Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (2 page)

The emergence of Einstein as a world figure in 1919 is a striking illustration of the dual impact of great scientific innovators on mankind. They change our perception of the physical world and increase our mastery of it. But they also change our ideas. The second effect is often more radical than the first. The scientific genius impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman or warlord. Galileo’s empiricism created the ferment of natural philosophy in the seventeenth Century which adumbrated the scientific and industrial revolutions. Newtonian physics formed the framework of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and so helped to bring modern nationalism and revolutionary politics to birth. Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism. Indeed the politicai and social consequences of Darwinian ideas have yet to work themselves out, as we shall see throughout this book. So, too, the public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

The impact of relativity was especially powerful because it virtually coincided with the public reception of Freudianism. By the time Eddington verified Einstein’s General Theory, Sigmund Freud was already in his mid-fifties. Most of his really original work had been done by the turn of the Century.
The Interpretation of Dreams
had been published as long ago as 1900. He was a well-known and controversial figure in specialized medical and Psychiatric circles, had already founded his own school and enacted a spectacular theological dispute with his leading disciple, Carl Jung, before the Great War broke out. But it was only at the end of the war that his ideas began to circulate as common currency.

The reason for this was the attention the prolonged trench-fighting focused on cases of mental disturbance caused by stress: ‘shell-shock’ was the popular term. Well-born scions of military families, who had volunteered for service, fought with conspicuous gallantry and been repeatedly decorated, suddenly broke. They could not be cowards, they were not madmen. Freud had long offered, in psychoanalysis, what seemed to be a sophisticated alternative to the ‘heroic’ methods of curing mental illness, such as drugs, bullying, or electric-shock treatment. Such methods had been abundantly used, in ever-growing doses, as the war dragged on, and as ‘eures’ became progressively short-lived. When the electric current was increased, men died under treatment, or committed suicide rather than face more, like victims of the Inquisition. The post-war fury of relatives at the cruelties
inflicted in military hospitals, especially the Psychiatric division of the Vienna General Hospital, led the Austrian government in 1920 to set up a commission of inquiry, which cailed in Freud.
¹¹
The resulting controversy, though inconclusive, gave Freud the world-wide publicity he needed. Professionally, 1920 was the year of breakthrough for him, when the first Psychiatric polyclinic was opened in Berlin, and his pupil and future biographer, Ernest Jones, launched the
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

But even more spectacular, and in the long run far more important, was the sudden discovery of Freud’s works and ideas by intellectuals and artists. As Havelock Ellis said at the time, to the Master’s indignation, Freud was not a scientist but a great artist.
¹²
After eighty years’ experience, his methods of therapy have proved, on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than cure the sick.
¹³
We now know that many of the central ideas of psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formulated by Freud before the discovery of Mendel’s Laws, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, the existence of hormones and the mechanism of the nervous impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory is false.
¹⁴
Moreover, as the young Karl Popper correctly noted at the time, Freud’s attitude to scientific proof was very different to Einstein’s and more akin to Marx’s. Far from formulating his theories with a high degree of specific content which invited empirical testing and refutation, Freud made them all-embracing and difficult to test at all. And, like Marx’s followers, when evidence did turn up which appeared to refute them, he modified the theories to accommodate it. Thus the Freudian corpus of belief was subject to continual expansion and osmosis, like a religious system in its formative period. As one would expect, internal critics, like Jung, were treated as heretics; external ones, like Havelock Ellis, as infidels. Freud betrayed signs, in fact, of the twentieth-century messianic ideologue at his worst – namely, a persistent tendency to regard those who diverged from him as themselves unstable and in need of treatment. Thus Ellis’s disparagement of his scientific status was dismissed as ‘a highly sublimated form of resistance’.
¹⁵
‘My inclination’, he wrote to Jung just before their break, ‘is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation’.
¹⁶
Two decades later, the notion of regarding dissent as a form of mental sickness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression.

But if Freud’s work had little true scientific content, it had literary
and imaginative qualities of a high order. His style in German was magnetic and won him the nation’s highest literary award, the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt. He translated well. The anglicization of the existing Freudian texts became an industry in the Twenties. But the new literary output expanded too, as Freud allowed his ideas to embrace an ever-widening field of human activity and experience. Freud was a gnostic. He believed in the existence of a hidden structure of knowledge which, by using the techniques he was devising, could be discerned beneath the surface of things. The dream was his starting-point. It was not, he wrote, ‘differently constructed from the neurotic symptom. Like the latter, it may seem strange and senseless, but when it is examined by means of a technique which differs slightly from the free association method used in psychoanalysis, one gets from its
manifest content
to its
hidden meaning
, or to its latent thoughts.’
¹⁷

