Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (21 page)
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Authors: Patrick Wilcken
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Professionals & Academics, #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #History, #Americas, #South America, #Brazil, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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On the run in to Martinique, relief spread through the decks at the prospect of landfall and the first bath in weeks. Hopes were short-lived. A crude French nationalism reigned in the colony, loyal to Vichy France, rather than any notion of embryonic resistance. Paranoid officials, brooding in their colonial outpost, finally had a group of “traitors” on whom to vent their anger and frustration. As soon as the
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
docked, heavily armed troops in tropical kit flooded onto the decks
.
There were show interrogations, consisting mainly of eyeballing and shouting abuse, followed by internment in prison camps.
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
docked, heavily armed troops in tropical kit flooded onto the decks
.
There were show interrogations, consisting mainly of eyeballing and shouting abuse, followed by internment in prison camps.
Breton was singled out for special treatment. He was forced to pay a nine-thousand-franc “deposit” to enter Martinique, which was subsequently revoked, although he ended up paying fifteen hundred francs in “internment fees” for the pleasure of being imprisoned in the former leper colony Pointe-Rouge. When he presented his invitations to speak in America, one official scoffed, “A fat lot of good
that’ll
do the Americans.” Breton was eventually freed with the parting shot: “We don’t need any Surrealist or hyperrealist poets in Martinique.”
33
that’ll
do the Americans.” Breton was eventually freed with the parting shot: “We don’t need any Surrealist or hyperrealist poets in Martinique.”
33
Lévi-Strauss was accused of being “a Jewish Freemason in the pay of the Americans” and was apparently told that “so-called French Jews are worse than foreign Jews.”
34
But his luck held. At the request of the ship’s captain, who had served as chief officer on the Brazil trips, he was spared the rigors of the camps and was, along with the Martinican and Smadja, allowed ashore. They toured the island in an old Ford, grinding up mountain roads in low gear past fern fronds and fruit trees set against pale mists and volcanic earth. Lévi-Strauss found the landscapes pleasing, more in tune with his idealized vision of the tropics than Brazil’s mix of the baking
cerrado
and the claustrophobia of the forests.
34
But his luck held. At the request of the ship’s captain, who had served as chief officer on the Brazil trips, he was spared the rigors of the camps and was, along with the Martinican and Smadja, allowed ashore. They toured the island in an old Ford, grinding up mountain roads in low gear past fern fronds and fruit trees set against pale mists and volcanic earth. Lévi-Strauss found the landscapes pleasing, more in tune with his idealized vision of the tropics than Brazil’s mix of the baking
cerrado
and the claustrophobia of the forests.
From Martinique, he took a Swedish banana boat to San Juan, Puerto Rico. For the first time he sensed America on the air, albeit from the edge of the Caribbean:
I breathed in the warm smell of car paint and wintergreen . . . those two olfactory poles between which stretches a whole range of American comfort, from cars to lavatories, by way of radio sets, sweets and toothpaste. I tried to guess what the girls in the drug-stores with their lilac dresses and mahogany hair were thinking about, behind their mask-like make-up.
35
Lévi-Strauss’s official welcome, though, was hostile. His immigration paperwork was already out of date, and while he cabled New York for fresh assurances, he was placed under a loose form of house arrest, accompanied by two bored police officers wherever he went. Three weeks passed before the Americans could arrange for an FBI expert to inspect his crate of fieldwork notes. The agent, though highly suspicious of a card-index reference to Karl von den Steinen’s classic work on Mato Grosso,
Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens
, eventually passed the collection. Months after being bundled on the refugee ship in Marseille, Lévi-Strauss was cleared to proceed to New York.
Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens
, eventually passed the collection. Months after being bundled on the refugee ship in Marseille, Lévi-Strauss was cleared to proceed to New York.
As he embarked on the last leg of his voyage, another Jewish intellectual, Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, was fleeing Europe by boat. After passing the wreckage of the recently sunk
Bismarck
, Jakobson’s liner plowed across the North Atlantic, bound for New York. The two men’s subsequent meeting would mark the beginning of a new intellectual matrix; two disciplines—anthropology and linguistics—would come together, as the study of kinship and phonemics, of systems of sound and marriage, became unlikely bedfellows.
