Although the Auxiliary Board made it possible for the League to produce a series of high-profile American stage premieres, its members often faced criticism. Minna Lederman recalled that members were often referred to as "the ladies." But she added: "I don't think they gave money except when there was an opera coming on. . . . They did so then because of the glamour of the conductor." 66 Others felt the same way about analogous groups. Louise Varèse, for example, recalled somewhat disparagingly that Varèse's New Symphony Orchestra had a "large Ladies' Committee" that did "whatever ladies' committees do" (VLD, 140).
Among Reis's many other achievements, a final item deserves attention: her publication in 1930 of American Composers of Today, the first catalogue of music by American modernists. While today the compilation of bibliographies and work lists has become almost commonplace, in 1930, for these composers, such a source was unique. It served as an invaluable and highly practical means of giving conductors, performers, publishers, and critics a sense of existing contemporary literature, and it made access to these works possible. Two years later Reis produced a revision of the catalogue with two-and-a-half times as many entries (expanding from fifty-five names to one hundred and thirty-five), with subsequent editions in 1938 and 1947. 67
The involvement of Reis, Whitney, Wertheim, and Walton in new music during the 1920s has been obscured in subsequent accounts of modernism, but attitudes already in place at the time helped prepare the way. Female leaders of composer organizations may have disparaged the social pretensions of "the ladies" on their auxiliary boards, but men who viewed these same groups often evinced even broader disdain that also included women organizers and patrons. Some composers, it is true, expressed gratitude for the help they had received; Copland and Cowell publicly acknowledged their debts to Reis and Walton. 68 But others all but demonized their benefactors, expressing gendered bigotry. Music critics tended to be the most outspoken, often attacking women as a group rather than singling out individuals, exposing a deep-seated misogyny with many sources.
On the one hand, the 1920s not only witnessed the birth of a new American art, straining to free itself from ties to the past and to Europe, but the continuing struggle of the "New Woman," whose desire for freedom was equally as intense and ambitious. She threatened cherished traditions, especially in the first decade after the nineteenth amendment, when women gained the right to vote. As Minna Lederman put it, "We thought we could do anything." 69
That was the "modern" side of the issue. For musicians, however, there was an even stronger attitude that had roots in the nineteenth-century notion of music as a feminized sphere. As stewards of the parlor, as supporters of opera and symphony orchestras, as teachers, and as local activists through music clubs, women had increasingly gained control over certain aspects of music-making in the United States. For many men, this gave music a disturbing air of effeminacy, leading musicians to a "manliness complex," as a 1924 editorial in Musical America put it. 70 Women had become associated with the genteel tradition of the late nineteenth century, and when that tradition faced rejection women suffered accordingly. This was a major issue in early modernism, and it remained strong throughout the 1920s. Further, women were viewed as agents of "conspicuous consumption," to use Thorstein Veblin's famous term, and so became an easy target in the complex of anti-commercialism and anti-traditionalism fundamental to American modernism. Increasingly, consonant music, and especially the pretty sort representing longstanding European traditions, became linked with effeminacy, while strong dissonance was labeled "manly" or "virile." Witness a review of one of the Copland-Sessions Concerts, a series that from 1928 to 1931 was dedicated to promoting the music of young American composers, in which a compliment is paid in sharply gendered language: "But there is a pretty high average in ideas and workmanship, and an an especially high one in virility." 71
Gender dichotomies frequently overlapped with distinctions between new and old, highbrow and lowbrow. In an essay published in 1929, Nicolas Slonimsky, a member of the young generation of composers, illustrated this process at work. "Yes, we want our musical tastes to be governed by the young sophisticates rather than by Mrs. Carrie Jacobs Bond" (a turn-of-the-century composer of popular songs, most notably "I Love You Truly"). 72 Similarly, the composer George Antheil attacked popular tunes of the recent past with an obscene and gendered slur.
I pride myself with the fact that most of the themes [of Antheil's Second Sonata for Violin, Piano, and Bass-Drums] are not original. 'In the shade of the Old Apple Tree,' 'Hochee Chooche' [sic], 'Darling, you are growing older,' and all the most vomiting, repulsive material. This sonata is like Joyce, and like spew . . . nevertheless it is electrical. For the first time in the history of the concert stage the world is allowed to gaze raptuously [sic] into an open cunt. 73
Women patrons, as highly visible focal points for the tensions within modernism, were often criticized. In 1920 the critic Paul Rosenfeld--the same Rosenfeld who was a close friend of Claire Reis and would become one of the most enlightened voices of the decade (at least in his concert-music tastes)--wrote an article for The Dial that discussed the demise of Varèse's tenure with the New Symphony Orchestra (the group subsidized primarily by Gertrude Whitney). The orchestra's failure to succeed in performing contemporary music was "one of the innumerable consequences of the fact that in America musical organizations have patronesses more often than they have patrons."
Great musical bodies cannot exist in America today, it is a commonplace, without subsidies. . . . But in our civilization, the man is not interested in art. . . . The control of the purer forms of music are almost entirely left to the distaff side. . . . But, unfortunately, the control by women of art is not the health of art. . . . In consequence, artistic activity remains, for the majority of those who engage in it, a lightly social expression. 74
In the same vein are the remarks of Deems Taylor, a stylistically conservative composer and well-known critic of the 1920s, who presented his survey of contemporary music in Civilization in the United States, a collection of essays that assessed the state of American culture. "Women," wrote Taylor, "constitute ninety per cent of those who support music in this country. . . . It is no disparagement of their activities to say that such a state of affairs is unhealthy." Rather than being lightweight, as Rosenfeld had charged, women were prone to "demand that art be edifying" and to encourage chauvinism among American composers. 75
In 1928, a year after Varèse's next organizational effort, the International Composers' Guild, had come to an end, Rosenfeld hailed the group for its achievements and compared it with its principal rival, the League of Composers--again in gendered terms. The League, which was dominated by women, fulfilled "a social function where the performance of music served the ambitions of mediocrities; handsomely dressed people conversed up and down the aisles; and music preluded to an apotheosis of personal projections and chicken salad in close quarter." 76
As critics increasingly connected women to the new-musci movement, they questioned whether those on the "distaff side" were capable of intellectual engagement with the bold new sounds they were fostering. Satire became a frequent weapon. In 1926, the critic W. J. Henderson published an article in The New Yorker, titled "The Modern Music Jag," in which he sarcastically pointed out that women were giving up the Charleston for another fad: new music. 77 Three years later Vanity Fair published a caricature by the famed artist Miguel Covarrubias (see 2).  Blitzstein was saying as much about the hypocrisy of artists who accepted support as he was about the women who gave it, but he was also drawing on a cultural stereotype now firmly established. As late as 1981 the composer Jerome Moross dimsissed the League of Composers as not being "a dues paying organization, but . . . a pet project of two rich ladies who were constantly struggling over the leadership." 79
Such charges, now and then, have overlooked the importance of the social functions hosted by women, occasions that made it possible for composers to integrate themselves into a network of publishers, performers, and concert managers. Varèse himself benefited from such events, whether hosted by Gertrude Whitney or Juliana Force, as did composers associated with the League. A particularly revealing document in this regard is an annotated guest list drawn up by Aaron Copland in the spring of 1930 for a party given by Blanche Walton, probably after one of the Copland-Sessions Concerts on 13 April. 80 Some of the guests were plainly invited for their topicality. The program that evening had included three new Hungarian works, Istvan Szelenyi's Recitative, Pál Kadosa's Sonatina, and Imre Weisshaus's Piano Study, and a number of Hungarians were among the invitees (the Hungarian Consulate General, the violinist Leopold Auer, the composer and violinist Sandor Harmati), most likely a reflection of Walton's association with Béla Bartók. There is also a small Polish contingent, in deference to a work by a Polish composer that had been performed. But the other invitees show that Copland was staging an event that brought together the many powerful res associated with modern music. They included leaders of the League of Composers, such as Claire Reis and her husband Arthur, as well as cofounders Emerson Whithorne and Federick Jacobi; concert managers, especially Arthur Judson and F. C. Coppicus, two of the most important of the day; and members of the press, especially the British critic and composer Leigh Henry and Robert Simon of the New Yorker.
