Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Freed’s renaming of R & B was shrewd. Repackaged, it was no longer race music, and white stations could play it. Record companies soon caught on, one response being to issue white (and usually sanitised) versions of black songs. For instance, some regard ‘Sh-Boom,’ by the Chords, as the very first rock ‘n’ roll number.44 No sooner had it hit the airwaves, however, than Mercury Records released the Crew Cuts’ sanitised ‘cover’ version, which entered the Top Ten in a week. Soon, white performers like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley were imitating black music and outdoing them in terms of commercial success.45 Films like The Blackboard Jungle and TV programs like American Bandstand further popularised the music, which above all provided a cohesive and instantly recognisable force for teenagers everywhere.46 For the sociologically minded, early pop/rock songs reflected Riesman’s theories very neatly – for example, Paul Anka’s ‘Lonely Boy’ (1959), the Videls’ ‘Mr Lonely’ (1960), Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’ (1960), and Brenda Lee’s ‘All Alone Am I’ (1962), although loneliness, one assumes, had existed before sociology. A crucial aspect of the rock business, incidentally, and often overlooked, was the hit chart. In the new transient conformist communities that W. H. Whyte had poked fun at, statistics were important, to show people what others were doing, and to allow them to do the same.47 But the most significant thing about the advent of rock/pop was that it was yet another nail in the coffin of high culture. The words that went with the music – fashion, the ‘altered consciousness’ induced by drugs, love, and above all sex – became the anthems of the generation. The sounds of rock drowned out everything else, and the culture of young people would never be the same again.

  It was no accident that pop developed as a result of the white middle classes adopting black music, or a version of it. As the 1950s wore on, black self-consciousness was rising. American blacks had fought in the war, shared the risks equally with whites. Quite naturally they wanted their fair share of the prosperity that followed, and as it became clear in the 1950s that that wasn’t happening, especially in the South, where segregation was still humiliatingly obvious, the black temper began to simmer. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on 17 May 1954 that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, thereby repudiating the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that had prevailed until then, it was only a matter of time (in fact, eighteen months) until Rosa Parks, a black American, was arrested for sitting at the front of the bus in a section reserved for whites, in Montgomery, Alabama. The civil rights movement, which was to tear America apart, may be said to have begun that day. Internationally, there were parallel developments, as former colonies that had also fought in World War II negotiated their independence and with it a rising self-consciousness. (India achieved independence in 1947, Libya in 1951, Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960.) The result was that black writing flourished in the 1950s.

  In the United States we have already seen what the Harlem Renaissance had accomplished in the 1920s. The career of Richard Wright spanned the war, his two most important books appearing at either end of the conflict, Native Son in 1940, and Black Boy in 1945. Beautifully written, Wright’s books agonisingly describe what was then a slowly changing world. A protégé of Wright’s found this even harder to take.

  Ralph Ellison had wanted to be a musician since he was eight years old, when his mother had bought him a cornet. But he ‘blundered into writing’ after attending Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in 1933 and discovering in the library there T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land.48 Inspired jointly by his friendship with Wright and by Hemingway’s reports from the Spanish Civil War in the New York Times, Edison eventually produced Invisible Man in 1952. In this large book, the hero (unnamed) passes through all the stages of modern American black history: ‘a Deep South childhood; a Negro college supported by northern philanthropy; factory work in the North; exposure to the frenzy of sophisticated Negro city life in Harlem; a “back-to-Africa” movement; a Communist-type outfit known as “The Brotherhood”; and even a “hipster” episode.’49 Yet each of these regurgitates him: the invisible man fits in nowhere. Edison, despite his earlier criticism of Gunnar Myrdal, had little positive to offer beyond this bleak criticism of all the possibilities that face the black man. And he himself fed strangely silent after this novel, becoming not a little invisible himself. It was left to the third of the American Negro writers to ready get under the skin of the whites, and he only did it when he was thrown by force of circumstance into the fire.

  Born in 1924, one of ten children, James Arthur Jones grew up in crushing poverty and never knew his father. He took his stepfather’s name when his mother married David Baldwin some years later. That stepfather was a preacher of ‘incendiary’ sermons, with an ‘ingrained’ hatred of whites, so that by the time he was fourteen James Baldwin had acquired both characteristics.50 But his preaching and his moralising had revealed him to have a talent for writing, and he had been introduced to the New Leader (where C. Wright Mills got his break) by Philip Rahv. Because he was homosexual as well as black, Baldwin took a leaf out of Richard Wright’s book and became an exile in Paris, where he wrote his first works. These were firmly in the tradition of American pragmatic realism, influenced by Henry James and John Dos Passos. Baldwin defined his role then as being ‘white America’s inside-eye on the closed families and locked churches of Harlem, the discreet observer of homosexual scenes in Paris, above all the sensitive recorder of the human heart in conflict with itself.’51 He made a name for himself with Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni’s Room (1956), but it was with the emergence of the civil rights movement in the later 1950s that his life took on new and more urgent dimensions. Returning to the United States from France in July 1957, in September he was commissioned by Harper’s magazine to cover the struggle for integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. On 5 September that year, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had attempted to prevent the admission of black pupils to a school in Little Rock, whereupon President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce integration and protect the children.