Gnosticism has always appealed to intellectuals. Freud offered a particularly succulent variety. He had a brilliant gift for classical allusion and imagery at a time when all educated people prided themselves on their knowledge of Greek and Latin. He was quick to seize on the importance attached to myth by the new generation of social anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer, whose
The Golden Bough
began to appear in 1890. The meaning of dreams, the function of myth – into this potent brew Freud stirred an all-pervading potion of sex, which he found at the root of almost all forms of human behaviour. The war had loosened tongues over sex; the immediate post-war period saw the habit of sexual discussion carried into print. Freud’s time had come. He had, in addition to his literary gifts, some of the skills of a sensational journalist. He was an adept neologian. He could mint a striking slogan. Almost as often as his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, he added words and phrases to the language: ‘the unconscious’, ‘infantile sexuality’, the Oedipus complex’, ‘inferiority complex’, ‘guilt complex’, the ego, the id and the super-ego, ‘sublimation’, ‘depth-psychology’. Some of his salient ideas, such as the sexual interpretation of dreams or what became known as the ‘Freudian slip’, had the appeal of new intellectual parlour-games. Freud knew the value of topicality. In 1920, in the aftermath of the suicide of Europe, he published
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, which introduced the idea of the ‘death instinct’, soon vulgarized into the ‘death-wish’. For much of the Twenties, which saw a further abrupt decline in religious belief, especially among the educated, Freud was preoccupied with anatomizing religion, which he saw as a purely human construct. In
The Future of an Illusion
(1927) he dealt with man’s unconscious attempts to mitigate unhappiness. ‘The attempt to procure’, he wrote, ‘a protection
against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.’
¹⁸

This seemed the voice of the new age. Not for the first time, a prophet in his fifties, long in the wilderness, had suddenly found a rapt audience of gilded youth. What was so remarkable about Freudianism was its protean quality and its ubiquity. It seemed to have a new and exciting explanation for everything. And, by virtue of Freud’s skill in encapsulating emergent trends over a wide range of academic disciplines, it appeared to be presenting, with brilliant panache and masterful confidence, ideas which had already been half-formulated in the minds of the élite. ‘That is what I have always thought!’ noted an admiring André Gide in his diary. In the early 1920s, many intellectuals discovered that they had been Freudians for years without knowing it. The appeal was especially strong among novelists, ranging from the young Aldous Huxley, whose dazzling
Crome Yellow
was written in 1921, to the sombrely conservative Thomas Mann, to whom Freud was ‘an oracle’.

The impact of Einstein and Freud upon intellectuals and creative artists was all the greater in that the coming of peace had made them aware that a fundamental revolution had been and was still taking place in the whole world of culture, of which the concepts of relativity and Freudianism seemed both portents and echoes. This revolution had deep pre-war roots. It had already begun in 1905, when it was trumpeted in a public speech, made appropriately enough by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the
Ballets Russes:

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.
¹⁹

As Diaghilev spoke, the first exhibition of the Fauves was to be seen in Paris. In 1913 he staged there Stravinsky’s
Sacre du Printemps;
by then Schoenberg had published the atonal
Drei Klavierstücke
and Alban Berg his String Quartet (Opus 3); and Matisse had invented the term ‘Cubism’. It was in 1909 that the Futurists published their manifesto and Kurt Hiller founded his Neue Club in Berlin, the nest of the artistic movement which, in 1911, was first termed Expressionism.
²⁰
Nearly all the major creative figures of the 1920s had already been published, exhibited or performed before 1914, and in that sense the Modern
Movement was a pre-war phenomenon. But it needed the desperate convulsions of the great struggle, and the crashing of regimes it precipitated, to give modernism the radical political dimension it had hitherto lacked, and the sense of a ruined world on which it would construct a new one. The elegiac, even apprehensive, note Diaghilev Struck in 1905 was thus remarkably perceptive. The cultural and political strands of change could not be separated, any more than during the turbulence of revolution and romanticism of 1790–1830. It has been noted that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin were all resident-exiles in Zurich in 1916, waiting for their time to come.
²¹

With the end of the war, modernism sprang onto what seemed an empty stage in a blaze of publicity. On the evening of 9 November 1918 an Expressionist Council of Intellectuals met in the Reichstag building in Berlin, demanding the nationalization of the theatres, the state subsidization of the artistic professions and the demolition of all academies. Surrealism, which might have been designed to give visual expression to Freudian ideas – though its origins were quite independent – had its own programme of action, as did Futurism and Dada. But this was surface froth. Deeper down, it was the disorientation in space and time induced by relativity, and the sexual gnosticism of Freud, which seemed to be characterized in the new creative models. On 23 June 1919 Marcel Proust published
A l’Ombre des jeunes filles
, the beginning of a vast experiment in disjointed time and subterranean sexual emotions which epitomized the new pre-occupations. Six months later, on 10 December, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt, and the centre of gravity of French letters had made a decisive shift away from the great survivors of the nineteenth Century.
²²
Of course as yet such works circulated only among the influential few. Proust had to publish his first volume at his own expense and sell it at one-third the cost of production (even as late as 1956, the complete
A la Récherche du temps perdu
was still seiling less than 10,000 sets a year).
²³
James Joyce, also working in Paris, could not be published at all in the British Isles. His
Ulysses
, completed in 1922, had to be issued by a private press and smuggled across frontiers. But its significance was not missed. No novel illustrated more clearly the extent to which Freud’s concepts had passed into the language of literature. That same year, 1922, the poet T.S.Eliot, himself a newly identified prophet of the age, wrote that it had ‘destroyed the whole of the nineteenth Century’.
²⁴
Proust and Joyce, the two great harbingers and centre-of-gravity-shifters, had no place for each other in the
Weltanschauung
they inadvertently shared. They met in Paris on 18 May 1922, after the first night of Stravinsky’s
Rénard
, at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who had
already insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his taxi. The drunken Irishman assured him he had not read one syllable of his works and Proust, incensed, reciprocated the compliment, before driving on to the Ritz where he had an arrangement to be fed at any hour of the night.
²⁵
Six months later he was dead, but not before he had been acclaimed as the literary interpreter of Einstein in an essay by the celebrated mathematician Camille Vettard.
²⁶
Joyce dismissed him, in
Finnegans Wake
, with a pun:
‘Prost bitte’.