It was through these mundane yet effective means that women patrons and supporters played such a crucial role in the rapid acceptance and institutionalization of modernist music. Yet their role in the new-music movement in America during the 1920s also raises questions with ongoing implications. Did women support a musical and cultural form that was deeply implicated with misogyny? And if so, how did they view themselves within it? Was the American modernist movement much more elitist and much less based in counter-cultural impulses than we have often imagined it to be? Was modernism's "traffic with the emerging world of consumerism and fashion," as the literary critic Lawrence Rainey has urged, "more complicated, more ambiguous" that we have often assumed? 81
Modernist composers, in many respects, tried to have it both ways. They constructed an autonomous profile and often took pride in the elitist constituency to which their music appealed. Deeply suspicious of the pressures brought to bear by a mass market, they consciously distinguished themselves from "commercial" musicians--a designation that was increasingly applied not only to composers of popular songs, such as George Gershwin or Jerome Kern, but to conductors of the standard European repertory, such as Damrosch and Arturo Toscanini, who vigorously marketed the music of Beethoven and Brahms through the newer media of radio and recordings. 82 At the same time, though, they sought recognition and success, and they were not above using techniques derived from the realm of commercial advertising to promote their work. Cowell staged a press conference--or as Musical America put it, "an impromptu recital for the benefit of the cameramen"--on the roof of the Knabe Building on Fifth Avenue a week after his Carnegie Hall debut in February 1924, and George Antheil hired a professional agent to promote the New York premiere of his Ballet Mécanique three years later. 83 Further, composers increasingly sought concert venues that would attract widespread publicity. In December 1924 the International Composers' Guild moved its concerts to Aeolian Hall, the same spacious facility where Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue had premiered that February, and increasingly the Guild's programs featured conductor-celebrities, most notably Leopold Stokowski and Fritz Reiner. Even its premiere of Pierrot lunaire in 1923 had created a kind of popular sensation: the Klaw Theater had been packed, and the audience had included no less than the movie star John Barrymore, whom Minna Lederman later recalled meeting there. 84 And as already noted, productions of the League of Composers became increasingly splashy throughout the course of the decade.
But what of the women who funded and organized many of these events? Did they willfilly submit to becoming scapegoats for composers' ambivalence about success and commercialism? Little evidence survives to indicate their reaction. Yet Minna Lederman, whom I knew during the final fifteen years of her life, may provide a revealing example. Although a tough professional, shrewd political strategist, and brilliant editor, she never questioned the degree to which she helped build a world that was largely male. She saw criticisms of wealthy female patrons, the League's Auxiliary, or even Claire Reis, as being directed at another species. To some degree, she saw herself as one of the guys, and her sense of being exceptional may have been more common than we now imagine; some, perhaps most, of the women attacked by composers and critics may have believed that the bigotry they witnessed was directed elsewhere. Seeing themselves as strong intellectuals and gifted administrators, not as representatives of unpleasant stereotypes, they may have floated above the misogynist comments that surrounded them.
However they rationalized their ambiguous status, women patrons were collaborating with male composers who seemed to be as living in a state of cultural paranoia. They feared their European contemporaries, who they felt were viewed as the real thing, while they struggled for crumbs of credibility. They feared jazz because it posed stiff competition, especially among continental critics. "American music is not jazz. Jazz is not music," declared Rosenfeld in the opening salvo of his An Hour with American Music, essentially a treatise on behalf of American modernism. 85 If they were descendants of America's Protestant past, they feared Jews, who were gaining prominence in many arenas of American musical life. And they feared the women whose patronage and social networks were indispensable to their careers. "Political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century," writes Andreas Huyssen, "consistently and obsessively genders mass culture as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities."
Male apprehension about "the 'wrong' kind of success," meaning commodification, went hand in hand with "the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued." 86 Women patrons and activists, in short, may have symbolized much more than the sum of their monetary contributions or hours volunteered. They represented gender change and shifting power relations. They highlighted the deep dependency of composers on a complex modernist community. They also reminded them of the degree to which new technologies were abetting the commodification of art. And they were easy targets, in part because they seldom struck back, preferring to position themselves above misogyny. Of the many paradoxes that characterized New York's modern-music community in the 1920s, one of the most vexing is how an aesthetic ideal so deeply committed to openness and free-wheeling experimentation should have been beset by so many self-constructed limitations. If we continue to accept the received account of this period, then the stories of Whitney, Walton, Wertheim, Reis, and other women who labored for modernism will stay safely within the realm of "women's history." If not, we may move closer to a more integrated assessment of the American musical past--one that honors all voices while keeping in plain view the tensions and paradoxes of the contexts in which they were first heard.
Carol J. Oja is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College. She is currently at work on Experiments in Modern Music: New York in the 1920s.
Research for this project has been aided by a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University and a grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies. I am grateful to Judith Tick for many kinds of help, and also to Adrienne Block, Minna Lederman, Ralph Locke, Vivian Perlis, Catherine Smith, Mark Tucker, and Linda Whitesitt. Throughout the notes, the following sigla indicate the location of manuscripts: LCMD for the Library of Congress, Music Division; and NYMD, for New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Music Division. These are followed by the name of the collection, with box numbers furnished whenever available.