  The experience changed Baldwin: ‘From being a black writer carving out a career in a white world, Baldwin was becoming black.’52 No longer a mere observer, he conquered his fear of the South (as he himself put it) in the pages of Harper’s, his anger and his honesty laid bare for the white readers to accept or reject. The message he conveyed, in painful, raw language, was this: ‘They [the students in the sit-ins and freedom marches] are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them.’53 Two of Baldwin’s essays were reprinted as a book, The Fire Next Time, which attracted a great deal of attention as he eloquently discovered a language for the Negro experience and explained to whites the virulent anger inside blacks. ‘For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language…. I realised what tremendous things were happening and that I did have a role to play. I can’t be happy here, but I can work here.’54 The anger of the blacks was out of the bag and could never be put back.

  Elsewhere, black writing was also making advances, though in Britain the novels of Colin Maclnnes (Absolute Beginners, 1959, and Mr Love and Mr Justice, 1960) were more astute observations on the way of life of West Indians in London, who had been arriving since 1948 to work in the capital’s transport system, than arguments with any direct social or political point.55 In France, the concept of négritude had been coined before World War II but had only entered general usage since 1945. Its main theme was a glorification of the African past, often stressing black emotion and intuition as opposed to Hellenic reason and logic. Its main exponents were Léopold Senghor, president of Senegal, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria, is considered in chapter 30 (page 526). Négritude was a somewhat precious word that made the process it described sound safer than it did in the hands of, say, Baldwin or Edison. But its central message, like theirs, was t
hat black culture, black life, was every bit as rich, as meaningful, and yes, as satisfying as any other, that art that was original, moving, and worth sharing, could be made out of the black experience.

  In fact, négritude was a European label for something that was happening in francophone Africa.56 And what was happening was much tougher and more profound than the word made it appear. This process – decolonisation – was an inevitable by-product of World War II. Not only were the colonial powers now too enfeebled to maintain their hold on their possessions, having relied on colonial manpower to help them fight their wars, they were under strong moral pressure to relinquish their political hold. These developments were naturally accompanied by parallel intellectual changes.

  The first modern realistic novel to be published in West Africa was Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), although it was the publication in 1951 of Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard that made the Western metropolitan countries aware of the new literary developments occurring in Africa.57 Above ad, however, Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, was the archetypal African novel. It described a situation – the falling apart of a traditional African society as a result of the arrival of the white man – in vivid terms that contained beautiful English. It was recognisably sophisticated yet set in an unmistakable non-Western landscape – non-Western emotionally and non-Western geographically. And it was all woven into a superb tragedy.58

  Achebe’s mother tongue was Ibo, but he learned English as a boy and in 1953 became one of the first students to graduate, in English literature, from University College, Ibadan. Besides Achebe’s profound sympathy for the imperfections of his characters, the beauty of his approach is his realisation – revealed in his title – that all societies, all civilisations, contain the seeds of their destruction, so that the arrival of the white man in his story is not so much the cause as the catalyst to speed along what was happening anyway. Okonkwo, the hero of the novel, a member of the Igbo culture, is a respected elder of his vidage, a macho man, a successful farmer and wrestler, but at odds with his son, a far gentler soul.59 The reader is drawn into the rhythms of the vidage, Umofia, so successfully that even the Western reader accepts that the ‘barbaric’ customs of the society have good reason. Indeed, we are given a crystal-clear picture of a society that is stable, rich, ‘complex, and fundamentally humane’ – that is thought out. When Okonkwo breaks the rules of the vidage, we accept that this must mean seven years in exile. When the hostage he has raised in his family – whose existence and love for Okonkwo we have come to accept – is murdered, and when Okonkwo himself delivers one of the blows, we accept even this, in itself a remarkable achievement of Achebe’s. And when the white man arrives, we too are as baffled by his behaviour as are the villagers of Umofia. But Achebe, much as he loathed colonialism, was not intent on merely white-man-bashing. He drew attention to the shortcomings of Umofia society – its stasis, its inability to change, the ways in which its own outcasts or misfits might well be drawn to Christianity (Okonkwo is himself unchanged, which is part of his tragedy). Things Fall Apart is a profoundly affecting work, beautifully constructed.60 In Onkokwo and Umofia, Achebe created a character and a society of universal significance.

