Lévi-Strauss’s association with the surrealists was a fertile coming together of ideas. He was interested in midcentury artistic preoccupations: the subversive power of the subconscious, the importance of myth, irrationality and juxtaposition. The surrealists saw anthropology and psychology as the key modernist disciplines. They fed off half-digested ethnography and idolized tribal art. Just before the outbreak of the war, the artist Kurt Seligmann had spent almost four months at a trading station in British Columbia observing the ritual life and artwork of the Northwest Coast Indians, shipping an eighteen-meter-high totem pole back to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Breton was a keen collector of indigenous artifacts, which had lined his studio in Paris. And while driving back across America from Santa Monica in Peggy Guggenheim’s Buick convertible, Max Ernst stopped off to witness Hopi dances and collect Zuni kachinas (figurines) carved from cottonwood root.
In New York, Ernst chanced upon even richer pickings. He was walking past a shop on Third Avenue, run by a German antiques dealer named Julius Carlebach, when a spoon caught the corner of his eye. It was of Northwest Coast indigenous provenance and was being displayed as a part of a collection of spoons from around the world. Ernst spoke to the dealer, who told him he would put together a collection of Northwest Coast tribal artifacts, which Ernst subsequently snapped up. At first he kept the shop’s location hidden from his fellow artists, turning down Seligmann’s offer to reveal the source in exchange for his collection of witchcraft illustrations, but eventually Breton tracked the shop down.
Soon Lévi-Strauss, along with all the surrealists, were descending on Carlebach’s store, pooling their money to buy up the Teotihuacán stone masks, Northwest Coast wood carvings, and Inuit and Melanesian art. Carlebach was a man of simple tastes, only interested in “old German chinaware and quaint curios of the Gemütlich type,” but, guided by the surrealists, he bought up wooden carved masks, bowls and clubs with built-in visual puns. His source was the Museum of the American Indian’s warehouse in the Bronx, which was filled with so-called duplicates that the director was selling off for fifty dollars apiece. One afternoon two taxis full of surrealist artists—among them Ernst, Breton, Matta, Tanguy and Seligmann, along with Lévi-Strauss and Georges Duthuit, the art critic and son-in-law of Matisse—set out for the Bronx warehouse. With the help of a guard, they toured the museum’s stores, selecting choice artifacts, which would then mysteriously end up for sale in Carlebach’s shop.51
For the collector, New York at midcentury was a treasure trove. A spectacular range of global flotsam had washed up in what had already become one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. With the right connections, there were trunks of Peruvian antiques, shelves piled high with Nazca vases, boxes of jewelry salvaged from the Russian Revolution or packing cases of rare Utamaro Japanese prints on offer, sold informally from apartments, garages and sheds in the backstreets of midtown Manhattan. The secondhand shops were piled high with sixteenth-century Spanish and Italian furniture. Though relatively poor at the time, Lévi-Strauss found he could afford an antique Tuscan sideboard, on sale for just a couple of dollars. After the war he had it shipped back to Europe, where it furnished his apartment in Paris.52
IN 1942 AMERICAN SURREALIST artist David Hare, working with Breton and Ernst, launched the journal VVV, a Documents-like combination of poetry, art, anthropology, sociology and psychology. Their stated aim was “to distinguish what is dead from what is living in all fields relevant to art and action,” an enterprise requiring “the very different skills of coroner and midwife.”53 The first issue is like a time capsule representing the artistic tics and obsessions of an era, containing pieces on mythology, childhood, dream imagery and discussions about the possibilities of purity through spontaneity. Incongruously wedged between poetry by Aimé Césaire and a collection of surreal images—a clock in fragments, an umbrella on a staircase, bathtubs in a field, a New England church with pews outside—was a piece by Lévi-Strauss.