1. Paul Rosenfeld, "Musical Chronicle: Introit," The Dial 69 (November, 1920): 550; and Carlos Salzedo, who with Edgard Varèse was cofounder of the International Composers' Guild, "Outward Shows," Eolus 5 (May 1926): 4.
2. Henry Cowell, "Introduction to the 1962 Edition," in Henry Cowell, ed., American Composers on American Music ([Palo Alto:] Stanford University Press, 1933; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1962), x. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1.
3. Walter Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926), 323.
4. See Minna Lederman, Modern Music: The Life and Death of a Small Magazine ("Modern Music," 1924-1946), I. S. A. M. Monographs, Number 18 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983); and Carol J. Oja, "The Mother of Them All: Remembering Minna Lederman," Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter, 15 (spring 1996): 1-2, 14. On Varèse, see Louise Varèse, Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972); hereafter abbreviated VLD.
5. George Antheil to Mary Louise Curtis Bok, 7 July 1925, written from Paris, LCMD, Antheil Collection.
6. See K. H. Ruppel, "Die Prinzesssin Edmond de Polignac," Melos 34 (June 1967): 198-203.
7. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 147.
8. Dorothy Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 151; Lederman, interview with author, 3 March 1988.
9. See Richard Crawford, "Professions and Patronage: American Musical Economics," unpublished essay, n.d. Material from this essay is incorporated in Chapter 2 of Crawford's The American Musical Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
10. Program, The New Symphony Orchestra, April 1919, NYMD, Program Collection.
11. See Olivia Mattis, Edgard Varèse and the Visual Arts, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1992, 149.
12. See Bryan R. Simms, "The Society for Private Musical Performance: Resources and Documents in Schoenberg's Legacy," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 3 (October 1979): 135-42.
13. On Milhaud's Paris performance see Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, trans. Leo Black (London: Longman, 1971), 128. Casella chronicled his performances of the work in an article for Modern Music, stating that "little of Schoenberg's music has been heard in Italy" and that Schoenberg's art was "so alien to our temperament" that Italians presented him with a "chasm [that] can never be bridged" (Alfredo Casella, "Schoenberg in Italy," Modern Music 1 [November 1924]: 7, 8).
14. Anne Firor Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 127. In a study of the patronage of literary modernism in England, Paul Delany quotes a British census of 1911 as listing 52,432 men and 195,712 women as having "Private Means" and being "Without Specified Occupations." A comparably disproportionate number of American wealthy women faced a similar lack of fulfilling occupation (Paul Delany, "Who Paid for Modernism?" in New Economic Criticism, eds. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [London: Routledge, forthcoming 1997]).
15. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1904; New York: Signet Classics, 1964), 9.
16. B. H. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, with the research collaboration of Flora Miller Irving (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 181.
17. The most informative sources about Whitney's patronage of composers are VLD, 153-5 and 259; Friedman, Whitney, 387, 405; and Mattis, Edgard Varèse, 149-61.
18. John Sloan, quoted in Juliana Force and American Art: A Memorial Exhibition, September 24-October 30, 1949 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1949), 35-6. Whitney's contribution as an art patron is evaluated in Roberta K. Tarbell, "Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney as Patron," in Patricia Hills and Roberta K. Tarbell, eds., The rative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980), 11-22, 171-2.
19. Another of the Guild's patrons was Mrs. Christian Holmes, born Betti Fleischmann and heir to the yeast fortune, who came to New York from Cincinnati around 1920. She had been head of the board of directors of the Cincinnati Orchestra (it was she who hired Leopold Stokowski as the Cincinnati Orchestra's conductor in 1909). An article published in the Cincinnati Times Star after her estate was settled, gives a rare view into the dimensions of one person's patronage. Among the reported $20 million that Holmes gave away during her lifetime, $222,812 went to the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York, $158,118 to the National Music League, and $36,500 to the American National Opera Company. By contrast, her gifts to the Guild must have been too small to be reported ("Holmes Estate Is $7,836,623," [Cincinnati] Times Star, 23 December 1947; clippings, Cincinnati Historical Society). Other information about Holmes comes from: Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1982), 50-3.
20. The split between the Guild and the League ostensibly came over whether or not the performance of Pierrot lunaire should be repeated after its American premiere (Varèse opposed repeat performances, while those who eventually formed the League favored them). But there was also a power struggle going on between Varèse and Claire Reis, and it left hard feelings on both sides. Probably because of this, Louise Varèse gives little credit to Wertheim in writing the Guild's history. She mentions Wertheim only twice: as one of Claire Reis's appointments to the Guild's executive board and as a host of Guild meetings (VLD, 177, 185). In addition to her financial and administrative involvement in the Guild, Wertheim wrote at least one article promoting its work, "World-Wide Guild of Composers," Christian Science Monitor, 17 December 1922.
21. A "family history" of the Morgenthaus continues the focus on males, noting that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had "real talent" as a singer, but that "a musical career was the last thing in the world [his father] had in mind for his only son. Music was all right, though, for the girls. Alma, one of my father's three sisters, trained her voice to the edge of professionalism; later she became a discriminating and demanding patron of avant garde composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Aaron Copland" (Henry Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History [New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991], 240.)
22. Barbara Tuchman, letter to author, 11 December 1987; Anne W. Werner, interview with author, 21 February 1988.
23. Minna Lederman, interview with author, 1 April 1989.
24. While New York composers tended to fall into separate ideological camps after the split between the Guild and League, there was some overlap. For example, a letter from Carl Ruggles to Blanche Walton, written in 1926, shows that Wertheim continued to reach out to Ruggles, one of the ICG's principal res: "Curious: Dr. Bartlett forwarded a note from Mrs. Wertheim asking about me, and what I was doing, and I answered her a fortnight ago, but have received no reply" (Ruggles to Walton, postmarked 19 November 1926, NYMD, Walton Collection).
25. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), 112.
26. Copland and Perlis, Copland, 129; Aaron Copland to Nadia Boulanger, 19 December 1927, "Mrs. Wertheim gave me $100 for Israel" (LCMD, Copland Collection).
27. On Wertheim and Cos Cob Press see Carol J. Oja, "Cos Cob Press and the American Composer," Music Library Association Notes 45 (December 1988): 227-52. See also her obituary, "Mrs. Morgenthau, A Patron of Arts," The New York Times, 26 December 1953, 13. Through their dedications, Cos Cob imprints suggest something of Wertheim's patronage. Five scores were dedicated to her: Copland's Piano Concerto, Gruenberg's Jazz-Suite for Orchestra, Marion Bauer's "Chromaticon" from Four Piano Pieces, Roy Harris's Concerto for Piano, Clarinet, and String Quartet, and Israel Citkowitz's "Gentle Lady," published in the Cos Cob Song Volume.