  A second Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, a poet and playwright, published his first work, The Lion and the Jewel, a year after Achebe’s, in 1958. This was a play in verse, a comedy, also set in an African village, which enjoyed a great success. Soyinka was a more ‘anthropological’ writer than Achebe, using Yoruba myths to great effect (he even made an academic study of them). Anthropology was itself one of several academic disciplines that helped reshape what was regarded as ‘culture,’ and here Claude Lévi-Strauss was the most influential figure, with two works published in 1955. Born in Belgium in 1908, Lévi-Strauss grew up near Versailles and became a student at the University of Paris. After graduating, he did fieldwork in Brazil while he was professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo. Further fieldwork followed, in Cuba, but Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 for military service. In 1941 he arrived as a refugee at the New School for Social Research in New York, and after the war he was French cultural attaché to the United States. Eventually, he would be appointed to the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, in 1959, but by then he had begun his remarkable series of publications. These fell into three kinds. There were his studies in kinship, examining the way familial relationships were understood among many different (but mainly Amerindian) tribes; there were his studies of mythologies, exploring what they reveal about the way people very different on the surface think about things; and third, there was a sort of autobiographical/philosophical/travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955.61

  Lévi-Strauss’s theories were very complex and not helped by his own style, which was far from easy and on more than one occasion defeated his translators. He is, therefore, an author very difficult to do justice to in a book of this kind. Nevertheless we may say that, his studies of kinship apart, Lévi-Strauss’s work has two main elements. In his paper ‘The Structural Study of Myth,’ published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1955, the same year as Tristes Tropiques appeared, and later developed in his four-volume Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss examined hundreds of myths around the world. Though trained in anthropology, he came to this work, he said, with ‘three mistresses’ – geology, Marx, and Freud.62 The Freudian element in his work is much more obvious than the Marxian, or the geology, but what he appears to have meant is that, like Marx and Freud, he was seeking to find the universal structures that underlie human experience; like the historians of the Annales school (chapter 31), he saw the broad sweeps of history as more important than more proximate events.63

  All mythologies, Lévi-Strauss said, share a universal, inbuilt logic. Any corpus of mythological tales, he observed, contains a recurrent harping on elementary themes – incest, fratricide, patricide, cannibalism. Myth was ‘a kind of collective dream,’ an ‘instrument of darkness’ capable of being decoded.64 In all, in what became four volumes, he examined 813 different stories with an extraordinary ingenuity that many, especially his Anglo-Saxon critics such as Edmund Leach, have refused to accept. He observes for instance that across the world, where figures from myth are born of the earth rather than from woman, they are given either very unusual names or some deformity such as a clubfoot to signify the fact.65 At other times myths concern themselves with ‘overrated’ kin relationships (incest) or ‘underrated’ relationships (fratricide/parricide). Other myths concern themselves with the preparation of food (cooked/raw), whether there is sound or silence, whether people are dressed or undressed. It was Lévi-Strauss’s claim, essentially, that if myth could be understood, it would explain how early man first came to decipher the world and would therefore represent the fundamental, unconscious structure of the mind. His approach, which came as a revelation for many people, also had one important secondary effect. He himself said explicitly that on the basis of his inquiries, there is really no difference between the ‘primitive’ mind and the ‘developed’ mind, that so-called savages are just as sophisticated in their storytelling, just as removed from the truly primitive, as we are ourselves.66

  Earlier in the century, as we have seen, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict’s work had been important in showing how different peoples around the world differ in various aspects of their behaviour (such as sex).67 Conversely, the thrust of Lévi-Strauss’s work was to show how, at root, myths reveal the essential similarity, the basic concordance, of human nature and beliefs right across the globe. This was an immensely influential view in the second half of the twentieth century, not only helping to undermine the validity of evolved high culture put forward by Eliot, Trilling, et alia, but promoting the idea of ‘local knowledge,’ the notion that cultural expression is valid even though it applies only to specific locations, whose reading of that expression may be much more diverse and complex – richer – than is evident to outsiders. In this, Lév
i-Strauss and Chinua Achebe were saying the same thing.

  This development in anthropology was aided by a parallel change in its sister discipline, archaeology. In 1959 Basil Davidson published Old Africa Rediscovered, a detailed account of the ‘Dark Continent’s’ distant past. A later year, Oxford University Press released its magisterial History of African Music. Both these works will be properly considered in chapter 31, where we examine new concepts in historical thinking.68 But they belong here too, for running through the work of Ellison, Baldwin, Maclnnes, Achebe, Lévi-Strauss, and Basil Davidson was the experience of being black in a non-black world. Responses differed, but what they shared was a growing awareness that the art, history, language, and very experience of being black had been deliberately devalued, or rendered invisible, in the past. That history, that language, that experience, needed to be urgently reclaimed, and given a shape and a voice. It was a different alternative culture to that of the Beats, but it was no less rich, varied, or valid. Here was a common pursuit that had its own great tradition.