that he could return and mitigate the all
but certain horrors that were to come under this tyrannical regime.
For support, he approached an internationally respected law professor,
himself a Jewish exile from home, who shocked him with his response:
“My post-war conclusion is that no goy is entirely civilized.” It was the
Jews who had helped to make a civilized country out of a land “filled
with illiterate peasants and barbarous noblemen.”'*-' This, now, was their
gratitude.
Go back to Carpathia? Who made their stupid, backward little country into
something? We did. Jews did. If they produced a poet, we fed him; if they
produced a composer, we listened to his works. We gave them a theater,
a press, a business organization, a name in the world of scholarship. We
gave them a position in the world of money and banking and financed their
peace and their crazy war. And now they want to expel us and denaturalize
us when they don’t just let us rot in concentration-camps or pitch us into
the river. 41
Unable to accept the role of an alien in exile, the man became an apologist
for the regime that would destroy him, and in a speech filled with salving
rationalization for himself and the spirit of Gotterdammerung that was
to lead the Nazis to utter ruin in the years ahead, admitted to the accuracy
of the professor’s perceptions, but chose to be a part of whatever became
of the land and people from whom he could not break, and for whom
he expressed approval and sympathy.
Better for them to die by their own semi-barbarous monitions than to
live by that which is contrary to all their instincts, character, historical
development, for that thing, though it might save their bodies will finally
cause their souls to wither and to disintegrate. And that is why they rise
against the Jews in misery and misfortune.... I know that, to be a member
of a nation, part of the body of a folk, one must share its instincts. If those
instincts lead to darkness and death at a given historic moment, one must
choose darkness and death. . . . These people are mine. I shall live with them
and die with them. 44
With hope that he could, somehow, “gradually mitigate the harsh
ness of the White Terror from within,” he returned, only to find himself
arrested minutes after crossing the border. Charged with treason and
imprisoned while awaiting trial, he suddenly felt as if he had been robbed
“of all human and humane bases for his life . . . [of] all earthly sense of
home, of solidarity, of belonging somewhere on this grim and confused
earth.” There he was, willing to sacrifice himself, but instead, being
cast “out into a void where there was no faith, no home, no allegiance,
nothing to serve or love, no object of loyalty, no aim or goal,” all of
Page 532 - [see page image]
513
Vision of Terror
which he myopically identified with his beloved land. Surely the world
would be outraged, Jew and non-Jew alike, at the injustice of the trial
that was surely to result in his conviction. 45
But the man’s attorney more clearly delineated the problem. The
people had been “maddened” by defeat and territorial loss, and in their
inability to secure redress from those more powerful who had “inflicted
the injustice,” had needed to “externalize their hatred somehow” and
direct it toward those most “defenseless”—the Jews. So, too, did the
government need to bolster its ailing economy, but in a legal way in
order to project a positive image abroad. It was now certain that the
man would lose all of his property for having committed what, in this
“shaggy, cruel, picturesque, alien, half-barbaric land,” was deemed “a
political offense.”'"
Those who were to judge him had been his friends in years past,
but they had changed, and were now wearing expressions “both blank
and bitter,” brought on by the dropping of “superficial gestures” of
friendliness behind which lay “the fear and the hostility” of a centuries-
old tradition of seeing the Jew as destroyer. 47
They had always feared, those men, that the Jews would dupe them; their
blood had always nourished the old hate against those whom they had
wronged and accused of foul crime and incredible black magic; their blood
had half-believed the old, dark, superstitious accusations and had remem
bered the immemorial days when among their war-like, savage, half-naked
ancestors had first come, despised and sold into the world by Rome, those
astute, awe-inspiring, long-robed and bearded Orientals who could commu
nicate at a distance by means of horrifying symbols painted on parchment,
who knew the power of herbs and simples and the powers of the mind, and
who prayed, wrapped in shawls edged with the purple of the Mediterranean,
to an invisible God in empty shrines. 48
With this realization the court appeared to him at once farcical
and evil, as the prosecutor rose to accuse the Jews of undermining the
postwar government with its liberal laws (Weimar?), advocating social
experiments in place of “national honor.” The defendant, he claimed,
was the embodiment of this opposition to the “national will.” With
“evil prophecy,” he had “poisonjed] the minds of all with whom he had
come in contact.” As a clear case of “spiritual treason,” all defenses
were to be rejected as “familiar ones of international liberalism guided
everywhere by Jewish brains.” To accept them, the court agreed, would
mark “the death of order, stability, reverence, State and Church . . . and
the destruction of Christian civilization.” 49
In his cell awaiting execution, the man realized that while he had
not lived as a Jew, he was soon to die as one. He would do honor to
Page 533 - [see page image]
514
Ludwig Lewisohn
the memory of those martyrs who, like himself, had died only because
they were Jews. “How many generations of Jews did it take to go from
martyrdom to martyrdom?” he wondered. “Not many, as history goes,”
he understood as he went to his death, his head held erect so that “these
Goyim should not see him cringe; they should not see him falter. Not
him nor any Jew.” 50
In death, as in life, he remained the object of his executioners’ fears.
Unable to understand the condemned man’s behavior, they felt defeated
by the strength he had found in the tradition he had mistakenly abjured.
Trying to explain what had sustained the Jews at such moments—for
he had seen this behavior before—the chief executioner turned to the
attending priest and identified it as “their contempt for us and our
religion.” The priest, “as though to ward off a malign influence. . .
crossed himself quickly and began to mumble a Latin prayer.""
Ludwig had never before so forcefully presented his position, nor
expressed his feelings so openly. Perhaps the limited exposure of so
small a printing had encouraged his forthrightness. Though not to be
published until 1931, the ideas, and their accompanying emotions, had
been given the life he wished them to have, and for now it was time to
move on, to think more optimistically of the future. Particularly so, he
acknowledged, if he and Thelma were ever to have the child they desired
so deeply. “I want and crave a child.. . . Thelma agrees with me,” he
had written her mother that late December day in 1929.
They had hoped to be free of Mary’s “annoyances, chicaneries,
difficulties, dangers” before the child was born, but they could wait
no longer. 52 The appellate court had only weeks earlier again upheld her
right to sue for libel. 53 Ludwig attributed the decision by Judge Joseph
Proskauer, himself a Jewish community leader, to his desire to appease
the suspicions of a non-Jewish world, acting in ways reminiscent of
the blindness exhibited in The Romantic. “There, my friend,” he wrote
Liveright, “you have another illustration of my theories: he probably
bent over backward so as not to seem to his Gentile colleagues to use
any personal knowledge of me or my works or my influence among our
people in America in my favor."" 1 He planned to appeal to Proskauer
(with a copy of Crump), and to a host of other Jewish notables once
Shylock was completed. 55 This work had to take priority. Unlike “the
Johnnies like Scott Fitzgerald, who can sell the serial rights to their books
for $40,000,” he needed all of his time to complete projects for which
he would be paid, working “pretty uninterruptedly at writing, so as to
live decently and put away just a few pennies for Thelma,"'’ and for the
child to whom he could one day pass along the Jewish heritage he had
so stridently defended.
Page 534 - [see page image]
515
Vision of Terror
For what else were his efforts, and those of other Jews, if not to
perpetuate the traditions they held sacred, he asked in response to news
that the Menorah Journal's future was threatened by the mounting
financial distress of the day. It “shocks me profoundly,” for it alone was
the “one oasis—the one fact from which one can infer that American
Jewry has such a thing as a mind,” something more than “the news that
Miss Sadie Gumpelstein gave a pink tea on Erev Chanukah.” Economize,
yes; but without sacrificing “either artistic form or intellectual honesty.”
For above all others, it alone had proven repeatedly to be the one place
to which he could send the hundreds of young American Jews who wrote
him asking how to “establish contact with Jewish culture” and “be
Jews.” It was a “disgrace to American Jewry” to allow this one voice to
be silenced just now, he protested angrily. Rather, it should be expanded,
and a “series of Jewish books” should be added. “Of what good are all
our efforts if we lose the minds and souls of the new generations?” 57 he
asked on the eve of a new year that would see the widening effects of Wall
Street’s collapse, and its repercussions in Europe with the rejuvenation
of National Socialism in its many forms throughout the Continent.
Page 535 - [see page image]
516
22
Shylock’s
Redemption
Few could escape thoughts of the Crash’s impact during the early
weeks of 1930. Janet Flanner’s “Genet” had recently reported to the
New Yorker that “Generally the French people’s sympathy in our disaster
had been polite and astonishingly sincere, considering that for the past
ten years they have seen us through one of the worst phases of our
prosperity.” 1 Now they would no longer have to endure the thousands
of tourists from America, nor their reminders that the center of the
world was shifting across the Atlantic. Hemingway’s Robert Cohen
could complain by 1926 that “I’m sick of Paris, and I’m sick of the
Quarter.” Though “fairly happy,” Hemingway, in reflection, “like many
people living in Europe . . . would rather have been in America.” 2 Now
they could all go home, without a sense of self-betrayal. The Crash had
afforded them the long-sought exit back to the attachments they had
never severed. If critical, and fiercely so at times, it was the critique of
the insider, as Ludwig had recognized in Up Stream. They were, after
all, going home.
So many American expatriates had already left Paris, or were ready
ing their return by January 1930; so few were now coming to the Quarter.
“Prosperity is more than an economic condition; it is a state of mind,”
Frederick Lewis Allen noted in his 1931 “Informal History” of the
1920s, Only Yesterday. The age that could, with massive hysteria and
postwar celebratory release, shower thirty-six million pounds of paper
on Lindbergh as he rode triumphantly through the streets of New York
two years earlier, could just as easily in late 1929 find itself amidst a
Page 536 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
flood of shattered hopes in the wake of the events of a single afternoon.
Without purposefulness of direction for a decade, “Americans were
soon to find themselves living in an altered world which called for
new adjustments, new ideas, new habits of thought, and a new order
of values.” 3
In the coming years, Ludwig would find some satisfaction as many of
the disillusioned came to regard his perceptions, long held, as guideposts
in their own continuing search. But for the moment, he could do little but
work on with his thoughts, and watch the outward-bound parade, while
fixed in his own state of exile imposed not by self but by State. A flurry of
letters throughout these early weeks between Ludwig and his American
publishers reflected the financial concerns that were winning a place of
predominance in the thoughts of most. Liveright, attempting to save
himself from going under for the last time, had put together “an awfully
good team,” selling off his ownership bit by bit in an attempt to keep his
house afloat. Perhaps imprudently, but with his usual generosity, he had
fulfilled Ludwig’s request that their latest titles be sent as a Christmas
gift to Mrs. Spear, and, additionally, had posted copies to the Lewisohns
“with my best compliments and with no debit to your account,” 4 a
gesture of friendship Ludwig most certainly would have welcomed.
To Canfield and Saxton, Ludwig recommended a “cooperation”
with his “friend, the distinguished psychoanalyst, historian and philoso
pher, Dr. Otto Rank,” whose multidimensional ideas, unlike those of
Adler and other Freudians, would have significant impact in a variety
of areas and “hence a wide sale.” 5 And to Cerf’s inquiry regarding the
progress of a volume of “American essays” discussed sometime before,
he noted that without a contract or letter stating the terms, he had not
begun to work on the project, but that such an agreement could easily be
reached (with Thelma holding the copyright). “I think it will be an amus
ing book to do and I agree with you that it should have a good sale.” 6
America’s culture and society, for all that his interests lay elsewhere
and despite his halting progress on Expression in America, still remained
of some concern to Ludwig. Two years earlier, his friend Regis Michaud,
a French critic of American literature, had published a treatise titled The
American Novel Today: A Social and Psychological Study, whose anti-
Puritan, psychoanalytic approach bore the stamp of Ludwig’s influence
throughout, as Michaud himself would demonstrate in his anthology of
Ludwig’s essays on literature, Verite et Poesie, just then being offered for
publication as well. 7 A year later, Michaud, in Ce Qu’il Faut Connaitre
de PAme Americaine, spoke specifically of Ludwig’s struggle against the
“implacable taboos” of his society, and of how he was, at last, free of a
“world of servile conformity and shameful fear.” 8
517
Page 537 - [see page image]
518
Ludwig Lewisohn
Now, in January 1930, Mencken was in Paris, and Michaud brought
him to Ludwig’s home for a discussion of American culture that was
recorded by Nino Frank, a reporter for Les Nouvelles Litteraires. (In a
review of Shylock several months later, Frank would speak of Ludwig as
“one of the most eminent and interesting personalities in American lit
erature today.'T The conversation revolved around what Ludwig iden
tified as “this complete disequilibrium that Europeans have perceived
in the social and moral life of Americans,” a phenomenon explained
psychoanalytically as a form of schizophrenia. “He gets drunk and he in
vents Prohibition. So with everything.” Mencken identified the cause of
this condition as “Neopuritanism,” which Ludwig, able now to “regard
America with some humor,” viewed as the result of the older, majority
Anglo-Saxon population who, fearful of the massive immigration over
the preceding thirty years, found it “necessary ... to impose on them its
law.” Mencken concurred, seeing their forceful response as “a sort of
impact against the free spirit of the immigrants,” represented by Ludwig
and himself, among others. “Let us speak frankly,” Mencken went
on, “everything that counts in America as far as writers and thinkers
are concerned possesses no Anglo-Saxon trait.” It was they, Ludwig
added, who were finding the prosperity of America illusory and “life in
America” too dear to maintain as given. 10
This, certainly, continued to be Ludwig’s experience even from the
distance of exile in Paris. On January 25 he wrote a long, detailed
account of his legal difficulties in an attempt to solicit Stephen Wise’s in
tervention with either the State Department or the president. He pointed
out that Louis Marshall had been owed a favor by Henry Stimson,
Hoover’s secretary of state, which he had been planning to use in righting
this situation. Now with Marshall’s death, he had nowhere else to turn.
Apologizing for troubling his old friend, he set out his case and his plans
should he and Thelma “both be set free,” there being no possibility of
one traveling without the other. “We have learned that the absence of
a legal document has nothing to do with the grace and sacrament of a
marriage.” He had been prevented from rushing to Palestine in the wake
of the previous year’s disturbances there, and had been left to work on
Shylock without a return visit to Venice. But his long-anticipated work
on the Bar Kochba revolt could not be pursued any further without
again seeing the sites at which it had occurred. “I have learned to read
Hebrew. I have gathered documents. But I cannot go on, because I cannot
go to Palestine. That is the sore point.” Such work, he was convinced,
would have a positive impact on the Jewish world, particularly upon
those who increasingly found the need to seek their identity within
it. He was not, despite “the personal parts of Mid-Channel. . . [that]
Page 538 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
were wrung from me by a sort of despair, what is currently known as
‘radical’ in all that concerns the personal life.” Severely poor judgment
at a young age had “crippled, narrowed, embittered” his life for the next
two decades; now, through the “morally monstrous” machinations of
Mary, he had been left unable to be of greater “help” to those Jews who
were seeking direction in their return to Judaism, or of political support
in their Zionist quest. 1
Wise assured Ludwig on February 18 that “a few of us here in
America will make it our business quietly, but I hope not ineffectively,
to intervene” if the usual judicial and governmental channels being
pursued by the attorneys at Harpers were to fail. 12 Ludwig responded
with gratitude—“We were beginning to feel that we hadn’t a friend in
all America who was willing to plead for us” 13 —to which Wise in turn
advised that the difficulty might be ended with a cash payment. “Could
you in some way effect a settlement with her?” 14 This, of course, was
a route Ludwig had long negated, leaving Wise the task over the next
several years of “quietly” pursuing other means.
The attorneys at Harpers, as Wise had discovered, were doing all
they could to weaken the libel case Mary had filed against them as a
party to her fight with Ludwig. Inquiries had uncovered proof of Mary’s
true age of sixty-nine (though in 1919 she had maintained in print that
her birth year was 1882), of her illegitimate birth in a London hospital,
of a first marriage in Chicago in 1889 to Henry Childs, of her Chicago
divorce decree’s signing six days after her “first marriage ceremony with
Lewisohn,” and thus, of the “justification of the book’s allegation that
the legality of her married status with Lewisohn was brought about by
false swearing,” as was her claim of continuous residence in Chicago
despite years spent in New York before filing for divorce in the city of
her childhood, as depicted in Crump. So, too, had their investigations
disclosed her repeated efforts, and success, in broadly discussing the
events of her marriage in the press, which Harpers’ attorneys held to be
“voluntary publication by Mrs. Lewisohn of substantially all the details
asserted or intimated in the book itself—and therefore justification for
our publication regardless of its actual truth,” all of which they believed
were sufficient defenses against her complaints which “in due course
(several months). . . will be reached for trial. 5
Ludwig, however, in the face of increasing financial constraints,
was far less calm about these proceedings. In a letter to his London
publisher, he accused Harpers and its attorneys of creating the present
situation by failing to heed his warnings, and, instead, acceding to the
threats of Mary’s attorneys by voluntarily revising Mid-Channel. To
Ludwig, this appeared as an admission of guilt which had encouraged
519
Page 539 - [see page image]
520
Ludwig Lewisohn
her further pursuit. And because of their ill-conceived decision and the
prolongation of the case, Harpers was now planning to withhold his
quarterly royalties in payment of a portion of his share of the legal
fees they had incurred for him, with the further possibility of additional
loss of royalties should the final judgment be for the plaintiff. At the
same time, Harpers was continuing to pressure him for more material,
which, though “entirely natural in such a world as the present,” was
unconscionable since “Harpers, from the days of the Crump advance,
have always gotten their pound of flesh.” It was such pressure in the
past, he claimed, that had forced him to abandon Expression in order to
work more quickly on other pieces that could, in a shorter period, turn
a greater profit. Once again, he was to undertake a translation project
(Bernard Guttmann’s novel Ambition) merely for the income, something
“entirely inappropriate for a writer of my standing.” Worse still, he
was forced to have Thelma translate a second manuscript, “because I
damn well need the money.” With Mary already sixty-nine years of age,
couldn’t Harpers take a “slightly longer view” ? As with Dreiser’s Genius,
which reappeared in 1923, eight years after its suppression, Crump was
certain to be publishable in time. “Let Harpers contract for Crump:
let them roll up charges against that.” Surely, there was no “danger of
their losing money on me.... A little human and humane tactfulness in
financial matters would be, as the French say, strongly indicated." 1 ’
Legal activities and the writings which fueled them continued over
the coming months as Ludwig made ever greater efforts to juggle them
along with the more personally satisfying literary work he had mapped
out for himself. On March 2 he sent Saxton the preface to Michaud’s
newest work, a study of Emerson, noting in his accompanying letter
that he was “working hard at my historical novel” [Shylock), interrupted
only by “a nasty gastric attack following a delightful outing and brought
about by moral cowardice in the face of stern maitres d’hotel, who look
pained and horrid if you don’t partake of each course. Damn them!” 17
There was gratification to be found elsewhere as well, that month,
as both he and Thelma were to parade their talents upon the stage.
The Harvard-Radcliffe Menorah Societies had scheduled the premiere
of Adam for two evenings at the Agassiz Theatre in Cambridge, having
received “special permission of the author,” whose belief in its one day
being performed was more satisfyingly rewarded by the nature of the
company bringing it to life. 18 It was, as he repeatedly emphasized in his
years of correspondence with Hurwitz, chiefly for this new generation’s
return to Jewish life that he labored so diligently. Their performance
was ample reward for his efforts, as was the recognition Thelma had
received for hers through the Paris years. Her latest concert was to be
Page 540 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
held on March 31, the twenty-second “Concert du Musique Moderne”
sponsored by the Groupe d’Etudes Philosophiques et Scientifiques pour
l’Examen de Tendances Nouvelles, Section Musicale, of the Sorbonne.
Its Amphitheatre Descartes was to be filled with the sounds of Hugo
Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Braunfels, and other
contemporary German and Austrian lyricists and composers whose
work would soon be consumed by the fires of the new order in their
homeland. 19
Throughout the winter and early spring, Adam continued to receive
mixed reviews in the press, at once condemned by Lionel Trilling as
“awkward and without conviction” and filled with “the dullest stereo
types of a sort which it is impossible to imagine," 1 " while hailed by some
for scenes “written with compact expressiveness and fine feeling.”- Still
others compared it to the drama in Island and found it wanting, 22 while
at least one reader, Father Alford Kelley, attacked Harpers for having,
with Island, “descended to the gutter and the brothel to get material for
publication.” 23 Saxton, in defending Ludwig to Kelley, noted differing
sensibilities among readers, but added that the book’s heavy sales was
evidence of the “wide approval” Ludwig’s integrity as “a creative artist”
had earned for him, an “integrity . . . hardly open to attack, we think,
with such finality as you assume.”- 4
Escott’s critics issued similarly mixed reactions. The poet Arthur
Davison Ficke, a year younger than Ludwig, heaped detailed praise upon
Ludwig, adding, “I do not recall having seen anywhere so illuminating
a study of male jealousy in its nobler aspects.”-'' And while the New
York Times’s critic cited its possible merit “as an essay on sex” before
condemning it as a failure comparable to Roman Summer and far below
the quality of Island, 26 another hailed it for “older wisdom, greater
depth, larger humanity” than even Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and
Morals. 27 It was, as a Boston writer determined, a book for all “who
find dissatisfaction in wedded life”—a work “fearless in denouncing
sham and the shackling conventionalities which hinder man’s necessary
expression, without discarding so many of the customs necessary for the
protection of the home and the race.” 28
It was this same wish to denounce the destructive while celebrating
ideas and values which gave life meaning that had so forcefully moved
Ludwig to develop his visionary novel of Jewish revival in the face of
anti-Semitism’s dominance, Shylock. Even Saxton, while thanking him
in mid-March for the Michaud preface and encouraging him to return to
Expression (there being “nothing like it in print. . . [and certain to] let
in a great gust of fresh air in a room that has been musty and cobwebby
for years on end”), saw the power of placing the man condemned for
521
Page 541 - [see page image]
522
Ludwig Lewisohn
all time in Christian literature at the critical center of events positively
affecting his people’s future, events whose importance could be seen
again in the unfolding history of Ludwig’s own time. “I think it is an
inspiration,” Saxton wrote, “to have hit upon the Shylock theme and I
look forward with great eagerness to the finished book.” 29 On April 3
Ludwig set aside the completed manuscript, a short but important tale
of but fifty thousand words, 30 “almost pure narrative, of the classico-
historical imagination” which, he believed, would “harmonize with
something in the present mood of America.” He had little doubt of
the tale’s intrinsic merit. “I am convinced that the idea was most happy.
People are rather thrilled when I mention it.” Yet, as always, he felt “too
close to my opus just now to estimate the quality of the execution." 1 '
Shylock’s last days had presented Ludwig with the opportunity
to examine once again the contemporary and the personal through
the lens of history, hoping thereby to guide the spiritually searching,
and to remind the politically attuned that a place of escape had once
again become a necessity. For Ludwig, no other alternative existed to
ameliorate Jewish suffering. Rejection of assimilation as a viable solution
was at the very heart of his angrily told tale, as it had been in his life.
Had not Shylock’s own daughter learned, as had Ludwig, “that it was
a heinous sin . . . to feel shut out from a world that was not hers, to be
ashamed of her own people”? She had tried “to master the longings in
her soul,” but memories of her Jewish past “wrought upon her again
and her heart had throbbed by day and by night and strange dreams and
palpable visions had pursued her.” In time, she “had felt her new life die
in her heart and had known that she was a stranger amid strangers,”
her only “friend . . . the harsh billows of the autumnal sea.” 32
Shylock, too, had felt the sting of self-negation. “Was he in truth still
himself?” he asked after undergoing conversion, only to experience his
tormentors’ continuing rejection. “The Goyim. . . hated and despised
him still,”' : forcing him to mock his own traditions as he sat silently
reciting the “shema” of the Jewish martyrs, whose freely chosen act now
mocked his cowardice. 34 Had he not known since the days of his youth
that the Gentile was capable of treachery? Had not their acts throughout
the years been evidence enough of deception and betrayal, remaining
with him as reminders, flooding his thoughts as he looked on at the
events to come, shedding light on a future he envisioned with increasing
certainty? “His constant soul had held fast all accidents of fate and
fortune, all shapes and aspects of his life, the flickering hopes, the harsh
and long despair. The incessant memories haunted him; they streamed
through his brain like flights of strong birds; he found that his old heart
could still know ache.. . . All the dead years and days arose in his soul
Page 542 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
as though their voices were not hushed nor their sun extinguished.” 35
Those whom his father had befriended had turned upon him, as had
their children upon Shylock, attacking him with the blood of freshly
butchered pigs, forcing him to kiss their severed snouts.'" The state’s
defeat in the last war had brought charges of perfidy against the Jews. In
retaliation, they had been forced into a ghetto, made to wear a yellow
hat, while the populace celebrated their expulsion and confinement, as
it would the burning of the Jews’ books and other acts of humiliation. 37
He was determined now to convert his anger at the “innumerable
humiliations of his sacred nation. . . [and] the dreadful injustice that
seared his soul” into a means of redemption for his people. It was clear
that the “world needed a change." ’ God might send his Messiah, but
Shylock doubted too strongly to await his arrival. He knew “in the depth
of his soul. . . that this hope too would come to naught and that he had
better address himself to the harsh necessities of the world.” ” It was to
be his task “to help right the balance in the hand of justice,” and with “a
heart. . . bitter against the enemy,” filled with the “unquenchable zeal”
of a penitent apostate, he spoke out with a clear Zionist voice of the
Jews’ impending return to the “faith of our fathers” as they “set their
faces to the East,” and, thereby, escape the “seething cauldron” which,
for them, all of Christendom had become. 40
True, there had been good days, but evil times were always close
behind. The sultan’s trusted adviser, the Jew Joseph Nasi, knew this all
too well. Despite his favored position and the security it might otherwise
have promised his people, “We are always as the grass that springeth
up and is mowed down again, or as a shadow cast by a tree which
disappeareth when the sun sinks in the vault of heaven.” These were
“hours . . . when all men deem us strangers,” when accusations of ritual
murder, of commercial deceit, of usurpation of power were being spread
by those truly in control of the masses who each day raised their voices
more loudly in fear. “We are strangers everywhere and everywhere there
is raised the cry that was raised in Mizrayim [Egypt] of old time that
if we multiply in numbers or in wealth we are enemies and should be
oppressed,” Joseph reminded his people. For this reason alone he had
secured the purchase of “a ruined city and . . . villages in the sand of the
hills . . . and forgotten lands ... in the land of Israel to be a country and
a place of refuge and a land of their own for as many of our people as
could dwell there." *'
Ludwig’s vision of the transformation of oppressed exiles into build
ers of “their city in their own land” was a mix of political wisdom and
mystical yearning, born of the events to which he had been a witness
over these last years in Europe and of the romantic in him drawn to a
523
Page 543 - [see page image]
524
Ludwig Lewisohn
reading of the classic Kabbalistic text, the Zobar, that he might “gaze,
with the Holy one, blessed be He, into the olam ha’aziluth, the world
eternal, in order to know that in the olam ba’beriah, the created world,
Jews needed a guide." 4;
Despite the wildness of the land and the ever-present danger of the
Arabs, who, like their Christian enemies, claimed the Jews dishonored
the teachings of their faith and the person of their Prophet (though they,
too, were pleased to partake of the benefits the Jews’ money provided), 43
the settlers were “trusting that the soil of their own land would give them
of its virtue.”' 14 “And old men among them, whose feet had trod the
paths of exile for many weary years, whose brows had been furrowed
by the long shame of the yellow hat, whose breasts had been seared by
the Jew’s sign worn among them, whose backs had bent in unwilling
obsequiousness to priest and knight and burgher—these old men grew
clear of eye and certain of tread and with their pale hands planted seeds
in the holy soil and arose and gazed calmly at the horizon."’ 1
Still, though “he dreamed a waking dream of a great, free Jewish
folk, which would armour itself with strength and with valour and, if
need were, with the sword . . . [who] would go back to the land of our
fathers carrying gifts of peace, healing, even of gold to the poor,” the
world would not allow them to rest. “What,” Ludwig asked in Shylock’s
voice, “is to be the end?” 46 Would the Jews ultimately require more than
a program of self-renewal? “A great fear came into his heart.” Might
there not be need for “the Eternal to cause to arise, this year and in this
generation ... a redeemer for Zion to lead Israel out from the wars and
conflicts and bloodthirstiness of nations . . . and the evil ways of men ?“ 4 ’
Ludwig harbored fears of other hopes left unfulfilled, which he had
similarly voiced in Shylock and elsewhere that April of 1930. In his
letter to Canfield written five days after completing the novel, he spoke
for several pages of his finances, repeating his anger at receiving so
small an advance for his work and at being without benefit of magazine
serialization for the huge sums still enjoyed, even in these hard times, by
Fitzgerald and others more “dreary. . . [and] esoteric.” Healthy sales
and what he termed “my huge reputation” had left him, nonetheless,
in a financially precarious position, with money enough for Paris, but
not New York, should he at last receive the justice he deserved. What
little remained after the year’s expenses had been placed in an account
under Thelma’s name, “so that we, in our peculiar circumstances, can
risk having a child.... If I couldn’t do that, what would I be working
or living for? Art? Hell!” 48 The years had passed too quickly, and
Ludwig had grown weary of feasts and fame. He needed more, and
as he approached his forty-ninth year he looked upon middle age from
Page 544 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
behind the mask of Shylock’s Joseph Nasi and spoke of sorrows he could
not otherwise have exposed, of a world incapable of justice, of the son
he might never have. “God hath not even given me a child to whom to
leave either name or treasure. Justice is what I sought in order to be able
to practise mercy. I am almost persuaded that the world was so created
that it will always lack both and were it not for the small help I can give
our people, I would put away from me offices and honours and go a
barefoot pilgrim to Yerushalaim.” 49
And if not to Palestine, he told Liveright that April, then he would
“go off for week-ends and short trips” 50 as the pace of work quickened in
this deteriorating economy. Ideas were racing ahead of the time available
to see them developed. He could hardly afford much time away. His
daily journal in the weeks that followed filled with notes for work that
would, or would not, be completed that year. They were to be a means
toward ensuring future economic well-being at a time when he still could
afford to trade a year-old Citroen for a new Renault while continuing
to add to his collection of antique Jewish ritual objects. But for how
much longer? 1 Clearly, an elevated standard of living and the fear of
its loss were parts of the worrisome picture he drew for himself. Soon,
indications that he was contemplating a return to Expression appeared
in his journal, along with sketches for a new Jewish tale set in the ghetto
of eighteenth-century Paris (The Renegade), and for a set of “Dialogues
concerning the Jews. . . Jesus, Macabbees, or Esther transformed to
contemporary life.”'-'
But these notes, and the many others that were recorded during this
period, represented far more than mere projects designed to increase his
income, as important to him as this was. As the political situation wors
ened on the heels of economic deterioration, particularly in Germany,
he felt compelled to address the search for a set of universally acceptable
values. As early as April 10, a week after finishing Shylock “dripping in
my own sweaty blood," : ' he outlined the basic position he would adhere
to throughout the coming months. “The question here is the line of the
dimension of values,” he wrote under the heading of “Humanism—
Dualism.” He would set the ground rules for its search “irrespective
of metaphysics. The old division with its consequent hierarchy does
not work. Not no values; other values,” he concluded, with a marginal
notation of “Nietzsche” added to his observations, without much else
as yet spelled out. 54
With “the course along which I was being more or less driven”—
Adam, Escott, and Shylock—behind him, he had hoped to work on this
question. But new projects were already under contract. The translation
of Ambition was due at Harpers in a month, and though he had yet
525
Page 545 - [see page image]
Ludwig Lewisohn
to begin work on it, his skills would allow him to finish on time. He
would be happy to undertake similar work overseeing a translation by
Thelma, he told Huebsch, should he have a work of fiction in mind,
“her work being guaranteed by the united family.” Thelma was tiring
of her musical career and the minimal remuneration it had realized, and
was anxious “to contribute to the family exchequer . . . [having] trained
herself to translate from the German, a language she has really mastered
during these seven years of our life together.”
Hopeful as well that Huebsch might be able to assist in extricating
him from Mary’s grip, Ludwig asked if any evidence of his early disaf
fection for her might be found in the files at Huebsch’s office. “Did I ever
to you from Columbus break through the silly reserve that I then still
thought due me as an American gentleman? Jesus Christ, if I may use so
unjewish an expression—my idiot adolescence lasted long, didn’t it? If
you have those letters and if I was ever less of an ass in one than usual—
let me know! It might be of the very greatest service to me now.” 55 The
letters, in fact, had been sent and saved. But Huebsch, perhaps wishing to
remain free of legal entanglements, never acknowledged their survival.
Liveright notified Ludwig, in a letter sent from London on April 29,
that he would be in Paris on May 3 for a brief stay. “I really feel that we
have lots to talk about and I look forward with keen anticipation to our
meeting after so many years.’”' His business floundering in New York,
Liveright had scheduled a whirlwind tour of European centers in search
of new material, an aggressive final push before the inevitable collapse.
Sinclair Lewis, writing to Mencken on May 4, the day of Liveright’s
meeting with Ludwig, noted “that the book-business is in such a vile
way just now that nothing’s really selling.” Yet, beyond the objectivity
of the observation lay deep-seated anger over his loss of place, despite
a Nobel Prize. Literary critics, he claimed, had begun to bury him and
others, such as Mencken and Dreiser, with “brief and bitter obsequies,
replacing them with newer writers whose work they favored more.”
With deepening consternation and more than a touch of the prejudices he
shared with others of this bypassed group, Lewis labeled them “classic,
cameo-craven, Anglo-Catholic lads as Hemingway, Johnny Dos Passos,
and Josephine Herbst." ’ Nor was this any longer a one-sided attack, as
these “lads” of the newer generation gained a more secure footing on
the literary landscape. Hemingway himself, in The Sun Also Rises, spoke
rather disparagingly of Mencken as “through now.. . . He’s written
about all the things he knows, and now he’s on all the things he doesn’t
know.” 58 Ludwig felt some annoyance with the younger set, but did not
share Lewis’s bigotry. Ludwig, in fact, continued over the years to believe
that Hemingway had made a contribution, and spoke of his old friend
52 6
Page 546 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
Lewis’s growing self-doubt and bitterness as products of his inability to
“bear the glory that had come to him with equanimity or ease.” 59
Ludwig, of course, had no such position to protect, nor any interest
left in maintaining a generational hold upon the culture. These were
the struggles of insiders—and he was, by circumstance and, ultimately,
by choice, markedly on the outside, writing for a different segment of
both generations. This variant concern had brought forth the work of
the last few years, and had made Ludwig’s “lovely dinner party” a
required stop on Liveright’s itinerary, though he was sorry not to “shine
more brilliantly.” Liveright was intrigued with Shylock, as he informed
Ludwig in a letter from London on May 14, particularly because “it
will be pro-Jewish—at least I hope it will.” With proper handling, sales
could reach one hundred thousand, he estimated, and serial rights, “with
expert nursing,” could prove “extremely valuable.” If Harpers did not
wish to place it in their magazine, he promised to pursue the matter
with “one or two people who . . . could be lured to make very fair bids
without our making an offer."”' But Liveright’s time was rapidly passing,
and Ludwig correctly assessed his former publisher’s effectiveness in a
changing world of letters ever more driven by the need to realize a profit
with every venture.
Canfield’s letter of the same day appeared to Ludwig as a far more
realistic assessment of the book’s potential, though he could not have
been pleased with Harpers’ decision not to serialize it in their journal.
Convinced of its literary quality and its appeal to “Jewish circles,” they
were certain that it would not receive “a big popular sale simply because
many readers will not have the breadth of mind nor the intelligence to
appreciate Shylock. ” It was, after all, “a little too specialized, if I may use
a word that is not very apt, for the audience of a general magazine."''
Ludwig knew full well what Canfield was referring to in speaking so
circumspectly about the anticipated reaction of the broader American
readership that lay outside “Jewish circles.” Yet, he could not allow
Canfield’s assessment to stand unanswered. “A very able American pub
lisher, having heard of the title from a mutual friend,” he wrote Canfield
on May 31, “offered an advance of $5000 sight unseen on the ground,
as it was amusingly put to me, that however good from a literary point
of view the book was, alas, it was enough of a ‘trick’ book and ‘trick’
title ... to warrant top-notch expenditures for advance, publicity, etc.”
With the character of Shylock being a part of “the imaginative life—to
the point of being proverbial—of Western mankind, ” the book was likely
to pique the interest of every high school graduate. It was this “initial
strong curiosity” that was certain to drive sales far beyond Harpers’
doubtful predictions. Still, aware of “how completely the bottom had
527
Page 547 - [see page image]
528
Ludwig Lewisohn
dropped out in America,” he urged Harpers to publish Shylock that
fall rather than wait until the following spring—and to bring it out
“with the right attitude and faith.” With the sales of his other titles
already markedly sliding, he would need the additional boost in the
coming year. As proof of Shylock’s market potential, he offered news of
current discussions of a German serialization. For once he had had “a
‘lucky’ idea.” 62
Ludwig was, in fact, increasingly able to look with satisfaction
toward European markets for the sale of his books. Sending “some
foreign news about me” to Canfield’s assistant, Miss Raphael, two weeks
earlier, in exchange for information on activities in America (“It does me
so much good at this distance to be kept informed”), Ludwig had spoken
of Crump, just then appearing in Dutch, and soon in French, and of
Island, already “quite a hit, strangely enough,” in Hungarian, while the
German translation was entering its second printing. Regis Michaud’s
translation of the novel would be out within days, and Dutch, Dano-
Norwegian, and Polish translations had already been contracted. Even
Shylock, still a year from its American publication, had begun to appear
in French that spring in the latest issue of Nouvelle Revue Juive.
On May 18, Ludwig wrote Miss Raphael that he was “hard at work
putting the German prize novel into English,” attempting to rescue it
for an American audience. Though “admirable,” Guttmann’s Ambition
needed “tightening and shaping. . . [as] the author knew too much
and put it all into the book” so that “the progress of the essential
fable . . . and its emotional reach” had been sacrificed to the writer’s
“historical interests and learning.” Ludwig, now in what he identified
as his “historical and imaginative . . . phase,'”' knew full well from his
work on Shylock what dangers such writing presented. Though the
translation would not be completed and mailed until May 31, he was
anxious to move to another of his projected fables, believing he had
mastered the genre. On May 28, he made notes on themes to be covered
in his retelling of the biblical story of Jewish oppression, “Mordecai,”
for which he had also begun to reread Herodotus as background for a
more authentic picture of Babylonia."
But the pressure and pace of composition and translation, aggra
vated by financial concerns and unending exile, had, by the end of May,
begun to wear upon Ludwig’s health. The occasional bouts of exhaustion
and intestinal problems were now becoming more frequent. “On June
3d,” he wrote Canfield, “we are leaving for three weeks at Vichy where I
have been ordered for digestive disturbances which are, I believe, nervous
in their origin. ' As Ludwig would more fully explain to Viereck shortly
after his return to Paris,
Page 548 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
I was going to write a short story and the short story ran away with me and
became a novel. For five months it absorbed me completely and made me
sweat blood. I couldn’t leave it alone, though I had really been over-working
before. It’s called THE LAST DAYS OF SHYLOCK and will not appear,
on account of the rotten business conditions in America, till March 1931.
Well, having finished that I somehow scented the fact that money would be
scarce and hence undertook to translate the Harper German prize novel. I
dictated the translation to Thelma in 35 days. By the time that was finished
it was the end of May and I had nervous indigestion and superfluous fat
and so we went to Vichy. “
But Ludwig had never intended to lie about idle, as his final lines to
Canfield on May 31 had made perfectly clear. In complete disregard of
his doctor’s orders, Ludwig had begun to work, even before setting out
for Vichy, on four new essays, notes for two books, and the next stage of
Expression. “I’ve never really dropped it [Expression]; I’ve only followed
stronger impulses on the basis of psychical economy: one can always
write history; the creative passion should be exercised as it arises.'''’'
On July 3, Viereck asked Leonard why he hadn’t heard from Ludwig
in months. “Has he had another brainstorm or is he in the throes of
gestation?This was, in actuality, precisely why neither of them had
received a message in some time from their old friend, though Ludwig’s
as yet unreceived letter of June 28 was now on its way to Viereck,
informing him that since returning home he had “done nothing but
attend to accumulated correspondence.. . . I’ve lost 11 pounds and feel
almost human again,” he reported, adding that Thelma, too, was “much
benefited.” He felt similarly positive that while the economic “slump is
playing hell with the sales of books and so with me . . . we’ll weather
the storm,” particularly “having no money invested.” 69
Yet more than work and distance separated Ludwig from his old
colleagues, and from the younger generation of writers; and no single
piece of writing portrayed their differences more decisively than did
“Blind Alley,” completed on July 10, and published that December in
Harper’s. Begun during this period of convalescence, it was his clearest
declaration of the need for a new vision, a last gasp of hope before the
darkness he saw descending upon Europe fell upon America as well.
The work that he and his fellow critics of American society had so
meaningfully engaged in since the early years of the war, “the purely
critical age in American thought,” was, he maintained without question,
“drawing to a confused and dusky close.” But the early years of this
period had been truly memorable, truly revolutionary and transforming,
and worthy of recollection and recording. Ludwig’s brief analysis, ending
529
Page 549 - [see page image]
530
Ludwig Lewisohn
with a note to future historians, is among the first published reflections
on the importance of this transitional half-generation.
With what joy did they who were then young wake up on bracing mornings
of the year 1915 to discover that they could and would rebel against the
massive dull democracy and all its ways, that a new freedom was a banner
and a trumpet-call, that art and hard critical thinking, allied for the first
time upon this continent, would burn new pathways through the jungle of
barbarism. Nor were these hopes and enthusiasms vain. Despite an evil war
and an evil peace, despite mechanization and prohibition and jingoism both
racial and cultural... a body of art and thought so forceful, effective, and
essentially homogeneous [was produced] that historians of more than one
future century will celebrate an age in which the intellectuals and artists of
America sat in severe and impartial judgment upon their country and their
people, in which they effectually touched and wrought upon the thoughts
and ways of life of millions of their countrymen.
“Yet the dusk, though still faint, is surely gathering about these
men and their works,” he went on, sighting “feebleness, amid petty
rancors and the revival of hoary claptrap” as the cause of their movement
off course. It was not his purpose here to “sit in judgment on these
friends and contemporaries,” for he, too, agreed with Mencken, Lewis,
Masters, Hemingway, Callaghan, and others that life had been filled
with the “ridiculous and disgusting.” How could any sensible and honest
observer conclude otherwise?
There was in the America of our youth no affirmation that was not puerile,
no dogma that was not worm-eaten, no popular belief that was not an
absurd delusion. We could not ally ourselves with the yea-sayers about us—
with orgiastic religionists or belligerent saviors of the world for democracy
or driveling new-thoughters or nativistic patriots or anti-saloon leaguers.
The spiritual level of affirmation had fallen so low that every noble word
was soiled and every idealistic monition discredited.
But the others, in their critical posture, had “buried no seed in any soil;
nor . . . built any ramparts to storm.” Instead, they had left behind mere
“twilight and stagnation.” Mankind is a “valuing” creature, in need of
exercising its “ability to create the very concepts and feel the accompany
ing emotion of liberty, of righteousness, of justice, and if need be to suffer
and to die for these.” Ludwig’s peers had torn down one ill-conceived
cultural structure without setting in place the foundation for another that
could affirm and “represent a triumph of the human spirit.” Into this
void had returned what had been so vigorously opposed, the false “lib
erty of our immigration laws, the righteousness of a Baptist patriot, and
the justice handed out by the government department of that name.” 70
Something more was needed from those whose responsibility as
writers and artists dictated more than “contemptuousness . . . [and] this
Page 550 - [see page image]
Shylock’s Redemption
hard implicit denial of values [from which] there will be flight.” One had
only to look to developments in Europe to see where such flight might
carry a society. Already, there were signs in America of a willingness
by too many to place their lives and thoughts in the hands of others
amply prepared to accept their sacrificial offering on the altar of certainty
and escape.
If men are not given reasonable values to live by they will go to camp-
meetings or feed their children to Moloch.. . . They will not long rest
content with gin and saccharine; if they are denied the nourishment of
sound ideas and sound creative works they may turn to delusions more
menacing than those from which the writers of the critical age succeeded in
rescuing them in the past fifteen years . . . unless the articulate spokesmen of
the nation change their tune, all reason and moderation will be drowned in
many parts of Europe, and we shall be left between the devil of Communist
passion and the deep sea of black [fascist] reaction. . . . The petting-party
sustained by bootleg liquor has in all ages been a forerunner of some Great
Awakening and preaching of hell-fire. We must get out of this blind alley,
if we can. One can, at least, warn the moral and spiritual nihilists that they
are playing into the hands of all whom they hate and dread, of all the forces
of darkness and intolerance. 71
For Ludwig, there had never been a question of whether American
society, and the morals that drove it, was without need of criticism and
change. And though he had held Europe in reserve as an escape, at
first as dream and then as refuge, he had seen its underside during his
half-dozen years of residency there. In many respects, it was no better
than the America he had fled. Social, political, and economic unrest, and
the danger of collapse, to be filled by menacing forces, were threatening
wherever he looked. Europe’s once shiny image had tarnished these early
days of economic crisis, acting as a warning to America. Forces perceived
by him some years before in Poland and Germany and elsewhere were
among the seeds planted by European counterparts to those critics and
reactionaries about whom “Blind Alley” concerned itself. He feared
those who were spiritually starved for values of a permanent nature,
for such values had to be grounded in the reality of this world and the
life that could be lived fulfillingly only through concern for the larger
community. “For the meaning of life is to be sought within life, in the
fundamentals as given. All Utopias propose to release these,” he noted,
but were based upon “the false analogy of the machine” whose only
“good use is to make the fundamentals more accessible and give man
more time for them,” rather than aid in the illusory quest of denying
their reality as both the communists and the fascists were doing through
their attempts to change the inner nature of man. Such “fundamentals,”
he warned, dared not be subverted. *
531
Page 551 - [see page image]
532
Ludwig Lewisohn
The application of this principle was nowhere more imperative than
in the developing emergency facing the Jews of Europe and Palestine.
Narrowing his focus from the wider societal problem of denial of values
to “The Jewish World Crisis,” he completed on July 28 his most vigorous
critique of the world’s treatment of the Jews, historically and in the
present, and of the West’s duplicitous response to Zionism. After re
hearsing the course of Jewish history from initial exile under the Romans
to perpetual rejection by host countries, he emphasized that the attempt
to normalize relations between Jew and Gentile, the “Emancipation,”
had failed “to heal the ills of the Jewish people or to solve the Jewish
problem for the world.” Invoking one of the “fundamentals” of which
he had earlier spoken, that of “self-determination,” he asked why it was
that all nationalists were deemed deserving but the Jews. “Anti-Semitism
has survived the emancipation,” he argued; “it has survived Jewish
co-operation in Western civilization; it has survived self-immolation,
patriotism, the sacrifice of battle, the unheard of [assimilatory] sacrifice
of the Jewishness of millions of Jews.” Clearly, as he had seen in the
one-sided response of the British, tilted toward the Arab population
despite the massacre of Jewish students in Hebron the previous year,
anti-Semitism was “as powerful as ever, though under other names and
upon other principles.” Why, then, should the Jews expect “a minimum
of fair play?. . . We created an economic capacity where there was none
and gave away money to landlords and higher wages and hospital
treatment and a brotherly attitude to the poor,” and, by the Arabs’
own testimony before the British commission investigating the distur
bances, had not displaced the resident population. Still, even the “liberal
press, especially in America, while mourning with us over the innocent
dead of Hebron and Safed, turned definitely against the Palestinian
experiment in Jewish colonization and was concerned chiefly over the
Palestinian Arabs’ right to self-determination.” Despite the pledge to
build with their neighbors “a neutral pluralistic state in Palestine. . .
with justice and with generosity... as the bearers of peace and true
civilization, of the values in human society that must and do prevail”—
despite all this effort to carry out the call of the prophets, to which
all traditions present in the West and in Palestine claimed adherence,
every attempt to deny the right of Jewish self-determination was being
energized by the ever-present, age-old effect of anti-Semitism. Given the
current situation and the dangers that appeared imminent in a changing
Europe, if not in America as well, it was the Jews’ duty to demand
an equitable application of this universally recognized “fundamental”
which other peoples had enjoyed or were similarly asserting. “We want
it recognized, in brief, that our self-redemption is an essential part of
Page 552 - [see page image]
533
Shylock’s Redemption
that larger movement by which, from age to age, all mankind seeks to
redeem itself. ”
Ludwig had traveled far since first claiming to be a southern Chris
tian gentleman. He had tried to redeem himself, and in these last years
had seen this redemption as a part of that of his people. “Each life has
a pattern,” he wrote in his journal on August 3, 1930, a pattern that
was “Invisible—like a covered design or picture until late—late.” 74 Five
days earlier, he had suddenly found himself in a meditative mood while
visiting Chartres Cathedral. “All worship,” he noted, was “ancestor
worship. These stones raised thus as [an] expression of the emotions of
those who begot the Frenchman of today.” Even for “the Frenchman
who does not believe,” they were a part of his personal identity, of his
“province,” that sacred center of his being. “Religion [is] valid within
history.” But this history was not Ludwig’s, as that of his adopted
Charleston had not been his a quarter of a century earlier. As the pattern
of his life had slowly and painfully revealed, he was to be the eternal
outsider. A lifetime in either place could not have made him truly a part
of its life, for their stones were not his. 75
Where, then, was he to find the stones of his own sacred center?
The day following his visit to Chartres was spent writing a brief preface
to the second edition of Crump, scheduled to appear in Paris in March
1931. As always, Ludwig drew a parallel between the book’s fate and his
own. Here was a “more . . . autobiographic book . . . symbolizing the
universal and permanent,” born of “beginnings . . . slow and obscure”
like those of a child from some forgotten corner of the world who had
“quietly made its way” until widening recognition had brought it (and
him) the promise of becoming “gradually a definite possession of the
European mind.” It was, he forthrightly admitted, “the best... of all
he has hitherto written,” not only in its technical composition, but in
“the spiritual loneliness of Virtue . . . of the entire fable,” and the values
of his own ancestors that lay behind each carefully chosen word. They,
and not the building blocks of Chartres, nor the pillars of Charleston’s
stately mansions, were the elements of a more lasting identity. “The glow
of a good stone lasts quietly; it has not the rocket’s power of surprising
by its detonation or dazzling by its perishable glitter.” '*
Page 553 - [see page image]
534
23
Dissident Voice
“My stuff is built for permanence,” Ludwig wrote Canfield in early
August 1930, as part of his appeal for Harpers to purchase the copyright
to his works held by the collapsing house of Liveright. Not that they
had remained all that profitable, particularly now. Still, “in such a
world as the present,” he felt the need to assume “the role, God help
me, of prophet and artist rather than that of entertainer.” “I am an
artist of the soul,” he had recently confided to Thelma, “a cbacham
(wise man)” in the tradition of the prophets and the Talmudists, “who
were artists on the side.. . . They were all first interested and concerned
over other things and art was a mere tool and by-product to them.”
His works, essays and fiction, had grown decidedly didactic, for which
the critics were now repeatedly taking him to task. So, too, had the
assumption of this prophetic mantle begun to affect sales and income.
Clearly, with profits elsewhere, he would have elected the flowing and
appealing narrative if the times had not directed him to use his energies
otherwise. But his inner voice could not allow such redirection. “A fine
kettle of fish,” he complained to Canfield, but they were the fish he
had chosen willingly and gladly. He requested only that his income be
protected. 1 Yet, for the moment, Liveright’s house remained erect, if
shaky; Canfield’s hands were tied. 2
In Europe, however, Ludwig’s efforts had been more favorably re
ceived. Without prodding, his works, appearing in a host of languages,
had won a small but dedicated and growing readership. On August 15
he completed the preface to the English translation of Mann’s Death
Page 554 - [see page image]
535
Dissident Voice
in Venice, reciprocating the favor of Mann’s earlier endorsement of
Crump in its German and subsequent French editions. Ludwig’s rep
utation enabled him as well to organize the December 1930 issue of
This Quarter, focusing attention on the latest important writing in
Germany. (The previous issue, at his urging, had drawn similar atten
tion to Soviet authors.) Though Titus failed to mention this contribu
tion, he did note his deep appreciation for Ludwig’s “superb trans
lation” of “Dina,” a chapter from Mann’s work in progress, Joseph
and His Brothers. The suggestion to have him translate the text had
come from Mann himself following Ludwig’s request for the material
in late September. Similar requests had been honored by Stefan George,
Heinrich Mann, Alfred Doblin, Rene Schickele, Hermann Hesse, and
Kurt Klaber. 3
Mann’s response of September 25 coincided with Ludwig’s earliest
note in his journal regarding what, in four years, would be his next
full-length novel, An Altar in the Fields. An “autobiographic” work, it
chronicled American postwar disillusionment, the flight to Paris, and the
search for meaning when this flight, too, failed to answer the questions
of a generation without its sacred center in place. Ludwig was to spend
more time on this novel than on any other, analyzing the disorientation
of the years that had followed the cataclysm of the Great War and the
effect it had had upon his own life and the lives of those he hoped
to address.
Throughout the process, he would look to the work of Freud,
Jung, and Adler, but most importantly, to the ideas of Otto Rank,
whose perceptions had recently put Ludwig back to work on Expression
in America. “The book on American Literature which I am doing,”
he wrote Alfred Knopf on October 6, “will probably show on every
page the influence of Rank’s theories.” The Artist and His Art, for
which Ludwig now offered to write an introduction, should Knopf
accept his strenuous recommendation for its publication, demonstrated
“permanent and fundamental” understanding of the creative process
and the forces that bore upon the creator. “Nothing ... is clearer to me
than that he has reduced to pathetic rubbish all conventional biography
and nine-tenths of descriptive and merely empiric criticism in all the
arts. In brief he has perfected a revolutionary organon of thought.” 4 By
November 10 the first new chapter for Expression was finished, and
within the year the long-awaited study would be completed. At times it
would feel like “making bricks without straw” in his “re-shaping [of]
the history of American culture.” 5 But it was worth the struggle. Titus
would publish a portion of this new material in This Quarter in June
1931as he would a chapter of Rank’s Art and the Artist in December of
Page 555 - [see page image]
536
Ludwig Lewisohn
that year. 7 Rank’s complete study would appear the following October,
and would include the introduction Ludwig had sought to write for it
two years earlier. 8
Hours after writing Knopf on October 6,1930, Ludwig was visited
by a young aspiring journalist, a Jew from Charleston who had come
to meet the prodigal son about whom so many at home had spoken so
often. In the minds of many Charlestonians, Ludwig had remained one
of their own—and as Ludwig would later admit, he, too, felt a certain
unbreakable tie. The previous December, Thomas Tobias had written
Harris from New York while in “what Ludwig Lewisohn likes to call
the ‘autobiographical impulse.’ ” Similarly moved the following autumn,
he would relate the details of his visit in Paris with this “rather short,
stocky man, dressed very quietly in a dark suit, with his hair brushed
straight back over [his] very broad forehead,” whose “face, which,
while disharmonic and distinctly Semitic, [had] struck no horror into
my heart,” as stories of his slovenly habits and “repulsive uglyness” had
led him to anticipate. Instead, he had been warmly greeted (again, despite
tales of ill-mannered behavior) and offered refreshments in exchange for
news of Charleston, and of Harris in particular. Ludwig had spoken of
his desire to visit this “city of ghosts,” from which neither memories
of high school and college “classmates empty above the neck,” nor of
his father’s insanity, could now keep him, once his affairs had been set
aright, perhaps within a year. 9 As William Smyser, another journalist
visiting him during this same period, noted, “When Lewisohn is not in
argument he is a placid, kindly person. Neither his inoffensive glance nor
his comfortable figure label him as a realistic novelist who upon occasion
can sharpen his pen points into controversial lances. His voice is deep,
elaborate, studied. When he speaks of serious things it is never lightly.
He gathers himself together. His back straightens and his right hand
comes up to emphasize the rhythm of his words . . . speaking inevitably
in perfect, rounded, beautifully constructed sentences.” To these, Smyser
added with surprise, he would knowingly “introduce a startling expletive
or an emphatic phrase” to strengthen his ideas."’
Tobias would witness this other side of his genial host as well, as the
conversation turned to Tobias’s own expressed need to find “a center
for a congested, unsatisfied state of mind.” Pacing the room, Ludwig
asked his young guest, “Jew to Jew,” whether he had read The Island
Within, which, he maintained, offered the solution his young guest
had so unrewardingly been seeking elsewhere. Proclaiming metaphysics
invalid for the modern man, Ludwig insisted that “we must seek about,
then, for definite, tangible values to center our lives upon.” Of these,
“the most real” is a sense of identity through belonging to the people and
Page 556 - [see page image]
537
Dissident Voice
cultural heritage of one’s origin—“a consciousness of racial tradition.”
But Tobias objected to such thinking. Was this not the basis upon which
the likes of Mussolini and the Ku Klux Klan had built their programs
of destruction and hate? Quite so, Ludwig responded, but only because
their arrogance and assertiveness, their ultranationalism and intolerance
had grown out of their distortion of this central human value. Such
perversion of the normal had to be eliminated through the “civilizing”
of this “essentially valuable trait.” The case of Hitler’s rising popularity
in Germany was proof not of nationalism as a cause of wars, but as “a
tag, a war-cry used by propagandists.” By Ludwig’s analysis, Germany
was in a “thoroughly neurotic condition” after being forced to sign an
admission of guilt at Versailles containing unreasonable demands for
reparation. Peace in Europe could only be preserved by “re-examining
the responsibility for the War” and by eliminating this debilitating debt.
“The uneasiness in France over the unrest in Germany today which was
conveyed by the recent election results is due to an unconscious piling
of guilt on her part for having exacted such an admission and such a
penalty.” It was Ludwig’s intent to say as much in a forthcoming article,
to be written anonymously, the reason left unrecorded. 1 '
So central was Ludwig’s sense of himself as a part of the Jewish
people that he very proudly displayed his framed Jewish marriage cer
tificates and his collection of Jewish ritual objects, taking great pride in
detailing their artistry for Tobias. Ludwig saw himself as proof of his
theory. So, too, apparently had the young Charlestonian, at least in this
one case. “His whole attitude was that of a man thoroughly at peace with
himself and his world,” though as Tobias further noted, there were other
reasons for such positive feelings. After years of struggle, Ludwig had
appeared able to maintain himself merely on income from his writing.
(Tobias’s own hotel room was costing a mere sixteen dollars for the
month.) The outpouring of fiction and essay, his more than ample living
quarters in a new building one block from the famed carrefour of Mont
parnasse, and his expanding waistline were testimony to the apparent
comfort he enjoyed.And if he was “clearly homesick for America,”
as Tobias wrote in the Charleston Evening Post upon his return in
January 1931, it was evidently an endurable illness. So, too, were the
“Dreadful furniture [and] Dreadful paintings” he complained about in
his notebook, and the apparent problems in his relationship with Thelma
who had selected them, rumor of which had already reached Viereck in
the States.
Ludwig’s ideas for the article on the “Versailles Treaty and Hitler
and Pogroms in Germany” appeared in his notebook entry for October
12, focusing on “Politico-economic, Psychology of Possession . . . [and]
Page 557 - [see page image]
538
Ludwig Lewisohn
Back to the Land,” with an explanation of aggression to be based upon
Freud. But these thoughts were never developed further for publication
in this form, 15 as unexpected news from New York concerning the appeal
of his case made him “quite literally ill,” shattering, if temporarily, the
contentment spoken of by Tobias only eleven days earlier. “If this case is
lost I am irreparably ruined,” he told Canfield on October 18. There was
no time now to wait patiently for Shylock's publication, “from either a
literary or book-selling point of view.” The real court battle was but a
year away, and he would “have to organize a committee in New York
which will engage an able and experienced and ruthless trial lawyer.”
There was ample time to accumulate funds for the struggle ahead, but
only if he worked with increasing speed. Though he informed Canfield
that “work [on Expression] seems futile under the circumstances,” 16 he
sat down soon afterward and set to work, able to write Canfield on
November 2 that “American literature still progresses." 1 ' By Decem
ber, he had completed two additional sections of the study and had
forwarded them to New York. 18
In promoting Shylock that fall, Ludwig was insistent, for reasons
other than economic, that it not be “put forth as a Jewish book,”
but rather as a step in “the direction of my development. . . [and as]
a more or less necessary development of American literature.” The
ethnic consciousness that had given rise to Shylock needed to become a
mainstay of the larger cultural thrust of America in the years ahead. No
longer should the old order of the Anglo-Saxons set the boundaries of
popularly acceptable literature, no more than it should the limits of his
concerns, or those of any other American." The same need to express
Jewish concerns that informed his recent essay “The Jewish Crisis”—
to feel that “in the hour of our crisis, I tried to be there” 20 —could just
as legitimately inform his fiction, and yet find an audience in the wider
American community beginning to undergo profound cultural change.
“It is of no little comfort to me to feel that I am able to do my bit at this
tragic moment," - 1 contributing what he understood as the necessary next
step for a world then moving increasingly in the opposite direction. By
his efforts, he hoped to move humanity away from the “cultural unitary
type of state” and toward the “cultural pluralistic.” “If my individual
experience didn’t raise a general issue, I’d feel that I had no right to
be talking and writing about myself so much; but in the last analysis
my whole life phrases the question of the individual and the state.. . .
Whether in government, the ‘cultural unitary’ state is not inferior to the
‘cultural pluralistic.’ ” The unitary “stamps every citizen with the same
stamp,” and in its “dangerous” American incarnation, “crystallizes”
all into a single type for the “regimentation of the personality [so
Page 558 - [see page image]
539
Dissident Voice
that] everyone comes to resemble his neighbor”—a tendency he was
outspokenly “trying to oppose.”
I hold the ideal of a community where the individual is let alone. Since
the story of man has been recorded he has always been at the mercy of his
fellows. First we had the religious state; everybody had to be of the dominant
religion or he got burned at the stake. Now we have the nationalistic state;
everybody has to be a nationalist or he gets knocked on the head. My ideal,
the state of a thousand years hence, is the “cultural pluralistic” state, where
everybody can do as he pleases, where there are as many ideas as there are
people and where the government limits itself to the collection of taxes.
Ludwig was at home in a variety of cultures and thought of himself as a
“citizen of the world.” It was out of this personal experience of cultural
pluralism that he strove so forcefully to contribute to the culture and
society of his adopted American homeland. 22
Following these public admissions, Ludwig would never again claim
to be solely analytical in his writing, even with his fiction. Rather,
he would acknowledge gathering his experiences and his visions into
a portrait of his world on the brink of radical change. “Shylock is
a self-projection,” he told an old American acquaintance, Lawrence
Drake, late that November of 1930, but “sublimate[d]... to something
bigger, to the Ideal,” which for Ludwig meant the liberalism of cultural
pluralism and the cultural Zionism that had brought him to study
Yiddish, Hebrew, and the Talmud after his return from Palestine. He
had abandoned the modern novel, so well executed in Crump, so that he
could more fully pursue this Zionist cause, as Drake reported from their
conversation. “It is safe to say that, no matter what he might choose
to be, he would be that 100 per cent.” If there was a demonstrable
turning point in Ludwig’s career and popular acceptance, or rather,
the growing loss of his readership (which he mistakenly thought would
grow) because of his premature vision of cultural pluralism, it was at
this juncture, where he chose to demonstrate openly his Jewish concerns.
“The imagination is not a dimensionless and timeless field where the ego
is freed from the force of its own unalterable self. I’m too old to kid
myself about that,” he told Drake. ' ’
But there was, nonetheless, despite his nearing the end of a fifth
decade, something more youthful about him than there had been in
the years before his flight from America. Drake remembered his first
encounter with Ludwig nearly ten years earlier at a Chicago reception in
his honor. “I shall never forget my first impression when Mr. Lewisohn
entered the room. Behind his very impressive pince-nez his dark eyes
looked tormented, strained, haunted even. He appeared impatient and ir
ritable, distracted amid the crowd.. . . There was something foreboding
Page 559 - [see page image]
540
Ludwig Lewisohn
about the amount of spleen that was revealed in his face.” How different
he was these many years later, his “step . . . jaunty.”
His body teemed with nervous energy.... In spirit, at least, he was ten
years younger than when I first met him some ten years ago. . . . He is not
wearing his pince-nez! Not even when he sits down to read me snatches
out of “The History of American Literature,” at which he is at work. That
tormented look has vanished from his eyes. His color is good. There are
no signs of spleen. I realized years later when I met Mr. Lewisohn amid the
literati of Chicago he was passing through the most difficult period of his
life. Today he is a changed man. It is obvious that in Paris he has found the
things which America had denied him—the leisure to work and the right to
a happy and normal domestic life. 24
Drake believed Ludwig’s happier life to be in part the result of his
apparent disregard of all political concerns. After some time together in
his apartment, Ludwig invited Drake for a walk. Brown cap set upon
his head, Ludwig led his guest through the streets of his Montparnasse,
passing a newsstand but deciding not to buy a paper. “Nobody listens
to the likes of us anyway,” Ludwig admitted, and while seated at the
Cafe de la Coupole, nursing a cup of coffee for more than an hour,
“discoursed on the political situation in France, in Germany, in Palestine;
on Hitler and the Versailles Treaty. He psychoanalyzed the peoples and
the governments of Europe,” Drake thought, as if it were all little more
than an intellectual pursuit. 25 But Drake had misread Ludwig’s changed
demeanor. If there was greater contentment, it was not because his
political concerns had ended, witness his annoyance. Ludwig’s inability
to dispense with the topic was a clear sign of that.
Nor had he yet found the “high tranquility and wisdom of soul” 26
he admired in his friend Sisley Huddleston’s rural life far from Paris in
the Normandy village of St. Pierre d’Autils. Huddleston had finally tired
of the salon and cafe (“suddenly too big, too noisy, too complicated, too
confused”) and had retreated into the countryside to live “among simple
folk and birds and beasts and flowers.”- He had just sent Ludwig his
account of this new life, Between the River and the Hills: A Normandy
Pastoral, complete with its dedication to Ludwig, who, “very proud and
very happy,” accepted it “from the heart as the evidence of a friendship
which has been an inspiration and a comfort to me now for several
years.” Neither Tobias nor Drake was aware of how Ludwig himself,
seemingly at home in Montparnasse, now dreamed of leaving. “I, too,
hope to settle on the land some day”—away from the throbbing life
of the city that had drawn people from nearly every corner of the
world. “But my day hasn’t come,” he confided to Huddleston. Nor
would it be to the French countryside. “It would not be mine here.”
Page 560 - [see page image]
541
Dissident Voice
Montparnasse was international, cosmopolitan—a place where Ludwig
could feel at home, in part. But outside the city lay a territory meant only
for visiting. Only the “Berkshire Hills of Connecticut or somewhere near
Jerusalem” could settle his soul. In their stead, he had learned to occupy a
private world, “protected by a power of inner indifference . . . that I have
always had.” It was the reserve, that “Island Within,” to which he had
retreated since his youth in Charleston, that territory whose “threshold
of consciousness” could be crossed only by a handful of people. “The
private operations of my mind can go on undisturbed. My doors are
usually closed, even when the uninitiated think them open.” 28
There was, however, a life in the larger world to which he had to
attend. Thelma’s concert at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, the tenth in a
series with Andre Asselin and Andre Levy, was scheduled for December
14, with selections from Schubert and Richard Strauss. 29 And he needed
to ask Canfield to send copies of Shylock to Thelma’s mother and a few
old friends at home, and to ship a dozen copies to Paris, “charging me
accordingly,” so that he could reciprocate with those who regularly sent
him copies of their work—Mann, Wassermann, Buber, Edmond Fleg,
Asch, and Huddleston. He would also “pickle away” two for himself,
“since my first editions are rising rapidly in value, I am told.” 30
And then there were the problems presented by the newly pirated
edition of Crump appearing in America under the imprint of John
Henderson. All efforts to secure Harpers’ agreement to republish it
had failed, leaving the field open for “Henderson.” Titus, in response,
hurriedly announced in This Quarter that he was reissuing Crump in
March, complete with the “masterly introduction by Thomas Mann.” 31
But a valuable market had been lost at a time when money was growing
tighter. Ludwig would receive nothing from the five-dollar sale price
of the bootlegged edition. Nor could he stop its distribution without
holding an American copyright. Only Mary, with a libel suit, could
accomplish this, and her attorney, by the last week of the year, had
yet to read the text. 32
It was uncertain precisely who this Henderson was, but evidence
was already pointing again to Samuel Roth, whom Ludwig had char
itably characterized eleven years earlier (when Ludwig’s poetry was
under consideration by him for publication) as a “dear, good shiftless
idealist."■' Ludwig’s accuracy had returned to haunt him, though the
broadside announcing its publication (and distributed at New York’s
avant-garde Gotham Book Mart) was complimentary, noting how “the
famous and genial author . . . must have dipped his pen in gall to write
this new book—a stupendous, fearless arraignment of marriage . . . such
as has never been attempted before." M By January 3,1931, Canfield was
Page 561 - [see page image]
542
Ludwig Lewisohn
convinced that Roth was the publisher, up to his old ways of bootlegging
each title he stole under a new imprint, much as he had done with Joyce’s
Ulysses. 35 Curiously enough, Mary’s final response was to threaten not
Roth, but his distributor, though copies inevitably reached the public
nonetheless. 36 Ludwig must have felt some satisfaction in knowing that
his book had finally reached America in a way that guaranteed his
own impunity. Yet, as he told Bradley upon receiving the contract for
the French edition of Escott later that month, “Art’s my affair in my
study; out of it I’m a householder, husband and tax-payer, like any other
man.. . . I’m a stickler for the professional seriousness of our job. It’s a
moral satisfaction to me to have these things properly handled." When
a check sent by Bradley on January 30 arrived two days later, Ludwig
undoubtedly shared this satisfaction with those whose bills he held. 38
Ludwig had been equally appreciative of the thousand-dollar check
from Canfield that had accompanied the first copies of Shylock a week
earlier. They were “beautiful and indeed noble,” and had added to his
“hope that my quite private estimate of certain qualities of the book
was near the truth.” Arthur Szyk, the book’s illustrator, joined him in
thanking Harpers for this “magnificent embodiment” of their work.
But no comment regarding his efforts could be wholly positive, and so
Ludwig complained bitterly to Canfield over the earliest reviews that had
appeared in America. The critics simply could not adjust their vision of
him to encompass his Jewishness—nor tolerate the critical perspective
it had given him on their world. “There is in certain quarters... an
irritated unwillingness to grant that I am what I am—in aim and, at
least sometimes, in execution. Out of this irritation a nastier impulse
toward me than would appear, were these folks not uneasily half-aware
of something in me that would bring tumbling down their comfort
able house of literary cards. " ' Particularly loathsome for Ludwig was
the New York Times review that spoke of the writing as “stilted and
artificial,” while expressing “surprise . . . that he makes of Shylock a
good Zionist."' Ludwig, of course, made no mention to Canfield of
the laudatory review that had appeared in the New York World, calling
Shylock “a fine novel. . . full of Jewish lore, Jewish suffering, Jewish
hurts . . . not dragged by the heels—it belongs.” Clearly Ludwig’s own
experiences had sensitized him otherwise. As Harry Hansen in the World
had recognized, “Lewisohn carries the wounds of the Jews on his own
body as a devout Christian believer might feel the stigmata. And this
colors everything Lewisohn writes.” 11
Defensively, Ludwig cataloged the many positive critical responses
his work was now receiving on the Continent. This “contemporaneous
posterity,” as he believed “foreign criticism” to be, was to be used to
Page 562 - [see page image]
543
Dissident Voice
“hammer at that sort of thing.” Professor Book, secretary of the Swedish
Academy, had devoted a long essay to his work in a recent issue of the
Stockholm newspaper; two others were soon to appear in France, one by
Jean Casson in Candide, the other Edmond Jaloux’s piece for Nouvelles
Litteraires. An important Dutch critic was at work on a chapter-length
discussion for his study of contemporary writers, while an article in La
Gauche characterized him as “one of the greatest American writers—
and possibly one of the greatest writers of the contemporary world.”
From Zurich, Carl Jung had written to tell him that the Psychoan
alytic Club had been reading Escott “for months as the profoundest
artistic treatment—the one most in harmony with the present state of
knowledge—of the human problems involved.” Ludwig wasn’t “merely
peeved” at the New York Times’ “moron” reviewer, but rather saw his
attack as symbolic. “The discrepancy is too painful." 4
The reviews in America continued over the next few months—some
were negative, some mixed, more were positive than not. But of the
comments that Shylock engendered, Stephen Wise’s was surely the most
satisfying for Ludwig. “I think I have never been quite as excited about
anything you have written. It is one of the most moving books I have
ever read,” no small compliment from a man as widely and eclectically
active in affairs within and beyond the Jewish world. “If you had never
written anything else and were never to write another word on Jewish
themes, ‘The Last Days of Shylock’ would be an immortal contribution,
not only to letters but above all, as you would wish it, to the life of
Israel. It is the great Jewish book of many years.” So moved was Wise by
Ludwig’s translation of the prayers spoken by Shylock that he proposed
what “might sound mad to people who would not understand”—that
Ludwig take hold of “the poor, prosy Union Prayer Book . . . [and] give
it life and beauty,” bringing to it that “quality which made me feel in the
wakeful hours of last night what a glorious version you could give us.”