28. On women publishers see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
29. Minna Lederman, letter to author, 17 July 1988.
30. Claire Reis, interview with Vivian Perlis, 5 February 1976, Yale University Oral History/American Music Collection. Also, Wertheim's daughter, Anne Werner, recalls that her mother's finances diminished after divorcing Maurice Wertheim in 1929.
31. Carl Ruggles to Blanche Walton, 7 February 1928, NYMD, Walton Collection.
32. Cowell, "Program Note" for a concert honoring Blanche Walton, given at the New School for Social Research, 12 April 1959; typescript copy in the collection of Mildred Baker, New York City. For biographical information on Walton see Richard Jackson, "Blanche Wetherill Walton," in H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, eds., The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, vol. 4, (London: Macmillan, 1986), 474.
33. Marion Walton Putnam (Walton's daughter), interview with author, 19 April 1989.
34. Blanche Walton, "Only a Sketch," manuscript fragment of a memoir, n.d., NYMD, Walton Collection.
35. Letters from the pianist Richard Buhlig and the composers Carlos Chávez, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Carl Ruggles, and Edgard Varèse, NYMD, Walton Collection.
36. Walton's gifts to the Guild are documented in Varèse to Walton, 8 December 1924, NYMD, Walton Collection.
37. "The Founding of the Society," AMS Bulletin 1 : 1.
38. See Judith Tick, "Ruth Crawford Seeger--A Modernist Pioneer," introduction to Ruth Crawford Seeger, Suite No. 2, series "Music In the United States of America" issued by the American Musicological Society (Madison: A-R Editions, 1993), xxii-xxiii. Tick also explores Crawford's relationship with Walton in a forthcoming biography of Crawford to be published with Oxford University Press.
39. This musicale is the subject of a letter from Copland to Walton; since his "Trio" was to be among the featured compositions on the program, the musicale probably occurred after the completion of Vitebsk in 1929 (Copland to Walton, "Wed," n.d., NYMD, Walton Collection).
40. Henry Cowell, "Program Note" for a concert honoring Blanche Walton; NYMD, Walton Collection.
41. Waldo Frank to Claire Reis, 21 September 1956, NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 2.
42. According to Susan Noyes Platt, Katherine Dreier "assumed an aggressive, didactic attitude toward the endeavor of the Société Anonyme"; she was a "crusading spirit" who sought to "enlighten the unseeing masses who did not understand the new art because of their inability to see beyond externals" (Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to Constructivism [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985], 8-9, 11). In 1923 Dreier published her influential account of Western Art and the New Era (New York: Brentano's).
43. Reis discussed her potential for a concert career in an interview with Vivian Perlis, 21 January 1976; hereafter abbreviated IVP. The interview was one of a series, and the tapes and transcript are at Yale University, Oral History/American Music Collection; they are an invaluable source, with the transcript running to some 300 pages. The quotation about charity is from Reis, "Outline," undated typescript autobiographical statement, NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1. Reis's obituary also provides biographical information: "Claire Raphael Reis Dies at 89; Leader in New York Cultural Life," The New York Times, 13 April 1978, sec. B, 2.
44. Born in Brownsville, Texas, to a Jewish family, Reis moved to New York with her mother, sister, and brother shortly after her father's death in 1898. She first studied piano in France and Germany. "Notes on Contributors" in Eolian Review 2 (March 1923): 28, accompanying an article by Reis, states that she worked with Tapper from 1908 to 1910. However among Reis's papers is a photograph of Tapper, stating on the back that Reis studied with her from 1906 to 1913; NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1a. Tapper (1859-1915) was an interesting re in her own right. Born in Norway, she had studied in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and Louis Maas, and was friends with Edvard Grieg, for whom she edited two volumes of piano compositions. Like many women, Tapper focused her career on nurturing others. A. Walter Kramer, editor of Musical America and another member of the circle that included Tapper and Reis, noted this trait: "And so she lived, for others, never for herself . . . I know that she composed much and that she destroyed it, never wishing to have her music appear in print" (A. Walter Kramer, "Bertha Fiering Tapper: Altruist [obituary]," Musical America 22 [25 September 1915]: 9).
45. Memoirs of Waldo Frank, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 65. Since Frank describes Ornstein as "just back from overseas successes," 1914 is a likely year for this event left undated by Frank; Ornstein had just returned to New York then after a highly acclaimed recital in London. There were other connections between Frank and Reis. His first wife was Margaret Naumburg, with whom Reis started the Walden School; and Reis's husband Arthur, whom she married in 1915, was business adviser to Frank's little magazine, The Seven Arts, which ran from 1916 to 1917. Arthur Reis was president of Robert Reis and Company, a firm established by his father that manufactured men's underwear.
46. Programs for the recitals are in NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 2. Included were works by Scriabin, Debussy, D'Indy, Schoenberg (Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11), Ravel, Busoni, Casella, Cyril Scott, and Stravinsky (Piano Pieces of 1915). Ornstein also performed his own Melancholie, Danse Arabe, A la Chinoise, Dwarf Suite, Sonata , and The Masqueraders.
47. Paul Rosenfeld to Claire Reis, 16 August 1915, NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 2.
48. Reis, typescript resume, dated 6 January 1952, NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1. The date of the inception of the People's Music League appears to be 1911. In Reis's biography (included in "Notes on Contributors," Eolian Review 2 [March 1923]: 28), it is given as that, also in several sets of typescript notes at NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1. However, in one of her interviews with Vivian Perlis, Reis stated 1912 (21 January 1976), and Perlis gives that year in her article about Reis for The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, vol. 4, 28. As Reis tells it, her founding of the People's Music League came about under the aegis of Maurice Wertheim, husband of Alma Morgenthau, who gave her a letter of introduction to Frederic Howe of the People's Institute. Mrs. Maurice Wertheim (Alma Morgenthau) became a member of the advisory council of the People's Music League.
49. Reis, "Outline," undated typescript autobiographical statement, NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1.
50. The event took place on 12 February 1922; a program for it is in NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 2.
51. Reis, "Outline."
52. Examples of Ruggles's anti-Semitism appear throughout his personal papers, housed at Yale University, the Beinecke Library, and his biographer refers to "Carl's anti-Semitism" as though it were so well known as to require no explanation (Marilyn Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles: Composer, Painter, and Storyteller) [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994], 195). Virgil Thomson, interview with author, 29 February 1988.
53. Reis, interview with Vivian Perlis, 29 January 1976; Yale University, Oral History/American Music Collection. When I reported Reis's remark to Minna Lederman (herself from a Jewish family), she was shocked to learn that Salzedo was Jewish, since she recalled him as an anti-Semite (interview with author, 21 June 1991).