It was titled “Indian Cosmetics” and returned to the mysterious volutes and coils—the “expert bruisings” and “graphic surgery,” as he put it—that he had photographed on the faces of the Caduveo women in backland Mato Grosso years before. By now, his analysis was beginning to focus on formal, aesthetic aspects:These highly developed compositions, at once unsymmetrical and balanced, are begun in one corner or other, and carried out without hesitation, going over, or erasure, to their conclusion. They evidently spring from an unvarying fundamental theme, in which crosses, tendrils, fret-work and spirals play an important part. Nevertheless, each one constitutes an original work: the basic motifs are combined with an ingenuity, a richness of imagination, even an audacity, which continually spring afresh.54
The extract is an intriguing window on his thinking on the eve of his theoretical breakthrough. It was as if he was groping toward a way of reconciling unity and difference, genre and originality.
Also in the issue was Lévi-Strauss’s appreciation of Bronislaw Malinowski, the recently deceased father of modern fieldwork. He heaped praise on Malinowski’s contribution to anthropology, both in terms of his pathbreaking ethnographic work and his twinning of “the two most revolutionary disciplines of our time: ethnology and psychoanalysis.” From now on, wrote Lévi-Strauss, all ethnography would be viewed as “pre- or post-Malinowski.” But the review had a sting in the tail, and a highly ironic one, given Lévi-Strauss’s future orientation. He criticized Malinowski’s “inexplicable disdain for history” and “absolute contempt for material culture.”55 Lévi-Strauss would always be interested in material culture, but would go on to reject outright historical approaches to ethnography.
THROUGH THE SUMMER MONTHS Lévi-Strauss tried to pick up the thread of his academic career. He finally began writing up his fieldwork notes, working them into a publishable thesis. He decided to write in English, to master a language in which he still felt clumsy. In the meantime he made contact with the leading lights of anthropology in the United States. He got in contact with Alfred Métraux, who was teaching at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. The two became close friends. Métraux would stay in the Greenwich Village studio when he was visiting New York, with Lévi-Strauss sleeping on a camp bed in the sitting room. At the time Métraux was organizing the Handbook of South American Indians, an encyclopedic overview of the region’s ethnography, and he invited Lévi-Strauss to contribute sections on the indigenous groups of central Brazil. Robert Lowie, who had supported his application to the New School, and Alfred Kroeber were teaching in California but made contact on visits to New York. Lévi-Strauss met anthropologists Ralph Linton and Ruth Benedict and got a taste of the departmental politics at Columbia University. Linton and Benedict’s mutual loathing was legendary, and they would invite Lévi-Strauss to dinner to bitch about each other.
But, most important, he had the opportunity to meet Franz Boas, then in the last years of his life. Boas had begun fieldwork among the Inuit on Baffin Island in the 1880s, before working with Pacific Northwest groups, including the Kwakiutl (now known as the Kwakwaka’wakw). He became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia—a post he held for thirty-seven years. A small-framed, intense figure with his bushy mustache, goatee beard and swept-back gray hair, Boas was the first to back up a professional interest in Native American culture with detailed fieldwork research into language, physical anthropology and material culture. His students, among them Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir, defined the first wave of institutionalized anthropology in America. “All of American anthropology issued from him,” Lévi-Strauss later said, without exaggeration.56
Lévi-Strauss wrote to Boas as soon as he arrived in New York. Boas received him cordially, as the young, unknown, virtually unpublished French anthropologist he then was. Lévi-Strauss subsequently went to Boas’s house in Grantwood across the Hudson, where he admired Boas’s collections of Kwakiutl wood carvings. Boas liked to tell the story of when he brought a Kwakiutl informant to
New York for the first time. The Native American seemed unimpressed by the heaving avenues, rows of skyscrapers, subways and the steam rising through pavement vents. What caught his attention were the freak shows that still ran on Times Square, with their dwarves and bearded ladies. He also developed specific aesthetic interests—becoming fixated on the brass balls on staircase banisters and on tumble clothes dryers in Laundromats—just as the anthropologist was wont to fetishize certain aspects of the indigenous cultures he visited.57
