FORWARD : Arts & Letters

The Lonely Passions of Ludwig Lewisohn

The Sexual, Religious and Literary Struggles of a Forgotten Intellectual Have a Haunting Relevance Today

The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn
Volume 1: A Touch of Wildness
By Ralph Melnick
Wayne State, 754 pages, $39.95.

The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn
Volume 2: This Dark and Desperate Age
By Ralph Melnick
Wayne State, 596 pages, $39.95.

By STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN
At the heart of Ralph Melnick's massively detailed two-volume biography of novelist, literary critic, memoirist, moralist and Zionist publicist Ludwig Lewisohn is the following earnest, simple question: Why is this man no longer read? Well, at first glance, the answer seems pretty obvious. Lewisohn wrote sentences like these - I quote, almost at random, from his 1929 memoir, "Mid-Channel: An American Chronicle":

Thus my thoughts turn, with an affection over which time has no power, to American autumn forests, to the more than Italian blue of those western skies, to a magnolia tree dark behind an old Charleston wall, to groves on the Hudson uplands, to frosted branches glittering beside a Wisconsin lake, to precipitous roads traveled by a car winged and immoral - for were not you there with me, Thelma? - among the mountains of Vermont?...It was this circumstance, I suspect, that caused our people in former ages to return to regions from which they had been expelled with every rigour of cruelty and contempt.

The meandering tone of the passage, its unrestrained, even incomprehensible impressionism, its self-indulgence, its sudden, coy reference to "our people" - all this, no doubt, helps explain why Lewisohn slipped long ago beyond the publishers' backlists and deep, deep into the auxiliary shelves of research libraries. True, such literary life-stories are sad, they reveal a fate that, arguably, writers fear most. ("Writers, major or minor," writes Cynthia Ozick, "may covet fame, but what they really work for is that transient little daily illusion - phrase by phrase, comma after comma - of the stay against erasure.") No one who writes can avoid feeling unease, or worse, when contemplating the disappearance of someone like Lewisohn who once was so widely read, so highly regarded.
In the 1920s, Lewisohn was an editor of The Nation when that magazine was at its height, he was a best-selling author in many languages, he was praised by Freud, he was befriended by Mencken, he was courted by Upton Sinclair, and he was a drinking partner of James Joyce. He was also among the most successful popularizers of Heine - and, for that matter, Freud - outside the Central European orbit. He was a figure of some prominence in Greenwich Village in its heyday, and later also in Paris, and he was psychoanalyzed by the Freudian pioneer A. A. Brill. Alfred Kazin rated him the most cultivated American literary critic of his time, with the exception, perhaps, of Van Wyck Brooks (who also has vanished with barely a trace).
Lewisohn wrestled, as we'll see, with a host of problems, but writer's block wasn't one of them. He published memoir after memoir, a huge body of literary criticism (including the studies "Goethe" and "Creative America"), many novels, much poetry, a study of Herzl and several popular accounts of Jewish thought and culture. Shortly before his death in 1955, he published still another insistent, polemical tract, "What Is the Jewish Heritage?" In the first decades of his literary career, he was among the most effective advocates of high culture, especially of Modernism, in America; later, he captured a central role in the popularization of Judaism.
Is there more to this story than but another grim object lesson in the transitory nature of fame? There is, and Mr. Melnick's biography amply proves it - alas, all too amply, and with recourse to a vast arsenal of data. These books are stuffed with undigested material, they have something of the feel of a precocious boy's attic. And Mr. Melnick tells his story in a mostly deadpan, chronological sequence. The rare readers who mine all these some 1,300 pages may well feel that they have at their disposal more information than even Lewisohn's own doting mother might care to know. (His father, much to Lewisohn's chagrin, didn't seem much preoccupied with knowing him at all.)
Still, despite Mr. Melnick's inclination to give us far too much, once one peels away at the edges of this tale it is, in fact, remarkably interesting, even haunting. It provides much insight into what it felt like to live as a Jewishly engaged intellectual in America in the first half of the 20th century. Hidden beneath the ungainly surface of this biography is a crucial insight into Jewish life in liberal society. Mr. Melnick, a librarian and teacher and the author of "The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank" (1997), seems to understand well the heavy price paid by Lewisohn for his intense, abiding Jewish preoccupations, which served to marginalize him and would eventually set him off as a provincial, even as a racialist, for most of his once-loyal readers and literary friends. In his middle years - his books no longer read much beyond a certain, highly identified sector of the Jewish community, and with much of his time spent on the road promoting Zionism - Lewisohn would become, arguably, just the sort of middlebrow scribbler, the repetitive, unadventuresome soul he loathed in his prime. These volumes have much to say about self-loathing and its mostly imperfect remedies.