54. Reis, interview with Perlis, 29 January 1976; and Reis, "Notes Added to Music," undated typescript, NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1.
55. Claire Reis, "Contemporary Music and 'the Man on the Street,'" Eolian Review 2 (March 1923): 24, 27.
56. Jerome Hart, "Modern Music: Its Appreciators and Depreciators," The Sackbut 4 (November 1923): 102. Hart was a frequent contributor to The Freeman, a journal for which Daniel Gregory Mason also wrote (in fact he also discusses a contemporaneous article by Mason in this same piece), and his language in The Sackbut sounds similar to that of the critic Henry T. Finck, suggesting a pattern of linking revolution, feminism, and modernist music: "Schönberg learned a lesson from the militant suffragettes. He was ignored till he began to smash parlor furniture [and] throw bombs" ("Schoenberg and the Suffragettes," Musical Progress [New York: Harper & Bros., 1923], 393). The text of this excerpt is in turn very close to that of an unsigned review in the New York Post on 27 January 1914; Finck was then music critic for that paper. Connections between misogyny and modernist music are explored in Catherine Parsons Smith, "'A Distinguishing Virility': Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music," in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 90-106.
57. Hart also called Henry Cowell a "Bolshevik" after hearing his tone-clusters, suggesting that his opinions were as much anti-modernist as anti-feminist (Jerome Hart, "Musical Bolshevism," The New York Times, 30 July 1922, sec. 2, 6.
58. Other members of the League's board who had defected from the Guild were Stephan Bourgeois, Frederick Jacobi, Louis Bruenberg, Minna Lederman, and Alma Morgenthau Wertheim.
59. Aaron Copland, "Claire Reis (1889 [sic]-1978)," The Musical Quarterly 64 (July 1978): 387.
60. Hilda Reis Bijur, interview with author, 16 November 1990. Not all suffragists, of course, were necessarily feminists. See Winnifred Harper, "The Younger Suffragists," Harper's Weekly 58 (September 27, 1913): 7-8, as discussed in June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 26.
61. Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s, 34.
62. Reis, interview with Perlis, 6 May 1977; Yale University, Oral History/American Music Collection.
63. See Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York's Orchestra (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 207-8, 245.
64. VLD, 140; Sophie Guggenheimer Untermeyer and Alix Williamson, Mother is Music (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 16. Apart from the Countess Mercati, who served as Chair, the members of the Auxiliary Board comprised: Mrs. Henry Alexander, Mrs. John Alexander, Mrs. Paul Baerwald, Mrs. Nicolai Berezowsky, Miss Dorothy Berliner, Mrs. Sidney Borg, Mrs. Henry Churchill, Mrs. David B. Dearborn, Jr., Mrs. Reginald De Koven, Mrs. Morris Fatman, Mrs. Henry Glazier, Mrs. Frank Gray Griswold, Mrs. Charles Guggenheimer, Mrs. Morgan Hamilton, Mr. Charles Hayden, Mrs. Christian Holmes, Mrs. Otto Kahn, Mr. Frederick Juilliard, Mrs. Philip Lewisohn, Mrs. Charles D. Liebman, Mr. Walter Meyer, Mrs. Charles E. Mitchell, Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, Miss Harriet Mundy, Miss Alice Newman, Mrs. John De Witt Peltz, Miss Elizabeth Rethberg, Mr. Sidney Ross, Mrs. Arthur Sachs, Mr. Alfred Seligsberg, Mrs. Horatio N. Shonnard, Mrs. Frederick Steinway, Mrs. S. W. Straus, Mrs. Charles Triller, and Mrs. N. Orme Wilson.
65. Claire R. Reis, Composers, Conductors, and Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955; reprint, Detroit: Detroit Reprints in Music, 1974), 73.
66. Minna Lederman, interview with author, 1 April 1989.
67. Claire Reis, American Composers of Today (New York: International Society for Contemporary Music, United States Section, 1930; Reis, American Composers: A Record of Works Written Between 1912 and 1932, 2nd ed. (New York: United States Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, 1932); Reis, Composers in America: Biographical Sketches of Living Composers with a Record of their Works, 1912-1937 (New York: Macmillan, 1938); and Reis, Composers in America: Biographical Sketches of Contemporary Composers with a Record of their Works, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Macmillan, 1947). Reis's other achievements include founding New York's Walden School, a private school for children, in the 1910s; later she also played a prominent role in establishing the New York City Center.
68. Copland, "Claire Reis," and Cowell, "Program Note," typescript version, 1959.
69. Lederman, stated in a private conversation with the author.
70. Unsigned editorial, "Music and Manliness," Musical America (2 February 1924): 20, as cited by Mary Herron DuPree in "The Failure of American Music: The Critical View from the 1920s," Journal of Musicology 2 (summer 1983): 311-2. Since some young composers of the 1920s were homosexual, women were not the only threat to "manliness." Decades later Louis Gruenberg would rue, to Claire Reis, "the sad state of music in America today since the politicians and homosexuals are dominating it" (Louis Gruenberg to Claire Reis, 1 December 1951, NYDM, Reis Collection, Box 2).
71. Irving Weil, "The Wizardry of Toscanini and the Latest from America," Musical America (10 March 1929): 53.
72. Nicolas Slonimsky, "The Patient, the Doctors, the Verdicts," Boston Globe, undated clipping (probably January, 1929), LCMD, Slonimsky Collection. This was a review of Paul Rosenfeld's An Hour with American Music.
73. George Antheil to Stanley Hart, [9 March? 1925], LCMD, Antheil Collection.
74. Rosenfeld, "Musical Chronicle: The New, or National, Symphony Orchestra," The Dial 69 (December 1920): 670.
75. Deems Taylor, "Music," Harold E. Stearns, ed., Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 205-6.
76. Paul Rosenfeld, "Thanks to the International Guild: A Musical Chronicle," By Way of Art (New York: Coward McGann, 1928), 14. Rosenfeld's statement, when coupled with ones such as the following, suggest that the League--at least occasionally--was perceived as being more lightweight than the Guild. "The league seems to entertian a rather good-humored, even indulgent, notion of its responsibilities to the public. In Making up its programs, it favors music which is fanciful and entertaining, rather than that which is intellectual and uncomporomising" ("Modern Music Guilds and their Messages," Christian Science Monitor, 15 May 1926, 16).
77. W. J. Henderson, "The Modern Music Jag," The New Yorker (21 February 1926): 21; a copy of the article is included among Claire Reis's papers (NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1).