Much later, at the end of 1942, Lévi-Strauss and Boas met on one final occasion at a lunch that has gone down in the annals of anthropology. The lunch was organized in honor of another French exile, Dr. Rivet of the Musée de l’Homme, with guests including Boas’s protégés Mead, Benedict and Linton. Rivet had been working in South America in Colombia and was passing through New York en route to Mexico. On a bitter winter’s day they settled around a large dining table at the university faculty club. “Boas was very jovial,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “In the middle of a conversation, he shoved himself violently away from the table and fell backwards. I was seated next to him and bent down to lift him up. Rivet, who had started his career as a military doctor, tried in vain to revive him. Boas was dead.”58
LÉVI-STRAUSS BEGAN WORK in the autumn at the New School for Social Research, his name chopped down to Claude L. Strauss, to distinguish himself from the jeans. “The students would find it funny,” he was told by way of explanation. The confusion would plague him throughout his life. “Hardly a year goes by without my receiving, usually from Africa, an order for a pair of jeans,” he told Didier Eribon in the 1980s—though, with fame, Lévi-Strauss found he could almost hold his own. When he gave his name while queuing for a restaurant in San Francisco in the 1980s, the waiter shot back, “The pants or the books?”59
The New School brought together émigrés from around Europe, great minds working in a looser, cross-disciplinary milieu. It was a vibrant environment, in which new music, theater and film mixed freely with academia. Lévi-Strauss gave lectures on the contemporary sociology of South America, a subject in which he had little grounding, beyond his experiences in Brazil. He had boned up on the topic over the summer and managed to pull together a series of evening classes, skipping from Argentina to Peru to Bolivia. He still struggled with the language, but since most of the students were also foreign refugees, broken English became the lingua franca.
In early 1942 the École libre des hautes études de New York—a kind of French university-in-exile—was inaugurated next door to the New School. Backed by De Gaulle’s Free French, as well as the Belgian government-in-exile, the university opened to great fanfare at the Assembly Hall of Hunter College with three thousand in attendance and Metropolitan Opera singers on hand to sing the American, Belgian and French national anthems. The New York Times compared the École’s role to Constantinople’s sheltering of scholars after the fall of Rome. The historical subtext was clear: in response to the boorish Nazi empire, French-speaking Jews—barred by racist laws from working in France, Belgium and Eastern Europe—were being welcomed in the New World. It became a major francophone institution in New York, with ninety professors teaching almost a thousand students in subjects ranging from cinematography to law.60
Lévi-Strauss lectured in French on anthropology—a relief after cobbling together sociological talks in English. The topics were broad: General Ethnography, The First Totalitarian State: The Incas, The Study of Material Culture in the Museum and in the Field. Yet Lévi-Strauss often found himself lecturing in near-empty rooms. Not that it seemed to bother him—he spoke “as if he were in a vast auditorium,” according to Patrick Waldberg’s wife, Isabelle, who attended his course. She remembered Lévi-Strauss’s lecturing style as competent, but by no means electrifying: “One feels that Lévi-Strauss takes great trouble to work through the issue, and even if he doesn’t reach startlingly original conclusions, he at least offers plenty of detail, expresses himself with clarity and often makes very interesting comparisons.”61
Toward the end of the war Lévi-Strauss also taught at Barnard College, a women’s campus affiliated to Columbia University in Morningside Heights, his first, nerve-racking foray into the mainstream U.S. university system. Thirty years later, during a talk to the college’s alumnae, he could afford to joke about his disastrous debut:When I settled myself behind the table and started lecturing on the Nambikwara Indians, my fright changed to panic: no student was taking notes; instead of writing, they were knitting. They went on knitting until the hour was over as if they were paying no attention to what I was saying—or rather trying to say in my clumsy English. They did listen, though, for after the class was over a girl (I can still see her: slender, graceful, with short and curly ash-blonde hair, and wearing a blue dress) came up to me and said that it was all very interesting but she thought I should know that desert and dessert are different words.