Photographs of Lewisohn as an adolescent show a grim, all-too-serious, pudgy, very Jewish-looking boy. This prodigy, who entered college at 15, was born in Berlin and grew up in Charleston, S.C., where his father had an early emotional collapse and died soon after and his mother - skittish and overbearing - worked hard to maintain proper appearances and to launch her brilliant son. Lewisohn's later sketches of his father (his novels and his many memoirs often, even obsessively traverse this same childhood terrain) were singularly insightful. In one of his best books, "The Case of Mr. Crump," Lewisohn writes of his father in a thinly fictionalized account: "He might have been a moderately prosperous man; he was for years, a very busy one. Herbert always kept a vision, an early one, of his father's tall, spare figure leaning forward and peering on account of his nearsightedness, hurrying with compressed lips and a frown, half of annoyance, half of timidity, from one appointment to another."
College was a time of prodigious, if often haphazard, reading and, not surprisingly, isolation. Lewisohn would be banned from the only fraternity at the College of Charleston - much as he would later be banned from teaching literature at an elite university - because he was a Jew, which itself remained a touchy, unseemly topic at home with mother. Her death would eventually help free him to explore openly his Jewish origins. At Columbia University, too, where he pursued his graduate studies in literature, he remained isolated, a sallow-faced bookworm, a budding poet with little more to his daily routine than his books, one or two faculty who recognized his talents and a handful of exceptionally intense male friendships.
In the biography's most intriguing chapter, Mr. Melnick describes these friendships. The chapter, called "Forbidden Loves," concentrates on Lewisohn's relationship with the German-born poet George Viereck, somewhat younger, somewhat more sophisticated (he had, as Mr. Melnick notes rather obliquely, been "involved in erotic experimentation under the direction of an aged physician"), and probably the most intense, honest love of Lewisohn's life. Only here, nowhere else in the book, is there reference to Lewisohn's homoerotic tendencies; there is no listing in the index either for homosexuality or bisexuality.
True, Mr. Melnick describes in meticulous, lavish detail Lewisohn's four marriages, his almost consistently disastrous dealings with women and the persistent uncertainty that surrounded the beginning, the middle and the end of these mostly turbulent relationships. In Lewisohn's words, what plagued him was "a recurrently evil conscience." Viereck himself, in an autobiography published in 1931, referred to his relationship with Lewisohn - without naming him - as the most significant of his younger years. Clearly, the relationship was no less important to Lewisohn, who begged Viereck to brave the social ostracism and live openly with him as his lover, which Viereck refused to do. The poetry that the young Lewisohn wrote to Viereck tells of an intense, loving relationship; it is, it seems to me, the most touching Lewisohn ever wrote, transparently affectionate and without the overlay of abstraction that so intruded on the many depictions of the women in his life. Lewisohn writes Viereck, in 1904:

...And there comes
To nestle in my heart
A song, a dream, an exaltation,
A sense of freedom, a divine delight,
As comes to one who after piteous nights,
After the wistful watch of tearless nights
Discerns the distant radiance of the dawn.

Still, Viereck's name never appears in Lewisohn's memoiristic or fictional accounts of his college years. It is disconcerting to read in Lewisohn's prologue to "Up Stream" (1923) - a book that includes a description of his time at Columbia, when he roomed at Viereck's apartment, but without any reference to George - the following statement about its unassailable accuracy: "For both the novelist and the philosopher is only an autobiographer in disguise. Each writes a confession; each is a lyricist at the bottom. I, too, could easily have written a novel or a treatise. I have chosen to drop the mask." Nonetheless, the passages in "Up Stream" describing Lewisohn's first love - repackaged, somewhat casually, as a woman - are almost unbearably beautiful, especially when read against the backdrop of what seems to have been his unremitting guilt, his sustained feelings for Viereck, his lifelong mask:

A face, a voice, a gesture that seemed strange and unheard of arose before me and I was stricken by a blind and morbid passion. All the repressions of my tormented adolescence, all the false inhibitions in thought and deed now went toward the nourishing of this hectic bloom. It was winter. A white and silent winter. Playing with curious fancies we called our passion roses in the snow.

