Book Review: Fracture
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Fracture: Life & Culture in the West, 1918-1938
by Philipp Blom
Basic Books, 2015
The cover of Philipp Blom's new book Fracture: Life & Culture in the West, 1918-1938 (a meaty and even more satisfying follow-up to his earlier The Vertigo Years) shows a detail from Nose Dive on the City, the classic 1939 canvas by the great Futurist painter Tullio Crali that captures perfectly both the hurtling energy of the Futurist movement and its embrace of the danger inherent in progress. “The world had grown, and it had accelerated,” Blom writes; “If there was a new world in the making, it came out of the lack of understanding of what had taken place and why, out of a sense of shock.”
Fracture is a tightly-detailed and very lively narrative of that new world, a period of “wars turned inward” in which enormous technological advances caught most segments of the West by surprise in how invasive they were:
Even before 1914 new machines, scientific inventions, and industrial processes had been transforming the lives of city dwellers – and, to a lesser degree, those of people in the countryside. The denizens of the growing urban agglomerations had already come to rely on mass transportation, mass-produced goods, food imported from across the globe, work in factories and offices, newspapers and cinema, and everyday technologies such as condoms, which were made from vulcanized rubber and which facilitated easier and less risky access to sex. These technological possibilities changed not only daily lives but also the sense of self of those living in this way.
As Blom points out, philosophers of all stripes looked on those huge technological possibilities and saw the engine of modernity “devouring its children, that virtue and dignity were being swallowed by the rootless, internationalized, capitalist, mass-produced life of the big city.” Fracture opens in the wake of the carnage of the Somme, when, as Blom puts it, “Progress had become murderous; the Enlightenment had betrayed those who had put their trust in it.”
Blom's generous narrative strolls (not to say zig-zags) through a very pleasing variety of aspects to this warped Enlightenment, from the writings of Anna Akhmatova and Franz Kafka to the birth of the blues scene in Harlem to the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Betty Boop and Marlene Dietrich (and, of course, Fritz Lang's Metropolis), to the horrors of the Dust Bowl and the gradual rise of fascism in Europe and, more acutely, of National Socialism in Germany. Blom's skill at constructing this kind of panoramic look is on par with master like C. V. Wedgwood or Barbara Tuchman; his pen-portraits of figures like blues legend Mamie Smith or Testament of Youth author Vera Brittain, for instance, are masterfully done.
Part of the enjoyment of reading Fracture is a touch on the guilty side, since this author periodically indulges himself in pronouncements that are thought-provoking and ridiculous by turns. “No dictatorship has ever approved of jazz,” he writes in one example. “People who drink and dance together and feel their partner's moving boy on the dance floor simply find it more difficult to hate one another. Close dancing may be the best inoculation against ideology.”
Sentiments like this are good fun, although occasionally Blom can take them too far. Some of his snapshots about the changes in the collective psyche trade too freely on conceptions that are inordinately simplified in order to highlight contrasts that might not be so instructive without the massaging. The changes taking place in the Western ideas of masculinity, for instance, were a good deal more complicated than a description like this would imply:
It was not easy to be a man in 1914. Traditional forms of manliness and social hierarchies had been undermined by industrialization and urbanization. Most factory work could be done by women, too, and life in the big city required working couples to bring home two wages and to have fewer children. New jobs and occupations where hard to reconcile with the ideas previous generations had had of manly virtue. Encased in anonymous buildings and wedged in front of a typewriter, pale from the lack of sunlight and nervous from the constant din of machines in the vicinity, the modern office worker looked nothing like the image of martial virility that had ruled his upbringing. The feminist writer Rosa Mayreder had even dubbed offices “coffins of masculinity.”
The inestimable Rosa Mayreder notwithstanding, there were mousy office clerks before 1914 (typewriters too). Invoking some easy idea of “manly virtue” in order to stress changing postwar standards ends up being more distracting than anything else, especially in the midst of so much wonderfully insightful commentary.
The focus of that commentary is not on politicians and armies, Blom writes, but on “perceptions, fears, and wishes, ways of dealing with the trauma of the war, with the energies released by industrialization, with the confusing and exhilarating identities that became possible in an industrial mass society, especially once the old values had been shattered.” Fracture wades into this multifaceted chaos – this Futurist jungle – with wit and plenty of shrewd prose. If Blom follows it up with a history of social changes during the Second World War, readers would be well-advised to follow along.