Bismarck
, Jakobson’s liner plowed across the North Atlantic, bound for New York. The two men’s subsequent meeting would mark the beginning of a new intellectual matrix; two disciplines—anthropology and linguistics—would come together, as the study of kinship and phonemics, of systems of sound and marriage, became unlikely bedfellows.
AT THE END OF MAY 1941, Lévi-Strauss disembarked in New York with his crate of ethnographic materials, a few personal effects and a small amount of currency. The long journey into exile that had begun a year before in the deceptively tranquil woods behind the Maginot Line was finally over. He checked in at the New School for Social Research, which had by then adopted the role of a welcoming center, helping disoriented exiles find their feet. By the time Lévi-Strauss arrived, some thirty thousand French men and women had fled to New York. Some were
émigrés de luxe
—the rich avoiding the inconvenience of war—others penniless artists or academics. French newspapers, journals and a small book publishing industry were taking root; there were concerts, exhibitions and plays featuring French artists.
émigrés de luxe
—the rich avoiding the inconvenience of war—others penniless artists or academics. French newspapers, journals and a small book publishing industry were taking root; there were concerts, exhibitions and plays featuring French artists.
In a reprise of May 1939, Lévi-Strauss found that he had a salaried summer ahead of him before classes began in the autumn. Through an unseasonably humid spring, he set out to explore the city. He strolled up and down the avenues, ducked into cross streets, hopping from Chinatown to the Puerto Rican neighborhood around West Twenty-third Street; from Little Italy to the garment district off Union Square and the rows of sweatshops, still “charged with the stale odours from Central Europe.” He visited the fading Upper West Side and its grand turn-of-the-century apartments, now subdivided for poorer tenants, and walked through streets of East Side mansions. “One changed country every few blocks,” Lévi-Strauss later wrote, marveling at the novelty of an urban multiculturalism that European cities would only begin to experience on the postwar collapse of empire.
36
36
As he walked, he turned his ethnographer’s eye on New York. Aside from the cluster of skyscrapers around Wall Street, he found the urban landscape “astonishingly slack.”
37
Manhattan was not yet the corridor of high-rises that it would become, and in the shadow of that era’s tallest buildings lay a mishmash of villagelike residential areas, cottages, redbrick apartment blocks, greenery and vacant lots. Rio had been quaint, out of date—a tropical version of nineteenth-century Paris. In New York, the temporal was warped and bent, its social fabric rent by immigration, money and mobility. It was not so much modern as multilayered, a riveting mix of retro and provincial American styles, promiscuous European and Asian influences, and the hint of what was to come: “obscene” advertising for deodorant, dramatized department store window displays and eclectic couture.
38
37
Manhattan was not yet the corridor of high-rises that it would become, and in the shadow of that era’s tallest buildings lay a mishmash of villagelike residential areas, cottages, redbrick apartment blocks, greenery and vacant lots. Rio had been quaint, out of date—a tropical version of nineteenth-century Paris. In New York, the temporal was warped and bent, its social fabric rent by immigration, money and mobility. It was not so much modern as multilayered, a riveting mix of retro and provincial American styles, promiscuous European and Asian influences, and the hint of what was to come: “obscene” advertising for deodorant, dramatized department store window displays and eclectic couture.
38
Nosing around secondhand bookshops on Lower Broadway, Lévi-Strauss was moved to find issues of the
Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
on sale for a few dollars. “I could scarcely describe my emotion at this find,” he later remembered. “That these sacrosanct volumes, in their original green and gold bindings, representing most of what will remain known about the American Indian, could actually be bought and privately owned was something I had never dreamt of.”
39
He scrimped and saved, and gradually built up his collection—ranging from Mesoamerican pictographs to Pacific Northwest Coast Tsimshian mythology—ending up with every volume except one.
Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
on sale for a few dollars. “I could scarcely describe my emotion at this find,” he later remembered. “That these sacrosanct volumes, in their original green and gold bindings, representing most of what will remain known about the American Indian, could actually be bought and privately owned was something I had never dreamt of.”
39
He scrimped and saved, and gradually built up his collection—ranging from Mesoamerican pictographs to Pacific Northwest Coast Tsimshian mythology—ending up with every volume except one.