Here, and elsewhere, Lewisohn, without naming this as homosexual love, dismisses it as a mere episode, as something of a childish prank, as the actions of an immature late adolescent burdened at the time with crippling inhibitions. This is how Mr. Melnick handles this relationship, too. It remains sequestered away in the biography, much as Lewisohn himself preferred to see it, no doubt. Yet, in view of Lewisohn's own obsessive quest for authenticity - the trademark of all his writing and his public activity - how can we now avoid looking at him in his mature years, as well, without at least some reference to these early moments whose intensity suggests something more than mere passing fancy?
Lewisohn left behind some of the most emphatic, moving secular sermons written by a Jew in this century whose theme, repeatedly, is the need for authenticity: "I besought the young men who filled the hall," he writes, "to follow their inner law as human beings and as Jews, to consider profoundly what each was meant to be and to be that - that and nothing else, to kill the fear-born ape that lives in almost every human breast and to follow the absolute command of inner oneness." No doubt, to reduce Lewisohn's quest for authenticity to the tragic, painful fumblings of a repressed homosexual would be inadequate; to overlook these impulses seems misplaced.
Mr. Melnick should, perhaps, have taken a cue from Lewisohn himself, who in a moment of rare, almost wild candor - and recall that his biographer subtitles his first volume "A Touch of Wildness" - writes about "Up Stream" to another dear, male friend: "The erotic - my God, what a tale I could unfold - totally omitted." Mr. Melnick quotes the passage and then, without taking a breath, he rushes onward.

Unsurprisingly, not long after Viereck rejected him, Lewisohn married. He chose a much older woman: English-born and, as it turned out, unbalanced. Her name was Mary. Then there would be, in rapid succession, Thelma and then Edna, and, finally, Louise. He started making money, sometimes a good deal of money, as a writer. He would work as an academic for a time, first at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his employers didn't quite know at first he was Jewish (the English department chairman was misinformed by Lewisohn's kindly Columbia adviser, who told him that while his father was Jewish, his mother was a Christian, and Ludwig himself a man whose "sympathies and tempers are Christian"). Ohio State University hired him, too. His vigorous anti-war, pacifist activity eventually made university teaching all the more elusive. He would wed his Zionist aspirations to his pacifism, the latter discarded by him only with the advent of Hitler and World War II.
In the early 1920s, a few years after his mother's death, when he was already a well-known novelist and essayist, a meeting with Chaim Weizmann and the intuitive, keenly intelligent German Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld (who managed to charm even Hannah Arendt into sympathy for Zionism, at least for a time) helped turn Lewisohn's life around. Zionists helped finance a trip to Europe, North Africa and Palestine, and there Lewisohn fell in love with the new, still-raw Tel Aviv - another sign, no doubt, of the singularity of his tastes. He now began to write about the Zionist return; he would eventually become among the most visible, vocal advocates of Zionism in America. His Zionism didn't immediately sever him from the larger intellectual scene, and he retained for awhile, at least, his standing both with his literary friends and his still-expansive reading public.
Several of his books in these years, like "The Island Within" (1928) - half novel, half memoir, a meandering work that nonetheless had a major impact - sold well; soon, his Jewish books ceased to have much of a market, with Lewisohn branded provincial and, still more damningly, predictable. As a typical reviewer said already in 1923 about "Up Stream," "still another rehash of what are getting to be his two pet themes: his racial tribulations and those two women." More emphatically, in the 1930s, Bookman would call him "the Wandering Jewish Niobe." Eventually, the quality of his work would, in fact, decline; Mr. Melnick doesn't acknowledge this, it seems to me, but it is obvious from the many passages he cites. Where Lewisohn would still provide truly fresh insights, however, was in his analysis of the salience of Jewishness as seen against the background of its crippling, tragic marginality in a larger, Christian cultural world. "The remedy," he would insist, "lies in a radical change of attitude. Jews must analyze and criticize the environment in which they live. They have for that purpose the criterion of their Judaism - of their Jewish culture, tradition, temper."
Excoriated in the 1930s as a wandering Niobe, a decade later he would be rendered, quite simply, beyond the pale. From a 1940 survey, "Contemporary American Authors," Mr. Melnick quotes the following, truly astonishing statement about him: "his deepening sense of racial loyalties alienated him almost completely from any profound understanding of the nature and operation of American spirit. The physical and spiritual exile from his adopted land brought about in him a sort of exacerbated masochism which made such novels as 'Don Juan' (1920) and 'The Island Within' (1928) seem self-pitying and peevish." Here, in a few, pithy, dreadful lines are encapsulated, in effect, all that Lewisohn loathed about a cultural milieu - at once seemingly tolerant and, in fact, brutally intolerant - that, irrespective of the quality of his work, couldn't accept him or his writing because of the intensity of his Jewish preoccupations. Its rejection was real, despite the self-pity that became something of his trademark, and this isolation contributed, in turn, toward making him in the final decades of his career every bit as second-rate as his critics assumed he had always been.
Throughout these years, the diminutive, roundish Lewisohn was at the center of a remarkable series of romantic battles. His first wife, Mary, pursued him vigorously and loudly; his second wife, Thelma, sued him, spoke to the tabloids about their marriage and, once it ended, turned into a drunk and abandoned their son, Jim, to an orphanage. The son was left permanently scarred. During all this, Lewisohn continued to appear at countless Zionist gatherings, he crisscrossed the country promoting the Zionist cause, he edited the newspaper New Palestine while intermittently seeing and fleeing wives and ex-wives. And he continued to write much on the wages of sexual repression. He remained an astute interpreter of Modernism, although the Romantics were, most probably, more to his liking. Nietzsche, whom he first encountered as a teenager, frightened him quite nearly as much as did his first brushes with heterosexual sex.
"I am a Jew, serenely, gladly, almost with a sense of consecration," he would flatly insist. Yet, there is little evidence in these books that - except, perhaps, for his final years as an elderly academic at Brandeis, married now to a woman who treated him much as she might a bright, ever-demanding son and who much impressed his students and much annoyed the university's president - Lewisohn had more than a few, fleeting experiences of serenity.