Wise had no illusions, only a hope he knew would remain unfulfilled,
and so he closed his long note to Ludwig by assuring him that Shylock
would “live in Jewish history because you have come upon the noblest in
our life and made it live again in the glowing pages of your interpretation
of the Jew.” 43 This had certainly been Ludwig’s intent, but in part only,
for he had hoped, as well, “to appeal to the Christian world in giving
to it, what is so largely and so pardonably unknown, an insight into the
historic life of the Jewish people." 4 '
Such sharing of insights had long been at the core of his work,
extending beyond his Jewish writings. It was, as always, the motivation
beneath his work on America’s cultural tradition. Hard at work on
Expression, he pledged to complete the remaining chapters “as steadily
Page 563 - [see page image]
544
Ludwig Lewisohn
as is consonant with thoroughness and ripe reflection." 4 ' When on
January 30 he was able to send Canfield the next section, he advised
him of a title change that would better represent the nature of his efforts.
“I will not call the book a History of American Literature, it being no
such conventional kind of thing . . . [but] American Literature: An Essay
in Interpretation.” There remained only the few final, “more difficult
and complicated” chapters whose scope would be to bring together
the sweeping themes that had run through the previous analyses of
individual authors and periods—“The Soil and The Transition, Heralds
of Revolt, The Development of Forms, and The Great Critical Debate. ” 41
Yet the coldness of the new year had come at last, and it seemed
time again to vacate the chilling dampness of Paris for Nice’s promise of
warmth and renewal. Arriving at the Hotel de Luxembourg along the
Promenade des Anglais on February 12, Ludwig temporarily set aside his
promise to work “steadily” on Expression, in favor of a short novel that
had been taking shape in his thoughts for some time. Autobiographical in
cast, he hoped that The Golden Vase would communicate to those who
would not open his more scholarly study these same insights concerning
the relation of life to art, of sensuality to creativity. A month after settling
into his hotel room on the Cote d’Azur, he sent word of these past weeks’
efforts to Canfield, explaining how, though “determined to go through
with the history to the end,” he had been “run down” and in need of
this journey to the south.
Hence we came here and have had almost a solid month of brilliant sun.
But there was another circumstance: I told Tom Wells of a story of novelette
length that was knocking hard at my mind. Hence I determined if I could to
combine the writing of my story with my vacation. I have done so. I have
discovered why the urge to that story was so imperious; it flowed from my
fingers or sub-conscious or God—pay your money and take your choice—
as few things have ever done; it belongs to the best, the very best I have ever
done—as style, as substance, it is purely American. 47
On March 10, twenty-eight days after beginning The Golden Vase,
Ludwig set aside the completed manuscript of a thirty-thousand-word
tale later described by the Boston Transcript’s critic as “a triumph of
interwoven subtleties.”” “Weeks of extraordinary creative ardor” had
brought into being a book—half novel, half philosophical essay—that
was his latest rebellious plea for the freedom of self-expression, both as
an artist and as an individual in his personal affairs. “His consecration
and nobility abashes them,” Ludwig sketched in his notebook, “because
it reproaches them for not being what they could never be but knew they
ought to be—as men. ” 49
Page 564 - [see page image]
545
Dissident Voice
Not that Ludwig worked without end, day in and day out. It was,
after all, to be a vacation. “The sunlight is glorious,” Thelma wrote the
Bradleys during their first week on the Mediterranean, “and the restau
rants equally so—Italian and Jewish food. Ludwig writes in the mornings
and after that we amuse ourselves—as usual.” 1 " Yet even the mornings
were amusing for Ludwig as he wove less subtlety than his admiring
reviewer had detected. For amidst the unmistakable parallels with his
protagonist, the successful novelist and essayist John Ridgevale, were
a host of critical references to rather obvious, celebrated characters—
the “lank dull youth who had guided a flying-machine to no use dis
coverable by the rational mind over wastes merely tremendous”; the
“British essayist homeward bound with a purse swollen by American
fees, whose stock in trade was to confound both reason and liberty—
once pillars of the Republic—by the crackle of mystical paradox”; and
the “Baltimorean wit” whose “amusing attack” had not too greatly
affected his book’s “respectable sale in the course of the years." 11 To
these comments on Charles Lindbergh, Aldous Huxley, and Mencken,
Ludwig added his unmistakable attack upon the New York Times critic
who had questioned whether, in fact, Shylock was a novel, and not a
treatise: “This type of reviewer implied that there was a rigid and forever
frozen archetype of the novel of which he was the guardian; in the name
of that ideal, carefully left undefined, he berated Ridgevale.... To this
reviewer a new kind of cake was no cake at all; the same old sponge-cake
with mauve icing filled him with wonder and delight." -
And there were others, persons active beyond the shallow American
scene of celebratory craze and ill-conceived faddishness and noncon
structive cynicism, others who were no more spared the full thrust of
Ludwig’s sharpened pen, writers whose efforts he viewed as misguided,
those “stony youths” who “wrote well, amazingly well. . . [though]
they all wrote alike: with a studied hardness of surface and a proud
brassiness of soul. . . disillusioned on principle and sophisticated by
profession . . . the beginning of a new period, according to themselves,
not only in literature, but in life.” Perhaps it was the contrasting warmth
of the winter’s southern sun that had brought out Ludwig’s iciest critique
of those cafe-dwellers whom he had repeatedly disparaged in years past,
“not so much for his sake as for their own.” 53
Nor did he spare his old, dear friend Joyce, that “hopelessly neurotic
Irishman who had destroyed art as communication for himself because
he dared utter his ultimate obscenities only through an artificial language
learnedly composed and as impossible of survival except as a curiosity
as the dialect invented for himself by some talented living and dying
on a desert island,” or the “stony youth’s” second idol, Andre Gide,
Page 565 - [see page image]
546
Ludwig Lewisohn
“a Frenchman of genius ... a rake and a dandy . . . whose essential
triviality of soul was hardly outweighed by either his matchless subtlety
in observation or the languorous beauty of his sinuous and unmanly
style.” For they, through the lack of corrective response, had lent “their
names” to those who had insistently “made an idol of modernity and
the machine, forgetting wholly that the sayers of the original and the
great had never in any age fretted over form; but had filled with their
originality the accepted forms and transformed these by the vigor of their
genius.” Maturity of vision was needed, but none had been offered.
And so these youthful writers, “eccentric in manner and obscure in
substance . . . [had] showed no ripening nor flexibility. . . [nor] pro
duction of some work of high and recognizable worth.”'* Theirs had
been a legitimate rebellion, but they had squandered their outrage and
had made
of an ill-digested pessimism an excuse for not serving in their station and
measure the life of mankind.. . . Rightly had this famous post-war gener
ation given its moral repudiation to the evil world that bred the war. But
that repudiation ceased to have any moral power and convincingness if these
protestants did not strive to build up a newer, other, better world—first in
their own souls, next through their productivity of children and of works—
men-children taught to resist military slavery, works from which a new
humanity would learn to build within its bosom peace and righteousness
at last. 55
And so, Ludwig had made this task his own. Beyond the pleasure
of settling old scores and enjoying the opportunity to criticize the dis
approved, he sought once more to demonstrate the importance of love,
sensual and otherwise, in the freeing of humanity to create and to rebuild,
one-to-one and in community. Mary, as the paradigm of its opposite,
was, of course, present in the persona of Ridgevale’s wife, whom “he had
tried at first to love . . . [and] whose human worth he paid the tribute of
a sincere affection, with the imagination of his youth.” But the marriage
had been doomed to failure as “the ache of a profound want in him had
grown sharper and sharper,” a want whose denial had brought him only
“barrenness as an artist.
Years before the transatlantic voyage he had set out upon without
her, Ludwig’s Ridgevale had developed an infatuation for a young actress
appearing in a drama he had written for the Provincetown Players of
Macdougal Street. Ridgevale was then forty years of age, similar to
Ludwig’s at the time of Thelma’s entrance, and drawn to a woman not
unfamiliar to his creator—“Small, blond, eager. She had come forward
toward him with wide eyes in which he saw at once a wonder at the
miracle of art,” though he soon realized that her “artistic perceptions
Page 566 - [see page image]
547
Dissident Voice
[did not] rise high in the scale of values” (as Ludwig must have in reading
Thelma’s recent lifeless translation of Heinrich Mann’s story “Felicitas”
in This Quarter). But in his youth he had been “dark, awkward, shy,
homely, burning with ardors amid which he could not distinguish those
of the flesh from those of art,” forced to watch those other youths,
“those contemporary baseball and football heroes, draw from him the
indescribably desirable blond lithe maidens,” and she seemed a last
chance to attain “that long-renounced blond sweetheart and playmate
of his youth,” though there remained in him still the shyness of earlier
years (as there still would remain in later years “memories of favorite
repeated daydreams and reveries of his childhood in which there seemed
always to have been, whatever and whoever else there was, a girl-child
with blond hair”). But “forty now and very gray about the temples,”
there seemed little other choice but to grasp the moment, however brief
it might prove to be. 57
A dozen years later (ironically foreshadowing events yet to be in
Ludwig’s own life), with memories of this interlude of “days and nights
white with magic,” Ridgevale would experience along the Promenade
des Anglais a more sustaining, though again brief, relationship—“the
gray and wearying and laborious years” dropping away before a new
“vision of the source of beauty in the divine body of woman, generatrix
of both the life of the body and the life of the soul.” 58 Lisl Schonbrunn
(“beautiful brunette,” a Jew?) passed through his life and left a vision of
“the creative Eros in art. . . giver and partaker of ecstasy” who knew
“prophetically . . . how works of art are conceived and slowly gestated
and brought to birth with both supreme anguish and supreme joy”—a
vision that was his alone, it seemed, “considering his origin and tradition,
to both of which he clung, an adept of mysteries wholly hidden from
his fellows, who either treated the senses with a cheap unfairness and
a feigned or real disgust or else in this lesser era with a vengeful stupid
barren carnality."'''
In the end, Ridgevale’s image of Eros’s child “disengaged herself
and . . . sped on,” leaving him with only “the hunger of eternity [to]
suffice him and the alternate anguish and triumph of the creative act
and a trafficking with all that is not made with hands."'’ 1 Ultimately,
however, Ludwig was not Ridgevale, but his creator, able to alter a story’s
ending more easily than his life. And so we are left to wonder if this last
encounter, distinctly different from that of Macdougal Street, was the
beginning of Ludwig’s attempt to work through his disillusionment with
Thelma, particularly as he, along with his protagonist, contemplated
“the long day’s journey to Paris” and the need to find “as he had
always done a strength not only moral but physical in renouncing the
Page 567 - [see page image]
548
Ludwig Lewisohn
unreachable, in squaring his account with fate.” 61 That Ludwig would
again try to accomplish this renunciation in the coming years, that
he would attempt to make the necessary adjustments with no greater
success than in the past, would be his true fate against which no prior
“account,” no matter how sincerely felt, could be squared.
Sylvia Beach had gathered Joyce’s friends for a dinner in his honor
that St. Patrick’s Day, 62 an occasion that must have eased Ludwig’s
return. After completing the novel, he had stayed on in Nice for several
days’ rest before returning to Paris “for, I imagine, a long unbroken
stretch.. . . Money is hard to come by this year,” he commented to Hud
dleston in apologizing for not being able to visit that spring. “We must
concentrate for a while rather than expand."' * Thelma was now contin
uing her work of translating from German to supplement their income,
with short stories by Maria Muhlgrabner and K. H. Waggel appearing
in the March issue of This Quarter as part of a collection of works by
Austrian writers. Ludwig had similarly rendered into English a dramatic
scene by Richard Beer-Hofmann, 64 and, continuing his long-standing
practice of selling Expression piecemeal to journals in time of need,
contributed “The Weakness of Herman Melville” for the June issue. 65
The prospect of Crump’s reissue by Titus added to Ludwig’s cheeri
ness that spring, despite signs that the constancy of his agreeable style of
living was no longer assured. Unlike other publishers, Titus, “good man,
at least lets the authors in on the profits. ” "■ But Titus could publish only a
few titles, leaving Ludwig with the need to approach Saxton concerning
a proposal to have Thelma translate German and Austrian children’s
stories, to the accompaniment of Arthur Szyk’s illustrations. Harpers,
perhaps out of a fear that this project would further delay Expression,
rejected the offer and reminded him of the need for the book’s remaining
chapters, which Ludwig again promised to have in their hands by the
coming fall, “if the gods are good.” 67 Canfield was, of course, pleased to
receive the latest chapters together with Ludwig’s note, though the ap
pearance of Charles Angoff’s study of the same material now concerned
him. Ludwig tried to reassure Canfield that “it’s totally unreadable—
totally unusable except as a reference tome by sophomores.” Worse, “it’s
shockingly conventional... in spite of verbal smartness as in Mencken’s
bad manner,” while the remaining portion of his own study promised
to “get more and more interesting from now on.” 68
Having expended too much time and concern over the project, Lud
wig was more than happy to see its approaching completion. “I’m be
ginning to see the end of the book on American literature—no history!—
which has been on the stocks off and on for six years,” he reported to
Mark Van Doren that April 4, 69 the day after sending Canfield his note of
Page 568 - [see page image]
549
Dissident Voice
reassurance, together with marketing suggestions for The Golden Vase.
He was clearly pleased with this new work, assuring Van Doren that
he, too, would like it. “The atmosphere [in Nice] was too conducive to
writing for idling,” Ludwig told a reporter for the Paris Tribune on April
10, having “returned from the south with a 30,000 word novelette in
his portfolio.” “The sun breeds ideas in me the way it breeds maggots
in a dead horse—or in cheese,” he confided to Thelma upon their return
to Paris. 70
It was Ludwig’s hope that Harpers would serialize The Golden Vase
in their monthly journal before publishing it as a book. He needed the
money. Though he had sent the manuscript to Canfield without any prior
word of his intention to write it, he fully expected such consideration.
Harpers’ decision not to do so elicited one of Ludwig’s angrier responses
on April 14, begun by characterizing this latest work as “qualitatively
hitherto my high water mark: in style, in substance, in the blending of the
two.... I feel like a whore offering my self for sale,” forced, as he felt
he was, into making so strong a case. Could they not see their error, he
wondered, warning that future literary historians would see their refusal
as a sign “by which the purblindness of an age and the mere cussedness
of people is illustrated.” 71
Others appeared more interested in his efforts. The Committee on
Jewish Literature for the Blind had the previous day requested permis
sion to transcribe Shylock into Braille, 72 while two days later, Stephen
Wise, continuing his earlier interest in seeing Ludwig translate the prayer
book into English, urged him to consider doing so with the Zionists’
anthem. “We ought to have a version of Hatikvah that should be both
song and psalm,” Wise noted, adding that no one could do as beautiful
a rendering of the Hebrew as he. 73
Wise’s son James had already made his own proposal to Ludwig—an
anthology of the latter’s writings on Jewish issues, a project which, Can-
field wrote Ludwig on April 20, met with Harpers’ approval, providing
he, too, was in agreement. Material would be drawn mostly from work
previously published by them, though selections from Liveright’s Up
Stream and Israel were to be included. So, too, as an introduction, would
there be a revised chapter from the younger Wise’s book, Jews Are Like
That, 74 in which Ludwig’s growing awareness of himself as a Jew and
of the wider role this Jewishness could play in civilizing humanity were
to be discussed as themes encompassed by the anthologized passages.
Yet Wise’s greater interest was in demonstrating that Ludwig’s “spiri
tual pilgrimage” had “profounder aspects that are prophecy” for those
Jews who, emerging from centuries of persecution, were rejecting the
response of assimilation in favor of a “renaissance of Jewish culture . . .
Page 569 - [see page image]
550
Ludwig Lewisohn
[of] the turning of Jewish writers, artists, musicians to Jewish themes;
[and] the molten enthusiasm of the Jewish return to Palestine . . . [as]
a spiritual even more than [as] a national home . . . evidence of the
rebirth en masse of that which Ludwig Lewisohn’s story but symbolizes
and foretells." '
Canfield was fully aware of Wise’s emphasis and the possible limited
field of its interest, but, as he told Ludwig, “That field is important,
however, and anything we can do to cultivate it is to the good.” He, like
Ludwig, was a market strategist, and recognized how the book “would
keep a fire burning in many quarters where you and we have valuable
allies,” a recognition of the growing economic force of American Jewry
upon the publishing industry. A Jew Speaks was to appear that Septem
ber, timed to coincide with the heightened interest in things Jewish during
the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur season. 76
For reasons of intellectual exposure and economics, there was little
cause for Ludwig to deny consent. Had he edited the volume himself,
Ludwig wrote Saxton on May 21 after reviewing the manuscript, “I
should doubtless have made it differently.” Yet he trusted the younger
Wise’s judgment, Wise “being much more clearly in touch with the
people who are to be reached and helped than I am.” It was to have,
in Ludwig’s conception of the project, a therapeutic role. “The Jewish
people under and since so-called emancipation has become as a whole
neurotic,” the result of “its incapacity for normal self-affirmation—
minimum normal self-esteem,” finding “adaptation to [this new] life
and society excessively difficult.” Having the “good fortune to cure first
myself,” through the writing of these essays and works of fiction, he
hoped “next to bring some measure of healing to others,” given the
nature of “self-disesteem under majority pressure” that would occur
more readily because the text was being brought out by “an aristocratic
Gentile firm.” It was distressing to admit this to himself. “I could
weep within as I make this observation,” but it was sadly enough the
condition under which so much of contemporary Jewish life was being
experienced.
Nor would Harpers’ pedigree hurt the book’s sales within the Amer
ican Jewish community, as Canfield undoubtedly suspected. “Within the
measure of the present lousy business situation,” this unfortunate reality
would at least “put money in the purse of all concerned." There were,
of course, limits to what Ludwig would endorse merely to earn some
money. If quality or integrity were to be sacrificed, he would withdraw.
This much had changed since his early years as a writer. He could not
afford to be unselective. “Upon soberer reflection, I don’t like the idea of
having The Golden Vase hawked about editorial offices,” he had written
Page 570 - [see page image]
Dissident Voice
Canfield on May 3, advising him that he would not popularize the text
to secure its sale. 78
Not that he and Thelma were as yet feeling the extreme pinch of the
Depression, whatever his claims and beliefs to the contrary might be.
“In spite of bad times, and they seem indeed to be very bad,” he was
“taking things all together, going to make a little more this year than
last,” as he related to Mrs. Spear in mid-May. “I’m keeping my income
going by adding item to item,” putting each bit of income from journals
and books and translations, American and European, into a growing
account. “In other words I industriously squeeze the whole lemon,”
and the juice by now amounted to something in excess of twenty-five
thousand dollars, a sizable sum for 1931. Anticipating the next year’s
income, with a projected selling price of five dollars for Expression, he
had begun to plan a possible real estate venture in Burlington, Vermont,
“to do something definite for our future”—the building of an apartment
house similar to Mrs. Spear’s property.
Life for the Lewisohns had, in fact, remained quite agreeable since
Joyce’s party in March. “We must recover a little from a terrific whirl of
social doings. Thelma is better, calmer and happier and, for that reason,
of course, so am I.” They were now looking forward to the coming
winter’s trip south, and invited Mrs. Spear to join them. With Expression
to be completed by fall, “I’ll be much freer next winter than I was, or at
least, far more agreeably employed." v Speed and near-total focus upon
this task of completion would ensure this freedom. Having finished the
first of six remaining chapters on April 27, he moved on quickly, sending
Canfield a second on June 5 and another three weeks later. 80
During the intervening weeks, as he worked to bring Expression
to its conclusion, the reissue of Crump appeared. “Authorized, Una
bridged, Popular Edition,” proclaimed the promotional literature; “This
Great Banned Novel,” announced a broadside circulated throughout
Parisian bookshops.’ 1 Titus, defending his decision to revoke an earlier
pledge never to print more than the original five hundred copies, spoke
on the book’s flyleaf of the recent pirating in America, and assured his
readers that this reprinting was identical to the original, except for the
lone addition of Thomas Mann’s preface. Previously available only in
the German translation, English readers could now consider the accuracy
of Mann’s claim that Crump was “in the very forefront of modern epic
narrative ... at every moment. . . both more and less than a novel; it
is life, it is concrete and undreamed reality ... a work of art. . . that
illustrates the human oneness of the ethical and aesthetic categories by
means of a most moving example."As a reissue, there was little critical
response, though a brief review did appear in the Manchester Guardian
551
Page 571 - [see page image]
552
Ludwig Lewisohn
on May 15. The critic, in agreement with Mann’s assessment, termed
Crump “sincere and powerfully wrought,” adding that “there exists
throughout this novel a strength and integrity that apply to the emotions
of that purgation which tragedy alone can induce."’'
Contracts for Spanish editions of Crump and Escott arrived at
the end of May, with payment received on July 4, 84 seven years to the
day after Ludwig and Thelma had fled the States, leaving behind the
marital problems so graphically and philosophically delineated in these
two volumes. Now, in 1931, he toasted “the glorious fourth” with
Canfield and Wells, who were in Paris on a number of business matters,
including Expression's progress. “Book X” was already under way, he
told them, with two additional sections and the epilogue remaining after
its completion. He assured his editor and publisher that all 580 typed
pages, some 180,000 words, would be in New York by mid-October.
Only “a brief preface, an analytical table of contents and ... a thorough
and accurate index” would need to be added. He wanted the volume to
be used for its encyclopedic range, but yet would include “no notes,
appendices, or bibliographies—none of the paraphernalia of learning.”
Instead, “I want this to be read," he said of his efforts to redirect
American thinking through an analysis of its thoughts. “This book is
in no hitherto accepted sense a history of literature; it is a portrait of
American civilization drawn from the viewpoint of that civilization’s
creative expression of itself.” As such, he requested that a new title be
given the book, unveiling for the first time the idea of using Expression
in America, basing it upon Emerson’s statement that “All men live by
truth and stand in need of expression.”
There was scheduled, as well, an upcoming meeting between Can-
field, Ludwig, and the Zionist writer Marvin Lowenthal, on the notion
of developing a “Jewish Library” at Harpers. Their success with several
of Ludwig’s Jewish books and the realities of a Depression book market
had encouraged Harpers to look in this direction.’ ’ Stephen Wise, during
a visit a week earlier, had discussed this possibility, and, on July 1, had
written to Ludwig suggesting his son James as co-editor, reiterating what
Ludwig had earlier thought about the younger Wise’s greater knowledge
of the Jewish audience in America at that moment. 86
As a consequence of his own Jewish self-education, Ludwig had
grown increasingly concerned over the paucity of good Jewish materials
in English. He knew that others could not be expected to learn Hebrew
and Yiddish as he had, and that without these materials being available in
a language read by the mass of American Jewry, there would be no Jewish
renaissance. This concern was fueled by his recent disillusionment with
the Menorah Journal, long one of the important vehicles for this rebirth.
Page 572 - [see page image]
553
Dissident Voice
Angered over a piece criticizing the work of his good friend Sholem Asch,
Ludwig demanded the removal of his name as contributing editor and
an end to any mention of either his name or his works within its covers.
“Your mouldy Voltairean skepticism and pseudo forty-second street
smartness are of less use to the Jewish people and less service than even
the wretched family journals which announce the celebration of Yenkel
Abramovitch’s Bar Mitzvah.” Only after the journal’s “young critics”
had “done for our people an hundredth of what Sholom Asch has done
or even I, even I,” could they “kick up their hoofs,” Ludwig insisted.
Their comments, in the meantime, “are not criticism but chutzpah
knowing nothing of the needs “of our people . . . they insult and betray
[them] by every word they write. “ k '
Nothing, however, came of these discussions with Harpers. Yet, with
Ludwig’s counsel, James Wise, in spite of Helena Rubinstein’s backing
away from a promise (secured through Titus at Ludwig’s urging) of
twenty-five hundred dollars toward publication, brought out the first
issue of a new Jewish journal that December. 88 Opinion’s distinguished
life, with the ongoing assistance of Ludwig’s editorial advice and con
tributions, was to play an important role in this early stage of Jewish
renewal in America.
If the deepening Depression failed to doom this new venture, it
played an unmistakable role in limiting so much else that might have
been published in these years. Thelma’s efforts to find translation projects
continued to be among these casualties. Ludwig had written Bennett Cerf
concerning the publication of selections, in English, from the “searching
and profound” diaries of German playwright Friedrich Hebbel. As proof
of her ability to accomplish the task, he pointed to her work in This
Quarter, while offering his own hand in the project to ensure the quality,
should there be any doubt remaining in Cerf’s mind. “If you’ll give
her the job and make a contract with her, I’ll privately guarantee you
the quality of the work and do you an introduction without money
and without price." l '' But Cerf could not chance adding to his Modern
Library reprint list the work of a writer unknown in America. “We
cannot publish books just because we like them,” Cerf responded nearly
two years after the October Crash. “Each poor selling volume in the
Modern Library acts as a deterrent to the entire series. Deadwood has
ruined more than one reprint library, and we cannot afford to take
any chances.”''
The times dictated such cautiousness, and Ludwig undoubtedly
could appreciate Cerf’s concerns, for they, in fact, paralleled his own that
summer. The tenth part of Expression had been completed on July 27,
the next, four weeks later. Only the last remained to be written. “Barring
Page 573 - [see page image]
554
Ludwig Lewisohn
incidents,” it would be finished by mid-September. But “before doing so,
I have a hard task, a hard thing to say,” he wrote to Saxton on August
22. With Mary’s suit over Mid-Channel now appearing inevitable, he
wanted assurances of financial protection in the form of a guarantee of
payment for all royalties through November 1933, when a portion of his
total earnings could be attached, according to the percentages he would
then present. “I therefore propose that you guarantee me this security
and provide me with this margin of choice, as a matter of enlightened
self-interest.” There were “imponderable forces ... at work which may
cause an untoward outcome,” and he demanded protection. “I can’t
afford morally or materially to take the slightest margin of risk.” With
out such a guarantee, he promised to “destroy the book on American
literature,” wishing not to give this gift of his efforts to a country in which
“crooks and racketeers are treated tenderly” while he was being made to
pay dearly for “the human error in judgment... I committed at the age
of 23.1 shall not publish this book and then, by fundamental implication,
have America treat me as thieves and murderers are not treated. (I am
already, you know: bootleggers and racketeers have passports.) And—in
addition, be impoverished and degraded. Oh no. That can not be.... If I
give your lovely country its first adequately decent history of its literature
and civilization then by God neither I nor mine shall be penalized for
that beyond decency or endurance." 1
While Ludwig continued to work on the book’s concluding section,
Harpers formulated a new arrangement for payments, having invested
so much in the project over the years. Nor could Ludwig have actually
abandoned the book at this stage. There was simply too much of himself
similarly invested, too much he wanted to say to his fellow citizens back
home, to allow him to abandon six years of effort.
Not that everyone in the States was anxious to hear from him
again. The July issue of the highly respected Bookman had carried
a scathingly anti-Semitic attack upon Ludwig’s character, identifying
him as “the Wandering Jewish Niobe,” this rejecter of Christ who had
gone about incessantly weeping like a woman since those early days of
exile “when they all sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept and
would not be comforted”—though now, “by the waters of the Seine” his
weeping “grows beautifully less as his royalties from his tears . . . grow
beautifully more.” Benjamin de Casseres, the author of this personal
invective, was particularly upset by “his books on Jewry, his confessions
and his exodus from Our County,” though it is uncertain which was
the greater offense. De Casseres skewered his victim in this “Portrait
en Brochette,” finding “the Great Ostracized” guilty of “in-bitten racial
wounds,” of an imaginary and highly profitable tale of woe (“he thrives
Page 574 - [see page image]
555
Dissident Voice
and weeps, fattens and gnashes his teeth, the shekels piling up”), of
falsely crying persecution in a country from which he had now fled “to
the land where all Germans are free—France! . . . There was a universal
conspiracy to starve this Maccabee into submitting to something or
other. They stole his taleth. They filched his Purim cake. They put yeast
in his matzotbs. They planted a ham in his icebox. The nasty, naughty
Gentiles!. . . Ah, mes enfants, it may yet happen that this our Hamlet of
Jewry will blossom out as the first Falstaff of Israel, for hath not a Jew
a gullet? Will not his goodly stomach laugh when lined with royalty-fed
capon? Selah!" ' 2
What might de Casseres have thought had he known of Expression’s
completion on September 12, or of Ludwig’s dating the occasion in
his journal entry as “Rosh Ha-shanah! 5692! ”? 93 What must he have
thought a year later when reading Ludwig’s “Preface” and “Introduc
tion,” completed after Ludwig had read his accuser’s indictment in the
fall of 1931? For in this “portrait of the American spirit seen and
delineated,to which had been applied the insights of Freud and Rank
by an author once again accused of betraying and abandoning it, was
the very rejoinder that was to continue to disturb so many others after
de Casseres.
Ferocities of punishment were, of course, in direct proportion to the smoth
ered rebellion of the natural passions of humanity.... A society will bear
down most heavily upon those actions toward which its members are most
vividly drawn, but which some ghostly superstition causes them to fear.
A way out is sought—a way out of this unbearable contradiction. An
enemy is invented, an evil one, one upon whom both guilt and punishment
can be rolled, who is both instigator and sacrifice, who both explains the
moral torment in which men find themselves and expiates it for them. This
method of finding for an irresolvable moral conflict an outer instigator
and sacrifice is as old as the world. Under this pretext Jews have been
burned and heretics massacred from age to age. . . . From the witch-hunts
in seventeenth-century Massachusetts to recent whippings and shootings
of the Ku-Klux Klan, these outbursts have been characterized by a hectic
torment, a sexual symbolism and ambivalence that stamp them with the
unmistakable stamp of the Puritan conflict. 95
At the very moment that Perry Miller was beginning his work of reha
bilitation for the sorely tarnished reputation of the Puritans, work that
would become the basis for a new vision of America’s moral foundation
among a generation of scholars reacting against the progressive voices of
a post-Victorian and postwar society, Ludwig was presenting the most
imaginative exploration of the underside of this tradition undergoing
this repolishing of its image, hoping finally to break its hold upon
the people. 96
Page 575 - [see page image]
556
Ludwig Lewisohn
It is because the fortunes of men and women in America today are still at the
mercy of laws, customs and opinions that grew out of the Manicheanism
of the Puritans; it is because the youngest writers of the twentieth century
are still, through infection or resistance, warped by its fears and hates, that
this account of expression became imperative.. . . Any attempt to speak
out was felt during the greater part of the American past to be a danger
and a betrayal. Nowhere else has the integration of literature with life
been so suspected and feared. The only artist tolerated was the artificer
who observed the rules of the social and moral game, glorified fighting and
stealing and represented life as emptied of both reflection and desire.. . .
Men wrote not what they thought or believed or experienced but what,
according to Puritan business morality a good and respectable man ought to
experience and to believe. All books so written can help us no more; they are
the monstrous documents of an age that is passing and that is not likely ever
to be reborn.. . . The story of our literature is the story of successive moral
revolutions ... far from won. Great masses of the American people have
felt and still feel the integration of experience and expression to be a godless
and un-American attempt to destroy their cherished tradition . . . and have
in a hundred ways tried to tighten defensively the fighting solidarity of that
degenerate Puritan view of life which has gathered power and pride from
its successes in the material world. No, the revolutions are not yet won. But
the story of them is the best record of our past and the happiest omen of
our future.
Page 576 - [see page image]
557
24
Private Furies,
Public Washing
“Opportunities for writing as I used to are very difficult to find or
make,” Leonard wrote Ludwig on September 20,1931, sharing news of
Depression America with his old friend. 1 Ludwig, too, was concerned,
but for the moment, he shared only the anxiety and not its material
effects. He had even received a serious inquiry late that August for the
cinematic rights to filming Crump in Germany, 2 while Titus had already
added to his income that summer by selecting the section in Expression
in America on Whitman for September’s This Quarter: 3 And, of course,
there was great anticipation on the part of all involved with the book
that sales, despite the continuing economic downturn, would be brisk
and long term. While they waited for its early spring 1932 publication,
Ludwig looked forward to the sales reports for The Golden Vase and to
the reviews that would soon begin to appear.
Still, he dared not rest while there were new possibilities to pursue.
He presented Bradley with another translation project for Thelma, Kurt
Klaeber’s novel Steerage, “the best piece of ‘proletarian’ literature that
has yet come to my notice,” an assessment concurred with by Thomas
Mann, “whose words would be available.” This, Ludwig added, was
quite an unusual statement for either to make, neither “being other than
bourgeois of the dreariest kind.” It was, however, the “sheer literary
power, freshness, originality” that convinced them of the book’s wor
thiness of further exposure, particularly in an America where Michael
Gold’s Jews without Money, a lesser work in Ludwig’s judgment, had
won so wide a readership. Completing this package, as with the offer
Page 577 - [see page image]
558
Ludwig Lewisohn
he had earlier tendered to Cerf, was his promise to “keep a benevolent
eye on the translation.” Bradley approached the American publisher
Brentano, 4 while Ludwig, wanting to take timely advantage of Steerage's
recent appearance in Germany, approached its publisher in Berlin, the
Internationaler Arbeiter Verlag. 5 They immediately provided him with
a three months’ option. “The book is altogether remarkable and fits in
with much in the present American mood,” he excitedly wrote Bradley
upon receiving word from Germany, hoping to encourage his agent to
undertake a more active search in the States.
Nor was this the end of Ludwig’s own search for further work there,
though once he began to “look into the German situation,” he quickly
found little to offer encouragement. “It’s desperate—quite,” he wrote
Bradley on October 21, as much of what he found reflected Germany’s
worsening economic situation and its political fragmentation, with a
paucity of works beyond the needs of ideologues. A few novels by Franz
Werfel and Max Brod were worth pursuing, he believed, as were a
handful of “topical books,” among them Georg Solomon’s memoir of a
former Soviet commissar, Unter den roten Machtarben, about which he
had “a distinct feeling” that it “might be really important.” 6
None of these proposals would lead to a contract, though in the
future Ludwig would translate the work of both Brod and Werfel. He
did, however, see Scheilocks Letzte Tage brought out by a publisher in
Leipzig that year, thereby extending his fight against the persecution of
Jews to the very people who were soon to promote its most virulent
outburst. It was a measure of the time’s coming madness that in the
land which had once given birth to the assimilationist dream by which
Ludwig had lived for so long, there were those who would seek to hear
his counter-message of Jewish assertiveness only moments before others
would so forcefully move to silence both.
Ludwig’s awareness of this gathering crisis in his homeland may
account for the energetic response he gave Bradley when in late October
he was sent an outline for another’s book on Jewish thought. The
range, depth, and inclusiveness of Ludwig’s suggested additions serve as
testimony to his commitment to the threatened life and cultural heritage
of his people. Whether speaking of Serouya’s omissions of significant
thinkers, ancient or contemporary, or correcting the “comparative ne
glect of inner-Jewish movements,” or no less cautioning against the
tendency toward a nationalist fallacy in wrongly emphasizing minor
French writers, Ludwig sought to lend whatever assistance he could
to the proposed project. This “badly needed” book, he felt, had to
be as effective as possible. Perhaps immodestly, he offered to write an
introduction for its American edition, believing its international appeal,
Page 578 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
if properly focused, would extend there, as he was certain it would to
Germany, even at this late hour. He hoped, as well, to give this long
tradition the survivalist context of cultural Zionism, seeing his own voice
as part of “the all-important tendency that leads from Moses Hess and
Leon Pinsker over Herzl to Ahad Ha’am and Nathan Birbaum and so
down, if you like, to such minor but effective people as Hugo Bergmann,
Hans Kohn and even my humble self,” 7 a context which he hoped might
show others how to weather the gathering storm.
Ludwig had, in fact, contemplated writing his own survival manual
as early as October 9, 1930, when he outlined in his notebook “Not
a history but an interpretation of history!”—to be titled The Jews: A
Handbook. Beginning with a chapter on origins, he planned to dis
cuss the Jews’ role in the creation of their longest-standing antago
nists (“They Produce Christianity”), the problems of “Emancipation &
Assimilation,” the relationship between “Zionism & Psychoanalysis”
(presumably their curative powers), the “Character” of the people, and
their “Productivity.” The overall “Plan” consisted of the “building up
of a psychological picture from documents of various ages,” making
use of traditional religious texts as well as the work of secular Yid-
dishists, of the writings of the converted Heine and Disraeli, as well
as those of the Jewishly committed Zangwill and Buber—and a long
list of unlikely candidates for inclusion, among them Karl Marx, Fer
dinand Lassalle, Leon Trotsky, and Herbert Marcuse. To these were
to be added examples of legend and folklore, family documents, me
dieval chronicles, biographical sketches, case histories out of the work
of the Freudians, and Hasidic tales—whatever would reflect clearly
upon the question he felt was central to all inquiries regarding the
Jews’ future: “What is it in the psychical structure of Israel that dic
tates this fate and formula forever recurrent? What in us has cooked
our fate?” 8
Ludwig would never write his Handbook, as other needs would
press in upon him and the Jewish communities of Europe. But he would
continue to think through this question of the Jews’ self-imposed “fate,”
of how their character had played so great a role in determining their
history. In April 1931 he recorded some ideas for an essay or a book on
“The Psychological Foundations of the Jewish Religion,” in which he
proposed to discuss “the decay of religion, assimilationist doctrine and
mechanistic philosophy, the dis-integration of the individual through:
Self-affirmation. ” The “conflict between self and society [was] hard
in normal circumstances,” and clearly these were not normal times in
which to attempt the creation of one’s “social self.” There was, he was
convinced, a “Parallelism of Zionism and [the] new Psychology” which,
559
Page 579 - [see page image]
560
Ludwig Lewisohn
once recognized, could aid in the revival of the Jewish spirit within the
individual and the community. 9
In the coming months, he attempted to develop a “psychological
concept of history” that could foster this rebirth in the face of repeated
attacks from all quarters, a response whose possibility had been demon
strated by a past now being recalled. In fact, it was this very reaction of
persecution by those opposed to the uniqueness of Jewish culture that
had solidified the people, its ideas and values, and its way of passing
through the world. “The group having become what it has become
by virtue of forces ill-understood (what it is) creates its myth and its
history from within, and its history by the unique impact of its being
upon other groups. When this impact produces the same result whatever
the other group irrespective of century and character—then you have
Israel.” There was, as he saw on February 2, 1931, a repeating pat
tern of “Exile—Fertilization—Extension—Return” that stretched from
“Egypt/Babylon . . . Spain . . . Germany...” and beyond in his vision
as a Zionist contemplating the growing crisis.’"
As early as October 13, 1930, Ludwig had written that “if the
Treaty of Versailles is not reversed, there will be pogroms in Germany,”
calling the “stupidity of revenge” that had brought about such harsh
terms “criminal,” and the “oppression [and] poverty” they were causing
merely the seeds of “Fascism and Communism. . . results of despair
caused by war.” 11 Others had appraised the situation with greater opti
mism. Fairly representative of these voices was that of Cicely Hamilton,
who, in her 1931 analysis of Modern Germanics as Seen by an En
glishwoman, acknowledged that “Anti-Semitism, in Central Europe, is
a force both widespread and dangerous,” but asserted that the grow
ing Nazi Party’s promise of discriminatory and disabling legislation
would be modified once it came to power, as she was rather certain
it would. “On the face of it much of this programme is impracticable,
and if and when Hitler comes into power, he will certainly recognize
the awkward fact and begin to effect alterations.” Nevertheless, it was
understandable why such ideas, though troublesome and misguided,
had arisen and gained so wide a following. Had not the Jews achieved
relative prosperity in the face of German economic decline? If anti-
Semitism was wrong, so, too, were the Jews’ actions in Germany that
had given rise to this latest occurrence of an age-old response. “Like
most dangerous quarrels, this Anti-Semite business is a clash of two
rights and its causes are not wholly economic. The Nazi declaration
of war on the ‘materialistic Jewish spirit’ should not be taken as mere
eyewash; it is, on the contrary, a striving after virtue” as opposed to
the quest for the “golden calf,” and in accordance with “the German
Page 580 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
reverence for learning,” the tradition of honor as defined by the Prussian
military, and the professional class’s “way of life that was held in higher
regard than the road to commercial success.” Little should the observer
wonder, Hamilton assured her readers, at “the Nazi crusade against the
big department stores, the octopus-businesses which are spreading their
tentacles from one end of the Reich to the other,” or at its growing
acceptance among the masses of nonmembers. “It might be too much to
expect those who have failed where [the Jew] has succeeded to look on
his achievements dispassionately. They see only that he prospers while
they walk in poverty, that money that vanished in the epoch of inflation
has somehow reappeared in his pockets." -
Ludwig was far more perceptive of political and social conditions in
Europe, and on November 29, 1931, had characterized the Continent,
in its several major parts, as “narcissist” (France), “pseudo-narcissist”
(Poland), “megalomaniac” (Italy), or “repressive from inferiority and
suffering” (Germany)—elements of a negative character he identified
with most of the key players in the coming conflagration. This new
Europe—this new world, in fact, for he saw its shadow cast over conti
nents south and east—suffered still from the “same moral and spiritual
problems” that had always plagued it. Scientific advancement and the
growth of a freer individual life had failed to create a “broadening of
vision.” If knowledge had increased, wisdom had emerged unchanged.
“Typewriter! Goose-quill. No moral difference.” Most alarming was the
vision he outlined for a book, titled Apocalypse, in which the “uncritical
acceptance of official ideology” would lead to both “the growth of
Zionism” and the coming “of the Second War” whose devastation of
the Jews would result in “the Jews [being] ingathered” following an
extensive “search” for them during its “Aftermath."' :
These were deeply disturbing and emotionally draining perceptions
against which Ludwig fought to find a personal antidote. Even before
he committed to paper his vision of a German pogrom, he had added
a single line of hopefulness to his notebook for what was to become
the dominant theme in the second of his “Five Legends” (of which
“The Romantic” was the first to be completed), novellas that would
appear in 1933 under the collective title This People. To this new tale of
struggle between assimilation and Jewish self-assertion, he would add
his understanding of the essential vision of Judaism, “the deep human
meaning that life is not to be despaired of,” that “Jewish concept of the
‘‘sanctification'’ of the natural.” In the “gloom of [the] crash and financial
losses and [a] moral winter” there would be the “Sabbath,” he noted
two months later at the end of the outline he had drawn for this tale,
tentatively titled “Legend of the 36 Zaddikim” (those unwitting pillars
561
Page 581 - [see page image]
562
Ludwig Lewisohn
of the community who by their righteousness sustain the world even in
its darkest moments) and later changed to “The Saint.""
With so many other projects to complete during much of 1931,
“The Saint” progressed only in Ludwig’s thoughts. With the completion
of Expression, he and Thelma concluded several minor pieces of business
and left earlier than usual for Nice. “After finishing the huge tome,” he
wrote Huebsch on December 1, “we came down here for a few weeks of
well-earned rest in the sunshine.” : Settling into his favorite spot along
the Promenade des Anglais, he had resumed his usual schedule of restful
activity and within an eight-day period finished the entire novella, 16 using
for its opening the one line he had written eight and a half months earlier,
a line that would date the story’s setting to an earlier time in Ludwig’s
own life when stinging rejection had, upon reflection these many years
later, brought about a rebirth of his consciousness as a Jew: “About
thirty-two years ago there was born . .
Serialized in Opinion over a seven-week period beginning February
8, 1932, “The Saint” told the tale of a New York Jewish family whose
wealth had left it “smothered in luxury and corrupted by indulgence . . .
there being no obstacles.” Here were lives that were “empty, weary,
clamorous, without either gaiety or gentleness,” and made more so
by assimilationist wishes that had replaced the “counter-acting forces
of either group companionships or religious bindings” with “a moral
discomfort.” There was little doubt that Ludwig here offered yet another
impressionistic portrait of his own parents’ aspirations in America, of
the emptiness they had found even without the aid of great wealth, and of
his own journey, analyzed anew as his understanding of it had deepened.
Of the father he wrote,
Nathan [Jacques] nodded as sympathetically as possible, more so than he
felt; he wanted to head off the thrice told tale of the strictness of his wife’s
orthodox parents and of her unhappy early years. All that sort of thing
was happily over with. The nineteenth century, greatest of centuries, had
not, thank God, passed in vain. The twentieth was at the door. Supersti
tion, intolerance, old frictions and hatreds between group and group—all
these hoary evils belonged to history. Humanity was above all nations and
religions. Especially in America had that ideal been realized. He felt an
inner glow as he always did when he gave himself over to these happy
reflections. He took a copy of “Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy” to bed with
him and felt both safe and authoritative in contact with those grave and
definitive pages.
But his wife “suffered ... a series of isolations,” having “quenched the
memory of that Yiddish word uttered many years ago by her father” and
watched as “the friends of her youth . . . drifted away” in her attempt to
Page 582 - [see page image]
563
Private Furies, Public Washing
satisfy the wants of her husband. Alone, she had occupied herself with
literature and music, and when “she had borne a son, an immemorial
pride and satisfaction [had] swelled her breast.” For her, it was both
remembrance and opportunity, a chance to recapture a part of the life
she had all too unhappily sacrificed for one that had proven to be without
meaning. “In the dark of the night Emma Birnbaum [Minna] stripped
off the thousand swathings and pretenses of the many years; for one
moment she stripped them off and let her eyes fill with happy tears. She
had borne a son, a Kaddish . . ."**
Though their son, Leon, was less diligent a student than Ludwig,
yet more willing in his early years to confront bigotry than merely to
accommodate himself as best he could, the parallel between them was
nonetheless evident. Leonine in appearance, the forehead “high and
vaulted, the chin both firm and gently curved, his luminous eyes seemed
from the beginning to look out upon the world with both assurance
and goodness.” A weak mathematics and science student, unable to
“conquer his unexpungable disgust for the lessons and the books,"
he showed a marked ability with literature, “strong and aesthetic per
ceptions,” and “a remarkable insight into the substance of literature”
which “amazed his teachers,” though he was characteristically inclined
to “sharply and even impertinently negate all the heroic and patriotic
elements in poetry and prose”—an inclination not unrelated to instances
of “race and religious prejudice” he was made to experience in his
purportedly progressive Ethical Culture Society school, 20 drawn out of
Ludwig’s attempt to expose the hypocrisy of this progressiveness, and
later that of the communists whom Leon meets as they work to attract
this younger generation of Jewish assimilationists.
Leon ultimately comes to “be with the people whom he loved—the
unashamed Jews of the East Side,” searching among them for a way by
which he could be “at one with the Eternal and His universe,” 21 finding
in the Jewish tradition an “ancestral shape for the better moulding of his
personal aspirations.” Only then did his life take the shape and direction
he had sought, a life where
all merriment and all discussion were bound together or, as it were, radiated
from a center, and that center, which was felt and taken for granted and
never mentioned, but was the very soul and being of life and friendship
and subject-matter of speech here, was the fact that these people were Jews
and naught else and did not dream of being anything else and though Kant
was mentioned oftener than the Rambam and the Bolshevik revolution
oftener than the uprising of the Maccabees, it was all done within a
frame-work of common hopes and fears, within the bosom of an eternal
community. ^ ’
Page 583 - [see page image]
564
Ludwig Lewisohn
In time, many came to sense that Leon had found the “inner secret”
of piety, and sought his counsel, or, in growing numbers, came to hear
him speak, though he was “supported by no office or pretension or by
power or money.” Even those whose grandparents had arrived at an
earlier time, and who now were neighbors to his father, sought him
out. “To be worthy of our people by giving ourselves to it... to save
ourselves by losing ourselves for Israel,” he preached, “we must live
with Jews and for them; we must not be divided from them by anything,”
neither they nor their children. 23 Following his own teachings, he worked
tirelessly to raise funds for the indigent in the bleakest time, until he
suddenly died of pneumonia, only to be likened at his funeral to the
thirty-six zaddikim, those “wholly righteous men” because of whom
“God saves this wicked world.
Did Ludwig see himself in the role of a zaddik? It is difficult to know
with certainty, though it is clear that he saw his task as that of a guide to
the assimilated who wished to return to their Jewish selves. As with all
artists, his palette was filled with the pigments of his own experiences and
perceptions and hopes, though curiously enough, even his oldest friend
could not see the depth of Ludwig’s sincerity and concern. In a letter
dated only weeks before Ludwig wrote “The Saint,” Adolph Gillis, then
beginning work on a short book-length study of Ludwig’s life and work,
wrote Harris that Leonard felt “Lewisohn’s emphasis on his racial ori
gin . . . overstressed,” and that “Lewisohn’s being a Jew, as a factor in his
career, was not quite as important as, to quote Professor Leonard again,
his ‘being Ludwig Lewisohn’ was. ” 25 But Leonard had misread his friend,
thinking of him more as he had been in their years together than as he had
become since they had last seen each other before the war. “It makes me
gladder than you can know,” Stephen Wise wrote on December 3,1931,
in response to Ludwig’s letter from Nice, written after completing “The
Saint,” “that you now feel able to devote yourself indefinitely to Jewish
thoughts and subjects, now that the great Opus is out of the way.” 26
Ludwig and Thelma had stayed for over a month in Nice that year.
In the weeks that followed completion of “The Saint,” he received word
of the continuing negotiations with Mary in the matter of her libel suit.
“Let us hope for the best... as a matter of principle as much as from
the point of view of practical good,” though as he pointed out for
Canfield, “It seems inconceivable.” 27 Mitigating this ongoing concern
was the publication in This Quarter of his work on Henry James from
Expressionand Canfield’s letter of praise for the work he had waited
to receive for so many years. “I’m really touched by the fact that you and
Saxton see the book as it actually came to work itself out.” There was,
of course, the index to compose, but Ludwig knew nothing about such
Page 584 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
work, and hoped that the “analytical table of contents, giving captions
for each section of each Book,” would suffice to “give your index-maker
the ideological cues” he would need to do it properly.
So, too, was Ludwig pleased to learn that Harpers planned to
continue throughout the Christmas season to promote The Golden
Vase, now in its fifth printing. 29 Carl Van Doren, who had last seen his
friend and colleague from the Nation three summers earlier, would write
Ludwig on December 9, the day before Ludwig’s own letter of thanks to
Canfield, that he had found the novel “lovely and touching.” “I wish I
could talk to you about all sorts of thoughts and moods it started up in
me, or at least stirred to new activity. The Atlantic is such a nuisance.”
Van Doren had recently found himself involved in Ludwig’s le
gal problems, having years earlier seen a copy of Mary’s rejoinder to
his novel, the unpublished Don Juan’s Wife. Charles Recht, Ludwig’s
faithful attorney, was scheduled to see Van Doren for details about the
manuscript’s contents, 30 having just returned to New York from a visit
with Ludwig in Nice. Ludwig had long been fond of Recht and hoped
not to offend him with his next novella, “The Bolshevik,” Recht being a
“Communist friend,” 1 and Ludwig’s story being, as he characterized it,
“hard, cold, bitter.. . . He’ll hate it so and he deserves better of me.” 32
During his stay along the Riviera, Ludwig had written Canfield that
“Life, in this exile, is charming”; but with “hands too empty” after
Expression, he had once again found Paris in winter “steel-gray and
damned,” and the perfect setting in which to continue the third of the
five Jewish legends. Though this atmosphere undoubtedly contributed
to the tenor of the tale, it played a smaller role than Ludwig’s long
standing opposition to communism as a poor substitute for the Judaism
abandoned by young Jews in their belief that this new order would
create an international brotherhood that would one day eliminate the
disabilities they had suffered as members of “a hated and despised
minority.” Ludwig, voicing his opposition through Leon in “The Saint,”
had already foreseen that the violent and anti-Semitic nature of the
Soviet leadership and rank-and-file would ultimately turn them against
those Jews who had joined them in common cause.' In the weeks that
followed, he would continue to work on the story and risk injuring
Recht’s sensibilities in pursuit of the truth as he perceived it.
It was this same concern for Jewish survival and renewal that marked
Ludwig’s decision to allow the serialization of “The Romantic” in the
first issue of Opinion, on December 7, 1931. James Wise’s “Forenote”
spoke of the “symbolic coincidence” of the journal’s birth during the
Hanukkah season, for it, too, was a part of the “Maccabean heritage,”
a “servant of that light” kindled centuries earlier. The need for the Jewish
565
Page 585 - [see page image]
566
Ludwig Lewisohn
people to take its fate into “its own hands . . . [as] the affirmation of a
people’s will to endure” was never greater, with threats massing from
outside as well as from “assimilationist theories of self-annihilation” 34 —
words Ludwig could have written himself, and, indeed may have had a
hand in composing. “I have the paper very much at heart,” Ludwig
wrote Canfield in appealing for Harpers’ advertisement revenue, “it
came originally from my head.” 35 Feeling an almost proprietary interest
in the journal’s success, Ludwig would soon press Canfield even harder,
requesting that all of Harpers’ business with the Menorah Journal, New
Palestine, and Jewish Standard be shifted to Opinion “for the present. . .
to help our paper." “
Stephen Wise was concerned, as well, for the fate of Opinion, but
more so for the well-being of his child. It was to have been James’s “organ
or medium of expression,” but Stephen felt that his son was too reticent
to use it as such, and called upon Ludwig to encourage the young editor
to amplify his brief editorials. 37 The older Wise would, of course, find
his place within the new weekly, providing a column in each issue until
1936, when he assumed the editorship following his son’s departure.
“These are awful times,” Stephen Wise would add to his year-end
note of appeal to Ludwig on his son’s behalf. Only “the gleam of hope
in Palestine” could offer a bit of relief to a time that he felt certain
would “be included in the annals of Jewish misery. We are all very much
disturbed about the Hitler situation. There are definite beginnings of a
Hitler movement in America, and I am trying to move Warburg and
Adler and others to take definite steps, both here and abroad, before the
thing is upon us. What I most fear is that Hitler will come into power,
find himself unable to fulfill any of his grandiose promises, and therefore
will be compelled to turn the mob loose on the Jews.” 39 It was, however,
in direct fulfillment of just such a promise that the Jews were to feel
the full weight of Hitler’s coming to power. Of this consequence there
was little doubt in Ludwig’s mind, for years earlier he had read Mein
Kampf, as few others appeared to have done. Even among those few
who had read of Hitler’s program, he appeared nearly alone in taking
his promise of destruction seriously. As Ludwig witnessed the spread of
a new wave of anti-Semitism in Germany and its neighboring states, we
can only speculate as to his thoughts as he now more earnestly considered
returning to a United States, where, according to his old Zionist friend,
Hitler’s growing shadow had already begun to cast its darkness.
“You have produced a great book,” Canfield wrote Ludwig concern
ing Expression in his opening letter of the new year, 1932, “and if we’re
any good we’ll get a wide public for it, depression or no depression.” 40
This, however, would have to be accomplished without the aid of the
Page 586 - [see page image]
567
Private Furies, Public Washing
nation’s two leading book clubs, both having decided against offering
Expression to their membership. Ludwig found this “morally discour
aging,” particularly since Henry Canby served on the editorial board
of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Carl Van Doren similarly at the
Literary Guild. “If men of that caliber are inwardly reluctant,” friends
of many years who had felt so positively in the past about his work, then
“how much more people on a lower plane?” 41 The various reasons given
by the clubs for its rejection, including the Guild’s claim that it was “too
literary,” 42 were judged by Ludwig to be “quite specious.” Books that
“made equally severe demands upon the taste and intelligence” of their
readers were regularly a part of their lists. “The gentlemen in question
have persuaded themselves that these defenses are good defenses,” but
Ludwig remained utterly unconvinced. Rather, as he maintained to Can-
field early in February, his work, apparently without distinguishing one
book’s subject from the next, had been deemed “too narrow in interest,”
a seemingly polite way of dismissing his work as too Jewish and polit
ically out of focus. Hadn’t Sholem Asch’s work, illustrating traditional
Jewish life and anti-Bolshevik, been similarly rejected in favor of Call
It Sleep, Henry Roth’s negatively Jewish proletarian novel? Wouldn’t
his assessment prove accurate, Ludwig wagered Canfield, when both
clubs rejected his anticipated companion to Expression, an anthology
of American literature just then taking shape in Ludwig’s thoughts as “a
working out and recovering and re-appreciating of the spiritual wealth
of America. We’ll offer that. We shall see.” 43
It was clear to Ludwig that this was, indeed, a historic moment of
great change and importance. He saw the worst possibilities he could
imagine as the likely direction his world would take, and included in his
vision an extension of the prejudice in Europe onto an American plane
however less ferocious its manifestation. He advised Canfield to “Keep
this letter; it will be a document in our history and the history of the arts
some day.” So long as he had written without a Jewish voice, his work
had been read, and by increasing numbers. But he felt a chilling wind
of rejection here and there now that he had spoken out with greater
volume and frequency about the injustices being experienced by Jews
at the hands of Christians in Europe and elsewhere. Rather than debate
his observations, his detractors attacked him through his work, either
as a novelist who couldn’t be an essayist, or as an essayist incapable of
writing fiction. As a Jew, it would have been safer to write uncritically of
his adopted country, as others had successfully done. But it was beyond
his control, fated as he was, apparently, to suffer “the penalties of my
peculiar and not unpainful election,” and not always by the pens of those
who were conscious of their real motives.
Page 587 - [see page image]
568
Ludwig Lewisohn
Deep in psychical strata to which the individual does not always descend
there is the feeling: if there is to be an American writer like that—he should
[not] be called nor be L. L. He should be more profoundly of us. And I
am, as you know, not without an understanding and a sympathy for this
particular reaction. But the Gods choose, not we. I should doubtless be both
much happier and have an easier time in life if I were—Edna Ferber. No man
with his eyes open would, I think, assume this particular fate, especially not
in our country. But I have been chosen for it. 44
And so he pushed Saxton on the Jewish series for America (“I am
behind the series, and, in truth, its ‘onlie begetter,’ ” he wrote Bradley
in mid-February) and continued to advise Serouya on his projected Les
Penseurs Juifs depuis VAntiquite nos Jours (“to aid and abet him,” as
Ludwig termed his support) directed at a European audience 45 —all the
while feverishly at work on his own writings. “Bolshevik” had been
completed on January 27, 46 and the fourth legend, “By the Waters of
Babylon,” had been immediately begun. “The man and his work are
one,” Ludwig noted when discussing his writing that winter. Stories
would “float into my mind,” and those which brought with them “an
inner key, a musical pattern, a mood of style which is, then at that
particular time, the right and only mood for me,” seemed irrepressibly
to write themselves. “I make scarcely an erasure or a change. The stuff
wells up.” 47
By the end of February, the pace was beginning to prove too ex
hausting. Already that month, he had engaged in negotiations with
the Theatrical Exchange for film and dramatic rights to another of his
novels, 48 and had completed half of the fourth legend, while “the fifth is
done in my head. ” The absence of any notations for these in his notebook
seems to corroborate the intensity with which he worked during these
weeks, as indicated by his essay on style and his letter to Canfield on
February 28. To these he added a piece on “Jewish Literature in Europe,”
published in Opinion on the twenty-ninth of that month. “If present
conditions, both economic and psychological, in Central Europe are
not swiftly alleviated,” he warned his readers, “it may well be that the
intellectual and artistic hegemony of Jewry will pass from the hands of
German-speaking Jews.” Yet, given the vast amount of material being
published—a fifteen-volume translation of the Babylonian Talmud, eight
of the projected (but never to be completed) fifteen-volume Encyclopedia
Judaica, Martin Buber’s rendering into German of the Bible (recently
brought out by a new publishing house, Schocken), and works by A. D.
Gordon, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Simon Dubnow, and Arthur Ruppin—
it was clear to Ludwig, as it was to any cognizant observer, that this
“hegemony will perish in a blaze of splendor.” Displaying an uncanny
Page 588 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
sense of its own impending demise, these German Jews, particularly the
Zionists among them, had exercised a survival instinct of unmatched
intensity. “It is extraordinary what, in this dark and desperate time, the
Nationalist-Zionist wing of German Jewry is accomplishing.”
Jews in other countries—France, Poland, Holland, Sweden, even
Spain—were similarly active. If on a smaller scale, they were no less
consciously repudiating their detractors and the sentiments of formerly
acceptable assimilationists within their own community, of whom Lud
wig declared, their “day is done and their game played out.. . . The
period in which such things can happen is . . . definitely drawing to a
close.” Henceforth, Jews who wrote would “have to do so as JEWS; the
device of both literary ‘passing’ or of whining to be accepted as what
they are not. . . will fall into swift disuse.” And nowhere more than in
America did this need to be the case, for the center of the Diaspora, if
not the entire Jewish world including the Yishuv, was certain to pass
to the New World in the wake of the “darkness and discouragement
[that] hover over Europe.” Why, then, he berated his co-religionists
in the States, had so many failed to “risk” their social and financial
capital to ensure a Jewish future? “I stress these most notable cultural
activities not only on their own account but in the faint hope of arousing
a feeling first of shame, next of desire for emulation, in the breasts of
my fellow Jews who compared to their brethren in Germany and the
German borderlands, are so numerous and, whether days are darker or
brighter, so rich and free!”
Why, he ended his polemic, was no American Jewish publisher
bringing out “the most notable artistic achievement of European Jewry
today,” Asch’s epic novel of Russian Jewry from the czars to the Bol
sheviks, The Deluge? Was it Asch’s “deeply religious nature” and his
“mature reflection that. . . regards Bolshevism as the scourge of God?' M ‘
“Don’t let God ask you on the Day of Judgment: Why didn’t you pub
lish Schalom [s*c] Asch?” he had pressured Huebsch, among others.’ 11
Without positive responses over the previous several months, he was
now convinced that “the risk will undoubtedly be taken by a Christian
publisher,"’ 1 optimistic as he still was that Harpers would create the
Jewish series they had discussed.
“I’m going to take a month’s vacation in March, because I’ve over
produced and I feel ga-ga,” Ludwig found himself forced to write Can-
field on February 28. Even in this worsening economic atmosphere, he
saw no other choice. He would, of course, complete the final legend by
the end of June, but would need an advance against royalties beginning
on May 1. “You know me by this time. I come across. And that arrange
ment will put my mind quite at ease,” allowing him to move on to, “let
569
Page 589 - [see page image]
570
Ludwig Lewisohn
us hope, [a] more or less profitable occupation,” the American literature
anthology. Hoping that his prior wager with Canfield over its rejection
by the book clubs would prove wrong, he speculated that “maybe Carl
[Van Doren] could bring himself to take that, the spiritual history of his
country according to the sources, newly appreciated and selected even
by me.” Ludwig was fully aware of the tone of his voice, still smarting
from Expression’s incomprehensible rejection. “Let me be cynical in my
ripe years. I have the right.”'-
Ludwig’s exhaustion and cynicism were only exacerbated when two
days later, on March 2, he received a frightening cable from Canfield
informing him that certain publishers of works quoted in Expression
were demanding payment for the use of their material. It was a time
when all publishers’ needs were great, and all patience rather limited on
most sides. This latest challenge, an economic one that would reduce
his anticipated income from the book, on top of the clubs’ refusals,
pushed him to the limit of his emotional endurance. “I’ve never had
any nervous trouble really in all my life,” he protested to Canfield in a
moment of rage-induced forgetfulness, “but I’m on the edge at last.. . .
Don’t, please, give me any more news except sales news. I don’t like to
have to forget so often that I was ‘drug up’ to be a Southern gent. Ah,
no, I’m fed up.” 53
Saxton cabled the next day to assure Ludwig that all permissions
had been secured and that publication was now imminent. 54 Ludwig
received a note from Canfield several days later, assuring him that the
book would soon appear. His raw nerves slightly salved, he wrote a
warm note of thanks, to which he could not help but add that he still
believed, with regard to his assessment of his countrymen back home,
that “there’s something to my bitterish analysis.” As evidence, he pointed
to his personal predicament. “Some of my recent gloom has been due
to other causes—to irritations attributable to my involuntary exile from
home and its rather complicated inner and outer consequences.” Perhaps
it was Canfield’s writing while on vacation in South Carolina, “my quasi
native state,” as Ludwig characterized it, that had brought forth this hint
of something more deeply troubling to him. “The S.C. country has a lot
of magic, hasn’t it?” Ludwig remarked. “How I’d like to see it again.”''
The years of separation from home and of Thelma from her mother,
the disappointment over a singing career that had never achieved what
Thelma had hoped it would, her sporadic work as a translator made
more imperative by the worsening financial outlook and without the
solace of a more successful attempt at her own poetry, and the jealousies
she began to experience as she fantasized Ludwig’s romantic involve
ments with others as her own youth began its inevitable march into early
Page 590 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
middle age—each of these had, by 1932, begun to tarnish the brighter
life they had long enjoyed. So, too, did Ludwig’s own apprehensive
reaction to his advancing age, and the pressure he placed upon Thelma
to conceive his child before the end of his fiftieth year. Perhaps every
human relationship has a Rashomon-like quality—certainly Ludwig and
Thelma’s had, both with their own perspective on events and emotions,
neither fully prepared to sacrifice more of themselves and their wants
than they needed to if the other was to be more fulfilled than they
ultimately were. And yet both looked at their individual contributions
to the other as a near-total gift of their selves.
But if there is a scale by which to measure this giving, then perhaps
the balance would fall to Ludwig’s side, rather than to Thelma’s. As
the older and more accomplished of the two, he proved more capable
of compromise, or at least of enduring the frustrations that such self-
effacement often required of him. Ludwig’s efforts at securing concert
dates and translation assignments, and of sharing his busy artistic and
intellectual life with Thelma, were attested to by her even after their
separation some years later. “He had always encouraged me to express
myself,” she would write of the help he had given her poetry, and when
publication had been arranged with Titus, he had offered “generously to
write a foreword to my book.” 56 Yet she would talk resentfully of giving
up her career as a singer to act as his hostess, burying her life in his so
that he could exercise his genius and give the world the gift he alone
could offer it. It was in this context, and in the larger one of perceived
betrayal, that she would later speak of his asking her, in the spring of
1932, to bear his child.
By this time Ludwig was nearing fifty. We had that perfect understanding
which does not need speech, and because we did have this symphony
of minds and souls I knew something was bothering him. One night he
expressed himself. “Thelma,” he said, “no man’s life is complete without
a child, some one to carry throughout time the life stream which is passed
on to him. I am not completely happy because I have no son. If I had a
son I would be complete, happy in the ultimate sense.” So this was what
he wanted—a child, a son to carry on after him. I had given him everything
of my life. It was not too much to give him this wish he carried so close
to his heart. For almost ten years we had been perfect companions and
lovers to each other. In those ten years he had developed his genius. He had
written important books. I knew how much he had depended on me, for
he acknowledged it to the world in his books. He had told all the reading
world what our life together had meant to him. “Ludwig, Darling, you
shall have your son if it is at all possible,” I promised him.. . . Nothing
was too much to do for our love. A child of ours would have a heritage
that would sing down the ages. Oh, yes, I knew that Ludwig had not
571
Page 591 - [see page image]
572
Ludwig Lewisohn
obtained a legal divorce from his wife. But we were not to be bound by
that. We were married as much, and more, as any two people could be. We
were married because we loved each other with a devotion that passed all
barriers. I was known all over the Continent as Mrs. Ludwig Lewisohn.
This fact had been printed publicly and had been acknowledged by all
our friends. We were honored and feted wherever we went. There were
times when we had our difficulties, when, because of the lawsuits back
home our passports were picked up and we could not leave the country
until they were straightened out. But these were only little annoyances that
intruded into our happiness as a Summer fly buzzes around and disturbs,
but does not affect you. We had gone down to Nice and there in a quaint
villa by the sea we had enjoyed the soft sunshine, the clear blue waters.
If we could not leave the country then we could find our joys within
its boundaries. Locked in each other’s arms on soft moonlight nights the
world was well lost to us. I remembered all of those things and the beauty
of life before us, a beauty that would be cemented forever in a child of
our own. 57
Thelma, in later recounting this period, glossed over what Ludwig
had obliquely referred to in his note to Canfield as their “inner” prob
lems, preferring instead to speak of only their “difficulties” brought
on by forced exile, and the tensions they experienced from time to time
because of it. Ludwig, if occasionally more open about these matters, still
remained unwilling to offer details or to discuss the origins of those “con
sequences” which lay deeper than the more visible governmental inter
ference in their private affairs. Only a careful reading of An Altar in the
Fields, now being shaped amidst the deepening tensions of these months,
would afford the outsider any insight—that, and the recollection and
notebook of American journalist George Seldes, who frequented the
Lewisohn home during his years in Paris, years in which he experienced
what he would later characterize in his memoir, Witness to a Century,
as that period in which he relieved himself of journalistic obligations
in order to concentrate on the writing of a novel. “Montparnasse was
unquestionably still the intellectual center. Its cafes were meeting places
of thousands who worked all day at their professional callings, as well
as tens of thousands of frauds who were tolerated, and gaping tourists
who were despised.” In the fourteen years of visiting and, then, residing
in Paris, he had met only one “lost” soul, Harold Stearns, drowning in
alcohol at the Select—and perhaps an automobile mechanic or two who,
in returning to work, would have put an end to the chagrin of that garage
owner whose offhanded comment to Gertrude Stein in the early postwar
years, about the difficulty of finding competent employees among the
unskilled youth of France, the skilled appearing to him to have been
“lost” in the conflagration, led to what Seldes viewed as a “fraud . . .
Page 592 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
impossible to rectify."'* On the contrary, Seldes had found “each day
a new adventure with people, each day worth recording,” whether in
Paris, “filled with tens of thousands of hopeful men and women, quite
a number of writers and painters and poets, and thousands of fakers,”
or on the Riviera, where “everyone worked.” 5 *
It was in the last winter of his stay in Montparnasse that Seldes
became a witness to the deterioration of Ludwig and Thelma’s relation
ship. Thelma had already, before Paris, grown suspicious of Ludwig’s
acquaintances with other women, particularly his more extended contact
with Dorothy Thompson. “In the old Vienna days,” Ludwig related to
Seldes, “Thelma conceived the notion that Dorothy and I entertained
a feeling for each other which impinged . . . She was wrong,” he added
after breaking his thought in mid-sentence, “even though Dorothy, who
is now such an overwhelmer, rather clung to me.” She was now in Paris,
and after she had dined with the Lewisohns one evening, “Thelma made
me an Eifersuchts-Auftritt [a jealous scene]—subtle but disturbing,” as
Ludwig later described the events in explaining to Seldes why he should
not mention to anyone having seen Ludwig at the Closerie de Lilas with
Thompson, or on another occasion with the young “Miss Bing, whom
Eugene Bagger commended to me in a literally starving condition and
for whom I’ve been doing little acts of kindness.... If she knew that,
however innocently and accidentally, I saw Dorothy again,” Ludwig
worriedly added, “she would—silly as it is—suffer. And I don’t want
her to. It’s so futile and senseless."” 1
Seldes apparently kept Ludwig’s confidence, having “liked Ludwig,
despite his pompousness,” as he would recall his host of many evenings
nearly a half century later. Seldes considered Thelma “a fair soprano,”
though he utterly disliked sopranos, “even the greatest.” But she had a
quality he found even more disturbing. “Her frankness was too much
for me—it reminded me of testimony in the days I covered divorce
proceedings.” 61 It was an apt description for the atmosphere that was
beginning to develop between Ludwig and Thelma, and for the obsessive
jealousies that were beginning to drive him from her. On February 21,
only two weeks before Ludwig’s “ga-ga” nerves forced him back to
Nice for another period of rest, Seldes recorded how Ludwig’s shouted
promise to Thelma, that “You will have a child, before January first,
1933,” had elicited only her protestation that “it was too late.”
Thelma’s ambivalence toward the roles she played in Ludwig’s life
was clear to many observers who had witnessed her frequent lack of
propriety in announcing to him in their presence, “I am your Muse,
your Mistress, your Wife, your Inspiration and your housekeeper.” So,
too, were his feelings toward her. If despite her short stature and rather
573
Page 593 - [see page image]
574
Ludwig Lewisohn
ample figure of 180 pounds, Ludwig would often describe his “Cutie”
to others as “beautiful: the Gretchen type, you know,” there were times
when he bared his emotions before guests as well. Yet, while “Ludwig
made scenes before others, Thelma had no reticences,” Seldes added in
judging her greater willingness to bring personal matters into a public
forum, as she did at a Paris party one evening when she began to relate to
one and all how the “last time I was here I had cocktails, and I got very
erotic. I said, ‘Ludwig, let’s go home right away and take advantage of
this,’ but unfortunately, I had too many cocktails, and I had to vomit.’"'-'
The most telling recollection of their relationship by Seldes appears
in his notes following an evening at the Lewisohn home, a large party
attended by Asch, Rank, and others prominent in Ludwig’s and Thelma’s
world. Among these was the conductor and impresario Pierre Mon-
telle, a surprise guest brought unannounced by another invitee. Thelma
greeted him with very mixed feelings, “honored” by his presence, as
she told him, but still angry over his refusal, three years earlier, to
arrange a concert for her, and upset that another singer, with a superior
voice, was also attending the party. Thelma’s singing earlier that evening,
before Montelle’s arrival, had evidently been of poor quality. She excused
herself as not being “in good voice” that evening, though she knew better.
