What aspect of the life of the late Norman Mailer last week has not been examined, from his revolting pattern of violence against women, to his boxing and penchant for speaking in comic accents, to the strange décor of his Brooklyn apartment, with its apparatus of “ship’s rigging and nets”?
There is one: a brief but explosive public campaign against modern architecture in 1963 and 1964. The story is told by Neil Levine in Modern Architecture and Other Essays, an anthology of writings by Vincent Scully, the celebrated Yale professor who inadvertently became Mailer’s foil in that campaign.
Modern architecture was still at its summit of prestige and cultural authority in 1963, although the grumbling over Frank Lloyd Wright’s recent Guggenheim Museum and Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building, which closed off Park Avenue’s long vista, was an indication of latent but unfocused public unhappiness. Mailer used his monthly column, “The Big Bite,” in Esquire magazine to rail against these and other buildings. His prose was characteristically bombastic: modern architecture was “totalitarian” and thrust us alone into “the empty landscapes of psychosis, precisely that inner landscape of voice and dread which we flee by turning to totalitarian styles of life.”
What Mailer proposed as an alternative to modernism was not made clear, and one was not sure what to make of his perverse praise for the “Gothic knots and Romanesque oppressions” of his childhood schoolhouses. But it scarcely mattered; the essay drew a storm of public attention and was reprinted in both the Architectural Forum and the Village Voice. For a rebuttal, the Forum enlisted Scully, a historian of unusual eloquence, who took Mailer to task for his “lazy, potboiling paragraphs.” Scully pointed out that modern architecture invariably was opposed to totalitarianism, that both the Soviet and the Nazi state suppressed it, and that Mailer himself was suffering from a vestigial affection for “representationalist” architecture.
Mailer’s rejoinder was memorable. It was not political totalitarianism that he meant but the cultural totalitarianism that arises when architects subordinate the visual character of neighborhoods and cities to their own insatiable egos:
modern architecture . . . tends to excite the Faustian and empty appetites of the architect’s ego rather than reveal an artist’s vision of our collective desire for shelter which is pleasurable, substantial, intricate, intimate, delicate, detailed, foibled, rich in gargoyle, guignol, false closet, secret stair, witch’s hearth, attic, grandeur, kitsch, a world of buildings as diverse as the need within the eye for stimulus and variation. For beware: the ultimate promise of modern architecture is collective sightlessness for the species. Blindness is the fruit of your design.
Such a sentiment is now a commonplace. But in 1964 it was rather unusual, even prescient. For a brief moment, Mailer perceived with clarity (and a surfeit of passion) that something had gone awry with modernism, and he expressed it with extraordinary force.
Mailer’s foray into criticism would be a one-shot affair, not a serious endeavor but simply an opportunity to play the Bad Boy in yet another sphere of human activity. More’s the pity; for Mailer—to judge from this one exchange—clearly had more natural ability as an architecture critic than a boxer.
Europe and Hamas:
Most European countries have for the most part been traditionally Christian countries. And although there are many anti-Jewish and Muslim loving Christians in those countries, shouldn’t the Christians living there be concerned about the growing Muslim populations in those countries and the desires on the part of Jhihadists to establish Islam as the dominant religion in these countries? One would think?
Some big ironies in all this:
“Proportionate respone”
Hey–we invented this! It’s called “Eye for an Eye”.
Number two:
Whenever it’s pointed out that Israel enjoys the tacit and even explicit assent of some Arab governments, reflexive peaceniks say these are corrupt, illegitimate entities that do not enjoy the support of the “Arab Street”.
Yet every time a peace proposal or truce is floated by these same “corrupt, illegitimate” governments, reflexive peaceniks berate Israel for keeping a skeptical distance. Can’t win either way, if you’re Israel.
europes vital interests are the same as ours: cheap oil and no terrorism on our shores. we should be backing hamas not israel if we are talking about vital interests.
I am continually surprised by the ways liberals think about human behavior. Mr. Ash believes that the Muslims of Europe throw away their own lives and endanger the lives of others because they’re so mad about the way some fellow Arabs are treated on another continent – some fellow Arabs, one may add, for whom the European Muslims have never demonstrated the slightest regard, or tried to help in any other detectable way. Why is it that no one worries that Americans will righteously slaughter others because they’re mad about the way some Caucasians are treated somewhere? I await the liberal petition to free Jonathan Pollard on the grounds that Jews being killed by Arab terrorism made him so darned mad – not to mention that by keeping Pollard in jail, we’re just creating more Israeli spies.
big m- yeah islamic terrorism has nothing to do with politics. it’s just a gene they have.
hard to believe neo conservatism is on the wane!
I suppose in some strictly literal sense both the impulse to destroy Israel and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of any authority other than Islam which characterize radical Islamic terrorism *are* political. So what? Does labeling it “political” make it any more susceptible to rational compromise?
No gene. Just a giant chip on a shoulder.
By implication thousands of rocketes shurled at Israel by a group sworn not only to destroy Israel but to kill Jews is within Europe’s interests. Garton Ash can at least be complimented for rare candor.
Then again, it would be false to say that Europeans, especially their elite, are all right with Jew killing. They’re against it, but not to the extent that it actually upsets anybody else. This is hardly new and at least as of this morning Israel’s inattention to the UN resolution is a hopeful sign that the Israelis realize this.
blah blah blah. I swear if the nazis were coming to get us you guys would bravely stand at the front of the pack saying this is anti semtism” as they tossed us into the cattle cars.
yeah, it’s anti semetism. so what? it was anti semetism in ww2, that didn’t stop it from happening did it?
the idea is to avoid getting killed not do everything you can to bring it about.