78. Vanity Fair 31 (February 1929): 54.
79. Jerome Moross to Catherine Smith, 20 July 1981. Quoted with the permission of Catherine Smith.
80. Copland, party list now attached to an undated letter [before 16 March 1930], "Monday," NYMD, Walton Collection. A page in a scrapbook compiled by Claire Reis includes clippings for such events at her house, including "a companionable tea" for the Pro Arte Quartet, a reception for Frederick Jacobi, and "an amazing party" after a League concert; all are unidentified and undated (NYMD, Reis Collection, Box 1a). The exact date of the party is unclear. It may also have followed the previous concert on 16 March, for an undated letter from Copland to Blanche Walton states: "Our concert is scheduled for 16 March. I'll be able to send you a list of people to ask before the week is out. You might word it: To meet composers and assisting artists after the C-S concert" (n.d., written on stationery for the Copland-Sessions Concerts, NYMD, Walton Collection).
81. Lawrence Rainey, "The Social Structure of Modernism," in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 1997), 29 (in typescript).
82. See Judith Tick, "Charles Ives and Gender Ideology," in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 102, who discusses Ives's gendered tirades against the cultural "monopoly" represented by the marketing of European classics. See also Carol Oja, "Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s," The Musical Quarterly 78 (winter 1994): 646-68.
83. "Henry Cowell, American Modernist, Demonstrates his 'Fist Technic,'" Musical America 39 (16 February 1924): 3.
84. Minna Lederman, interview with author, 21 June 1991.
85. Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with American Music (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1929), 11.
86. Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman," in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 53.
.
"For some time past," wrote John Gould Fletcher in 1918, "various people have been clamoring for a new religion, without seeing that a new one was being born under their noses." The new religion has been created in the newspapers, and its god, says Fletcher, is the tank. The tank "has seized upon our imaginations":
Writers continually hymn for us His virtues. Short stories, sonnets are dedicated to Him. His picture appears everywhere in our papers. Artists paint Him as he appears upon the battlefield, and inventive children experiment with model Tanks in wood and cardboard. 1
This god was invented in Britain during the First World War and first used at the Somme in September 1916. The military and technical history of the tank has been well documented; much less is known about its cultural significance, especially among civilians. 2 How did this new weapon alter the ways in which Britain imagined itself, its citizens, and its relationship to the war? The tank was one of the few innovations in which Britain was more successful than Germany; this alone gave it considerable ideological force. But its significance was far greater than its military value. For Fletcher, its "commanding personality" had "captivated" the civilian imagination. If the tank won the war, as its champions claimed, it did so through the mobilization of fantasy rather than on the battlefield. This paper attempts to show how.
The tank was developed to answer a serious military problem: to break the deadlock on the western front. Not long after the war began, the western front had become paralysed. Two powerful armies faced one another in trenches which extended from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps, a distance of nearly five hundred miles. Each side was equipped with machine guns and artillery and was separated from the other by impenetrable barbed wire. Neither side could advance; unprotected troops trying to struggle through the barbed wire were mowed down by machine guns and artillery fire. The war settled into the terrible stalemate of 1915, followed by the failed pushes of 1916. The killing continued, but the war itself was immobilized. To break the deadlock, some kind of armored vehicle was needed to break through or crush the barbed wire, knock out the enemy's gun emplacements, and allow the infantry to advance--to transform stasis into movement. This need was answered by the tank. Its champions envisaged hundreds of technically efficient tanks launched in a sector of hard ground. The tank was Britain's secret weapon, and would, it was hoped, overwhelm the Germans with surprise and terror as well as technical mastery.
By the late summer of 1916, the high command was desperate for a success at the Somme, following the hundreds of thousands of deaths since July of that year. After intense political struggles within British military circles, tanks were brought into action in September 1916--about six months before they were ready--at one of the wettest, muddiest sectors of the front (see 1). 3 By this date, only sixty machines had been manufactured. Transporting them to the front was a huge undertaking, and many of the crews were physically exhausted before they reached the battle. Several tanks were damaged in transit; others broke down on their way to the starting line. Several more became bogged or broke down, and only eighteen actually took part in the assault. 4 The tank crews were bitterly disappointed; the other troops were skeptical (TW, 37). But hardly anyone actually saw this failure, and it was reported in the newspapers as a remarkable success.
The newspapers were one of the most important sources of propaganda in the Great War, as many historians have documented. 5 They were also a key site in which civilians' fantasmatic relationship to the war was mobilized--and to some extent produced. When the first tanks went into battle, the Daily Mail announced a success for "our glorious infantry, airmen, and gunners, and . . . the wonderful new armored 'tanks,'" and gave a prominent place to a long report by its correspondent, Beach Thomas:
The sun rose to-day on a British success and a German defeat. It set on an enhanced victory and a greater rout. . . . We are advancing still, and the enemy still retreating. . . . Soon after six the spasmodic barking of the cannonade (now normal in spite of its intensity) gave place to a "kettle-drum bombardment." The "fun" was "fast and furious," and two minutes after the orchestra opened our men leaped from their trenches. They were not unaccompanied. . . . we had brought up a certain number of armored cars which the moonlight transformed into fantastic monsters. . . . They looked like blind creatures emerging from the primeval slime. To watch one crawling round a battered wood in the half-light was to think of "the Jabberwock with eyes of flame" who
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood
And burbled as it came.
. . . these iron monsters . . . amused our men rather than encouraged them. They were a jest, cheering hearts, possibly faithful creatures, but no rival to the bayonet. . . . Munchausen never approached the stories imagined for them by soldiers. But their pet name is "tanks," and they were chiefly regarded as a practical joke. Whales, Boojums, Dreadnoughts, slugs, snarks. . . . They were said to live in trees and houses and jump like grasshoppers or kangaroos. 6
The propagandistic quality of the writing seems obvious: the use of "we" and "our," the excess of praise ("our glorious infantry," etc.), the duplicitous suggestion that the slow-moving tanks were "said" (presumably by soldiers) to "jump like grasshoppers or kangaroos," when they were much more likely to be stuck in the mud. More striking, however, are the metaphors which place the tank simultaneously in a tradition of literary fantasy (Jabberwock, Munchausen) and somewhere in prehistory. These images appear in a great many newspaper accounts, as well as in tank histories, memoirs, literary works, and even official military communications. The Times, for example, describing the same battle, imagines the tanks as "unearthly monsters, cased in steel, spitting fire," and likens them to toad-salamanders, echidna-dragons, mammoths, Leviathan, and various other mythical and ancient beasts. 7 For Punch, the tank is a dragon, mounted by St George. 8 Mitchell's tank history remembers the first tanks as "uncanny brutes emerged from some dim prehistoric age" (TW, 78). 9 Ford Madox Ford calls them "ugly, senseless armadillos" which move like "slow rats . . . snouting crumbs of garbage." 10
Almost all the early tank writings compare the machine to some kind of dinosaur emerging out of the primeval mud. As Gertrude Stein remarks, "war makes things go backward as well as forward." 11 The most advanced weapon of 1916 takes civilization into a new phase of modern technology at the same time as plunging it back into prehistory--an image both terrifying and pleasurable. It is sometimes argued that the Great War destroyed belief in evolution, but the war's cultural resonances are actually more complex than this. 12 With the tank, especially, evolution begins to run backwards and forwards, simultaneously--a vertiginous notion which informs a number of late modernist writings, from Ford's Parade's End (1924-1928) to Woolf's Between the Acts in 1941.
