LEWIS MUMFORD
A Life
Donald L. Miller
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989
628 pp., $ 24.95
Lewis Charles Mumford - still with us at the age of ninety-four - was born in the last years of the Victorian age. He would remain a Victorian in many of his attitudes and values - his self-discipline, passion for order, and moral intensity. But he experienced the trauma of living during a time when change occurred with an acceleration beyond the imagination of past generations. He was for more than a half-century a major figure on the American, even international, cultural scene, turning out some thirty books and over a thousand essays and reviews.
Mumford's most significant work was done without benefit of a university chair, private foundation grant, or a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Although taking advantage in his later years of the financial pickings to be reaped from the visiting professor game, he retained a lifelong suspicion of (or to be more accurate, contempt for) the university as a stronghold of sterile conformism and Ph.D.s as narrow pedants. Mumford, Donald L. Miller writes in this biography, was "one of America's last surviving men of letters . . .[who] supported himself entirely by his pen, producing a body of work almost unequaled in this century for its range and richness."
Mumford was a loner who, for the most part, was not active in organized campaigns for one or another cause. He lived a disciplined, structured, almost monastic life in which his writing came first, even before his responsibilities as husband and father. None of his books achieved best-sellerdom. His reputation was largely limited to an intellectual elite. In a sense, Mumford aimed at that audience. The foundation of his work was his faith in the power of ideas to change the world and his accompanying conviction that writers and artists such as himself were catalysts for social and cultural change.
As time went on, Mumford felt resentment, even despair, over what he saw as his lack of influence. Paradoxically, his complaints were loudest when awards and honors were flooding in. Perhaps the answer to this paradox lies in the extravagance of his aspirations. "Even as an adolescent, he had secretly believed that he was marked for greatness; Nietzsche's idea of the Superman, the superior human figure whose task it is to save the world by sheer force of will, is a persistent theme in his earliest unpublished writings," writes Miller.
A trove of information
A professor of history at Lafayette College, Miller takes pains to deny that his is an official biography. Mumford had first discouraged his attentions because he had wished to be his own biographer. Sketches from a Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford was published in 1982 but covered only up to the mid-1930s. When the ravages of age prevented Mumford from going further with the autobiography, he appears to have turned to Miller as a surrogate. He, his wife, and their daughter gave Miller lengthy interviews; more important, Mumford allowed Miller free access to is voluminous papers - including that part of the collection deposited at the University of
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