Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  By the same author

  Non-fiction

  The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who

  Burned a Million Pounds

  I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary

  Our Pet Queen: A New Perspective on Monarchy

  Fiction

  The Brandy of the Damned

  The First Church on the Moon

  Copyright © 2015 by John Higgs

  Signal Books is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Higgs, John, author

  Stranger than we can imagine : an alternative history of the 20th century / John Higgs.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-3847-1 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-7710-3848-8 (html)

  1. History, Modern–20th century. 2. Twentieth century.

  I. Title. II. Title: Twentieth century.

  D421.H53 2015 909.82 C2014-907868-4

  C2014-907869-2

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Counterpoint Press.

  Jacket design by Andrew Roberts

  Jacket images: (astronaut on moon) © Steven Taylor / Getty Images; (television) © Wisconsinart / Dreamstime.com

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Lia, the twentieth century’s post-credits twist,

  and for Isaac, the pre-game cutscene of the twenty-first century.

  All love, Dad x

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1 RELATIVITY

  Deleting the omphalos

  2 MODERNISM

  The shock of the new

  3 WAR

  Hoist that rag

  4 INDIVIDUALISM

  Do what thou wilt

  5 ID

  Under the paving stones, the beach

  6 UNCERTAINTY

  The cat is both alive and dead

  7 SCIENCE FICTION

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

  8 NIHILISM

  I stick my neck out for nobody

  9 SPACE

  We came in peace for all mankind

  10 SEX

  Nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)

  11 TEENAGERS

  Wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom

  12 CHAOS

  A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo

  13 GROWTH

  Today’s investor does not profit from yesterday’s growth

  14 POSTMODERNISM

  I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here

  15 NETWORK

  A planet of individuals

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  ‘We needed to do what we wanted to do’

  Keith Richards

  Murdering Airplane by Max Ernst, 1920 (Bridgeman/© ADAGP Paris & DACS London 2015)

  INTRODUCTION

  In 2010, the Tate Modern gallery in London staged a retrospective of the work of the French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. To visit this exhibition was to spend hours wandering through Gauguin’s vision of a romanticised South Pacific in late nineteenth-century Tahiti. This was a world of vivid colour and guilt-free sexuality. Gauguin’s paintings saw no distinction between mankind, divinity and nature, and by the time you reached the end of the exhibition you felt as if you understood Eden.

  Visitors were then spat out next to the Tate’s twentieth-century gallery. There was nothing to prepare them for how brutal walking out of one and into the other would be.

  Here were the works of Picasso, Dalí, Ernst and many others. You immediately wondered if the lighting was different, but it was the art that made this room feel cold. The colour palette was predominantly browns, greys, blues and blacks. Splashes of vivid red appeared in places, but not in ways that comforted. With the exception of a later Picasso portrait, greens and yellows were entirely absent.

  These were paintings of alien landscapes, incomprehensible structures and troubled dreams. The few human figures that were present were abstracted, formal, and divorced from contact with the natural world. The sculptures were similarly antagonistic. One example was Man Ray’s Cadeau, a sculpture of an iron with nails sticking out of its base in order to rip to shreds any fabric you attempted to smooth. Encountering all this in a state of mind attuned to the visions of Gauguin was not recommended. There was no compassion in that room. We had entered the abstract realm of theory and concept. Coming directly from work that spoke to the heart, the sudden shift to work aimed solely at the head was traumatic.

  Gauguin’s work ran up to his death in 1903, so we might have expected a smoother transition into the early twentieth-century gallery. True, his work was hardly typical of his era and only widely appreciated after his death, but the jarring transition still leaves us struggling to answer a very basic question: what the hell happened, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the human psyche? The Tate Modern is a suitable place to ask questions like this, as it stands as a kind of shrine to the twentieth century. The meaning of the word ‘modern’ in the art world means that it will be forever associated with that period. Seen in this light, the popularity of the gallery reveals both our fascination with those years and our desire to understand them.

  There was one antechamber which separated the two exhibitions. It was dominated by an outline of a nineteenth-century industrial town by the Italian-Greek artist Jannis Kounellis, drawn directly onto the wall in charcoal. The sketch was sparse and devoid of human figures. Above it hung a dead jackdaw and a hooded crow, stuck to the wall by arrows. I’m not sure what point the artist was trying to make, but for me the room served as a warning about the gallery I was about to enter. It might have been kinder if the Tate had used this room as a form of decompression chamber, something that could prevent the visual art equivalent of the bends.