The first tanks also generate a peculiar kind of laughter, as The Times correspondent suggests:
I watched the great things manoeuvre about the field, grotesque and unspeakable; and at each new antic which they performed, each new capacity which they developed, one could do nothing but sit down and laugh till one's sides ached. Were they only a preposterous joke or were they a serious contribution to modern warfare? 13
Similarly, the Southern Daily Echo reports, "It makes you roar with laughter to see one of them slide up to a house, go slick-bang through the walls, and come out the other side without a scratch, leaving the house, of course, just a pile of bricks and mortar." 14 Many of the reports present the tank as comical; a "preposterous joke", which is said to terrify the Germans and make the British laugh uncontrollably. What is the significance of this laughter? In Bergson's famous definition, laughter is produced by "Something mechanical encrusted on the living." 15 This seems appropriate for the tank, a machine which looks like a "self-propelling mammoth," "half battleship, half caterpillar." 16 But Bergson also points out that laughter is "above all, a corrective"; it "intends to humiliate." Laughter, in other words, has a political function; it helps a society to define itself and its borders, and to regulate behavior. 17 This was particularly important in the last two years of the war, which produced new demands on the population and required that they consent, and keep on consenting, to the slaughter.
Very few people saw the tanks in battle; yet almost everyone in Britain knew what they looked like. As Mrs. Humphry Ward remarked in 1917, "London is full of tanks, of course--on the films." 18 Tank films were extremely popular, reaching an audience of perhaps twenty million people, and tanks made cameo appearances in various other war films. 19 An exhibition in London in March 1918 claimed to include the world's largest photograph--twenty-three feet and six inches by seventeen feet--of tanks on the western front. 20 Many other representations appeared, such as an "exclusive" tank toy for Christmas from Selfridge's. 21 There were tank pleasure rides, tank handbags, tank teapots, tank money-boxes, paper napkins decorated with pictures of the Royal Family and tanks. Small china models of the tank were produced: these were about six inches long, and often decorated with a small picture--of Peterborough Cathedral, for example. 22 Often witty or parodic, these strange, uncanny objects projected the tank right into the heart of civilian culture.
As well as being surrounded by representations of the tank, a surprising number of civilians saw tanks first hand, at close quarters, in Britain, in one of the more surreal propaganda campaigns of the war. This campaign can be traced through the newspaper reports in the spring of 1918.
On Friday, 1 March 1918, the British newspapers reported a new drive to raise money for the war. The campaign was announced in mock-military terms: "Business men all over the country are closing their ranks for next week's great offensive to raise One Hundred Millions in National War Bonds and War Savings Certificates." 23 The "great offensive" was Business Men's Week, which aimed to persuade businesses to invest their entire week's takings in national war bonds. 24 The preliminary responses were promising, as companies jostled to pledge their week's income, and more, to the cause: Selfridge's promised £50,000; Harrod's, £75,000; Ellerman Lines, £1 million. 25 Business Men's Week was the highlight of an intensive campaign to sell war bonds which aimed to raise an average of £25 million per week, every week, for about a year. 26
Readers were encouraged to buy their war bonds from a tank, parked for the week in Trafalgar Square. The Times explained:
A military pigeon post is being arranged to convey investors' cheques to the Tank in Trafalgar-square. Special baskets of pigeons in charge of soldiers will be on view in the Square. Those who wish to invest amounts over a certain sum can be supplied with a pigeon which will be taken by a soldier to their homes, where the cheque or application for bonds can be inserted in the small metal holder on the leg of the bird, which will then fly with it to the Tank in Trafalgar-square. The pigeons will not accept cheques from outside the Greater London area.
It adds that "A special telephone exchange is being installed to serve the six Tanks in the London area." Anyone who was interested simply had to dial "Tanks, London." 27
All over the country, fund-raising targets were set according to the population of each center. Large cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool promised to raise £2.5 million each, enough to pay for a super-dreadnought, while a tiny Welsh village hoped to raise enough to buy one aeroplane. 28 The logic of this method of selling war bonds was explained in an advertisement in the Daily Express:
IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS the State demanded arms and ships.
TO-DAY, You are only asked to lend the money to buy them.
Until recent times the provision of ships and armour for the defence of the country was nearly always the duty of the various towns, villages and individuals.
THE REVIVAL OF ENGLAND'S GLORY
. . . "Lend your money" says the State "and arms and ships will be provided." 29
Readers were urged to buy as many bonds as possible, to "help your own city, town or district to carry out the task allotted to it." 30 The advertisement constructs its readers, somewhat reluctantly, as free citizens rather than feudal subjects, but they were citizens under pressure to renew their consent to the war and to express that support visibly, in public.
The first day of Business Men's Week was very successful; in London alone, £4.5 million was raised. 31 One tank was stationed behind the Royal Exchange, where business men were invited to go "Over the top of the City Tank" to buy their war bonds. 32 Another tank (called Egbert) remained in Trafalgar Square (see 2), while four others roamed the boroughs of London, spending a day in each place, collecting money. 33 Almost all the named tank bank investors in the newspaper reports are large businesses, paying up to two million pounds each. But the organizers of Business Men's Week also hoped that working-class people would invest in war bonds, and activities were devised to attract punters from all classes. The Times described the "attractions" provided in Trafalgar Square: a display of model ships, launched by an admiral of the United States navy, and a pigeon race at lunchtime with war bonds as a prize. 34 Another tank was "in state" at Hackney, where a local shop, "camouflaged" as a trench, sold "war trophies." 35 A few days later, everyone in Fulham who bought war bonds was filmed, and the film screened in a local cinema; the best "tank smile" won a prize. 36
On the final days of Business Men's Week, citizens were invited to choose "British bonds to-day or German bondage to-morrow." MPs spoke from the top of the tank in Trafalgar Square and the Lord Mayor of London dropped a message from an airship, reminding Londoners of their duty. Altogether, Tank Week raised £135 million, much to the organizers' satisfaction. 37
Not long after they were invented, then, tanks appeared on the streets of all the major British cities. (The first tank banks were introduced the previous autumn, in November 1917, during the battle of Cambrai.) 38 Contemporary reports suggest that civilians rather liked them. Even allowing for newspaper inaccuracies and propaganda, the evidence suggests that large numbers of people visited the tank banks and many bought war bonds. 39 Others were less enthusiastic; Virginia Woolf, for example, acidly described a warm spring day in 1918, in which the sound of "Richmond worshipping a Tank was like the hum of bees round some first blossom." 40 John Gould Fletcher complained in the Egoist in 1917 that Britain's attempt to destroy the German military machine had led to the invention of other, equally undesirable machines, including the tank and the war loan, "a machine to empty our pockets." 41 In his 1918 essay "The New God," Fletcher likened the tank to a mechanical god, remarking ironically that its ability to collect money was "miraculous," and that buying war bonds had become a "religious ceremony." 42
In the newspapers, by contrast, tank banks were represented as entertainment for the populace, reported in phrases which weakly parody the language of war: the "great offensive"; "go over the top"; and so forth. All over the country, business, the press, and the state worked together to provide official spectacles which aimed to generate laughter and pleasure, and to regenerate support for the war. Tank banks became the center of a kind of carnival--to which the popular musical Chu Chin Chow, for example, sent a camel to buy £10,000 of war bonds. 43 As the Daily Express remarked with approval: "All that the Tank Fair needs is a coconut shy!" 44 In its editorial--entitled "Have You Tanked?"--the Express argued that people who fail to buy war bonds will "surely be marked with a blush"; and "the man without a tank certificate should be as uncomfortable as the man who has not shaved." 45 Citizens were offered a choice between communal pleasure (however fictitious) and social embarrassment. Consent becomes a form of personal hygiene, and those who refuse should carry a physical mark of shame.