Jealous, she had sat through her guest’s performance, as Seldes noted,
“biting her lips, shaking her head, disapproving, censoring, correcting,
and not too privately at that, so that others noticed.” Unable at last to
control herself, she leapt up, grabbing the crowd’s attention as she “sang
in dumbshow, her mouth wide open at times and with full gestures, as
if to say, now this is the way it should be sung.”
Whatever satisfaction this second performance had given her was
negated by the other singer’s own second offering, this time to the newly
arrived Montelle. Ludwig attempted to soothe Thelma’s fury, and until
applause broke out she appeared to content herself by belittling her
guest’s obvious talent. But with the strong sound of clapping hands
she could no longer “contain herself,” Seldes recorded. “I’ll break it
up,” she declared emphatically, and stormed into the drawing room,
pushing Seldes ahead of her, insisting that he be her partner in forcing her
jealous will upon the others. “Let’s break it up. Let’s dance,” she insisted.
Protestations by Seldes, that he didn’t know how, were ignored. “Won’t
anybody dance,” she yelled to the dazed guests. “Hysterically, and with
a fury,” she began pushing furniture and rugs to the sides of the large
room, “trundling things about,” attacking the scene and “superhumanly
lifting” whatever was in her way as she compelled her guests to join her
on the newly created dance floor.
Page 594 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
Thus she cleared the rooms of carpets and encumbrances of chairs and
things, meanwhile running to and from the victrola, changing needles, wind
ing, shifting furniture, winding, dropping a record into splinters, spinning
like the fat top she was, herself wound up perpetually. In this quiet room,
where a score of persons sat quietly in wonder, she spun like a small cyclone
and her red hair became a little disordered. Gradually others were drawn
into the vortex. All her grabbing at persons to dance, all her shouting
to persons to watch out, to join in, to do something, eventually had an
effect. First one couple, then another began to dance, and soon the floor
was shaking and the sitters had their feet stepped on or their faces flicked
by the waltzer’s staggered movements. And so it became an evening of
silly dancing, and so it was convenient for all those who had so politely
applauded the singing to remark on the lateness of the hour, the hard day’s
work ahead, sickness in the family, the urban train service, the rain and the
lack of taxis, and quickly everyone dispersed, leaving the drawing room
empty. Thus Cutie won the field. 63
For Ludwig, there was no such easy escape. Tantrums and outbursts
of overwrought emotions, clearly pointing to far greater underlying
causes, immediate and long term, were becoming all too familiar. He
must have suspected, given the depth of his psychological understand
ing, that these worsening problems in their relationship might prove
intractable in the years ahead. Certainly, there were indications of this
awareness in moments of private reflection and occasional guarded
references in notes to close friends, and in the pages of Altar. “It was her
mood on some of these later occasions that had started his alarm. There
was an unwonted hilariousness and recklessness about her; she drank
more cocktails than she could properly stand; she was or tried to be in
ways that [he] detested and that were wholly unlike her the life, as it was
disagreeably called, of the party.” When she would later tearfully recall
her behavior and cling “desperately to her husband,” he would suggest
that she moderate her drinking, only to receive from her that “sombre
and resentful look [that] came into her eyes ... as though she had a little
dagger and were pressing it into her flesh and was glad to bear the pain in
the certain knowledge that it wounded his heart far more desperately.” 64
And so he looked off into the future, promising himself a child, perhaps
hoping that it would meliorate conditions with Thelma, incapable, if
not blinded by this wish, of foreseeing how this complication would
play its unexpected role. He knew, however, that if this dream were
to be realized, rest and peacefulness between them would be necessary,
particularly given Thelma’s delicately balanced emotional state.
Upon their arrival in Nice in early March 1932, they had registered
at their accustomed hotel along the Promenade des Anglais and set to
work, removing all distractions and feeling the satisfaction of artistic
575
Page 595 - [see page image]
576
Ludwig Lewisohn
accomplishment. While Ludwig worked to complete the next novella in
his “Legend” series, Thelma continued with her translation of some Ger
man poetry, “basking in the sunlight,” as she wrote Bradley, requesting
that he not “forget a poor girl who needs a German translation to do,” 65
hoping that he would serve as her agent, as he had Ludwig’s.
The arrival of the first copies of Expression only moments before
their departure southward from Paris had added to this change in their
emotional state. They could leave on a positive note. The years of toil
and anticipation had brought forth a weighty volume, Ludwig’s best as
Canfield would assess it many years later, and “one of the outstanding
books of literary criticism.”'" Here was a book that would challenge
Ludwig’s critics as none had since Up Stream’s appearance had set
the defenders of Protestant America’s hegemony on edge. Ludwig had
been too “frightfully tired” to send Bradley a copy, but as he told him
on March 10, after several days of rejuvenation from creativity, sun,
and the expectation of a positive critical reception “already bucking
me up,” he would see that one was forwarded to him as soon as he
returned to Paris. 67 On the twelfth, Canfield cabled news of the excellent
reviews that were appearing, and followed the message with a longer
note. “On the whole, it seems to us that the critics are appreciating
the importance and outstanding quality of your work.. . . We are all
delighted by the reception of the book.” He hoped that Ludwig would
be as pleased as they, though news of sales, which Canfield knew to
be of great concern to his author, would have to await the larger pub
lic’s response."'
The earliest reviews of Ludwig’s “portrait of the American spirit
seen and delineated, as the human spirit is best seen, in and through
its mood of articulateness, of creative expression,” 6 ” were as positive
as Canfield had characterized them. The Boston Transcript’s reviewer
praised Expression for the beauty of its prose, “but more so for the
spirit which it shows,” a clear challenge to “all who read books by
Americans, to those who teach our children or publish our books. . .
to those who, from whatever angle, believe in the good life.” 70 Joseph
Wood Krutch, Ludwig’s old friend and successor at the Nation, echoed
this belief in discussing what he identified as a “profoundly interesting
[book]. . . [by] a mind both born and trained to respond to the appeal of
literature.” For Krutch, Expression was the challenge and the stimulus
for a reawakening. “Schoolmarms and professors have rendered the
American classics rather more dusty than most, but Mr. Lewisohn will
encourage many readers to blow that dust away.” 71 Granville Hicks
pointed to the breadth of Ludwig’s knowledge, “a vivid awareness of
the literature of other countries as puts the professional scholar to
Page 596 - [see page image]
Private Furies, Public Washing
shame,"'-’ while a New York Times critic, though disagreeing with some
of Ludwig’s assessments of individual writers, and with his “blind bating
wherever the shadow of Puritan influence is discovered,” as well as with
“the will-o’-the-wisp of modern psychology” that had “sometimes led
[him] astray,” spoke of Expression as “clear in its thought... [a] critical
work of a high order . . . [and] of a distinguished style ... a good book,
and in its central doctrine deserves the influence for which he hopes."’ 1
These views were seconded over the next weeks and months by
friends and strangers alike. A critic in the Catholic World of May found
Expression to have “the combined distinction of being artistically beau
tiful and almost passionately inspired in its approach to its subject and of
almost unquestionable validity as to its most important conclusions." ‘
Commonweal, a sister Catholic journal, found Expression, if uneven,
“Brilliant. . . easily the most serious and significant, as well as the most
entertaining, study yet made of the meaning of American literature as a
whole." ' The critic at the New Yorker, though bothered by the use of
Freud, found Expression so compelling that he raised what had been “no
very high opinion of Ludwig Lewisohn as a literary critic” and advised
his readers that, “If you’ve enough interest in the history of American
letters to read anything about it, I’d recommend this book to you above
all others."""
This, too, was the opinion of Ludwig’s long-standing friend and ally
at the Nation, Carl Van Doren, who through the years had believed
that criticism, not fiction, was Ludwig’s true calling. Expression, he
would note in 1936, had again enabled Ludwig’s mind to be “free and
masterful,” qualities which his readers had long valued in him. 77 Van
Doren, in the lead article to the Nation’s spring 1932 book supplement,
spoke of it as more than a “superb history of American literature.”
What had been set before him was “primarily a moral epic of Amer
ica.” Postwar changes had shattered the accepted literary canon, long
maintained by “provincialism and patriotism and propriety and iner
tia (among teachers not wishing to prepare new materials),” and had
forced “men and women taught to read in the nineteenth century . . .
to read about the twentieth. . . bared in literature,” something they
simply “could not endure.” Citing the deflation of some reputations
(Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Irving, Howells, and Lowell)
and the rise of others in their place (Whitman, James, Melville, and
Dickinson), he wrote that “several writers of the past forty years now
mingle on virtually even terms with the sacred band.” Van Doren was
certain that “a good many years will have to pass before the traditional
canon is thoroughly revised.” On that day, no one “will be seen to
have done as much” as Ludwig. “Detaching himself from the myopic
577
Page 597 - [see page image]
578
Ludwig Lewisohn
controversies which go on in the United States, he has from the distance
of his exile looked back with a commanding eye.... If Mr. Lewisohn
is proved by events to have been a bad prophet, it will be because his
country either could not or would not hold itself up to the level of his
prophetic demands." ' Privately, Van Doren told Ludwig that he had
read Expression “with nothing but a feeling of the most lively delight
in your splendid high codes and lovely prose. It isn’t only the best book
written on that theme. It’s the best book, I rather think, ever written
by Ludwig Lewisohn. That says a lot. There is a splendor, a freedom in
the execution which makes me happy because it seemed to show how
strongly you have escaped from the troubles which we both know you
have had to fight. I congratulate you in a mood of pure sympathy and
satisfaction.” 79
“I continue to hear enthusiastic comments about Expression in
America, and as a matter of fact, I don’t remember when I have heard
so many kinds of people agree about a book,” Krutch wrote Ludwig.
Mark Van Doren soon confirmed this news by writing Ludwig of the
“many persons [who] have come running up to me, or written letters,
saying: ‘See what L.L. has said about you,’ ” truly “a measure of your
fame here, and of the eminence which your book enjoys.” All of which
Van Doren concurred with. “It is a magnificent book, by the way.” 80
But inevitably, not all readers were that willing to see Ludwig’s
efforts this way. If the voices of outsiders and dissenters from within
the ruling class had praised Expression for the ground it had cleared,
the hegemonic forces in America were holding fast. The Christian Sci
ence Monitor's critic had by April found it an “irritating and arrogant
book,” 81 and H. M. Jones in the Yale Review that summer noted that the
work was “inextricably confused,” attempting to be at once “a history
of American literature, and ... a book about sex and art.” His advice
for Ludwig was to forget both Freud and “his crotchets,” and confine
himself, “as he does on those occasions when his writing is of some
value,” “to literary criticism of the standard, old-fashioned sort.” 82 By
August, Gorham Munson would write in the Atlantic that Expression
“reads like a collection of notes for a university course by a professor
somewhat bored with the theme,” and where this was not the case, like
“sheer weekly journalism”—while “everywhere Mr. Lewisohn’s air of
self-importance intrudes." * ‘ A far more acerbic attack appeared that year
in John Chamberlain’s critique of “the progressive mind in America,”
Farewell to Reform, calling Ludwig’s efforts an “unctuous aberration." ^
The following spring this same sentiment was echoed in an “Open Let
ter” to Ludwig (with others addressed to Krutch and Lewis Mumford) in
Page 598 - [see page image]
579
Private Furies, Public Washing
the Modern Monthly, citing the study as “a pernicious book . . . chock-
a-block full of nonsense.'" 1 ’
Perhaps Sean O’Faolain best assessed the dispute that was to rage
onward in print over the next half century when he wrote in October
1932 that “To anyone interested in the reactions of political and so
ciological atmosphere on literature in America Mr. Lewisohn’s volume
will prove extremely revealing and at all times arresting: whether or
not one finds it satisfying will depend on the reader’s attitude towards
Mr. Lewisohn’s attitude."' 1 But ultimately, the opinions he valued above
all others were those of his closest friends and peers. Convinced of the
soundness of his judgment, Ludwig had rarely taken deeply to heart the
thoughts of his critics, concerned more that their negative responses to
his writings not distort his meaning, or support wrongheadedness, or
damage sales.
Within the circle of expatriate writers, Hemingway’s books had won
Ludwig’s admiration, which they would hold into his last years. It must
have pleased him to learn of Hemingway’s request to Max Perkins for a
copy of Expression, only weeks after its publication. Hemingway himself
thought well enough of the book to include it among those he shipped
from Key West to Cuba in 1940, a time when breaking up his library
meant taking only those volumes he respected and needed as a working
tool for his own knowledge and writing.’'
Upton Sinclair had similarly found the book an intense “pleasure”
to read. “As I turn over the pages I see estimates which seem to me like
bull’s eyes.” He was particularly happy to see someone else “of author
ity” negating “the silly efforts to make Melville into a world writer,”
having twenty years earlier found Moby Dick a cause of “boredom and
confusion. To be great nowadays,” he added in disparagement of much
new that he was reading, “you have to be sick; and personally I think the
price is too high.” So impressed with Expression was he that he spent
four pages of a letter to Ludwig discussing its merits. “There are very few
books to which I would give so much time,” he informed Ludwig, adding
that he was sending a copy of his letter to the publisher for possible use
in advertising, and to Leonard, “because he has been writing me about
your book.” 88
Two days after its publication, Leonard had already finished reading
Expression and was writing to Ludwig “on its qualities as criticism,
leadership, sanity, wisdom, eloquence, and prophecy.... It is your very
best, or of your very best,” judged by his “old friend of thirty years” to
be the culmination of these decades’ efforts, true to the person Ludwig
had been when they had first met on the steps of Columbia and to the
Page 599 - [see page image]
580
Ludwig Lewisohn
consistency of his mission that had grown in strength and maturity with
the passage into his middle years.
It lives and speaks in that world that is most your own—beyond race,
beyond time, yet wisely aware of both as contingencies. That has from
childhood been most your own, that was so vitally your own in those
New York days of our first far meetings and talks. Indeed, it is amazing
to trace how consistently your vision and judgment and sympathies, your
power to generalize with analytic precision, as in this splendid maturation,
were implicit in your living and reading (but real reading is a phase of
living) even then. Some of the folks you talk about were in diapers then,
or then not given to the shores of light. . . and darkness . . . but that—
and maturation—almost seems the main difference between you then and
you in the book. That maturation is a tremendous difference, of growth
in knowledge and power—but still the difference between the sapling oak
and the wide-branching great tree that has outstood all winds with a boll
that the axeman soon gave up hacking at, as not available for every day
timber . . . (and too hard work anyway!).
Yet Leonard was not without a critical word. “Your breadth and balance
are beyond praise right thro,” he wrote, but then went on for a third of
his nine-page letter speaking of “our one important disagreement. . . the
fundamental, declared, almost unctuous use you make of doctrinaire, or
thodox, super-freudian psycho analysis.” No stranger to Freud, Leonard
stressed that “we are only at the beginning” of understanding the human
mind and could not apply the master’s ideas “like mathematical laws as
at once solving all sorts of phenomena in character, conduct, and desire.”
Having “for some ten years . . . swallowed most of it uncritically,” he
sought now to spare “my oldest friend and America’s best prophet from
becoming a crazy man.” More than his concern for literary criticism was
Leonard’s worry for “the stability of your intelligence . . . [and] sense of
humor”—a “little dippy,” as he characterized certain statements Ludwig
had made in some recent correspondence. 89
Perhaps it was this very element of psychological insightfulness that
had first attracted Henry Miller to Expression, forcing him, as he told
Anai's Nin on September 28,1932, to realize “that the psychologists were
more right than I was—that it was ineluctable—the fact of there being
but a few fundamental patterns to the whole groundwork of human
behavior.” He had so wanted to deny any validity to Ludwig’s general
approach, to see an endless variety to all human activity, each act novel,
totally mysterious, unique. “I am agreeing with him all the time and yet
the more he exercises his powers of persuasion the more I rebel against
him.” But in the mirror of Ludwig’s book Miller had found images
of his own experiences as a repressed American author whose “only
excuse . . . for writing was to write something so disturbing, so volcanic,
Page 600 - [see page image]
581
Private Furies, Public Washing
that America or Europe would not be the same after it.. . . Could I make
them hate me sufficiently?” he wondered aloud, as Ludwig might have
in those earlier years when he outraged Puritan America with Snare, Up
Stream, and Crump. In Ludwig, Miller had surprisingly found a voice for
his own plaint, another whose need to “create a stir” he fully understood,
an outsider, a Jew, who, better than he, had found the words to attack the
Puritanism that remained as “the source of American puerility, sterility,
and paralysis. I was formulating an attack that was indefensible, even to
myself, and I was annoyed again that I could not justly, logically defend
the issue.” In Miller’s own inversion of the expected, he now sought to
defend Ludwig’s position “because he was a Jew and it disturbed me
that a Jew could so keenly and rightly put his finger on the source. 90
Ludwig had, of course, known that some in America would be far
less accepting than those earliest critics whose reviews awaited him upon
his return to Paris on April 8,1932. He had fled the city, in part, so that
he might “escape the repercussions,” flying to North Africa in the final
weeks of their Mediterranean stay. “I simply didn’t want to go through
the nervous strain of waiting to see just what results might follow the
publication of my book,” he told the Paris Tribune the day after his
return. Now he was back, refreshed, ready to face the unfavorable
responses he felt certain were at hand. “I feel as though my mind had
had a good washing,” but the events that would unfold, domestic and
global, would all too soon test its positive effects. 91
Page 601 - [see page image]
582
25
On the Edge
Ludwig returned to Montparnasse to find that his opening remarks
to the French section of the International League against Anti-Semitism,
delivered in Paris on March 1, 1932, had been published in the latest
issue of Opinion2 “Two human phenomena dictate the grave prob
lem and recurrent tragic emergency that have bidden us assemble here
tonight,” he had begun his address as chairman that evening. “The first
is a tendency profoundly and immemorially rooted in the human mind,
according to which men find it supremely difficult to acknowledge to
themselves their errors, their weakness, and their guilt.” Turning from
the face of reality, they sought a scapegoat upon which to project their
sense of guilt, “a vicarious sacrifice and atonement” assented to by that
portion of mankind which “finds it possible to listen to the voice of
passion and self-justification and to withdraw itself from the dictates of
humility, of reason and of love.” Too often this sacrificial object had been
the Jew, “nailed upon a cross to take upon himself the sins of his [gentile]
brethren.” So, again, it was happening, as it had “tragically often from
medieval times to this day.” The truth of the accusations rested solely in
“myth and superstition—the desperate flowers of guilt and fear.” And
these were now mixing “with immediate fears, [as] perverted instinct
joins repressed guilt and men seek to make responsible for their sins
those who are present, weak, defenseless and recognizably other than
themselves.” This intolerance was the true mark of a group’s “maturity
of civilization,” and their attitude toward the Jews among them a true
test of whether they possessed “the master quality of the brave of soul
Page 602 - [see page image]
On the Edge
and the kind of heart.” As with every group, the Jews possessed their
own unique way of life. They could not change—nor should they. And if
their hosts now found them intolerable, “the minimum ideals of justice
and honor that are inherent in mankind itself” required their assistance
at repatriation to the ancient homeland of Israel. If they could not,
“as a rational and ethical being,” offer and guarantee “such minority
rights as will permit us to live with average dignity and self-respect, both
economically and culturally,” then “the minimum ethical demand ... in
the name of your own ideals of justice and honor” was to facilitate the
evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Palestine and other safe havens. 2
Seven and a half years to the day before Hitler’s invasion of Poland set
the machinery of death in motion, Ludwig’s impassioned call for rescue
met with a deafeningly silent response.
Wise, however, needed no convincing of the danger inherent in these
darkening days, and spoke of it to a large audience gathered at Ohio
State University on April 12, attributing much that he said to Ludwig
as a “great Jewish sage.” A member of the faculty later approached
Wise with a story of how Ludwig in his days at the university had often
insisted upon the students’ need for Latin and Greek. 3 But these were
clearly no longer Ludwig’s chief concerns as he continued to assist in the
translation of Asch into English and to work with Serouya on his study
of Jewish thought, 4 while pursuing various Jewish writing projects of
his own. If Expression in America appeared to be a digression from this
new path, he was quick to criticize Lewis Gannett on April 24 for being
“unworthy ... to commend me for having left my Ghetto.... I am still
necessarily functioning as the product of that smaller Ghetto which, in
fact, I had never left, which no one can leave but only pretend to and so
be both an ape and what Dr. Johnson used to call a ‘barren rascal.’
They were old friends, and Ludwig felt comfortable chiding him for
this misperception, adding in confidence how “fearing the [economic]
wrath to come . . . Thelma and I ran off for a long vacation.” 6 There was
reason to be encouraged by Expression’s weekly sales rate of more than
two hundred copies. 7 Yet economic conditions for Ludwig were, in fact,
worsening as royalties from other titles were suddenly declining, if not
disappearing, while early income from Expression repaid advances from
previous years. This “was supposed to be my banner year,” he wrote Sax
ton, but instead, “the foundations of existence are crumbling under me.”
He wanted the people at Harpers to appreciate the “peculiar disabilities
both economic and moral” under which he was continuing to “labor,”
caused, as they were fully aware, “on account of my involuntary exile.”
If only he could return to New York, he would even consider “literary
journalism or analogous things” to augment his declining fortunes. 8
583
Page 603 - [see page image]
584
Ludwig Lewisohn
In the meantime, he planned to complete the “Legends” series by
June and then begin work on The American Anthology, hoping that
the latter would be adopted by one of the book clubs now that its
companion, Expression, had received so notable a reception and could
be promoted as a college text. “In doing the anthology, I’ll bear the needs
of that department in mind. I was once an ‘educator,’ you know.” To
move ahead on these two projects, he asked for an advance of four
hundred dollars a month over the course of the next full year, “my
irreducible minimum for continuing to function.” “I need for essential
creative work some measure of hopefulness.. . . Luckily the Legends are
nearly done and the anthology requires only knowledge, thinking and
taste.” Unspoken was his desire to go beyond these as his “chief novel,”
An Altar in the Fields, was already “rather throbbing within,” with notes
now beginning to appear in his journal. 9
These same concerns, more sharply drawn, filled Ludwig’s letter
to Canfield the following week. “The world being what it is, I am . . .
panicky on the subject of finance—or, rather, to put it more humbly and
truly, of making a living.” He was happy to learn of Canfield’s impending
visit to Paris, and remained hopeful that they “could then work out some
scheme whereby I could continue to work and function either until things
get better or until we all slide into chaos.” He was, as he had told Saxton,
waiting until the following year to work on Altar—“for inner creative
reasons” and “as a matter of self-preservation,” wishing not to “publish
it in another season like this ... I have a hunch it will be my biggest,”
and he could ill afford to squander so good an opportunity. If he was to
pour so much of himself into this work, he hoped for a wider audience
than now seemed possible.
Yet, what he wanted as much, if not more, was the chance to finally
go home. Nearly eight years had passed since self-imposed flight had led
to “involuntary exile.” The “moral triumph” enjoyed by Expression,
with the critical assistance of “so many of our most intelligent con
temporaries,” had made him “doubly home-sick.” So far from home
now, without the daily support of colleagues and friends, encamped in a
Europe increasingly unsettled and unsettling, his thoughts were turning,
more often than ever, to images of return to the States. “I wouldn’t be
panicky for a moment if I could go to America,” he told Canfield, asking
him to keep this in confidence. “Don’t say this to anybody.” 10
The problem, as always, was Mary. Though so many years had
passed, her pursuit had continued unabated. Damages for the revised Up
Stream had been collected; Mid-Channel had been threatened, carefully
screened, and altered in a vain attempt to prevent a libel action by her;
and Crump had been censored by the government and left untouched by
Page 604 - [see page image]
On the Edge
all but the scandalous hands of a book pirate. Still, Mary had relentlessly
continued to seek the alimony Ludwig had been denying her since the
court settlement in June 1924. As a settlement for the libel damages still
under appeal by Harpers, but not past and future alimony to which
she was legally entitled, an agreement was finally reached on May
10, 1932. It was a small step, but the first, nevertheless, in Ludwig’s
attempt to regain his residency in America. On that day, John Larkin,
Harpers’ attorney, wrote Canfield of the settlement, portraying it as
the best possible solution, preferable to a trial which would probably
have resulted in a large award for damages, “the Appellate Division
having held that the book was libelous.” It was, he reminded his client,
a case of “Lewisohn vs. yourselves,” and, therefore, necessary to secure
the best possible settlement for Harpers. 1 The sum of one hundred
dollars a month for life, plus twenty-five hundred dollars in attorney
fees, “sounds worse than it actually is,” Canfield advised Ludwig later
that day, given “the fact that Mrs. L’s term of life is limited, as you
have pointed out.” Canfield expressed his belief that “all through these
difficult negotiations ... we have enjoyed your confidence and trust,”
and felt confident that Ludwig would be pleased that the monthly
amount agreed upon had prevented Mary from attacking his royalties. 1;
Ludwig’s friend and personal attorney, Charles Recht, had been
a party to these negotiations, and though he had raised a number of
objections, “as your mouthpiece,” he advised his friend and client to
accept the settlement. Even though it would provide Mary with sufficient
income to pursue him further over the question of alimony, Recht felt
that Harpers had been gracious and supportive over the years, including
the lucrative “arrangement for you through Butterworth” that had
allowed Ludwig and Thelma “to live comfortably in Paris.” Having
“been more than decent to you,” Recht strongly urged Ludwig not
to place his publisher at risk of having to pay a large cash settlement
should the case return to the courts." The lack of further discussion
appears to indicate Ludwig’s agreement with this proposed settlement,
as does Mary’s ability in the coming years to continue her legal battle
against him.
The pace of Ludwig’s work increased of necessity in the weeks
that followed. The fourth legend, “By the Waters of Babylon," H was
completed on May 12, and a series of Goethe’s poems in translation
was submitted for the June issue of This Quarter, in honor of the Goethe
festival being staged in Germany to mark the centenary of his death.''
Serouya was continuing his work on Jewish thought, and Ludwig, after
reading a portion of the manuscript in progress, asserted that “espe
cially in these hard times,” only a “useful book,” a “chronicling” of
585
Page 605 - [see page image]
586
Ludwig Lewisohn
historical developments, would “make Rabbi X in Akron, Ohio, buy
such a book . . . [without] which he’d have otherwise to look ... in
750 volumes, which volumes, moreover, are not accessible to him.” An
interpretive essay, even one as well conceived as Serouya’s, would find
only a very limited market, and, therefore, have little chance of finding a
publisher. “I don’t say, heaven forbid, that he’s to eliminate himself.
But he must subordinate his personal discursiveness to a systematic
presentation of the material.
Ludwig was himself finding it necessary to subordinate the personal
in these difficult times. An earlier offer to buy the manuscript of Crump
had been refused. Without a need for the money, he had decided against
parting with his last remaining handwritten manuscript, the others being
lost with his trunks in 1924. “Hence I had determined never to sell this
Ms.,” he wrote on June 3 in answer to a new inquiry by a Chicago
attorney, “and in fact turned down a very handsome offer in the fantastic
days of Coolidge.” But the world had dramatically shifted. “The equally
fantastic depression has struck me too . . . this year quite suddenly and
violently.” He had, as he told his potential buyer, fared relatively well
the two previous years, but no longer. “Therefore it would be of great
benefit to me to sell this Ms. for $3250. It is in my small affairs, as in
greater ones, a question of balancing the budget!" 7 The manuscript,
along with this letter of offering, would eventually come to rest in the
library of the University of Texas.
The final legend, “A Writ of Divorcement,” remained now to be
written if he was to complete the five as promised for June 1932. On the
sixteenth, he and Thelma left Paris for the village of Rambouillet, 18 thirty
miles southeast in the direction of Chartres, where they remained for
nine days of retreat and work. “Paris, and especially Montparnasse . . .
seemed to turn itself into an inferno,” he wrote Huddleston the day after
returning home. “We took the good petrol-buggy, our one relief and
refuge, and passed a blessed period in the fields and woods—walking,
talking with calm nerves, working. I brought back 7000 words.” Lud
wig’s letter had been prompted by a note of praise for Expression
from Huddleston, and a gift of a wooden sculpture which appealed
both to Ludwig’s sensuous nature and his growing need for the simple,
the human scale, that was disappearing from his world, leaving it and
himself desolate. “That simple and yet rather noble hand-carving out
of a piece of living wood seems to me a symbol of so much that is lost
or slighted, of so much that must be recovered, if human life is to have
once more any essential decency and dignity.” After one day’s return
to the city, he was already planning to leave, unable to complete the
final legend amidst the distractions. “We are going off again, if only to
Page 606 - [see page image]
On the Edge
Barbizon,” some forty miles to the southeast of Paris, where among the
woods made famous by Corot and others, he hoped to conclude “the
last in my volume of legends.” He promised Huddleston to visit him in
the countryside when they returned, “and drink a glass or two to many
things and, above all, to our friendship." 1 '
“Writ,” finished on July 6, used the struggle between Jewish tradi
tion and the pull of assimilation as a vehicle for his critique of certain
contemporary intellectual, cultural, and religious developments which
he saw as substitute faiths. Of the Jews who founded the fields of
psychoanalysis and sexology as if they were measures of conduct and
truth in this world, rather than as symptomatology, he asked, “Are these
men who, having lost their own laws, incapable of obeying others, are
seeking to construct a universe in which moral laws can be abrogated and
replaced by either a psychological or physiological technique?” Neither
was he tolerant of the Marxists, those “infected with the poison of
the argument concerning the sufficiency of economic causes.” (He had
known a number of these Soviet Jewish Marxists while in Paris, Boris
Plniak and Ilya Ehrenbourg among them.) These and other ideas were re
placing the traditional approaches to life, at times using valid arguments
(“contraceptive practices as aids to the liberation of the moral life, to
the suppression of poverty and, through the curb on overpopulation, of
war”) “in the secret and half-conscious hope of obtaining for ourselves
release of instinct without the price of moral responsibilities.” 20
Held up against this tendency in contemporary Jewish life was his
idealized portrait of “the entire tohu va-vohu of the orthodox Polish
shut,” of those who were utterly at home within the Zion of their
character, their history, their tradition, and the house of their God,
because it had never occurred to them that they could be at home or
at peace elsewhere.” Nor were they at war with their own inner natures.
How, then, had the human condition so developed “that the Eternal
could be offended by the qualities which He Himself. . . had given to
His creatures and to the work of His hands?" - ’ 1
Traditional Jewish marriage became for Ludwig in this tale the
measure by which to judge the relationships he saw around him, and,
perhaps, his own, for there are traces of arguments he might have
used in attempting to convince Thelma to bear his child, traces that
would appear again in Altar as a consuming theme at this point in their
lives. As Ludwig would have lived his own life with Thelma, he saw
“a phenomenon peculiarly Jewish,” the “division and complementary
activity” between husband and wife, she to conduct “all worldly matters
entirely to her tact and her judgment,” he to reach “decisions on the
whole range of interests that are correctly called metaphysical,” each
587
Page 607 - [see page image]
588
Ludwig Lewisohn
accepting the other’s authority within their spheres “with an equal
submissiveness.... In a deep sense she was his mother as well as his
wife and he her teacher as well as her husband."* 2
“Writ,” as the story of a young progressive Jew seeking a way back
to the culture of his people after a period of assimilation during his
college years, and of his marriage to an assimilated graduate of Vassar
College, enabled Ludwig to frame these thoughts. As their wedding
day approached, and he insisted upon a traditional ceremony, “the first
serious discussion” arose between them. She worried about the reaction
of “the fashionable Gentiles among her Vassar classmates . . . and what
their attitude might be to the thing proposed . . . dragged through that
hocus-pocus” without which she would have been far happier. 23 Her
resentment of this alien way appeared to continue into their honeymoon.
She would swim throughout the day, as though she “deliberately wanted
to wear herself out. . . elaborate precautions against those natural con
sequences of our union,” a union sanctified in Jewish tradition, but
not by “the sportiest Vassar type” and not according “to a supposed
Nordic ideal.” Instead of embracing the natural, “she had in her sub-
consciousness, at least, identified passion both of mind and of body as
Jewish and she fled from these as embodying her Jewishness and fled
toward all that represented to her the security of melting into the alien
majority.” For Ludwig, this reaction to her husband’s Jewishness was
emblematic of much of the younger generation of Jewish Americans in
their rush to be a part of the country in which their parents had sought an
escape from the disabilities of the Old World. But they had all sacrificed
far too much of themselves in the process.
I knew of the obscure but powerful connection between Myrtle’s resistance
to her Jewishness, to the Jewishness in me and her resistance to all the
primordial, to all the natural and saving, to all the personally and racially
preservative forces in human life.... It was not the first time in life, of
course, that I had come into contact with this phenomenon of Jewish self-
hatred, with this protective aversion of Jewish souls from all things Jewish,
with the deep infection of a Jewish soul by the most hostile Gentile estimate
of both itself and its people and with the consequent desire to de-Judaize
itself utterly and to become utterly merged with that Gentile world which
it at once so passionately both feared and loved.. . . But since there is no
abstract nor undescended species or individual on earth and as, since each
human being exists only concretely, her Jewishness, like the Jewishness of
every Jew, was identical with her deepest and most primordial self; so she
denied life and love and generation and also the husband whom, in her way,
she loved. 24
How much of this directly reflected Ludwig’s relationship with
Thelma is a matter of speculation, though she was a child of both a
Page 608 - [see page image]
On the Edge
Jew and a Gentile and he perhaps saw these elements at war within her.
Certainly, as accusations by her against him would later demonstrate, she
feared conceiving their child, in part, because of the “boyish silhouette”
and “virgin slenderness” then in fashion. “She dreaded pregnancy not
least for the foolish and shallow and, in truth, most wicked reason
that it would indefinitely prevent her from cultivating herself as an
American type.” As “physiologically a normal Jewish girl,” Myrtle
(Thelma) had paid dearly “in voluntary starvation, in violent exercise, in
extreme discomfort and barrenness of life” for the slavishness required
to re-create herself against type. Knowing “that a happy sexual union
curves the lines and rounds the bosom of women, especially of those
of Semitic lineage . . . she refused love as well as food.” 25 Thelma, now
approaching the onset of middle age, had grown more conscious of
a waist never that slender to start with. When Ludwig chronicled his
protagonist’s plea to his wife, that they do what was naturally theirs in
their roles as Jews, we cannot help but visualize this same scene with
Thelma, Ludwig sadly and passionately imploring her to assume her
role as the mother of their child, in fulfillment of this same ancient
commandment—and in consummation of the marriage he knew to be
binding in spirit alone.
I begged her to listen to me with her full mind; I plead with her for truth
between us. I did not ask her to confess anything or to humiliate herself. I
asked her to remember our wooing and our love and to accept that love and
its natural consequences in a concrete world. We were Jews and so must
live as Jews. We were wife and man and should thus become mother and
father. This was the order of nature as well as the ordinance of our tradition
and our faith. Nothing else, I besought her to believe, yielded any comfort,
any happiness, any satisfaction or peace of soul. I asked her whether she
had been or was happy or at peace and whether she did not think my way
of life at least worth trying. At that she began to weep and the whole of
her sweet huddled body to twitch with the violence of her sobs. Seeing this
I begged her to let us begin anew and to set out on the right path now and
in this very hour and asked her that, as a pledge of this new beginning she
give herself to me, her husband, without precaution or afterthought in the
hope that from our embrace might issue a child truly at last to wed and
bind us.
Unable to accede to her husband’s wishes, she rose from the bed and
left the room, and “with all of her might she had slammed the commu
nicating door and turned the key in the lock.” It was at this moment
that he knew their marriage had reached its end. Before she had left the
next morning and returned to her parents’ home, long before she had
sued for divorce, “with a sorrow that will never wholly leave me, I was
constrained to give her the get, the ancient Jewish writ of divorcement,
589
Page 609 - [see page image]
590
Ludwig Lewisohn
in my heart." ’’ Had Ludwig, we must wonder, nearly reached this point
with Thelma, or sensed its approach?
There is in the telling of this tale something of the change that
was now occurring with increasing frequency and intensity inside the
American Jewish community. The Island Within had been Ludwig’s call
to others to search out forgotten elements of their Jewish identities and
to seize upon them for anchorage. Now that was being evidenced by
him, even from afar. Not that he was its sole cause. The growth of the
Yishuv, the plight of European Jewry in the ravaged postwar period,
and the rising tide of anti-Semitism at home and on the Continent had
all played their roles in fostering greater consciousness and assertion of
identity and the right to be one’s self, without apology or justification
of difference. “This unemphatic rebirth,” slow but felt, was enabling
the returning Jews “to drop a hundred frail pretenses and conceal
ments and subterfuges,” and to live “a far healthier and saner life.”
Myrtle’s time during this last decade had been spent “in the Gentile
environment of Vassar or Europe.” She had missed the “change [that]
had come over the tone, the inner tone and temper, of many Jewish
communities of America. The Zionist hope and nationalist attitude had
come to be first tolerated, then adopted.” And with this new awaken
ing “the history and traditions of the Jewish people were studied and
regarded with a new and warmer interest. A thousand lost and lonely
and warped and forlorn spirits felt more at home in both the world and
the universe.”
Ludwig’s own life had certainly changed in this way, as identification
had led to commitment and then to study. He had hoped Thelma would
follow his lead in such “metaphysical” matters, as he had hers in the
sphere of the “practical.” It was a time for change, for healing wounds
of the past, for correcting errors now realized. In acknowledging this
change in Myrtle’s mother, Ludwig appears to offer understanding and
posthumous rebirth for his own, “having, like most of her generation,
failed to be as Jewish a mother to her children as she might have
been.” Rather, “her new son [by marriage] was a satisfaction and a
blessing . . . himself not only a rising artist but a good Jew” 27 —a mark
of his own penitence and turning toward Judaism, seen earlier in Shylock
and in a host of other tales and essays at various stages of his return.
Ludwig in 1932 felt the compelling need to draw for his readers a
clear picture of the conflict within which they would all find themselves
increasingly enmeshed and torn, even from within their own households,
as he was now experiencing in ever increasing measure. “It was very
curious to observe side by side in the American Jewish community,” as
he characterized the conflict in “Writ,” “this base imitation of basest
Page 610 - [see page image]
On the Edge
Gentile ways on the one hand and the rise of Zionist sentiment and the
reintegration of Jewish life and spirituality on the other.”-'
This, ultimately, had been his intent behind each of the legends. In
the “Necessary Preface” to the combined collection, written midway
through his work on “Writ,” Ludwig spoke of the “hesitant reproaches
[that] came to me from year to year,” of friends who asked repeatedly
why he addressed himself “so largely and so persistently to Jewish
subjects and to the delineation of Jewish life”—“all very old and very
dear personal friends, [who] suffer persistently in the presence of my
Jewish books from an unconquerable moral discomfort,” all the while
attempting to steer him back on course and away from these disturbing
concerns with “arguments on so uncharacteristically low a plane as
that I ‘parochialize’ myself, limit my effectiveness, restrict my audience,
diminish my modest earnings.” These, Ludwig was willing to concede,
were the results of his work. “Chill praise is my portion at best. More
usually it is the irritation of reviewers or the warnings of friends. And
when I write a non-Jewish book there is rejoicing as for the repentant
sinner or as for the strayed lamb that has found its way back to the
fold”—“emotions of which the aware conscience could not approve,”
nor, as in Ludwig’s case, cause a turning away from what had to be said.
Unhappily, but inevitably and with a sense of greater justification than
other men could provide, he had assumed this new position to which
he had been assigned “by my Gentile friends” and others. “As a Jewish
writer I am in the shadow, not in the blaze of the sun,” but for Ludwig,
it was a place of comfort, accustomed as he was to carrying into battle
the unfurled banner of unpopular ideas.
He expected “few to believe or be guided by it, since it strips the
veil from too uncomfortable a truth.” He was convinced that Gentile
and assimilated Jew alike would reject out-of-hand what he had to offer
them. Neither was willing to face the reality of the relationship between
them, nor change their expectations, the Gentile longing for the Jews
to bend themselves, and the assimilated Jews willing to be bent in the
hope that acceptance would be won. The dominant image of the Jew in
literature and on the stage was of a people unthreatening, comical, sad,
striving to be other than themselves. It was an image Ludwig sought
earnestly to change, seeking to discomfort even those Gentiles whose
ill-at-ease consciences, piqued by an awareness of the anti-Semitism
their culture had perpetrated over the centuries, felt salved by images
of tolerance, if only the Jews would be more like everyone else.
The world has a bad conscience about the Jew and many Jews, the western
ized or assimilated ones, have a bad conscience about themselves. Hence
both Gentiles and Jews, for very clear self-exculpatory reasons, rejoice in
591
Page 611 - [see page image]
592
Ludwig Lewisohn
Jewish characters that are quaint and harmless, comic and therefore inferior
to themselves. They want (the Gentiles) to feel superior; they want (the Jews)
first to share the Gentile feeling of superiority, next to be able to avert a
possibility of anti-Semitic feeling by being able to say to their Gentile friends:
“Look, we are an honest, quaint, home-loving, comical folk, essentially
humble and sweet. Can you be angry with us? Are we a menace? We tell
jokes and eat gefillte fish and love our mammies! Not we exactly; we are just
like yourselves, restrained and Nordic and proper, but the East-siders, the
workers, the masses, the common people. And some day, of course, these
comical and harmless people will be just as nice and Nordic as ourselves.”
And so the Gentiles with their bad conscience and the assimilated Jews with
their equally bad conscience want stage-Jews, comical or pathetic, want nice
and quaint Jews and want to salve their wounded conscience with facile
emotions and false solutions and pinchback reconciliations.
Only those honest with themselves could assent to the truths to
which his legends pointed—that there were cultural differences, deeply
ingrained and passed from generation to generation, which were equally
valid and not in need of some leveling amelioration; that Jews had every
right to demand to be what they were, to live as they chose; that neither
the assimilationists’ fawning nor the Gentiles’ acceptance of them for the
price of obsequiousness could be tolerated. Unlike the “nice Jews” whom
Zangwill had once offered his gentile audience, and whom Ludwig in
his assimilated youth had himself praised, the Jews of these legends “are
not nice . . . nor quaint nor sweet nor self-deprecatory. They do not cater
to the reader’s sense of superiority; the assimilationist cannot point to
their harmlessness and sweetness.” His Jews were “as God made them,”
given “to the darker preoccupations and sterner passions, capable of joy,
capable now and then of festive freedom and release, but upon the whole
a somber and a tortured folk.... It has a past and a portion of it has
a will toward a future and everywhere that will is smitten and crippled
and tortured and even at its most fortunate balked by fear within and
hate without.”
“I take my stand once more with unpopularity and truth,” he
declared openly as a prelude and cautionary note to those who would
seek in his legends “nice Jews . . . like the ‘nigger’ who is nice because
he ‘knows his place.’ ” All politeness had been shed, all equivocation set
aside. “I warn the reader at the outset that in these tales there are to
be found neither ‘nice’ Jews nor ‘benevolent’ Gentiles.” The times had
become too dangerous for the perpetuation of either role, and Ludwig,
“to the utmost extent of my small powers,” was doing all he could to
prolong the “moral discomfort. . . felt by my Gentile friends.
If not for the downward spiraling of the Depression, Ludwig might
have abandoned all of his work on non-Jewish themes. He had written an
Page 612 - [see page image]
On the Edge
introduction to his cousin Arthur Eloesser’s book on German literature,
one of the last to be published by a Jew on this subject in pre-Hitler
Germany,’" and had promised George Jean Nathan, upon invitation,
that he would contribute to the newly proposed American Spectator,
“having long been of the opinion that we need badly an American journal
of sharp and disinterested critical opinion.” He reconfirmed this pledge
in late September 31 after a monetarily unprofitable summer. Aside from
a small check received in payment for the French translation of Escott
(Crime Passionnel), 32 there was only the disappointing news concerning
the anthology of American literature upon which he had already begun
to work that July. 33
General agreement had been reached that 280,000 words, some
seven hundred pages, would be an acceptable length, with introductions
to each section of anthologized material to be written by Ludwig, in
addition to his general introduction. On August 18 he sent word to
Canfield that “the anthology is shaping up gradually. I see it. I can
promise already that it will be a book you and I will both enjoy owning.
Hence that may be true of others.” At least they both hoped as much.
Ludwig was working hard to assure his readers “the tang of every mood
that America has known,” selecting portions of a wider variety of works
than previous anthologies had included. “American literature is going
to look better in my anthology because of the selecting,” he confided
with pride to Thelma. 34
But each selection needed the permission of its publisher or author,
and this proved problematic and costly, with flat fees or royalty payments
to be taken from gross receipts, thereby diminishing Ludwig’s potential
income. Letters were sent by Ludwig, not by Harpers, to a host of
authors seeking permission for the use of their work without fees. With
slight variation of reference to old ties or to the book’s high quality,
and, therefore, the need for inclusion of particular works, he sent each
essentially the same appeal, that “in spite of what has happened to the
book business,” he was following Expression by adding “document to
theory and actually exhibit our literature in its totality as it really is.”
He reminded his authors that “no book can bear heavy permission fees
today,” and told how, despite months of work, he would “in the end even
so not be the gainer by this volume.” Instead, there was commitment on
his part to the project, “a point of honor with me to complete, in spite
of the economic break-down, these dealings of mine with the literature
of my country.” While Expression, he told them, had been a “huge
critical success,” it had yet to pay the “minimum expenses for the time
of composition.” Still, he hoped “to do this one more all-American job,
if my friends and contemporaries will cooperate.” ’’
593
Page 613 - [see page image]
594
Ludwig Lewisohn
There was truth in this appeal—he did want to complete a task he
believed worthwhile. But ultimately, the greater motive for pursuing this
project, as he wrote Leonard on October 16, having that day completed
Creative America, was to reduce and survive the weight of mounting
debt that had crushed the financial cushion he had enjoyed in the earlier
stages of this period of economic decline. Only to his old friend would he
admit this mix of motives in appealing for permission to use a selection
of his poetry in the anthology without payment.
Ah, nion vieux, we came back from that historic outing last spring to find
that the famous depression which had hitherto crept nearer by almost im
perceptible degrees, had pounced. All plans for leisure and Beschaulichkeit
were wiped out. Production and, I sometimes fear, over-production not from
a creative but a market point of view, had to continue. All amenities had
to be, for the time being, neglected. If we were to pull through with some
rags of personal dignity left,—that had to be done. And even today I’m not
writing to you from motives altogether pure, though even in their impurity
not without good. 36
Further disillusioned by the lack of substantial royalties from Expres
sion, he told Canfield in mid-November that while adding to the “world’s
store” of knowledge was a worthy pursuit, “if it doesn’t at least earn
board and keep for the actual time of labor and composition, I’m not
noble enough to be happy about it.” Once his newest volume of essays,
now in midstream, was completed, he promised Canfield, “I’ll write
nothing but fiction, so help me Gawd!” 37
The introduction to Creative America had been written while Lud
wig was still moderately enthusiastic about the project. He had sent
it off to Canfield on September 21, informing his publisher that he
had elected not to introduce each section, but rather placed all of his
comments together in the beginning of the volume, so as not “to in
terrupt the continuity... by editorial talk,” which he considered “an
impertinence and a gross error of taste.” On the other hand, should a
textbook edition be decided upon, he would, of course, provide “the
necessary pedagogical apparatus."For the moment, as he wrote in the
introduction, he hoped only to “advance the question ... for its own”
of what represented in the nation’s variegated literature “a usable past
and a not inglorious present,” believing that “the creative expression
of the American people has never been esteemed at its true value.” He
aimed to take a true measure of “the spiritual temper of the nation” by
viewing its literature “in its totality” and “with serenity of taste.” In so
doing, he hoped to deflate the reputation of some and promote that of
others long neglected or undervalued. Among these was Roger Williams,
who, unlike so many of his derivative contemporaries, “commanded an
Page 614 - [see page image]
On the Edge
impassioned eloquence . . . [and] struck a note of libertarianism and of
human goodness which at least once was and may again become the clas
sical American note.” 39 To promote this often neglected “temper,” he had
judiciously selected from among his authors’ works, demonstrating both
the dominance of its opposite and its breaking forth from time to time,
most forcefully in reaction to the Victorian malaise, including among
those voices for change his own, with selections from Island, Crump,
Shy lock, and The Golden Vase 40 (“my favorite among my things,” as
he had told Leonard that October), 41 thereby assuring a Jewish note
among these new sounds that had come, of late, to “bear witness to the
profound reality, the increasing density, the growing articulateness of
American civilization.” 42
Among the few invited voices to refuse inclusion was that of Ezra
Pound. “Sorry. I can not give my free consent,” he wrote to Ludwig on
October 21. Pound objected to offering an American publisher “char
ity,” particularly Harpers, “one of the richest of the houses and the
most damnable, one that has always given the shittiest deal to my
generation.” 4 Ludwig’s final attempt to secure Pound’s work for the
anthology, sent just prior to the book’s printing nearly a year later, would
meet with a similar response. “If the dregs of England can tow the mark,
those aged American skunks can do the same.” But there was more to his
angry response than this. Ludwig had offered Pound the opportunity to
select his own material for inclusion, yet Pound doubted Ludwig’s ability
or willingness to follow through, calling this offer “a bit ambiguous,”
even though he had heard of his “influence with Harpers.” “I don’t in
the least know that I could count on you to assist in getting anything I
want to read into an American edition.” It was, for Pound, a war against
“the old crusted idiots who haven’t yet heard of Beethoven or 1880.. . .
Harpers are probably the worst firm and greatest obstacle to an advance
in American publication of contemporary works or ideas.”
Nor was Ludwig, for Pound, any less of an “impediment,” though he
was offering to include Pound among the other moderns in his anthology.
Together, Harpers and Ludwig were “parasites” and “ought not to be
allowed to profit on the risks of honester firms.” Ironically, or perhaps
with only a bit more awareness than in September 1933, Pound would
later adopt this same charge against all those who shared Ludwig’s
ethnic background—for this was, in his mind, a cultural struggle, not
only against the old guard (“Do they print any living authors?”!, 44 but
against that alien people who found themselves all too often vilified,
at times less subtly than at others, in the writings of Pound and his
circle. One could criticize, attack, and tear down from within the family,
but outsiders, practicing a similar art, were, ultimately, outsiders whose
595
Page 615 - [see page image]
596
Ludwig Lewisohn
proper business lay elsewhere. As the Jewish-American literary critic
Leslie Fiedler remarked nearly sixty years after Pound’s stern refusal,
“Our very notions of our literary past have been radically changed
by Jewish-American critics.. . . Such critics . . . eventually taught a new
generation how to read in new ways the classic American writers . . .
as well as canonical modernists like Hemingway and Faulkner, Eliot
and Pound, some of whom had themselves been anti-Semites, and all
of whom had long remained the property of an exclusive WASP critical
establishment.” 45
“I know not whether it is the Jew in him or his specific demon that
made him act like that,” Ludwig’s old Charleston acquaintance Karl
Saul wrote to Harris in July 1932, in trying to understand Ludwig’s
abandonment of Mary and his flight to Europe with Thelma. 46 Among
those bred on the vestiges of an earlier American culture, Ludwig was
to be condemned for this unseemly behavior. Even among others seem
ingly uncaring of this dying hegemony, and often living on the edge of
respectability in its eyes, there was, in 1932, all too great a sense of
ease and acceptance of anti-Semitic expression, witness Janet Flanner’s
apparent admiration for the French author Gyp, that “anti-Semite whose
wicked wit helped skin Dreyfuss alive.”'
It was in the midst of such an atmosphere that Ludwig accepted
Canfield’s warning that July regarding the U.S. State Department’s in
tractable stance on the confiscation of his and Thelma’s passports,
adding that “it would be difficult to get anywhere. . . unless Mrs. L.
withdraws her complaint. It isn’t likely that she will do so out of a clear
sky.” 48 Canfield advised Ludwig a week later to make several new but
minor changes in the upcoming reprinting of the original edition of Up
Stream that she now demanded, “because it is just as well to appease
Mrs. L. in view of the concessions we hope to get.” 49 Yet none would
be forthcoming, despite Ludwig’s agreeing to these changes. “I can’t
stand it here nor the whole situation much longer,” Ludwig admitted in
mid-August 1932. 50 But neither Mary nor the State Department was yet
ready to relinquish their claims against this recalcitrant who mocked the
authority of that world from which they sprang.
Nor, for reasons similar in origin, could Harpers allow Ludwig’s
“Necessary Preface” to the legends remain as originally written. “You
will at once see certain points in the preface,” Ludwig had assured
Canfield on August 18. 51 But Canfield was quick to perceive their deeper
meaning and intent, and advised revision. Couched in terms of strength
ening the opening of This People, he advised Ludwig to omit the pref
ace entirely, rather than sound “apologetic” for having abandoned the
more general work for which he was widely known. “If, however,
Page 616 - [see page image]
On the Edge
you want to make a point of presenting the real Jew as against the
comic or ‘Christianized’ type,” it should be done in such a way as to
transmit the notion “that the real Jew has seldom been dealt with,
and that, obviously, he is the type of real interest and significance in
our present day life,” rather than dwell on personal recollections or
make reference to “the unpopularity of presenting the real Jew.” Such
statements, Canfield and Saxton feared, might greatly diminish sales, if
nothing else. 52
Despite this well-conceived critique, with its appeal to Ludwig’s need
for funds, he remained determined, at first, to retain the preface, but
without the “profoundly ironical” references to the relative unpopu
larity of his Jewish work. He still wanted to make his point about the
general unacceptability, to non-Jew and to the assimilated among his
co-religionists, of those Jews who insisted upon living by their Jewish
cultural differences. “I shall revise the Preface to the Legends from the
point of view you suggest,” he promised Canfield, for “if you and Eugene
[Saxton] don’t get it, then the attack upon the aggressiveness of the
dominant culture, would, of course, be lost on the general public. “' 1
But realizing four days later that he had struck too deeply, Ludwig
agreed to abandon the preface for some new “front-matter.” “You and
Eugene object to my ‘necessary preface’... It was born from a quite
justified mood of bitterness—but a mood that does no good. Hence can
the preface.” Instead, he would “use some of it in another place some
day. “ “ Two months later it appeared unchanged in Opinion. ss If the non-
Jewish world was unwilling to face criticism for its attitudes toward Jews
who would be Jewish unapologetically, without the mask of subtlety
placed over the truth, then Ludwig would place this critique within the
framework of fiction for them—while sharing his uncompromised voice
with those within his own community for whom the unvarnished truth
was a source of light upon the way.
For Ludwig understood that the character of an individual could be
no more easily transfomed than could the beliefs of a group. “A law will
not keep men sober, neither will a law or a series of laws make men keep
peace or establish economic justice.. . . Laws will do little or nothing to
ameliorate . . . great evils,” including anti-Semitism. To think otherwise,
he maintained, would result in little change. (“Has a law kept Sinclair
Lewis from becoming a sot?”) “As the years go on—I am now forty-
nine [s/c]—I feel more and more convinced that all forms of Utopianism,
including the present economic Utopianism [of the Soviets], are—forms
of Utopianism.” He warned, in emphasizing the divorce from reality
required by such visions, that while “God knows we need amelioration,”
such external pressures by a government “will not heal; it will barely
597
Page 617 - [see page image]
598
Ludwig Lewisohn
touch the fundamental and enduring ills to which man is prone.” “If
only economic determinism was a fact!” he had noted in his journal
two months earlier. “Change in economic technique, unless proceeding
from an inner change, merely give to old vices and follies and miseries of
men another form filled with the same substance.”Similarly with anti-
Semitism, which no amount of legislation or discrediting by exposure
and reason could cure. “These can be touched only by the acceptance of
timeless moral wisdom of individual conversion, Umkehr, teshuvah, if
you’ll permit me to use the classical Hebrew term,” he argued in his letter
to Upton Sinclair the day before abandoning the preface. “Laws do not
work; only the inner law of each soul.” 57 Through his fiction, he hoped
to reach this element among the unconverted who might otherwise set
aside his work if at first assaulted with the truth they already sought to
deny.
More and more, his writing now turned toward Jewish themes,
and when Stephen Wise came through Paris on his way to the World
Jewish Conference that summer, he took with him a strongly assertive
statement from Ludwig to be presented to those gathered in Geneva."
In the midst of compiling Creative America, Ludwig wrote Canfield
on August 18 that “I’m also thinking hard about the articles toward
the book on religion,” which was to summarize his current thinking
on a number of issues relating to Judaism. “Also now and then scenes
from The Altar in the Fields come to me,” 59 as they had over the past
two years with greater frequency as he felt the growing need to create
in a Jewish mode. Though Altar’s two protagonists are not Jews, the
book is filled with a Jewish perspective and a Jewish voice. In his
notebook entry for May 11, 1932, under the heading “On Religion
for Altar” Ludwig characterized his Protestant protagonists as afraid
to experience life fully, to let go of the dogmatic ideas and patterns
of behavior that were life-denying rather than life-affirming. Though
stultifying, they offered the safety of emotional control and constancy
of conception. “Christianity satisfies a great fear of life and nature,
especially Protestant Ch.,” he wrote in that day’s entry, contrasting it
with Judaism (and Confucianism), a way of life of “vitality, tenacity,
[of] facing the music,” seeking no scapegoat, no “Lamb of God that
taketh away sins of the world,” no “vicarious atonement.” Rather,
its imagery was that of the “Jew on Yom Kippur,” confronting the
world and himself as they are. And once again, to help those whom
he sought to critique, he created a Jewish rescuer, a psychiatrist modeled
in part after himself (a “fat Jew suffering homesickness for [the] Ger
man culture” he had abandoned in his youth), 60 whose critical stance
from outside the mainstream was offered up as the “Necessary Pref-
Page 618 - [see page image]
On the Edge
ace” for a this-worldly self-examination, to be accepted by the Gen
tiles or not.
“Art may bring a new righteousness which, by what it is, breaks the
old,” he had written in his notebook that April 25. By fall, with Creative
America consuming too much of his attention, but without recourse in
these precarious times, he was straining to get the novel under way, to
offer his antidote to the puritanism he judged to be “too much,” 61 and
to find in this creative act some spiritual solace of his own. Art was
“not compensatory for [the] inadequacy of the artist,” he had noted
elsewhere in his journal during these weeks, “but for [the] inadequacy
of the universe to [a] great soul.” 62
With Creative America completed in October, Ludwig and Thelma
once again left Paris for Vichy, 63 where, ironically, given its future in
volvement in the mass murdering of Jews, he wrote the “Introduction”
to Edmond Fleg’s Zionist work The Land of Promise. Fleg had long
enjoyed a position in the cultural life of France, and yet a deepening sense
of being “profoundly ill at ease” in this “Western Zion” had moved him
to visit Palestine and to witness the return, though he, like Ludwig, was
unable to commit his life to this upbuilding of the homeland. The lure of
the West could not be overcome, no matter how great the understanding
that its culture “is not ours. . . that the great renunciation must be
made” or Jews themselves would be guilty of a “heart that retards the
rebirth of the people in the land of Israel.” Ludwig recognized in Fleg
his own inability to make “the next step, the final step, and achieve that
return, that conversion, that teshuvah, on the brink of which Mr. Fleg
is eternally hovering.” Torn by the conflict often raging between the
familiar that could never be his, and the life that could, but for which he
would abandon all that he had known, Ludwig’s final words to Fleg were
addressed equally to himself as a salve for a profoundly discomforted
conscience. “And so this troubled pilgrim may well lead others to a
farther point than he himself had reached. Him indeed we shall always
see in pathetic guise.. . . But the love of that farther shore is at least
inexpungable from his heart, and the spirit of love may draw other men
nearer to the shore of his desire.’"'
But once back in Paris, and despite his repeated resolve to attend
to Jewish matters to the near exclusion of most others, Ludwig found
himself having to fight harder just to keep his head above the economic
tide. To his displeasure, he was being forced once again to write for the
very audience he knew to be diminishing as his concerns grew more
narrowly focused. And still, though he needed and would continue
to need this larger readership to increase his income, he could not
help but concentrate just as strenuously at keeping his focus upon
599
Page 619 - [see page image]
600
Ludwig Lewisohn
themes of personal, if broader, concern, themes that were, ultimately,
of consequence because they touched upon the survival and well-being
of his people, though such connections were far from obvious.
None of these broader themes had greater consequence for him, or
for what he was attempting for the sake of his fellow Jews, than the
insights of Otto Rank in his seminal work, Art and Artist. A deepening
friendship had developed between the two since their arrivals in Paris six
years earlier, both coming most immediately from Vienna, both refugees
from the cultural and professional strictures they had fled. They had
shared thoughts, psychoanalytic and artistic, and at one point Rank had
served as Thelma’s analyst. Ludwig had earlier recognized the potential
contribution in Rank’s ideas and, as he had for others in years past and
present, encouraged his friend to set these thoughts to paper while he
promoted them. Having first secured Alfred Knopf as Rank’s American
publisher, he had prevailed upon Titus to publish a chapter of Art and
Artist in This Quarter, hoping to build a market and following for his
friend’s ideas. With both elements of his campaign in place, Ludwig had
then set down his own precis in the “Introduction” that accompanied
Art and Artist's publication that October.
Frequent companions, Ludwig and Rank had undoubtedly discussed
the book during numerous walks in the Bois 65 or while seated at a
favorite cafe. As Rank’s biographer has noted, Ludwig “knew and
understood Rank better than any reader of his time.” Even their work
style was similar, Rank having finished most of the book during a month
long sitting. 66 Clearly, there was no one better for the task, nor as
appreciative. As Ludwig wrote in an announcement of its publication
appearing opposite the title page of Modern Education, Rank’s second
major work of that season, Art and Artist was “a revolution not only in
the history but in the criticism of all the arts, primarily of literature.. . .
No critic of art, no intelligent student of any of the arts can venture
to pursue his path unstirred by it; to the creative personality it brings
an unparalleled revelation of the ground-work of its character and
method.”'
For Ludwig, Rank offered an explanation for the course he had
chosen in larger, more objective and absolute terms than he himself could
provide. Previous analyses of the creative process, Ludwig maintained,
“had obviously no ‘reality’ nor any profound relationship to the living
experiences of any man.. . . They never uttered the secret.” Freud’s
findings had offered the first real revolution in human understanding,
but they, too, had proven too mechanistic, insisting upon “an unbroken
chain of causality, of which all the links were to be the same kind.”
If he himself suffered from an Oedipal complex, Ludwig posited, so,
Page 620 - [see page image]
On the Edge
too, did all men according to Freud’s analysis. How adequate, then, he
asked along with Rank, was it as an explanation for the artist’s drive
toward self-expression? “The pure Freudian teaching gradually assumed
a character of rigidity,” Ludwig observed. “Its brilliant beginnings were
followed by no adequate developments.”
Transcending “these precise limitations” of a mechanistic orienta
tion were Rank’s thoughts concerning the “proper place and function
[of] the psychology of the will.” In analyzing this human force, “he has
descended to the center from which all cultural phenomena radiate . . .
[and] grasped the realities of human processes.” It was here, in Rank’s
insights into Ludwig’s own character as an artist and his lifelong search
for some deeply meaningful role to play, that Ludwig had found reason
enough to thank his friend by lending his own words of approbation.
Anyone who has the creative experience will, like myself, read and ponder
with a kind of awe the revelations concerning the character of that experi
ence, especially in the opening and closing chapters of the work before us.
The free creative and self-representative character of all art, its tendency of
liberation from the biological, its self-justificatory and immortalizing urge,
its need of and yet resistance to the collective culture of its age, the artist’s
conflict with the dualism of creativity and experience, his need of Muse and
mate and the difficulty of combining the two, his resistance to his art itself,
his desire for fame and his fear of being depersonalized by that essentially
myth-making process—all these explanations and revelations by Dr. Rank
I cannot conscientiously call otherwise than literally epoch-making.
So too, for Ludwig, was Rank’s notion of the progress of humanity
itself, “the development of creature to self-conscious creator. . . the
process whereby art gradually becomes differentiated from religion and
tends finally to take religion’s place.” Raising art above “that supremely
silly and vicious notion” which placed it “a little below flirting, a little—
by courtesy—above baseball,” Rank judged it “an organic portion of
that whole process and activity by virtue of which man is human.” Most
importantly for Ludwig’s sense of himself as a writer and critic with a
Jewish mission, he found in Rank justification for the role he had chosen
to play. “In a manner basic to myth and religion, to all human psychol
ogy, to the entire civilizatory process,” Ludwig emphasized in concluding
his summary of Rank’s contribution to human understanding, was the
artist’s “prophetic function and will.” 68
It was in the expression of this role, years earlier spoken of by him as
belonging to the poet’s voice, that Ludwig felt compelled that fall of 1932
to pursue a series of social and political analyses which he believed were
crucial to correcting the present course of events throughout Europe
and America, the perceived end of which would be an unprecedented
601
Page 621 - [see page image]
602
Ludwig Lewisohn
degree of Jewish suffering. Though he and Thelma had been ill and had
experienced “a rather gloomy period . . . this particular material, which
I sincerely think is needed, insisted on organizing itself in a sort of inner
fire.” He assured his editor at Harpers, Lee Hartman, that his motivation
was, in fact, “civilizatory” and not financial, having just turned down
a lucrative magazine offer “cooked up” by Bradley. “I came home and
turned over the notions for the articles and looked at the magazine in
question and a feeling of both physical nausea—literally, mind you—and
spiritual discomfort came over me and I was nearly ill.”
Completing the first of the projected six essays the day before
sending his note to Harpers on October 27. he set down in brief outline
“the scheme” of what he was tentatively titling Toward Religion. As with
so much of his work, it had been germinating for some time, and had now
emerged full-blown upon the stack of blank pages before him. Within
two months, the entire work, including the “Introduction,” would be
finished.
Having in the article [“A Bourgeois Takes His Stand”] sent herewith defined
the type that seems to have created what we know as civilization, I proceed
in article two to criticize the chief modern superstition, namely that the
new means have changed the ends, by which this type is in danger of
losing leadership. Article three takes up the essential unchanged character
of man, an animal which must choose among his desires and whose reflexes
can demonstrably not be conditioned in the long run, who—Chapter IV—
creates civilization out of a curious transcendence of his biological urges,
who, from caveman and tattooing savage, expresses this transcendence in
art, V—and who cannot live a rational life unless—VI—he makes his typical
fate, as he has always done in the past, significant through religion.
Ludwig felt confident that he and Harpers shared similar concerns
and that, “for reasons needless to explain,” they would publish his
thoughts in the coming year. 69 But when the fifth essay had been com
pleted and no reaction to the four previous submissions had yet reached
him, Ludwig wrote Hartman that he was “rheumatic and dour and not
exactly cheered by the silence with which all hands treat me.” 70 Having
still received no response by year’s end, Ludwig, remaining confident in
Harpers’ acceptance of this latest effort, slightly reshaped the book by
eliminating one of the essays, substituting in its place an “Introduction”
to the work, which he then sent together with the final “Plan for ... a
‘Book for this Age.’
In mid-January 1933, Canfield’s first response to the project arrived
in Paris. He had, in fact, not read any of the essays until the work
had been completed. “Together,” he told Ludwig, “they make a very
impressive whole and enable me to visualize the book much better
Page 622 - [see page image]
On the Edge
than if I had read the chapters separately at different times.” Canfield
complimented Ludwig further by asserting that “no one else could . . .
have stated a view. . . which is much needed in this day” as he had,
having “succeeded in presenting the fundamental faith of the civilized
mind with a new freshness.” Here, Canfield assured Ludwig, was “a
really fine document which should help and reassure a great many people
who have been carried away by half-baked ideas because of their being
thought modern and up-to-date.” Saxton had already sailed for Europe,
and would soon visit to discuss their joint concerns about this and
other matters. 72
Yet on the same day, Canfield sent a message to Saxton of a far less
positive nature. “I feel slightly hypocritical because of writing to him
with some enthusiasm,” he admitted to Saxton. “As a matter of fact, the
stuff seems to me, as it did to Lee, rather long-winded and somewhat of
a rehash of things he has said before in other books.” Despite this joint
assessment, Canfield felt compelled to publish the book for the sake of
maintaining a workable relationship with his author, whose other books
continued to create income for the company. “As there is no earthly
chance of deflecting Lewisohn’s desire to have the material published,
it seemed to me best to accept it with good grace.” Yet the planned
schedule of publication for Ludwig’s next several books, purposefully
kept from him, would project Toward Religion’s release into June 1934
at the earliest, seeing Creative America and the still unwritten “long
novel” preceding it in the fall of 1933 and January 1934, respectively.
But was it, in fact, a “rehash”? “There are some fine passages,”
Canfield added in a marginal note to Saxton as he reconsidered his
letter before sending it on. 73 Perhaps he had not been quite fair enough
in assessing Ludwig’s ideas. Since his years in Charleston confronting
the underside of traditional American society, Ludwig’s thoughts had
been evolving. Like most others who tried to understand their world
and find solutions to its ills, he had seen different times create different
needs. Rather than become fixed in a single, restrictive set of ideas, he
had constantly reevaluated his perceptions, offering correctives to set a
more humane and rational course for himself, the people with whom he
had come to identify, and the larger world beyond them.
Toward Religion contained many thoughts previously expressed.
Anyone writing as often as Ludwig would, as a matter of course, be
guilty of repetition. But there was much that was new among these
“fine passages.” Drawing together his thoughts from the perspective of
a middle-aged man in a world spinning rapidly out of focus and toward
the breakup of all that his sense of reason and civility, in its deepest
sense, had valued as timeless and immutable, Ludwig desperately hoped
603
Page 623 - [see page image]
604
Ludwig Lewisohn
to refocus his readers’ attention upon the “freedom toward personality,
research, thought, the ultimate freedom which is essential to progress in
the only true meaning of that abused word, the freedom of mind that
will keep a man from plunging into the menacing mass barbarisms of
either the right or the left.”
Having condemned the values of middle-class America throughout
his socialist-leaning years, he now sought to find something worth retain
ing from that imperfect way of life which could, nonetheless, contribute
to the preservation of a civilized order. “The spiritual and preserva
tive uses of the institution of private property, limited if necessary and
curbed to below the predatory level, have not been sufficiently thought
upon, especially in America.” Rather than the hoarding of wealth to
the detriment of others, some measure of one’s own place, inviolate,
was indeed necessary if individuals were to “partake of the divine in the
life of man.” Only here could the “household gods,” those sacred ele
ments of one’s uniqueness, reside and flourish and give sustenance. “The
memoried house is necessary for privacy, dignity, disinterestedness and
disinterestedness is necessary for the preservation of human freedom.”
There was, Ludwig wished to emphasize, nothing new in this “central
position” now occupied by “the bourgeois [who] wrongs himself and
society as a whole by any abandonment” of it. The growth of capitalism
and industrialization had changed only the context, not “the eternal
religious property-holding freeman of the ages” with whom Ludwig
had come to share a common cause against the oppression of fascist
and Stalinist alike. This bourgeois freeman, as Ludwig was quick to
point out, held the last possible hope against the rising tide of tyranny
and all that would destroy the “humane life.”
In his hands is the civilization which begins with Isaiah and Plato, a civiliza
tion which the machine has not essentially changed. He and his work and
his spirit are more necessary than ever. For he is the only man left in view
who has preserved that human dignity that will not punch an alien master’s
time-clock, either of the spirit or of the body, be that master called king or
oligarch or commissar of the people. He is the only man left who would
rather flee with his kindred and family to waste lands and wring a scanty
living from a narrow and infertile plot of earth in spiritual freedom and
disinterestedness, as he probably did at the beginning of those other Dark
Ages of history, than to consent to a despair that would destroy human
civilization. On these qualities and on this function of his he may take
his stand. 74
If he could conceive of flight into poverty to preserve spiritual
freedom as the cornerstone of civilization, rather than succumb to “The
Fallacy of Progress” (as the proposed book’s second chapter would be
Page 624 - [see page image]
On the Edge
titled), 75 it was, as well, a vision of his own increasingly more desperate
circumstance, in part the result of just such a decision rather than surren
dering to an “alien master,” judicial or commercial. Worsening times had
now made these idealized sacrifices more threatening. Canfield’s letter
of December 16,1932, only confirmed earlier hints for Ludwig. “At the
moment,” wrote Canfield, “the picture does not look any too good from
our point of view.” 76 The latest accounting of Ludwig’s indebtedness
to Harpers, which Canfield did not pass along to him, assigning this
task instead to Saxton during his upcoming visit, had exceeded seventy-
five hundred dollars—a combination of advances against royalties on
yet unpublished work, legal fees, and monthly settlement payments to
Mary. 77 It was, given the period, an almost insurmountable debt. Yet
Canfield, with perhaps a wry smile, communicated his confidence in
Ludwig’s “cooperation and talent” to greatly reduce “the debit balance.”