  The dead birds, the accompanying text suggested, ‘have been seen as symbolising the death throes of imaginative freedom’. But seen in context between Gauguin and the twentieth century, a different interpretation seemed more appropriate. Whatever it was that had died above that nineteenth-century industrial town, it was not imaginative freedom. On the contrary, that monster was about to emerge from the depths.

  Recently I was shopping for Christmas presents and went into my local bookshop for a book by Lucy Worsley, my teenage daughter’s favourite historian. If you are lucky enough to have a teenage daughter who has a favourite historian, you don’t need much persuading to encourage this interest.

  The history books were in the far corner of the fourth floor, at the very top of the building, as if history was the story of crazed ancestors we need to hide in the attic like characters from Jane Eyre. The book I wanted wasn’t in stock, so I took out my phone to buy it online. I went to shut down an open newspaper app, pressed the wrong icon, and ac
cidentally started a video of a speech made by President Obama a few hours earlier. It was December 2014, and he was talking about whether the hacking of Sony Entertainment, which the President blamed on North Korea, should be regarded as an act of war.

  Every now and again there is a moment that brings home how strange life in the twenty-first century can be. There I was in Brighton, England, holding a thin slice of glass and metal which was made in South Korea and ran American software, and which could show me the President of America threatening the Supreme Leader of North Korea. What about this incident would have seemed more incredible at the end of the last century: that this device existed, and allowed me to see the President of the United States while Christmas shopping? That the definition of war could have changed so much that it now included the embarrassing of Sony executives? Or that my fellow shoppers would have been so accepting of my miraculous accidental broadcast?

  I was standing next to the twentieth-century history shelves at the time. There were some wonderful books on those shelves, big fat detailed accounts of the century we know most about. Those books act as a roadmap, detailing the journey we took to reach the world we now live in. They tell a clearly defined story of great shifts of geopolitical power: the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the American Century and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet somehow that story fails to lead us into the world we’re in now, adrift in a network of constant surveillance, unsustainable competition, tsunamis of trivia and extraordinary opportunity.

  Imagine the twentieth century is a landscape, stretching out in front of you. Imagine that the events of its history are mountains, rivers, woods and valleys. Our problem is not that this era is hidden from us, but that we know too much about it. We all know that this landscape contains the mountains of Pearl Harbor, the Titanic and South African apartheid. We know that in its centre lies the desolation of fascism and the uncertainty of the Cold War. We know people of this land could be cruel, desperate or living in fear, and we know why. The territory has been thoroughly mapped, catalogued and recorded. It can be overwhelming.

  Each of the history books in front of me traces a different path through that territory, but those paths are not as different as you might think. Many are written by politicians or political journalists, or have strong political bias. They take the view that it was politicians that defined these troublesome years, so they follow a path that tells that story. Other books have staked out paths through the art or technology of the period. These are perhaps more useful, but can feel abstract and removed from human lives. And while these paths differ, they do converge along well-trodden highways.

  Finding a different path through this territory is daunting. A journey through the twentieth century can seem like an epic quest. The gallant adventurers who embark on it first wrestle with three giants, known by the single names of Einstein, Freud and Joyce. They must pass through the forest of quantum indeterminacy and the castle of conceptual art. They avoid the gorgons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand whose glance can turn them to stone, emotionally if not physically, and they must solve the riddles of the Sphinxes of Carl Jung and Timothy Leary. Then things get difficult. The final challenge is to somehow make it through the swamp of postmodernism. It is not, if we are honest, an appealing journey.

  Very few of the adventurers who tackle the twentieth century make it through postmodernism and out the other side. More typically, they admit defeat and retreat to base camp. This is the world as it was understood at the end of the nineteenth century, just over the border, safe in friendly territory. We are comfortable with the great discoveries that emerged up until then. Innovations such as electricity or democracy are comprehensible, and we take them in our stride. But is this really the best place for us? The twenty-first century is not going to make any sense at all seen through nineteenth-century eyes.

  The territory of the twentieth century includes dark patches of thick, deep woods. The established paths tend to skirt around these areas, visiting briefly but quickly scurrying on as if fearful of becoming entangled. These are areas such as relativity, cubism, the Somme, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics and climate change. They have a reputation for initially appearing difficult, and becoming increasingly bewildering the more they are studied. When they first appeared they were so radical that coming to terms with them meant a major remodelling of how we viewed the world. They seemed frightening in the past, but they don’t any more. We’re citizens of the twenty-first century now. We made it through yesterday. We’re about to encounter tomorrow. We can take the dark woods of the twentieth century in our stride.

