Some forty years on again and we find Samuel Beckett, an Irishman long resident in Paris, publishing, in French, a series of dialogues on painters and painting with the art critic and son-in-law of Matisse, Georges Duthuit. In the first of these, on Tal-Coat, the Dutch painter so admired by Wallace Stevens as well as himself, he says: ‘I speak of an art … weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.’ What would you put in its place? asks a puzzled Duthuit. ‘The expression that there is nothing to express,’ responds Beckett, ‘nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’
I could go on with my examples. I could quote from Melville's Bartleby and from Mann's Doktor Faustus, from Henry James's Notebooks and from Paul Celan's speech on receiving the Büchner Prize; I could turn to musicians and painters and quote from the letters of Schoenberg and the interviews Francis Bacon gave to David Sylvester, from Giacometti's comments to James Lord and Geörgy Kurtág's account of his Paris crisis in the mid-1950s. But there would be no point. Let these four examples stand for a century of pain, anxiety and despair on the part of writers, painters and composers, and let their words stand for what has been called the Crisis of Modernism.
How are we to respond to this? One way is to ignore it altogether, as does Peter Gay in his recent Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. This dreadful book exemplifies everything that is wrong with positivist history: lacking any questions to put to the past it opts for a mere account of ‘what happened’, and, needing somehow to organise the mass of material, comes up with the theory (though that is too kind to it) that Modernism consisted of two strands — a desire to shock the bourgeoisie and a desire to express subjectivity. The first allows Gay to concentrate (with relief, one feels) on such public events as the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire for obscenity; the second becomes a mantra he can trot out whenever he is faced by a Modernist work. Thus we are told that ‘modernist painters … exhibit their innermost being’ and that ‘the modernist novel is an exercise in subjectivity’. The trouble with the first is that it focuses on a superficial aspect of Modernism, with the second that it is so vague as to be meaningless when it is not at odds with the observable facts, as, for example, when Gay wryly notes that Kafka does not seem to be particularly interested in subjectivity. Though Gay's book is especially bad, it is typical of those studies of the subject which seek to ignore that there was a crisis at all and try merely to describe ‘what happened’ between 1880 and 1940, as they would try to describe ‘what happened’ at any other period.
More interesting, if scarcely more illuminating, are those responses which note the symptoms of a crisis only to dismiss them with various degrees of disdain or condescension. One example of this was typified for me by a lecture I heard given by the first professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, Patrick Corbett. Corbett was a huge man, and, as he spoke, he prowled round the lectern, kicking at the wainscoting and the floor. The lecture went something like this: ‘Kierkegaard! Hunh! (kick) Nietzsche! Hunh! (kick) Dostoevsky! Hunh! (kick) Baudelaire! Hunh! (kick) Sartre! Hunh! (kick) Nothing that a good walk on the Downs wouldn't have put right!’ In other words, these effete ninnies were all suffering from oversensitivity mingled with self-regard; what they had to say was the result of their cosseted upbringing and a sharp kick up the backside was all that was needed to bring them to their senses. This of course has always been the response of the majority of Englishmen to Modernist artists and thinkers. In December 1945 Evelyn Waugh wrote a letter to The Times, commenting on an exhibition of Picasso and Matisse which had just opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Waugh's wit and his mastery of the English language cannot hide the rage he feels when, with the war just won at enormous sacrifice, he and his fellow-countrymen are subjected to such continental posturing:
Señor Picasso's painting cannot be intelligently discussed in the terms used of the civilised masters … The large number of otherwise cultured and intelligent people who fall victim to Señor Picasso are not posers. They are genuinely ‘sent’. It may seem preposterous to those of us who are immune, but the process is apparently harmless. They emerge from their ecstasy as cultured and intelligent as ever. We may even envy them their experience. But do not let us confuse it with the sober and elevating happiness which we derive from the great masters.
Though the names may have changed, and Picasso is now generally accepted, this is still the view of a large section of the British public today, given the courage to voice their view by the likes of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, whose epistolary exchanges (‘all these cheerless craps between 1900 and 1930 — Ginny Woolf and Dai Lawrence and Morgy Forster’) are exactly on a par with Waugh's letter and Corbett's lecture.
A more sophisticated critique of Modernism is the Marxist one I heard put forward by another Sussex professor, Eduard Goldstücker, a charming and cultivated man who had fled Czechoslovakia when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, but who had, before that, as rector of Charles University, been responsible for making Kafka acceptable inside the Soviet bloc. He maintained that, intelligent and perceptive as writers like Kierkegaard and Kafka were, what they really tell us is that the bourgeoisie was in crisis and that what they took to be personal and artistic problems were in fact social ones, and that once these were resolved, as they one day would be, we would look back on them and their complaints as historical curiosities.
Finally, there is a completely different kind of response which we might label the post-Modern. This takes the form of saying that we are all infinitely flexible, that we can all choose our traditions as and where we like, so that there is no need to get into a state about a crisis in one tradition, we simply need to let it go and jump onto another train, as it were. The anxiety, not to say obsession, evinced by the Modernists betrays, the post-Modernist suggests, an unwarranted belief in Truth and Self. There are, however, he argues, many truths and many selves, and what the angst expressed by these writers shows is how much they were still in thrall to now outdated notions which had long been dear to Western thought but which we have now thankfully laid to rest.
None of the charges put forward by the last three groups of critics is entirely silly. One can easily lose patience with Kafka's masochism and his self-centredness, with Picasso's egotism and Beckett's elegant, almost mannered, expressions of despair. Reading Waugh taking pot shots at Picasso and Wittgenstein, or Larkin and Amis laughing at Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, is refreshing — we don't, after all, want to worship them, or any artist. But unfortunately what we get is not simply a criticism of what these artists were like as human beings or of the adulation they evoked in this or that coterie; it slips all too easily into a response to their work, and one can't help feeling that Larkin and Amis are rather like little boys overawed at a grown-up party and determined to show they aren't by being rude to the guests. (Waugh is much grander and more sure of himself; his philistinism exudes the confidence of a long tradition of smoking-room suspicion of continental poseurs.) As for Goldstücker, there is a point to his view that this is a social as much as an artistic crisis. It is not a crisis, though, that has an obvious solution, whether social or artistic. The post-Modernist too puts his finger on a real problem: Modernists do occasionally give the impression that they are fighting old battles with inadequate tools. But the best explorations of the issue, whether by the artists themselves, or by such critics as Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin or Erich Heller, are undertaken with full awareness of these pitfalls, while at the same time denying that we can simply choose our traditions as and where we want them.