The purpose of the letter, he assured Ludwig, was not “to disturb you
but to urge that you make plans to give us the manuscript of a full
length novel in time for autumn publication.” As a Christmas gift,
Canfield was sending a copy of The Temptations of St. Anthony, a
reminder that Ludwig not be driven off course by the pursuit of success
or family, but rather tend to the ascetic, monastic life in fulfillment
of his obligations—as St. Anthony had himself once overcome the evil
hosts tempting him. Ludwig could not have been amused, knowing his
situation well and the implications of the gift as a means of emphasizing
it—a means that must have been offensive, if only through Canfield’s
insensitivity.
“You have probably been worrying about the situation a little your
self,” Canfield had remarked in that same letter. ’ Seeking to prod his
author to greater productivity, he purposefully, and reprehensibly, failed
to inform Ludwig that more than a third of the debt had already been
absorbed by Harpers, and that the remainder would be covered by the
sales of only thirteen thousand copies of his next novel, about half as
many as Escott had sold, several thousand less than either Shylock or
Mid-Channel, and a mere 20 percent of Island's total. Furthermore,
these figures of indebtedness did not include projected income from This
People or Creative America J 9
Ludwig, of course, was anything but cheered by the coming year’s
prospects. Though he and Thelma could ill afford to go south that winter
as they had by now become accustomed, the state of their physical
and emotional health under conditions domestic and external seemed
to leave them little choice. On December 30, he wrote Hartman from
Nice, asking that all six essays be serialized in Harper’s prior to their
publication as a book—even if he could pay for only five. “I’d like the
605
Page 625 - [see page image]
606
Ludwig Lewisohn
message to get across,” Ludwig asserted to his editor, though the need
for additional income was undoubtedly of equal weight.'
After two weeks in Nice, Ludwig wrote Canfield a long, “important
and upon the whole cheerless” letter, his “last active gesture this year.”
They were now “desperately poor.” Thelma had undergone surgery in
September (possibly an abortion that had resulted from a brief affair
with another man), 81 and was in need of warmth and a period of
“freedom from household cares” if her recovery was to be complete.
Ludwig himself had been ill for some time now, “perhaps more in
mind than in body,” and had hoped that his stay amidst the sunshine
and old friends (including “the Huddlestons and the Padraic Colums
and other charming people”) 82 would prove recuperative. Yet nothing
had been able to mitigate “the moral defeat involved for me in your
compromising the Midchannel trial.. . . My being forced to pay a tribute
is undermining my health and courage to live.” It was, for Ludwig, a
pure “example of that triumph of moral evil, of which I speak in my
book.” The “slothful hearts and the moral malice of men,” and not
the “economic motives” involved, had proven to be the most troubling
aspects of this continuing affair. Nor had any of his friends or admirers
in the States extended “one true effort to help me.” Of what use were
“protestations of friendship . . . and all the fanfares of adulation?” he
asked Canfield, reminding him that “as my publisher you will have to
reckon with the true state of affairs,” a clear reference to the indebtedness
Ludwig held to be partially the fault of Harpers’ unfavorable settlement
with Mary.
Doing all that he could to remain financially in control of his life,
Ludwig began accepting lecture engagements that fall and winter (he
had spoken before the American Club in Paris shortly before leaving for
Nice) 83 and arranging for additional translations of his works through
Bradley’s agency (whose latest inquiry regarding the rights to Island had
been sent to Ludwig the day before this letter to Canfield).'" “A gleam
of light came day before yesterday,” he added amid the gloom of this
year-end message to Canfield. Hartman had promised to take some of
the essays for Harper’s, and had expressed what Ludwig interpreted
as a desire to publish the whole group if financially possible (though
given Hartman’s assessment of their quality to Canfield, this may have
been a gross misreading on Ludwig’s part). Ludwig assured Canfield
that this serialization would provide an adequate substitution for the
advancement on Toward Religion, needed, in part, because of Thelma’s
still unpaid medical expenses. In the interim, however, he would require
a thousand-dollar advance “as soon as possible after the receipt of this
letter,” and an additional two thousand once the book was accepted,
Page 626 - [see page image]
607
On the Edge
“or I go under.” In return, he would carefully read the proofs for This
People, and, “not lacking in industry. . . slowly go at my long novel
An Altar in the Fields.” If all went according to plan—advances on
serialization of the essays, continued royalties, the sale of translation
rights, and occasional paid lectures—“I ought at least be able to keep
my diminished head even in bad times above water." 1 '
But Ludwig’s life had never gone according to plan. In the coming
months, Hartman would use but two of the six essays, 86 while only
one of the remaining four would ever appear in print, sold to Scribner’s
for publication late that new year, the income retained by Harpers to
partially balance Ludwig’s indebtedness. 87 Toward Religion would not
be published until 1934, with the rapid change of events quickly dating
much of its content and necessitating extensive rewriting. The sunshine
of Nice would itself quickly fade upon their return to the realities of
Paris life and the larger world’s demands, while the once bright light of
their relationship would continue to darken slowly, adding to their sense
of dissolution in a year that was to mark a turning point for everyone’s
world. “Think well, are you to abandon / The heart you live to save,”
Ludwig had written in a song he had composed for Thelma that year, a
plea that she not add to the growing shadow. Only work and the coming
fulfillment of a long-held dream were to keep alive his “fire / Beyond the
dusty grave."*'
Page 627 - [see page image]
608
26
Pagan Revolt
“How good of you that you hope the new Secretary of State will
prove more accessible,” Ludwig wrote Stephen Wise on January 7,1933.
Wise’s note of December 27 had lent some encouragement in the opening
days of the new year. 1 Though recent political differences had estranged
Wise from Franklin Roosevelt, old alliances forged during FDR’s days
in New York State politics had not been severed. As the months passed
and the new administration in Washington pressed on with its reforms,
Wise’s assessment grew more favorable toward his old friend and ally.
And though he would refuse the general invitation to visit FDR at any
time he wished, Wise’s wounds would sufficiently heal to enable him to
accept a personal invitation extended to him by the president in January
1936. Thereafter, Wise would become a loyal and outspoken supporter
of Roosevelt until his death, despite questionable decisions regarding the
fate of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe. 2
This continuing relationship between Wise and FDR was, ultimately,
to have a positive effect upon Ludwig’s own struggle to return to the
States. “Being imprisoned in France, with all due appreciation of the
French, has been a very hard thing to bear,” Ludwig confessed to
Wise that January. “But this is not all,” he added, speaking of the
painful isolation he now felt, so many of his friends from Paris having
returned to America together with most of the now repatriated colony.
If there was little income to be found back home, there was even less in
France, and with the dollar now devalued against the French franc, the
absurdly inexpensive lifestyle of the American expatriate had become
Page 628 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
a thing of memory forever. “I have publishers in America and friends
and admirers,” he reminded Wise, though they seemed to Ludwig to
have abandoned him at this moment of emotional distress. Only Wise
appeared steadfast. “You are the only one who truly remembers, who
truly thinks of me and mine.. . . You can imagine how I feel about that
and what, in such a world, it means." '
Ludwig’s vision of the future was the darkest it had been in many
years. Mounting financial obligations, the inconclusive state of affairs
with Mary and their continuing inability to return to the States, Thelma’s
incomplete recovery and its possible impact on their plans for a child,
the lack of a contract for Toward Religion, and the worsening crisis
in Germany had each shared in darkening his world. Even “the sun
is stingier here this year than we have ever known it to be,” he wrote
Bradley on January 5 from Nice, despite news of a possible Italian edition
of Island. Ludwig was anxious to start work on Altar, but would not
again work without a prior contract. He needed to see Saxton when
he reached France, but “I can’t possibly spare the R/R fare,” he told
Bradley. Saxton would have to “come down here for a visit. . . [as] an
interview is very necessary before I begin the long novel.”'*
Ludwig sent a similar message that day to Hamish Hamilton, Harp
ers’ representative in London, repeating his need to see Saxton in Nice,
but only after Saxton had stopped in London and found a publisher
for The Golden Vase, This People, and Toward Religion. Right of first
refusal on the “very long novel” would be included “if he takes the
three.” Ludwig had previously raised this issue with Hamilton, and
in his desperate state, was now losing patience. Given his success on
the Continent, he was puzzled as to why no outlet in Britain had been
found. While Bradley had negotiated these other arrangements, Ludwig
preferred to work through Harpers for the British rights. Nor did he
wish to continue with Thornton Butterworth, publisher of Shylock, The
Defeated, and Escott. “Butterworth was all right for a while,” he told
Hamilton. “But he’s too ignorant to handle my books and evidently
doesn’t want to.” Nor did Hamilton.
I’ve gently called this matter to your attention before. You’ve hidden your
self in a cloud of silence—a perfect cloud. . . . I’m now—tell Eugene—on
this matter on a mild rampage. During the past worst year in history I
have sold rights and have had books appear and pay me some money in
Germany, France (3) including my play (!), Sweden and Denmark. There’s
no use telling me I can’t make equally good arrangements for the British
Empire. Have Cape and Gollancz and Allan Lane and others been seriously
approached? ... I certainly, by God, use the language Shakespeare wrote
and I expect a serious effort to be made. 5
609
Page 629 - [see page image]
610
Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig’s tone remained equally strident when he wrote Canfield
two days later that the debts he had spoken of were, in fact, not debts
at all but advances for work already completed, from which they would
both gain financially in time. “These advances are not debits. I’ve sold
you certain properties and you’ve made a legitimate prepayment. That’s
not debt. We are square. More than! For each book will in time earn me
more.” Arguing that he was “NOT in debt,” the minimum advance of
two thousand dollars, the “sine qua non of my doing this novel now,”
appeared reasonable to him. This would “square” them, he insisted,
once payment on Altar had been made. “I know that money is tight and
you can give me the money in convenient ways,” he graciously conceded,
dealing as though from a position of strength. “On no other conception
of the situation can I go on. This is quite final.... I have enough to bear
without artificial and trumped up miseries.” 6
A long letter to Hamilton on the twelfth, its contents to be released
to Saxton, laid out Ludwig’s conditions for seeking a British publisher—
that he not be presented solely as a novelist (“this was Butterworth’s
error”), but rather “as a literary person who writes in a certain way
and whose works cohere according to certain principles; that he be
represented by a publisher “who is interested and will gamble a little
on my total quality and literary personality”; that this publisher “begin
by handling a selection from my works with profound conviction,” such
that critics, and not reviewers, would bring out “a study or two in
prominent places” (as Ludwig had recently discovered in conversation
with H. G. Wells, “He esteems me highly; he has recently been reading
over Expression in America”); and last, that a special appeal be made to
Britain’s Jewish audience, which “has never been properly made.” He
advised beginning this latter campaign with Toward Religion, suggesting
that it be advertised as “the most significant book of its kind in the
English language since Zangwill’s Dreamers of the Ghetto. ” Properly
presented to a British publisher, with evidence from sales and the critics
in the States and on the Continent, “it will dawn on him . . . with such
force . . . [that] my day in England is bound to come. Why not let that
day be now and reap the benefit. 1 "'
Ludwig’s first direct contact with Saxton came on the sixteenth,
when he responded to Saxton’s letter by explaining, as he had to Can-
field, that he was, “however poor and oppressed, NOT in debt.” With
This People scheduled for publication on March 8, he suggested that
Toward Religion be brought out in September along with Creative
America, “the All-American Xmas book indispensable to every Ameri
can home . . . for Xmas 1933.” 8 Canfield, of course, was less sanguine
about Ludwig’s royalties matching his advances, and urged a quick
Page 630 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
completion for Altar, “in order to avoid a situation which would become
impossible to work out.” To assist Ludwig, he had asked Hartman to
send payment of five hundred dollars for the two chapters to be serialized
in Harper’s. But Canfield wanted Ludwig to know that in these difficult
times, everyone had to tighten their belts and be more accountable for the
dollars they earned. “Publishers, as well as everyone else in this country,
are being pretty severely pinched, and everyone has to make rigid and
uncomfortable economies in order to keep the budget balanced.” 9
Thelma’s indisposition that winter was mild enough to allow her to
present a concert of French, English, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and
African-American songs on January 22. Billed as the “Grand Soiree
de Gala d’Art Juif,” its profits were to go to the unemployed Jews of
Nice. “Mme. Ludwig Lewisohn, Thelma Spear” was to be accompanied
by violin, piano, a tenor, and a company of three dancers who would
perform in classic Hasidic style. 1 A week later, Ludwig wrote Saxton
of their intention to return to Paris by February 8. “Thelma is not at all
well and needs to be near her doctor.” Ludwig suspected the cause,
but chose not to speak of it, afraid to betray “a hope (pretty sure)
which I daren’t yet express." 1 Ludwig’s suspicions would be confirmed
the next day. Thelma was pregnant, 1 -’ and Ludwig was beside himself
with joy at the fulfillment of this long-held wish. Not until a week
later did he finally return to the business of negotiating with Harpers,
sending Canfield an almost verbatim copy of the financial assessment
and publishing schedule he had sent Saxton several weeks earlier. '
Final agreement on terms for income and repayment were reached with
Harpers the following week as Ludwig and Saxton hammered out terms
amenable to both parties. While assuring a proper reward for his labors
as an author, the contract was clearly designed to ensure against further
losses for Harpers. And when Scribner’s bought a chapter of Toward
Religion in May, Canfield informed Ludwig that, “in accordance with
the agreement,” the money was “being applied against the advances we
have made.” 14
Ludwig was pleased at the end of February when a copy of the
advertisement for This People reached him. “It helps to show me that all
is not dark and stagnant.” Thelma’s nausea was keeping them at home
each night now, he told Canfield, and for entertainment they would
“read enormous quantities.” Thelma had just finished rereading Tom
Jones and a work of Nietzsche’s, having, like Ludwig, a preference for
the older classics. Yet some of the new writers’ works were “appreciated
now and then; a fresh book, a new book in the contemporary English
language is mighty refreshing just the same.” He thanked Canfield for
the Aldous Huxley he promised to send, and intimated that this same
611
Page 631 - [see page image]
612
Ludwig Lewisohn
attitude could be extended to additional volumes he might choose to
favor them with.
Along with his note, Ludwig sent a circular letter regarding This
People which he hoped Harpers would send to all the rabbis in America,
and to the memberships of the American Jewish Congress and the major
Zionist groups in the States. “The novel goes sturdily on,” he noted in
closing, the first “Book” having been completed six days earlier. The
next, however, would take nearly two months to finish, and the third
almost five, as events in Germany soon began to absorb more of his
time and concern than ever before. In the coming months, a half dozen
or more journal articles would appear, focusing upon the Nazi program
and its particular interest in the Jews. 15
Ludwig’s opening passage in This People, that “I will multiply thy
seed as the stars of the heavens” (Gen. 22:17), rang with a particularly
bittersweet resonance when the first copies reached him that March.
How sadly prophetic the closing story must have seemed to Ludwig as
he reread his legend of exile and return, this tale of his people’s eternal
wandering and inevitable displacement from wherever they might settle.
However good their temporary fortunes, they would inevitably be made
to weep over their fate “By the Waters of Babylon,” and move on. Once
more they were being forced to face “the hardships of that road which the
exiles took” in their millennial journey “home to their land,” however
distant and dreamlike that point of arrival had seemed. But on this
occasion, Ludwig feared, far fewer would survive to sing the ancient
“Song of Ascents,” promised through centuries of prayer as the hope of
a return to the holy mount in Jerusalem. There seemed little certainty
that their “mouth [would] be filled with laughter” as they beheld the
Zion of their dreams."
If the critics of This People viewed the book as “propaganda,” born
of “racial preoccupation,” as the New York Times pronounced it, 17 or
simply dismissed it because of the “fundamentalist assumptions about
life” upon which it was based, as did Granville Hicks in the Nation,"
Ludwig was certain that conditions in Germany were already proving
the wisdom of his concerns. As he told Huddleston on March 26,
Though I’m working at my novel you can readily imagine that I’m deeply
troubled by the situation in Germany, especially since I know with all due
gratitude for American and British and French sympathies and protests,
that the good old liberal panaceas will not work and that our people in
Germany, with whom I suffer in every nerve at every moment, incurred
their share of the tragic guilt by not ten years ago, at least, withdrawing to
their [own] gymnasia, [saying] we will not, God forbid, contaminate your
spiritual life, if—rightly or wrongly—you feel it to be a contamination.
Page 632 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
As he had earlier abandoned the socialist visions of his youth in the
face of growing Soviet terror, so now had he lost faith even in the
liberal pronouncements of those whom he was convinced would stand
by and do little more than condemn and wring their own hands in the
face of this growing Nazi persecution, as if to wash away the guilt of
inaction. If the reviewers of This People could critique his work because
of its ethnic focus, such criticism was to be expected and, therefore,
to be judged of little moment. What else should he have anticipated,
having adopted a none too opaque separatism? “Our best and noblest
serve you in vain instead of serving their own,” he continued in his
analysis, even to so close a non-Jewish friend as Huddleston. Ludwig
knew, through scarring personal experience, just how self-defeating the
assimilationists’ path was. He had spent far too much of his life in this
same vain effort, though unlike most of his German-Jewish peers, he had
awakened earlier to the reality of the Jews’ true position in the world.
If, as Ludwig explained to Huddleston, “Bruno Walter hung on to his
pretended 100% Deutschtum and even, I fear, a Lutheran protective
baptismal certificate until he was thrown out with every circumstance
of contempt and derision,” he himself would not share this same fate.
There would be no masking nor mistaking his identity after years of
work in Jewish fields, nor any further misappropriation of time, talent,
or energy.
Even Up Stream, once his most powerful and widely recognized
statement of a personal Kulturkampf, had lost its place of importance
for him. “I no longer like Up Stream,” he confessed to Huddleston;
“it has no essential intellectual stamina. It stops at every threshold.. . .
How little these things matter!""' All willingness to pull punches had
dissipated in the years since he had laid down this earlier challenge. He
would no longer hide his identity as he had a dozen years earlier, nor
expend himself over work unconnected to the larger and more dangerous
issues of the day.
“Don’t forget that political events—including the White Terror on
Germany—make Toward Religion more actual every hour,” he insisted
to Canfield on March 29. 20 A week later, in an agitated state concerning
This People's possible role in mitigating these conditions, he wrote once
more to Canfield complaining of its apparent lack of exposure. It had
been out for weeks now, and none of his friends had been heard from.
Had they been sent copies, as requested? Had the American rabbinate
been contacted? “It’s not too late. It’s a crucial book at so crucial a
moment!” The times militated against delay of any kind. He had just
sent an article concerning the German situation to the Nation in response
to Ernest Gruening’s “urgent request yesterday.” It was certain to appear
613
Page 633 - [see page image]
614
Ludwig Lewisohn
shortly. “Written in blood, it is the piece justificatine dictated by history
itself of This People.”
There was much more about events that he wanted to say, much
more that he knew of than many others who were addressing “the
German horrors.” And he was freer to express his thoughts and to
communicate information than those who were on the scene. “I am
in a better position than American correspondents in Germany, whose
mail is photographed and whose telephone wires are tapped. I have
direct information and testimony through the Saar and through other
channels,” including his old literary associates Gerhart Hauptmann,
who would ultimately join the Nazis; Thomas Mann, who would soon
condemn them, but with a mixed response to the Jews’ plight; and
Ludwig’s cousin Arthur Eloesser, who would die in exile in Zurich in
February 1938. Only Eloesser, however, would ask that his words be
repeated. “You can tell anyone who asks what is going on here.... It is
a dangerous thing . . . [to] tell the real truth for it is regarded as treason
and punishable by law, very severely.. . . The Spanish Inquisition has
nothing on this crowd.” Ludwig hoped to transmit this information, to
make certain that his cousin had not risked his life in vain. He hoped,
as well, to put the news and the threat into their context, to give some
understanding as to why such phenomena were occurring, “knowfing]
Germany and German psychology like the back of my hand.” These he
would present calmly. “I won’t go atrocity-mongering,” he promised.
“That’s no good.” Instead, he would clearly delineate the problem in as
forceful a presentation as this demeanor would allow. “America ought
to know what is really going on,” he insisted to Canfield that April 5. 21
Nor did he find himself constrained by the organizational politics
that fiercely raged at that moment between Jewish groups in Germany
and in the States over the most effective response. There were those
who failed to see the uniqueness of the situation, believing that quiet
diplomacy, either between Jewish communal leaders in Germany and
the Nazi regime, or in a Washington behind-the-scenes urging of the
State Department and the president, would be sufficient to stem the
flow of civil disabilities and populist rage. Few were calling for an all-
out counterattack on Hitler’s designs. Among them was Stephen Wise,
whose awareness of the Nazis’ intent dated back several years and
whose fears were raised by the anti-Semitism already flowing in many
countries long before Hitler’s assumption of power. If German-Jewish
leaders called for silence, and the American Jewish Committee and the
B’nai B’rith sent representatives to Washington, Wise organized and,
against their strenuous objections, held the first public rally condemning
Germany’s actions on March 27, 1933, in New York’s Madison Square
Page 634 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
Garden. Before twenty-two thousand people, he declared that “the time
for caution and prudence is past. We speak up like men. How can we
ask our Christian friends [sharing the speaker’s rostrum that day] to
lift their voices in protest against the wrongs suffered by Jews if we
keep silent?” Like Ludwig, Wise understood that “what is happening
in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth
unless it is challenged and rebuked. It is not the German Jews who are
being attacked. It is the Jews.” 22 Years later, Wise’s daughter recalled
the atmosphere in which the few, like her father and Ludwig, had
to maneuver as they fought to gain assistance for their fellow Jews
endangered by hate, fear, and indifference.
I don’t think anybody looking back can realize the extent to which these few
men were isolated, or how utterly anti-Semitic and dishonorable the State
Department was, or how fearful Jews were here, afraid of stirring up trouble
which might affect their position. Nor was there any apparatus for breaking
through to reach the public.. . . My father was surrounded by fear, by the
accommodation of the Western world to Hitler in hopes of placating him,
and by isolationism in America. Also there was the feeling that the Jews
would cause a world war, plus a great deal of open anti-Semitism spread by
Father Coughlin and many others. Walls of loneliness surrounded the few
Jews who spoke and tried to act. A sense of impotence was pervasive. 23
Ludwig was well aware of this “sense of impotence,” and hoped
somehow to breach it. By April 10 he had sent a second article, “an
analysis of Hitlerism as group-pathology,” on its way to the Nation,
hoping it would elicit widening concern and support in America. “I do
my best here,” he lamented to Stephen Wise, feeling isolated from even
those few who were joining their efforts, as they had two weeks earlier in
New York. All one does is tragically inadequate.” Perhaps because of his
proximity, he thought he might have some measured success in pressing
his non-Jewish German friends into openly attacking the new regime,
“for I think it is supremely shameful that no German voice has been
raised!” Unaware of their true feelings, he was urging Hauptmann and
Mann to enter the arena, though he did know of the latter’s precarious
situation at that moment. In Paris on a lecture tour, “Thomas and Katya
Mann [had] dined with us less than six weeks ago; they were afraid to
go; they did flee to Lugano,” he informed Wise. Now, perhaps, Mann
could openly condemn his attackers. “He owes it to me to speak out,” as
he did to those “certain principles that are eternal,” he had declared that
night. :i To defend them, Mann had told Ludwig, he would “protest by
emigrating since you cannot protest in the presence of overwhelmingly
brutal force.” In so doing, he saw himself as upholding the “minima
of a humane civilization that must not be called into question,” those
615
Page 635 - [see page image]
616
Ludwig Lewisohn
principles “above fashion and above time” which the Nazis “scorn and
deny.” If he were to remain in Germany under “an enforced silence, I
would seem to be assenting to that denial." -'
After Mann adopted so strong a stance, Ludwig had every reason
to expect him to rise to the Jews’ defense. But Ludwig’s request to
Mann of April 7, urging, insisting that he speak out about conditions
in Germany, 26 would receive an unexpectedly worded reaction filled
with the fear and tension of the moment, and with the ambivalence
Mann himself felt concerning the fate of the Jews. “What is all this?”
Mann asked in his diary at the beginning of April, attempting to un
derstand the catastrophic events that had overtaken his homeland, and
the acquiescence or approval of the majority of his countrymen. “Fear?
Forced acts of submission? Or a wave of feeling that has overwhelmed
everyone inside the country and is stronger than the forces of human
ity or reason?” Reports reaching him in Switzerland spoke of endless
confusion, “despite the nationalistic, anti-Jewish festivities and all the
banners.” Believing Hitler “a mere puppet... in a fairly desperate state
of mind,” he predicted that a military takeover was imminent, with
order soon to be restored. He was being cautious, nonetheless, knowing
that certain elements still in power would arrest him upon his return, as
he had spoken against them over the last few years. Though somewhat
embarrassed, he would for the moment say nothing against “the truly
swinish methods by which this ‘people’s movement’ won its victory.. . .
So far as I am concerned, a cautious, somewhat shamefaced silence must
be maintained.
Mann was relieved to learn the following day, April 3, that his
children had “made their escape at the last moment, for today travel
restrictions were put into effect all over the country. “ ’' Yet his misguided
hope of a quick reversal of power in Germany continued for several
more days. On the fifth, he could still believe that “these people are
bound to fall.. . . The dictatorship is in impossible hands.. . . Hitler’s
gang cannot fulfill its promises.” Holding “the masses in thrall” by
celebration and rally would run its course. So, too, would “the fuss over
the Jews . . . subside in the face of indignant protests from outside.” If
not immediately, then soon. 29
But by the seventh, the day Ludwig wrote to him, Mann’s remain
ing hope seemed to have slipped from his tightening grasp. News had
reached him that day that “in Germany they are beginning to clamp
down on intellectuals; not only the Jews, but all those suspected of
being politically untrustworthy and opposed to the regime.” House
searches were now being conducted, and “fresh anxiety” had replaced
what little optimism had been retained in the face of mounting reality. 30
Page 636 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
When Ludwig’s letter arrived the following day, it was greeted by a
radical change in his perception of the situation, “my pessimistic belief
in the irreversibility of all this,” as he characterized it, including his new
understanding of “the disenfranchisement of the Jews.” He now saw
Hitler’s position as firmly entrenched, part of a “phenomenon of world
psychological processes” tending toward dictatorship, permanently. “It
is my private belief that it is here to stay.. . . That the betrayed and
besotted people will rise up in ‘civil war’ and sweep it all away is
beyond my hope.” In this context, Ludwig’s request, while understand
able, appeared to Mann as unreasonable and naive. No one could be
expected to so endanger life and property. As he noted in his diary that
Saturday, April 8, “Urgent letter from Lewisohn in Paris about the brutal
treatment accorded the Jews in Germany. Demands some explanation
for the American people, who have turned against all Germans and are
once more disposed to believe all the old wartime propaganda. A foolish
demand, stemming from ignorance of the terrible significance, ferocity,
and frenzy of what is taking place in Germany, and of the consequences
that would follow even the mildest show of dissent." 1 '
Mann’s nerves continued to unravel in the intervening days be
tween his receipt of Ludwig’s appeal and his response. “The relaxation
I felt here the first days seems to have vanished. My nerves are again
strained, overwrought.. . . One should expect a general uprising in the
near future, prompted by rage and despair. I wish I could believe it,” he
noted on the ninth. 32 Yet, if he was despondent over his country’s fate
and the personal loss to himself and his family, he remained strangely
ambivalent toward the consequences befalling the Jews of Germany.
However unpleasant, the removal of non-German elements from the
culture and society of his country would, he believed, have a positive
effect in the end.
For all that, might not something deeply significant and revolutionary
be taking place in Germany?... It is no calamity after all that Alfred
Kerr’s brazen and poisonous Jewish-style imitation of Nietzsche is now
suppressed, or that the domination of the legal system by Jews has been
ended. Secret, disquieting, persistent musings. Come what may, much will
remain that in a higher sense is repellent, base, and un-German. But I am
beginning to suspect that in spite of everything this process is one of those
that have two sides to them. 33
Not until 1936 would Mann truly be forced into exile. Until then,
it would be voluntary. Hitler hoped that Mann, as Germany’s most im
portant literary figure, would return to the Fatherland. There was some
justification for this hope, for Mann had earlier published and spoken
out in ways that were not all that dissimilar to positions acceptable
617
Page 637 - [see page image]
618
Ludwig Lewisohn
to the Nazi regime. An advocate of the German invasion of Belgium
during the Great War, he had condemned parliamentary democracy and
all notions associated with liberalism and political movement to the left.
Though Mann had begun to speak out against fascism by 1920, Hitler
still harbored hopes of winning his support. Given Mann’s late evolution
toward democracy and a belief in “socialist morality,” as he termed it
in his first major address in America in 1938, 34 and his still continuing
dislike for un-German Jewish elements inconsistent with the Volkgeist
of his countrymen, this hope was not without some foundation.
Mann’s response to Ludwig on April 12, however couched in le
gitimate fear of reprisal against himself and his family, was equally
questioned.
No, I have nothing to say to you, that you could repeat to the American
public or the American Jews. I’m not in any position to do so; my situation
is so difficult that your request seemed indeed naive. It is clear from your
letter that you have absolutely no idea of the terrible scope of what is taking
place in Germany, and therefore, you can’t imagine what an unreasonable
demand such a request contains. To the very last I sought to circumvent what
is now happening in Germany. I fought longer and with stronger words than
caution should have allowed. That has to suffice morally, and indeed it does
suffice to make my presence in Germany impossible for the moment. I’m
sitting here in Switzerland with my wife, and really don’t know where I’ll be
able to lay my head tomorrow or the next day. If I had been in Germany at
the outbreak of the catastrophe I would be in prison now. If I were even to
open my mouth now, the consequences would be very serious. No German
can speak out who has something to lose at home, or who is vulnerable
in any way. We can only dare put some of our thoughts and feelings into
words. If I said to you what you would like to hear, tomorrow not only
would my property in Germany be taken from me, but also my son would
be taken hostage, and who knows what would happen to my elderly parents
in law, who are Jewish. Not one of my books would be allowed to be sold
in Germany, and there would be even worse consequences. Who would be
served? Everyone knows what I think. Especially in America, where just
last year I spoke many times about the Jewish problem in particular. If I
repeated it now, experience shows it would only have the opposite effect
for those it was intended to help.
Though writing in German, Mann added in large English lettering at
the top of the first page, “Not printable political,” adding to his earlier
insistence that not a drop of this reach public view. “Do not imagine
I will permit you to pass on even a syllable of what I have said here.”
The consequences were potentially too grave, and only his friendship
and trust had brought him to express his private thoughts in writing.
Without free speech in Germany, he told Ludwig, “resistance [was]
unthinkable.” To speak out would be viewed as propaganda and, he
Page 638 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
feared, “punishable as high treason.” Now was certainly not the moment
to speak out. “The time will come again, perhaps still in my lifetime,
when the truth can be spoken. At least it must be hoped. It would not
be heroism to speak it now, but rather madness." '
Yet Mann had known several days earlier that he would be “remain
ing outside,"and had moved quickly to deed his German property to
his children a week after writing Ludwig, though there were still no
signs of its potential confiscation. 37 It was decided the following day,
however, amidst “nervous perturbation” and with a “stomach [that] is
rather bothersome as always when my nerves are under strain,” that
his children would not return to Germany to settle the family’s financial
affairs. 1 ' An alternative solution was found ten days later, on April 30:
“Yesterday in Zurich in pouring rain to the little Jew Tennenbaum . . .
who received us hospitably and discussed our financial problem with
us.” 39 Though Mann “could have a certain amount of understanding for
the rebellion against the Jewish element,” as he had expressed his feelings
just ten days earlier, 40 and could record rather unemotionally some weeks
later that “the role of Jewry in Germany has played itself out,” 41 he
saw no contradiction in seeking the assistance of the “little Jew,” nor
in maintaining his relationship with Ludwig. Such was the nature of
ambivalence, certainly of the hypocrisy which was to characterize the
response of many others in the coming twelve years.
For his part, Ludwig remained unaware of Mann’s truly private
thoughts. In relating to Canfield how “events in Germany, of which I
get the direct personal repercussion here, have very nearly unnerved me,”
he spoke most sympathetically of Mann’s situation amidst this “unpar
alleled . . . dreadfulness.” Swearing his reader to absolute secrecy, he
spoke of Mann’s “very confidential” flight to Switzerland. If Mann,
“no Jew but a German of patrician descent,” was now forced into
exile, by inference the situation confronting the Jews must be beyond
imagination. But Ludwig knew Canfield well enough not to focus his
remarks directly upon the fate of the Jews. “The horrors perpetrated
not only against Jews but against all decent people are without example
in any supposedly civilized country,” he wrote on April 22, three months
into the Nazi era. 42
Ludwig continued to plead Mann’s case in an article written during
these April days and published as the lead piece in the September 1933
issue of the English Journal—the first of a continuing stream of polemics
against the new German regime. “Two weeks before the National-
Socialists swept Germany . . . [Mann] sat with me in my study. He was
filled with intense anxiety over the fate of his country.” So, too, Ludwig
explained, was Mann troubled by what he assumed to be his own
619
Page 639 - [see page image]
620
Ludwig Lewisohn
fate should he return home, having three years earlier condemned the
fanaticism of those now in power. “A strong ethical sense, a profound
feeling of responsibility” had motivated him then, as now, and as an
artist he had continued to bear witness to his age as “the expressive
mouthpiece of mankind even when he is immediately concerned with
his most intimate fate.” Without access to Mann’s diary, Ludwig could
assure his readers that his friend “has joined the company of illustrious
exiles who in all ages have suffered in the cause of liberty and justice." 4;
On April 14, Ludwig sent the Nation an article that was to raise ob
jections from many quarters over the next several months. “Germany’s
Lowest Depths” became his first published attack upon “the patho
logical bloodthirstiness of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaign” following
Hitler’s assumption of authority. “The moral tone and flavor of this
whole movement is grossly pathological,” characterized by “barrack-
yard vulgarity” and “psychopathic arrogance.” Behind this, however,
lay the myth of the German folk subjugated to the alien designs of the
Jews, whose weakening of the people’s will and institutions had brought
about the need for their removal and the elimination of those cultural
elements they had introduced in usurpation of the purity they sought to
destroy in their quest for domination. “A foul, sadistic, self-exculpatory
myth has been propagated, according to which the pure, innocent, blond,
blue-eyed Nordic has been betrayed into defeat and shame by the woolly
haired, uncreative, lecherous Mediterranean spawn, whose treacherous
emissary, nursed in the unsuspecting Nordic’s bosom, was the German
Jew.. . . Supposedly reputable scholars” had come to support this myth,
Ludwig noted in disbelief, not realizing how deeply this fiction, most
fully developed in Nazi expression, had cut into the psyche of even one
as rational as Mann.
Whatever the etiology, Ludwig’s greatest concern remained his un
questioning certainty that the Nazis indeed planned to murder all Jews
within their grasp. Only weeks after Hitler’s election to power, Ludwig
attempted to focus his readers’ attention on this primary goal. “The
gigantic atrocity, which is the concern of the whole civilized world, is
the elimination of the Jews.” Having attempted to become a part of
German life, achieving positions of preeminence in the arts, business,
letters, and the professions, and after having “shed their blood, again
out of all proportion to their numbers, in the so-called defense of their
country from 1813 to the World War . . . they are to be ‘cleaned out’ of
German civilization.” This “elimination” was to be accomplished not
by expulsion, as in past centuries and in other lands, but by killing. If
any had doubts, Goring’s attack four weeks earlier should have dispelled
them. “These creatures shall feel my fist till they are obliterated.” They
Page 640 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
were, in Goring’s words, “to be exterminated.” As proof of the Nazis’
sincerity, Ludwig pointed to their latest act of entrapment. Rather than
allow the Jews of Germany to leave, in keeping with their avowed
wish to purify the folk and its culture, all Jewish passports had been
canceled. “To crown this crowning atrocity,” they had made escape
nearly impossible. Surely, Ludwig asked in protesting the early silence
with which these measures had been universally met, the world, and
particularly America, could not permit such a plan to be carried forth.
“For no American, however little he may like the Jews, can imagine
the pathological bloodthirstiness of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaign.. . .
The Nazis are not even folk-mystics; they are sadists; they are a crew
of half-crazed criminals who must be curbed if civilization is anywhere
to endure.”
While some letters to the Nation would object to Ludwig’s uncom
promising condemnation of Germany through its identification with
Nazi policy, the greatest outcry came in response to his comments
concerning the issue of the German Jews themselves, and of their failed
attempt at assimilation. What was happening to them, Ludwig believed,
needed to serve as a lesson for Jew and non-Jew alike. Each, from his
own perspective, needed to see the end to which such self-denial and
reliance upon the goodwill of a host could come. In what was clearly
misunderstood as Ludwig’s placing the blame for their victimization
upon the victims themselves, he sought to spur Jewish renewal wherever
there was still time, and to insist that non-Jews allow this to occur
unmolested and without discriminating reaction in spheres of mutual
involvement.
This German persecution is the first major persecution in which the perse
cuted have sold out spiritually to their oppressors at the latter’s invitation
and command. They have eviscerated themselves; they have for generations
extruded from their consciousness all Jewish content and from their political
and moral lives all Jewish bindings. They are in fact today as Germanized
as it is possible for them to be and have nothing within them wherewith to
bear their Jewish fate. Can anyone conceive of a more cruel confusion or
of a more hideous dilemma?
“Eight years ago,” Ludwig reminded his readers, he had, in Israel,
“warned the Jewish people against this unspeakable fate,” but no one
took seriously either the warning or the cry for “auto-emancipation”
without which “there is no faintest hope.” Had the German Jewish
community “ever permitted themselves to face the music of reality,” they
would have constructed their own cultural institutions, political group
ings, and social networks upon which, in this era of internal expulsion
and exile, they could have fallen back. Instead, their very “attempt to
621
Page 641 - [see page image]
622
Ludwig Lewisohn
obliterate the difference [between Jew and Gentile in Germany] is but
to render the aggressor fiercer and the persecuted more defenseless.”
As a final warning to his American readers from both communities,
“lest this poison corrupt the world,” he laid out what he saw as the
minimal conditions of coexistence in a just world. “Let Americans no
more demand assimilation but respect their Jewish friends in the measure
in which they are themselves, in which they are Jews.” 44
In this moment of first shock within the Jewish community of
America, Ludwig’s pronouncements regarding the direction it should
take garnered the passionate responses he possibly expected, though the
number and the often vituperative language used may have come as
something of a shock. The first selection of letters was published two
weeks later in the Nation under the heading “Mr. Lewisohn Raises a
Storm.” Leading these was the enraged reaction of Elmer Rice, Ludwig’s
longtime friend whose successes on Broadway had rarely involved the
portrayal of Jews or Jewish life. “His position is that of a weaver of ro
mantic daydreams—a cloistered man, who shuts his eyes to the realities
of life,” Rice said of Ludwig. “Mr. Lewisohn’s Judaism is as unthinking
and as destructive as Hitler’s Teutonism,” he added, characterizing the
call for “auto-emancipation” as “a reversion to the superstitions and
prejudices of a bygone age rather than an intelligent acceptance of the
actualities of the modern world.” While it was true that anti-Semitism
had not been eradicated anywhere, its degree was “progressively di
minishing and will continue to diminish in exact ratio to the Jews’
adaptation to their environment.” Thus, in the face of Hitler, Rice could
declare “Mr. Lewisohn’s Zionism” to be a “utopian fantasy,” while
calling upon “humane and enlightened men and women everywhere
to join hands in a common effort to liberate all the peoples of the
earth from the stifling heritage of racial and national fear, suspicion
and hatred. - '* '
Similar charges were raised by others whose variations on this theme
of tribalism and obscurantism need not be repeated here. They are in the
literature of the period, in the Nation and elsewhere in the reactions Wise
had met weeks earlier; they remain for the court of history to act as their
judge. But a few further objections were raised, and stand as witness to
the misperceptions, understandable before the events to come, of those
who had put their faith in the truly utopian belief of ongoing progress
and its alleged concomitant, tolerance. Ludwig’s call for a reaffirmation
of the “moral grandeur” of the prophets, in response to the declining
morality of their world, was met by one reader’s dismissal of this call as
“vastly old-fashioned, and not nearly so exciting as the various mental
acrobatics which science offers us.” 46 Wrote another, “The solution of
Page 642 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
the ‘Jewish problem’ does not lie in any ‘returning.’ Problems are solved
by progress, not by retrogression. Jews should continue to live the life of
full citizens of the modern world, and demand their rights, not as Jews,
but as human beings. Sooner or later their Christian neighbors will also
become human and leavened with enlightenment, and the Jews will get
their rights.” As proof, the writer pointed to Russia, where “the Jewish
problem has disappeared, because religion and capitalistic nationalism
have been done away with.” 47 And yet another, while agreeing with
Ludwig that discrimination leads to abjectness on the part of victim and
oppressor, condemned his “Jewish fundamentalism” as blind adherence
to “laws laid down some two thousand or more years ago for a nomad,
desert population.” She was surprised to find “so fine an intellect as
Mr. Lewisohn’s going down in such utter disarray before the impact of
discrimination. 1 '
Ludwig was not without his defenders, however, and three weeks
later, on June 7, the Nation “concludejd] the debate with . . . excerpts
from representative letters.” Only one repeated the charges of the ini
tial respondents, praising those “many cultured Jews” who had raised
their voices in “resentment. . . against the reactionary sentimentality of
Ludwig Lewisohn.” While accepting “the hostile passion vented upon
Jewry” and the need to combat it, he warned against being “beaten back
into the medievalism of our persecutors.” 49 All others were supportive of
Ludwig to varying degrees. In particular, they attacked what one writer
characterized as Elmer Rice’s equation of “normal Jewish consciousness
of historical responsibility . . . with Hitler or fascist chauvinism.” Unlike
Rice, they saw the Zionists “as true liberals and progressives” who alone
appeared to include Jewish liberation among the “common effort to
liberate all the people of the earth."'" A second denied Rice a role as
“Jewish spokesman” for having claimed that “the position of the Jew
throughout the world today is better than it has ever been,” given the
clear threat in Germany, Poland, Rumania, the Baltics, “and other coun
tries where the Jew is not only economically declassed but is hounded
like a dog politically and socially."" While others added to this chorus
of condemnation of Rice, only one offered a more measured response, a
compromise of sorts between Ludwig’s Jewish nationalism and Rice’s
accommodationist stance. Neither separation, as Marvin Lowenthal
understood Ludwig’s position, nor adoption necessarily worked. Both
had led to disaster, as history and current developments had proven.
Instead, there was need for tolerance by all for each individual’s decision
regarding personal cultural and religious preference and practice. Only
then, Lowenthal maintained, could the Jews be safe, for ultimately, it
mattered not what they did, but what was done to them.
623
Page 643 - [see page image]
624
Ludwig Lewisohn
Anti-Semitism, it cannot be too often repeated, is not a Jewish but a Gentile
problem. There is little the Jew can do to vanquish it. If he goes native,
like Mr. Lewisohn, he runs the chance of getting knocked on his caftan by
a Pole. If he turns Gentile, like Mr. Rice, he may get his fedora bashed by
a gummi-kniippel. There will be no solution until the world acknowledges
the right of a man to indulge in whatever culture he pleases and in whatever
doses he prefers, precisely as it grants him the right to believe, half-believe,
make-believe, or disbelieve in whatever religion comes to his hand. Isn’t the
world big enough to hold pure Jews, half-caste Jews, half-caste Gentiles,
and pure Gentiles?"
Lowenthal, whose reasoned voice would gain a place in the Jewish-
American community in the years ahead, could not see that Ludwig,
behind the moment’s passion, was not in fundamental disagreement
with his call for universal tolerance. But Ludwig had already answered
Lowenthal’s final question nearly two decades earlier when he had
written, in his “Introduction” to the translation of Pinski’s The Treasure,
of “the echo of immemorial sorrow” and of the “power to endure in faith
and hope from generation to generation.”'' It was out of his realization
that faith was no longer possible for most German Jews, nor present
in the lives of many of his American co-religionists, that he spoke so
passionately in favor of a return to a Jewish cultural life of whatever
stamp the individual wished to impress upon it. Without such a context,
the coming terror, he rightly feared, would be infinitely more difficult to
understand and endure.
The measures against which Ludwig fought during these early days
of the Nazi regime had an unforeseen and positive effect upon his per
sonal state of affairs. United States government protest and newspaper
coverage had drawn significant attention to the situation in Germany,
and with it, weekly sales of This People had suddenly doubled. “We have
been doing all we can to cash in on the publicity of the obnoxious Hitler
program,” Canfield callously wrote Ludwig on April 11, 1933. 54 A week
later he wrote again, informing Ludwig that his “best bet” for selling
articles to American journals was “the present German situation."''
Ludwig’s response was to promise an analysis of what “intelligent Amer
icans should know about this German business, something fundamental,
with which I’ve been in touch for years,” having “predicted more or less
this business in 1925!” If Canfield could sell the idea, he would write
the piece. "
But while Canfield and the literary agent, Carl Brandt, contin
ued their efforts to place an article by Ludwig that wouldn’t “become
antedated at a moment’s notice by happenings which would be fully
covered by the newspapers,"'' Ludwig had already secured a place for
Page 644 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
his discussion of some “fundamental” bits of “this German business.”
“The New Kultur” appeared in the Nation on June 21, laying out in
rich detail the Nazis’ movement toward control of thought and action
“calculated to please the Aryan soul and rouse the Aryan risibilities,”
burning books, condemning artistic works, expelling dissenters, and
replacing the Judaeo-Christian ethic with a Graeco-Germanic one so as
to justify the “homo-erotic feeling and practice” with which the “avowed
ideology [is] drenched.” Thus would they remove that “obscure feeling
of guilt inherited from the ancestral experience of 1500 years,” along
with those responsible for it, the Jews, whether bourgeois or Bolshe
vik. (Many of the churches had already adopted a German nationalist
orientation, thereby often willingly compromising the Christianity they
professed, itself the secondary target of the Nazis.) Ludwig, however, did
not see Bolshevism in this same light, but rather as a competing form
of the fascist attempt to censor and control, and to overturn the Jewish
teachings he firmly held to.
For the world, all of us who have any hope left in humanity, it is to be
noted that an attack of unrivaled strength and ferocity is being launched
against the life of the mind as such, against all intellectual values, against all
disinterestedness of thought, of research, of aspiration, against the slowly
won rights of the human spirit and the freely functioning personality, against
every principle and every truth that men have lived for and often died for
since the Renaissance, against all that has constituted for so long the very
charter of humanity itself. Barbarians in the East trample upon this charter;
equally fierce Barbarians of the North now join them. So I quite expect to
see foolish little parlor Bolsheviks presently joined by foolish little parlor
Nazis. It is so cheap and easy to plunge and shiver and obey. Self-sustaining
personalities had better be vigilant. A dark age threatens. 58
Despite such easy access to the press for his ideas, he had learned
with the first article in April that the liberal voices in America were
largely unconcerned, if not adamantly opposed to Jewish cultural so
lutions to the problem of Jewish persecution. Though these responses
were at the heart of his analysis, he would have to speak in more
general terms if he was to find more universal acceptance. He could ill
afford to sacrifice whatever support endangered Jews might find among
those who idolized notions of Western liberalism which prevented them
from seeing the unworkability of their solution. Nor was this something
startlingly new for Ludwig. “At the time of the Arab troubles in 1929,”
he noted in a letter to fellow Zionist Ernest Gruening, the liberal press
had failed to support the Jews’ quest to normalize their lives in their own
homeland, in accordance with their own cultural patterns. He wondered
then if “the Jewish people could get any help from the liberal press.”
625
Page 645 - [see page image]
626
Ludwig Lewisohn
True, there had always been a general outcry, in universal terms, that
persecution of anyone was unjust. But the only solution for which this
liberal press would offer support was “the outmoded escape mechanism
symbolized by our friend Elmer Rice.” In anticipation of a problem
repeated throughout the remainder of the century, he condemned this
liberal press which, “for some strange reason . . . will not admit 1, that
there is a Jewish people, which is persecuted as a people; 2, that this
people has developed within the past half-century a philosophy and a
policy of self-help and auto-emancipation.” Rather, he had repeatedly
found that “the liberal press has space for sentimental inutilities but
no space for a realistic approach to the problem.. . . There is space for
protests and for lamentations,” he asserted after his Zionist paper had
been rejected by his friends at the Nation, but “there are not four pages
a year for an explanation of the only line of thought and action by
which, demonstrably and practically, has been brought any nearer to
solution and to healing one of the sorest problems of mankind.” Though
saddened by this abandonment, he understood “the slightly pathological
reasons why they are not. . . with us,” adding dejectedly, “I see that I
was too hopeful.'’'''
It was a time when Ludwig’s old ally, H. L. Mencken, could condemn
Hitler by comparing him to the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,
and yet still advise Jewish leaders to “go slow” in their fight against
anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States. 60 In writing to Sinclair
Lewis on June 7,1933, Mencken complained that the writer Paul Good
man, “in the face of the Nazi assault, has turned 100% Jewish and is
bombarding me with letters denouncing everything German.... I find it
difficult to follow him so far.” 61 And three years later, in an exchange of
letters between Mencken and Lewis, they both reaffirmed their inability
to grasp what Goodman had been saying and then abandoned the
attempt. 62
Ludwig’s own willingness to continue his search for support seemed
both longer-lived and less hopeful, for while he continued to press on
in the general community, he quickly turned inward as well, addressing
the Jewish world in the hope that he would find there a far greater desire
to pursue useful solutions, in consonance with the very nature of auto
emancipation. Had Zionism ever truly expected external support? On
May 20, he wrote Henry Salpeter of the Jewish Daily Bulletin with “two
things in mind (1) Fugitives (I see them every day—these German Jews
and they break my heart. But, my God, they’re also a lesson.) (2) Front
Door—Back Door . . . certain American and French and British Jewish
reactions.” Ludwig’s ongoing work in Paris to aid some five thousand
German Jewish refugees that year, collecting funds, securing apartments,
Page 646 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
acquiring furniture, and the like, had sharpened his focus on these
issues, particularly the reaction of some wealthy French Jews whose
reluctance to assist in this effort had stemmed from their fear “that a
sudden influx of conspicuously intellectual Jews would increase anti-
Semitism.” Only the arrival of money from American Jews had helped
to abate the problem of having just “enough money for the current
day’s food.” 63
Ultimately, Ludwig turned to Opinion and published “A Jewish
Notebook” in two parts during July and August of 1933, hoping to raise
the consciousness of the Jewish world, as he could not that of their hosts.
If this outside world was not prepared to listen to what the Jews wanted
and needed for themselves, then he would sound the necessary alarm
more loudly within his own community in “this year of decision. . .
written in blood and tears, in terror and confusion.” Leon Pinsker,
Ludwig reminded his readers, had raised doubts in the previous century
concerning the wisdom of winning a place in the larger society through
Jewish self-denial, warning further that the Jews’ gentile hosts, even the
most accommodating liberals among them, would never fully accept
their Jewish fellow citizens as equals. They too, in ways different from
those practiced by bigots from whom they had disassociated themselves,
were guilty of destructive prejudice, guilty of that “secular mistake and
sin. . . which belongs wholly to the period of the civic emancipation
of the Jews.” In their rush to offer a place to all who would accept
their values and image of propriety, they had failed to recognize how
legislation alone could not act swiftly or deeply enough against a hatred
so central to Christian culture in both its religious and secular forms—
nor how elements of this same prejudice had motivated the shape and
thrust of their own programmatic solution, for a willingness to accept
Jews who have, in effect, traded away their Jewishness for the chance to
assimilate was simply another form of intolerance destructive of Jewish
cultural survival, however well intended. Few statements, then or since,
have been as clear or as adamant in rejecting the offer of civic equality
at so dear a price.
Surely and inevitably the day has at last come when it is clear that this
expectation of a certain kind of progress in an unswerving direction was a
delusion not only, not chiefly, as a matter of fact but as a matter of possibility.
We must go back to the moment of the emancipation; we must rebuild from
that moment on. For the tragedy of the liberalistic tradition and hope was
not that they were too liberal, as many reactionaries now assert, but that
they were not liberal enough. Liberalism compromised on the shame of
toleration at the price of self-destruction. It never offered freedom, which
has no meaning except that of being what one was eternally meant to be;
627
Page 647 - [see page image]
628
Ludwig Lewisohn
it never offered equality, for it asked as the price of a limited parcel of civil
rights the obliteration of the soul of the Jewish people. It was a hollow
compromise; it has crumbled to the dust and the dust is soaked in the
anguished sweat of our crucifixion. 64
What had kept so many Jews from seeing this, he asserted, was
their refusal to admit that the theory upon which their assimilated lives
had been built “is false and has been proven false—false and hollow
to the very crumbling and corrupted core of it, the theory, namely, that
the Jews can cease to be Jews in order to buy their way into Gentile
civilization or that the masters of Gentile civilization will admit that the
price of the de-Judaization of the Jews has ever been wholly paid.” 65
Expressions of grief and help now being offered by Jews outside of
Germany were insufficient, Ludwig maintained with equal force, for this
latest persecution was “in its true character as differing fundamentally
from all previous persecutions and thus marking the beginning of a new
period in history in which Israel will be more deeply menaced.” Guilt for
having demanded and accepted this self-denial must lead, in the face of
this “sudden and overwhelming catastrophe,” to a teshuvah, a return to
Jewishness among Jews, that would move them beyond such expressions
of grief and toward a renewal of Jewish life. Yet those few like himself
who were calling for this teshuvah had found little receptiveness. “There
is a community of four and a half million Jews in America without a
folk-life. Its bindings are sociological, not spiritual. We speak and there
is no resonance; we plead and there is no echo.” Yet there was no other
choice but to speak out for those like himself whose meaning in life was
tied to the spiritual rebirth of their people.
Though there is little or no resonance when we speak and little echo when
we plead, yet we must speak and plead because the creation of a folk-life
amid the Jews of America and the turning of a sociological community into
a spiritually homogeneous people is the only hope—the only and single
hope—not only for the Jews of America but for all Israel. Hence we must
strive somehow first to create that by our speaking and pleading which
we need in order to speak and plead freely at all. We must overcome our
hesitancies and our dismay and our sense of thrusting ourselves forward in
order in our humble measure and with our humble means to serve Israel.
And this we must do, since to serve Israel, even if it rejects us, even if we
are constantly misinterpreted (as I shall be in this matter and upon this very
point), that is the content and meaning of our lives. And now an hour and
a day have come which are crucial. We are b’emek he-charutz, in the Valley
of Decision. We shall hear and heed the voice from Zion that Joel heard
and proclaimed or we shall perish. 66
“How many Jewish books are in your houses and how many purely
Jewish acts do you perform,” Ludwig demanded, in contradistinction
Page 648 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
to “defensive talk” that issues all too quickly while “your souls harden
and wither” without their being “saturated . . . [by] the flowering into
legend and ritual and poetry and philosophy of the instincts and being of
our people.” By speaking defensively for others, by solely grieving and
sending assistance without recognizing the emptiness of assimilation and
the ultimate precariousness of their own position in a gentile world, there
would be nothing left for these Jews with which to defend themselves,
Ludwig warned, neither against external assault nor internal confusion
and collapse. Cognizant of the personal attacks to which he was exposing
himself from within and outside the Jewish world, he saw no alternative
but to be as honest and as forceful as his rhetorical skills would allow.
Anything less would add to the
crippling sickness of preoccupation without knowledge [that] is most preva
lent. It is a necessity and a duty to be brutal today. It is necessary to be brutal
even at the risk of being misunderstood. For, given the precise circumstances
that confront us from now on, the Jewish ignorance of American Jewry
may prove a disaster of incalculable consequences to all Israel. And I do
not exaggerate.. . . You are Jews. Nothing will save you anywhere in the
world from bearing the Jewish fate that is yours. Wherewith you will bear
it and help others to bear it, how will you affirm it and consent to it and
even rejoice in it, if Israel and its life and its history and its meaning and its
speech and its ethos are not alive and eloquent in your hearts and minds} 67
“What then are you to do?” Ludwig asked his readers, for “there
is no short or easy way, no way that has to do with the silly ephemeral
catchwords of an age.” The “ ‘assets’ of Judaism” were present only to
those who sought them through the age-old process of opening one’s
self, “in the depth of your own being in stillness,” to the “core of your
being [which] is Jewish.” Such openness would then inevitably lead to
the realization that “it is inhuman and impossible to love an abstract
humanity and to love without relation or discrimination,” a direct
response by Ludwig to those who would credit to the strengthening
of ethnic identities the very barbaric acts of the Nazis and others against
whom he and they were struggling. There was, he went on in his defense,
no “shadow of hostility to other peoples,” no hint of similarity “with
anything that has to do with the chauvinism or belligerent exclusiveness
of the other nations”—for “to read the classics and the records of our
people and the sayings of our saints and sages” was to discover “the
pacifist and spiritual nationalism and self-integration which we achieved
in the age of the prophets . . . [and] which we shared with all the families
of mankind.” Unlike other nations, the Jews had served as an ethical
beacon in a darkened world, and their nationalism had served to protect
and strengthen the “ spirit of humility and of love ” which they had chosen
629
Page 649 - [see page image]
630
Ludwig Lewisohn
in ages past to bring to the other peoples of the world. A study of these
texts, and of the historic moments out of which they had grown and were
sustained, would demonstrate “the ineluctable habit of the individual
Jewish soul and of the soul of all Israel to take upon itself a law, an
ethical command, a way of life of its own choosing and by the witness
of ourselves and of all the world different in some essence, however
subtle, from the laws and ways of life chosen by other peoples.”
Ludwig hoped to share this discovery with those “young American
Jews” who, like himself so many years earlier, were “wanting and
yearning [with] that inner yearning [which] is the source of your being
troubled.” He advised them to take “upon yourselves the law and love of
a wholly Jewish life,” to join with the Hasidim and dance with them and
the Torah on Simchat Torah, “to get a little shikker [drunk]” on Purim,
“for it is with joy that we are to be Jews.” Yet above all else, there
was study out of which would come a strengthening of the initial inner
vision and yearning. “The teshuvah and the vision came to me more
years ago than I knew,” he acknowledged publicly for the first time,
speaking of a reclamation of his Jewishness long before he had dated it
in Up Stream and elsewhere. Back in New York from his years in Ohio,
he had wandered the Lower East Side, acquiring first Yiddish and then
Hebrew texts, expanding his Jewish universe in the years that followed
with Talmud, Hasidism, philosophical and theological works, histories,
and literature from many ages and lands. “I started humbly,” he sought
to make known to those who felt hesitant because the task seemed
too formidable, “nor shall I ever be more than one who studies, one
who learns, a talmid [student] of the masters.” “Above all,” he offered
encouragement, emphasizing how he had come “upon a world that was,
in all its profounder and more luminous aspects, my world, the world of
my people and of my own instincts and perceptions.” Not that he had
abandoned the larger world or had “lost a single non-Jewish friend—
not one.” His writings in fields beyond Jewish interests were proof of
his ability to bridge the two worlds as he happily brought “to bear
upon our traditional Jewish learning the light of modern perceptions and
cognitions.” There was no need for his readers to fear cutting themselves
off from this larger world community. Rather, he hoped they would
follow his lead and discover the deeper joy that came with being in
consonance with all parts of their true inner selves. “I have sought to
live Jewishly with Jewish Jews and in so living I have found the texture
of life to be of a beauty and of a significance that I had never known." - x
Experiencing the tension and anguish of helplessness toward his
Jewish friends, relatives, and co-religionists in Germany, Ludwig had
spoken more deeply in his “Notebook” articles about his own sense of
Page 650 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
being a Jew than he had ever brought himself to do in the past. But real
izing that many to whom he had hoped to address these thoughts were
outside the circle of a Jewish journal’s readership, he sent along a far less
passionate version to the Nation, which published it on July 26 under the
title “Ignoble and Unhealthful.” To appeal to the Nation’s assimilated
and liberal Jewish readership, he cast this return in humanistic terms
and drew a parallel between teshuvah and Christian grace, portraying
both as no more than an acknowledgment of one’s self as one truly is,
or, in more theological language (which he used, in this instance, most
sparingly), accepting the role which God had laid out. “The content of
the plea which not I alone but many who are wiser than I address to
the Jewish people can again be stated in universally human terms as
follows: human freedom consists in the affirmation of the inevitable, or,
if one likes, in achieving by that process which the church calls grace
and the synagogue teshuvah, an identification of one’s will with the will
of God.” 69
A final article on the German catastrophe would appear that summer
in the August issue of Harper’s. “The German Revolt against Civiliza
tion” was Ludwig’s most complete analysis of the Nazi assault upon the
West, bringing to bear upon it theological and psychological insights
as a means toward gathering support in the struggle against Hitler
and, ultimately, for international aid for the growing tide of German
Jewish refugees who, despite passport restrictions, were making their
way across the frontier. “The demon by which the German people is
possessed is no night fear of the Middle Ages . . . [nor] a throw-back to
medievalism” with its religious persecution of Jews. To see it in this
way “is to misunderstand the movement,” to fail to recognize in it
“a revolt against Christianity in its broadest as well as in its deepest
sense; it is a pagan revolt against the whole of Christian civilization;
it dreams, spinning like a dervish, of Nordic armies overrunning the
earth, of berserker rage in battle, of the ecstasy of death and blood.”
Here, Ludwig held, was the true source of the Nazi thrust, its “holy
madness” and “sacred pestilence” long suppressed, now loosed upon
those institutions and ideas that had kept it beneath the surface for a
thousand years or more. 70 This, he warned his unsuspecting readers, was
the real danger, for the Nazi movement was not merely the demagogic
rantings of a thug and his criminal circle, but an expression of something
deep within the minds and hearts of pagan Europe, a land stretching
far beyond the German borders. Racist, with a “fanatical belief in the
superiority of the Aryan-Germanic racial strain”; anti-woman, seeing
them as breeding stock to increase the pure race; anti-Christian, as
purveyors of an alien morality opposing the stern measures required for
631
Page 651 - [see page image]
632
Ludwig Lewisohn
this upbuilding of the German folk, and as a force opposing the “deeply
and broadly tainted . . . sexual perversity and its accompanying sadism”
so much a part of the lives of a significant portion of the leadership and
their followers; and anti-Semitic with their avowed priority, “the re
purification of the German race from foreign blood and foreign faith.”
There was little doubt that the solution to “all [those] ills due to the
biological and spiritual contamination of this race” was the destruction
of Jewry, and with it, the necessary silencing, through conviction or
threat, of Christian voices within and outside of the Church."' It was to
this that he had alluded in his earlier letter to Gruening when referring
to “something fundamental, with which I’ve been in touch for years.” It
was this vision, this understanding of the inner Germanic folk life, and its
resonance among other peoples on the Continent, that most frightened
him now, for he knew how deeply ingrained this sentiment truly was,
how thin the layer of Christian civility in far too many quarters, and
what the dropping of this facade would mean to the future of those
whose opposing way of life had brought, in its Christianized voices, the
countermeasure which had now been overthrown, leaving nothing in its
place to diminish the attack already begun.
To think of the Nazis merely as hoodlums and fools stung into action by
hunger and demagogues is gravely to underestimate both the force and the
menace of the movement.. . . The “holy madness,” however, the demon of
pagan revolt, had to wreak itself upon an immediate and accessible object.
And that object had to be, however unconsciously, a symbol of all that was
to be destroyed; it had to be the symbol of peace and forgiveness; it had
to be the symbol of the free personality alone with its God; it had to be
the symbol of the critical intelligence, which the “holy madness” holds in
especial abhorrence; it had to be non-pagan, non-Germanic. It had to be the
Jews. . . . For it is clear to-day that they will act according to their myths.
They have begun. The scapegoat is being slain; the Jew is crucified. 72
Ultimately, however, as Ludwig attempted to convince his readers,
it was more than the Jews’ fight, for the Nazi assault, if centered most
strongly against them, was not theirs alone to bear. Rather, it was, in
its deepest meaning, “the revolt against civilization” itself, an attack
upon all who would maintain the truths and patterns of ethical behavior
embodied in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Was it not, then, the
duty of all who would defend these principles and the civilization built
upon them to fight not only against the Jews’ oppression, but for their
own sake as well?
To be hard on principle in the name of one’s own madly and neurotically
conceived superiority, to take delight in punishment, to be unashamed
of insane pride and the cruelty that it engenders—is that not a pagan
Page 652 - [see page image]
Pagan Revolt
revolt against the whole inner meaning of Western civilization, however
imperfectly, however haltingly that meaning has been wrought out by us in
practice? Is it not an unbearable repudiation of all that constitutes the one
faint hope of humanity? For that hope may be said to have arisen when
the unknown scribe recorded in Leviticus the words: “Thou shalt bear love
unto thy neighbor as to thyself.” And this became the groundwork of the
prophets from Amos of Tekoa to Jesus of Nazareth. And all the sages of
the Talmud and all the doctors of the Catholic Church and all leaders of
Protestant revolts and all republicans and liberals and humanitarians and
whosoever in all our Western civilization had any vision of goodness and
the good life, any hope of better things for mankind—all, all, whatever
differences divided them, united on this fundamental principle of the duty
of love, of mercy, of forgiveness between man and his brother. It is this
foundation that the German neo-nationalists repudiate and seek to destroy.
They must see an unbroken front of moral resistance in which all civilized
men, irrespective of nation, race, or creed, wholeheartedly unite. 73
Though Bradley’s letter of August 9 brought news of Island’s sale to
an Italian publisher for a translated edition, 74 after a spring and summer
of polemic, Ludwig’s attention as a writer and a Jew remained clearly
focused upon Hitler’s assault. New voices were slowly joining his and
those few already allied with him in this struggle. Ludwig must have been
pleased to receive James Wise’s Swastika: The Nazi Terror, complete with
its symbol of death over half the book’s front cover. “The fate of German
Jewry is not a Jewish but a world issue,” Wise had written at the end
of his chronicle of the early months of Nazi persecution. Hoping to aid
the endangered Jews of Germany by pointing beyond them, he, too, had
declared emphatically that the world’s “fate is still in doubt. Civilization
is at death grips with madness in Nazi Germany."'' Ludwig’s own voice
would continue to be directed toward this widening catastrophe and its
implications for the Jews. What energies he could devote to his writing
in the next several years would be focused upon the world’s political
arena, struggling to save Jewish lives and to renew the Jewish culture he
had come to value far above all others.
In time, however, this single-mindedness would diminish as personal
matters intensified their demands upon him. Ludwig had ended his
letter of May 20 to Salpeter by asking that the Jewish Daily Bulletin
adjust its fee upward slightly so that he might be able to write for
them. “On a stack of Talmuds. . . I’m honest-to-God poor and have
(thank God and unbeschrein) a baby coming and all and all.” 76 In a
single sentence, Ludwig had encapsulated his most personal concerns—
God and Judaism, financial ruin, the imminent arrival of his child,
and the two unmentioned, Thelma’s growing impatience with her role
as homemaker, and Mary’s continuing hold upon them both. Altar,
633
Page 653 - [see page image]
634
Ludwig Lewisohn
completed on August 29, 77 had offered the opportunity over the past
eight months to focus on several of these issues—the sanctity of marriage
and the need for fidelity, sexual and otherwise; the conflict between
a woman’s career and the demands of motherhood; the search for
a meaningful task in one’s life amidst the disparity of truths in the
marketplace of ideas—but a fictional analysis was no substitute for
real-world solutions, nor would it shield him from having to face each
one, often in combination with another, in the months and years ahead.
Ludwig would not turn again to fiction for nearly three years. Instead, he
would work through the problems of his personal life in the privacy of his
home, among his friends and counselors, and in the halls of government.
Page 654 - [see page image]
635
27
Out of Prison
Clearly, it was time for Ludwig to go home, back to the States, back to
where he hoped to rebuild his life on a foundation more solid than before.
This, beyond all else, was the conclusion he had reached in completing
An Altar in the Fields, though at one point in the story he would write
that “at home they would be able to seem to fill the emptiness around
them and between them with errands, with the companionship of others,
with real or feigned occupations.” “In a distant past there stood on a
street of the Lower West Side of Manhattan a row of houses that were
survivals of an older and friendlier age,” 1 began this most revealing
fictional account of life with Thelma and of his search for a return to
basic human truths overlooked in his earlier rush for the successes of
passed moments. In his despair he had pursued her, despite her hesitancy
and his own awareness of the youthfulness with which she had so single-
mindedly sought the world’s spotlight. But he had finally begun to move
beyond this need, traveling along his own path in search of a compatible
soul to accompany him in the pursuit of greater truths and truer artistic
expression. “Though his highest ambition was to write ... he often felt
suddenly alien and lost in the hot bright habitations of men.” Away from
them, alone amidst the forces of nature (as he had first experienced them
as a child in the rural South), he felt truly alive, “quieted and healed and
far more at ease with himself and his thoughts than indoors among
the glib and clever people.... As a wind arose and flapped among the
buildings of Manhattan like a great flag ... he strode on, feeling with
an animal pleasure the vigour of his limbs,” renewed in his search for
Page 655 - [see page image]
636
Ludwig Lewisohn
this truth, for its artistic expression, and for the woman with whom to
share it. 2
Thelma’s putative image in the novel, however, was still caught
up in the youthful folly of quick and universal recognition, made ever
more severe by the shallowness so characteristic of the generation out of
which she had emerged. The glibness of the period, and of those postwar
youth whose pretentions of artistic greatness seemed most emblematic
of it to Ludwig, had appeared wherever he had traveled as a challenge
to all that he valued—study and learning without end, hard labor at
one’s chosen art, sexual expression in a meaningful relationship, the
spiritual dimension at the core of one’s sense of self, and the search for
some social stability and continuity, some permanency, as a guarantor of
human dignity and the creative process. Thelma’s unending discontent,
despite all that he had done to aid her development as a singer and
writer, seemed symptomatic of this misguided era. “Her reveries were
now, as they had been in her childhood, independent of reality.” And
while “she did not truly expect reality to embody her dreams. . . she
knew . . . that this was an age of stormy active women who made their
own careers and stood on their own feet. It did not occur to her to doubt
the accuracy of this description of the age, nor of the superiority in this
respect as in all others of this age over other ages.” Thus, she could never
truly find contentment, Ludwig realized, no matter how little or great
her success and recognition. Her sense of self-worth, and that of her
generation (perhaps more for its women, now enjoying greater freedom
to explore new paths, than for its men), was too restrictive, too narrowly
focused, too dismissive of much that a fuller life encompassed. “She did
not accept herself—this young American girl of the nineteen hundred
and twenties—in her totality. Upon the plastic clay of her nature the age
had scrawled a sharp but shallow pattern.” Ludwig saw much more in
Thelma than she saw in herself, but she, disappointed with her pursuit of
a life in the arts, had been blinded and closed to these possibilities. “She
would not admit to herself that this pattern was not the whole of her. But
the whole of her, the major deeper part of her beyond that pattern, was
there. It existed. It guided two-thirds of her actions, gestures, attitudes.
But since these were developed by the pattern, they were often slightly
perverted, crippled, made to take on masks and disguises.” 3
“Life is Real,” he asserted for his readers to ponder; it was neither
a dream image nor an endless journey. There were limits established by
the natural order of things. But only the voice of greater experience,
of longer and deeper perception, could speak of this path which both
the disillusioned young man of Altar and his disappointed wife had to
follow if they were to find the fulfillment they sought, for despite his
Page 656 - [see page image]
637
Out of Prison
greater sense of the natural and of the need to seek his own road, the
husband (an earlier Ludwig) had again become weighted down by the
pursuit of success.
As in so much of his earlier fiction, truth was again given by Ludwig
to a Jew of German background to proclaim to the Gentiles among
whom he found himself. A man of attributes similar to Ludwig’s in his
middle years, Dr. Weyl, a psychiatrist from Ohio, was the one who would
offer the curative path to an earlier persona of himself and to the woman
who had not as yet reached the understanding he had finally achieved.
“I got desperate because I couldn’t give my patients what they needed,”
Weyl told his young friend, until he realized that the answer lay in their
achieving “a vision of some sort that would make the common things of
life significant and purposeful.” The problem, as Weyl analyzed it, was
that there was “nothing in you—love of your people or of a cause or even
of a doctrine—that you would want your son to carry on. Then how did
you ever expect to write?” he asks rhetorically. “You’ve got nobody to
write for and nothing to write about.” The young man retorted with the
accusation of “reactionary,” to which Weyl responded, clearly speaking
Ludwig’s own defense against those who had attacked his critique of
socialism and his support of traditionally bourgeois values: “Don’t let
that word get between you and life. What your generation has forgotten
is that the fundamental facts of human life have nothing to do with either
time or doctrine. They remain constant under all superficial changes: We
must eat and beget and pray. So soon as we’re not hungry we want to
beget and pray and out of the significance of these two instincts we’ve
derived art and philosophy and science. If the instincts fail you or the
meaning goes out of them, you’re left flat. Reactionary! ” Arriving at this
understanding had been too long a process, Weyl admitted, hard fought
and gained at great personal cost, including his sense of anchorage in
the world. “You have everything a man needs,” he tells the husband, “a
country, a living tradition of your own to carry on and to transform,
your soil under your feet and your ancestral speech on your tongue,”*
American assets that Weyl, like Ludwig, had been forced to abandon.