This confusion, he playfully concluded, showed that even back then he was mixing the ecological and the culinary, “which later served to illustrate some of the structural properties of the human mind.”62
Whether or not, on some subconscious level, Lévi-Strauss was already drawing his ideas together, the raw materials of future analyses were gradually building up. In a faint echo of Karl Marx’s time in the Reading Room of the British Library a century before, each morning from nine till midday he would sit in the now defunct American room of the New York Public Library.63 In contrast with the cavernous main reading hall, the American room was a smaller, more intimate setting for Lévi-Strauss’s research. A high portal with an austere marble architrave led into the room of a dozen reading desks, a counter behind which the librarian would sit and banks of card catalogs. Natural light streamed through the skylights, illuminating floor-to-ceiling book casing, with a mezzanine for access to the upper shelves.
It was there, in the classic beaux arts building on Fifth Avenue, with its murals, decorated ceilings, carved oak and tiled floors, that Lévi-Strauss hoovered up the vast store of ethnography that had accumulated in the library’s subterranean stacks. “What I know of anthropology I learnt in those years,” he later recalled.64 On breaks he browsed scientific journals, trying to keep abreast of the latest developments in other fields. As he digested ethnography after ethnography, memorizing obscure native beliefs and practices, a Native American in full feather headdress and buckskin jacket sat a few tables along, jotting down notes with a Parker pen.65
It was during this period that he came across another book that fit like a key into his evolving thought: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, an eccentric classic that looked at the mathematics of morphology. A Scottish polymath, D’Arcy Thompson showed how both natural and human engineering had arrived at similarly elegant geometric solutions to design challenges thrown up by physical conditions in the world. In a series of beautifully written illustrations of his ideas, D’Arcy Thompson compared the shape of a falling drop of water to a jellyfish, plant fiber to wire, the metacarpal bone from a vulture’s wing to a certain type of truss. Nature’s diversity was generated out of different applications of classical proportions and ratios, which had subsequently been rediscovered in the geometry and mathematics of Pythagoras and Newton. Although some have considered the book scientific heresy because it played down the role of Darwinian evolution, it continues to fascinate to this day.66 For Lévi-Strauss, D’Arcy Thompson’s blend of aesthetics and theory was hugely appealing.
PRIMED WITH RAW MATERIAL, Lévi-Strauss was ripe for theory. He was in search of a framework, some organizing principle, the inner structure that he had sensed during his fieldwork in Brazil. He was looking for what had triggered the powerful sensations that he had felt while gazing into the bunch of dandelions on the Luxembourg border and while reading Granet’s kinship book. “At the time I was a kind of naïve structuralist,” he later explained, “a structuralist without knowing it.”67
The catalyst was the Russian poet and linguist Ro
man Jakobson. He was fluent in a dozen languages and had been a key member of both the Moscow and Prague linguistic schools. The world Lévi-Strauss had recently been introduced to in New York had long been Jakobson’s natural milieu—a mix of academia and modern art, lecture halls and bohemia, avant-garde poetry and the then emerging field of structural linguistic analysis. In revolutionary Moscow, Jakobson had mixed with the futurists; in Prague, with Czech surrealists and modernist cabaret artists. He had even dabbled in anthropology, studying folklore in and around Moscow, alongside the Russian ethnologist Petr Bogatyrev.
A bon vivant, “a veritable globe-trotter of structuralism,”68 Jakobson had arrived in New York after a tortuous flight across Central Europe and Scandinavia, never more than a few paces ahead of the galloping Nazi frontier. On the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Jakobson had been teaching at Masaryk University in Brno. Well known as a Jewish antifascist intellectual, he burned his papers and went into hiding. He wound up in Prague, spending a month living in a wardrobe at his father-in-law’s apartment. Accompanied by his wife, Svatava, Jakobson traveled on to Denmark, where he had been invited to teach at the University of Copenhagen. The journey took the couple through the Nazi heartlands, forcing them at one point to change trains in Berlin. There, Jakobson took perverse delight in drinking a beer on the platform while posting off letters to friends who were astonished to see a Berlin postmark days after Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 16