Lévi-Strauss toured the museums. What they lacked in range and depth, they made up for in solidity and attention to detail. He became fascinated by the hyperrealist dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, with their too-perfect arrangements of stuffed animals and plants from around the world, re-created, like a freeze-frame of a zoo exhibit, down to their last leaf and whisker. The ground floor of the museum, curated at the turn of the century by the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, was given over to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast—a string of indigenous settlements stretching from Alaska through British Columbia down as far as Oregon, which had produced some of the finest pre-Columbian art in the Americas. The museum’s broad corridors housed rows of heavy totem poles, obsidian masks and wooden chests carved with a mix of formal and figurative designs. Lévi-Strauss spent hours wandering through these galleries, looking at each artifact in detail.
One object, a
sxwaixwe
mask from the Salish people around Vancouver, particularly disturbed him. With its plug-shaped eyes—two cylinders projecting out from the face as if the eyeballs were mounted on stalks—and its gaping mouth, the mask was an exceptional piece. “It looked so different from the rest,” Lévi-Strauss remembered thirty years later. “Not the same shape, not the same style, and especially these protruding eyes—and my problem was, why these protruding eyes? What is their meaning? What are they there for?”
40
These were questions that he would be able to answer only toward the end of his career, with the help of the theoretical tools he would develop in the interim, when he returned to the subject in the 1970s in
La Voie des masques
(
The Way of the Masks
). In the intervening period he developed what he described as a “carnal bond” with Pacific Northwest art, which intrigued him as much aesthetically as intellectually.
41
sxwaixwe
mask from the Salish people around Vancouver, particularly disturbed him. With its plug-shaped eyes—two cylinders projecting out from the face as if the eyeballs were mounted on stalks—and its gaping mouth, the mask was an exceptional piece. “It looked so different from the rest,” Lévi-Strauss remembered thirty years later. “Not the same shape, not the same style, and especially these protruding eyes—and my problem was, why these protruding eyes? What is their meaning? What are they there for?”
40
These were questions that he would be able to answer only toward the end of his career, with the help of the theoretical tools he would develop in the interim, when he returned to the subject in the 1970s in
La Voie des masques
(
The Way of the Masks
). In the intervening period he developed what he described as a “carnal bond” with Pacific Northwest art, which intrigued him as much aesthetically as intellectually.
41
WHILE VISITING SURREALIST PAINTER Yves Tanguy, Lévi-Strauss found a small studio in Greenwich Village near the corner of Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue, which he immediately rented. Down a dingy basement corridor and up a staircase, the studio gave onto an overgrown garden. The accommodation was basic—a single room with a bed, a table and two chairs, with a sitting room annex. For decorations, Lévi-Strauss painted his own artwork, “a large surrealist-inspired canvas in somber tones, with giant interlocking hands dissolving into other features.” It was a reworking of the manic sketch he had produced in the Amazon after the herder Emídio had blown his hand apart.
42
On the coffee table there was a glass ashtray along with a small wooden statue of a golden-eyed warrior and a miniature British-Columbian totem.
43
The desk on which he wrote much of his five-hundred-page thesis was barely a meter wide.
44
Unbeknownst to Lévi-Strauss, Claude Shannon, the father of cybernetics, was renting an apartment on the same block, “inventing an artificial brain,” according to one of Lévi-Strauss’s neighbors.
45
Over the next years, the two men—one working on computer circuit boards and the other on tribal kin relations—would labor away on the same fundamental problems completely unaware of each other’s existence.
42
On the coffee table there was a glass ashtray along with a small wooden statue of a golden-eyed warrior and a miniature British-Columbian totem.
43
The desk on which he wrote much of his five-hundred-page thesis was barely a meter wide.
44
Unbeknownst to Lévi-Strauss, Claude Shannon, the father of cybernetics, was renting an apartment on the same block, “inventing an artificial brain,” according to one of Lévi-Strauss’s neighbors.
45
Over the next years, the two men—one working on computer circuit boards and the other on tribal kin relations—would labor away on the same fundamental problems completely unaware of each other’s existence.
As the artistic hub of New York—a network of cold-water flats, poky studios and crumbling tenement apartments—Greenwich Village was quickly colonized by the surrealist émigrés. Yves Tanguy joined Breton on Eleventh Street and Roberto Matta on Ninth. After a spell uptown in Peggy Guggenheim’s Hale House, Marcel Duchamp had eventually settled nearby in his famously minimalist one-room studio, decked out with a table, a chair, a packing case and two nails hammered into the wall with a piece of string hanging off one of them. American artists were also moving into the neighborhood. A few blocks away was the young and then relatively unknown Jackson Pollock, along with Gordon Onslow Ford, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell.