The “Homeward Road” proved a difficult one as the man’s younger
wife grew increasingly resentful of his desire to take this new direction
toward his own inner truth. “Necessity wipes out all temporary mean
ings, and freedom consists in incorporating necessity in our wills,” Weyl
assured him. It was “a hard lesson” which, in time, he thought she might
come to learn. It was understandable that she could not as yet assent to
it, not unlike those Jews who denied their Jewishness, spending a lifetime
of struggle seeking to be what they were not. “So-called modern women
often remind me of Jews.. . . There are no Jews who are not Jews. How
Page 657 - [see page image]
638
Ludwig Lewisohn
much better to be whatever you are effectively and proudly.” The choice,
ultimately, was “in your own hands."
“Europe is going mad,” Weyl told his young friends. Why not join
him on a trip to the “East,” to North Africa, “to see people who can
adjust themselves to fate?... I want to see religious people, people who
accept themselves, people who still live, instead of looking for ways
of living outside of life."' He hoped to find there “a religion . . . that
renders significant and spiritually sufficing the common and universal
circumstances of human life: labor and rest, food and drink, prayer and
pleasure, marriage and begetting.” This sense of religion, of life itself,
had disappeared from America. “We have modern plumbing and saw
dust in our souls . . . [and] a good deal of half-hearted assent to dogma
and a good deal of pleasant emotionalism.” But he was looking for
something tougher, something more genuinely moving and confirming,
something akin to the life of his Orthodox Jewish grandfather, who, in all
that he did each day, thought he was “making God and good prevail.” 7
It was during these days of travel in the desert, observing the simpler
lives of the North African Muslims who prayed to the source of their
fate, that Weyl’s companion found what he had been brought along to
seek. Here he “open[ed] his heart and let the earth and the people and
gestures that he saw transform themselves into symbol truer than fact
and into vision that often seemed to burst its mere material bond.” And
suddenly he felt himself being transformed, reborn into a new world,
seen as it truly was for the first time. “Inhaling deep the dry pure air of
the desert, far more primordial in its quality than the air of the sea laden
with moisture and touched with a tang of hidden life, [he] felt as though
his mind had stripped off vesture after vesture, swathing after swathing
of the intricate gear of civilization—cities and trains and factories and
prejudice and habits engendered by these—and naked as the stones of
the desert, could at last survey earth and the fate of man.” 8
In the days that followed, his wife experienced her own transfor
mation, not as total as his, but “a perception of her own that she was
drawing from this world,” and a genuine desire, for the first time, to
share her life with him, “a desire as of parched earth for water... a
desire from which had faded the aridity of the abstract and assertive
self.” 9 In the starkness of the desert, she, too, had come finally to
experience the “mystical character of marriage” that had revealed itself
to Ludwig as he was busily sketching her story a year earlier. 10 He had
taken a brief respite from the writing, and while walking the forests and
shores of Normandy, had had a mystical vision of his own, “a spiritual
revelation—a sudden mystical assurance that my mind was functioning
with the best substance of things.... It was very comforting... as
Page 658 - [see page image]
639
Out of Prison
though I had talked with God,” he had recounted for Thelma upon
their return to Paris. 11 Transformed, Ludwig would record this ineffable
vision (“often, very often, present to me”) eight years later.
I was at a lonely inn north of Harfleur ... at the head of a little peninsula
that juts out into the North Sea. I walked for hours daily in the forest
that covers the peninsula. One day, near sunset, I stood at deserted cross
roads under immemorial trees. It was very silent and it was utterly silent
within me. Into that inner silence stole a conviction and a knowledge for
which there are no words. I experienced one-ness, one-ness with the universe
and the Divine. I knew that my spirit was allied with it. Ever since, amid
whatever horrors and disappointments, the cries of men have had less power
upon me. 12
For Ludwig, as for his younger protagonist, “the barren rocks
and the cosmic silence” had brought answers to the most troubling
questions, “not in sterile intellectual terms, but in terms of the humblest
realities.. . . They opened vistas upon the landscape of humanity; they
taught a so-called ‘modern’ what it meant to be a human being, a child
of Adam ... as Dr. Weyl had explained.” 1: Sharing this vision with his
wife one evening, not long after, under “the light and fire of the great
moon ... in that silence as of cosmic space . . . they went gravely down
the slope of the dune into the hollow and made the sands of the desert
their first true marriage-bed.” 14
Ludwig, though trying to be the realist, to see life as it was, stripped
of abstractions and utopian visions, could never completely overcome
the need to romanticize his life, or to dream of a better day. As he
completed the text, he imagined the America to which he was hoping
to return as “suffering profoundly for the first time within the memory
of anyone now alive and so grave things had to be forced gravely,”
without recourse to whim or to new stimuli. New York friends had
been similarly affected, he believed, and with the Depression had come
their abandonment of much that Ludwig had hoped would one day be
gone forever, that “old hard spuriously bright assurance . . . [and] the
deliberate substitution of third-rate artistic and intellectual activities for
life itself and for those true preoccupations of humanity out of which art
must grow as trees from soil.” It seemed clearer than ever that the world
they had left behind when they sailed for Paris “was even then a dying
world.... All that talk . . . sounded well enough but it really made no
sense.""
Now that old life was gone. No longer did they crave its former
excitement or enclose themselves in “futile day-dreams ... of success
and of glory.. . . They were both tranquil and busy and found a meaning
in the preoccupations of the day.” They were, after all, settling into
Page 659 - [see page image]
640
Ludwig Lewisohn
their modest new home, awaiting the arrival of their child. Days were
spent readying all, and evenings were shared quietly, reading and talking
and sitting near one another before the fireplace. “She was very heavy
now and her belly was great.. . . The new life had broken her forms
or, rather, it had transmuted them into a form more monumental and
perhaps ruder but nearer the primeval forms of earth and stone.” Ludwig
could romanticize this imagery, as Thelma herself may have in the days
before she grew to resent the changes wrought by the pregnancy and
birth. It was as if the polemics were meant to convince himself that
life was moving ever closer to what he had wished it to be. Rebirth,
Permanent Horizon, Trumpet of Jubilee, The Answer, and dozens of
other books and articles over the next two decades would each have
about them, in title and content, this same imagery of the better, truer
life, the life he had finally chosen for himself but had not yet achieved—
each work an act of polemicizing all who would listen, himself even
more than they.
He watched her and he saw from the deepening of that smile on her wide
red lips that she felt the child stirring in her womb. He arose and went
to her and kissed her hair and lips and hand. Then he walked out into
the autumn night for a last turn about the place.. . . He raised up his face
toward the stars. He gazed and gazed until it seemed to him that he could
feel the turning of the earth on which he stood.... He stooped toward the
earth and looked at the stones that lay scattered on his hill. He lifted one
stone and placed it on another . . . until within a semicircle of three tiers of
stone he had piled up others into the semblance of a table. He knew that he
had built an altar and now it seemed to him as though he must pour out a
libation and wish for the security of his house and for the safe delivery of
his child. Instead, he lifted up his face to the sky once more and stretched
out his arms in a wide primordial gesture. Beside his altar he stood and
prayed a prayer that had no words, nor contained any supplication, nor
besought either change or favour. It was an unspoken prayer of assent and
of acceptance. It affirmed for one man the things that do not change and are
of God. Slowly he dropped his arms and bent his head and went down the
hill to the house in which his wife, his child within her womb, was waiting
for him. 16
As Ludwig dreamed and prepared to receive his child into the world
late that August, he recorded in Altar, his most religious book, that
“vision of both a deeper truth and a better life [which] comes as by
the flash of grace and changes the whole man.” There was about this
long-term process, only partially chronicled here, a process that could
be traced to those awe-filled moments when as a child he had been
terrified and yet fascinated by the violent storms of St. Matthews, a sense
“of election and grace,” for “only a very few will experience crisis and
Page 660 - [see page image]
641
Out of Prison
rebirth.” Yet, “each of these will again experience them on his own terms
and arrive at different ends.” But for all these differences, personal and
traditional, a base similarity remained. “The imponderable elements are
here the all-powerful ones . . . the pure attitude and gesture of sorrow
and of resignation to the inevitable, to the will of God.” 17
On September 17,1933, James Elias Lewisohn was born to Ludwig
and Thelma in Paris. Good wishes poured in from friends and associates
old and new, in the States and on the Continent. Carl Van Doren assured
Ludwig “that for pure joy there is nothing like a baby that I’ve ever
encountered,” 18 and even that master of cynicism, Mencken, sent his
“most profound and sincere congratulations. You have at last become
a respectable citizen of society,” he remarked before adding a further
measure of sarcasm, now ethnically tainted, regarding his having heard
“various reports that you have turned against Hitler, and now have grave
doubts about him.” (A year later, Malcolm Cowley would note that “it
is curious how this thread of anti-Semitism runs through [Mencken’s]
essay” on proletarian novels, “too often done,” according to Mencken,
“in English that seems to be a bad translation from the Yiddish” by
Jews with “distinguished [albeit largely bogus] Anglo-Saxon names”—
an essay Cowley characterized as written “as if he were making a
free translation from a pamphlet by Dr. Joseph Goebbels.”) Dorothy
Thompson, knowing Thelma’s fear that a child might end her career as
a singer, rushed to assure her that while “one has to make all sorts of
sacrifices in this life, in behalf of and against a so-called career . . . having
a baby isn’t under any circumstances one of them.” Stephen Wise was
nearly as overjoyed as the parents by news “almost (though not quite)
too good to be true.” He promised that the years would prove how “a
child is a great, great joy,” and wondered if his birth “between Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur has a profound meaning . . . [that] he may
well become a great leader of our people." 1 '
Thelma later recalled Jimmy’s birth as “the culmination of all our
dreams . . . [in] those wonderful days.” 20 How “Ludwig was overjoyed.
At last he had his ultimate wish. He had a son through whom his blood
flowed and who was his contribution to the endless life stream of hu
manity. I shall never forget his face as he bent over me and kissed me.” 21
Ludwig was truly overcome with joy, and two months later he inscribed
the original manuscript of the third book of Altar, “Homeward Road,”
to her, “written during the latter months of my dear wife Thelma’s
carrying our son . . . and now presented to her as another token of her
husband’s devotion and love.” 22
It was far from chance that he had selected this portion for her.
With his family now complete, his thoughts had turned ever more
Page 661 - [see page image]
642
Ludwig Lewisohn
intensively toward mounting the most aggressive assault he could on
the U.S. State Department. “He felt that the time had come to return,”
Thelma remembered, his “periods of depression . . . further aggravated
by the unsettled conditions back in America.” But America still did not
welcome his return. “The law was waiting for us,” Thelma recalled,
with charges under the Mann Act still pending. Yet for Ludwig this
threat “acted as a goad on his free spirit, his singleness of mind,” she
later wrote. 23 Ludwig would not be deterred, growing more determined
than ever to achieve victory and sail home.
All previous attempts had failed when, in March 1933, he had
thought to approach Mary with what he believed to be a conciliatory ap
peal to drop her pursuit for the sake of his expected child. “At the end of
ten years I’ve written a letter to Anne Crump,” he told Canfield that same
day, sending him the letter to forward to Mary, “registered, return receipt
demanded.... If it comes from here she’ll pretend not to have received
it.” Canfield, however, wrote back on April 11, explaining why he and
the others at Harpers thought it inadvisable to send. Rather, they pro
posed to have a representative, friendly to both parties, visit with Mary
and test the waters without mentioning Ludwig’s part in this latest effort.
Even if he failed to win any concessions, it was still their advice that his
one-sided letter not be sent, and that some other means be sought. “This
question, however, is one for you to decide, and we don’t mean to be
interfering. We are merely expressing our opinion as your friends, and,
to a certain extent, your advisors, for whatever it is worth.
Canfield, of course, was correct in his assessment. Ludwig’s letter
was anything but conciliatory, threatening to have a “clarification for use
in the future . . . whether you answer this letter (of which I am keeping a
copy) or no.” The last word, he promised her, would be his. “Some day
I shall write the third volume of my biography, probably to be entitled
Haven. In that volume I shall desire, however briefly, to tie up finally
the loose threads.” All attempts to win “vindication by a suppression of
the printed word” would ultimately fail, he promised Mary; the revised
editions of Up Stream and Mid-Channel, though recalled, had already
been widely circulated. Nor could she prevent the inevitable American
publication of Crump, despite its current blacklisting. “You can no
more suppress the book than I can withdraw it. It exists. Vindication
by suppression of my writings is then impossible.” Further arguing his
case, Ludwig proceeded to tell Mary how her many acts of revenge, in
the courts, in Washington, in the press, had confirmed the portrait he
had drawn of her in Crump. “Thus precisely would Anne Crump have
acted.” She had “lived up to that dreadful symbol. . . [having] done
nothing to live it down.” Now that she was “entering upon that period
Page 662 - [see page image]
643
Out of Prison
of human life beyond the Psalmist’s three-score years and ten, when the
shadows must begin to fall and the future is uncertain and precarious,”
would she not truly wish to redeem herself and set them free? If not,
then his conscience in the matter would be clear. “I shall not have to
say to myself in the event of your death that I preserved an inhuman
silence and gave you no opportunity to vindicate yourself even at the
eleventh hour.” 25 In the end, the letter was never sent, as intervening
parties prevailed upon Ludwig’s better sense. Larkin was quite right in
assessing the letter as potentially of lasting damage to Ludwig’s efforts.
“It would only antagonize still further Mrs. Lewisohn and make every
chance of Lewisohn’s return to this country and the divorce which he
wants in my opinion utterly impossible.
Ludwig, of course, was unwilling to place too much hope in any
single possibility, and chose, in addition, to seek further help from Wise,
outlining for him a plan of surreptitious return. Contemplating some
period in the near future, he asked Wise to send all correspondence
after April 1 to Thelma’s mother. It was their intent to make their
way to her home in Burlington separately, Thelma and Jimmy by train,
accompanied by Mrs. Spear, and he and the cat in a car driven across
the Canadian border by Thelma’s cousin. Having slipped “cross the
frontier,” they would “occupy different apartments” and he would “of
course own nothing . . . until a settlement is made. Thus an immediate
fool-proof refuge is provided.” This, he seemed fairly certain, might be
the only recourse left to him, given Mary’s state of anguish after a lifetime
of guilt-ridden acts.
My fear is that Mary has rigged up for herself, between the ages of 60 and
70, a psychical mechanism which requires her “punishing” me in order
not to face her own conscience. For her arguments are mad: the more
cruelly and dishonorably I have treated her, the more should she normally
wish to disassociate herself from me. Her clinging, even to my name, like
an importunate beggar, like a disease, points of course to quite another
situation. If only she did sincerely believe me a scoundrel—all would be
well. She’s haunted by her first husband, her old mother whom she left in
the streets to perish, her daughter’s madness, my embittered youth . . . Ah! 27
Wise advised Ludwig to contact Felix Frankfurter, Harvard law pro
fessor, friend of Justice Louis Brandeis, and one of Roosevelt’s advisers.
Both Frankfurter and Brandeis were Zionist leaders of long standing,
with access to the highest offices. In the meantime, Wise himself would
approach the State Department. 28 Ludwig accepted Wise’s counsel and
sent him a letter to forward to Frankfurter on April 10. 29 Little would
come of these efforts in the months ahead, nor would Wise’s repeated
appeals to them in August and September yield a response by year’s end. 30
Page 663 - [see page image]
644
Ludwig Lewisohn
On May 12, Canfield informed Ludwig that he and George Hummel,
an attorney friendly to both parties in the conflict, were soon to “lunch
with Mrs. L. [and] as soon as that has taken place, I will write you
again."' The meeting was held toward the end of the month, but little
conclusive came out of it. So little, in fact, that Canfield wrote Ludwig
on June 1 that while they had “at least. . . clarified the atmosphere a lit
tle .. . there is nothing definite to report.” What had been established—
“some basis for discussing with you what may be done”—could wait
until he arrived in Paris at the beginning of July. The issues were com
plex enough, and of sufficient duration, that no quick resolution was
possible. “It is essential that we go over the ground together,” Canfield
concluded.-
Ludwig had been doubtful of their success, arguing against the
well-intentioned efforts of his supporters—“angels,” as he called them
with a touch of wonder at the unreality of their expectations. “You’re
bum psychologists. That wretched woman will only feel an added self-
importance from your seeing her and a new lease on life from the thought
of having ‘foiled’—She’ll use that word—you,” he assured Canfield on
June 5. “My letter might have made a breach in that identification of her
persecution of me with her will to live. Might! ” he added, believing her
vindictiveness had kept her alive these many years, and that denying
her the ability to continue to victimize him “might” bring an end to her
life. Mary, of course, had long portrayed herself as a victim of “the direct
or overt hostility that has inevitably followed the private and printed
propaganda against me,” as she wrote to the English secretary of PEN
that April.' 1 If such feelings had not, in fact, kept her alive, they had at
least offered reason enough to keep her blood heated and coursing.
Helena Rubinstein, “quaint creature that she is,” had lent Ludwig
and Thelma her country cottage that summer of the pregnancy. She was
“truly fond of Thelma . . . [who] needs as much country as possible.”
Given the strains of Nazi developments, the pressures of writing, and the
stress of Mary’s continuing success, Rubinstein and her husband, Titus,
undoubtedly saw a similar need in Ludwig. Though ten days of work
remained on Altar that August, and but four weeks to the expected
arrival of their child, Ludwig, a bit rested from his country retreat,
broke his long self-imposed silence on the matter. “It is clear that we
must go home; it is necessary for moral and financial reasons,” he wrote
Canfield. Already, arrangements for fee-paid lectures and inexpensive
living accommodations were being made. It was to everyone’s advantage,
Harpers’ and theirs. Besides, “in every moral and social sense” he and
Thelma had been married for ten years, and with a child soon to join
them, “we must be protected from annoyances, embarrassments, etc.
Page 664 - [see page image]
645
Out of Prison
The minimum of decency and justice requires that.” He was, therefore,
authorizing Canfield and Larkin to entertain “any sane formula which
will bring about the desired result.” He was, quite simply, agreeing to
“placation by vindication,” as he characterized it. The truth of the matter
was that had Mary granted him a divorce in 1924, he “would have been
content not to make or express any judgment at all.” Having given her
fifty dollars a week and offered her his interest in their home at 6 Jane
Street, and received her refusal in return, he was left with no other option
but the “defensive position” he had been forced to maintain through the
years. “So soon as these causes are removed I shall be willing to declare
that it was the anger and disappointment and embarrassment caused by
these that motivated my various animadversions and delineations and
gave them their acridness.” In truth, he went on, no word would ever
have been written about “the past” had not all this occurred. “Every
soul has its case growing out of its difficulties and . . . incompatibilities
of character etc. in a marriage are nobody’s ‘faults.’ ” He was now willing
to leave Up Stream and Mid-Channel as they originally were, and would
“sound a note of peace and reconciliation in Heaven ... if the proper
steps are taken.” If not, he would “be obliged to continue my vindication
and her condemnation beyond her death.” This was his best offer, far
more conciliatory than his letter five months earlier. The impending birth
of his child had rendered a different sense of the situation, with a new
set of responsibilities. “My first duty today is not to truth or to myself
but to my wife and child,” he advised Canfield in making the offer to
accept even less than this, if only peace and passage to America would
result. “But keep this letter. Keep it in the Harper archives,” he asked in
bold letters, as proof that he was, in fact, justified in what he had done
in response to Mary’s attack over the years, should he now be forced to
accept full culpability in return for a set of passports. '*
It was this same sense that Canfield communicated to Hummel
several days later, having arrived home from his meeting with Ludwig in
Paris weeks earlier. “I had several long talks with Ludwig abroad, and
I really think that he is willing to go to any reasonable length to supply
the ‘vindication’ Mrs. Lewisohn requires.... [I] propose to get hold of
the lady and find out whether there is any basis on which she will talk
business.” “ Nearly a month passed before she could be located at her
son’s home in Columbus, Ohio. Canfield sent word on September 20
that he would meet with her once she returned to New York, probably
in October. 36
But with Jimmy’s birth three days earlier, the situation had suddenly
changed. Ludwig and Thelma could hardly undertake so difficult a
journey and border crossing from Canada by boat, rail, and automobile
Page 665 - [see page image]
646
Ludwig Lewisohn
with a newborn child. “We must stagger along till very early spring.
Then we flee to Burlington, Vermont, where there’s a roof that’s our
own,” and the promise of work. “The gleam of light on the horizon is
the report of my lecture agent for the season of 34-35. He seems to think
that I can gather quite a lot of dollars,”' a welcome change from his
current financial situation. Over the years, he had complained to a string
of publishers and editors about the lack of prompt royalty payments.
Mary’s settlements had only complicated matters, while the Depression
added further to Harpers’ need to hold Ludwig tightly accountable for
much of this money. Previous publications and current articles were
earning a decent income, but a portion remained in New York to pay his
continuing indebtedness. Still, Ludwig was appreciative of all they were
doing for him. Without them, he had admitted to Huddleston earlier that
year, “we’d be in the streets.” Others, however, were not as forthcoming
with money owed for his efforts. “Well, we must hope for enough of an
upward trend to lead, at least, to a recovery of morale.” It was all he
could wish for under the circumstances. 38
Ludwig had spent much of the year searching for journals that
would accept his work, particularly his perceptions of the situation in
Germany. And if these interests found their way into print, so, too,
did his attempt to justify himself as a writer of fiction. “The Crisis
of the Novel,” originally intended for the American Spectator when
completed the previous October, was published that May in the Yale
Review. “Americans have at least this mark of a young people,” he
began his rebuttal to the critics, “that they experience without reflection,
that they distrust the reflective faculties and distrust them most when
exercised by men of creative temper.” If “a mild indulgence is granted
to poets,” this was certainly not the case for novelists of intellect. “Let a
novelist show that he has a brain, he is discredited at once. He is said to
be ‘no novelist’ and his books ‘no novels.’ These exercises of a childlike
nominalism are supposed to finish the discussion and to put the writer
in his place.” The moment needed neither an experiment in mood or
form, nor a turn backward to “the cast-off clothes of mid-nineteenth
century naturalism . . . [of] so many of the younger novelists . . . [who]
embrace more or less closely that communist ideology.” Rather, “men
are hungering for a new vision and a new chapel,” a new faith and a myth
to embody it. As ancient cultures passed stories from one generation to
another, new stories would arise “from [the] deepest communion with
what of ultimate faith and striving is now alive in the best and most
devoted men and women." v
“We’re all, in our different ways, seeking Zion,” he would write
Canfield in October, 40 pointing to this dream as the heart of his efforts,
Page 666 - [see page image]
647
Out of Prison
though so many had portrayed him as a writer “longing for motherly
comfort. . . [seeking] his catharsis through literature,” as did the psy
chiatrist Louis J. Bragman in a January 1933 article in Psychoanalytic
Review, to which he would add a second in July 1934. 41 Others saw him
as the outsider “revaluating” what was never in need of interpretation,
particularly not as “filtered through an alien mind . . . warping, destroy
ing and falsifying.” Dorothea Brande, the author of this critique, warned
that she might be seen as an anti-Semite, “as though stupidities of the
sort that abound in Expression in America were never written except
by members of Mr. Lewisohn’s race. That they come to us oftenest and
in their most extreme form from Jewish writers cannot be denied,” she
nonetheless advised her readers. 42 Even the French seemed to misunder
stand him. One journalist interviewing Ludwig the previous year had
thought his work similar to Proust’s introspective writings, an analysis
quickly corrected by Ludwig in his acknowledgment of Flaubert as the
French master from whom he had learned the most. 43
But of these many misperceptions, that of Adolph Gillis in his short
book Ludwig Lewisohn: The Artist and His Message seemed to trouble
Ludwig most. Not that he was opposed to the idea of a book about
his life and work. “Certainly a man who has written forty books should
have a book written about him. Especially one whose fortunes have been
uneven, and whose preoccupations have ranged from novels to criticism
to poetry,” 44 as he had told Thelma with some disappointment. But he
was not at all convinced that Gillis was the person for such a task, and
had tried unsuccessfully to discourage him, apparently with good reason.
“I never thought very much of this,” he later wrote on the flyleaf of a
copy he initialed. “But the man insisted on going ahead just the same.” 45
Gillis was “an earnest, devoted but slightly misguided young man who
insisted on bursting forth with his opusculum in spite of my warnings,”
Ludwig wrote in a letter to the Hershes of South Carolina, in which
he admitted, as he had nowhere else, to the loss of interest “in all non-
Jewish matters for myself.” It was this element that Gillis and the others
had overlooked, though it was the central thrust of his work. 46
Gillis’s work was the most comprehensive, and most positive, appre
ciation of Ludwig’s efforts to date, attempting in its brief 110 pages to
place his accomplishments within a biographical context. In the copy he
inscribed, Ludwig changed the dates of his birth and arrival in America,
again reducing his age by a year, 47 as if to make it official. But this was all
he would change, though there was sufficient reason for his displeasure
with the book. Gillis had drawn much from Harris during the two years
he worked on the study, 48 as he had from Trent 49 —though neither ever
fully understood the deeper motivations of their former student. If Gillis
Page 667 - [see page image]
648
Ludwig Lewisohn
came closer than they, seeing in Up Stream and, more so, in Israel a
“groping for moral values ... in the suffering of his race” (“the destiny
of the Jews was clear at last: it was, after twenty centuries of agony of the
flesh and the soul, to set up above the ramparts of a decayed civilization
the standards of justice and righteousness”), he still could not accept the
conclusion reached from this analysis, that “assimilation for the Jew is a
tragic delusion.” Even in mid-1933, months after Hitler’s reign of terror
upon German Jewry had become well known, Gillis could propose, and
apparently believe, that “of a certainty many, perhaps most, Jews are
happy despite anti-Semitism; some Jews are unhappy for other equally
compelling reasons. There are other joys and tragedies in Israel, and it
is time for Lewisohn to see them.” If Ludwig wished to create a “broad
humanitarianism,” Gillis argued, then “surely no good can come from
painting Gentiles only in their worst lineaments and painting Jews only
in their best.” Though Gillis was willing to accept Ludwig “as a teacher,”
he would require him “to use once again the quiet voice that we heard
in The Island Within.” Rather than speak of “the separateness of the
Jew and contempt of the Gentiles,” Gillis advised Ludwig that “recent
events in the world seem to point to another moral.”
Perhaps, but then Gillis failed to see in Ludwig’s marital struggles
the root example of so much of what he saw as wrong with American
society and its institutions, and one of the primary causes of his turning
back toward his Jewish roots. Whether by miscalculation or disingen
uous caution, Mary was absent throughout all of Gillis’s discussions
of Up Stream, Mid-Channel, Crump, and the many other books which
nevertheless “body forth an honest vision, and in the flame of man’s
suffering light up the vast theater of the world. Who will deny this virtue
in Lewisohn,” Gillis asked, “a man whose artistic impulse and creative
self-justification make him the symbol of a larger life ... as both herald
and prophet of his day?” Yet, if Gillis failed to understand the animus in
Ludwig’s voice, to his own credit he saw that “in an age of skepticism,
Lewisohn believes; in an age of inertia, he fights on.. . . There is not
schism for him between truth and conduct, between the ideal and reality.
There is only the battle between.”’ 1
Perhaps Gillis and the other critics should not be too harshly judged,
for few of Ludwig’s oldest friends in those years ever fully appreciated
the strength of his Jewishness or the dominant role it had come to play,
seeing him always as they had in the former persona of a progressive New
York critic. Only Dreiser gave evidence of having sensed this change.
In response to Ludwig’s request for permission to publish excerpts of
his writings in Creative America, 51 Dreiser added, without prompting,
a word of support for the Zionists: “For the life of me, I never can
Page 668 - [see page image]
649
Out of Prison
understand why the Jews who, in one place or another, find themselves
scored by local or national prejudices, do not wish really to establish a
nation of their own, therein to exercise their great genius for all phases
of life, and to present the world with an example of an equitable and
creative nation sufficient to inspire the rest of the world to follow its
example and leadership. The world certainly needs that.” 53 So positive a
statement, supportive of the political and moral efforts of those Zionists
with whom Ludwig felt closest, would, he told Dreiser, be “immensely
useful to our cause.” Might he quote it? “No one, Gentile or Jew, has
so justly expressed our necessary aims.” 54
As with Ludwig’s other pursuits throughout that spring and summer
of 1933, Creative America's forthcoming publication, given the financial
state of the world, had necessitated this continuing effort at securing
authors’ or publishers’ reprint permission for little or no fee. Neither
he nor Harpers could afford the expense. Refusal now came to mean
either “paring down” or elimination as costs began to outdistance all
estimates of the book’s income. Ludwig had thought the book finished
months earlier, and was gravely disappointed to learn that he would have
to re-edit the work because of these developments. Already exhausted
by other projects, he nevertheless promised Canfield on April 22 that he
would “rest over a short weekend and then first of all take up the matter
of the anthology.”
“Somehow I find myself so instinctively American that the tottering
of the dollar gives me a vertigo beyond the economic question; not until
now did it seem to me that the foundations were crumbling." * 5 It was
this understanding of a shared fate that had made it ever more difficult
for Ludwig to accept the refusals of particular authors, and Ezra Pound’s
more than anyone’s. Why, he wondered angrily in September, had Pound
assumed so high an estimate of his importance? “The man is a little mad,
but what always amazes me is where these second-rate people—granted
that he’s written a very few good poems—get their amazing arrogance.”
So as not to be faulted for otherwise unexplained exclusions, he insisted
to Saxton that the book’s “Acknowledgements” note that some writers
were “inadequately represented because we could not afford a more
adequate representation,” or totally without inclusion because of this
refusal to reduce their fees. 56
Ludwig’s own financial “vertigo” had again driven him to offer his
manuscripts for sale. “Like everyone else I am, of course,—well, ruined,
at least for the present,” he had written on April 24, in response to
George Howard’s second inquiry regarding Crump, which he now told
Howard was in the possession of his old benefactor, Louis Asher of
Chicago. Believing that it would bring a thousand dollars, Asher had
Page 669 - [see page image]
650
Ludwig Lewisohn
already advanced Ludwig the money. 57 By June, Ludwig was willing
to entertain “any reasonable terms convenient to yourself,” offering
it to Howard at half the previous price, to be paid in five monthly
installments. “The pressure on all writers, except performers in most
popular magazines, is heavy.. . . The crisis in world affairs bears far
more heavily on those who hope to contribute to the permanent spiritual
wealth of mankind.” To further “justify myself a little” in making this
offer, he was sending along a number of pamphlets authored in support
of the anti-Nazi cause. ' 1
Ever entrepreneurial, Ludwig made several other attempts to expand
his income that summer. Never totally satisfied with Butterworth’s han
dling of his work (in fact, a sizable stock remained from previous years),
he again implored Bradley, his European agent, to find a new British pub
lisher. After further refusals from Cape, Gollancz, Heinemann, Methuen,
Faber, Cassell, and Hoder, Ludwig replaced Bradley with Hamish Hamil
ton, and in September, signed a contract with Harpers’ London office
for British publication and distribution. 59 At the same time, Ludwig
was attempting to convince his old friend Carl Van Doren, the leading
voice at the Literary Guild, to have Creative America featured as their
Christmas selection. “I don’t consider [such an appeal] amiss,” he told
Saxton on July 17, “in view of the book’s character. It is, after all, not
my book but America’s. " M ‘
On October 11, Saxton wrote Ludwig that “we have finally tied
up the last strings on the anthology.” In doing so, however, Harpers
had “taken the liberty” on a number of occasions of substituting one
or another poem, eliminating an author here and there, and cutting
Ludwig’s qualifying statement regarding “paring down” and exclusions.
“It seemed to me that they declined to come in,” Saxton gave as his
reasoning. Nor was there sufficient reason for “giving any indication
that [others] had suffered by scanty representations.” 61
Creative America, by the very ideas that generated certain selections
and dismissed others, was destined to be received in much the same way
as Expression. The earliest notice, appearing in the Saturday Review
of November 25, criticized Ludwig for having filled two-thirds of the
volume with writers publishing after 1870, concentrating far too much
on “the moderns,” including his own far too lengthily represented writ
ings. “Mr. Lewisohn is an amateur in American literary history—a gifted
amateur, but still an amateur. . . [whose] book is mainly interesting
as an exhibition of his temperamental preferences.” 62 Louis Kronen-
berger in the New York Times offered a more favorable accounting
of Ludwig’s efforts, pleased with its “strong sense of direction” and
with “contents ... in many instances . . . above criticism.” Where he
Page 670 - [see page image]
651
Out of Prison
found fault was in the “excess of text-slashing” and “in the choice of
material. . . particularly among the moderns,” points that Ludwig had
hoped to blunt with his now-removed introduction. 63 Newton Arvin
found much more to celebrate in the choices that were included, crediting
Ludwig with great judiciousness. “Lewisohn not only drops overboard
a certain amount of junk, but rescues some unhackneyed things.'"'* This
and more was repeated by Carl Van Doren in the Nation, seeing the
book not merely as an anthology but as a “work of art. . . provocative
of debate. . . the most exciting anthology of the whole of American
literature that has ever been made.” 65
Yet, Van Doren would not endorse Creative America for the Literary
Guild, and as the year drew to a close, Ludwig remained deeply troubled
over the financial future of his expanded family. Plans for his return to
the States included the already organized lecture tour, but Ludwig was
as yet uncertain of Mary’s possible grasp upon this income. He hoped
for “a break somewhere”; just one “would change the picture.” 66 If
handled properly, the anthology might still prove to be the source of
security he sought. When a copy of Creative America arrived in Paris,
he was at once pleased with its contents but angered at the way in which
its primary marketing tool, the cover’s copy, had been written. He had
sent explicit wording and instructions, and neither had been followed.
There was to have been no mention made of Expression, “no high-brow
association with my high-brow goings-on,” but rather “a broad appeal
to half-educated masses” on the basis of an installment plan purchase
made out of spiritual need, without regard to his or Harpers’ reputation.
Income and the desire to provide a standard work of America’s best
thoughts, needed now more than ever, should have been motivation
enough for the publisher. Losing sight of these ends had caused Harpers
to have committed “a grievous mistake, a perfectly rotten psychological
blunder.” Once again he would lay out the ad copy as it should have
read. “The essence of the American Civilization in One volume. The best
that we have wrought out in American meaning and beauty is here.. . .
In this time of economic need and spiritual stress no American home
need lack this compendium of every American’s fairest heritage.. . . Are
you conscious of the spirit of America, against which both Fascist and
Communist is rising? Are you sure? The expression of that spirit is yours
and your children’s for one dollar down and one dollar a month for
three months.”
Both concerns—financial security and the expression of permanent
values in a cataclysmic world—were lodged by Ludwig against Harpers
that November 18. “We cannot hectically throw my books on the
market in mere impatience to get back rapidly the tiny investments they
Page 671 - [see page image]
652
Ludwig Lewisohn
represent.” Altar should not appear that coming February if Toward
Religion was to come out in May. Too much Lewisohn, especially so soon
after Creative America, would doom them all. More important, however,
was his concern that Toward Religion would appear without the changes
dictated by the pace and nature of the year’s events, nor with the
individual essays in their proper order. The message he wished to convey
would seem dated in parts, and incomprehensible in others, if he were
not allowed to make the changes that Harpers, having already printed
the book, was more than willing to forego. “You must let me re-write
the Introduction,” he insisted to Canfield, “which the trend of affairs
has evidently made necessary and add a long Appendix, which the turn
of things has made equally necessary.” He was “moreover . . . alarmed”
by the last chapter being first, “the organically thought-out argument
of the book” preceding its development, a “headless business . . . quite
unlike Harpers. Panic does no good,” he cautioned his publisher. 67
Ludwig had, in fact, told Wise the previous March that the already
printed book needed revising so that it might constitute the best possible
“prolegomena to a Jewish philosophy of life which I hope in later and
calmer years to write.''"' Above all else, this was his primary concern.
In pursuit of that goal, he had undertaken an extensive study of Jewish
sources, having compiled a list of what he thought to be the best expres
sions of the various schools of modern Jewish thought. When he next
proposed an anthology of this material to Canfield on November 10,
he was already in contact with the authors. After Creative America, he
was making certain that the many pieces were in place. Martin Buber,
like the others, was “happy and prepared to fulfill your wishes,” as he
had written the “Very honored Dr. Lewisohn” a month earlier. 69 And
now Ludwig was ready to approach Harpers with his proposal for this
“crucial book,” an anthology translated and “with an immense and
crucial Introduction.” There were no fees, and the rights, which he held,
had already been secured. Harpers need only print and distribute. “What
ever comes or goes 3000 to 4000 copies . . . cannot fail to sell. . . [to]
Jews and Gentiles . . . friends and enemies” alike, for different reasons.
“It is the central document—here is such Jewish conspiracy as exists! The
irony of it.” 70 Seeing little problem with such a book, and conceiving
readily that it would turn a profit, Harpers agreed to publish and to
advance Ludwig a thousand dollars in two payments during the first
months of 1934. On December 15, 1933, he thanked Canfield and
notified him that the book, already half completed, “is good and useful
and will be used by the people it’s meant for.” 71
By late fall, Ludwig’s life appeared to be regaining some stability
and direction. Books were about to be published, others were in various
Page 672 - [see page image]
653
Out of Prison
stages of completion. Though not as before, there was income on which
he could rely until his return to the States, where lecturing would help
support his family. “Paris is today the dearest city in the world and
we count the weeks until we can get away,” he wrote Wise in early
November. “We’re marking time till Jimmie is old and strong enough to
be taken home . . . [provided] our government do[es] the decent thing by
us both,” 72 and returned their passports. “I have missed America sorely
for a long time,” he had confessed to Dreiser in August, telling him of
his plans to settle in Burlington, “through forever with large cities as
places to live in.” 73
Friends in America, among them Wise, Recht, and John Haynes
Holmes, minister of Brooklyn’s famed Community Church, were again
busily at work attempting to secure the Lewisohns’ release from exile.
Thomas Corcoran of the Treasury Department had offered the first real
hope on October 6, when he informed Wise that “affidavits of identity”
could be obtained more easily than passports, and “vised like a passport”
to reenter the country. 4 If not what Ludwig would ultimately agree to,
it was at least a sign of positive change in Washington. 75
Canfield’s letter, received in the last week of December, contained
exactly the news Ludwig most dreaded, now that he had begun visu
alizing his life elsewhere. “I have had two rather discouraging talks
lately,” Canfield began his dire note, “one with ‘Ann C.’ and one with
Recht.” Mary was demanding an impossibly large sum of money and a
“retraction of all the statements you have made,” while Recht had passed
along information from a Vermont attorney that Ludwig’s arrival there
“would be dangerous.” Canfield attempted to cheer Ludwig with word
of Creative America’s continuing sales and a promise to promote Altar
fully. But he understood how his letter would be “a great blow to you”
and offered his sincerest sympathy. “I know you are in a disturbed state
of mind but you must have faith that we are doing the best we can.” 76
Two days later, Mary requested a copy of each of her husband’s
books, pleading “impoverishment to the level of the barest necessities
for years,” and appealing to Canfield’s “Christmas spirit to the degree
that would warrant you in sending me a set. ” 77 Her cynicism and sense of
control over the situation were matched by Ludwig’s panic and fears. “I
am desperate,” he wrote Canfield on December 26. “There’s no nonsense
about this. It’s the grim truth.” He had thought that all was settled and
had, while enjoying what now was clearly “a false security,” given up
their apartment as of March 31, 1934. He had believed that Recht had
thoroughly checked all eventualities, only to learn at this late moment
how likely it was that he would fall afoul of Vermont’s adultery statute
and land in prison. “There must be some way of protecting us somewhere
Page 673 - [see page image]
654
Ludwig Lewisohn
in America,” he insisted, claiming that his demand had not arisen out
of “the so-called artistic life,” but was that of “a very conservative
essentially religious man, a conventionally devoted American husband
and father who has no refuge for his family,” all “because at 24 he was
trapped into a marriage ceremony with a maniac.” Surely, being “so rich
in friends” and standing “for something at least decent and useful in the
world,” he would not be abandoned so that Mary, “after darkening the
best years of my life and embittering the souls of my parents . . . can
destroy not only me but my wife and child."''
The following day, still agitated, Ludwig sent Canfield “a necessary
continuation,” assuring him that “God will reward you” for efforts on
his behalf, “at least I hope so.” He urged Canfield to send copies of
Creative America to members of the State and Treasury Departments in
Washington as proof of his fitness for American residency, and pleaded
that “NO ONE influence Feakins to stop working for me and so com
plete my ruin.” If need be, he would reside in Canada while Thelma and
Jimmie went on to Burlington, entering the States only to lecture and
visit. Payment could be made to Louis Asher, who would transfer funds
to him, thereby avoiding Mary’s garnishing his income. “I can be saved
to be a source of profit and credit if a few faithful friends stand by me
now.'” Even South Africa had invited him to lecture, proof that “I can
gradually cash in on my reputation if I’m given half a chance."' ‘
Recht was sent a longer letter by Ludwig on the twenty-eighth,
bluntly detailing possible legal moves, and demanding his assistance,
as Recht had previously led him to believe that all was in order. “Now
immediate and vigorous action is necessary.. . . Every day counts. We
have to leave in April.” The American Zionist leadership, particularly
members of the bar from around the country, were to be enlisted.
“Make it clear to my friends—they’re worthy people and your fellow-
Jews . . . that my usefulness to our people will be destroyed if I can’t find
protection for myself and my little family.” Could he count on Recht’s
aid? “Am I making myself quite clear?” 80
There was more to Ludwig’s anger with Recht than this sudden
reversal for which he held his attorney partly responsible. During his visit
to Paris the previous summer, Recht had likened Ludwig’s relationship
with Thelma to his own tenuous ties with “his trulls,” as Ludwig called
Recht’s mistresses. “I just felt myself get pale,” he told Canfield on
December 29. “I was too much in his debt and too much in his power
to be able to afford to knock him down.” 81 But he had lost much of
his prior respect for Recht, and not merely because of his denigrating
and cavalier attitude. Ludwig’s own deepening commitment to Jewish
life, which Recht discounted in equal measure, had already driven a
Page 674 - [see page image]
655
Out of Prison
wedge between them. “A conventional Jewish husband and father,
“grown more conservative as the years have gone on,” 83 he was more
protective of his family and less patient in the face of attacks upon
his people from the left and the right, Gentile or Jew. Ludwig found
Recht’s unflattering comments and his apparent reluctance to commit
himself to greater efforts on his old friend’s behalf at this dangerous
time particularly intolerable. Perceiving Recht, correctly or not, as will
ing to destroy another whose Jewishness proved offensive to his own
“apostasy,” Ludwig wrote Canfield that “I can trust my Jewish friends,
of course, But no Jew can trust a Jewish renegade, whether the name of
his apostasy be Communism or some other ism. For at the core of the
substance of the renegade’s soul there is a shame so deep and so foul
that it urges him on to put to shame and to defile all that is Jewish in
the loyal and noble sense, all that is decent and of good report, so as to
justify himself by pulling all things down to his own level.
Such “self-obliteration,” which Ludwig believed he detected in
Recht’s reluctance to assist him further, had to be countered with every
measure available and at every instance for the betterment of not only
the Jews, but of all humanity. Two months later Ludwig would ask
rhetorically in Opinion what the Jews were to do now that Emancipation
had failed, his response all too obviously meant to counter Recht’s “arro
gance and lust after power” falsely promised as bait for his assimilation.
How are we to go about for a third time to solve our problem of living
in a pagan world? We must re-emancipate ourselves upon other and upon
truer terms. We must reject the Pagan demand of paying with our spiritual
destruction for an apparent equality. We must cleanse ourselves of the
servility and falseness and inner division which the attempt to meet that
demand has brought upon us. We must re-integrate ourselves with our
culture, our instincts, the very sources of our being. We must be Jews, and
as such we must demand of a world that feigns to be a Christian world,
our rights as individuals, as minority groups, as a people in the land of our
fathers. We must strive after the co-operation of all free men in the world,
of all Christian men in the world. And at last we must ask that co-operation
and that friendship upon honorable terms—as Jews, as conscious bearers
of one of the world’s great spiritual civilizations and therefore as men and
brethren, not as suppliants, imitators, henchmen and hangers-on. How clear
that should be to any unspoiled human instinct! But precisely the gravest
wrong done us by the false emancipation, the emancipation offered and
accepted upon false and dishonorable terms, is the warping and defiling of
our instincts and the disintegration of thousands upon thousands of Jewish
souls. Hence our immediate task is to cure the warped and broken soul of
Jews and to make them worthy of being Jews. The spiritual wounds of the
emancipation must be healed. To save the Jewish people we must convert
that people to itself and every Jew who puts off the falseness and dishonor
Page 675 - [see page image]
656
Ludwig Lewisohn
of servile assimilation and puts on the new man of his re-integration with
his people shall know that he is helping to save not only Israel but a world
pagan and unredeemed.' ’
On the eve of the new year, Ludwig sent Canfield a last plea, that
he find “lawyers who have no semi-subconscious axes to grind,” and
who would therefore find some successful means by which he could
reenter the States with his family through Canada, either together or
separately, or if need be, after an extended stay in the Detroit suburb of
Windsor, Ontario (“where, curiously enough, in the boom days Thelma’s
mother bought a building lot”). “Many Americans, having heard the
rumor, Americans of all kinds and creeds, write me most kindly that my
presence at home will contribute to . . . the religious life of our country.
Not, bien entendu, the spread of communism,” whose own barbarities
he would oppose with increasing self-assurance in the years ahead. “The
message which, in my humble way, I am coming to carry is an essentially
conservative message, an essentially and in the broader sense religious or
binding message.” Though “nervous and alarmed,” he assured Canfield,
“I haven’t lost insight or judgment.. . . Don’t think I’m phantastic.” As
if to offer proof that he was still firmly rooted in reality, he concluded
this final letter of 1933 by assuring Canfield that “as to our business
affairs, we’ll come to amicable agreements as we always have.” 86
Ludwig was more resolute than ever to take the offensive in the new
year in his dealings with Mary; even if it meant countering the advice of
his attorneys, whose “chuckleheadedness” in the past had prevented him
from being “in a better situation today.” The letter he had prepared for
Mary months before had never been sent. On January 2, 1934, he sent
a second, more forceful message for Canfield to forward, return receipt,
together with Mary’s February check from Harpers. “This is absolutely
necessary to my moral position.. . . Certainly you good people have no
results to show. Now I want to insist.”* 7
With a newborn son in his life, Ludwig was determined to win his
release by appealing to Mary’s own memories of “undoubted devotion”
to her own children, offering what he assumed to be a compelling
argument for her to do so, that, now “past three-score and ten years,”
she “might wish to take to the grave . . . the memory of some humanity. ”
To this opening, Ludwig added “a specific claim,” that having cared for
Mary’s children during their years together and after, and having endured
her attempt “to ruin me by scurrilous publicity” and impoverishment,
making it “ethically impossible to pay you alimony” even in the years
when a higher income would have allowed it, he had every “right. . .
[to] now call upon you in the name of my little son to accept this offer [to
Page 676 - [see page image]
657
Out of Prison
double her income from his writings] for a clean solution and to desist
from your persecution of the innocent which a mere legal technicality
has permitted you to exercise.” If she refused, his means and willingness
to retaliate were clear. Whatever he had written of their affairs in the past
had been “wrung from me by the persecution to which you subjected
me and mine.” But the future could bring a literary reconciliation. The
choice was hers. “You are sufficiently aware of the character of literature
to know that, if I am spared, I shall some day write a third and final
volume of autobiography. In that volume I shall have to tie up the
threads. How do you wish that to be done? On a note of forgiveness,
however tragic in character, or by the printing of this letter and the
observation that it was written in vain?” 88
Canfield forwarded the letter to Mary on January 15 as Ludwig had
insisted, but disclaimed any sympathy with its contents, not wishing
to give the appearance of siding with either party. “Please understand
that in forwarding this letter I am merely acting as a messenger boy,”
he assured her. “I do not intend to make any comment either to you
or to Ludwig,” he added in the hope of being perceived, along with
Harpers, as completely neutral in this affair.^ Mary, who two weeks
earlier had communicated her appreciation for having been sent ten of
Ludwig’s books, despite “my own temerity in having asked for them,” 90
thanked Canfield “for your courtesy in sending it directly to me,” rather
than through Larkin or the accounting office of Harpers. She fully
understood Canfield’s “awkwardness,” and offered her “assurance that
I shall respect your desire not to be involved in the way of criticism re
this maddening communication.” There would be a reply, she assured
Canfield, and asked only that it be sent through his office. 91
Intervening illness, a second letter from Ludwig, and fresh negotia
tions with Mary’s attorney by his clerical supporters, Wise and Haynes,
would delay Mary’s response for three months. Not until April 22 would
she be prepared to send her “long and comprehensive letter,” in care of
Canfield, who had recently “corroborate^] the newspaper report that
he [Ludwig] is shortly to arrive in the United States.” Out of appreciation
for Canfield’s assistance during these many difficult months, she offered
her own words of caution. “As you are aware of the contents of Ludwig’s
letters to me, I ask you to read my answer to him carefully. I ask you to
do this for your own sake as the probable publisher of his last volume
of autobiography.” 92
The months that passed between Ludwig’s first letter to Mary that
January 2 and his arrival in America on May 1, and the receipt of her
response shortly thereafter, would be filled with the business of endings
and beginnings, and the preparations for both. And with the weeks’
Page 677 - [see page image]
658
Ludwig Lewisohn
passing, the panic would begin to dissipate and a sense of calm within
the Lewisohn household would slowly take its place. “The nervous and
emotional strain on me has been terrific,” he wrote Canfield on January
5, apologizing for the tone of his last “rasping letter.” “Think of the
books I’ve produced in the past few years. And now, at the end of that
Herculean labor, I’m faced with poverty, threatened with disgrace.” He
asked for understanding, promising that “if I survive I’ll justify the faith
of my friends and associates in the future as I have in the past.” Had he
not always fulfilled his contractual obligations, more as a friend than as
a business associate? “I’m in crisis . . . sick today.. . . My head is getting
too bloody.” Surely his luck might “turn a little” and he would be able
to repay his friends’ kindnesses and his own financial indebtedness. “I’m
sure you won’t desert me now but go on keeping me going while I work
for you.” 93
Proof of Ludwig’s worthiness of such trust came days later, and he
quickly sent Canfield news of this “gleam of light, the first in weeks, that
had arrived with the news from Feakins that the lecture tour in America
was being finalized. Ludwig asked again for Canfield’s understanding,
expressing his “sincere regret” for the “infuriating letter” he had sent the
previous month, believing that such an apology would, “in view of our
long years of association . . . suffice on the moral side.” As for the “prac
tical,” he promised that his Book of Modern Jewish Thought, “planned
in conjunction with experts and specialists as a needed book,” would
“sell long if never brilliantly.” There would also be, as contracted, two
new novels in the coming years, and the “modest living from lecturing
and allied work” that would allow him to support his family and slowly
repay Harpers’ advances for legal fees and settlement payments. He
merely needed to be helped “over the move and the transition . . . and the
picture can be changed within a reasonable period. That is clear, isn’t it?
Our interests are identical,” he reminded his would-be benefactor. Over
the next three weeks, Ludwig received a substantial fee for the Italian
translation rights to Island, 95 and gave his permission to use a chapter
from The Drama and the Stage and his review of Elmer Rice’s Adding
Machine from the Nation for an anthology of theater criticism being
prepared for W. W. Norton. 96 Perhaps his luck had already begun to turn.
With the arrival of this news on the heels of his agent’s note concern
ing an expanded lecture tour, Ludwig wrote Wise in mid-January that
“I am moved more than I can say by the response that Feakins is already
getting even for the late spring from Jewish groups.” Some reservations
about the future remained, as he thought how during “All those dreadful
years of my youth I treated the woman far above her deserts and was
too simple-minded to even observe—all initial unsuitability aside—her
Page 678 - [see page image]
659
Out of Prison
undeviating untruthfulness and corruption of the very heart.” But he
would do all he could to avoid any further confrontations and to secure a
“discreet divorce,” or minimally, “God help me, [an] iron-clad and fool
proof guarantee of non-interference with me and mine.” To effect this
finality, he was prepared to sign “any statement of her own formulation
vindicating her,” and even double his annual payments to her. He wished
only to serve some useful purpose “to our people” and to ensure “the
peaceful development of my little son.” Only the passage to America
held out any hope of achieving these goals. “If only I can get there and
function in peace!”''
Wise’s reply counseled patience. He had already secured what he
believed to be expert legal advice, that Ludwig and Thelma’s presence
in America, particularly with Jimmie as evidence, would likely result in
Ludwig’s arrest for violation of the Mann Act. 98 On February 3, Ludwig
wrote Wise thanking him for retaining this new legal counsel, attributing
his impatience to his awareness of “being in a sense betrayed,” not by a
stranger or an old antagonist, but by Recht, his attorney of many years.
“All of the difficulties of my life have arisen from the fact that I cannot
antecedently imagine evil or treachery. That was the cause with Mary. It
is so here.” After a decade and a half of mutual assistance and trust, they
were moving in opposite directions, a change that had affected Recht’s
willingness to expend the energy needed to overcome what he had now
begun to characterize as a “hopeless” situation. The stronger Ludwig’s
Jewish ties became and the deeper his opposition to Stalin’s dictatorial
policies, the greater appeared the estrangement. Ludwig’s suspicions
seemed confirmed by the lack of support Recht had demonstrated in this
latest round of legal maneuvering. In Ludwig’s assessment, Recht had
“tried subtly to discredit both my personal life and my convictions and,
as he was more and more actively involved in Russian affairs, which was
his business and which I treated courteously, seemed to develop toward
me a sinister quality, while still professing all friendship and devotion.”
Recht had written angrily to Wise concerning Ludwig’s accusatory letter
of December, and was, according to Ludwig, “trying even to discourage
Harpers about me and about all things Jewish . . . another example of
the death of loyalty and goodness ... as the world grows more evil.”
For Ludwig, this was not a question of opposition to communism, or a
conservative attack upon the Red menace, but rather his opposition to
oppression in whatever form it took. “It seems to me that there is no
longer any point in our discussing either Fascist or Communist ideology.
The contents of doctrine have their merit. What we must fight is the spirit
that in the name of any ideology shrinks from no disgrace or cruelty
or treachery."''
Page 679 - [see page image]
660
Ludwig Lewisohn
Many others besides Recht had come to struggle with this problem
of where on the political continuum to place Ludwig. He had for some
time been repudiating both poles, but few listened carefully. The latest
printed attack came in the final issue for 1933 of the Saturday Review.
In an article titled “The Liberals Grow Old,” critic Bernard Smith had
accused Ludwig of turning from being “an enemy of gentility and a
spokesman for moral freedom” to a “forlorn . . . reactionary . . . [who]
screams rancorously for individualism and pouts his corrosive spleen
over a generation that has awakened sickeningly to the need for social
responsibility." 1 " Asserting that Smith had “not attentively read” what
he had written, Ludwig, in a letter to the editor on January 12, spoke
of the problem he posed for most of those who spoke of such issues.
“It is not the first time that I have come upon a purely fanciful image
of myself that has lodged itself in certain minds for the reason, I sup
pose, that my true views do not fall within any popular categories. I
have long outgrown the rootless liberalism, which I always held with
reservations anyhow, of the post-war years; I am, God forbid, neither
Fascist nor Marxist reactionary toward barbaric tribalism, and so I am
hard to place. That much is clear.” What was not clear to Smith and
the others was what Ludwig referred to as his “mature view” of life,
“a fundamentally philosophic and religious one” that was at the root
of all that he wrote. “My critical theory and practice cohere with both
my reintegration with my people and my return to the religion of my
fathers.” To see this clearly, he advised his critics to read the books
which were far more representative of his thinking—not Expression in
America, but Israel, Mid-Channel, Shylock, and This People. Nor did
he believe, as did Smith, that he was alone in his views, if only “that
young men and women here and there all over the country are closer
to me than the ladies and gentlemen who write the critical journals.”
This America, the country of a spiritually hungry youth, held “views
analogous to mine,” he wrote that January with a sense of pride and
anticipation.'"
And so, when Wise’s next letter arrived in mid-February, carrying
disappointing news of probable adultery charges, he resolved not to
accept this defeat as final, but to carry on the fight against what Wise
himself spoke of as Mary’s “vindictive and sadistic nature,” which, as
Wise further cautioned, was “likely to move her to proceed against you
when once she learns that you are legally within the grasp of her power
to injure you.” 102 Wise’s caution was well taken, for while he, together
with Holmes and Thomas Epstein (Wise’s attorney), were attempting
to arrange a meeting with Mary’s attorneys in an effort to negotiate
an end to the hostilities, 103 she was writing Holmes that her “state of
Page 680 - [see page image]
661
Out of Prison
mind” on the issues involved had not changed over the years. And when
Wise finally succeeded in arranging a meeting on February 27, his efforts
proved fruitless. 1 '*
Ludwig had already booked passage to Montreal for April 7, when
cancellation of the voyage postponed the Lewisohns’ departure to the
following week. Ludwig’s decision to sail had been based on the advice
of his new attorney, Arthur Garfield Hays. The two men shared much in
their backgrounds and life experiences. The son of German Jewish im
migrants, Hays had been born but six months before Ludwig and would
die almost precisely a year earlier. A student at Columbia University’s
law school during his client’s days on that campus, he had nearly been
barred from practice for “pro-German” activities during the early war
years. A civil libertarian, he had defended Horace Liveright’s right to
produce a play with a lesbian theme, sat on the defense team for Sacco
and Vanzetti, successfully appealed the Scottsboro Boys’ conviction,
reorganized the Dramatist’s Guild along equitable lines, attempted to
defend those accused by the Nazi regime of the Reichstag fire, upheld
the free speech rights of the German-American Bund and of American
communists, attacked the House Un-American Activities Committee,
and was a part of the law committee of the NAACP. Most relevant
to Ludwig’s difficulty was Hays’ own divorce in 1924, the year of
Mary’s refusal to grant Ludwig a similar release.'"' Entangled in his
own extended settlement negotiations, Hays was fully appreciative of
the problems Ludwig had faced for over a decade. As Ludwig remarked
to Canfield on March 2, it was Hays who had “pointed out ways and
means—not too troublesome—by which we can avail ourselves of our
legitimate refuge in Burlington.” If this proved too risky, there would
still be time then to leave for Canada, which would be “100% safe.
The worst that could befall, then, is that for a period we should have
to make our home in Montreal or Toronto which, save for the damned
climate, would be an infinite improvement and release.’ 1 "’ There was
little reason now not to finalize their plans. Without the need to wait
for Mary’s acquiescence, Ludwig had booked a cabin, arranged for the
shipment of their possessions, and notified the American consul in Paris
of the dates during which they would use the now promised temporary
passports, good only for travel to America.
After ten years in Europe, there was much to prepare before their
return. Little time remained for the creative life, but without it there
was an emptiness in both their lives—and so they tried to fill the time
with as much artistic and intellectual activity as they could. The Book of
Modern Jewish Thought “makes some progress,” Ludwig had written
Wise in early February, 107 though not at the pace it might have in other
Page 681 - [see page image]
662
Ludwig Lewisohn
seasons. “I do some work,” he told Canfield on March 6, “though
we’ve slowly begun to pack, because my mind is easier." 1 ' They were,
however, scheduled to broadcast a show on Radio-Coloniale on March
21, “an Heure Americaine consisting of a brief discourse by me and
a brief recital, La Chanson franaise, by my better half”—a farewell
performance by both, unscheduled as such, but serving that purpose
nonetheless. 1 '
Altar had appeared several weeks earlier, and Ludwig studied the
reviews, pleased as he was with the book’s design, if only moderately so
with its text. “Objectively and coldly, it’s as good a realistic American
novel as the current best—no high praise from my point of view.” In a
season of lesser fictional achievement, by his estimate, Altar measured up
well, if only by relative comparison rather than against the more absolute
standards by which he judged all writing, including his own. As such, he
was troubled by the first reviewer’s comments. Though constrained by
other tasks from offering a response at this time, he nonetheless indicated
his displeasure to Canfield, noting the negative attitude of the reviewer
as part of a pattern, though neglecting to define it for Canfield. F. T.
Harsh first praised Altar as one of Ludwig’s “best novels,” only to add
that “I think most of us have felt ‘almost but not quite’ about Ludwig
Lewisohn. The passion, sincerity, and eloquence of his best passages
is so very often offset by his nose dives into essential spiritual and
philosophical falseness.” Ludwig understood clearly what Harsh meant
by his use of the final phrase. There was little doubt in either mind
concerning the ethnicity of their opposing views. “So far I’ve seen but
one review of the Altar, that by Harsh in ‘books.’ It is curiously symbolic
of a special attitude to my fiction. Harsh uses big words—‘greatness’—
which are not used in regard to others and then says harsher or, rather,
more impatient things that he would of those contemporaries. Reflect on
that quite coolly. It has happened so many times as to be significant."'"’
Other reviewers either repeated Harsh’s objection to good writing and
passion wasted in a failed effort, or, more positively, overlooked the
book’s technical problems “because it is about things which matter—
about values. “For its comments alone [it] is amply worthwhile and
affords food for serious discussion and for profound thought,” as one
critic noted." '
The severest critique was Ernest Bates’ “Lewisohn into Crump,”
appearing that April in the American Mercury. For Bates, the man who
had once offered his Book of Modern Criticism as “a text-book of radical
criticism . . . [for] young assailants of academicism,” and who, through
Up Stream, had “proudly set himself up as a symbol of the oppressed mi
nority . . . closer to the ideals of their country than were their emotional
Page 682 - [see page image]
663
Out of Prison
opponents and traducers”—this Lewisohn had, with his “adventure in
Judaism,” abandoned this assault and joined the retrograde. “The case
of Mr. Lewisohn has proved to be a case of the supplanting of a given
character by his opposite within a single organism. One of the finest
intellects of our time strove to master its environment and failed.. . .
Subtly within the personality arose a counter-force, creating first the
subjective consolidations of megalomania, then a refusal to acknowledge
the nature of the environment, and finally, made possible to a proud spirit
by this refusal. . . ‘the will of God.’ ™ n
Had Bates fully understood Ludwig’s position, he might not have
been so vituperative in his objection; for Ludwig was not defending the
“business-ridden society” he had earlier attacked, as Bates claimed, but
had taken his own critique of it a step further, beyond mere questions
of social change and into a discussion of how such change was most
permanently effected. “The ultimate causes of social change remain
individual conversions toward specific moral choices and their laws,”
Ludwig had written in “Is Love Enough?,” published a year earlier
in Harper’s as part of the projected Toward Religion. The unbroken
line from early literary criticism through Up Stream and into his Jewish
affirmation was clear to those willing enough to consider it.
For man is, once again, a choosing animal, a religious animal, who can
attain his maximum satisfactions only by proposing to himself a rational
end and by making the selections, the renunciations, by means of which
alone—alone!—that end can be attained. Renunciations in obedience to
self-proposed ends constitute the inherent method by which man lends his
life order and form, and from which arises his only chance of equilibrium
and peace and happiness. Human marriage, like all the other things that
constitute civilization, must represent the re-molding of nature into hu
manly significant form. Nature cannot be transcended or cast aside. That
is the Pauline error. The potter cannot transcend his clay. Without it the
wheel will shape no pitcher. But the pitcher’s shape is not in nature. It is the
impress upon nature of the potter’s mind. 114
Ludwig’s “potter’s mind” was once again shaping the clay of his
own life, depending only upon himself to engineer his return through
attorneys and contacts of his own choosing, rather than relying any
longer on the more standard channels established by Harpers. And
so, when Mary neglected to respond to his first letter, he had sent a
second in March, again using Canfield as courier, 1 ■ which Mary had
found “more human than the first which is libelous per se and does not
deserve a reply.” Nevertheless, as she asked Canfield to relate to Ludwig,
she intended to compose a “full” response once she had sufficiently
recovered from her illness. 1 ' *
Page 683 - [see page image]
664
Ludwig Lewisohn
As Wise busily finalized passport approval in Washington, Holmes
once again attempted to bring reason and sympathy to bear upon Mary.
But the meeting between them on March 26 “alienated her from me,” as
he explained to Ludwig with sympathy. “Alas, dear friend, for all your
pain and humiliation! Whatever your faults or failures, you and Thelma
deserve no such fate as this, and I would give my good right hand if I
could do anything to help you.” 117 He would try one last time, writing to
her “with a sincere expression of my sympathy and understanding” for
the pain she and Ludwig had caused one another, and with the hope that
he might prevent the two from being “injured beyond repair in all that
makes up the essence of mind and character.. . . The only thing that now
counts is a cleaning up of all this mess, a wiping out of an irreparable past
and a beginning of life over again for the future.” Not to do so, Holmes
advised Mary, was to support those who claimed her continuing pursuit
of Ludwig to be proof that she was “a selfish, spiteful, vindictive woman,
resolved to torture to the end, at the expense of lives including her own
which should be relieved from pain.” Surely, this was not her intent,
for vengeance, he reminded her, was a part of the “divine economy,”
as Paul had taught, and “as dishonorable as it is cruel” when exercised
by one human upon another. Did she not realize how dangerously close
she stood to “losing all pity and sympathy, a full share of which should
be rightly hers”? Nor would this loss of “your own good reputation”
be momentary, for it was likely that, given Ludwig’s place in literature,
his own story would one day be written by an independent judge whose
view of her would be unfavorably colored by her refusal to consider
“every appeal of reason.”
Especially I tremble at this prospect when I realize that your husband ... is
a man of great distinction in the field of literature, whose works are destined
to create and maintain an abiding interest in the details of his life. When
Mr. Lewisohn’s biography comes to be written for a posterity that will not
forget him, you will have your large and important part in that biography.
I should think that even the simplest dictates of prudence would persuade
you to make that part of such a character as will not alienate you forever
from the kindly memory of men. 118
Encouraged by all the supportive activity he had generated, Ludwig
buoyantly, but exhaustingly, went about concluding his affairs in Paris
and preparing their worldly possessions for shipment. “You can imagine
the labor of going through the accumulation, especially of papers, of all
these years, the wrench, too, of breaking up our home—glad as we are to
go,” he wrote Canfield on April 4. The decade-long European interlude
had been his most productive and satisfying period. Their departure
would be bittersweet. Close friends and familiar geography would be
Page 684 - [see page image]
665
Out of Prison
deeply missed. But a new world was opening up, with so many others
waiting to welcome them—Feakins, who had already secured “two
modest but morally encouraging engagements for early May”; Wise,
long a supporter and someone who would play an ever more crucial
role in averting potential disasters in future years; Hays, “looking after
legal and other security like a perfect Trojan”; Holmes, who “for all the
good it will do, is holding private indignation meetings over A. C.”; and
Mrs. Spear, whose material support would aid their initial resettlement
in America and, unwittingly, make possible the ultimate dissolution of
her daughter’s life with Ludwig. 119
On April 17, Ludwig and Thelma emerged from the U.S. consul
general’s office in Paris with their temporary passports in hand. Fully
aware of the consequences of falsifying information, he had replaced
the year removed earlier from his date of birth in an attempt to inch
closer to Thelma’s. If once motivated by vanity and embarrassment,
he no longer despaired over the gaping disparity in their ages, for
while Thelma’s appearance had naturally matured during these past ten
years, his own, as witnessed by his passport photographs of 1924 and
1934, had surprisingly grown more youthful. The haggard, apprehensive
expression had softened and eased. For all the hardships experienced,
these had been his best years.
Carrying his passport as a symbol of hard-fought victory, despite
its restrictions of passage and time, 120 Ludwig embarked with his small
family on April 21, and arrived in Burlington on the first of May. He
would next write “An American Comes Home” for Harper’s, 121 as if it
were the start of a new life. And to Wise he would note on May 12,
“Here I am speaking to you from this side at last, with a heart full of
love and gratitude to you above all other friends.” Wise’s unflagging
efforts in Washington had proven the key to the portals of America. But
if Ludwig was filled with the happiness of a forced exile allowed at last
to return home, he was certain that a new phase of his struggle with
Mary and the society he had fled was about to begin. “I feel like a man
let out of prison,” he confided to Wise, “though still, alas, dragging a
chain.”
Page 685 - [see page image]
Page 686 - [see page image]
667
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
Individuals
BC Bennett Cerf
BH Benjamin W. Huebsch
CC Cass Canfield
EL Edna Lewisohn
ES Eugene Saxton
GV George Sylvester Viereck
HH Henry Hurwitz
HL Horace Liveright
HM Henry L. Mencken
JS Joel Elias Spingarn
LH Lancelot Minor Harris
LL Ludwig Lewisohn
ML Mary Arnold Lewisohn
SH Sisley Huddleston
SW Stephen Wise
TD Theodore Dreiser
TL Thelma Spear Lewisohn
WB William A. Bradley
WL William Ellery Leonard
Manuscript Collections
BHP Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
COC College of Charleston Archives, College of Charleston
HHP Henry Hurwitz Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati
Page 687 - [see page image]
668
Notes to Chapter i
HLP Horace Liveright Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
HMP Henry L. Mencken Papers, New York Public Library
HSCA High School of Charleston Archives, College of Charleston
JSP Joel Elias Spingarn Papers, New York Public Library
LHP Lancelot Minor Harris Papers, College of Charleston
LLP I Ludwig Lewisohn Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati
LLP II Ludwig Lewisohn Papers, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.
LLP III Ludwig Lewisohn Papers, College of Charleston
LLP IV Ludwig Lewisohn Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington
LLP V Ludwig Lewisohn Papers, University of Texas, Austin
RHP Random House Papers, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.
SWP Stephen Wise Papers, American Jewish Historical Society, Waltham,
Mass.
TDP Theodore Dreiser Papers, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
UWA University of Wisconsin Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison
WBP William A. Bradley Papers, University of Texas, Austin
WLP William Ellery Leonard Papers, Clara Leiser, Executrix
CHAPTER 1
1. Ludwig Lewisohn, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (New York:
Boni and Liveright, 1922), 11-23; and birth certificate, LLP II. Ludwig’s father
appears as Kaufman Jacques Lewisohn. This date of 1882, and not 1883 as
Ludwig later claimed, is reconfirmed by the register of students at the High
School of Charleston, HSCA; Stanley Chyet, “Ludwig Lewisohn: The Years of
Becoming,” American Jewish Archives 11 (October 1959): 125-26; and LL,
interview with Thomas Tobias, 1931, LLP I.
2. LL, Up Stream, 19.
3. Ibid., 11,21-22.
4. Ibid., 23-27; LL, The Case of Mr. Crump (Paris: Edward W. Titus,
1926), 45; and photograph of his grandmother, LLP I.
5. LL, Up Stream, 27-30.
6. Ibid., 30-31.
7. Ibid., 31-33.
8. Ibid., 35-41.
9. Ibid., 42-43; Cora Evans to Stanley Chyet, 3 July 1958, and news
clipping of unknown origin or date, “She Led All-Girls Orchestra,” LLP I. Also,
St. Matthews’ Record, special issue of 1904, notes that the second floor of one
of Jacobson’s buildings was occupied by the town’s Masons, an organization in
which Jews had long held membership in Europe and in South Carolina.
10. LL, Up Stream, 12-13, 43-14.
11. Ibid., 43, 58-59.
12. Ibid., 44. Mrs. C. has been identified by Mr. Banks, clerk of the Calhoun
County Court in St. Matthews, as Mrs. Cain, a leader in the Methodist church.
Less likely is Mrs. Crosland, a Baptist. Mrs. Cain lived within a few blocks of
the Lewisohn home and the Methodist church attended by Ludwig.
Page 688 - [see page image]
669
Notes to Chapter 1
13. Ibid., 45-46.
14. Ibid., 47.
15. Ibid., 49-50.
16. Ibid., 53.
17. Ibid., 48—49.
18. Ibid., 38-39.
19. Ibid., 8.
20. EL, interview with the author, January 1980.
21. Evans to Chyet, n.d. and 3 July 1955, LLP I. The Record of Graduates,
Memminger High School, Charleston, South Carolina, lists Fannie Jacobsky as
an 1874 graduate. Memminger School Archives, College of Charleston.
22. Evans to Chyet, 1 June 1958, LLP I.
23. Evans to Chyet, 17 May 1965, LLP I.
24. Evans to Chyet, n.d., LLP I.
25. LL, Up Stream, 44.
26. Ibid.
27. LL to Evans (“My dear Cousin”), 16 December 1922, and Evans to
Chyet, 30 October 1959, LLP I.
28. LL, Up Stream, 51, 62-64.
29. Ibid., 52.
30. Ibid.
31. LL, Haven, with Edna Lewisohn (New York: Dial, 1940), 28-29.
32. LL, Up Stream, 52-54.
33. Ibid., 54.
34. EL, Diary, n.d., LLP I.
35. LL, Up Stream, 54.
36. Ibid., 54-55.
37. LL, An Altar in the Fields (New York: Harper, 1934), 15.
38. Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 9,49-50.
39. Leon Banov, As I Recall (Columbia: R. L. Bryan, 1970), xii-xiv. Banov
was Charleston County’s first public health officer.
40. LL, The Broken Snare (New York: Dodge, 1908), 140; and LL, Up
Stream, 56.
