Writing history, Gustave Flaubert once complained, is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful. With his new book, an 880-page doorstop titled The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand has produced a more impressive quantity. It is the reviewer who is left in the position of Flaubert’s historian, since The Free World itself is oceanic — vast, shapeless, and by turns enervating and sublime. It is a volume that resists summarization.
Menand is a consummate littérateur, at once an English professor at Harvard University, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. He worked on The Free World for a long time. By his own reckoning, Menand spent a year on each of the 18 chapters. They cover the two decades after World War II, “an exceptionally rapid and exciting period of cultural change,” when the United States lost political credibility in the world but moved from the periphery to the center of artistic and intellectual life. Rejecting a survey approach to history, Menand offers a profusion of intimate biographical essays on “the headliners” of the age: Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. The Free World revives the artists and thinkers we complacently learned about in school.
Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001) used group biography to explore the origins of pragmatism, America’s major contribution to philosophy. It concentrated on four men and therefore built up a centripetal energy that The Free World lacks. The new book has many more characters. It ramifies in a hundred directions and is always on the cusp of devolving into a mere collection. Reading it straight through creates the impression of being trapped in a gigantic work of shaggy-dog scholarship, as one swings in a plotless way from capsule biography to capsule biography, from subject to subject. The effect can be indigestive, like consuming five volumes of Oxford Very Short Introductions in a single sitting.
Regarded individually, though, Menand’s thumbnail sketches are canny and lucid, and the chapters are sometimes brilliantly constructed. One chapter begins with Matthew Arnold’s definition of critical disinterestedness — “a free play of the mind” — and elegantly concludes, some 60 pages later, with a discussion of the English translation of Jacques Derrida’s jeu: “freeplay.” Menand also deserves praise for debunking many cherished myths of the era. “The idea that Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world either domestically or internationally,” Menand writes, “is a myth produced by a Cold-War-within-the-Cold-War argument about American cultural imperialism.” In a similar way, The Free World devotes a heroic amount of effort to sorting through the career-minded obfuscations of writers and artists, leaving them no less fascinating than before. Menand suggests, for example, that one of the French critic Roland Barthes’s most celebrated essays was a “review” of a touring MoMA exhibition, The Family of Man, that he never actually saw.
Menand is a relaxed prose stylist, and at his best, he sounds like the first sensible person to discuss a given artwork or literary career, an effect he achieves by writing in a cool succession of understatements. Another one of his trademarks is the clarifying negation: “The twentieth-century paperback revolution was not a revolution in production. It was a revolution in distribution;” “[Trilling] did not go after Stalinists; he went after people who couldn’t see that Stalinism was a problem;” “[Student demands] kept multiplying. This was not because events got out of the organizers’ control. It was because that is the way the New Left was designed to work.”
The Free World has a major throughline, if not quite a unifying theme, in the era’s preoccupation with freedom. An enormous sum of energy was devoted to clarifying the conditions of its existence. Liberal intellectuals such as Trilling and Isaiah Berlin were gripped by the fear that “the line separating liberalism from authoritarianism is much less bright than liberals assume.” The Cold War encouraged slippery-slope anxieties. Everything from national security to instrumental rationality to commercial culture might be insidiously morphing free societies into tyrannies. As Menand writes, “the Cold War charged the atmosphere.” It raised the stakes of artistic and intellectual debate. It turned “questions about value and taste, form and expression, theory and method into questions that bore on the choice between ‘alternative ways of life.’” Freedom was not just a solemn obsession, however. It was also an effective slogan, a wedge that could be used to lift the dead hand of historical circumstance. Menand notes that Martin Luther King Jr. used the word “equality” just once in his I Have a Dream speech, while he spoke of “freedom” 20 times.
The Cold War made ideas, paintings, and movies matter more than they otherwise would have, which accounts for the wistfulness that has greeted the book’s publication. “Remember when high culture was revered?” Michael Dirda asked in the Washington Post. “Louis Menand’s ‘The Free World’ made me nostalgic.” The irony is that Menand doesn’t particularly admire the windiness and self-importance that characterized a great deal of midcentury thought and culture. “There was a lot of righteousness, not to mention self-righteousness, back in the days of Partisan Review,” he wrote in an early version of the Trilling chapter. “The age of heroic criticism [is] over, and thank God.”
This attitude contributes to sober-minded assessments, but it also means a Cold War history that is curiously indifferent to communism. Menand shares a distaste for what Tom Hayden once described as “the morbid traditions” of the anti-communist Left in the U.S. One gathers that he likes the American foreign policy strategist George Kennan because he saw Marxism as a fig leaf for Russian nationalism. Menand acknowledges there was some kind of fuss about communism in the early sections of the book, but he is happier avoiding the subject. This is not because Menand has sympathy for the Soviet Union or fellow travelers. On the contrary, he has always written with firm confidence in the unstoppable logic of egalitarian liberalism and commercial culture. More than any neoconservative, Menand was the perfect critic for the end of history. At a time when criticism is trying to regain its old portentousness, there is something formidably blithe about The Free World.
Timothy Crimmins is a writer in Chicago.