46
Life in the village was convivial. Italian delicatessens sold homemade spaghetti, traders laid out fruit and vegetables on carts, and the clubs along MacDougal Street played gravelly, slow-tempo jazz into the night. Nevertheless, the French complained bitterly about the lack of cafés, which had formed the backbone of their bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Lévi-Strauss’s own nostalgia was different. Although French to his core, his long spell in South America had left him rootless. “I dreamt a lot about the map of France,” he later recalled, “a France I hardly knew.”
47
46
Life in the village was convivial. Italian delicatessens sold homemade spaghetti, traders laid out fruit and vegetables on carts, and the clubs along MacDougal Street played gravelly, slow-tempo jazz into the night. Nevertheless, the French complained bitterly about the lack of cafés, which had formed the backbone of their bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Lévi-Strauss’s own nostalgia was different. Although French to his core, his long spell in South America had left him rootless. “I dreamt a lot about the map of France,” he later recalled, “a France I hardly knew.”
47
Through Breton, Lévi-Strauss soon became an honorary member of a celebrated artistic set. He was invited to soirées where the surrealists played their infamous parlor games:
vérité
, a psychoanalytic version of “truth or dare”; charades using only analogies; tarot card readings; and
cadavres exquis
(exquisite corpses), a game in which textual and visual fragments produced by members of the group were agglomerated into bizarre images and narratives. The artists visited one another’s houses, dined out, went to cocktail parties hosted by Peggy Guggenheim and late-night dancing sessions at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.
vérité
, a psychoanalytic version of “truth or dare”; charades using only analogies; tarot card readings; and
cadavres exquis
(exquisite corpses), a game in which textual and visual fragments produced by members of the group were agglomerated into bizarre images and narratives. The artists visited one another’s houses, dined out, went to cocktail parties hosted by Peggy Guggenheim and late-night dancing sessions at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.
Lévi-Strauss warmed to Max Ernst from the outset, and became friends with André Masson. He admired Tanguy the painter, but found him difficult to get along with. Duchamp “had great kindness,” and Lévi-Strauss’s friendship with the poet and art critic Patrick Waldberg—who would later become one of surrealism’s chroniclers—outlasted the brief bohemian sojourn in wartime New York.
48
Waldberg remembers touring the exotic restaurants of Manhattan Island with Lévi-Strauss, sampling Panamanian tortoise eggs, moose stew, oyster soup, Mexican oil-palm grubs and “silky textured octopus.”
49
It is through Waldberg’s eyes that we see Lévi-Strauss at this crucial stage of his life—an exile, a thinker still on the periphery, but on the brink of greatness:
48
Waldberg remembers touring the exotic restaurants of Manhattan Island with Lévi-Strauss, sampling Panamanian tortoise eggs, moose stew, oyster soup, Mexican oil-palm grubs and “silky textured octopus.”
49
It is through Waldberg’s eyes that we see Lévi-Strauss at this crucial stage of his life—an exile, a thinker still on the periphery, but on the brink of greatness:
He appeared to me imbued with what I would call an air of dignity: tall and slender with a long chiseled face, a look at once profound and searching, sometimes dreaming and melancholic, sometimes fixed and alert . . . For those who didn’t know him well, his manner could be difficult and at times even cold . . . I also remember the weight of his silence, as soon as an unwelcome presence tried to get him to say something he didn’t want to say. But if he was with trusted friends, he knew how to turn on the charm with warm, sometimes passionate, words.
50
Lévi-Strauss’s association with the surrealists was a fertile coming together of ideas. He was interested in midcentury artistic preoccupations: the subversive power of the subconscious, the importance of myth, irrationality and juxtaposition. The surrealists saw anthropology and psychology as the key modernist disciplines. They fed off half-digested ethnography and idolized tribal art. Just before the outbreak of the war, the artist Kurt Seligmann had spent almost four months at a trading station in British Columbia observing the ritual life and artwork of the Northwest Coast Indians, shipping an eighteen-meter-high totem pole back to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Breton was a keen collector of indigenous artifacts, which had lined his studio in Paris. And while driving back across America from Santa Monica in Peggy Guggenheim’s Buick convertible, Max Ernst stopped off to witness Hopi dances and collect Zuni
kachinas
(figurines) carved from cottonwood root.
kachinas
(figurines) carved from cottonwood root.
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