41. LL, Up Stream, 58-59.
42. LL, Crump, 44.
43. LL, Up Stream, 58-59.
44. LL, Crump, 47, 60. Lewisohn remarked during a lecture how his father
would return home after a day’s work and seat himself at the piano to play
Mozart or Beethoven (Tape recording, n.d. [ca. 1950], LLP I). The earliest record
of Jacques’ employment is in 1900, when he worked for Buell and Roberts at
573-75 King Street, a furniture, dry goods, and notions shop. In 1902 he moved
to the Phoenix Furniture Company at 187-91 King Street, where he remained
until leaving Charleston in 1914 (Walsh’s Charleston City Directory [title varies],
Charleston, 1900-1914).
45. LL, Crump, 60, 47.
46. Ibid., 49.
47. LL, Up Stream, 60.
Page 689 - [see page image]
670
Notes to Chapter i
48. Register of Students, WSCh.
49. Virgil C. Dibble, “Annual Report of the High School of Charleston,”
Yearbook, City of Charleston, South Carolina, 1893 (Charleston, 1894), 186-
87. A good outline of the curriculum followed by Lewisohn is found in the year’s
annual report to the mayor for 1894:
In the classical department, our boys are thoroughly grounded in the forms,
syntax and prosody of Latin and Greek, and are subjected before graduation
to an examination in their Grammars, from cover to cover. In reading,
beginning with a literal rendering of their texts, they are led, as the course
advances, to recognize and appreciate elegance of expression, and to employ
good English in their translations. They receive, especially during the last
two years, the most careful training in writing Latin and Greek, and are
made to memorize many of the best portions of the authors studied. They
are also taught the history and geography of ancient Greece, Italy and
Asia Minor, and are made familiar with classical Mythology. Our pupils
enjoy, I am sure, the very best advantages, and when they leave us, whether
they pursue their studies in some higher institution of learning, or enter
at once upon the practical work of life, they carry with them the vigor of
thought, facility of expression and appreciation of culture which a classical
education inspires and develops. The course in Mathematics is directed not
only to the learning of processes, but to the understanding of principles
and their application. The boys who come to us are supposed to be already
well advanced in Arithmetic, but they receive such additional instruction in
this important study as will make them independent of their text-books in
solving difficult problems, and will prepare them for the work to be done in
the higher classes. Algebra we now begin before the close of the first year,
and our pupils are required, in the remaining years of the School course, to
accomplish in this branch all that is demanded for admission into the best
Colleges in the Country. As indicating the extent of our course, I will state
that at the last annual examination, the Algebra paper of the Graduating
Class was the paper used at the Harvard entrance examination two years
previous. The Geometry course is accomplished in the second and first
classes, and the instruction is made as practical as possible, so as to develop
and train the logical faculty of the pupils. It is hoped in the near future to
enlarge the course in Mathematics, so as to include Plane Trigonometry.
The department of English is being steadily developed. Our pupils are not
only made to study and learn what are called the English branches, and
thus acquire a considerable fund of information, but they are given large
opportunities of becoming familiar with English as a language. They are
encouraged to read our best authors, and are required frequently to prepare
Compositions, so as to be able to write correctly and with ease. All that can
be included in a four years’ course is insisted upon, and the boys acquire that
which will prove a good working capital when their school days are over.
The department of Modern Languages includes French and German, the
two languages which, in the scope and beauty of their literature, and in the
spirit and attainments of their scholars, are most closely allied to our own
language. French is begun in the Fourth Class, and German in the third, and
Page 690 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 1
the boys thus have ample time in which to master the requirements of our
course. Those who accomplish the course can have no difficulty in reading
at sight ordinary passages in French or German. Two years are given to
the course in Physics. Experiments are performed before the Class, and the
boys are encouraged to test for themselves the principles and formulas of
the Science. Their mastery of the subject is such as to fit them intelligently
and without difficulty to enter upon of the special courses in Technological
Institutions of high grade (Yearbook, City of Charleston, South Carolina,
1894 [Charleston, 1895], 226-27).
For a brief history and several student memories of the school, see Bantam,
8 May 1939, an issue devoted to the institution’s one hundredth anniversary,
HSCA.
50. LL, Crump, 56.
51. William Joseph Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou
bleday, 1954), 300; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Anna Dawes, quoted in Michael
Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 34, 78, 145; and Walt Whitman, quoted in a
letter to the New York Times Book Review, 22 May 1994, 51.
52. LL, Up Stream, 65-66; and LL, Don Juan (New York: Boni and Liv
eright, 1923), 5.
53. LL, Crump, 57; and LL, Up Stream, 71.
54. LL, Crump, 60.
55. LL, Up Stream, 67-68; and Bantam, 19.
56. LL, Crump, 60-61.
57. LL, Up Stream, 70.
58. Ibid., 62-64.
59. Ibid., 66.
60. Ibid., 74. Federal Judge J. Waites Waring, a college friend of Ludwig’s,
similarly recalled the Charleston of his youth as “a place of perhaps the most
rigid and at the same time flexible place that practices what we called Shintoism.
Charleston has lived in the southern confederate tradition completely. At the
same time it has lived in a simple, kindly pleasant way. It hasn’t been the Ku
Klux Klan attitude. Charleston is one of the most respectable communities. It
has a charm to it. It’s a beautiful old city, the lower part of Charleston where
most of us lived. I say most of us. I mean our crowd. It has a charm, a fashion,
but it doesn’t think much, and it doesn’t think outside of its pattern. Its pattern
of thinking allows certain expansion and contraction but you don’t go beyond
a certain bound. It’s not like the Bible belt where hell and brimstone and eternal
damnation are preached. There was none of that kind of thing. It was a kindly,
pleasant, happy, understanding kind of place. It was a matter of, We don’t
do these things, and Decent people don’t think those things, and they don’t
express those things, but they live within the general confines and doctrines.
You lived that way. It’s in the atmosphere. People don’t question it. Now, so far
as race relations was concerned, I practically never heard any discussion. For
years I always thought that there was something wrong with the situation in race
relations, but still it was what we had and we lived in it and we were pretty happy
under it and why bring that up. It was that kind of attitude” (J. Waites Waring,
671
Page 691 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter z
The Reminiscences of J. Waites Waring [New York: Columbia University, Oral
History Research Office, 1957], 8-9).
61. LL, Up Stream, 70; and LL, The Island Within (New York: Harper,
1928), 88.
62. LL, Up Stream, 81-82; LL, Crump, 67-68; and Lillian Smith, Killers of
the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949), 75-76. For a full and perceptive treat
ment of this theme, see Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to
Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982).
63. “Diffugeres Nives,” Lewisohn translation, Charleston News and
Courier, 26 June 1897, 8.
64. LL, Up Stream, 63.
65. Ibid., 78-79.
CHAPTER 2
1. LL, Crump, 49.
2. Ibid., 66.
3. Ibid., 49-50.
4. Ibid., 50-51.
5. Ibid., 52-54.
6. Ibid., 47-48, 52.
7. Ibid., 50.
8. Ibid., 59.
9. Ibid., 58-59.
10. LL, Up Stream, 79.
11. LL, Crump, 61-62.
12. College of Charleston, Catalogue of the College of Charleston, 1900-
1901 (Charleston, 1900), 44.
13. Yearbook, City of Charleston, South Carolina, 1898 (Charleston, 1899),
285.
14. LL, Crump, 62-63.
15. LL, “Expectation,” in The College of Charleston Magazine 1 (January
1898): 26 (hereafter referred to as Magazine).
16. College of Charleston, Register of Grades, 1885-1916, COC. The fol
lowing compilation was made for the years 1897/98-1900/1901, with each
grade representing a full year’s course.
F S ] S
Mathematics
53
65
Latin
93
73
69
70
German
98
90
88
75
French
92
92
94
84
English
90
90
89
88
76
672
Page 692 - [see page image]
673
Notes to Chapter 2
History
93
88
81 67
Chemistry
55
68
Gothic
71
75
Psychology
75
Logic
71
Sociology
85
Overall Average—76.11
President Harrison Randolph, in presenting Ludwig’s degrees, commented,
“It gives me great pleasure to announce that Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn of Charles
ton, has in the past four years of residence at the College completed not only
the work for the Bachelor’s degree, but that required for the Master’s degree as
well. The degree of Master of Arts ordinarily requires the full work of one year
at the College, in addition to the four years required for the Bachelor’s degree.
But Mr. Lewisohn has been able to do the work of five years in four, and the
diploma for the Master of Arts will be handed to him at the same time as that
for the Bachelor’s degree” (Charleston News and Courier; 25 June 1901).
17. LL, Haven, 89; and Catalogue . . . 1900-1901, 36-54. The recent addi
tion of a full program in English is reflected in the college’s 1899 annual report
and in its mention of a lack of English materials in the library at this time.
18. Waring (Reminiscences, 19-20) remembered della Torre as “a magnifi
cent Latin scholar.... I knew him in later life, a good deal. I knew him socially,
a charming creature, Italian descent. He not only knew how to read and write
Latin, but he knew the flavor of Latin literature, and he would pass that on to
his students. It was not that you had to say ‘amo’ means ‘I love,’ but you had to
know what ‘amo’ meant in a sentence of Virgil. He gave you the literary taste.”
19. W. S. Currell to Harrison Randolph, 15 August 1898, LHP.
20. Moyen-Benish to Harrison Randolph, 17 August 1898, LHP.
21. LL, Up Stream, 82. Waring (Reminiscences, 19) confirmed this influence
upon Ludwig, an influence Harris apparently had upon all those who sought to
cultivate a taste for literature: “Have you read Lewisohn’s book, Up Stream?
There he speaks particularly of Harris. Harris had as fine a taste for English
literature as anybody I’ve ever known. Lewisohn said that too. Harris had
enormous influence on Lewisohn’s life, retiring, shy, kind of scared creature
that Harris was. He didn’t force anything on you, but if you’d take it from him,
you could drink as deep as you wanted to.”
22. Interview with LH, Charleston News and Courier, 24 February 1935,
LLP II.
23. LL, UpStream, 81-84.
24. Ibid., 83; Nannie Scott to LH, n.d. [ca. 1900], LHP.
25. H. M. Belden to LH, 12 April 1902, LHP.
26. LH to Carlotta Harris, January 1913, LHP.
27. LL, Crump, 63.
28. Ibid., 63-64
29. Ibid., 64-65.
Page 693 - [see page image]
674
Notes to Chapter 2
30. The account of LL’s activity in the Chrestomathic Society comes from
the society’s minutes, COC.
31. Magazine 1 (January 1898): 38.
32. James Harold Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston (Charles
ton: College of Charleston, 1935), 206.
33. Waring, Reminiscences, 22.
34. From an anonymous interview in the Charleston News and Courier, 24
February 1935, LLP II.
35. LL, “Maggie’s Fate,” Magazine 1 (February 1898): 83.
36. LL, “Oh Well for Him,” Magazine 1 (February 1898): 58.
37. LL, Up Stream, 89-91. As in so many other instances in Up Stream, LL’s
chronology was in error, incorrectly placing this garden party two years after it
took place.
38. Ibid., 91.
39. Ibid., 96-97.
40. LL, Don Juan, 6-7.
41. LL, Crump, 66-69, quote on 67-68.
42. LL, Stephen Escott (New York: Harper, 1930), 12.
43. Ibid., 12-14
44. LL, Crump, 66-69.
45. Ibid.
46. LL, Up Stream, 97.
47. LL, “Claribel: A Melody,” Magazine 1 (April 1898): 142.
48. LL, “Necessity,” Magazine 2 (October 1898): 21.
49. LL, Crump, 69.
50. LL, “Minor Matters,” Magazine 2 (October 1898): 46. Accession
records for the period from the Charleston Library Society indicate the addition
of this work to its collection, and LL’s probable source.
51. Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (Philadelphia: Jewish Publica
tion Society, 1938), 20, 518, 522.
52. Accession Records of the Library, COC.
53. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Gods, Aphorism 5, Part 10, as
quoted in his Ecce Homo (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 868.
54. Belden to LH, 16 May and 5 June 1895, LHP.
55. LL, “Twilight,” Magazine 2 (October 1898): 60-61.
56. LL, “Christmas,” Magazine 2 (December 1898): 1.
57. LL, “Nocturne,” Magazine 2 (April 1899): 260.
58. LL, “Erysichthon,” Magazine 3 (May 1900): 285.
59. LL, “The Sea-Mew,” Magazine 4 (October 1900): 14.
60. LL, “Mystery,” Magazine 4 (November 1900): 56.
61. LL, For Ever Wilt Thou Love (New York: Dial, 1939), 92.
62. LL, “In the Seventh Heaven,” Magazine 4 (October 1900): 23-28.
63. Ibid., 28.
64. LL, Crump, 69.
65. LL, “Heinrich Heine: A Study of His Life and Works,” i-ii, unpublished
typescript, LL Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina,
Columbia.
Page 694 - [see page image]
675
Notes to Chapter 3
66. Ibid., viii-ix.
67. Ibid., 5-7.
68. Ibid., 14.
69. Ibid., 42.
70. Ibid., 43-44.
71. Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Heine: Memoirs from His Works, Letters,
and Conversations, ed. Gustav Karpeles, trans. Gilbert Cannan, vol. 2 (London:
William Heineman, 1910), 253.
72. LL, “Sonnet,” Magazine 4 (January 1901): 135.
73. LL, Crump, 51.
74. Ibid., 71.
75. Ibid., 70-71; and George Fredrickson, “Redemption through Violence,”
New York Review of Books, 21 November 1985, 59.
76. LL, “The Land of Love,” Magazine 4 (February 1901).
77. LL, “Reformers of Society,” Magazine 4 (June 1901): 310.
78. LL, “The Uses of Poetry,” Magazine 4 (June 1901): 311-19.
79. LL, Crump, 74.
80. LL, “Oh Well for Him,” 58.
81. LL, “The Sea,” Magazine 3 (January 1900): 59.
82. LL, “The Uses of Poetry.” Lewisohn’s salutatorian address was received
as “one of the best ever delivered by a graduate of the College of Charleston”
(Charleston News and Courier, 25-26 June 1901).
CHAPTER 3
1. LL, Crump, 71.
2. Ibid., 71-76.
3. Ibid., 76-77.
4. Ibid., 75.
5. Randolph to Rev. Toomer Porter, n.d., COC.
6. LH to The Citadel, n.d., LHP.
7. LL to LH, 7 August 1901, LHP.
8. LL, Upstream, 100.
9. LL, Crump, 76; and LL, Notebook, 27 December 1901, LLP II.
10. LL to LH, 22 August and 7 August 1901, LHP.
11. LL to LH, 22 August 1901, LHP.
12. Extract of a letter from W. P. Trent to LL, n.d., LHP.
13. LL, Crump, 73.
14. LL to President Eliot, 19 September 1901, LHP. These attempts, both
at Harvard and at Columbia, are dated the following summer in Up Stream.
The reason for this may be either an unintentional memory lapse or perhaps the
dramatic license of a literary artist as autobiographer.
15. LL, Crump, 77.
16. LL quoted in E. T. H. Shaffer, “The Turn of the Century,” Magazine 27
(June 1924): 34.
17. Ibid., 34.
Page 695 - [see page image]
676
Notes to Chapter 3
18. LL, Crump, 76-78.
19. LL, Upstream, 103.
20. Ibid.; and interview with Richard E. Haymaker, 1980.
21. LL to LH, 5 October 1902, LHP.
22. Ibid.
23. LL to LH, 2 November 1902, LHP.
24. Ibid.
25. LL, Up Stream, 84-86,113-14.
26. Ibid., 105-6.
27. Ibid., 107.
28. LL to LH, 2 November 1902, LHP.
29. Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 51-52, 113; and Bernard G. Richards,
“Back of the Books,” reprinted from the Jewish Book Annual 5705 (New York:
National Jewish Welfare Board, 1945), 2.
30. LL to LH, 2 November 1902, LHP.
31. Ibid., and LL, Upstream, 111.
32. LL to LH, 29 January 1903, LHP.
33. LL to LH, 22 February 1903, LHP.
34. LL, Up Stream, 108.
35. WL, The Vaunt of Man (New York: Huebsch, 1912), 167-68
36. WL, A Son of Earth (New York: Viking, 1928), 31.
37. LL, Up Stream, 108-9
38. WL, quoted from his memoir, The Locomotive God (New York: Apple-
Century, 1940), 226-27; Elmer Gertz, “A Bizarre Fellowship,” Chicago Jewish
Forum 3 (winter 1944): 97; and Meredith Yearsley, “William Ellery Leonard,”
Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 54 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), 202.
39. WL, Vaunt of Man, 168-69; LH to Carlotta Harris, 18 August 1915,
LHP; and Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals
and the First World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 121.
40. LL, Crump, 78-79.
41. Ibid.
42. LH to Carlotta Harris, 18 August 1915, LHP.
43. WL, quoted in The Locomotive God, 232; Elmer Gertz, Odyssey of
a Barbarian: The Biography of George Sylvester Viereck (Buffalo: Prometheus,
1978), 28—44; Gertz, “A Bizarre Fellowship,” 98; and Keller, States of Belonging,
123-24.
44. Gertz, “A Bizarre Fellowship,” 98-99.
45. WL, The Locomotive God, 232-33.
46. Gertz, “A Bizarre Fellowship,” 99.
47. LL to Randolph, 7 May 1903, COC.
48. LL to LH, 28 August 1903, COC. LL had done a considerable amount of
research, going so far as to contact descendants of writers for materials, among
them W. H. Hayne, the son of poet Paul Hamilton Hayne (LL to Hayne, 20
September 1903, Paul Hamilton Hayne Papers, Duke University, Chapel Hill,
North Carolina).
49. LL, “Books We Have Made,” Charleston News and Courier, 2 August
1903, 20.
Page 696 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 3
50. Ibid., 6 September 1903, 20.
51. Ibid., 21 September 1903, 8.
52. LL to LH, 28 August 1903, LHP; and LL, Roman Summer (New York:
Harper, 1927), 21-22.
53. Charleston News and Courier, 21 September 1903, 8.
54. LL to LH, 17 October 1903, LHP.
55. LL, Crump, 92, 97.
56. LL to LH, 17 October 1903, LHP.
57. LL, Roman Summer (New York: Harper, 1927), 21-22.
58. LL to LH, 17 October 1903, LHP.
59. LL to George R. Carpenter, 18 November 1903, English Department,
Columbia University Archives.
60. LL, UpStream, 119-21.
61. LL to LH, 17 October 1903, LHP.
62. LL, Prefatory note to his typescript “Poems,” n.d., LL Papers, South
Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.
63. LL, Untitled Journal, LLP II. This is an earlier, handwritten compilation
of much of the material that later appears in the University of South Carolina
typescripts.
64. “The Sphinx,” n.d., in ibid.
65. “Lines Written in a Study,” 17 October 1903, in ibid.
66. “The Final Shame,” 27 October 1903, in ibid.
67. LL, “Poems,” Dedicatory Note, 1905.
68. Reference to George Viereck’s growing influence upon Ludwig is made
in Ludwig’s letter to LH of 17 October 1903, LHP; see also GV to Stanley Chyet,
16 September 1956, LLP I.
69. WL, Vaunt of Man, 167.
70. GV, Gedichte von George Sylvester Viereck (New York: Progressive
Printing Company, 1904), 21-25.
71. LL, Up Stream, 121; LL, “It Was in Autumn . . .,” Notebook, 1904,
LLP II; and LL, Escott, 21-22, 52.
72. Gertz, Odyssey, 34-35, 85; and LL, “Poems,” XII, May 1904, LLP III.
73. LL, “Consolation,” n.d., LLP III.
74. LL, “A Dream,” n.d., LLP III.
75. LL, “Sonnet,” n.d., LLP III.
76. LL, “Amor Triumphans,” n.d., LLP III.
77. LL, “Who Shall Forgive . . .,” n.d., LLP III.
78. LL, “The Lepers,” n.d., LLP III.
79. GV, Nineveh and Other Poems (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1907), 81-83.
80. LL, Notebook, 1 January 1904, LLP II.
81. LL to GV, 1 January 1904, LLP III.
82. LL, “Lost,” Notebook, 2 February 1904, LLP II.
83. Gertz, “A Bizarre Fellowship,” 99; and Gertz, Odyssey, 70-71. A letter
from Arthur Symons to GV, 29 September 1906, appears to suggest that LL
actually translated Nineveh, Viereck’s first English-language book of poems,
from an original German manuscript (“Mr. Lewisohn has I see already not only
read but translated you with admirable skill”) (Symons Papers, SUNY Buffalo).
677
Page 697 - [see page image]
678
Notes to Chapter 4
84. GV, My Flesh and Blood: A Lyric Autobiography with Indiscreet An
notations (New York: Liveright, 1931), 347-48.
85. LL, UpStream, 116-18.
86. LL, Crump, 81, 86; and GV to Stanley Chyet, 25 January 1954, LLP I.
87. LL, “Poems,” VIII, April 1904, LLP III.
88. LL, Crump, 89-90.
89. LL, “Poems,” IX, April 1904, LLP III.
90. LL, “The King of Dreamland,” n.d., LLP III.
91. LL, “George Sylvester Viereck: An Appreciation,” reprinted from the
Sewanee Review 9 (April 1904): 3-4, LLP III. Copy autographed for Laura
Viereck.
92. GV, Nineveh, 150, copy at LLP II.
93. LL, “Sonnet,” n.d., LLP III.
94. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American
Farmer, ed. W. P. Trent, with a preface by LL (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904).
See also Stanley F. Chyet, “Lewisohn and Crevecoeur,” Chicago Jewish Forum
22 (winter 1963): 130-35.
95. LL to Minna Lewisohn, 6 March 1904, LLP II.
96. Minna Lewisohn, untitled poem, LLP II.
97. LL to Minna Lewisohn, 6 March 1904, LLP II.
98. George R. Carpenter to LL, 11 April 1904, Columbia University
Archives.
99. LL, Up Stream, 122.
100. Ibid., 123. A generation later, Stanley Kunitz, who would go on to be
a celebrated poet, would similarly leave a Ph.D. program in English at Harvard
University when a professor would tell him that “Our Anglo-Saxon students
would resent being taught English literature by a Jew” (Joe Lewis, “At 90, Kunitz
Remembers a Lifetime of Poetry,” Forward, 15 December 1995, 13).
101. LL, Crump, 96.
102. LL, Up Stream, 118.
103. Ibid., 127.
CHAPTER 4
1. LL, “Poems,” XVII, July 1906, LLP III; and LL to GV, 9 and 21 July
1904, LLP III.
2. LL, “Sphinx XXI” and dedicatory note, 1904, LLP III. In Crump, 87-
88, he told of how “he copied the manuscript and dedicated it to” his first love.
3. LL, “A Southern Night,” n.d., LLP III.
4. LL, “Poems,” August 1904, LLP III.
5. WL, Sonnets and Poems (Boston: Stanhope Press, 1906), 21, 53.
6. LL to WL, 3 August 1904, WLP.
7. John Bennett to Susan Smythe Bennett, 28 September 1904, John Ben
nett Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina.
8. LL, “Poems,” XIV, July 1904, LLP III.
Page 698 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 4
9. LL to WL, 18 August 1904, WLP; LL, Up Stream, 131, 153-54; and
Adolph Gillis, Ludwig Lewisohn: The Artist and the Message (New York:
Duffield and Green, 1993), 16-18.
10. LL, “The Storm,” 26 November 1904, LLP III.
11. LL, “A Victor,” 22 January 1905, LLP III.
12. LL, “Sic Transit,” n.d., LLP III.
13. LL, “The Vigil,” 9 September 1905, LLP III.
14. LL, “Poems,” XVIII, September 1904, LLP III.
15. ML to LL, 11 October 1934, LLP II; ML to LL, 5 March 1935, LLP I;
John Larkin to Henry Hayne, 28 February 1930, LLP II; LL, Crump, 5-6; LL,
Up Stream, 131; LL, Mid-Channel: An American Chronicle (New York: Harper,
1929), 27; LL, Altar, 10; and The National Cyclopedia of American Biography,
37:270, where Mary is recorded as ten years younger than she was.
16. LL, Crump, 95,101,104,110.
17. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1926), 154.
18. Ibid.; and LL, Crump, 113, 134, 149.
19. LL, “Poems,” XVIII, October 1904, LLP III.
20. LL, Up Stream, 132-34.
21. LL to Mr. Dolmetsch, 9 May 1955, Dolmetsch Papers, College of Will
iam and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.
22. LL, Crump, 152.
23. LL, “Aspects of Modern Poetry,” Charleston Sunday News, 10 February
1906.
24. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (Chicago: Quadrangle,
1964), vii-ix. For an excellent discussion of these first late-Victorian dissenters,
and the aftermath of their efforts, see Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and
Times of a Lost Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
25. WL, Byron and Byronism in America (Boston: Nichols, 1905), 15; Lit
erary Digest, 3 March 1906; Current Literature 41 (September 1906); American
Monthly Review of Reviews 34 (October 1906), LLP II.
26. ML to Harry Childs, 2 May 1905, WLP.
27. LL to LH, 14 February 1906, LHP.
28. LL to WL, 6 March 1906, WLP.
29. LL, Up Stream, 134-35; and Gillis, Lewisohn, 19-22.
30. Cora Evans to Stanley Chyet, n.d., LLP I; and LL, Crump, 160, 180.
31. LL, Journal, [1906], LLP II.
32. LL, Crump, 150-51.
33. ML to Harry Childs, 2 May 1905, WLP.
34. Harry Childs to ML, 6 May 1905, WLP.
35. Harry Childs to ML, 8 May 1905, WLP.
36. ML to Harry Childs, 10 May 1905, WLP.
37. LL, Crump, 154.
38. Minna Lewisohn to ML, 12 October 1906, WLP; and LL, Crump, 165.
39. LL to WL, 13 October 1906, WLP.
40. LL to WL, 3 October 1906, WLP.
41. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 159; and LL, Crump, 155-57.
42. ML to LL, 11 October 1934, LLP II; and National Cyclopedia, 37:271.
679
Page 699 - [see page image]
680
Notes to Chapter 5
43. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 159; and ML to LL, 11 October 1934, LLP II.
44. LL, “White Roses,” Smart Set 20 (October 1906): 89-95.
45. LL, “The Conversion of Marcia,” Smart Set 24 (April 1908): 141—45.
46. LL, Up Stream, 135.
47. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 159-60.
48. LL, Crump, 171-78.
49. LL, “A Sentimental Story,” Smart Set 22 (May 1907).
50. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 161.
51. LL, Crump, 179-82.
52. LL, Up Stream, 137-38.
53. LL, Snare, 95-98.
54. Ibid., 33, 260.
55. Ibid., 178-81.
56. Ibid., 257-58.
57. Ibid., 283.
58. Ibid., 132-33.
59. Ibid., 51.
60. Ibid., title page.
61. LL to LH, 14 September 1906, LHP.
62. LL to WL, 13 October 1906, WLP.
63. LL to WL, 3 December 1906, WLP.
64. LL to WL, 20 November 1906, WLP.
65. LL to WL, 9 October 1907, WLP.
66. LL to WL, 3 December 1906, WLP.
67. LL to WL, 5 November 1906, WLP.
68. LL to WL, 3 December 1906, WLP.
69. LL, Crump, 182-84.
70. LL to WL, 9 October 1907, WLP.
71. LL, Crump, 186; and LL, Up Stream, 138.
CHAPTER 5
1. LL to LH, 31 October 1907, LHP.
2. LL, published as “Souvenir de Boheme,” Smart Set 22 (July 1907): 158.
3. LL to LH, 31 October 1907, LHP.
4. LL, Up Stream, 138.
5. LL, Crump, 186-90.
6. LL to LH, 31 October 1907, LHP.
7. LL to WL, 31 January 1908, WLP.
8. LL, “The Celebrants,” Smart Set 24 (March 1908): 174-215.
9. LL, Up Stream, 139; LL to LH, 31 October 1907, LHP; Gertz, Odyssey,
48-55; LL to Dolmetsch, 9 May 1955, Dolmetsch Papers, College of William
and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia; and LL, Crump, 190-93.
10. LL, Crump, 231, 234; and LL, Up Stream, 140-41.
11. LL, Crump, 233.
12. Gillis, Lewisohn, 25.
Page 700 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 5
13. LL to LH, 3 June 1908, LHP.
14. LL, Crump, 203.
15. LL, “An American Ode,” “At Last,” and “The Masque of Thought,”
1 January 1908, WLP. His work began to appear in Moods, one of the early
“little magazines” concerned with fostering progressive social ideals and avant-
garde literature, often publishing artistic material of high quality rejected by
the larger journals for marketing reasons or because of editorial unsuitability.
Among those who shared its pages were Louis Untermeyer, James Oppenheim,
Joyce Oppenheim, and Joyce Kilmer. See Frederick J. Hoffman et al., The Little
Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1974), 239.
16. LL to WL, 3 January 1908, WLP.
17. LL to WL, 29 August 1908, WLP.
18. James L. W. West III, “Dreiser and the B. W. Dodge Sister Carrie
Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 324.
19. LL, Cities and Men (New York: Harper, 1927), 87-89.
20. LL, Haven, 23.
21. LL, Up Stream, 142-43.
22. New York Times, 24 October 1908.
23. William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 1 November 1908,295.
24. M. Hemphill, “New Books,” Charleston News and Courier, 1 Novem
ber 1908, LLP II.
25. “The College of Charleston Commencement Exercises,” Charleston
News and Courier, 16 June 1908.
26. Nathaniel Wright Stephenson to LH, summer 1906 and September
1906, LHP
27. John Bennett to Susan Smyth Bennett, 4 September 1907, Bennett Pa
pers, South Carolina Historical Society.
28. LH to Carlotta Harris, 3 and 8 September 1908, LHP
29. LL to LH, 3 November 1908, LHP.
30. John Bennett to Susan Smythe Bennett, 10 November 1908, Bennett
Papers, South Carolina Historical Society; and LH to Carlotta Harris, 8 March
1908, LHP.
31. LH to Carlotta Harris, 18 October 1908, LHP.
32. LL to LH, 19 November 1908, LHP.
33. LL to WL, 29 August 1908, WLP.
34. LL, “Dionysia,” Current Literature 46 (February 1909): 220.
35. LL to WL, 14 November 1908, WLP.
36. LL, “Amor Triumphans and Other Poems,” Pathfinder 1 (December
1906): 13; LL, “Burn . . .,” found in partial manuscript of “Amor Triumphans,”
LLP II; and LL, “The Final Hour,” WLP.
37. LL to WL, 4 November 1908, WLP.
38. LL, Up Stream, 145.
39. LL to WL, 4 November 1908, WLP.
40. LL to LH, 21 April 1909, LHP.
41. LL to LH, 28 March 1909, LHP.
42. LL to LH, 21 April 1909, LHP.
681
Page 701 - [see page image]
682
Notes to Chapter 5
43. LL to LH, 29 April 1909, LHP.
44. LL to LH, 4 May 1909, LHP.
45. LL to LH, 29 April 1909, LHP
46. LL to WL, 29 August 1908, WLP.
47. LL to WL, 11 November 1908, WLP
48. LL to LH, 4 May 1909, LHP
49. ML to LH, 5 May 1909, LHP.
50. LL to LH, 10 May 1909, LHP.
51. LL to LH, 22 July 1909, LHP.
52. LL to WL, 27 September 1909, LHP.
53. LH to Nannie Scott, 8 August 1909, quoted in Nell Halladay Boand,
Nannie Scott of “Bel Air School” (Richmond: Boand, 1971), 159.
54. LL to Richard Watson Gilder, 25 September 1909, The Century Collec
tion, New York Public Library.
55. LL to WL, 27 September 1909, WLP.
56. LL to WL, 5 October 1909, WLP; and LL to LH, 14 October 1909,
LHP
57. LL, “The Modern Novel,” Sewanee Review 17 (October 1909): 458-
59.
58. LL, A Night in Alexandria (New York: Moody, 1909), 5, 11.
59. LL, “Symons’s Romantic Movement in English Poetry,” Forum 12
(November 1909): 488-89.
60. LL to LH, 14 October 1909, LHP
61. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 171-72.
62. Oral History of BH, Oral History Office, Columbia University.
63. For a good accounting of Huebsch’s life and career, see Anne Catherine
McCullough, “A History of B. W. Huebsch, Publisher” (Ph.D. diss., University
of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979).
64. BH, “Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life,” Colophon, New Series, 406-7.
65. LL to BH, 18 October 1909, BHP. Feuchtersleben (1806-49), an Aus
trian physician, poet, and philosopher, wrote numerous works concerned with
ways of creating harmony between the body and the mind so as to enhance life’s
beauty.
66. A series of letters between LL and A. W. Thorndike, 23 October-24
November 1909, Columbia University Archives.
67. BH, “Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life,” 414.
68. LL to BH, 9 December 1909, BHP
69. LL to WL, 12 December 1909, WLP
70. LL, review of The Poet of Galilee, Forum 43 (January 1910): 86.
71. LL to BH, 30 December 1909, BHP; Edward N. Bristol to A. R.
Hohlfeld, 21 March 1910, UWA; and LL, German Style: An Introduction to
the Study of German Prose (New York: Holt, 1910).
72. LL to A. R. Hohlfeld, 26 February, 16 and 30 March 1910; and A. R.
Hohlfeld to LL, 3 March 1910, UWA.
73. National Cyclopedia, 271.
74. Calvin Thomas to Hohlfeld, 14 March 1910, UWA; and LL to GV, 25
May 1910, LLP III.
Page 702 - [see page image]
683
Notes to Chapter 6
75. LL to Hohlfeld, 8 April and 5 May 1910, UWA.
76. LL, German Style (New York: Henry Holt, 1910).
77. LL to LH, 19 March 1910, LHP.
78. LL to BH, 29 July 1910, BHP Ludwig was asking BH and Edward
Bristol to act as bondsmen in the case, so that the money could be transferred to
his stepdaughter’s account. Huebsch agreed, though months would pass before
the matter was entirely settled (LL to BH, 18 September 1910, BHP).
79. LL, Crump, 244.
80. LL to WL, 12 July 1910, WLP
81. LL, Up Stream, 149.
82. Ibid., 148.
83. LL to BH, 18 September 1910, BHP.
CHAPTER 6
1. LL, “The Storm,” Current Literature 49 (October 1910): 452.
2. LL to BH, 26 November 1910, BHP; and Mary Hazeman [UWA] to
Melnick, 22 June 1979.
3. LL to LH, 29 December 1910, LHP.
4. George Clark Sellery, Some Ferments at 'Wisconsin, 1909-1947: Mem
ories and Reflections (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 3-5.
5. LL to LH, 29 December 1910, LHP.
6. LL to BH, 26 November and 10 December 1910, BHP.
7. LL, “The Discipline of Naturalism,” Nation, 9 December 1909, 568.
8. LL, Upstream, 152.
9. LL to LH, 29 December 1910, LHP.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Yves Delage and Marie Goldsmith, The Theories of Evolution, trans.
Andre Tridon (New York: Huebsch, 1912); Hermann Sudermann, The Indian
Lilly and Other Stories, trans. Ludwig Lewisohn (New York: Huebsch, 1912);
Henry Holt and Co. advertisement, in Nation, 26 January 1911.
13. LL to BH, 31 January 1911, BHP.
14. WL, The Locomotive God, 280-81; John Stark, “The Monster at the
Center: William Ellery Leonard’s Struggle to Stave Off Madness through Art,”
Wisconsin Academy Review 25 (December 1978): 12-13; and “Leonard,” Dic
tionary of Literary Biography, 202-3.
15. LL, Up Stream, 152-53, 181.
16. LL to BH, 31 January and 15 August 1911, BHP; LL, Crump, 241—42,
252.
17. LL to BH, 25 August 1911, BHP.
18. LL, Crump, 148-52; and LL, Up Stream, 150.
19. LL to Minna Lewisohn, 12 September 1911, LLP II.
20. Osman Castle Hooper, History of the Ohio State University, ed. Thomas
C. Mendenhall, vol. 2 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1926), 1—4,
218-20.
Page 703 - [see page image]
684
Notes to Chapter 6
21. LL, Up Stream, 160; and “Total Enrollment Will Reach 3700,” Ohio
State University Lantern, 11 September 1911, 1.
22. John Bennett to Susan Bennett, 2 March 1930, and John Bennett to
“W. W.,” 5 April 1934, Bennett Papers, South Carolina Historical Society; LL,
Up Stream, 173; and LL, Haven, 223.
23. LL, Crump, 263-64.
24. LL, Altar, 10; and Susan Jenkins Brown to Charles Madison, 31 May
1970, LLP I.
25. LL to BH, 30 September 1911, BHP.
26. LL, Crump, 255-56, 261, 265-67.
27. LL to BH, 30 September 1911, BHP.
28. LL to BH, 12 October 1911, BHP; and Ludwig’s testimonial to WL,
WLP.
29. LL to BH, 23 October 1911, BHP.
30. LL to WL, 3 November 1911, WLP.
31. LL to LH, 21 October 1911, LHP.
32. LL to BH, 3 and 6 November 1911, BHP.
33. LL to BH, 1 and 3 December 1911, BHP.
34. LL to BH, 9 December 1911, BHP.
35. LL to Hohlfeld, 26 December 1911, UWA.
36. Hohlfeld to LL, 3 January 1912, UWA.
37. LL to BH, 1 January 1912, BHP.
38. LL to BH, 16 January and 3 February 1912, BHP.
39. LL to Hohlfeld, 4 February 1912, UWA.
40. LL, Crump, 288-94; and LL, Haven, 111.
41. LL to BH, 22 February 1912, BHP.
42. LL, Up Stream, 177-79; and LL, Crump, 297.
43. LL to BH, 22 February 1912, BHP.
44. LL to BH, 10 March 1912, BHP.
45. Review of Hermann Sudermann, The Indian Lilly, Nation, 3 March
1912, 236.
46. LL to the editor of the Nation, 4 April 1912, 336.
47. LL to BH, 31 March 1912, BHP. Also The Dramatic Works of Gerhart
Hauptmann, ed. Ludwig Lewisohn, vol. 1 (New York: Huebsch, 1912), v-vi.
48. LL to BH, 15 May 1912, BHP; and BH to LL, 17 May 1912, BHP.
49. LL, “Introduction,” Hauptmann, vol. 1, xi-xxii.
50. LL, Up Stream, 180; LL, Notebook, LLP II; and LL, Haven, 262.
51. Minna Lewisohn to LL, 11 July 1912, LLP II; and LL, Up Stream, 180.
52. LL, Up Stream, 180-81.
53. LL, Haven, 262.
54. LL, Escott, 46.
55. LL to BH, 14 November and 6 December 1912, BHP.
56. LL to BH, 13 December 1912, BHP.
57. LL, reprinted in Hauptmann, 2:ix-xii; and A. R. Hohlfeld, review
of Hauptmann, New York Times, “Review of Books,” 15 December 1912,
769-70.
58. LL to LH, 29 December 1912, LHP.
Page 704 - [see page image]
685
Notes to Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
1. LL, Crump, 298.
2. LL, Haven, 262.
3. LL, Diary, 14 August 1952, LLP II.
4. BH to LL, 3 January 1913, BHP; LL to Hohlfeld, 18 February and 10
July 1913, UWA; and LL to LH, 1 April 1913, LHP.
5. LL to Hohlfeld, 18 February 1913, UWA; and LH to Carlotta Harris,
18 February 1913, LHP. LL had already published several book reviews over
a number of years in the New York Times, his most recent appearing on
December 1, 1912 (“Modern German Literature,” 712), a critique of Otto
Edward Lessing’s Masters in Modern German Literature. But after his visit to
New York, these were followed in rapid succession by a review of the ninth
volume of The Cambridge History of English Literature (“Who Reads Pope?”
23 February 1913, 95) and a discussion of the Oxford collections of Latin,
German, and Victorian verse (“Oxford Verse,” 20 April 1913, 238). (See also
Crump, 302—4, for another account of this trip, though out of chronological
order.) It is important to note that in 1908, two unknown writers destined to
turn American letters in new directions had been added to the Smart Set’s staff—
George Jean Nathan, a theater critic with a keen, avant-garde eye, and Henry
L. Mencken, who would exceed even Mann’s brightest hopes, turning it into a
more serious literary journal by the time LL’s “The Laboratory” (May 1913)
was published. By 1914 they had wrested control of the magazine, and for the
next decade they used it as their own unofficial organ. Nathan, Mencken, and
Ludwig were to become close, if at times warring, partners in the remaking of
American literary culture.
6. LL to BH, 22 February 1913, BHP; and LL, Roman Summer, 31.
7. LL to BH, 22 February 1913, BHP.
8. LL to Hohlfeld, 31 March and 10 July 1913, BHP; Hohlfeld to F. R.
Sykes, 2 April, Sykes to Hohlfeld, 8 April, and Hohlfeld to Pratt Agency, 8 May
1913, UWA.
9. LL to LH, 1 April 1913, LHP.
10. LL to LH, 29 December 1912, LHP.
11. LL to LH, 1 April 1913, LHP.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 152.
15. LL, “Introduction,” in Gustav Frenssen, Jorn Uhl (New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1923), 7-8.
16. LL to BH, 26 July 1913, BHP.
17. BH to LL, 29 July 1913, BHP.
18. BH to LL, 29 July and 4 August 1913, BHP; and LL to BH, 2 August
1913, BHP.
19. LL to Hohlfeld, 13 August, Hohlfeld to Lauterbach, 8 August, and
Hohlfeld to LL, 8 August 1913, UWA; and LL to BH, 26 July 1913, BHP.
20. LL to BH, 4 August 1913, BHP.
21. LL to BH, 23 August 1913, BHP.
Page 705 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 7
22. LL, “The Lie: A Play in One Act,” Smart Set 4 (December 1913): 138.
23. LL, Crump, 307.
24. LL to Hohlfeld, 27 February 1913, UWA.
25. LL, “The Laboratory,” Smart Set 40 (May 1913): 51-54. Harris had
thought the poem “a mighty fine thing, to my mind” when he saw it in the spring
of 1912 (LH to Carlotta Harris, 18 February 1913, LHP).
26. LL, “Introduction,” Hauptmann, vol. 2 (New York: Huebsch, 1913),
xi.
27. LL, Crump, 306.
28. LL, “The Quiet Hour,” MS, December 1913, B. W. Hewitt Papers,
University of Vermont, Burlington.
29. LH to Carlotta Harris, 3 April 1913, LHP.
30. LL to Hohlfeld, 1 December 1913, UWA.
31. LL, Crump, 300-301, 309.
32. LL to Hohlfeld, 1 December 1913, UWA.
33. LL, “Sunday,” Smart Set 42 (April 1914): 115.
34. LL, Up Stream, 188.
35. Ibid., 188-89; and LL, Crump, 287.
36. LL, Up Stream, 190-91.
37. Ibid., 186-87.
38. Ibid., 194-95.
39. LL to Randolph, 31 May, College of Charleston Faculty Minutes, 16
May, and College of Charleston, Board of Trustees Minutes, 18 May 1914,
COC.
40. LL to LH, 9 September 1914, LHP.
41. Susan Jenkins Brown to Charles Madison, 31 May 1970, LLP I.
42. LL to LH, 9 September 1914, LHP.
43. LL, Crump, 312, 314-15.
44. Rupert Brooke, The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1966), 103. For a fuller discussion of the European intellectuals’
hopes for the war, see Roland N. Stromby, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals
and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982).
45. LL, “Germany in War Time,” Literary Digest, 16 October 1915, 856.
46. Peter Viereck, interview with the author, 1990; Keller, States of Belong
ing, 157; and LL to LH, 9 September 1914, LHP.
47. GV, Confessions of a Barbarian (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910), 185.
48. LL, “An American Ballad of the War,” International 10 (August 1916):
243-44.
49. Ibid.; LH to Carlotta Harris, 18 August 1915, LHP; and LL, Up Stream,
199.
50. LL to LH, 9 September 1914, LHP; and LL to Clark, 15 June 1915,
Beinecke Library, Yale University.
51. Review of Hauptmann, vol. 2, in Nation, 23 October 1913, 391-92.
52. LL, “Gertrude and I,” International 10 (April 1916): 122.
53. Hohlfeld to LL, 26 February 1915, UWA.
54. J. Rankin Towse, “Naturalism on the Stage,” Nation, 17 June 1915,
686
Page 706 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 7
690; and HM quoted in Publications of B. W. Huebsch, a catalog of books
published by BH, n.d., Elmer Gertz Papers, Library of Congress.
55. “The Modern Drama in Literature,” New York Times, 22 August 1915,
304; and LL to BH, 22 August 1915, BHP.
56. BH to Selig Adler, 13 December 1948, BHP.
57. LL to Clark, 5 March 1915, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
58. LL to Hohlfeld, 10 July 1915, UWA.
59. LL to WL, 12 August 1915, WLP.
60. LL to Hohlfeld, 15 February 1915, UWA.
61. LL to BH, 22 August 1915, BHP.
62. LL to BH, 3 September 1915, BHP.
63. LL to BH, 9 September 1915, BHP.
64. LL to TD, 20 January 1916, TDP.
65. LL to BH, 7 April 1916, BHP.
66. LL, “Introduction,” in Hauptmann, vol. 5 (New York: Huebsch, 1915),
vii.
67. LL, The Modern Drama: An Essay in Interpretation (New York: Hueb
sch, 1915), 1-6, 164-65, 276.
68. LL, The Spirit of Modern German Literature (New York: Huebsch,
1916), 118-19, 61-63.
69. LL to BH, 22 August 1915, BHP.
70. LL, “The Garden,” International 10 (February 1916): 44-47.
71. LL, “Introduction,” in Hauptmann, vol. 4 (New York: Huebsch, 1915),
viii-ix.
72. LL, “Special Introduction,” in Max Halbe, Youth (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, Page, 1916), xv-xvii.
73. Intercollegiate Menorah Association, The Menorah Movement (Ann Ar
bor, 1914), 119-20; and Marc Lee Raphael, Jesus and Judaism in a Midwestern
Community: Columbus, Ohio, 1840-1975 (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society,
1979), 212.
74. HH to LL, 20 April 1915, HHP.
75. HH to LL, 5 May and 16 July 1916, HHP; and “Farm Study Circle to
Take Up Judaism,” Lantern, 2 March 1917, 5.
76. HH to LL, 16 July 1917, HHP; and WL, “Menorah,” Menorah Journal
1 (January 1915): 20-22.
77. LL, Diary, LLP I.
78. LL, Mid-Channel, 23-24.
79. LL, “Introduction,” in David Pinski, The Treasure (New York:
Huebsch, 1915), 7-8; and Harold Clurman, “Yiddish Influence on American
Theater,” in Bernard Rosenberg, Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by
Jewish Intellectuals in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982),
183. The degree of Jewishness that was developing within him and the depth
of his conscious desire for identification with his fellow Jews is apparent in his
reaction to the visit of noted Jewish scholar Morris Jastrow, in 1917, to Ohio
State. Jastrow was supporting the war, and Ludwig so very much wanted to argue
with him, “to tell him that he’s a chutzpah—ponim (Hebrew coll., impudent of
front or face).” It was the kind of expression that only someone familiar with the
687
Page 707 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 8
popular speech of Yiddish-speaking Jews would have used. Had he learned this
from his new associates—or from his mother? Is this another clue to the Jewish
background he had acquired as a child? (LL to WL, 13 April 1917, WLP).
80. LL, “Introduction,” in George Hirshfeld, The Mothers (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1916), xi, xii; and Hirshfeld, 120.
81. LL to BH, 26 August 1916, BHP.
82. LL to BH, 30 August 1916, BHP.
83. LL to Hohlfeld, 12 February 1916, UWA.
84. LL to Hohlfeld, 22 January 1916, UWA.
85. LL to BH, 3 September 1916, BHP.
86. LL to Munsterberg, 28 November 1916, University Archives, Ohio State
University; and LL, Spirit of Modern German Literature, v.
87. BH to LL, 30 August 1916; “Ask Wilson to Make a Move for Peace,”
New York Times, 31 August 1916, 1; and BH, Oral History, Columbia Univer
sity, 170-71.
88. “President Wilson’s Appeal for Neutrality,” typescript in author’s pos
session.
89. New York Times, 4 February 1917.
90. LL to BH, 3 September 1916, BHP.
91. LL to TD, 28 November 1916, TDP.
92. LL, “The Higher Good,” International 11 (January 1917): 6; and LL
to GV, 9 December 1916, LLP III.
93. LL, “Higher Good,” 6-7.
94. Ibid., 7.
95. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., viii-ix.
96. LL, “Higher Good,” 7.
97. LL to BH, 7 April 1917, BHP.
98. WL, The Locomotive God, 361-62.
99. LL to BH, 7 April 1917, BHP.
100. Hans Bak, Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1993), 66-67.
101. Sansculotte 1 (January 1917): 1.
102. LL, “Christmas on Fifth Avenue,” Sansculotte 1 (February 1917): 1.
103. LL to GV, 20 July 1916, LLP III.
104. LL, “Christmas on Fifth Avenue,” 1.
105. “What War Would Mean,” Lantern, 9 February 1917.
106. “Heed the Call at Once,” Lantern, 19 April 1917.
107. “Perpetuity of Civilization,” Lantern, 4 June 1917.
108. LL, Crump, 322.
109. LL to WL, 13 April 1917, WLP.
110. LL, Upstream, 217-19; and LL to WL, 13 April 1917, WLP.
111. LL, “A New England Fable,” International 11 (April 1917): 116-19.
CHAPTER 8
1. LL, Up Stream, 220; and Carl Van Vechten, Sacred and Profane Mem
ories (New York: Knopf, 1932), 173-76.
688
Page 708 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 8
2. John Reed, The Day in Bohemia, or Life among the Artists, Being a
]eu D’espnt Containing Much That Is Original and Diverting (New York: John
Reed, 1913), 2-4.
3. David Oskinsky, “The Crayon Was Mightier Than the Sword,” New
York Times Book Review, 4 September 1988, 13.
4. Caroline R Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920-1930: A Comment on Amer
ican Civilization in the Post-War Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1965),
221-22.
5. Meyer Schapiro, “Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory
Show,” in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: George
Braziller, 1978), 135-78.
6. “The International Art Exhibit,” Nation, 20 February 1913, 174; and
“Old and New Art,” Nation, 6 March 1913, 140-243.
7. Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1939), 393. For a detailed study of the period,
see Adele Heller, ed., 1915: The Cultural Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1991).
8. LL, Up Stream, 220; and Charles Hagen, “Village Bohemians from
Another Era,” New York Times, 2 September 1994, 1. For a lively account
of this world, see Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of “The
Masses,” 1911-1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
9. Reed, The Day in Bohemia, 3.
10. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP.
11. Ibid.
12. LL, Up Stream, 221.
13. Ibid., 222-23.
14. Ibid., 221.
15. Ibid., 222-26.
16. LL to WL, 13 April 1917, WLP.
17. May Romm, “Abraham Arden Brill, First American Translator of
Freud,” in Franz Alexander, ed., Psychoanalytic Heroes (New York: Basic,
1966), 211-20.
18. A. A. Brill, “The Writer and His Outlets,” in J. George Frederick, ed.,
The Psychology of Writing Success (New York: Business Bourse, 1933), 27-29.
19. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, vol. 3, Movers and Shakers
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 511-12.
20. LL, Up Stream, 227.
21. Ibid., 227-28. It is uncertain whether Ludwig and Adolph Lewisohn
were related. The latter’s family has given conflicting thoughts on this matter,
though Stanley Chyet recalls being told by Ludwig’s late cousin Cora Evans that
they were indeed related to the New York Lewisohns (letter to Melnick from
Chyet, 17 December 1983).
22. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP.
23. Susan Edmiston and Linda Cirino, Literary New York (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 69.
24. LL, Cities and Men, 91. Their bond undoubtedly became stronger
after Dreiser concurred with Ludwig’s negative assessment of the South during
689
Page 709 - [see page image]
690
Notes to Chapter 8
his visit to Savannah, Georgia, of which he spoke in a letter to him on 4
February, 1916 (TD, American Diaries, 1902-1926 [Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1982], 134). Regarding Ludwig’s overlooking certain
artistically displeasing literary “barbarisms” in Dreiser’s writing, it is apparent
in comparing the “Introduction” to volume 1 of the Hauptmann series to that
of volume 2 that he had grown far more concerned with moral questions than
with those of literary quality, and would have been willing to sacrifice a good
deal of the latter for a strong statement of those ideas he valued most.
25. LL, Altar, 25.
26. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return (New York: Viking, 1934), 47,101-2.
27. BH to George P. Morris, 7 April 1917, BHP.
28. LL to TD, 3 and 19 November 1917, TDP.
29. TD, Diaries, 185, 227-28.
30. BH, “Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life,” 408.
31. LL, Cities and Men, 93-94.
32. TD, Diaries, 195-96.
33. LL to Clarke, 9 March 1918, Yale University Archives; and BH, Oral
History, Columbia University, 250-51.
34. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP. The same reason was given to Mencken
by Ludwig on 27 May 1918 (HMP).
35. LL to HM, [?] May 1918, HMP. Earlier that year, he had written to
Mencken to tell him of his presence in New York, and to apologize for having
taken so long to contact him directly. He had spoken to Mencken’s colleague
at the Smart Set, George Jean Nathan, but not having heard from Mencken,
he assumed that the message had not been relayed. Only his taxing schedule
of teaching and writing had prevented him from being “heard from again” any
sooner—something Mencken may have wanted to postpone as long as possible
(LL to HM, [?] 1918, HMP).
36. LL to HM, 6 July 1918, HMP.
37. LL to HM, 27 May 1918, HMP.
38. LL to Mr. Dolmetsch, 9 May 1955, LLP II.
39. LL to HM, [?] May 1918, HMP.
40. LL to HM, 27 May 1918, HMP.
41. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP.
42. LL, Crump, 331-34.
43. TD, Diaries, 195, 200, 217, 234.
44. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP.
45. Bosworth Crocker [ML], Pawns of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918),
76-77. Their years together had proven artistically profitable for her as well as
for him. Under the pseudonym of Bosworth Crocker, she had published her first
play, The Last Straw, in 1914, opening on the evening of February 12, 1917, in
a production by the Washington Square Players in New York’s Comedy Theater.
Both the play and its production by the leading avant-garde “little theater”
had received good reviews, though Dreiser, in customary disapproval of her,
thought her play a “cheap imitation of Hauptmann.” A year later, her Pawns of
War appeared with a “Foreword” by John Galsworthy, who saw its potential
significance as a propaganda piece. “When Prussian militarism is killed at last,”
Page 710 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 8
the English author had written, “the word Belgium will be found graven on
its heart.”
46. LL, “A New York Sketch,” Smart Set 56 (September 1918): 29.
47. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP.
48. LL, Crump, 349; and LL, The Poets of Modern France (New York:
Huebsch, 1918), v-x.
49. LL, Poets of Modern France, 1-6, 67-70.
50. LL, Up Stream, 230-31.
51. Ibid., 231.
52. LL to WL, 12 August 1918, WLP.
53. “An Announcement of Change of Ownership,” Bookman 48 (Septem
ber 1918): n.p.
54. LL to WL, 12 August 1918, WLP.
55. LL, “Foreshadowings of the New Novel,” Bookman 48 (September
1918): 79-81.
56. Ibid., 82.
57. LL to WL, 7 July 1918, WLP.
58. LL, “Foreshadowings,” 82-83.
59. Ibid., 83.
60. Ibid., 84.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Lewis Allen Browne, “Bolshevism in America,” Forum 59 (June 1918):
703, 717.
64. James A. Reed, “The Red Flag of Bolshevism,” Forum 60 (December
1918): 746-47.
65. LL, Cities and Men, 96-97.
66. LL, review of “The Little Brother” and “A Place in the Sun,” Town
Topics, 5 December 1918, 14.
67. HM, quoted in W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Scribner, 1965),
231.
68. Ibid.; and HM to TD, 7 January 1919, HMP.
69. The foregoing description of the project and the meeting is found in
Swanberg, Dreiser, 230-32; and George Jean Nathan, The Intimate Notebooks
of Theodore Dreiser (New York: Knopf, 1922), 40.
70. LL to TD, 10 January 1919, TDP
71. Swanberg, Dreiser, 232.
72. LL to HM, 27 May 1918, HMP
73. LL, “The Problem of Modern Poetry,” Bookman 48 (February 1919):
550.
74. Ibid., 551.
75. Ibid., 551-54.
76. Ibid., 554, 557.
77. Amy Lowell, “The Case of Modern Poetry versus Professor Lewisohn,”
Bookman 48 (February 1919): 558-66.
78. LL to HM, 21 June 1919, HMP.
691
Page 711 - [see page image]
692
Notes to Chapter 9
79. LL, review of “The Bonds of Interest,” Town Topics, 24 April 1919,
14; and LL, review of “She’s a Good Fellow,” Town Topics, 8 May 1919, 12.
80. LL, review of “Lunch in Pawn,” Town Topics, 27 March 1919, 11.
81. LL, review of “The Book of Job,” Town Topics, 6 March 1919, 13.
82. LL, “A Note on Tragedy,” Nation, 31 May 1919, 879-80.
CHAPTER 9
1. Bolitho and Gerould quoted in Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday
(New York: Harper, 1931), 61-62; and LL, Altar, 129-30.
2. LL, Mid-Channel, 5; and LL, “Villagers and Others,” Nation, 19 June
1920, 827.
3. LL, Mid-Channel, 4.
4. LL, A Modern Book of Criticism (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919),
i-iv, 174, 178.
5. Ibid., 183-85.
6. The discussion of the Nation during these years is based upon Oswald
Garrison Villard’s Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (New York:
Harcourt, Brace), 349—467; Carl Van Doren, Three Worlds (New York: Harper,
1936), 139; and Michael Wreszin, Oswald Garrison Villard (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1965), 129.
7. Van Doren, Three Worlds, 138-39.
8. Joseph Wood Krutch, More Lives Than One (New York: William Sloan,
1962), 173-74.
9. Ibid., 173; and LL, Mid-Channel, 5.
10. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1942), 273.
11. Van Doren, Three Worlds, 147-48.
12. LL to WL, 19 December 1919, WLP; and George Jean Nathan, The
Popular Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1918), 39, 53.
13. LL, “The Theatre: Mythical and Real,” Nation, 29 November 1919,
694-96.
14. LL, “The Cult of Prettiness,” Nation, 20 December 1919, 806.
15. LL, “The Cult of Violence,” Nation, 24 January 1920, 118.
16. LL, “The Jewish Art Theatre,” Nation, 13 December 1919, 747-48;
and Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years (New York: Knopf, 1950), 4.
17. LL, “A Certain Playwright,” Nation, 22 November 1919, 662-63.
18. John Reed, quoted in Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 280-82.
19. Floyd Dell, Love in Greenwich Village (New York: Doran, 1926),
28-31.
20. On these movements in American theater, see Joseph Wood Krutch, The
American Drama since 1918: An Informal History (New York: George Braziller,
1957), 5-17; and a thumbnail sketch in Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright:
Publisher of the Twenties (New York: David Lewis, 1970), 3-4. The Washington
Square Players would later change their name to the Theater Guild.
21. Dell, Love in Greenwich Village, 31-33; Luhan, Movers and Shakers,
282-83; and Susan Glaspell to LL, [1936], book in the author’s collection.
Page 712 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 9
22. Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse (New York:
Theatre Arts, 1959), 9-10; and LL, “Toward a People’s Theatre,” Nation, 17
January 1920, 82.
23. LL, Mid-Channel, 5.
24. LL to WL, 19 December 1919, WLP.
25. LL to HM, 15 October 1919, HMP. Of his work for Town Topics, he
later wrote, “I have a dim but kindly recollection of both tales and playlets which
I wrote for it. The whole thing was (wryly) rather fun” (LL to Dolmetsch, 9
May 1955, Smart Set Papers, College of William and Mary). Regarding another
Liveright assignment, he wrote to HM, “I’ve made an agreement with Liveright
to bring out a volume of the best stories of Harris Morton Lyons with a biography
and critical introduction. It’s a scheme I have long had—ever since his death, in
fact—and now have the opportunity of really reviving a man who was, in his
own way, something of a master. And we have damned few in this part of the
world” (2 October 1919, HMP).
26. LL to HM, 15 October 1919, HMP.
27. BH to W. A. Swan, 5 February 1964, BHP.
28. CC, interview with the author, 24 December 1982.
29. CC, Oral History, Columbia University, 182-83.
30. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, 1-86. Dorothy Dudley (Forgotten Frontiers:
Dreiser and the Land of the Free [New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1932]),
an early biographer of Dreiser, and herself a part of that Anglo-Saxon world of
letters, spoke ambivalently of the importance of this handful of rogue Jewish
publishers, of Harold Guinzburg (with whom Huebsch formed Viking in 1925),
of Alfred Knopf, who left Doubleday in 1915 (as Ludwig had done a decade
earlier), and of Horace Liveright, who earned special mention:
It was the advent of the Jewish intelligence, about to seize new moral and
aesthetic values, and turn the moderns from martyrs into money-makers.
Under their direction not only intellect for its own sake and art for its own
sake, but also “books that tend to corrupt morals” for their own sake, would
begin to pay. Prosperity was at hand. A knot of crude artistic licentiousness
soon would blaze, extrinsic to great art, but perhaps a prerequisite with
us before we could grow up and be mature. A more subtle complicated
state of license would have been proof that already we were grown up. The
contract between Dreiser and Liveright in May 1917, between Middle West
and near East, was an unconscious symptom of rough change.. . . The new
trustees of the Melting Pot, self-made like everything truly American, with
their genius for presentation were finally putting the country on the way.
(400-401)
Even Mencken, that iconoclastic challenger of prejudices large and small,
lapsed into a culturally predetermined stance when he called Liveright a “poor
sportsman” whose financial support, he assumed, had come “from some new
Jew backer.” Mencken went so far as to question Dreiser’s continuing arrange
ment with Liveright, telling him on August 27,1920, that “I was always in doubt
about your alliance” (TD, Letters of Theodore Dreiser, vol. 2 [Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959], 276-77).
693
Page 713 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 9
31. BC, At Random (New York: Random House, 1977), 31.
32. Lillian Heilman, An Unfinished Woman (Boston: Little Brown, 1969),
33-34; and Anderson, quoted in Gilmer, Horace Liveright, 237. For a full treat
ment of Liveright, see Tom Daro’s Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright (New
York: Random House, 1995). The staff that greeted the departing stragglers
of the previous evening took their work with utmost seriousness. Liveright
had succeeded in gathering an exceptional group, including many who were
to gain prominence as writers and editors in the coming decades—Saxe Com-
mins, later an editor for Cerf at Random House; Beatrice Baknow, the wife of
George S. Kaufman and the bridge between the more “sophisticated” Algonquin
Round Table and the Liveright crowd; Bennett Cerf, who bought the Modern
Library in 1925, and unwittingly aided in Liveright’s demise by leaving him
without the safety net (sales for the series having reached over 300,000 copies
a year) he needed to withstand repeated financial losses on Broadway; Thomas
Smith, former editor of Century Magazine and now acquisitions editor; Manuel
Komroff, Russian journalist and New York film critic, before taking charge of
production; Julian Messner, in charge of sales, and later publisher of “radical”
works (including a biography of Paul Robeson); and Lillian Heilman, who later
spoke of her days at Liveright’s with admiration for the central character in all
of these scenarios.
A job with any publishing house was a plum, but a job with Horace
Liveright was a bag of plums.. . . Liveright, Julian Messner, T. R. Smith,
Manuel Komroff, and a few even younger men had made a new and brilliant
world for books.. . . They discovered or persuaded over Faulkner, Freud,
Hemingway, O’Neill, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, e. e. cummings . . .
all of them attracted by the vivid, impetuous, high-living men who were the
editors. It didn’t hurt that Horace was handsome and daring, Julian serious
and kind, Tom Smith almost erudite with his famous collection of erotica
and odd pieces of knowledge;. . . that the advances they gave were large and
the parties even larger, full of lush girls and good liquor; that the sympathy
and attention given to writers, young or old, was more generous than had
been known before, possibly more real than has been known since. (28)
33. HL, quoted in Gilmer, Horace Liveright, 86.
34. LL to WL, 19 December 1919, WLP.
35. LL, “The Critic and the Theatre,” Nation, 27 December 1919, 830-31.
36. LL to WL, 19 December 1919, WLP.
37. LL, “Comedies,” Nation, 14 February 1920, 210.
38. LL to WL, 19 December 1919, WLP.
39. LL to JS, 10 March 1920, JSP; LL to WL, 3 April 1920, WLP; and LL,
Haven, 105.
40. LL, Haven, 262.
41. Jacques Lemisch to LL, 2 March 1919, LLP II.
42. LL, “Richard Dehmel,” Nation, 6 March 1920, 296.
43. LL, Mid-Channel, 6-7; and LL, Crump, 369.
44. LL, “The One-Act Play in America,” Nation, 6 March 1920, 309.
45. LL, “Medley,” Nation, 3 April 1920, 439.
694
Page 714 - [see page image]
695
Notes to Chapter 10
46. LL, “The One-Act Play in America,” 309.
47. Ibid.
48. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., ix-x.
49. LH to Carlotta Harris, 24 March 1920, LHP.
50. LH to Carlotta Harris, 27 March 1920, LHP.
51. LL to WL, 3 April 1920, WLP.
52. LH to Carlotta Harris, 30 March 1920, LHP.
53. LH to Carlotta Harris, 1 and 2 April, 1920, LHP.
54. Carlotta Harris to LH, 2 April 1920, LHP.
55. LH to Carlotta Harris, 2 April 1920, LHP.
56. LL to WL, 3 April 1920, LHP.
57. LH to Carlotta Harris, 6 April 1920, LHP.
58. LH to Carlotta Harris, 2 April 1920, LHP.
59. LL to WL, 3 April 1920, WLP.
60. LL, Crump, 343.
61. LL, Mid-Channel, 8-9.
CHAPTER 10
1. Wreszin, Oswald Garrison Villard, 147.
2. LL to BH, 1 July 1920, BHP.
3. LL to WL, 3 April 1920, WLP.
4. LL to BH, 1 July 1920, BHP.
5. LL to WL, 19 December 1919, WLP.
6. LL, Mid-Channel, 9-10.
7. LL to BH, 1 July 1920, BHP.
8. LL to WL, 19 September 1920, WLP.
9. LL, “Cox—A Provincial for President,” Nation, 17 July 1920, 68.
10. LL, “The Poet and His Moment,” Nation, 10 July 1920, 42. He would
later return to this dispute in Roman Summer, talking again of the “icily fertile
Amy Lowell, self-appointed and widely accepted dictator in the realms that had
once been the Muses,” whose “cataracts of glittering, well-chosen words made
his head ache. Too much, too much. Cold fury and the excess of a fundamental
impotence of expression” (41-42).
11. Ibid.
12. LL, Mid-Channel, 6.
13. LL, “The Ivory Tower,” Nation, 4 September 1920, 263.
14. HM to Carl Van Doren, 6 September and 21 October 1920, in HM,
Letters ofH. L. Mencken (New York: Knopf, 1961), 193-94, 206-7.
15. LL, “The Ivory Tower,” 263.
16. LL to WL, 23 April 1921, WLP.
17. LL to WL, 19 September 1920, WLP.
18. LL, “Musical Comedies,” Nation, 24 April 1920, 560-62.
19. LL, “An Evening at the Movies,” Nation, 18 September 1920, 332.
20. LL, “Underworld,” Nation, 6 October 1920, 383.
21. LL, Mid-Channel, 6-7; Van Doren, Three Worlds, 146-47.
Page 715 - [see page image]
696
Notes to Chapter io
22. Grace Hager Lewis, With Love from Grade: Sindair Lewis, 1912-1925
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 157; and Mark Schorer, Sindair Lewis: An
American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 285.
23. LL, “A Note on Acting,” Nation, 17 November 1920, 569-70.
24. LL, “Goethe and Ourselves,” Nation, 29 June 1921, 921.
25. LL, Mid-Channel, 13-14.
26. LL, “The New Literature in America,” Nation, 23 March 1921, 429.
27. Stuart Sherman, “Is There Anything to Be Said for Literary Tradition?”
Bookman 52 (October 1920): 108-12.
28. Samuel Orth, Our Foreigners (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920),
179-80.
29. Sherman, “Is There Anything,” 112.
30. LL to Stuart Sherman, 4 December 1920, University of Illinois Archives,
Urbana.
31. LL, “Tradition and Freedom,” Nation, 8 December 1920, 651-52.
32. LL, “Interlude,” Nation, 26 January 1921,126.
33. LL, quoted in Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, vol. 1
(New York: KTAV, 1972), 99.
34. LL to LH, 7 March 1921, with “Books Recommended to LMH” ap
pended, including works by Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Sherwood Anderson, and Som
erset Maugham (Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence), LHP.
35. LL, “William Ellery Leonard,” Nation, 12 January 1921, 45.
36. WL to ML, 25 October 1920, WLP.
37. LL to Mary Hunter Austin, 11 March 1921, Mary Austin Papers, Henry
E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
38. LL, Up Stream, 9.
39. LL, “According to Sorcery,” Nation, 20 April 1921, 598; and LL, Up
Stream, 9-10.
40. LL to WL, 3 April 1920, WLP; and Richard Winston to Charles Madi
son, 3 September 1970, LLP I.
41. HH to LL, 10 May 1921, HHP.
42. LL to WL, 23 April 1921, WLP.
43. Ibid.
44. LL to WL, 21 May 1921, WLP.
45. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., x.
46. LL to WL, 21 May 1921, WLP.
47. LL, Up Stream, 247.
48. LL, “A Note on Dramatic Dialogue,” Nation, 9 March 1921, 381; LL
to HM, 8 July 1921, HMP.
49. LL, “The Poet and the World,” Nation, 25 May 1921, 732.
50. Ibid.
51. LL, Mid-Channel, 11.
52. LL, “Introduction,” in Remy de Gourmont, The Book of Masks
(Boston: John W. Lucas, 1921), ii.
Page 716 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 11
CHAPTER 11
1. LL, “Introduction,” in Ernest Howard Culbertson, Goat Alley: A Tra
gedy of Negro Life (Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd, 1922), 7-8.
2. LL to John Bennett, 27 October 1906, Bennett Papers, South Carolina
Historical Society.
3. LL to HM, 8 July 1921, HMP.
4. LL to HM, 16 July 1921, HMP. Ludwig stayed with L. Shapiro of 45
Russell Street, Brookline.
5. LL to HM, 25 July 1921, HMP.
6. “Treasure Hunts among Old Bookshops,” America, 29 August 1921,
LLP I.
7. LL, “Taste and the Man,” Nation, 3 August 1921,121-22.
8. LL, Mid-Channel, 15-16.
9. LL, Crump, 353-54.
10. LL, Mid-Channel, 15-16.
11. Ibid., 16.
12. LL, Crump, 367-68.
13. Van Doren, Three Worlds, 208-9. For a detailed study of Greenwich
Village during the 1920s, see Ware, Greenwich Village.
14. Dell, Love in Greenwich Village, 16-18.
15. Quoted in Allen, Only Yesterday, 338.
16. Ibid.
17. LL to WL, 23 April 1921, WLP.
18. LL, Crump, 364, 367.
19. Dell, Love in Greenwich Village, 25.
20. LH to Carlotta Harris, 1 September 1921, LHP.
21. LH to Carlotta Harris, 5 September 1921, LHP.
22. LH to Carlotta Harris, 2 September 1921, LHP.
23. LH to Carlotta Harris, 19 September 1921, LHP.
24. LH to Carlotta Harris, 8 September 1921, LHP; LL, Haven, 199; and
LL to WL, 22 September 1921, WLP.
25. LL to JS, 22 September 1921, JSP.
26. LL to WL, 22 September 1921, WLP; and LL, Crump, 367-68.
27. LL to HM, 22 June 1922, HMP.
28. Van Doren, Three Worlds, 256.
29. LL to JS, 22 September 1921, JSP.
30. LL to WL, 22 September 1921, WLP.
31. LL, “Eugene O’Neill,” Nation, 30 November 1921, 626.
32. LL to WL, 22 September 1921, WLP; and LL, The Drama and the Stage
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), prefatory note, n.p.
33. LL to WL, 22 September 1921, WLP.
34. LL to WL, 14 January 1922, WLP.
35. Ibid.
36. LL, “We Want Civilization,” Nation, 22 February 1922, 225.
37. LL, “Republican Germany and the Arts,” Nation, 1 March 1922, 247.
38. LL, “The Critic and the Theatre,” Nation, 27 December 1919, 830.
697
Page 717 - [see page image]
698
Notes to Chapter ii
39. Brander Matthews, “Up-Stream in America,” New York Times Book
Review and Magazine, 9 April 1922, 8; and Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step
(New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1922), 361.
40. HM, H. L. Mencken’s “Smart Set” Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1968), 28
41. Hamlin Garland to Henry Cabot Lodge, 10 February 1922, Lodge
Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; and Ernest Hemingway, The
Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1970), 143.
42. Agnes Harris to LH, 13 October 1922, LHP.
43. Frank Eugene Broyles to LH, 8 January 1923, LHP.
44. LH to Carlotta Harris, 19 September 1922, LHP.
45. HM, “Dream and Awakening,” Nation, 21 June 1922, 434-35; and
TD, Letters, 2:405.