  So this is our plan: we’re going to take a journey through the twentieth century in which we step off the main highways and strike out towards the dark woods. We’re aware that a century is an arbitrary time period. Historians talk about the long nineteenth century (1789–1914) or the short twentieth century (1914–91), because these periods contain clear beginnings and endings. But for our purposes ‘the twentieth century’ will do fine, because we’re taking a journey from when things stopped making sense to where we are now.

  If we’re going to make it through, we’re going to have to be selective. There are millions of subjects worthy of inclusion in an account of this period, but we’re not going to get very far if we revisit all of our favourites for the sake of nostalgia. There’s a wealth of fascinating literature and debate behind everything we find, which we will have to ruthlessly avoid getting bogged down in. We’re on a mission, not a cruise. We set out not as historians but as curious travellers, or as adventurers with an agenda, because we are embarking on our travels with a clear sense of what we will be paying attention to.

  Our plan is to look at what was genuinely new, unexpected and radical. We’re not concerned by the fallout from those ideas, so take it as read that everywhere we visit caused scandal, anger and furious denouncements by the status quo. Those aftershocks are an important part of history, but focusing on them can disguise an emerging pattern. It is the direction that these new ideas were pointing in that we’ll pay attention to. They point in a broadly coherent direction.

  There’s a moment for every generation when memory turns into history. The twentieth century is receding into the distance, and coming into perspective. The events of that century now feel like they belong in the category of history, so this is the right time to take stock.

  Here, then, is an alternative route through the landscape of the last century. Its purpose is the same as all paths. It will take you to where you are going.

  Albert Einstein in Chicago, c.1930 (Transcendental Graphics/Getty)

  ONE: RELATIVITY

  Deleting the omphalos

  On the afternoon of 15 February 1894 the French anarchist Martial Bourdin left his rented room in Fitzroy Street in London. He was carrying a homemade bomb and a large amount of money. It was dry and sunny, and he boarded an open-top horse-drawn tram at Westminster. This took him across the river and on to Greenwich.

  After leaving the tram he walked across Greenwich Park towards the Royal Observatory. His bomb exploded early, while he was still in the parkland. The explosion destroyed his left hand and a good chunk of his stomach, but did no damage to the observatory. A group of schoolchildren found him lying on the ground, confused and asking to be taken home. Blood and bodily remains were later found over sixty yards away. Bourdin died thirty minutes after the bomb exploded, leaving no explanation for his actions.

  The Polish writer Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) was inspired by these events. Conrad summed up the general bewilderment about Bourdin’s actions when he described the bombing as ‘a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it is impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought […] One remained faced by the fact of a man blown to pieces for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other.’

  It wasn’t Bourdin’s politics that puzz
led Conrad. The meaning of the term ‘anarchism’ has shifted over the last century, so that it is now commonly understood as an absence of rules where everyone can do whatever they like. Anarchism in Bourdin’s era was focused more on rejecting political structures than on demands for unfettered personal liberty. Nineteenth-century anarchists weren’t claiming the right to total freedom, but they were claiming the right not to be controlled. They recognised, in the words of one of their slogans, ‘No gods, no masters’. In terms of Christian theology, they were committing the sin of pride. This was Satan’s rebellion and the reason he was cast down from Heaven: non serviam, ‘I Will Not Serve.’

  Nor was Conrad confused by Bourdin’s desire to plant a bomb. It was the middle of a violent period of anarchist bombings, which began with the assassination of the Russian tsar Alexander II in 1881 and lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. This was fuelled by the ready availability of dynamite and an anarchist concept called the ‘propaganda of the deed’, which argued that individual acts of violence were valuable in themselves because they served to inspire others. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz, to give one example, successfully assassinated the President of the United States William McKinley in September 1901.

  No, the baffling question was this: if you were an anarchist on the loose in London with a bomb, why would you head for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich? What did it offer as a target that, for example, Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament lacked? Both of these buildings were closer to where Bourdin lived, had a higher profile, and symbolised the power of the state. Why didn’t he try to blow those up? It seemed that he had recognised some aspect or quality of the Royal Observatory that he felt was significant enough for him to risk his life to destroy.

  In events and stories inspired by the Greenwich bombing, little attention is paid to the target. The explosion was fictionalised in Conrad’s novel and that book influenced the American terrorist Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. Alfred Hitchcock adapted the story in his 1936 film, Sabotage, in which he updated the bomber’s journey across London from a horse-drawn tram to a more modern bus. Hitchcock had his bomb explode early when the bus was on The Strand, a spooky fictional precursor to an incident sixty years later when an IRA terrorist accidentally blew himself up on a bus just off The Strand.