In the spring of 1999, Louis Menand taught a class called
“Art and Thought of the 1960s” at the graduate center of the City University of
New York. He assigned Malcolm X, Joan Didion, “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Toward the
end of the semester, he told his students he was thinking of writing a book
about the 60s.
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Maybe he shouldn’t, they told him.
“So you can make a painting of a soup can — that’s not such
a big deal,” Menand said, characterizing his students’ response. Sixties
culture, he recognized, was a close ancestor of the culture of the day. “I
realized,” he added, “that what they were really interested in was the 50s,
which they didn’t understand as well.”
Menand took his students’ note. The result, “
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,” will be published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux on Tuesday. The book seeks to explain not the 60s scene (though Andy
Warhol, soup cans and all, does appear), but how the ground was prepared for it
by the West’s most influential thinkers, authors and artists between 1945 and
1965.
“This book is the backstory to contemporary American
culture,” Menand, 69, said in a video interview this month from Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where he is a professor at Harvard. “It’s about the emergence of
an American culture that became central in world affairs.”
He began work on it around 2011, nearly a decade after his
last large history book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “
The Metaphysical Club,” was
published. He credited an office in the stacks at Harvard’s Widener Library —
he secured it after 10 years on the waiting list; you can find him next to the
Slavic periodicals — for helping him complete a book spanning more than 700
pages, not including endnotes.
While Menand, who goes by “Luke,” rejects the notion that
his book tells the story of the baby boomers — “It’s 75 million people,” he
said, “so they’re not all in ‘Doonesbury’” — writing “The Free World,” he
conceded, meant writing about his own world.
“As you have probably guessed, this is the period I grew up
in,” he writes in the preface. The book, he says, “was a way of filling in the
blanks in my own story.”
Readers of “The Metaphysical Club” or Menand’s critical
essays in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, will recognize the
elegant, even-keeled prose in “The Free World.” He aspires to take readers by
the hand and walk them through complex abstractions.
“The Free World” is more of a survey than “The Metaphysical
Club,” which told an ambitious but contained story focused on four American
thinkers of the philosophical school known as Pragmatism. Many major figures
get the better parts of their own chapters in “The Free World”: Hannah Arendt,
George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin. French intellectuals play
significant roles, with sections on Jean-Paul Sartre, anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss, and film theorist André Bazin. The artists Menand spotlights are
reminiscent of the roll call offered by the bohemians in the musical “Rent”:
“Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, and Cage” (Menand’s pop-music chapter focuses on
the Beatles).
“The Free World” does have a through line, gestured at by
its title. Thinkers like Arendt and Sartre looked around the postwar landscape
and concluded that freedom would be the era’s byword. And while they were
certainly interested in political liberty, Menand in his telling focuses
primarily on the era’s distinctive legacy of thinking about a freedom
associated with self-knowledge.
“When you understand more clearly, in a demystified way,
what your situation is, you have some agency, you have some freedom,” Menand
said. “To me, that’s the right line to take.”
The quest for this kind of freedom recurs throughout the
book — in the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, the anti-colonial politics
of Aimé Césaire, the feminism of Betty Friedan — before running aground in the
tragic final chapter, which profiles New Left activist Tom Hayden, a student of
European existentialism, and closes with the US involvement in Vietnam and
Western intellectuals’ reckoning with the question of whose interests their
talk of freedom had served.
“It didn’t all turn out the way we hoped it would turn out,
and Vietnam became a communist totalitarian state,” Menand said.
Menand relentlessly grounds his analysis in a larger
context. In his telling, Arendt’s bleak view of European civilization arose
from her repeated displacement as a German-born Jew. “Bonnie and Clyde” could
be made in Hollywood in the 60s not only because of the influence of the French
New Wave but because of the lapsing of a rule that had banned movies from
showing a gun firing and the bullet hitting its target.
Amanda Claybaugh, a close colleague of Menand’s at Harvard
before she became the school’s dean of undergraduate education, said embedding
ideas in stories is an “analytical mode” for Menand.
“If you tell a story, you have to think in very concrete and
specific terms about how culture works in a particular moment, how certain
ideas, influences, encounters shape a person.”
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