46. LL to HM, 22 June 1922, HMP.
47. Anzia Yezierska, “Mr. Lewisohn’s ‘Up Stream,’ ” New York Times Book
Review and Magazine, 23 April 1922, 22.
48. WL to LL, 6 June 1922, LLP II.
49. LL, “On a Campus,” Nation, 3 May 1922, 542.
50. LL, “Sin in France,” Nation, 24 May 1922, 624-25.
51. LL, “The Cloister and the World,” Nation, 3 May 1922, 540.
52. LL, “Escape,” Nation, 27 September 1922, 313.
53. LL, “The Generations,” Nation, 31 May 1922, 654.
54. LL, “The Clown,” Nation, 21 June 1922, 753-54.
55. LL to BH, 9 September 1915, BHP.
56. Susan Jenkins Brown to Charles Madison, 31 May 1970, LLP I.
57. LL, review of “A Little Journey,” Town Topics, 2 January 1918, 12.
58. Bosworth Crocker [ML], “Wishes,” Bookman 51 (April 1920): 225-26.
59. LL to Mary Austin, 3 March 1921, Austin Papers.
60. LL, “The Story Ashland Told at Dinner,” Smart Set 34 (February 1919):
101-5.
61. LL, “Prohibition Ditties,” Nation, 22 June 1921, 888.
62. LL, Crump, 362-65, 434.
63. LL to Upton Sinclair, 30 June 1922, Upton Sinclair Papers, Indiana
University, Bloomington.
64. LL, Crump, 358.
65. Ibid., 373; and C. A. Graeser to LH, 25 August 1922, LHP.
66. LL, Don Juan, 7-8.
67. LL, “Speaking of the Theater;” Nation, 12 July 1922, 50.
68. LL, “Babbitt,” Nation, 20 September 1922, 284.
69. LL, “Concerning Faith,” Nation, 18 October 1922, 420.
70. Ibid.
71. LH to Carlotta Harris, 19 September 1922, LHP.
72. Ibid.
73. LL, Crump, 375.
74. LL, Don Juan, 11-12.
75. LL, “Introduction,” in Frenssen, Jorn Uhl, 5-6.
76. LL, “Worthy of the Muse,” Nation, 21 February 1923, 224.
Page 718 - [see page image]
699
Notes to Chapter 12
77. LL, Mid-Channel, 16-18.
78. LL to Cora Evans, 16 December 1922, LLP III.
79. LL, Mid-Channel, 32-33, 38.
80. LL to Upton Sinclair, 2 November 1922, Sinclair Papers, Indiana Uni
versity.
CHAPTER 12
1. LL, Don Juan, 9-10.
2. Basil King to TL, 11 August, and Havelock Ellis to TL, 6 July and 1
October 1922, LLP IV; and LL, Haven, 290.
3. TL, “Dangerous Paradise: My Love Life with Ludwig Lewisohn,” Liv
ing Romances, April 1940,10.
4. LL, Crump, 404-5.
5. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 10.
6. LL to TL, Monday [13 October 1922], LLP IV.
7. TL, “Was I His Wife or His Mistress?” True Confessions, June 1940,
35.
8. LL, Don Juan, 15-16.
9. LL, Crump, 355-56.
10. LL, Don Juan, 38.
11. LL to TL, Friday [early fall 1922], LLP IV.
12. LL to TL, Saturday [16 December 1922], LLP IV.
13. LL to TL, Monday [19 October 1922?], LLP IV.
14. LL to TL, Monday [13 October 1922], LLP IV.
15. LL, Don Juan, 33-34.
16. LL to TL, Friday morning [15 December 1922], LLP IV.
17. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 11.
18. LL to TL, 26 December 1922, LLP IV.
19. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, 83.
20. LL, Crump, 405-6.
21. LL to TL, Friday morning [15 December 1922], LLP IV.
22. LL to TL, Saturday [16 December 1922], LLP IV.
23. Ibid.
24. LL to TL, Wednesday, 20 December [1922], LLP IV.
25. LL to TL, 27 December 1922, LLP IV.
26. LL to TL, 1 January 1923, LLP IV.
27. LL to TL, 26 December [1922], LLP IV.
28. Ibid.
29. LL, Don Juan, 8-9.
30. LL, Mid-Channel, 27.
31. LL to TL, 6 January 1923, LLP IV.
32. LL to TL, Tuesday morning [9 January 1923, on Philadelphia sta
tionery], LLP IV.
33. LL to TL, 14 January 1923, LLP IV.
34. LL to TL, Tuesday morning [9 January 1923], LLP IV.
Page 719 - [see page image]
700
Notes to Chapter iz
35. LL to TL, 14 January 1923, LLP IV.
36. LL to WL, 22 January 1923, WLP; and LL to TL, 22 January 1923, LLP
IV. It was during this visit that Ludwig had dinner at the home of Louis Asher,
who was to become one of his patrons in the years ahead. Asher’s son Frederick
related how “Lewisohn obviously had never eaten an artichoke but didn’t want
to admit it. Result: while he carefully observed how others dipped their leaves
in little dishes of Hollandaise sauce and then bit off the soft under portions of
the leaves, he gained enough self confidence to go it alone on the balance of the
artichoke and courageously ate all of the thistle as well!” (Frederick Asher to
Ralph Melnick, 31 March 1980).
37. LL to TL, Thursday [18 January 1923], LLP IV.
38. LL to Upton Sinclair, 3 November 1922, LLP IV.
39. LL to TL, 28 January 1923, LLP IV.
40. Ibid.; A. R. Hohlfeld to LL, 20 December 1922, UWA; and Abraham
Crombach to Stanley Chyet, 23 December 1958, LLP I.
41. “The ‘Persecuted’ Mr. Lewisohn,” Dearborn Independent, 27 January
1923; and Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 182.
42. The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (Dearborn:
Dearborn Independent, 1920), 5-6.
43. “The ‘Persecuted’ Mr. Lewisohn.”
44. A. R. Hohlfeld to LL, 20 December 1922, UWA.
45. HH to LL, 1 January 1923, HHP. In this letter, Hurwitz pleads with
Ludwig to allow him to print the text of his talk in the Menorah Journal, an
offer that Ludwig apparently declined.
46. Arnold Crombach to Stanley Chyet, 23 December 1958, LLP I.
47. LL, Mid-Channel, 21-24.
48. LL, Don Juan, 10.
49. LL, Crump, 387-89.
50. Ibid., 388; and LL to TL, n.d. [Monday], LLP IV. This arrangement is
corroborated by much additional evidence, including the pleadings presented by
Mary and by Ludwig in their several court battles in the years ahead.
51. LL to TL, 5 February 1923, LLP IV. On the ring’s origin, see TL,
“Dangerous Paradise,” 11.
52. TL, “Was I His Wife,” 35.
53. LL to WL, 20 April 1923, WLP.
54. LL to HH, 4 February 1923, HHP. Several similar apologies are found
in this period.
55. LLto Miss McAffee, 9 February 1923, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
56. LL to TD, 30 March 1923, TDP.
57. LL to WL, 20 April 1923, WLP.
58. LL, “Literary Central Europe,” Nation, 14 March 1923, 319.
59. LL, “Preface,” in John Cowper Powys, Suspended Judgments: Essays
on Books and Sensations (New York: American Library Service, 1923), [ii].
60. “ ‘Lewisohn Insults’ Resented by Veterans,” New York Times, 5 April
1923, 4.
61. “Ludwig Lewisohn Tells What He Did Say,” New York Times, 7 April
1923, 16.
Page 720 - [see page image]
701
Notes to Chapter 13
62. LL to WL, 20 April 1923, WLP.
63. LL, Mid-Channel, 51.
64. LL to Harvard Menorah Society, 5 May 1923, HHP
65. LL, Mid-Channel, 51-56.
66. LL to TL, Monday night [30 April 1923], LLP IV.
67. LL to TL, Tuesday night [1 May 1923], LLP IV.
68. LL to TL, Wednesday [2 May 1923], LLP IV.
69. LL to TL, Sunday, 6 May 1923, LLP IV.
70. LL to Mrs. Spear, 5 May 1923, LLP IV.
71. Ibid.; and Melvin Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holo
caust (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), 317-18.
72. LL to TL, [spring 1923], LLP IV.
73. LL, “The Three Critics,” republished from the Nation in his The Cre
ative Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 106-9.
74. LL to TL, Sunday, [spring 1923], LLP IV.
75. LL to TL, 9 May 1923, LLP IV.
76. Ibid.
77. LL to TL, 30 May [1923], LLP IV.
78. LL to TL, [spring 1923], LLP IV.
79. LL to TL, 1 June 1923, LLP IV.
80. LL to TL, [ca. June 1923], LLP IV.
81. LL to TL, Tuesday [June 1923], LLP IV.
82. LL to TL, 8 July [1923], LLP IV.
83. LL to TL, 1 June 1923, LLP IV.
84. LL to TL, 8 July [1923], LLP IV.
85. LL to TL, [ca. 1 July 1923], LLP IV.
86. LL to TL, Tuesday [June 1923], LLP IV.
87. LL, “Introduction,” in Bosworth Crocker [ML], Humble Folk: One-Act
Plays (Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd, 1923), 9-10.
88. LL to TL, Sunday [8 July 1923], LLP IV.
89. Ibid.
90. LL to TL, Wednesday [mid-July 1923], LLP IV.
91. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 10-11.
92. LL, Mid-Channel, 52-53; and LL, Altar, 66.
93. LL, Mid-Channel, 44.
CHAPTER 13
1. LL, Mid-Channel, 41—42.
2. Ibid., 50.
3. LL, Don Juan, 71-72.
4. Ibid., 70.
5. Du Bose Heyward to LH, 8 August 1923, Heyward Papers, South
Carolina Historical Society, Charleston.
6. LL, Don Juan, 78-79.
7. LL, Altar, 69; and Edmiston and Cirino, Literary New York, 78-79.
Page 721 - [see page image]
702
Notes to Chapter 13
8. Susan Jenkins Brown to Charles Madison, 21 May 1970, LLP I.
9. LL, Don Juan, 82-86.
10. Ibid., 223.
11. Ibid., 87.
12. ML to LL, 3 March-22 April 1934, LLP II. The identity of the agency
is disclosed in LL to ML, 22 May 1934, LLP I.
13. LH to Carlotta Harris, [late September 1923], LHP.
14. LL, Don Juan, 271.
15. LH to Carlotta Harris, [late September 1923], LHP. Don Juan’s Wife
never appeared and the manuscript is presumed lost along with the reported five
thousand letters Ludwig sent Mary over a period of twenty years. All attempts
to locate her family have failed.
16. LH to Carlotta Harris, [late September 1923], LHP.
17. ML to LH, 30 September 1923, LHP; and LL to WL, 25 December
1923, WLP.
18. LL to ML, 22 May 1934, LLP I.
19. LL to TL, 26 October [1923], LLP IV.
20. LL to WL, 25 December 1923, WLP.
21. LL, Mid-Channel, 62-63.
22. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 11-12.
23. LL, Mid-Channel, 63; and LL, “First Fruits,” Nation, 3 October 1923,
360.
24. LL, Mid-Channel, 71.
25. Review of LL’s Don Juan, in the New York Times, 21 October 1923, 9.
26. LL, Mid-Channel, 71.
27. Ibid., 73. Of Don Juan he wrote, “it proved to be the slightest prelimi
nary sketch for a later work [Crump] of very different extent and weight” (Don
Juan, 73).
28. Joseph Wood Krutch, review of LL, Don Juan, Literary Review, 3
November 1923, 203.
29. H. S. Canby, review of LL, Don Juan, Nation, 5 December 1923, 649.
30. LL, Mid-Channel, 73.
31. LL, “Ludwig Lewisohn,” Nation, 21 November 1923, 583.
32. Ibid., 583-84; and LL to TL, [June 1923], LLP IV.
33. LL, “Ludwig Lewisohn,” 584.
34. HL to LL, 6 December 1923, HLP.
35. LL, The Creative Life, 5, 211.
36. LL, “Divertisements,” Nation, 19 December 1923, 718.
37. LL to WL, 19 September 1920, WLP.
38. LL, Crump, 403.
39. LL, Don Juan, 291.
40. LL, The Creative Life, 174-77.
41. LL, Mid-Channel, 55-57.
42. Maurice Samuel, Little Did I Know (New York: Knopf, 1963), 278.
43. Meyer Weisgal, Meyer Weisgal... So Far (New York: Random House,
1971), 65.
44. LL, Mid-Channel, 57, 60.
Page 722 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 13
45. LL to WL, 25 December 1923, WLP.
46. Ibid.
47. LL, Crump, 416-21.
48. LL, Mid-Channel, 29.
49. “Author to Pay Alimony,” New York Times, 26 January 1924, 6; and
LL, Mid-Channel, 65.
50. “Author Wins a Point,” New York Times, 2 February 1924, 13; LL,
Mid-Channel, 65; and TL to Clara Leiser, 15 April 1939, LLP II.
51. LL, Crump, 393-94.
52. LL, Mid-Channel, 65.
53. LL, “The Jew Meditates,” Nation, 20 February 1924, 200-201.
54. LL, “Storm-Center,” Nation, 19 March 1924, 307-8.
55. LL, “Un-Americanized Americans,” Dearborn Independent, 29 March
1924, 177-78.
56. LL, “Fragmenta Critica,” unpublished lecture, [1924], LLP II.
57. LL, Crump, 421-22.
58. LL to WL, 10 May 1924, WLP.
59. LL, Crump, 426-27.
60. Ibid., 426, 428.
61. LL, Mid-Channel, 66.
62. Ibid., 65-66, 69-70.
63. Ibid., 70.
64. Ibid., 73.
65. LL, Altar, 150.
66. Ibid., 152.
67. LL, Don Juan, 303-5.
68. LL to Edgar Lee Masters, 2 June 1924, Edgar Lee Masters Papers,
University of Texas, Austin.
69. LL to WL, 8 June 1924, WLP; and LL, Mid-Channel, 74.
70. LL, Roman Summer, 59.
71. LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
72. LL, “All God’s Children,” Nation, 4 June 1924, 22.
73. LL, “A Philosopher of Liberalism,” Nation, 2 July 1924, 22.
74. Brief in the case of Mary Lewisohn v. Harper and Brothers, and Ludwig
Lewisohn, 1929, LLP I; and ML to LL, 2 March-22 April 1934 (single letter),
LLP II.
75. LL, Mid-Channel, 74-75; and TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 12.
76. Dell, Love in Greenwich Village, 320-21.
77. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924),
1-2, 285-87. See also Cowley, Exile’s Return, for a full treatment of this
journeying to Europe.
78. LL, Mid-Channel, 75-76.
79. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 12.
80. LL to WL, 4 July 1924, WLP. Ludwig would write in 1940 that he paid
Mrs. Spear’s way to England with them (Haven, 269), but there is no other
mention of this in Mid-Channel or any correspondence, or in Thelma’s own
703
Page 723 - [see page image]
704
Notes to Chapter 14
accounts. It is more likely that he paid her way when she visited them in Europe
on one of several future occasions.
CHAPTER 14
1. LL, “Confession II,” Nation, 16 April 1924, 457-58.
2. LL, “Too True,” Nation, 26 March 1924, 352.
3. Ibid.
4. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition, 1927-1934 (San Francisco: North
Point, 1989), 6.
5. LL, “Confession II,” 458.
6. LL, “Once More,” Nation, 6 June 1924, 680.
7. LL, “New Morals for Old: On Love in Marriage,” Nation, 29 Novem
ber 1924,464-65. This was part of a larger series that was to “print the opinions
of a few intelligent observers on the shifting moral standards of our day and on
the difficult problems of modern sex relations,” among them Bertrand Russell,
Elsie Clews Parsons, Floyd Dell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joseph Wood Krutch,
Isabel Leavenworth, H. L. Mencken, Edwin Muir, and Arthur Garfield Hays
(Sara Alpern, Freda Kirchwey: A Woman of “Nation” [Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987], 49).
8. LL to JS, 6 September 1926, JSP (in a statement prepared for the U.S.
Department of State). Ludwig’s former colleague at the Nation, Joseph Wood
Krutch, later noted how Ludwig “celebrated the beauty of monogamy through
a series of marriages each of which was defended as the only true marriage it
had been his good fortune to achieve” (More Lives Than One, 180).
9. LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
10. ML to SW, 5 April 1926, SWP.
11. LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
12. [Unknown] to LL, 15 January 1924, Weizmann Archives, Rehovot,
Israel. Ludwig’s passport gave the World Zionist Organization’s 77 Great Russell
St., London, office as his address in England.
13. Chaim Weizmann to Josef Meisels, 16 July 1924, Weizmann Archives.
14. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 12.
15. LL, Israel (New York: Boni and Liveright 1925), 45-47.
16. LL, Mid-Channel, 86-89.
17. LL to Miss Liebermann, 24 July 1924, Weizmann Archives.
18. LL to GV, 7 August 1924, George Sylvester Viereck Papers, University
of Iowa, Iowa City.
19. Elias Canetti, The Torch in My Ear (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1982), 299-300.
20. LL to JS, 7 August 1924, JSP.
21. LL to Miss Liebermann, 13 August 1924, Weizmann Archives.
22. LL to JS, 9 June 1926, JSP; and LL to HL, 14 October 1927, HLP.
23. LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
24. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 2.
25. LL, Mid-Channel, 90-93.
Page 724 - [see page image]
705
Notes to Chapter 14
26. LL, “Blind Alley,” Menorah Journal 10 (November/December 1924):
496-97.
27. LL, Mid-Channel, 91.
28. LL, Israel, 49, 51, 69-70.
29. LL, “Blind Alley,” 497.
30. LL, Israel, 74, 79-80.
31. LL to Miss Liebermann, 13 August 1924, Weizmann Archives.
32. LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
33. ML to SW, 5 April 1926, SWP.
34. LL to JS, 6 September 1926, JSP; and LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
35. ML to SW, 5 April 1926, SWP.
36. LL, Israel, 81-82.
37. Ibid., 82.
38. Ibid., 82-83.
39. Ibid., 84-86.
40. Ibid., 102-3 (this portion of the chapter on Poland was written in
September 1924 and published as “Hunger and Holiness,” Menorah Journal
11 [February 1925]: 62-66).
41. Ibid., 86-87.
42. Ibid., 92-93.
43. Ibid., 97 (published previously as “Hunger and Holiness”).
44. LL, Mid-Channel, 97.
45. LL to WL, 19 August 1924, WLP.
46. LL, “Departure,” Nation, 1 October 1924, 325-36.
47. Miss Liebermann to LL, 26 August, and LL to Miss Liebermann, 6
September 1924, Weizmann Archives.
48. LL to WL, 27 September 1944, WLP.
49. LL, Mid-Channel, 123.
50. Arthur Schnitzler, The Road to the Open (New York: Knopf, 1923),
412.
51. As told by LL to Stanley Chyet, former student of LL.
52. LL, Mid-Channel, 127.
53. Marion Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 87.
54. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 12.
55. TL, “Was I His Wife,” 36.
56. LL, Israel, 122-23 (previously published as “The Return to Jerusalem,”
Nation, 31 December 1924, 724-25).
57. Ibid., 125-26 (previously published as “The Return to Jerusalem”).
58. Ibid., 127-29.
59. Ibid., 135-38.
60. Ibid., 139-40, 152-55.
61. Ibid., 136,141,144—46, 209.
62. Ibid., 155-56.
63. Ibid., 157-58.
64. LL to WL, 23 October 1924, WLP.
65. LL, Israel, 161.
Page 725 - [see page image]
706
Notes to Chapter i 5
66. Ibid., 164-65.
67. Ibid., 221-22.
68. Ibid., 216-17.
69. Ibid., 195-96 (published originally as “A City Unlike New York,'
Menorah Journal 11 [April 1925]: 167-72).
70. LL, Israel, 217-19.
71. Ibid., 223.
72. Ibid., 217,172.
73. Ibid., 180-81.
74. Ibid., 182.
75. Ibid., 190-92 (published originally as “A City Unlike New York”).
76. Ibid., 192.
77. Ibid., 213.
78. Ibid., 206.
79. Ibid., 202.
80. Ibid., 196-97.
81. LL, Mid-Channel, 97-98.
82. Ibid., 101-4.
83. Ibid., 98-101.
CHAPTER 15
1. LL to Gershon Agronsky, 8 November 1924, Weizmann Papers, Central
Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
2. LL, Israel, 280.
3. The exact itinerary is unknown, with only Ludwig’s passport offering
some indication of his travels during this period (LLP I).
4. LL, Mid-Channel, 111.
5. Ibid., 106.
6. Ibid., 107.
7. Ibid., 108-10.
8. Ibid., 110.
9. Jakob Wassermann to LL, 1 January 1925, Barrett-Lewisohn Papers,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and LL to Upton Sinclair, 25 September
1924, Sinclair Papers, Indiana University.
10. LL to WL, 3 December 1924, WLP; and TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 13.
11. Edgar Lee Masters to LL, 14 October 1924, LLP V.
12. ML to SW, 14 October 1924, SWP.
13. SW to ML, 25 October 1924, SWP.
14. ML to SW, 25 October 1924, SWP.
15. SW to ML, 29 October 1924, SWP.
16. Henrietta Szold to Louis Lipsky, 12 November 1924, Weizmann
Archives.
17. ML to Chaim Weizmann, 2 December 1924, Weizmann Archives.
18. Chaim Weizmann to ML, 11 December 1924, Weizmann Archives.
19. Chaim Weizmann to LL, 11 December 1924, Weizmann Archives.
Page 726 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 15
20. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 13.
21. LL, Mid-Channel, 125-26.
22. Ibid., 128.
23. Related to the author by Stanley Chyet, to whom LL had relayed this.
24. LL, Mid-Channel, 131.
25. Ibid.
26. LL to JS, 7 March 1925, JSP.
27. LL, Mid-Channel, 139-40.
28. LL to JS, 7 March 1925, JSP.
29. LL, “Silence in Central Europe,” Nation, 13 May 1925, 312.
30. LL, “America in Europe,” Saturday Review of Literature, 9 May 1925,
737-38.
31. LL, “The Art of Being a Jew,” Harper’s, May 1925, 725, 729.
32. LL to JS, 12 May 1925, JSP; and LL, “America in Europe,” 737.
33. LL, Mid-Channel, 140.
34. LL, Holy Land: A Story (New York: Harper, 1926), 1, 18, 22.
35. Ibid., 22-24.
36. Ibid., 26.
37. LL to WL, 21 May 1925, WLP.
38. LL to Upton Sinclair, 6 June 1925, Sinclair Papers, Indiana University.
39. Thomas Mann to LL, 28 December 1925, LLP V.
40. LL to WL, 3 July 1925, WLP. Dating for this trip is based on LL’s
passport (LLP I).
41. WL to LL, 24 June 1925, LLP IV.
42. LL to WL, n.d. [1925], WLP.
43. LL, Mid-Channel, 141; and LL, Notebook, LLP I.
44. LL, Roman Summer (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 237-38.
45. LL to T. B. Wells, 21 August 1925, LLP IV.
46. Jakob Wassermann to LL, 20 August and 15 December 1925, LLP IV;
and LL, Haven, 72.
47. LL, “Palestine or Russia?” Nation, 7 October 1925, 385.
48. H. Goldberg to Felix Warburg, 2 October 1925, LLP I.
49. LL, “Can an Artist Live in America?” Nation, 7 October 1925,423-24.
50. Sinclair Lewis to LL, [ca. October 1925], LLP I.
51. LL, Modern German Poetry (Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius, 1925),
10-11,54.
52. LL to GV, 30 September 1925, LLP III. The spring concerts’ successes
are confirmed in the New York Times, 1 May 1925, 22.
53. LL, Mid-Channel, 143; and Edgar Lee Masters to LL [ca. December
1924], LLP I.
54. LL to GV, 30 September 1925, LLP III.
55. ML to SW, 5 April 1926, SWP; and WL to LL, 24 June 1925, LLP IV.
56. Sinclair Lewis to LL, 19 October, and Stefan Zweig to LL, 21 October
1925, LLP V.
57. LL to HH, 30 September 1925, LLP I.
58. LL, “Martin Buber,” Menorah Journal 12 (February 1926): 69-70.
59. TL, “The Secret,” Menorah Journal 12 (February 1926): 70.
707
Page 727 - [see page image]
708
Notes to Chapter 16
60. LL, “Portrait,” and TL, “Portrait,” both in Harp 1 (November 1925):
8-9.
61. LL, Mid-Channel, 146.
62. Ibid.; and TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 13.
CHAPTER 16
1. Many books have been written about Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Of particular delight is William Wiser’s The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1983). An ably written, succinct account of this
period appears in Ishbel Ross, The Expatriates (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
1970), from which this passage is taken (p. 237).
2. Root, The Paris Edition, 124-25.
3. For an excellent treatment of these artists, see Kenneth E. Silver and
Romy Golan, The City of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945
(New York: Universe Books, 1985). Material quoted here appears on page 83.
Harold Clurman relates a parallel incident from 1924 that is worth noting for
the continuing division within French society it portrays. “The real shock of anti-
Semitism did not come with Hitler. It was a long-developing thing. I remember
in 1924 I went to see Isadora Duncan. She mentioned a certain dance critic
and she was going to answer his criticism of her. He didn’t like her dancing
because he was against modern dance. And as she said that, a man in the
box cried out, ‘He’s a dirty Jew!’ And she looked up and said, ‘But I like the
Jews.’ At which the audience applauded. He got frightened because the audience
applauded her, so he said, ‘Well, not the dirty ones.’ All this happened in Paris
in 1924” (Clurman, “Yiddish Influence on American Theater,” in Rosenberg,
Creators and Disturbers, 188).
4. LL, Mid-Channel, 154.
5. Ibid., 154-55; and LL, Altar, 152-53.
6. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964), 5.
7. Gertrude Stein, quoted in Frederick Hoffman, The Twenties: American
Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York: Viking, 1960), 25.
8. LL, Mid-Channel, 151.
9. Ibid., 157-58.
10. Root, The Paris Edition, 11-12.
11. Brian Morton, Americans in Paris: An Anecdotal Street Guide (Ann
Arbor: Olivia and Hill, 1984), 230.
12. LL, Mid-Channel, 149-50; LL to George Howard, 3 June 1925, LLP V;
and LL, Altar, 171-72.
13. LL, Mid-Channel, 151-52; and Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem
Asch (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1976), 87.
14. LL, Altar, 187.
15. Myron Chester Nutting, “An Artist’s Life and Travels” (Los Angeles:
University of California Los Angeles Oral History Program), 371 (unpublished).
16. FG, “With Latin Quarter Folk,” Boulevardier, 15 May 1926, LLP II.
The starting date of November 30, 1925, for Crump is noted on the book’s
Page 728 - [see page image]
709
Notes to Chapter 16
MS, LLP V, University of Texas, Austin; and LL, Case of Mr. Crump, MS,
University of Texas, Austin. For a description of the writing of Crump, cf. Robert
Greenfield, “Significant Ugliness: ‘The Case of Mr. Crump’ in Perspective,”
Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 21 (April 1991): 99-135.
17. “In Defense of Our Literary Exiles,” Bookman [1925/26], LLP II. Note
the possibly earlier title.
18. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 13.
19. TL, “Was I His Wife,” 36.
20. LL, Mid-Channel, 158; and Scrapbooks, LLP II.
21. FG, “With Latin Quarter Folk.”
22. WL to LL, 2 December 1925, WLP.
23. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 13.
24. LL, Mid-Channel, 161.
25. LL, “Thomas Mann at Fifty,” Nation, 9 December 1925, 667-68.
26. The first review appeared in the New York World on November 29,
1925, 7. Most reviews praised his poetic language and prophetic vision, though
the New York Times included a news feature of Rabbi Samuel Schulman’s public
condemnation of Ludwig’s thesis of Jews as a distinct people, presented at Temple
Beth-El on New York’s Fifth Avenue (7 December 1925, 24).
27. LL, Mid-Channel, 166, 168.
28. Thomas Mann to LL, 28 December 1925, LLP V.
29. Hans Burgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of His
Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 73.
30. LL to JS, 2 January 1926, JSP.
31. LL quoted in Gershon Agronsky to Israel Goldberg and Meyer Weisgal,
19 February 1926, Gershon Agronsky Papers, Central Zionist Archives.
32. Ibid.; Meyer Levin, In Search (Paris: Author’s Press, 1949); and Leon
Hoffmann, Ideals and Illusions: The Story of an Ivy League Woman in 1920’s
Israel (New York: S.B.I. Books, 1992), 30.
33. LL to HM, 10 March 1926, HMP.
34. HM to LL, 27 March 1926, LLP IV.
35. LL, Mid-Channel, 166.
36. ML to SW, 5 April 1926, SWP.
37. SW to ML, 21 April, and SW to John Haynes Holmes, 21 April 1926,
SWP.
38. LL, Mid-Channel, 169.
39. LL, untitled poem dated 21 March 1926, LLP II.
40. Hemingway, Moveable Feast, 45.
41. LL, Mid-Channel, 166.
42. LL to Mrs. Spear, 18 April 1926, LLP IV.
43. Ibid.; and LL, Haven, 264.
44. FG, “With Latin Quarter Folk.”
45. LL, Haven, 72.
46. Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 369-70.
47. Ibid., 370.
48. LLto GV, 28 October 1928, George Sylvester Viereck Papers, University
of Iowa, Iowa City.
Page 729 - [see page image]
710
Notes to Chapter i 6
49. LL, Haven, 72.
50. Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 370-72, 502-3, 581, 757.
51. SH, Paris Salons, Cafes, Studios: Being Social, Artistic and Literary
Memories (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1928), 252-53.
52. In My Time: An Observer’s Record of War and Peace (New York:
Dutton, 1938), 261.
53. SH, Paris Salons, 253.
54. Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 363, 370, 395, 1109.
55. Note appended to letter of LL to SH, n.d., LLP V. Completion date
noted on MS, LLP V.
56. LL, Mid-Channel, 179,163.
57. SH, Paris Salons, 253-55.
58. LL, Mid-Channel, 168-69.
59. Ibid., 179.
60. Ibid., 186.
61. Emma Goldman to LL, 28 May 1926, LLP V.
62. LL, “An Unknown Poet,” Nation, 13 October 1926, 364.
63. LL, Mid-Channel, 173-74.
64. P. L. B. to Messrs. Harper and Brothers, 8 June 1926, LLP I.
65. LL to Mrs. Spear, 18 September 1926, LLP IV.
66. Toby Widdicombe, “Edward William Titus,” in Karen Lane Rood,
ed., American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939 (vol. 4 of Dictionary of Literary
Biography) (Detroit: Gale Research, 1980), 388; and Hugh Ford, Published in
Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-
1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 120-22.
67. LL, “Tribute to Edward Titus,” New York Times, 12 February 1952,
26. Alex Small of the Paris Tribune spoke similarly of Titus (quoted in Ford,
Published in Paris, 121).
68. LL, Mid-Channel, 175; Ford, Published in Paris, 125; and LL to Mrs.
Spear, 18 September 1926, LLP IV.
69. LL to WL, [June 1926], WLP.
70. LL, Mid-Channel, 191-94.
71. LL to WL, [June 1926], WLP.
72. LL to Donald Klopfer, 26 June 1926, RHP; and Charles Madison, Jewish
Publishing in America (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976), 264.
73. LL to Donald Klopfer, 17 July 1926, RHP.
74. LL, Gegen den Strom: Eine Amerikanische Chronik (Frankfurt: Frank
furter Societats-Druckerei GMBH, 1924), frontispiece and Geleitwort.
75. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., x-xii.
76. LL, Up Stream, 131.
77. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 154.
78. LL, Up Stream, 135.
79. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., 159-60.
80. LL, Up Stream, 146; Up Stream, rev. ed., 172.
81. LL, Up Stream, 148; Up Stream, rev. ed., 175.
82. LL, Up Stream, 177; Up Stream, rev. ed., 210.
Page 730 - [see page image]
711
Notes to Chapter 17
83. His passport dates their entry into Czechoslovakia as July 25, 1926,
LLP I.
84. LL to BC, 12 August 1926, RHP.
85. LL to JS, 6 September 1926, JSP.
CHAPTER 17
1. Horace Kallen to SW, 20 September 1926, LLP I.
2. TD to LL, 16 August 1926, LLP IV.
3. TL to Mrs. Spear, 18 September 1926, LLP IV.
4. Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 372-73.
5. TD to LL, 21 September 1926, LLP IV.
6. LL, Mid-Channel, 188-91.
7. LL to Mrs. Spear, 18 September 1926, LLP IV.
8. LL to BC, 27 September 1926, RHP.
9. BC to LL, 15 October 1926, RHP.
10. LL, “Culture and Barbarism,” Harper’s, November 1926, 729-33;
“Rainer Maria Rilke,” Saturday Review of Literature, 4 December 1926, 384-
85; and LL to HH, 27 September 1926, LLP I.
11. LL to HH, 27 September 1926, LLP I; and TL to Mrs. Spear, 18
September 1926, LLP IV.
12. LL to WB, 12 October 1926, LLP V; and LL, Mid-Channel, 186.
13. LL to WB, [October 1926], LLP V; and interview with CC by the author
in 1982.
14. Thomas B. Wells to LL, 18 October 1926, LLP II.
15. LL, Holy Land, title page.
16. Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 394.
17. LL, Mid-Channel, 261.
18. Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939),
306-9; Noel Roley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of
Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Norton, 1983), 245—46;
and Michael Moscato, ed., The United States of America v. One Book Entitled
“Ulysses" by James Joyce (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America,
1984), xvii-xx.
19. LL, Haven, 139.
20. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3 (New York: Viking, 1966),
151.
21. Ibid., 151-53; Fitch, Sylvia Beach, 246.
22. LL to HL, 30 November 1926, LLP II.
23. Ibid.; and Jakob Wassermann, Wedlock (New York: Grosset and Dun
lap, 1926), 347. The New York Times review appeared on December 12, 1926.
Others, more negative, followed into May 1927.
24. LL to HL, 18 December 1926, HLP.
25. TL, “Was I His Wife,” 36.
26. TL and LL to Mrs. Spear, 18 September 1926, LLP IV; and LL to WB,
12 October 1926, LLP II.
Page 731 - [see page image]
712
Notes to Chapter 17
27. HM to LL, 27 November 1926, LLP V.
28. LL, The Island Within, 3-7; and LL, The Defeated, MS, 7 December
1926, LLP II.
29. LL, Mid-Channel, 175; Jakob Wassermann to LL, 31 December 1926,
LLP IV.
30. LL to HM, 16 December 1926, HMP.
31. Elmer Rice to TL, 25 December 1926, LLP IV.
32. LL to HL, 18 December 1926, HLP.
33. LL to HL, 5 January 1927, HLP.
34. TD to LL, 6 January 1927, Theodore Dreiser Papers, Cornell University.
35. Advertisement appearing in transition 1 (April 1927): n.p.
36. LL to HL, 8 February 1927, HLP.
37. HM to LL, 6 and 8 January 1927, H. L. Mencken Letters, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
38. Sinclair Lewis to LL, 8 January 1927, LLP V.
39. Janet Flanner, “Paris Letter,” New Yorker, 22 January 1927, 40—41.
40. BC to LL, 19 January 1927, RHP.
41. LL, Up Stream, rev. ed., n.p.
42. LL to BC, 16 April 1927, RHP.
43. LL, Mid-Channel, 175-79; Ford, Published in Paris, 126. Mencken, in
late February 1927, wrote, “So far as I know, the vigilant bureaucrats of the
Customs Service have not yet forbidden its importation” (“Portrait of a Lady,”
American Mercury 10 [March 1927]: 379).
44. Moscato, U.S.A. v. “Ulysses," xviii.
45. Thomas Mann to LL, 6 February 1927, LLP V; and HM, “Portrait of a
Lady,” 379.
46. LL, Mid-Channel, 179-80.
47. LL to HH, 1 February 1927, LLP I; and LL, “Tobias Levy,” Menorah
Journal 13 (June 1927): 252.
48. LL to HL, 8 February 1927, HLP.
49. Transition 1 (April 1927).
50. Robert Sage, Paris Tribune, 20 March 1927, quoted in Hugh Ford,
The Left Bank Revisited (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1972), 245.
51. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Significant Ugliness,” Nation, 9 February 1927,
149-50.
52. HM, “Portrait of a Lady,” 379-80.
53. LL to HM, 7 March 1927, HMP.
54. LL to HL, 8 February 1927, HLP.
55. HL to LL, 25 February 1927, HLP.
56. Sinclair Lewis to Alfred Harcourt, 23 March 1927, quoted in Sinclair
Lewis, From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 236.
57. LL, Mid-Channel, 199; Jimmie Charters, This Must Be the Place (New
York: Lee Furman, 1937), 107.
58. FL to JS, 8 June 1927, JSP.
59. LL, Mid-Channel, 227-28.
Page 732 - [see page image]
713
Notes to Chapter 18
60. LL to JS, 20 March 1927, JSP; and LL to WL, 10 April 1927, WLP.
61. WL to LL, 12 March 1927, WLP.
62. LL to WL, 10 April 1927, WLP.
63. “Lewisohn vs. Harpers,” LLP I.
64. LL to WL, 10 April 1927, WLP. Regarding Thelma’s infertility, see LL
to Mrs. Spear, 18 September 1926, LLP IV.
65. WL to LL, 8 May 1927, WLP.
66. LL to WL, 10 April 1927, WLP.
67. The Roving Critic, “Unholy Matrimony,” Century Magazine, April
1927, 76-77.
68. Alex Small, “A Transitional Phenomenon,” Paris Tribune, 10 April
1927, quoted in Ford, Left Bank, 246.
69. LL to WL, 10 April 1927, WLP.
70. New York Times, 1 May 1927,17.
71. LL, Mid-Channel, 141-43.
72. LL, Roman Summer (1930), 237-38.
73. LL to WL, 10 April 1927, WLP.
74. WL to LL, 8 May 1927, WLP.
75. LL to BC, 16 April 1927, RHP.
76. BC to LL, 7 June 1927, RHP.
77. New York World, 4 May 1927, Scrapbook, LLP II.
78. Quoted in Edward Titus’s post-censorship circular advertising Crump,
LLP II.
79. Lewis Galantiere, “Another American Tragedy,” New York Herald
Tribune, 12 June 1927, Scrapbook, LLP II.
80. “People Here and There,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Tune 1927, Scrap
book, LLP II.
81. LL, “French Poet: New Style,” Saturday Review of Literature, 2 July
1927, 948.
82. Charters, This Must Be the Place, 107.
83. LL to GV, 5 May 1927, LLP III.
84. LL to GV, 8 June 1927, LLP III.
85. LL to Thomas B. Wells, 17 July 1927, LLP II.
86. LL, “The Politics of a Man of Letters,” Harper’s, January 1928,237—42.
87. LL to CC, 17 August 1927, LLP II.
88. LL, untitled promotional piece for The Island Within, n.d., LLP IV.
89. LL to JS, 16 September 1927, JSP.
CHAPTER 18
1. LL to HL, 10 September 1927, HLP.
2. LL to CC, 10 September 1927, LLP II.
3. Thomas R. Smith to HL, 29 September 1927, HLP.
4. HL to Thomas R. Smith, 30 September 1927, HLP.
5. HL to LL, 3 October 1927, HLP.
6. LL to BC, 30 July 1927, RHP.
Page 733 - [see page image]
714
Notes to Chapter 18
7. BC to LL, 22 August 1927, RHP.
8. LL to HL, 14 October 1927, HLP.
9. HL to LL, 29 October 1927, HLP
10. LL to JS, 16 September 1927, JSP; Harms Heinz Elvers, The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice (New York: John Day, 1927); and Thomas Mann to LL, [1927],
LLP I.
11. LL to BH, 20 October 1927, BHP.
12. LL to WL, 22 October 1927, WLP.
13. LL, Mid-Channel, v.
14. LL to CC, 3 October 1927, LLP II.
15. LL, Cities and Men, n.p.
16. LL to CC, 10 September 1927, LLP II.
17. LL to WL, 22 October 1927, WLP.
18. LL to CC, 3 October 1927, LLP II.
19. LL to CC, 31 October 1927, LLP II.
20. Thomas B. Wells to LL, 10 August 1927, LLP II.
21. CC to LL, 26 October 1927, LLP II.
22. LL to CC, 17 August 1927, LLP II.
23. LL to CC, 3 October 1927, LLP II.
24. LL to CC, 17 August 1927, LLP II.
25. Robert Sage, “A Modern Xantippe,” transition 7 (October 1927): 161.
26. LL to LH, [fall 1927], LHP.
27. Charters, This Must Be the Place, 41.
28. LL to Sinclair Lewis, 20 July 1927, Lewis Galantiere Papers, Columbia
University.
29. LL, Mid-Channel, 172.
30. Hemingway, Moveable Feast, 94.
31. “In Defense of Our Literary Exiles,” n.p.; Harold Stearns, “Left Bank
Notes,” in Ford, Left Bank, 29.
32. Hemingway, Moveable Feast, 101.
33. Ernest Hemingway, “Introduction” to Alice Ernestine Prin, Kiki’s Mem
oirs (Paris: Black Manikin, 1930), 10-12.
34. Root, The Paris Edition, 46.
35. SH, Paris Salons, 125.
36. LL, Mid-Channel, 172.
37. Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 216.
38. LL, Altar, 243.
39. Elliot Paul, “From a Litterateur’s Notebook,” in Ford, Left Bank, 21.
40. LL, Mid-Channel, 185.
41. LL to LH, [fall 1927], LHP.
42. LL, Mid-Channel, 173.
43. LL to LH, [fall 1927], LHP
44. LL to BH, 20 October 1927, BHP
45. LL to CC, 31 October 1927, LLP II.
46. LL to BH, 20 October 1927, BHP.
47. LL to CC, 31 October 1927, LLP II.
Page 734 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 18
48. LL, “French Poetry of Today,” World Review 5 (November 1927): 122;
LL, “French Literature Today,” Nation, 23 November 1927,572-73; LL to LH,
[fall 1927], LHP.
49. LL to CC, 12 November 1927, LLP II.
50. CC to LL, 26 October 1927, LLP II.
51. The first review to appear was that of Lewis Galantiere in Nation, 7
December 1927, 658.
52. LL to CC, 12 November 1927, LLP II.
53. LL to BH, 20 October 1927, BHP.
54. Henry Ford, “The Righteous Indignation Entertained by Jews Every
where Toward Me,” in The Jews in America, 1621-1970: A Chronology and
Fact Book (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1971), 117-18.
55. LL to CC, 31 October 1927, LLP II.
56. LL to CC, 12 November 1927, LLP II; and LL to HL, 11 December
1927, HLP.
57. George Ryley Scott, “Senescent British Fiction,” New Age, 10 Novem
ber 1927, n.p., Scrapbook, LLP II.
58. “Jews in Fiction,” Jewish Guardian, 11 November 1927, n.p., Scrap
book, LLP II.
59. Chaim Weizmann to LL, 14 November 1927, LLP V.
60. Review of The Defeated, “Literary Supplement,” London Times, 15
December 1927, n.p., Scrapbook, LLP II.
61. LL to CC, 30 October 1297, LLP II; and LL to HL, 11 December, and
HL to Arthur Pell, 23 December 1927, HLP.
62. Shirley Graham, Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World (New York: Mess-
ner, 1946), 188-89; Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf,
1988), 109; and Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 552-53.
63. Schorer, Sinclair Lewis, 486-87; LL to CC, 3 October 1927, LLP II.
64. HH to LL, 23 December 1927, LLP I.
65. Nutting, “Artist’s Life,” 394-95.
66. LL to HL, 1 January 1928, HLP.
67. Thomas Mann to LL, 12 December 1927, LLP IV.
68. Mark Van Doren to TL and LL, 1 January 1928, Barrett-Lewisohn
Papers, University of Virginia; and Mark Van Doren, ed., An Anthology of World
Poetry (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), x-xv.
69. Mark Van Doren, ed., An Anthology of World Poetry (New York: Boni
and Liveright, 1929), x-xv.
70. LL to Upton Sinclair, 8 January 1928, Sinclair Papers, Indiana Univer
sity.
71. LL to BC, 8 January, and BC to LL, 10 February 1928, RHP.
72. LL to HM, 8 January and 19 February 1928, HMP.
73. LL to CC, 21 January 1928, LLP II.
74. LL to CC, 2 February 1928, LLP II; and LL to HL, 7 February 1928,
HLP.
75. LL to WL, 3 February 1928, WLP.
76. LL to HH, 3 February 1928, LLP I.
77. LL to CC, 2 February 1928, LLP II.
715
Page 735 - [see page image]
716
Notes to Chapter 19
78. LL to CC, 19 February 1928, LLP II.
79. CC to LL, 1 March 1928, LLP II.
80. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner, 1937, 1970).
81. Sigmund Freud to LL, [1929], and Albert Einstein to LL, [1929], LLP I.
82. “Fascinating Novel,” Buffalo (N.Y.) News, 3 March 1928, Scrapbook,
LLP II.
83. Harry Hansen, “The First Reader,” New York World, 7 and 9 March
1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
84. Lawrence Morris, “A Brave and Sad Book,” New York Evening Sun,
10 March 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
85. “Ludwig Lewisohn’s New Novel,” Galveston News, 11 March 1928,
Scrapbook, LLP II.
86. Review in San Francisco Chronicle, 11 March 1928, Scrapbook, LLP
II.
87. Carl Van Doren, “Pogrom in Manhattan,” New York Herald Tribune,
18 March 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
88. Henry Montor, “The Spiritual and Intellectual Wanderings of Ludwig
Lewisohn,” New Palestine, 9 March 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
89. Reviews in Nashville Banner, 18 March 1928, Cincinnati Commercial
Tribune, 11 March 1928, and Johnstown (Pa.) Democrat, 12 March 1928,
Scrapbook, LLP II.
90. LL to CC, 20 March 1928, LLP II.
91. CC, Oral History, Columbia University, 208; and CC to LL, 30 March
1928, LLP II.
92. “Another by Lewisohn,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1 April 1928, Scrap
book, LLP II.
93. LL to CC, 3 April 1928, LLP II.
CHAPTER 19
1. LL to Upton Sinclair, 18 February 1928, Sinclair Papers, Indiana Uni
versity.
2. LL to HM, 19 February 1928, HMP.
3. LL to JS, 11 February 1928, JSP.
4. “Lewisohn Must Pay $10,640,” New York Times, 15 April 1928, 19.
5. CC to LL, 6 April 1928, LLP II.
6. LL to CC, 21 April 1928, LLP II.
7. LL to HL, 21 April 1928, HLP.
8. LL to HH, 5 April 1928, LLP I.
9. HH to LL, 8 April 1928, LLP I.
10. LL to CC, 8 April 1928, LLP II.
11. LL to CC, 21 April 1928, LLP II.
12. HH to LL, 4 May 1928, LLP I.
13. William Langfeld, “Ludwig Lewisohn Reviews His Personality in Fic
tion,” Philadelphia Record, 14 April 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
14. New York Graphic, 28 April 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
Page 736 - [see page image]
717
Notes to Chapter 19
15. “Praises ‘Island Within,’ ” New York Times, 16 April 1928, 26.
16. SW to LL, 1 May 1928, SWP.
17. [James Waterman Wise], Jews Are Like That! (New York: Brentano’s,
1928), 126.
18. “The Six Best Sellers,” New York World, 13 May 1928, Scrapbook,
LLP II.
19. “Leading Author,” Pittsburgh Press, 19 May 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
20. “Six Months in the Field of Fiction,” New York Times, 24 June 1928,
Scrapbook, LLP II.
21. LL to Mrs. Spear, 10 July 1928, LLP IV.
22. “Best-Seller,” South Bend (lnd.) Tribune, 26 August 1928, Scrapbook,
LLP II.
23. LL to Mrs. Spear, 15 April 1928, LLP IV.
24. LL to LH, 15 May 1928, LHP.
25. “The Complete Ms. of ‘The Case of Mr. Crump,’ ” advertisement ap
pearing in a Titus catalog, Scrapbook, LLP II.
26. Nino Frank, “Lewisohn,” Malles et Valises (n.d.), Scrapbook, LLP II.
27. LL, “Midchannel,” Menorah Journal 15 (July 1928): 1.
28. HH to LL, 20 June 1928, LLP I.
29. LL to CC, 31 July 1928, LLP II.
30. LL to HL, 18 July 1928, HLP.
31. LL to Mrs. Spear, 10 July 1928, LLP IV.
32. LL to SH, [July 1928], LLP V.
33. LL to CC, 31 July 1928, LLP II.
34. HH to LL, 27 July 1928, LLP I.
35. LL to William Seagle, 3 September 1928, LLP I.
36. Regis Michaud, “La Litterature Americaine d’Aujourd’hui,” Mercure
de France, 15 July 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
37. Hans Burgin, Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of His Life (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1969), 81; LL, Der Fall Herbert Crump (Munchen:
Drei Masken, 1928); and LL to GV, 12 October 1928, George Sylvester Viereck
Papers, University of Iowa, Iowa City.
38. HL to LL, 29 August 1928, HLP.
39. HL to LL, 25 September, LL to HL, 28 October, and HL to LL, 10
November 1928, HLP.
40. LL to GV, 12 October 1928, Gertz Papers, Library of Congress.
41. LL to CC, 18 November, and CC to LL, 24 December 1928, LLP II.
42. LL, “The Pagan in the Heart,” in Bertrand Russell, ed., If I Could Preach
Just Once (New York: Harper, 1929), 19-20 (published first as “Levy versus
Smith,” Saturday Review of Literature, 19 March 1929, 752-53).
43. Ibid., 22.
44. Ibid., 25-27.
45. Ibid., 29-30.
46. Ibid., 30-31.
47. Ibid., 31.
48. Ibid., 34-35.
Page 737 - [see page image]
718
Notes to Chapter zo
49. Sidney Wallach, “The Case of Ludwig Lewisohn,” Jewish Tribune, 23
November 1928, 1,15.
50. LL to CC, 18 November 1928, LLP II.
51. Bertrand Russell, “Loyalty to One’s Group vs. Impartial Attitude to
Mankind,” Jewish Daily Forward, 13 May 1928, Scrapbook, LLP II.
52. Bertrand Russell to LL, 22 November 1928, Bertrand Russell Papers,
University of Texas, Austin.
53. CC to LL, 4 December 1928, LLP II.
54. LL to BH, 25 November 1928, BHP; and Sigmund Freud to LL, [1929],
LLP I.
55. LL to CC, 29 November 1928, LLP II.
56. LL to CC, 21 December 1928, LLP II.
CHAPTER 20
1. CC to LL, 7 January 1929, LLP II.
2. LL to CC, 29 November 1928 and 17 January 1929, LLP II.
3. LL to CC, 17 January 1929, LLP II.
4. LL, Mid-Channel, [312],
5. Edward Titus to H. K. Croessmann, 4 December 1929, H. K. Croess-
mann Papers, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
6. LL to CC, 17 January 1929, LLP II.
7. LL to CC, 16 February 1929, LLP II.
8. LL to HH, 16 February 1929, LLP I.
9. LL to CC, 25 March 1929, LLP II.
10. LL, “The Jew and the State,” New Palestine, 1 March 1929,159-60.
11. LL, “The Collapse of Assimilationism: From Romanticism to Reason,”
in Meyer Weisgal, ed., Theodor Herzl: A Memorial (New York: New Palestine,
1929), 262-63.
12. LL to CC, 25 March 1929, LLP II.
13. LL to SH [ca. 10 April 1929], LLP V.
14. HH to LL, 27 March 1929, LLP I.
15. Ruth Raphael to HL, 4 April 1929, HLP.
16. WL to Harper and Brothers, 10 April 1929, LLP II.
17. LL to HH, 7 April 1929, LLP I.
18. LL to SH [ca. 10 April 1929], LLP V.
19. LL, Adam: A Dramatic History in a Prologue, Seven Scenes, and an
Epilogue (New York: Harper, 1929), vii.
20. LL to CC, 19 April 1929, LLP II.
21. LL, Adam, vii-viii.
22. Ibid., 5-6.
23. Ibid., 7-8.
24. Ibid., 30.
25. Ibid., 33.
26. Ibid., 42-13.
Page 738 - [see page image]
719
Notes to Chapter 20
27. Ibid., 64-65.
28. Ibid., 79-80.
29. Ibid., 91.
30. Ibid., 97-98.
31. James Joyce to LL, 14 April 1929, Croessmann Papers, Southern Illinois
University.
32. Thomas Connolly, The Personal Library of James Joyce (Buffalo: Uni
versity of Buffalo Press, 1955), 24.
33. “Recollections of Thelma’s,” [1929], LLP I.
34. Mary Beth Norton, A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1986), 713-15.
35. LL to SH, 29 April 1929, LLP V.
36. LL to SH, 16 June 1929, LLP V.
37. Alexander Andrews to CC, 7 January 1929, LLP II.
38. CC to Alexander Andrews, 11 January 1929, LLP II.
39. “Mary Ludwig Lewisohn, Plaintiff, Against, Harper and Brothers, and
Ludwig Lewisohn, Defendants,” 6 May 1929, LLP II.
40. Henry Briggs to William Briggs, 7 May 1929, LLP II.
41. LL to Mr. Gibbons, 11 May 1929, LLP II.
42. John Larkin to LL, 31 May 1929, LLP II.
43. LL’s Passport, LLP I.
44. “Court Finds Libel in Lewisohn Novel,” New York Times, 12 June
1929, 10.
45. “$600,000 Building for Wells College,” New York Times, 12 June
1929, 10.
46. Robert Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 5.
47. Ibid., 315.
48. Ibid., 188-89.
49. Ibid., 200-201.
50. Ibid., 501-2.
51. HL to LL, 4 June 1929, HLP.
52. LL to HL, 14 June 1929, HLP.
53. HL to LL, and HL to Henry Schnittkind (Stratford Company), 25 June
1929, HLP.
54. LL, Israel (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1930).
55. HM, “Man and the Universe,” American Mercury 17 (July 1929): 379-
80.
56. F. K. Frank, “Mid-Channel,” New Republic, 10 July 1929, 214.
57. Irwin Edman, “Mr. Lewisohn Proposes Salvation,” Nation, 5 June
1929, 674.
58. Alice Marcet Haldeman-Julius, “Spurts from an Interrupted Pen,” The
Debunker and the American Parade 103 (August 1929): 70-71.
59. Alice Marcet Haldeman-Julius to Alice Haldeman-Julius, 18 June 1929,
Haldeman-Julius Papers, Pittsburgh State University.
60. “What Mr. Lewisohn Still Lacks,” Charleston News and Courier, clip
ping, Charleston Library Society.
Page 739 - [see page image]
720
Notes to Chapter zi
61. The Yearbook of the Poetry Society of South Carolina (Charleston:
Poetry Society of South Carolina, 1929), 57.
62. Prin, Kiki’s Memoirs, 174-80.
63. Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York: Coward-
McCann, 1963), 116.
64. Ibid., 120-21.
65. Dorothy Commins, What Is an Editorf Saxe Commins at Work (Chi
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 7-14, 26.
66. CC, interview with Ralph Melnick, 23 December 1982.
67. Charles Recht, “Excisions of ‘Mid-Channel,’ ” 19 June 1929, LLP II.
68. LL to ES, 30 June 1929, LLP II; and “Lose ‘Mid-Channel’ Suit,” New
York Times, 7 July 1929, 13.
69. LL to ES, 3 July 1929, LLP II.
70. CC to ES, 10 July 1929, LLP II.
71. ES to LL, 1 August 1929, LLP II.
72. LL to ES, 22 July 1929, LLP II.
73. “Lose ‘Mid-Channel’ Suit,” 13.
74. LL to Louis Marshall, 9 July 1929, LLP I.
75. Louis Marshall to Henry L. Stimson, 30 July 1929, LLP I.
76. J. P. Cotton to Louis Marshall, 13 August 1929, Louis Marshall Papers,
American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati.
77. For a full account of this crucial chapter in Zionist history, see Urofsky,
American Zionism, 299-329. Marshall quoted on p. 328.
78. LL to Louis Marshall, 27 August 1929, Louis Marshall Papers, Ameri
can Jewish Archives.
79. Urofsky, American Zionism, 329.
CHAPTER 21
1. Widdicombe, “Edward William Titus,” 390.
2. LL, “Tribute to Edward Titus,” New York Times, 12 February 1952,
26.
3. Ernest Walsh, “Editorial,” This Quarter 1 (spring 1925): 259.
4. Edith Moorhead, “And So On,” This Quarter 1 (spring 1927): 262-63.
5. Sylvia Beach, “Letter to the Editor,” This Quarter 1 (spring 1927): 289.
6. Edward Titus, “Editorially,” This Quarter 2 (July 1929): 3.
7. Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, 131.
8. Brian Morton, Americans in Paris, 65.
9. LL, “Introduction to a Projected History of American Literature,” This
Quarter 2 (July 1929): 84.
10. LL to ES, 1 August 1929, LLP II.
11. LL to CC, 6 September 1929, LLP II.
12. LL, Notebook, LLP II.
13. LL to John Larkin, 12 September 1929, LLP II.
14. ES to LL, 13 September 1929, LLP II.
15. CC to LL, 20 September 1929, LLP II.
Page 740 - [see page image]
721
Notes to Chapter 21
16. LL to CC, 12 October 1929, LLP II.
17. LL to HL, 24 October 1929, HLP.
18. HL to LL, 8 November 1929, HLP.
19. Charters, This Must Be the Place, 188, 197.
20. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up (New York: New Directions, 1956),
21-22.
21. LL to CC, 29 October 1929, LLP II.
22. LL, The Memories of Stephen Escott (London: Thornton Butterworth,
1930) , “To Thelma,” n.p.
23. LL to CC, 29 October 1929, LLP II.
24. LL to Mr. Conklin, 30 October 1929, LLP IV.
25. LL to GV, 6 November 1929, LLP III.
26. LL, Memories of Stephen Escott, following table of contents.
27. Ibid., 307.
28. Ibid., 304.
29. Ibid., 313-14.
30. Ibid., 306-7.
31. Ibid., 302, 307.
32. Ibid., 317.
33. Ibid., 314.
34. LL to CC, 1 December, and CC to LL, 7 November 1929, LLP II.
35. LL to CC, 1 December 1929, LLP II.
36. LL, Memories of Stephen Escott, 18.
37. LL to CC, 1 December 1929, LLP II.
38. Ibid.
39. LL, Notebook, 25 November 1929, LLP II.
40. LL to Mrs. Spear, 22 December 1929, LLP IV.
41. LL, The Romantic: A Contemporary Legend (Paris: Edward W. Titus,
1931) , 4-6.
42. Ibid., 32-33.
43. Ibid., 31-32.
44. Ibid., 35-36.
45. Ibid., 37-43.
46. Ibid., 42-43, 48-51.
47. Ibid., 54.
48. Ibid., 54-55.
49. Ibid., 60-61.
50. Ibid., 72-73, 75.
51. Ibid., 76-77.
52. LL to Mrs. Spear, 22 December 1929, LLP IV.
53. “Mrs. Lewisohn Wins Point,” New York Times, 30 November 1929,
12.
54. LL to HL, 15 December 1929, HLP.
55. LL, Notebook, LLP II.
56. LL to HL, 15 December 1929, HLP.
57. LL to Cohen, n.d., LLP I.
Page 741 - [see page image]
722
Notes to Chapter 22
CHAPTER 22
1. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 (New York: Viking,
1972), 62.
2. Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 5,12.
3. Allen, Only Yesterday, 338.
4. HL to LL, 10 January 1930, HLP.
5. LL to CC, 15 January 1930, LLP II.
6. LL to BC, 5 January 1930, RHP.
7. Regis Michaud, The American Novel Today: A Social and Psychological
Study (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928); and LL, VeriteetPoesie, trans. anded. Regis
Michaud (Paris: Boivin, 1929).
8. Regis Michaud, Ce Qu’il Taut Connaitre de I’Ame Americaine (Paris:
Boivin), Scrapbook, LLP II.
9. Nino Frank, “L’Actualite Litteraire a l’Etranger,” in Les Nouvelles Lit-
teraires (1930), Scrapbook, LLP II; and Sara Mayfield, The Constant Circle:
H. L. Mencken and His Friends (New York: Delacorte, 1968), 149.
10. Mayfield, Constant Circle, 149; and LL and HM, “Mencken and Lewi
sohn in Paris,” Living Age, 1 March 1930, 27-28. (Slight variation from the
published translation of their conversation has been made to remove several
grammatical errors imposed by attempting to cleverly reproduce the French
“word for word.”)
11. LL to SW, 25 January 1930, SWP.
12. SW to LL, 18 February 1930, SWP.
13. LL to SW, 28 February 1930, SWP.
14. SW to LL, 5 March 1930, SWP.
15. John Larkin to Harper and Brothers, 14 February, John Larkin to Henry
Haynes, 20 February, and John Larkin to O. D. Ronchi, 5 April 1930, all in
LLP II; LL to ML, 22 May 1934, LLP I; and Margaret Gardner Mayorga,
Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors (Boston: Little, Brown,
1919), 397.
16. LL to Hamish Hamilton, 7 March 1930, LLP II.
17. LL to ES, 2 March 1930, LLP II.
18. Herschel Yaslawsky to HH, 5 March 1930, HHP.
19. Invitation and program, BHP.
20. Lionel Trilling, review of Adam, New Republic, 9 April 1930, 226.
21. W. P. Eaton, review of Adam, New York Herald Tribune Books, 9 March
1930, 13.
22. Harry Hansen, review of Adam, New York World, 22 December 1929,
11.
23. Alford Kelley to Harper and Brothers, 26 May 1930, LLP II.
24. ES to Alford Kelley, 1 June 1930, LLP II.
25. Arthur Davison Ficke to LL, 18 September 1930, LLP IV.
26. Review of Escott, New York Times, 9 March 1930, 8.
27. F. L. Robbins, review of Escott, Outlook, 19 March 1930, 465.
28. Review of Escott, Boston Transcript, 15 March 1930, 2.
Page 742 - [see page image]
723
Notes to Chapter 22
29. ES to LL, 19 March 1930, LLP II.
30. LL, Notebook, 3 April 1930, LLP II.
31. LL to CC, 8 April 1930, LLP II.
32. LL, The Last Days of Shylock (New York: Harper, 1931), 203—4,
209.
33. Ibid., 106-7.
34. Ibid., 83, 92ff.
35. Ibid., 27, 40.
36. Ibid., 21-24.
37. Ibid., 16,18, 75.
38. Ibid., 73.
39. Ibid., 28-29, 34.
40. Ibid., 12, 50-52, 57-59.
41. Ibid., 129-31.
42. Ibid., 146-48.
43. Ibid., 153-55.
44. Ibid., 144.
45. Ibid., 149.
46. Ibid., 160-61, 188.
47. Ibid., 192-93.
48. LL to CC, 8 April 1930, LLP II.
49. LL, Shylock, 185.
50. LL to HL, 7 April 1930, HLP.
51. LL to Mrs. Spear, 10 April 1930, LLP IV.
52. LL, Notebook, following 10 and 26 April 1930, LLP II.
53. LL to BH, 11 April 1930, BHP.
54. LL, Notebook, 10 April 1930, LLP II.
55. LL to BH, 11 April 1930, BHP.
56. HL to LL, 29 April 1930, HLP.
57. Sinclair Lewis to HM, 4 May 1930, HMP.
58. Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 43.
59. LL, quoted in Schorer, Sinclair Lewis, 546.
60. HL to LL, 14 May 1930, HLP.
61. CC to LL, 14 May 1930, LLP II.
62. LL to CC, 31 May 1930, LLP II.
63. LL to Miss Raphael, 18 May 1930, LLP II.
64. LL, Notebook, 28 May 1930, LLP II; and TL, Notes, n.d., LLP I.
65. LL to CC, 31 May 1930, LLP II.
66. LL to GV, 28 June 1930, George Sylvester Viereck Papers, University of
Iowa, Iowa City.
67. LL to CC, 31 May 1930, LLP II.
68. GV to WL, 3 July 1930, Gertz Papers, Library of Congress.
69. LL to GV, 28 June 1930, George Sylvester Viereck Papers, University of
Iowa, Iowa City.
70. LL, “Blind Alley,” Harper’s, December 1930, 87-88.
71. Ibid., 91-92.
72. LL, Notebook, 12 July 1930, LLP II.
Page 743 - [see page image]
724
Notes to Chapter 23
73. LL, “The Jewish World Crisis,” Harper’s, November 1930, 701-9.
74. LL, Notebook, 3 August 1930, LLP II.
75. Ibid., 29 July 1930.
76. LL, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 30 July 1930, Friedman
Papers.
CHAPTER 23
1. LL to CC, 10 August 1930, LLP II; and TL, Notes, n.d., LLP I.
2. CC to LL, 21 August 1930, LLP II.
3. Thomas Mann to LL, 25 September 1930, LLP V; Edward Titus, “Notes
on German Contributors,” This Quarter 3 (December 1930): 308.
4. LL to Alfred Knopf, 6 October 1930, Alfred Knopf Papers, New York
Public Library, New York.
5. LL, Notebook, 10 November 1930-12 September 1931, LLP II; and
TL, Notes, n.d., LLP I.
6. LL, “The Weakness of Herman Melville,” This Quarter 3 (June 1931):
610.
7. Otto Rank, “Life and Artistic Creation,” This Quarter 4 (December
1931): 198.
8. Otto Rank, Life and the Artist (New York: Knopf, 1932).
9. Thomas Tobias to LH, 7 October 1930, LHP.
10. William Leon Smyser, “Champion of Individualism,” New York Herald
Tribune, 2 November 1930, Scrapbook, LLP II.
11. Thomas Tobias to LH, 7 October 1930, LHP, American Jewish Archives.
12. Thomas Tobias, Diary and Notes, 7 October 1930, American Jewish
Archives.
13. Thomas Tobias, “Is Homesick for America,” Charleston Evening Post,
17 January 1931, American Jewish Archives.
14. GV to WL, 7 October 1930, Gertz Papers, Library of Congress.
15. LL, Notebook, 12 October 1930, LLP II.
16. LL to CC, 18 October 1930, LLP II.
17. LL to CC, 2 November 1930, LLP II.
18. LL, Notebook, November and December 1930, LLP II.
19. LL to CC, 2 November 1930, LLP II.
20. LL to SW, 4 December 1930, SWP.
21. LL to CC, 2 November 1930, LLP II.
22. Smyser, “Champion of Individualism.”
23. Lawrence Drake, “Lewisohn’s Next Book Will Deal with Shylock and
Medieval Venice,” New York Morning World, 23 November 1930, Scrapbook,
LLP II.
24. Ibid.
25. TL, Notes, n.d., LLP I.
26. LL to SH, 7 December 1930, LLP V.
27. SH, Back to Montparnasse (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1931), 15-16.
28. LL to SH, 7 December 1930, LLP V.
Page 744 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 23
29. “Concerts Poulet,” broadside, LLP II.
30. LL to CC, 9 December 1930, LLP II.
31. “The Black Manikin Press Announce for Publication in 1931 to Be
Ready in March: A Popular, Complete, and Unabridged Edition of Ludwig
Lewisohn’s The Case of Mr. Crump, with a Masterly Introduction by Thomas
Mann,” This Quarter 3 (December 1930): xiii.
32. Charles Recht to LL, 23 December 1930, LLP II.
33. LL to WL, 17 December 1919, WLP.
34. “Ludwig Lewisohn’s Suppressed Classic,” broadside, LLP II.
35. CC to James Hamilton, 3 January 1931, and Charles Recht to LL, 19
December 1930, LLP II; and Moscato, U.S.A. v. “Ulysses,” 24.
36. CC to LL, 2 January 1931, LLP II.
37. LL to WB, 28 January 1931, WBP.
38. WB to LL, 30 January 1931, WBP.
39. LL to CC, 24 January 1931, LLP II.
40. Review of Shylock, New York Times, 11 January 1931, 9.
41. Harry Hansen, review of Shylock, New York World, 7 January 1931.
42. LL to CC, 24 January 1931, LLP II.
43. SW to LL, 9 February 1931, LLP II.
44. LL to Mr. Beck, 12 March 1931, LL Papers, South Caroliniana Library,
University of South Carolina.
45. LL to CC, 24 January 1931, LLP II.
46. LL to CC, 30 January 1931, LLP II.
47. LL to CC, 12 March 1931, LLP II.
48. Review of The Golden Vase, Boston Transcript, 7 November 1931.
49. LL, Notebook, “Works,” LLP II; and LL, Haven, 102.
50. TL to WB, 16 February 1931, WBP.
51. LL, The Golden Vase (New York: Harper, 1931), 1-2, 8.
52. Ibid., 15-16.
53. Ibid., 8,17-19.
54. Ibid., 18-19.
55. Ibid., 115-16.
56. Ibid., 117-18.
57. Ibid., 32-34; and This Quarter 3 (December 1930): 239-47.
58. LL, The Golden Vase, 140.
59. Ibid., 61-62.
60. Ibid., 137.
61. Ibid., 138.
62. Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1947), 391.
63. LL to SH, 25 March 1931, LLP V.
64. This Quarter 3 (March 1931): 398-415, 426-39.
65. This Quarter 3 (June 1931): 610-17.
66. LL to SH, 25 March 1931, LLP V.
67. LL to ES, 29 March 1931, LLP II.
68. LL to CC, 3 April 1931, LLP II.
69. LL to Mark Van Doren, 4 April 1931, LLP II.
725
Page 745 - [see page image]
726
Notes to Chapter 14
70. Harold Ettlinger, “What the Writers Are Doing,” Paris Tribune, 10 April
1931; and TL, Notes, n.d., LLP I.
71. LL to CC, 14 April 1931, LLP II.
72. Mrs. Stanley Blumenthal to Harpers, 13 April 1931, LLP II.
73. SW to LL, 16 April 1931, SWP.
74. CC to LL, 20 April 1931, LLP II.
75. LL, A Jew Speaks, ed. Janies Waterman Wise (New York: Harper, 1931),
ix-xxiv.
76. CC to LL, 20 April 1931, LLP II.
77. LL to ES, 21 May 1931, LLP II.
78. LL to CC, 3 May 1931, LLP II.
79. LL to Mrs. Spear, 17 May 1931, LLP IV.
80. LL, Notebook, n.p., LLP II.
81. Pamphlet and Broadside, LLP II.
82. LL, The Case of Mr. Crump (Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1931), n.p.
83. Review of Crump, Manchester Guardian, 15 May 1931, Scrapbook,
LLP II.
84. WB’s secretary to LL, 27 May and 3 July 1931, WBP.
85. LL to ES, 5 July 1931, LLP II.
86. SW to LL, 1 July 1931, SWP.
87. LL to HH, 25 July 1931, LLP I.
88. SW to LL, 19 October and 8 December 1931, SWP.
89. LL to BC, 1 August 1931, RHP.
90. BC to LL, 13 August 1931, RHP.
91. LL to ES, 22 August 1931, LLP II.
92. Benjamin de Casseres, “Portraits en Brochette: Ludwig Lewisohn,”
Bookman 61 (July 1931): 488-89.
93. LL, Notebook, n.p., LLP II.
94. LL, Expression in America (New York: Harper, 1932), vii.
95. Ibid., 14-15.
96. For a summary of the history of this scholarship, see Gordon S. Wood,
“Struggle Over the Puritans,” New York Review of Books, 9 November 1989,
26-31.
97. LL, Expression, 19, xxxi-xxxii.
CHAPTER 24
1. WL to LL, 20 September 1931, WLP.
2. WB to LL, 27 August 1931, WBP.
3. LL, “Whitman,” This Quarter 4 (September 1931): 75-87.
4. LL to WB, 6 October 1931, WBP.
5. LL to WB, 17 October 1931, WBP.
6. LL to WB, 21 October 1931, WBP.
7. LL to WB, 22 October 1931, WBP.
8. LL, Notebook, entries for 9 and 22 October 1930, LLP II.
9. Ibid., 31 April 1931.
Page 746 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 24
10. Ibid., n.d. and 2 February 1931.
11. Ibid., 13 October 1930.
12. Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanics as Seen by an Englishwoman
(London: Dent, 1931), 178-85.
13. LL, Notebook, 29 November 1931 and n.p., LLP II.
14. Ibid., 10 October, 7 and 27 December 1930, and 23 March 1931.
15. LL to BH, 1 December 1931, BHP.
16. LL, Notebook, 20 November 1931, LLP II.
17. Ibid., 1 March 1931.
18. LL, “The Saint,” Opinion, 8 February 1932, 8-9.
19. Ibid., 15 February 1932, 12-13.
20. Ibid., 22 February 1932,10-11.
21. Ibid., 7 March 1932,12-13.
22. Ibid., 14 March 1932,13-14.
23. Ibid., 21 March 1932,12-13.
24. Ibid., 28 March 1932, 13-14.
25. Adolph Gillis to LH, 3 October 1931, LHP.
26. SW to LL, 31 December 1931, SWP.
27. LL to CC, 2 December 1931, LLP II.
28. LL, “Where Henry James Never Entered,” This Quarter 4 (December
1931): 318-33.