Pompous, insecure, capable of considerable charm, too, but eventually marginal to the liberal cultural world that he had once so vigorously - and successfully - pursued as a young man, Lewisohn remained a truly courageous, public Jew. He was a prescient commentator on Nazism; he championed Zionism with great skill and acumen, and with a deep appreciation for the ways in which Jewish nationalism should exist usefully, and also happily, in the family of nations.
The most salient, singular feature of his prodigious work as a writer and political activist would be the exploration of authenticity - this preoccupation fueled, as he himself would acknowledge, by his own hunger for "wholeness." Reading about him in Mr. Melnick's account, it seems inconceivable to romanticize those earlier moments in American cultural life before the rise of the ethnic cultural politics in the late 1950s and 1960s when what was previously a seemingly coherent, unfractured American cultural life reigned supreme; this meant, of course, the marginalization of vivid, original voices like that of the young, Jewishly engaged Lewisohn.
The public, sometimes vociferous ethnicity of contemporary American life has, no doubt, its grotesque features, but its absence can be numbing. Reading about Lewisohn's life invites one to revisit the uncannily cool, distant relationship that, say, Lionel Trilling had at his height with his own Jewishness - once quite intense, but sequestered away after a series of fierce, youthful stories in the Menorah Journal. The austere reserve adopted by Trilling looks - at least when he is bracketed alongside that very different, Jewish literary child of Columbia, Ludwig Lewisohn - rather more self-conscious, deliberate, perhaps, on one level, essential but also almost unbearably restrictive. Lewisohn lived his Jewishness publicly, messily, vocally. Trilling was the far better critic; it is Lewisohn who now seems a rather more pertinent or, at least, the more familiar, even contemporary voice.
It wasn't Trilling but John Cheever whom I thought about while reading this study. The comparison may seem a bit far-fetched, and I make it not only because of their bisexuality. But consider how in Cheever - whose own personal life, as we now know after the posthumous publication of his journals, was conflicted and tortured in ways that few knew about when he was alive - we find a yearning for wholeness all the more powerful because of his keen sense of its inevitable elusiveness.
Take, for instance, the remarkable ending of Cheever's short story "Goodbye, My Brother." (He himself knew the lines were exceptionally good; he recalls in the introduction to his collected stories the moment he first thought of them, under the canopy of his 59th Street apartment house, where he recited them aloud until the doorman said, "You're talking to yourself, Mr. Cheever.") The story tells of a family gathering in an old, now rather dilapidated New England house, and of a brother capable only of spotting faults in people, who leaves abruptly, angrily after a senseless argument that, it is clear, has now severed his relationship from his clan. Cheever writes:

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatest of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and sister were swimming - Diana and Helen - and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

The passage is infused with such transparent, compelling wisdom and also intimacy, because Cheever himself was just this sort of man - someone who sought out that acne, those horrors in arcadia, the ugliness in suburbia, the flat, monotonous moments in domestic life that weigh as heavily, as he described it, as might the silence of a battlefield. And he had, as a result, much like Ludwig Lewisohn, all the more vivid appreciation, or at least all the more keen longing for those rare, quiet moments of peace and harmony when the demons ceased to haunt, when love seemed possible without conflict, unchecked by propriety or moderation. Lewisohn's life - and his work, too - were made of many similarly jagged edges, but their one unifying motif was an overriding preoccupation with the prospect, the pleasures, the dream of harmony. Without doubt, Mr. Melnick's study is bloated and often tedious. Still, one puts it down with much appreciation for Lewisohn's courage to confront demons, to write about (most of) them openly, often with insight, with compassion and, at his best, with deep, humane engagement.
Mr. Zipperstein, Koshland professor in Jewish culture and history at Stanford University, is the author most recently of "Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity" (University of Washington). He is writing a biography of Isaac Rosenfeld.