Coming to America
By Phillip Lopate.
The New York Times
February 3, 2008 Sunday
Phillip Lopate, who teaches English at Hofstra University, is the
editor of "American Movie Critics" and the author of the forthcoming
"Two Marriages" (a pair of novellas).
How Refugees From Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed
the American Performing Arts.
By Joseph Horowitz.
Illustrated. 458 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.50.
It is hard to imagine where American culture would be today without
the contributions of Hitler and Stalin — that is, without the
thousands of creatively gifted refugees who fled these murderers. A
good many cultural historians and writers have explored this meaty
subject from different angles since Anthony Heilbut’s 1983 landmark,
"Exiled in Paradise" (still the best book on the topic). And now, in
"Artists in Exile," Joseph Horowitz has taken a crack at it.
Horowitz, a former music critic for The New York Times and the author
of seven previous books, including the superb trio "Understanding
Toscanini," "Wagner Nights" and "Classical Music in America," is well
versed in this subject. As he says in his preface, "the topic of my
books has ever been the fate of Old World art and artists transplanted
to the New World." But right off he faces two problems:
(1) much of the biographical material about legendary figures like
George Balanchine, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Bertolt Brecht and
Igor Stravinsky is fairly familiar; (2) in casting so wide a net over
dance, music, movies and theater (a few novelists are thrown in as
well), he risks a diffuseness that was not evident in his earlier,
rigorously focused works.
Fully aware that no one book could possibly encompass the whole
story of European performing artists exiled to America in the 20th
century, Horowitz has wisely limited his approach to case studies
that exemplify different paths and fates. He has also restricted the
artists to those who came here as adults and stayed a long time, and
who grew up speaking a language other than English — hence virtually
no British subjects (for some reason Charlie Chaplin is included).
But, as though greedy to include everyone, the author keeps departing
from the case study method to cram in thumbnail sketches of other
exiled artists, many of whom pass in an excited blur. So this
heroically researched volume is a bit overstuffed, but it is also
chock-full of fascinating vignettes, stunning quotations and shrewd
insights on the fly.
Horowitz is most keen to examine what he calls the "synergies"
of "cultural exchange." In other words, what specifically did the
European artists who immigrated to the United States contribute,
and how receptive were they to American energies and the homegrown
efforts at expression?
The first case study, Balanchine, is the happiest and most balanced
example of cultural exchange. Having arrived in the United States in
1933, he crisscrossed the country by car many times and was delighted
with the unaffected way Americans moved, their cheerleader athleticism,
their leggy beauty. They were mercilessly unemphatic, in contrast to
the expressive Russians, and this attribute helped Balanchine devise
a choreography that was abstract, impersonal and more about dance
itself than about dying swans. Balanchine also had the ability to ply
both ends of the high-low cultural spectrum (he worked on 18 Broadway
shows and several movies). Horowitz says one reason he flourished was
that there was no ballet tradition in America; he had a clean slate.
In classical music, the hordes of immigrating musicians encountered
an established, largely conservative concert scene. The pianist
Rudolf Serkin fell in love with the United States and established
the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, but he had little time for American
composers. "In truth, Serkin’s was a colonizing influence," Horowitz
writes. "If this escaped notice, it is because American classical music
had since its inception been mainly Germanic." It took a French emigre,
Edgard Varese, to throw open the doors to more experimental sounds:
he incorporated the sirens, harbor whistles and dissonance of New
York streets directly into his compositions.
The book traces the uncertain, often difficult adjustments in
America for the leading modern composers — Stravinsky, Schoenberg,
Hindemith and Bartok. Horowitz’s sympathy for these creative
giants parallels his emphatic disgust with America’s "culture
of performance," which celebrated not composers but conductors,
instrumentalists and singers. He follows the varying careers of Arturo
Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, Otto Klemperer and
Dimitri Mitropoulos. Stokowski is amusingly revealed to have been a
born-and-bred Londoner who hoodwinked the American public into thinking
he was Eastern European, as did his first wife, Lucie Hickenlooper,
a pianist who had changed her name to Olga Samaroff.
There were advantages, apparently, to being thought an artist in
exile. The performers Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz, the
composers Erich Korngold (who conquered Hollywood) and Kurt Weill
(who wrote for Broadway) all grew rich, but did so by compromising
their musical integrity, according to the author. Again and again,
he asserts that the combination of low public taste standards and
commercial pressures stifled the exiles’ creativity.
In spite of Horowitz’s efforts to appreciate indigenous arts
(particularly jazz), he seems something of a Eurocentric snob when
he argues that America too often infected the sensitive exiles with
superficiality. This assessment is particularly problematic in the
book’s disappointing movie section. He dismisses the divine Ernst
Lubitsch as "a clever middlebrow craftsman," failing to see the charm
of his Hollywoodized Budapest, with Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullavan
and Joseph Schildkraut in "The Shop Around the Corner," as anything
more than "a confusion of accents." "Lubitsch’s adaptability —
to sound, to Hollywood, to America generally — may be read as
a lack of depth." The same for Billy Wilder, whose "subversive"
edge in "Sunset Boulevard" is upbraided as "no deeper than are its
characters." Douglas Sirk is sternly characterized as "a prized
confectioner of American melodramas."
The author just doesn’t perceive the depth in some genre movies. Even
Fritz Lang, whose Hollywood film noirs he grudgingly admits are
"substantial," is described as having done much more important work
back in Germany. It requires "some degree of special pleading," we
are told, to make the case for Max Ophuls’s beautiful "Letter From
an Unknown Woman" (not to mention "The Reckless Moment," which goes
uncited), compared with the films Ophuls made after his American
exile had ended. I don’t agree.
It makes no difference that the author’s and this reviewer’s tastes
occasionally clash. What does matter is that sometimes Horowitz’s
judgments seem shoehorned in to serve his pet theories. These notions
include: that the Russians adapted better to America than the Germans
did, because they came from an expansive, polyglot country undergoing
innovation; and that the artist-exiles "bonded with blacks from a
shared experience of marginality." So Rouben Mamoulian is overrated
as much as Lubitsch is underrated, and becomes "the unsung hero of
this tale" because he fits the narrative as an expansive, innovative
Armenian from Russia who directed "Porgy and Bess" and whose creativity
was ostensibly "shackled."
Horowitz’s overall conclusion is: "Taken as a whole, 20th-century
American immigrants in the performing arts were not able to sustain a
full growth curve upon relocating." Well, how many artists who never
leave home are able to sustain "a full growth curve" beyond their
initial triumphs? Where the author sees tragically wasted opportunity,
I see a remarkable outpouring of pleasurable art: Murnau’s "Sunrise,"
Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, Lubitsch’s "Ninotchka," Michael
Curtiz’s "Casablanca," Nabokov’s "Lolita," Kurt Weill’s "September
Song," Balanchine’s "Agon." Some of the exiled artists may have gotten
(to quote Weill) "lost in the stars," but we are the grateful gainers.