29. LL to CC, 10 December 1931, LLP II.
30. Carl Van Doren to LL, 9 December 1931, LLP I.
31. LL to BH, 1 December 1931, BHP.
32. LL to CC, 19 December 1931, LLP II.
33. LL, “The Saint,” Opinion, 21 March 1932,12. In his notebook (LLP II),
Lewisohn drew the analogy of “Bolshevism = reductio ad absurdum,” a further
reason for his rejection of the Soviets’ program.
34. James Waterman Wise, “Forenote,” Opinion, 7 December 1931, 3.
35. LL to CC, 2 December 1931, LLP II.
36. LL to CC, 19 December 1931, LLP II.
37. SW to LL, 31 December 1931, LLP I.
38. Melvin Urofsky, A Voice That Spoke for Justice: The Life and Times of
Stephen S. Wise (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 252-53.
39. SW to LL, 31 December 1931, LLP I.
40. CC to LL, 5 January 1932, LLP II.
41. LL to CC, 10 February 1932, LLP IV.
42. CC to LL, 2 February 1932, LLP II.
43. LL to CC, 10 February 1932, LLP IV.
44. Ibid.
45. LL to WB, 15 February 1932, WBP.
46. LL, Notebook, 27 January 1932, LLP II.
47. LL, untitled submission to Warner Taylor, ed., Types and Times in the
Essay (New York: Harper, 1932), 340-41.
48. LL to CC, 10 February 1931, LLP IV.
49. LL, “Jewish Literature in Europe,” Opinion, 29 February 1932, 6-7.
50. LL to BH, 1 December 1931, BHP.
727
Page 747 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 24
51. LL, “Jewish Literature in Europe,” 7.
52. LL to CC, 28 February 1932, LLP II.
53. LL to CC, 2 March 1932, LLP II.
54. ES to LL, 3 March 1932, LLP II.
55. LL to CC, 4 March 1932, LLP II.
56. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 13.
57. Ibid., 43.
58. George Seldes, Witness to a Century (New York: Ballantine, 1987),
249-51.
59. Ibid., 254, 264.
60. George Seldes to Charles Madison, 30 June [1976], and LL to George
Seldes, n.d., LLP I.
61. George Seldes to Charles Madison, 24 July [1976], LLP I.
62. George Seldes, notes attached to his letter to Charles Madison, 24 July
[1976], LLP I.
63. George Seldes, “Cutie-Suite,” Notebook, 1932, LLP I.
64. LL, Altar, 83-84.
65. TL to WB, [?] March 1932, WBP.
66. CC, interview, 23 December 1982; and CC, Up and Down and Around:
A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life (New York: Harper, 1971), 87.
67. LL to WB, 10 March 1932, WBP.
68. CC to LL, 12 March 1932, LLP II.
69. LL, Expression, vii.
70. Karl Schriftgiesser, review of Expression, Boston Transcript, 5 March
1932, 2.
71. Joseph Wood Krutch, review of Expression, Books, 13 March 1932, 1.
72. Granville Hicks, review of Expression, New Republic, 13 April 1932,
240.
73. “Literature and Life in America,” New York Times, 27 March 1932, 2.
74. Review of Expression, Catholic World, May 1932, 243.
75. E. S. Bates, review of Expression, Commonweal, 11 May 1932, 50.
76. R. M. C. [Coates?], “Books, Books, Books,” New Yorker, 26 March
1932, 67.
77. Van Doren, Three Worlds, 147-48.
78. Carl Van Doren, “Toward a New Canon,” Nation, 13 April 1932,429-
30.
79. Carl Van Doren to LL, [1932], LLP I.
80. Joseph Wood Krutch to LL, [1932], and Mark Van Doren to LL, [1932],
LLP I.
81. Review of Expression, Christian Science Monitor, 23 April 1932, 10.
82. H. M. Jones, review of Expression, Yale Review 21 (summer 1932):
836.
83. Gorham Munson, review of Expression, Atlantic Bookshelf (August
1932), LLP II.
84. John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of
the Progressive Mind in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), 178.
728
Page 748 - [see page image]
729
Notes to Chapter 25
85. C. Hartley Grattan, “Open Letter to Lewisohn, Krutch, and Mumford,”
Modem Monthly, April 1933, 175.
86. Sean O’Faolain, review of Expression, Spectator, 1 October 1932, 418.
87. Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading, 1910-1940: An Inventory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 149.
88. Upton Sinclair to LL, n.d. [1932], LLP IV.
89. WL to LL, 12 March 1932, WLP.
90. Henry Miller, Letters to Ana'is Nin (New York: Putnam, 1965), 56-59.
91. “ Lewisohn Admits He Fled America Because of Book, ” Ford, Left Bank,
131.
CHAPTER 25
1. LL, Notebook, 1 March 1932, LLP II.
2. LL, “The Minimum Ethical Demand,” Opinion, 4 April 1932, 5.
3. SW to LL, 12 April 1932, SWP.
4. WB to LL, 14 and 21 April 1932, WBP.
5. LL to Lewis Gannett, 24 April 1932, Gannett Papers, Harvard Univer
sity.
6. Ibid.
7. CC to LL, 26 April 1932, LLP II.
8. LL to ES, 30 April 1932, LLP II.
9. Ibid.; and LL, Notebook, 1931-1932, LLP II.
10. LL to CC, 6 May 1932, LLP II.
11. John Larkin to CC, 10 May 1932, LLP II.
12. CC to LL, 10 May 1932, LLP II.
13. Charles Recht to LL, 10 May 1932, LLP II.
14. LL, Notebook, 12 May 1932, LLP II.
15. “A Keepsake of Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Rendered by
Ludwig Lewisohn,” This Quarter 4 (June 1932): 571-74.
16. LL to WB, 28 May 1932, WBP.
17. LL to George Howard, 3 June 1932, LLP V.
18. Telegram sent by LL to WB, 21 June 1932, WBP.
19. LL to SH, 26 July [June] 1932, LLP V.
20. LL, “Writ of Divorcement,” Opinion, November 1932,12-13; and Ilya
Ehrenbourg to LL, [1931], Ehrenbourg Papers, University of Virginia.
21. LL, “Writ,” 13.
22. Ibid., 13.
23. LL, “Writ” (December 1932): 30.
24. LL, “Writ” (January 1933): 27-29.
25. LL, “Writ” (February 1933): 26.
26. Ibid., 24.
27. LL, “Writ” (December 1932): 30.
28. LL, “Writ” (February 1933): 26.
29. LL, “A Necessary Preface,” Opinion, 20 September 1932, 5-6.
30. LL, Notebook, June 1932, LLP II.
Page 749 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 2.5
31. LL to George Jean Nathan, 31 July and 25 September 1932, George
Jean Nathan Papers, Cornell University.
32. WB to LL, 2 July 1932, WBP.
33. LL to CC, 19 July 1932, LLP II.
34. LL to CC, 18 August 1932, LLP II; and TL, Notes, [1932], LLP I.
35. LL to Edgar Lee Masters, 17 October 1932, LLP V.
36. LL to WL, 16 October 1932, WLP.
37. LL to CC, 12 November 1932, LLP II.
38. LL to CC, 21 September 1932, LLP II.
39. LL, Creative America (New York: Harper, 1933), xi, xv.
40. Ibid., 667-83.
41. LL to WL, 16 October 1932, WLP.
42. LL, Creative America, vii.
43. Ezra Pound to LL, 21 October 1932, LLP IV.
44. Ezra Pound to LL, 2 September 1933, LLP IV.
45. Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish
Identity (Boston: David Godine, 1991), quoted in the Chronicle of Higher
Education, 14 August 1991. He notes further that “I found myself at the
University of Bologna as one of four Americans chosen to tell the Italians about
American Puritanism and realized that all four of us were Jewish.”
46. Karl Saul to LH, 9 July 1932, LHP.
47. Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 84.
48. CC to LL, 29 July 1932, LLP II.
49. CC to LL, 5 August 1932, LLP II.
50. LL to CC, 18 August 1932, LLP II.
51. Ibid.
52. CC to LL, 26 August 1932, LLP II.
53. LL to CC, 12 September 1932, LLP II.
54. LL to CC, 16 September 1932, LLP II.
55. LL, Opinion, November 1932,12-14.
56. LL, Notebook, 18 July 1932, LLP II.
57. LL to Upton Sinclair, 15 September 1932, Sinclair Papers, Indiana
University.
58. SW to LL, 2 August 1932, SWP.
59. LL to CC, 18 August 1932, LLP II.
60. LL, Notebook, 25 February and 11 May 1932, LLP II.
61. Ibid., 25 April 1932.
62. Ibid., 3 April 1932.
63. Ibid., October 1932.
64. LL, “Introduction,” in Edmond Fleg, The Land of Promise (New York:
Macaulay, 1933), 15-19.
65. LL, Notebook, 20 May 1932, LLP II.
66. E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank
(New York: Free Press, 1985), 298-99, 315-16.
67. “Another Important Book by Otto Rank,” opposite the title page of
Otto Rank, Modern Education (New York: Knopf, 1932).
68. LL, “Preface” to Otto Rank’s Art and Artist, typescript, LLP V. Other
730
Page 750 - [see page image]
731
Notes to Chapter 26
promotional materials concerning Rank’s two books published by Knopf are
attached.
69. LL to Lee Hartman, 27 October 1932, LLP II.
70. LL to Lee Hartman, 10 December 1932, LLP II.
71. LL, “Plan,” LLP II.
72. CC to LL, 11 January 1933, LLP II.
73. CC to ES, 11 January 1933, LLP II.
74. LL, “A Bourgeois Takes His Stand,” Scribner’s, August 1933, 97.
75. CC to LL, 16 December 1932, LLP II.
76. LL, “The Fallacy of Progress,” Harper’s, June 1933, 112.
77. R. C. Harwood to Miss Duffner, 8 December 1932, LLP II.
78. CC to LL, 16 December 1932, LLP II.
79. R. C. Harwood to Miss Duffner, 8 December, and CC to ES, 22 Decem
ber 1932, LLP II.
80. LL to Lee Hartman, 30 December 1932, LLP II.
81. LL, Altar, 97-98; and James Lewisohn, Roslyn (Portland, Maine: Casco,
1975), 79, in which Ludwig’s son refers to “my half / brother’s half remains.”
82. Concerning that winter in Nice, see Colum, Life and the Dream, 409.
83. Announcement, n.d., SWP.
84. WB to LL, 30 December 1932, WBP.
85. LL to CC, 31 December 1932, LLP II.
86. In addition to “The Fallacy of Progress,” he published “Is Love
Enough?” Harper’s, April 1933, 545-53.
87. CC to LL, 12 May 1933, LLP II.
88. LL, “Out of the Blue,” n.d. [1932], HMP.
CHAPTER 26
1. SW to LL, 27 December 1932, LLP II; and LL to SW, 7 January 1933,
SWP.
2. For a full analysis of this relationship, see Urofsky, Voice That Spoke
for Justice.
3. LL to SW, 7 January 1933, SWP.
4. LL to WB, 5 January 1932 [1933], WBP.
5. LL to Hamish Hamilton, 5 January 1932 [1933], LLP II.
6. LL to CC, 7 January 1933, LLP II.
7. LL to Hamish Hamilton, 12 January 1933, LLP II.
8. LL to ES, 16 January 1933, LLP II.
9. CC to LL, 18 January 1933, LLP II.
10. Broadside, “Grand Soiree de Gala d’Art Juif,” LLP II.
11. LL to ES, 29 January 1933, LLP II.
12. LL to ES, 30 January 1933, LLP II.
13. LL to CC, 6 February 1933, LLP II.
14. CC to LL, 12 May 1933, LLP II.
15. LL to CC, 26 February 1933, and LL, Notebook, 1933, LLP II.
16. LL, This People (New York: Harper, 1933), n.p., 297.
Page 751 - [see page image]
732
Notes to Chapter 2.6
17. Review of This People, New York Times, 16 March 1933, 18.
18. Granville Hicks, review of This People, Nation, 12 April 1933, 415.
19. LL to SH, 26 March 1933, Sisley Huddleston Papers, University of
Texas, Austin.
20. LL to CC, 29 March 1933, LLP II.
21. LL to CC, 5 April 1933, LLP II; and Arthur Eloesser to LL, 16 May
1933, LLP II. For biographical material on Eloesser, see “Arthur Eloesser,” Neue
Deutsche Biographie, vol. 4 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1959).
22. Quoted in Urofsky, American Zionism, 390-92.
23. Justice Wise Polier, in Rosenberg, Creators and Disturbers, 345-46.
24. LL to SW, 10 April 1933, SWP.
25. LL, Haven, 125.
26. LL to Thomas Mann, 7 April 1933, Thomas Mann-Archiv, Zurich,
Switzerland.
27. Thomas Mann, Diaries, 1918-1939 (New York: Henry Abrams, 1982),
143.
28. Ibid., 144.
29. Ibid., 145.
30. Ibid., 147.
31. Ibid., 147-48.
32. Ibid., 149.
33. Ibid., 150.
34. Sol Gittleman, “Thomas Mann’s Long Road to America,” Humanities
4 (November 1983): 9-10.
35. Thomas Mann to LL, 12 April 1937, LLP V.
36. Mann, Diaries, 148.
37. Ibid., 151.
38. Ibid., 152.
39. Ibid., 153.
40. Ibid., 153.
41. Ibid., 173.
42. LL to CC, 22 April 1933, LLP II.
43. LL, “Thomas Mann,” English Journal 22 (September 1933): 527-29,
535.
44. LL, “Germany’s Lowest Depths,” Nation, 3 May 1933, 493-94.
45. Elmer Rice, Nation, 17 May 1933, 557.
46. Rose Caylor, Nation, 17 May 1933, 557-58.
47. George Trager, Nation, 17 May 1933, 558.
48. Martha Gruening, Nation, 17 May 1933, 558-59.
49. Isaac Goldberg, Nation, 7 June 1933, 641.
50. Gabriel Segall, Nation, 7 June 1933, 641.
51. Philip Slomovitz, Nation, 7 June 1933, 641.
52. Marvin Lowenthal, Nation, 7 June 1933, 641—42.
53. Pinski, The Treasure, 8. For a detailed account of the disagreement
among American Jewish leaders over how effectively to combat Nazism in these
early years, a disagreement that reflected many of these positions, see Szajkowski,
“America-Jewish Struggle against Naziism and Communism in the 1930’s,” in
Page 752 - [see page image]
733
Notes to Chapter LI
his Jews, Wars and Communism, 433-47. Other accounts have been written
since, but the inclusion of original documentation provides a contemporary voice
not found elsewhere.
54. CC to LL, 11 April 1933, LLP II.
55. CC to LL, 18 April 1933, LLP II.
56. LL to CC, 30 April 1933, LLP II.
57. Carl Brandt to CC, 18 April 1933, LLP II.
58. LL, “The New Kultur,” Nation, 21 June 1933, 695-96.
59. LL to Ernst Gruening, 23 June 1933, LLP IV.
60. Quoted in Richard Lingeman, “Prejudices: Last Series,” Nation, 19
February 1990, 244.
61. HM to Sinclair Lewis, 7 June 1933, HMP.
62. HM to Sinclair Lewis, 28 May, and Sinclair Lewis to HM, 20 May 1936,
HMP.
63. LL to Henry Salpeter, 20 May 1933, Henry Salpeter Papers, Pennsylva
nia State University, University Park; and LL, Haven, 201.
64. LL, “A Jewish Notebook,” Opinion, July 1933, 10.
65. Ibid., 12.
66. Ibid., 10-11.
67. Ibid., 12-13.
68. LL, “A Jewish Notebook,” Opinion, August 1933, 22-23.
69. LL, “Ignoble and Unhealthful,” Nation, 26 July 1933, 106.
70. LL, “The German Revolt against Civilization,” Harper’s, August 1933,
275.
71. Ibid., 276-78.
72. Ibid., 276, 281.
73. Ibid., 282-83.
74. WB to LL, 9 August 1933, WBP.
75. James Waterman Wise, Swastika: The Nazi Terror (New York: Smith
and Haas, 1933), 128.
76. LL to Henry Salpeter, 20 May 1933, Salpeter Papers, Pennsylvania State
University.
77. LL, Notebook, 29 August 1933, LLP II.
CHAPTER 27
1. LL, Altar, 148-49, 3.
2. Ibid., 9.
3. Ibid., 11-12.
4. Ibid., 197-98.
5. Ibid., 273-74.
6. Ibid., 277.
7. Ibid., 278.
8. Ibid., 289-90.
9. Ibid., 293.
10. LL, Notebook, 15 April 1932, LLP II.
Page 753 - [see page image]
734
Notes to Chapter 27
11. TL, Notes, [1932], LLP I.
12. LL, Haven, 95.
13. LL, Altar, 295, 303-4.
14. Ibid., 311.
15. Ibid., 311,315.
16. Ibid., 322-24.
17. Ibid., 287-88, 301.
18. Carl Van Doren to LL, 9 October 1933, LLP IV.
19. HM to LL, 14 October 1933, LLP IV; Malcolm Cowley, Think Back
on Vs (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 71-72; Dorothy
Thompson to LL and TL, [ca. September 1933], LLP I; and SW to LL, 9 October
1933, LLP II.
20. TL, “Was I His Wife,” 36.
21. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 43.
22. LL, “Homeward Road,” LLP IV.
23. TL, “Dangerous Paradise,” 43.
24. LL to CC, 15 March, and CC to LL, 11 April 1933, LLP II.
25. LL to ML, 15 March 1933, LLP II.
26. John Larkin to CC, 25 March 1933, LLP II.
27. LL to SW, 15 March 1933, SWP.
28. SW to LL, 23 March 1933, SWP.
29. LL to SW, 10 April 1933, SWP.
30. SW to LL, 31 August and 18 September 1933, SWP.
31. CC to LL, 12 May 1933, LLP II.
32. CC to LL, 1 June 1933, LLP II.
33. LL to CC, 5 June 1933, LLP II; and ML to Herman Ould, 28 April
1933, Mary Lewisohn Papers, University of Texas, Austin.
34. LL to CC, [ca. 20 August 1933], LLP II.
35. CC to George Hummel, 25 August 1933, LLP II.
36. CC to LL, 20 September 1933, LLP II.
37. LL to SH, 1 October 1933, LLP V.
38. LL to SH, 26 March 1933, LLP V.
39. LL, “The Crisis of the Novel,” Yale Review 22 (May 1933): 533, 543-
44.
40. LL to CC, 24 October 1933, LLP II.
41. Louis J. Bragman, “Ludwig Lewisohn on ‘The Creative Eros,’” Psy
choanalytic Review 20 (January 1933): 9; and Bragman, “Ludwig Lewisohn:
Psychoanalyst of Literature,” Psychoanalytic Review 21 (July 1934): 300ff.
42. Dorothea Brunde, “Mr. Lewisohn Interprets America,” American Re
view 2 (December 1933): 197, 193.
43. Frederic Lefevre, “Une Heure Avec Ludwig Lewisohn,” Sommaire, 18
June 1932, 12-13.
44. TL, Notes, [1932], LLP I.
45. Copy of Gillis, Lewisohn, in the possession of the author.
46. LL to Virginia Hersh, 6 August 1933, LL Papers, South Caroliniana
Library, University of South Carolina. It is unknown if the Hershes were relatives
or friends from his earlier years.
Page 754 - [see page image]
Notes to Chapter 27
47. Gillis, Lewisohn, 1-2.
48. LH to E. M. Fitzsimmons, 17 July 1933, LHP.
49. Adolph Gillis to LH, 4 May 1932, LHP.
50. Gillis, Lewisohn, 104-5.
51. Ibid., 109-10.
52. LL to TD, 16 June 1933, TDP.
53. TD to LL, 5 July 1933, LLP V.
54. LL to TD, 10 August 1933, TDP.
55. LL to CC, 22 April 1933, LLP II.
56. LL to ES, 5 September 1933, LLP II.
57. LL to George Howard, 24 April 1933, LLP V.
58. LL to George Howard, June 1933], LLP V.
59. Hamish Hamilton to CC, 4 July and 22 September 1933, LLP II.
60. LL to ES, 17 July 1933, LLP II.
61. ES to LL, 11 October 1933, LLP II.
62. H. M. Jones, review of Creative America, Saturday Review of Literature,
25 November 1933, 285.
63. Louis Kronenberger, review of Creative America, New York Times, 26
November 1933, 12.
64. Newton Arvin, review of Creative America, New Republic, 13 Decem
ber 1933,143.
65. Carl Van Doren, review of Creative America, Nation, 29 November
1933, 628.
66. LL to CC, 30 September 1933, LLP II.
67. LL to CC, 18 November 1933, LLP II.
68. LL to SW, 15 March 1933, SWP.
69. Martin Buber to LL, 12 October 1933, LLP II.
70. LL to CC, 10 November 1933, LLP II.
71. LL to CC, 15 December 1933, LLP II.
72. LL to SW, 2 November 1933, SWP.
73. LL to TD, 19 August 1933, TDP.
74. Thomas Corcoran to SW, 6 October 1933, SWP.
75. William Feakins to LL, 14 November 1933, LLP II.
76. CC to LL, 18 December 1933, LLP II.
77. ML to CC, 20 December 1933, LLP II.
78. LL to CC, 26 December 1933, LLP II.
79. LL to CC, 27 December 1933, LLP II.
80. LL to Charles Recht, 28 December 1933, LLP II.
81. LL to CC, 29 December 1933, LLP II.
82. LL to SW, 26 December 1933, SWP.
83. LL to John Haynes Holmes, 17 September 1933, LLP I.
84. LL to CC, 29 December 1933, LLP II.
85. LL, “In a Pagan World,” Opinion 4 (February 1934): 11-12.
86. LL to CC, 31 December 1933, LLP II.
87. LL to CC, 2 January 1934, LLP II.
88. LL to ML, 2 January 1934, LLP II.
89. CC to ML, 15 January 1934, LLP II.
735
Page 755 - [see page image]
736
Notes to Chapter 27
90. ML to CC, 3 January 1934, LLP II.
91. ML to CC, 18 January 1934, LLP II.
92. ML to CC, 23 April 1934, LLP II.
93. LL to CC, 5 January 1933 [1934], LLP II.
94. LL to CC, 8 January 1933 [1934], LLP II.
95. WB to LL, 17 January 1934, WBP.
96. John Mason Brown to LL, 26 January 1934, J. M. Brown Papers,
Harvard University.
97. LL to SW, 12 January 1934, SWP.
98. SW to LL, 19 and 25 January 1934, SWP.
99. LL to SW, 3 February 1934, SWP.
100. Bernard Smith, “The Liberals Grow Old,” Saturday Review of Litera
ture, 30 December 1933, 378.
101. LL, “Mr. Lewisohn’s Position,” Saturday Review of Literature, 3 Febru
ary 1934, 448. Letter written 12 January 1934, LLP IV.
102. SW to LL, 9 February 1934, SWP.
103. LL to SW, 25 February 1934, SWP.
104. SW to LL, 27 February 1934, SWP.
105. “Hays, Arthur Garfield,” in American Reformers, ed. Alden Whitman
(New York: H. W. Wilson, 1985), 414-16.
106. LL to CC, 2 March 1934, LLP II.
107. LL to SW, 3 February 1934, SWP.
108. LL to CC, 6 March 1934, LLP II.
109. LL to CC, 2 March 1934, LLP II.
110. F. T. Marsh, review of Altar, New York Herald Tribune Books, 25
February 1934, 7.
111. E. B. C. Jones, review of Altar, New Statesman and Nation, 19 May
1934, 768.
112. G. R. B. R., review of Altar, Boston Transcript, 10 March 1934,1.
113. Ernest Sutherland Bates, “Lewisohn into Crump,” American Mercury
31 (April 1934): 441-50.
114. LL, “Is Love Enough?” Harper’s, April 1933, 553.
115. CC to LL, 15 March, and CC to ML, 15 March 1934, LLP II.
116. ML to CC, 19 March, and CC to LL, 20 March 1934, LLP II.
117. John Haynes Holmes to LL, 26 March 1934, LLP I.
118. John Haynes Holmes to ML, 26 March 1934, LLP I.
119. LL to CC, 4 April 1934, LLP II.
120. Ibid., and LL’s passport, LLP I.
121. LL, “An American Comes Home,” Harper’s, October 1934, 513-20.
122. LL to SW, 12 May 1934, SWP.
Page 756 - [see page image]
737
Bibliography
BOOKS BY LUDWIG LEWISOHN
The Broken Snare. New York: Dodge, 1908.
A Night in Alexandria: A Dramatic Poem in One Act. New York: Moods, 1909.
German Style: An Introduction to the Study of German Prose. New York: Holt,
1910.
The Modern Drama: An Essay in Interpretation. New York: Huebsch, 1915;
London: Seeker, 1916.
The Spirit of Modern German Literature. New York: Huebsch, 1916.
The Poets of Modern France. New York: Huebsch, 1918.
The Drama and the Stage. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
Up Stream: An American Chronicle. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922; Lon
don: Richards, 1923. Revised edition, New York: Modern Library, 1926.
Corrected revised edition, New York: Modern Library, 1926.
Don Juan. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923.
The Creative Life. New York: Boni 8c Liveright, 1924.
Israel. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925.
Modern German Poetry. Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius, 1925.
The Case of Mr. Crump. Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1926; New York: Henderson,
1930; New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947; London: Bodley Head, 1948.
Holy Land: A Story. New York: Harper, 1926.
Roman Summer. New York: Harper, 1927.
Cities and Men. New York: Harper, 1927.
The Defeated. London: Butterworth, 1927. Republished as The Island Within.
New York: Harper, 1928.
Adam: A Dramatic History in a Prologue, Seven Scenes, and an Epilogue. New
York: Harper, 1929.
Page 757 - [see page image]
738
Bibliography
Mid-Channel: An American Chronicle. New York: Harper, 1929; London: But-
terworth, 1929.
Roman Summer. London: Butterworth, 1930.
Stephen Escott. New York: Harper, 1930. Republished as The Memories of
Stephen Escott. London: Butterworth, 1930.
The Golden Vase. New York: Harper, 1931.
A Jew Speaks. Edited by James Waterman Wise. New York: Harper, 1931.
The Last Days of Shylock. New York: Harper, 1931; London: Butterworth,
1931.
The Romantic: A Contemporary Legend. Paris: Black Manikin Press, 1931.
Expression in America. New York: Harper, 1932; London: Butterworth, 1932.
Republished as The Story of American Literature. New York: Harper, 1937.
This People. New York: Harper, 1933.
An Altar in the Fields. New York: Harper, 1934.
The Permanent Horizon: A New Search for Old Truths. New York: Harper,
1934.
Trumpet of Jubilee. New York: Harper, 1937.
The Answer; The Jew and the World: Past, Present, and Future. New York:
Liveright, 1939.
For Ever Wilt Thou Love. New York: Dial, 1939.
Haven. With Edna Lewisohn. New York: Dial, 1940.
Renegade. New York: Dial, 1942.
Breathe Upon These. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1944.
A Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine: Our Contribution to a Better World. With
Bernard A. Rosenblatt and Albert K. Epstein. Washington, D.C.: Zionist
Organization of America, 1944.
Anniversary. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948.
The Vehement Flame. (Paperback edition of Stephen Escott.) New York: Farrar,
Straus, 1948.
The Tyranny of Sex. (Paperback edition of Crump.) New York: Farrar, Straus,
1949.
The Man of Letters and American Culture. Brooklyn, N.Y.: College English
Association, 1949.
The American Jew: Character and Destiny. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950.
The Magic Word: Studies in the Nature of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus,
1950.
What Is This Jewish Heritage? New York: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation, 1954.
Revised edition, New York: Schocken, 1964.
In a Summer Season. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1955.
BOOKS EDITED, TRANSLATED, INTRODUCED, OR WITH ESSAYS
de Crevecoeur, St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. Introduction by
Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904.
Viereck, George Sylvester. Gedichte von George Sylvester Viereck: With an Ap-
Page 758 - [see page image]
739
Bibliography
predation by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Progressive Printing Company,
1904.
Bartsch, Rudolf Hans. Elisabeth Koett. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. New
York: FitzGerald, 1910.
von Feuchtersleben, Ernst. Health and Suggestion: The Dietetics of the Mind.
Translated and edited by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Huebsch, 1910.
Sudermann, Hermann. The Indian Lily and Other Stories. Translated by Ludwig
Lewisohn. New York: Huebsch, 1911.
Hauptmann, Gerhart Johann Robert. The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Haupt
mann. Vols. 1-8. Edited, partially translated, and with introductions by
Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Huebsch, 1912-19.
Pinski, David. The Treasure. Translated with an introduction by Ludwig Lewis
ohn. New York: Huebsch, 1915.
Hirschfeld, Georg. The Mothers. Translated with an introduction by Ludwig
Lewisohn. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1916.
Halbe, Max. Youth. Translated with an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New
York: Doubleday, Page, 1916.
A Modern Book of Criticism. Edited with an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn.
New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919.
Latzko, Adolf Andreas. The Judgment of Peace: A Novel. Translated by Ludwig
Lewisohn. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919.
De Gourmont, Remy. The Book of Masks. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn.
Boston: John W. Lucas, 1921.
Culbertson, Ernest Howard. Goat Alley: A Tragedy of Negro Life. Introduction
by Ludwig Lewisohn. Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd, 1922.
Bosworth Crocker [Mary Arnold Crocker Childs Lewisohn], Humble Folk: One-
Act Plays. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd,
1923.
Powys, John Cowper. Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations.
Preface by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: American Library Service, 1923.
Frenssen, Gustav. Jorn Uhl. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Boni
& Liveright, 1923.
Wassermann, Jakob. Wedlock. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Boni
& Liveright, 1926.
Ewers, Hanns Heinz. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Translated by Ludwig Lewis
ohn. New York: Day, 1927.
Lewisohn, Thelma Bowman Spear. First Fruits. Introduction by Ludwig Lewis
ohn. Paris: Black Manikin Press, 1927.
“The Pagan in the Heart: On the Attitude of the Citizen as an Influence for Peace
or War.” In If I Could Preach Just Once, edited by Bertrand Russell, 15-35.
New York: Harper, 1929.
“The Collapse of Assimilationism: From Romanticism to Realism.” In Theodor
Herzl: A Memorial, edited by Meyer Weisgal, 262-63. New York: New
Palestine, 1929.
Guttman, Bernard. Ambition. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York:
Harper, 1930.
Page 759 - [see page image]
740
Bibliography
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York:
Knopf, 1930.
Rank, Otto. Art and the Artist. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York:
Knopf, 1932.
Untitled essay. In Types and Times in the Essay, edited by Warner Taylor, 339-41.
New York: Harper, 1932.
Fleg, Edmond. The Land of Promise. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New
York: Macauley, 1933.
Creative America. Edited by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Harper, 1933.
Rebirth: A Book of Modern Jewish Thought. Edited by Ludwig Lewisohn. New
York: Harper, 1935.
Werfel, Franz. The Eternal Road: A Drama in Four Parts. Translated by Ludwig
Lewisohn. New York: Viking, 1936.
Hoeliering, Franz. The Defenders. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1940.
Lewisohn, Thelma Bowman Spear. Many Mansions. Includes poems by Ludwig
Lewisohn. North Montpelier, Vt.: Driftwind Press, 1941.
Werfel, Franz. The Song of Bernadette. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. New
York: Viking, 1942; and Ladies Home Journal, March 1943.
“The Central Wrong. ” In Never Again: Ten Years of Hitler: A Symposium, edited
by Stephen Wise, 30-31. New York: Jewish Opinion, 1943.
“The Leader as Transformer.” In Chaim Weizmann: Statesman, Scientist, Builder
of the Sixth Commonwealth, edited by Meyer Weisgal, 61-68. New York:
Dial, 1944.
Jewish Short Stories. Edited by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Behrman House,
1945.
Buber, Martin. For the Sake of Heaven. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. Phil
adelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945.
Stern, Selma. The Spirit Returneth. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. Philadel
phia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Thirty-One Poems. Translated with an introduction by
Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: B. Ackerman, 1946.
Kulkiecko, Renya. Escape from the Pit. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New
York: Sharon Books, 1947.
Morgenstern, Soma. In My Father’s Pastures. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn.
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947.
Maugham, W. Somerset, Jacaques de Lacretelli, John Galsworthy, and Thomas
Mann. Among the Nations: Three Tales and a Play About Jews. Edited with
an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948.
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethe, the Story of a Man: Being the Life of
Johann Wolfgang Goethe as Told in His Own Words and the Words of His
Contemporaries. Edited and translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York:
Farrar, Straus, 1949.
Stampfer, Judah. Jerusalem Has Many Faces. Introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn.
New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950.
Brod, Max. Unambo. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Young, 1952.
Page 760 - [see page image]
741
Bibliography
Herzl, Theodore. Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for the Age. Edited with an intro
duction by Ludwig Lewisohn. Cleveland: World, 1955.
Picard, Jacob. The Marked One, and Twelve Other Stories. Translated with an
introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1956.
SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS
■‘Diffugeres Nieves.” Charleston (South Carolina) News and Courier, 26 June
1897.
“Books We Have Made.” Charleston News and Courier, 5 July-20 September
1903.
“German American Poetry.” Sewanee Review 9 (April 1904): 223-30.
“Aspects of Modern Poetry.” Charleston Sunday News, 10 February 1906.
“A Plea for Passionate Poetry.” Current Literature 10 (September 1906): 290-
92.
“White Roses.” Smart Set 20 (October 1906): 89-93.
“Amor Triumphos and Other Poems.” Pathfinder 1 (December 1906): 1-15.
“The Garden of Passion.” Current Literature 7 (February 1907): 224.
“A Sentimental Story.” Smart Set 22 (May 1907).
“Souvenir De Boheme.” Smart Set 22 (July 1907): 158.
“The Celebrants.” Smart Set 24 (March 1908): 174-215.
“Conversion of Marcia.” Smart Set 24 (April 1908): 141-45.
“Dionysis.” Current Literature 8 (February 1901): 220.
“The Modern Novel.” Sewanee Review 14 (October 1909): 458-74.
“Symon’s Romantic Movement in English Poetry.” Forum 12 (November 1901):
487-92.
“The Poet of Galilee.” Forum 13 (January 1910): 86.
“The Laboratory.” Smart Set 40 (May 1913): 51-54.
“The Lie: A Play in One Act.” Smart Set 40 (December 1913).
“Sunday.” Smart Set 42 (April 1914).
“Germany in War Time.” Literary Digest, 16 October 1915, 856.
“Gertrude and I.” International 10 (April 1916): 116-19.
“The Higher Good.” International 11 (January 1917): 6-7.
“Christmas on Fifth Avenue.” Sansculotte 1 (February 1917): 1.
“New York Sketch.” Smart Set 56 (September 1918): 29.
“Foreshadowings of the New Novel.” Forum 12 (September 1918): 79-84.
“The Problem of Modern Poetry.” Bookman 5 (January 1919): 550-57.
“The Story Ashland Told at Dinner.” Smart Set 10 (February 1919): 14-21.
“A Note on Tragedy.” Nation, 31 May 1919, 879-80.
“The Theatre: Mythical and Real.” Nation, 29 November 1919, 694-96.
“The Jewish Art Theatre.” Nation, 13 December 1919, 747-48.
“Cult of Prettiness.” Nation, 20 December 1919, 806.
“Towards a People’s Theatre.” Nation, 17 January 1920, 82.
“Cult of Violence.” Nation, 24 January 1920, 118.
“The Poet and His Moment.” Nation, 10 July 1920, 42.
Page 761 - [see page image]
742
Bibliography
“Creation and Analysis.” Nation, 17 July 1920, 74-75.
“The Ivory Tower.” Nation, 4 September 1920, 263.
The Homeless Muse.” Nation, 1 December 1920, 622-23.
“Tradition and Freedom.” Nation, 8 December 1920, 651-52.
“William Ellery Leonard.” Nation, 12 January 1921, 44-45.
“Macbeth in the Void.” Nation, 2 March 1921, 349-50.
“The New Literature in America.” Nation, 23 March 1921, 429.
“The Poet and the World.” Nation, 25 May 1921, 732.
“Goethe and Ourselves.” Nation, 29 June 1921, 921.
“Culture and Race.” Nation, 27 July 1921, 102.
“South Carolina: A Lingering Fragrance.” Nation, 12 July 1922, 36-37.
“Hauptmann on Broadway.” Nation, 11 October 1922, 392.
“Concerning Faith.” Nation, 18 October 1922, 420.
“The Negro Players.” Nation, 23 May 1923, 605.
“The Dance of Life.” Nation, 12 September 1923, 270.
“Ludwig Lewisohn.” Nation, 21 November 1923, 583-84.
“The Jew Meditates.” Nation, 20 February 1924, 200-201.
“Un-Americanized Americans.” Independent, 29 March 1924, 173.
“All God’s Children.” Nation, 4 June 1924, 22.
“A Philosopher of Liberalism.” Nation, 2 July 1924, 22.
“The Death of Society.” Nation, 10 August 1924, 156.
“New Morals for Old.” Nation, 29 November 1924, 464-65.
“Blind Alley.” Menorah Journal 9 (December 1924): 495-98.
“The Return to Jerusalem.” Nation, 31 December 1924, 724-25.
“Hunger and Holiness.” Menorah Journal 9 (February 1925): 62-66.
“A City Unlike New York.” Menorah Journal 11 (April 1925): 167-72.
“The Art of Being a Jew.” Harper’s, May 1925, 725-29.
“America in Europe.” Saturday Review of Literature, 9 May 1925, 737-38.
“Can an Artist Live in America?” Nation, 14 October 1925, 423-24.
“Palestine or Russia.” Nation, 7 October 1925, 423-24.
“The Fallacies of Assimilation.” Menorah Journal 10 (October 1925): 460-72.
“Thomas Mann at Fifth.” Nation, 9 December 1925, 667-68.
“Martin Buber.” Menorah Journal 11 (February 1926): 65-70.
“Culture and Barbarism.” Harper’s, November 1926, 729-33.
“Rainer Maria Rilke.” Saturday Review of Literature, 4 December 1926, 384-
85.
“Politics of a Man of Letters.” Harper’s, January 1928, 237—42.
“The Jew and the State.” New Palestine, 1 March 1929,159-60.
“Introduction to a Projected History of American Literature.” This Quarter 2
(July 1929): 84-108.
“Blind Alley.” Harper’s, December 1930, 87-88.
“Whitman.” This Quarter 4 (September 1931): 75-87.
“Where Henry James Never Entered.” This Quarter 4 (December 1931): 318-
33.
“The Jewish World Crisis.” Harper’s, November 1930, 701-9.
“Jewish Literature in Europe.” Opinion, 29 February 1932, 6-7.
“Minimal Ethical Demands.” Opinion, 4 April 1932, 5.
Page 762 - [see page image]
Bibliography
“A Keepsake of Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Rendered by Ludwig
Lewisohn.” This Quarter 4 (June 1932): 571-74.
“A Necessary Preface.” Opinion, 20 September 1932, 5-6.
“What of Divorcement.” Opinion, 2 November 1932-February 1933.
“Is Love Enough.” Harper’s, April 1933, 545-53.
“The Crisis of the Novel.” Yale Review 22 (May 1933): 533-34.
“Germany’s Lowest Depths.” Nation, 3 May 1933, 493-94.
“The New Kultur.” Nation, 21 June 1933, 695-96.
“The Fallacy of Progress.” Harper’s, June 1933,103-12.
“A Jewish Notebook.” Opinion 3 (July 1933): 10-13.
“Ignoble and Unhealthful.” Nation, 26 July 1933,156.
“A Bourgeois Takes His Stand.” Scribner’s, August 1933, 91-97.
“German Revolt against Civilization.” Harper’s, August 1933, 275-83.
“In a Pagan World.” Opinion 7 (January 1934): 13-15; (February 1934):
9-12.
“The New Meaning of Revolution.” North American Review 42 (September
1934): 210-18.
“An American Comes Home.” Harper’s, October 1934, 513-20.
“Jews in Trouble.” Atlantic, January 1936, 53-61.
“German Jewry’s Poignant Plight.” Literary Digest, 11 January 1936, 18.
“A Defense of the Acquisitive Instinct.” Forum 95 (April 1936): 245—48.
“An Instrument of Salvation and Self-Determination.” New Palestine, 8 October
1937, 5.
“There Is No Peace.” Opinion 9 (April 1939): 15.
“Clarifying Democracy.” Jewish Mirror 5 (August 1942): 5-11.
“Before Lidice and After.” Jewish Mirror 5 (September 1942): 5-10.
“Jewish Contributions to American Literature.” Jewish Mirror 5 (November
1942): 32-37.
“American Jewry and the Commonwealth Idea.” New Palestine, 10 December
1943, 138.
“Not Less Than Justice.” New Palestine, 1 January 1944, 175.
“If England Were . ..” New Palestine, 21 January 1944, 204.
“An Emigre Zionist Speaks Out.” New Palestine, 3 March 1944, 292-93.
“The Voice We Need.” New Palestine, 3 March 1944, 275.
“Pesach.” New Palestine, 31 March 1944, 319.
“Protest and Rescue.” New Palestine, 14 July 1944, 451.
“Jewish Brigade.” New Palestine, 13 October 1944, 3.
“History Passes Judgment.” New Palestine, 18 May 1945, 192.
“American Judaism.” New Palestine, 12 April 1946,155.
“Blood and Shame.” New Palestine, 21 February 1947, 69.
“The Test.” Esquire, May 1947, 23-32.
“The Sources of Being Jewish.” Congress Weekly, 13 December 1948, 6-7.
“Notes on Yiddish Poetry.” Jewish Frontier 10 (April 1949): 19-22.
“The Jewish Novel in America.” Congress Weekly, 5 December 1949, 5-7.
“On Jewish Fiction.” Commentary 8 (November 1949): 499-500.
“The Future of American Zionism.” Commentary 10 (August 1950): 117ff.
“Jew and the Book.” Congress Weekly, 13 November 1950, 4.
743
Page 763 - [see page image]
744
Bibliography
“Seven Professors Look at the Jewish Student.” Commentary, 12 December
1951,529-31.
“To the Young Jewish Intellectuals.” Jewish Frontier 12 (April 1952): 5-8.
“Evidence and Example for Our Times.” Congress Weekly, 9 March 1953, 14-
15.
“Ghetto Boyhood.” Saturday Review, 3 September 1953, 14.
“Israel, American Jewry, and the State Department.” Jewish Frontier 14 (Octo
ber 1954): 7-10.
“The Writer and the Reader.” Congress Weekly, 6 December 1954, 6.
“Jewish Reading List.” Saturday Review of Literature, 5 March 1955, 36-38.
“The Stories of Jacob Picard.” Jewish Frontier 16 (June 1956): 16-18.
“Reflections on Crisis.” Judaism 2 (Summer 1956): 195-204.
“Thomas Mann.” Jewish Frontier 19 (March 1959): 4-11; (April 1959): 18-24;
(June 1959): 14-19.
SELECTED WORKS PRIMARILY CONCERNED WITH LEWISOHN
Bragman, Louis J. “The Case of Ludwig Lewisohn.” American Journal of
Psychiatry 11 (September 1931): 319-31.
. “Ludwig Lewisohn on ‘The Creative Eros.’ ” Psychoanalytic Review 20
(January 1933): 5-9.
. “Ludwig Lewisohn: Psychoanalyst of Literature.” Psychoanalytic Re
view 21 (July 1934): 300-315.
Chyet, Stanley. “Lewisohn, a Zionist.” In Studies in Jewish Fiistory, edited by
Sh. Yevien, 103-36. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1974.
. “Lewisohn and Crevecoeur.” Chicago Jewish Forum 22 (Winter 1963):
130-35.
. “Ludwig Lewisohn: The Years of Becoming.” American Jewish Archives
11 (October 1959): 125^17.
. “Ludwig Lewisohn in Charleston.” Publications of the American Jewish
FJistorical Society 54 (March 1965): 262-322.
Gillis, Adolph. Ludwig Lewisohn: The Artist and His Message. New York: Fox,
Duffield, 1933.
Goldberg, Isaac. “Ludwig Backstream Lewisohn.” American Spectator 2 (Oc
tober 1936): 13-14.
Klingenstein, Susanne. The Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: Dynam
ics of Intellectual Assimilation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Lewisohn, Thelma Spear. “Dangerous Paradise: My Love Life with Ludwig
Lewisohn.” Living Romances, April 1940, 10-13, 44—45.
. “Was I His Mistress or His Wife?” True Confessions, June 1940, 35-36,
44-45.
Melnick, Ralph. “Ludwig Lewisohn.” in Dictionary of Literary Biography,
Volume 28: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers, edited by
Daniel Walden, 141-54. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984.
. “Ludwig Lewisohn: The Early Charleston Years.” In Studies in the
American Jewish Experience, edited by Jacob R. Marcus, 105-26. Cincin
nati: American Jewish Archives, 1984.
Page 764 - [see page image]
745
Bibliography
. “Oedipus in Charleston: Ludwig Lewisohn’s Search for the Muse.”
Studies in Jewish American Literature 3 (1983): 68-84.
Spiro, Saul. The Jew as Man of Letters: Being Some Notes on Ludwig Lewisohn.
Burlington, Vt.: Vermont Zionist Youth, Masada, 1935.
Page 765 - [see page image]
Page 766 - [see page image]
747
Index
Adam, 485-89, 504, 506-7, 520-21,
525
African-Americans, 27, 35, 37-39, 47,
51, 59, 65, 251, 289-90, 341, 360
Agronsky, Gershon, 407
Altar in the Fields, An, 109, 159, 221,
339, 451, 535, 572, 575, 584,
587, 598, 607, 609-11, 633-41,
644, 652, 662
Anderson, Sherwood, 220, 249,
258-59, 278, 291, 413, 435, 444
Answer, The, 640
Anti-Semitism, 15, 23-24, 28, 42—43,
57-58, 60-62, 67, 70-72, 83-84,
104,137-41,143,145,178, 218,
244, 256-57, 279-82, 294-95,
299-304, 324-25, 353-55, 370,
372, 385, 389, 415, 453, 476,
486-87,498,504-5,521-24,532,
537, 560-61, 565-67, 582-83,
590-92, 595-98, 609-33. See also
Nazi Germany
Armory Show, 212-13
Arnold, Matthew, 70, 79, 91
Asch, Sholom, 413, 541, 553, 567,
569, 574
Asher, Lovis, 447, 481
Austin, Mary Hunter, 284, 307
Babbitt, Irving, 245
Banov, Leon, 38
Beach, Sylvia, 426, 503, 548
Belden, H. M., 57-58, 67-68
Bellows, George, 237
Bennett, John, 132-33,135, 289
Berlin: Lewisohn and, 13, 23-29,
34, 76, 268, 367-71, 374, 386,
397-98, 422, 482
Blumfeld, Kurt, 332-34, 350, 369
Boni, Albert, 253, 257
Book of Modern Criticism, A, 245-47,
261, 279-81, 662
Book-of-the-Month Club, 448—49,
566-67
Bookman, 230-31, 234, 239^11, 405,
554
Books We Have Made, 90, 104, 449
Brandeis, Louis, 643
Brandeis University, 11, 16
Brill, Abraham Arden, 216-18, 285,
489
Brod, Max, 558
Broken Snare, The, 14, 38-39,120-24,
127-36,138, 220, 301
Buber, Martin, 398, 460, 541, 559,
568, 652
Burke, Kenneth, 207, 341
Page 767 - [see page image]
748
Index
Burlington (Vermont): Lewisohn and,
643, 646, 665
Butterworth, 416, 453, 479-80, 585,
609- 10
Canby, Henry, 567
Canfield, Cass, 257, 425, 435, 445,
447-49, 453-55, 457-60, 462,
465-70, 476-77, 479-81, 484-
85, 490, 497-98, 504, 506-7,
517, 527-29, 534, 538, 541-42,
544, 548-52, 564-70, 584-85,
593-94, 596-98, 602-3, 605-6,
610- 11, 613-14, 619, 624, 642,
644-46, 649, 652-58, 661-64
Carpenter, George, 83, 93, 104
Case of Mr. Crump, The, 15, 39-40,
42, 44, 47, 50, 52, 54, 58, 63, 70,
74, 77, 87, 92, 101-2, 109-11,
116, 118-19, 128-30, 136, 147,
156, 158, 164, 173, 180, 182,
184, 187-88, 220, 226, 262-63,
292, 294, 308-9, 314-15, 318,
327, 349, 352, 356-57, 393,
404-5, 407-8, 410, 414, 443,
471, 488, 490-91, 514, 519-20,
528, 535, 557, 586, 595, 648-49;
publication and sale of, 415-20,
423- 25, 429, 445-46, 479-80;
critique of, 430-31, 433-39, 471;
and banned in United States, 432,
440, 457, 480, 584, 642; French
translation of, 440,457, 471,477;
German translation of, 449, 457,
471,476-77; Czech translation of,
484; Dano-Norwegian translation
of, 484; Spanish translation of,
552; second edition of, 533, 548,
551
Catholicism: Lewisohn’s attraction to,
46
Censorship. See Ulysses and The Case
of Mr. Crump
Cerf, Bennett, 259, 417-18, 420,
424- 25, 431, 440, 445, 457, 517,
553, 558
Charleston: Lewisohn and, 13, 14,
27, 29, 36-82, 84, 90-92, 99,
106-8, 110-26, 132-34, 146-48,
155-56, 161, 164, 176-78, 185,
215, 219, 222, 236-37, 266, 268,
341, 343, 355, 381,419-20, 469,
487, 495-96, 533, 536-37, 596,
603
Children of the Ghetto, 66
Citadel, The, 77-78
Cities and Men, 425, 447, 453, 457
City College of New York, 179,192
College of Charleston, 13, 53-61, 70,
74, 80-81,111-12,170,177,185
Colum, Padrak, 413
Columbia University, 14, 79, 81-87,
90-93, 104-5, 126, 129, 136^10,
143,145,176-77, 352, 579-80
Columbus (Ohio): Lewisohn and,
155-210, 213, 215, 236-37, 306
Commins, Saxton, 442
Communism: Lewisohn’s response to,
12, 15, 390-91, 415, 441, 482,
531, 558-60, 564, 569, 587, 651,
659-60
Comstock, Anthony, 136
Cowley, Malcolm, 297, 221, 341, 641
Craig, Edward Gordon, 250
Crash of 1929, 488-89, 506, 516-17,
553
Creative America, 584, 593-96,
598-99, 603, 605, 648-54
Creative Life, The, 348-50, 610
Crocker, Mary Arnold. See Lewisohn,
Mary
Czechoslovakia: Lewisohn and, 374,
384, 386, 395
Davidson, Israel, 84
Dearborn Independent, 324, 354, 498
Defeated, The, 423, 438^0, 442, 444,
446, 453-54, 457, 609. See also
The Island Within
Dell, Floyd, 254, 293-94, 361
Della Torre, Thomas, 44—45, 55
Dial, 230
Dodge, Mabel, 217, 254
Don Juan, 63, 309-13, 316-17, 321,
328, 333-34, 336, 340^17, 349,
358-59, 408
Doubleday, Page, 108-9, 201
Drama and the Stage, The, 297, 658
Drama League, 201
Dreiser, Theodore, 108, 130-31,
203-4, 219-23, 226-27, 233,
Page 768 - [see page image]
749
Index
237-39, 264, 278, 413, 422-23,
429-31, 436,444, 526, 648-49
Eastman, Max, 254
Egypt. See North Africa: Lewisohn and
Einstein, Albert, 286, 371, 420, 460
Eliot, Charles, 80
Eliot, T. S., 397
Ellis, Havelock, 313
Eloesser, Arthur, 614
Eloesser, Fannie, 33
Eloesser, Siegfried, 26, 32-34
Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 258
England: Lewisohn and, 367-68
Evans, Cora (Eloesser), 33-34,115
Expression in America: origins of, 407,
425, 429, 439-40, 443; writing
of, 444-48, 452, 456, 458-60,
462, 466-67, 469-70, 477-78,
480-81, 489, 502, 504-5, 517,
520, 520, 525, 529, 535, 538,
543-44, 548, 551-53, 555-56,
562, 565, 593-94, 660; critique
of, 566, 576-79, 583, 586, 610,
647
Fascism: Lewisohn’s response to,
390-92, 402, 441-42, 482, 531,
561, 651, 659-60. See also Nazi
Germany
Ferber, Edna, 568
Feuchtersleben, Ernest von, 143-44
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 506-14
Flanner, Janet, 429, 431, 516, 596
Fleg, Edmond, 541, 599
For Ever Wilt Thou Love, 69
Ford, Ford Madox, 497
Ford, Henry, 202, 244, 324-25, 354,
370, 453, 498
Frank, Waldo, 334
Frankfurter, Felix, 643
Freeman, The, 270-74
Freud, Sigmund, 15, 375, 389, 412,
429, 448, 460, 481, 489, 517,
538, 559, 577-80, 600-601
Frost, Robert, 239
Gannett, Lewis, 351
German culture: Lewisohn’s attraction
to, 25-26, 30-32, 68, 70, 73, 76,
83-84, 87, 89, 144-46, 151-53,
162-63, 166, 169, 178-79,
185-96, 198, 220-23, 230-32,
238, 329-30, 349, 369-71, 394,
397, 443, 535, 558, 585, 593
German Style, 145-46, 153
Gide, Andre, 545-46
Gillis, Adolph, 564, 647^18
Glaspell, Susan, 249, 254
Goat Alley, 289
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 152, 238,
278, 284, 326, 330, 348, 350, 585
Gold, Michael, 557
Golden Vase, The, 544-49, 557, 565,
595, 609
Goldman, Emma, 239, 415
Goodman, Paul, 626
Great War, 185, 201-3, 209, 236;
Lewisohn’s attitude toward,
185-92, 202-3, 206-10, 215,
222, 230, 235-37, 360, 508-9,
535
Greenwich Village, 211, 213-14, 222,
237, 253-54, 293-95, 312, 341,
361,400
Gruening, Ernest, 270-72, 613, 625
Ha-am, Ahad, 381, 559
Hapgood, Hutchins, 213, 237, 239,
254
Harley School, 214, 223-24, 230
Harpers, 416, 420, 425, 448, 458,
460, 465-66, 470, 477, 484,
490-93, 497-99, 505, 519-21,
527-28, 534, 549-50, 552, 565,
593, 595-96, 602, 609, 646,
650-52, 656, 658-59, 663. See
also Canfield, Cass
Harper’s, 390, 392-93, 395, 413, 441,
448, 507, 529, 605, 611, 631,
663, 665
Harris, Joel Chandler, 115
Harris, Lancelot Minor, 55-58, 60, 68,
77-80, 82, 84-86, 88, 90-94,113,
118, 123, 125-26, 128, 132-35,
137-40, 142, 150, 152-53,
161, 170, 176-78, 181, 185-86,
189-90, 265-67, 283, 294-95,
301, 308, 310, 340, 343-44, 385,
449, 452, 596, 647
Harvard University, 14, 80, 175,
331-32, 470, 520
Page 769 - [see page image]
750
Index
Hauptmann, Gerhart: Lewisohn as
translator and critic of, 151-53,
161-64, 166, 168-69, 175, 179,
190-95, 206, 242, 250, 348, 375,
448; joins Nazis, 614
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 42
Hays, Arthur Garfield, 258, 661, 664
Health and Suggestion, 143
Heine, Heinrich, 70-73, 78, 84, 91,
145, 201, 241, 354, 559
Heilman, Lillian, 259
Hemingway, Ernest, 258, 324, 402,
445, 449-50, 502, 516, 530, 579,
596
Huebsch, Benjamin W., 142—44, 151,
153-56, 159-65, 167-70, 175-
76, 178-80, 183, 192-95, 201^1,
206, 223, 256-57, 270-72, 290,
295, 306, 452, 477, 526, 569
Henry Holt, 145, 169, 175
Henry Street Settlement House, 255
Heyward, Dubose, 340
Hirschfield, George, 200-201
Hitler, Adolph, 370, 375, 537, 540,
566, 583, 614-18, 620, 622, 627,
633, 641, 648
Hohlfeld, A. R., 145^46, 150, 163,
169, 175-77, 179,182,191, 201,
325-26
Hollywood, 465
Holmes, John Haynes, 256, 653, 657,
660,664-65
Holocaust, 16. See also Nazi Germany
Holy Land, 393, 395
Horace, 45, 50, 241, 385
Housman, A. E., 240
Huddleston, Sisley, 412-14, 426, 429,
488-89, 540-41, 586, 612-13,
646
Hunter College, 214
Hurwitz, Henry, 199, 285, 328, 425,
429, 433, 455, 459, 466-68,
470-71, 484-85
Indian Lily. See Sudermann, Herman
Island Within, The, 47, 417, 425,
442-43, 446, 448, 453-60,
465-68, 479, 496, 521, 536, 590,
595, 605-6, 609; critique of, 454,
460-62, 467-68, 476-77, 648;
German translation of, 481, 506;
Italian translation of, 633, 658.
See also The Defeated
Israel, 15, 89, 370, 375, 382, 384, 386,
389-92, 394, 396, 406-9, 424,
427, 430, 445, 454-56, 494, 506,
549, 621, 648, 660
Israel, State of, 16
Italy: Lewisohn and, 375, 384-86, 394
James, Henry, 140, 564
Jewish Daily Forward, 453, 476
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
396
Jews and Judaism: Lewisohn’s response
to, 28-29, 32-34, 45^18, 66-67,
71-75, 84, 104-5, 173-74, 178,
187, 198-201, 208, 227-29,
279-86, 292, 319, 326, 331-34,
337, 339, 349-50, 353, 366-68,
370-96, 398, 404, 414, 425,
442—43, 454, 459-62, 465-68,
470, 472-76, 481-87, 505-6,
509, 511-15, 518-25, 527, 532,
537-39, 549-50, 552, 558-69,
585-92, 597-602, 610-34, 655,
659
John Uhl, 178,311
Joyce, James, 15, 257, 403, 412, 417,
426, 433, 449, 455, 488, 503,
542, 545, 548, 551
Kallen, Horace, 413, 422
Kaplan, Mordecai, 282-83
Kaufman, George S., 444
Kazin, Alfred, 249
Killers of the Dream, 47
Kirchwey, Freda, 248, 351, 413
Knopf, Alfred, 535-36, 600
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 248-49, 429,
431,433, 436,469, 576, 578
Lady Baltimore, 38
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 559
Last Days of Shylock, The, 507,
510-11, 514, 518, 520-25,
527-29, 538, 549, 590, 595, 609,
660; critique of, 542-43, 545;
German translation of, 558
Leonard, William Ellery, 84, 86-87,
89-90, 95, 107, 113-14, 116-17,
124, 144-45, 147, 149, 154,
Page 770 - [see page image]
751
Index
160-61, 192, 207, 216, 228,
232, 240, 250, 255, 260-61, 267,
271-75, 283-84, 286, 298, 303,
328, 330-31, 345, 349-50, 355,
362, 373-74, 378, 386, 394, 398,
406, 417, 429, 436^0, 458-59,
481, 557, 564, 579-80
Letters from an American Farmer, 103
Levin, Meyer, 407
Lewis, Sinclair, 14, 249, 277-78, 413,
423, 429, 431, 450, 455, 526-27,
530, 597, 626
Lewisohn, Adolph, 218, 255
Lewisohn, Alice, 201, 255
Lewisohn, Edna, 15
Lewisohn, Jacques: in Germany, 23-28;
in St. Matthews (S.C.), 27-29,
33, 35-36; in Charleston (S.C.),
36, 39-40, 52-53, 62, 73, 76, 81,
110-11, 115, 117-18, 124-25,
148, 156, 164-65, 181-82,
348-49; and visit with Ludwig
in Columbus (Ohio), 168, 175;
emotional breakdown of, and
move to Columbus (Ohio), 182,
187, 193; and move to New
York, 218-19, 259; death of, 218,
261-64
Lewisohn, James, 15, 571-72, 641,
645-46
Lewisohn, Louise, 16, 439
Lewisohn, Mary, 14; meets Lewisohn,
109-11, 113, 115-18, 418-19;
marriage to Lewisohn, 118-21,
124-27, 129-30, 133, 135, 139,
146-47, 149-50, 155-59, 180,
182,187,193, 197-98, 201, 206,
214, 218-19, 224-28, 259, 263,
267, 283, 285, 419-20; left by
Lewisohn, 291-96, 298, 305-12,
317, 320-23, 327-28, 330-31,
336-38, 340, 342-45, 348, 351-
53, 356-61, 366-67, 376-83;
Pawns of War, 254; Humble Folk,
337; pursues Lewisohn, 386-88,
398, 408-10, 415, 417, 420-21,
424, 430-32, 435-37, 464, 469,
480, 490-94, 497-501, 507, 514,
516-19, 526, 554, 565, 584-85,
596, 606, 608, 633, 642-46, 648,
653-54, 656, 660-61, 663-65
Lewisohn, Minna (Eloesser): in
Germany, 23-29; in St. Matthews
(S.C.), 27-30, 32-36; in
Charleston (S.C.), 36, 39-43,
48-50, 52-53, 57, 71, 73, 76,
81, 103-5, 110-11, 115, 117-18,
124-25, 148, 156-57, 419; and
Judaism, 28-29, 32-34, 39,
71; death of, 164-65, 167; as
continuing influence on Lewisohn,
173-74, 180-83, 197-98, 200,
206, 218-19, 259, 262, 348-49,
354
Lewisohn, Thelma, 15; meets
Lewisohn, 312-24, 327-28,
330-38; with Lewisohn in New
York, 338-48, 351-52, 356-62;
on Lewisohn’s Zionist tour,
366-86; with Lewisohn in Vienna,
387-99; with Lewisohn in Paris,
402-665
Lipsky, Louis, 387
Literary Digest, 114
Literary Guild, 566-67, 650
Liveright, Horace, 237, 239, 255-61,
318, 322, 334, 349, 415, 417,
422, 424, 428, 430, 444-46, 454,
456, 466, 471, 494, 525-27, 534,
661
Lowell, Amy, 239-41, 273
Lowenthal, Marvin, 623-24
Luks, George, 237
Magnes, Judah, 282, 284
Manley, Edna. See Lewisohn, Edna
Mann, Thomas, 15, 394-95, 406-7,
413, 429, 432, 449, 452, 456,
471, 534-35, 541, 551, 557,
614-20
Mann, William D’Alton, 114-15, 128
Marcuse, Herbert, 559
Marshall, Louis, 498-501, 518
Marx, Karl, 559
Masters, Edgar Lee, 14, 239, 249, 278,
386, 444, 530
Matthews, Brander, 83, 93, 299-303
Mein Kampf, 370
Mencken, H. L., 14, 128, 169, 191,
224-25, 228, 237-39, 241,
274-75, 278, 286, 290-91, 296,
300-302, 408, 428-29, 431-32,
Page 771 - [see page image]
752
Index
434, 436, 457, 464, 494-95, 518,
526, 530, 545, 548, 626, 641
Menorah Journal, 199, 285, 328, 390,
425, 433, 438, 453, 455, 466,
484-85, 497, 552, 566. See also
Hurwitz, Henry
Menorah Society, 198-99, 331-32,
467, 470, 520
Merchant of Venice, The, 42-43
Methodist: Lewisohn as, 29-30, 34,
46, 60-62, 64, 72,174
Michaud, Regis, 413, 437, 458, 471,
517-18, 520-21, 528
Mid-Channel, 326, 339, 347-48,
350-51, 361, 374, 393-94, 403,
406, 426, 429, 439, 447, 518-19,
554, 605, 648, 660; writing of,
466-67, 469-71, 477, 479-80,
484, 490; re-editing of, 497, 505,
519, 584, 606, 642; critique of,
475, 494-96
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 291
Miller, Henry, 580-81
Modern Drama, The, 183, 191
Modern German Poetry, 397
Mothers, The, 200-201
Munsey, F. A., 128-29, 133
Nathan, George Jean, 14,128, 224-25,
238, 250, 593
Nation, 14, 133, 136, 151, 166, 176,
190-191, 212-13, 222, 270,
433, 453, 576-77, 651; and
Lewisohn as drama critic and
associate editor, 241, 247-51,
256, 260, 265-66, 270-78, 283,
291, 296-98, 303-5, 310, 328,
335, 346-47, 349-50, 359-60;
Lewisohn’s later writings for,
374-75, 388, 390, 396, 413, 612,
620-23, 626, 631
Nazi Germany, 12, 390-91, 511-12,
558, 560-61, 566, 568-69, 583,
608-9, 612-33, 644, 661. See also
Fascism, Lewisohn’s response to
Neighborhood Playhouse, 201
New England Fable, A, 210
New Palestine, 16, 350, 453, 462, 481,
506, 566
New Republic, 495
New York City: Lewisohn and, 27,
81-90, 92-105, 108-10, 126-47,
152, 175-76, 194, 208, 211-361,
382, 482, 630
New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice, 136
New York Times, 103, 108,169, 191,
299, 302, 329, 346, 352, 410,
416, 438-39, 468, 493, 521,
542-43, 545, 612, 650-51
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 67-68, 141, 146,
152, 284, 322, 330, 387, 252
Night in Alexandria, A, 140-41
Nin, Anai's, 580
Nock, Alfred Jay, 248, 270
North Africa: Lewisohn and, 375,
435-36, 581
Nutting, Myron, 404-5, 411-14, 423,
426, 455-56
Ohio State University, 14,155,157-59,
163, 183, 192, 206-10, 223-24,
583
O’Neill, Eugene, 241-42, 249, 254,
360,444,481
Opinion, 553, 561-62, 565-66, 568,
582, 597, 627, 655-56
Pacifist: Lewisohn as, 186-88, 228-30,
233-34, 237-39, 242, 482
Palestine: Lewisohn and, 15, 16, 349,
376-85, 391, 407-8, 415, 487,
492, 518, 532, 539, 583. See also
Zionist, Lewisohn as
Paris: Lewisohn and, 15, 394, 397-665
Paul, Elliot, 433, 451
Perkins, Max, 579
Permanent Horizon, 640
Pinsker, Leon, 559-627
Pinski, David, 200, 251-52, 282, 624
Poets of Modern France, The, 223,
229, 231
Poland: Lewisohn and, 371-74, 415
Porter Military Academy, 77
Pound, Ezra, 258, 397, 426, 502,
595-96, 649
Powys, John Cowper, 237, 239, 329
Pringle, E. H., Jr., 58-59
Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion, 325, 453
Putnam, Nina, 237
Page 772 - [see page image]
753
Index
Randolph, Harrison, 55, 60, 77-78,
80, 90,132,185
Rank, Otto, 413-13, 517, 535-36,
574, 600-601
Rebirth: A Book of Modern Jewish
Thought, 640, 658, 661-62
Recht, Charles, 352, 447, 454, 469,
497, 499, 565, 585, 653-56,
659-60
Reed, John, 211-12, 253-54, 258
Reinhardt, Max, 282, 375
Rice, Elmer, 413,429,455-56,622-24,
626, 658
Robeson, Paul, 14, 258, 360, 412-13,
455
Robinson, Edward G., 14
Roman Summer, 92, 359, 395, 438,
453, 458, 521
Romantic, The, 511-14, 565-66
Roosevelt, Franklin, 15, 608, 643
Rosenwald, Julius, 193
Roth, Henry, 567
Roth, Samuel, 426, 503, 541—42
Rubinstein, Helena, 416, 644
Russell, Bertrand, 472, 476-77, 481,
521
Santa Fe (New Mexico), 15
Santayana, George, 212
Saturday Review of Literature, 392,
453, 481
Saxton, Eugene, 497-99, 504-5, 517,
520-22, 584, 597, 603, 609-10,
650
Schnitzler, Arthur, 283, 285, 374-75
Seldes, George, 572-75
Shaw, George Bernard, 284, 348
Sheldon, Roy, 410, 413, 423, 434
Sherman, Stuart, 222-45, 279-81,
300-301
Simms, William Gilmore, 91
Sinclair, Upton, 14, 258, 300, 312,
456-57, 464, 579
Smart Set, 114, 120, 128, 136, 169,
191,224, 228
Smith, Lillian, 47
Socialist: Lewisohn as, 190, 207-9,
214-16
South Carolina Poetry Society, 340,
496
Spear, Thelma. See Lewisohn, Thelma
Spingarn, Joel Elias, 261, 295-97, 369,
392,407,416,420,436,443,446
Spirit of Modern German Literature,
The, 194-96, 198, 201-2, 204
St. Matthews (S.C.): Lewisohn in, 11,
26-36, 39, 45, 268, 640
Stein, Gertrude, 258, 402, 449, 502,
572
Stephen Escott, 64,168,466,480,490,
504, 506, 508, 510-11, 521, 525,
605, 609; Spanish translation of,
552; French translation of, 593
Stephenson, Nathaniel Wright, 132
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 79, 85,140
Sudermann, Herman, 153, 155-56,
159, 166
Suspended Judgments, 329
Symons, Arthur, 141
Szold, Henrietta, 387
Szyk, Arthur, 542
Theatre Guild, 261, 359
This People, 561, 596-97, 605, 607,
609-14, 624, 660; critique of,
612-14
This Quarter, 502-3, 535, 541,
547-48, 553, 557, 564, 585, 600
Thomas, Calvin, 145,177, 192
Thomas, Norman, 248
Thompson, Dorothy, 375, 455, 573
Titus, Roy, 15, 416-17, 424, 430, 440,
502, 504, 535, 541, 548, 557, 644
Toller, Ernst, 413
Toward Religion, 603-4, 606-7, 609,
652, 663
Town Topics, 114, 136, 224—25, 230,
242, 256, 266
Towne, Charles Hanson, 115, 130
transition, 433, 438, 449
Treasure, The, 200, 624
Trent, W. P., 79, 82-83, 90-91, 93,
103-5, 108,137-40, 143, 647
Trumpet of Jubilee, 640
Ulysses, 417, 432-33, 451, 488,
503, 542; Lewisohn’s defense of,
426-27
United States Customs Service: Crump
banned by, 432
United States Post Office: Crump
banned by, 432, 440, 457, 480
Page 773 - [see page image]
754
Index
United States State Department:
Lewisohn’s struggle with, 15, 367,
371-72, 398, 408-9, 417, 422,
491-93, 498, 517-19, 596, 608,
614, 642-43, 664-65
University of Virginia, 137-38
University of Wisconsin, 14, 145—46,
148-54, 175, 180, 194, 196
Untermeyer, Louis, 334
Up Stream, 12, 14, 28, 29, 32-34, 36,
56-58, 62, 81, 83, 89, 95-96,
100-101, 119, 128, 136, 154,
156, 158, 165, 167, 184-85,
204, 214, 307, 334, 350, 406,
411, 418 (German edition), 445,
460-62, 466, 516, 549, 576,
584, 630, 663; writing of, 178,
206, 264-65, 275-79, 285-87,
289-91, 294-98; critique of,
299-303, 314, 324-25, 392,
476-77, 613, 648, 662; revised
edition of, 417-20, 425, 431-32,
496, 642
Van Doren, Carl, 14, 248, 275, 296,
296, 429, 461-62, 469, 565, 567,
570, 577-78, 641, 650-51
Van Doren, Mark, 14, 248, 456,
548-49, 578
Van Vechten, Carl, 211, 258, 412
Vienna: Lewisohn and, 15, 371-72,
374-75, 384, 386-99, 402
Viereck, George Sylvester, 87-89, 92,
94-104, 106, 108-9, 113-14,
158, 189, 204, 369, 398, 441,
471, 528-29
Viereck, Louis, 87-88
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 202,
247-49, 255-56, 270-72, 282,
331-32, 336, 351, 388
Waring, J. Waites, 58-61
Washington Square Players, 253-54
Wassermann, Jakob, 266, 285, 375,
396, 427, 429, 541
Weisgal, Meyer, 349, 408
Wells, H. G., 610
Wells, T. B., 393, 395, 413, 441-42,
472, 544, 552
Weizmann, Chaim, 332-34, 337, 350,
367,371,387-88,454, 500
Werfel, Franz, 375, 455, 558
Wilson, Woodrow, 202-3
Wise, James Waterman, 468, 549-52,
565, 633
Wise, Stephen, 202, 367, 386-87,
408-9, 453, 467-68, 518-21,
549, 552, 564, 566, 583, 608-9,
614-15, 643, 653, 657-62,
664-65
Wister, Owen, 38
Wolk, Louise. See Lewisohn, Louise
World Zionist Organization, 332,
386-87
World’s Illusion, The, 266, 285, 396
Yezierska, Anzia, 302-3
Yiddish, Theater, 251-53
YMCA, 214-15, 230-31
Zangwill, Israel, 66-67, 467, 559, 592,
610
Zionist: Lewisohn as, 12, 15, 199,
331-32, 337, 343, 349-50,
366-84, 386-92, 395-96, 407-9,
427, 475, 482-83, 487, 505,
523-24, 532, 539, 542, 559-61,
612, 622, 625-27, 648
Zionist Organization of America,
386-87, 408
Zweig, Alfred, 369
Zweig, Stefan, 399