The tank bank campaign was so successful that a similar project was undertaken a few months later. Trevor Wilson describes the "Feed the Guns" campaign, in which Trafalgar Square was turned into a replica of a bombed French village, with a shell-damaged church tower, wrecked farmhouse, etc. Twenty thousand sandbags were brought in, and visitors were invited to "feed" the guns on display with war bonds and certificates. 46 Here, again, civilians seem to have permitted the state to infantilize them; they enacted a fantasy of the war as a circus or fairground, replicated in bizarre simulacra in Trafalgar Square.
Yet tanks were not uncomplicatedly benign or entertaining presences on city streets; the newspapers also admit that they look rather frightening and seem to threaten violence towards the civilian population of their own side. 47 The idea of tanks turning against civilians surfaced just days after the tank first appeared in battle. The Daily Mail reported (or perhaps invented) a "hopeful man who said that after the war is over he will certainly hire one of the 'tanks' to clear his wife's relatives out of his house." 48 Sales at the first tank banks were reported in the Daily Express, half mockingly, as "Tank Draws First Blood," and the tank itself described as "a hungry monster," "his mouth wide open," like a hippopotamus at the zoo. 49 A frightened child is assured that "he only bites Germans" and "purrs" when well fed. 50 In one newspaper advertisement, the tank is represented as a huge, looming presence--disproportionately large in comparison with the human res around it--shooting money out of its guns. 51 Sassoon's poem "Blighters" imagines--indeed, hopes for--a tank attack on civilians in a music hall: "I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls / Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, Sweet Home.'" 52 This is perhaps the best-known criticism of the use of tanks to trivialize the war, and it locates the blame entirely among civilians--especially women, the "prancing ranks of harlots" on the stage. Yet the processes which bring comic songs about tanks into popular entertainment are rather more complex than the poem allows.
The winter of 1917-1918 was perhaps the most difficult period of the war. With a shortage of food and heating, a very cold winter, and no end of the war in sight, there was a real possibility that the war might become insupportable. 53 The cost was also a problem. How could support for the war be regenerated, especially among civilians, and how was it to be paid for? The early tanks might not have been very successful in battle, but they answered these political problems very nicely and transferred hundreds of millions of pounds out of bank savings and into the war. This had a profound effect on Britain's economy, as John Maynard Keynes later pointed out. 54 Indeed, Britain, like the rest of Europe, ended the war severely in debt; this had serious consequences in the decades which followed.
Contradictory discourses of pleasure, fear, and duty; infantilism, community, and adulthood were employed to persuade and coerce the British people to renew their support for the war during its most unpopular period. This in turn raises questions about agency, and about what it meant to be a citizen in the last few months of the war--a period in which the franchise was extended from eight million to twenty-one million voters. 55 Historians often note that the postwar revolutionary movements were much weaker in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, perhaps because of the extension of the franchise. It is also possible that the particular ways in which civilians were persuaded to consent to the war--including the use of official carnivals around the weapons of war--may have been a factor in post-war politics. Such a claim can only be speculative; we cannot know what would have happened without the propaganda, censorship, tank banks, and so forth. But the success of the pro-war campaigns is highly suggestive; particularly significant is their ability to produce a fantasmatic, infantile, and pleasurable relationship to the war and its objects. The tank provided both fictions and fantasies as well as a physical presence and "commanding personality" around which people gathered, voluntarily, and about which they dreamed. 56 In short, it played a vital role in what Walter Lippmann termed the "manufacture of consent." 57
Overall, between October 1917 and September 1918, war bonds raised £1,000 million, an achievement which, as Trevor Wilson argues, caused considerable hardship among poorer people, especially as taxes and postage costs were increased around the same time. 58 This was the tanks' most successful campaign.
Intense secrecy surrounded the development and manufacture of the tank. The name "tank" was chosen as a disguise, and the early tanks were passed off as water-tanks, supposedly to be exported to Russia in boxes labelled "With Care to Petrograd." 59 Strange stories circulated about the origins of the tank; after the war, many different people claimed to have invented it, and a Royal Commission was set up to decide on its true parents, and to reward them with large sums of money.
A prototype was tested in the summer of 1915, using the caterpillar track, recently invented for American tractors. As a result of these tests, a track of pressed steel was developed and wrapped around the entire body of the tank, producing the characteristic rhomboid shape. The tracks did not actually move across the ground; rather, a lot of small sprocket wheels drove the body along its own tracks.  60 Or as Mary Borden puts it in her tank poem, "They moved slowly along on their stomachs / Dragging themselves forward by their ears." 61
The tank looks completely self-sufficient; this pleases many early observers. From the outside, the crew is completely hidden; what you see is a machine which appears to drive itself, fire its own guns, and even provide its own road. The tank looked like a completely new kind of mechanical warfare, and it generated intense excitement among journalists and propagandists. It was greeted with less enthusiasm by the army and the war office. Their ambivalence has been dismissed as conservative, narrow minded, and driven by an excessive love of cavalry. 62 Perhaps so, but it is also worth noting that the tank consumed large quantities of money, labor, steel, and so forth at a time of scarcity, and was actually not very good at negotiating a muddy landscape. Even in their most successful battle, at Cambrai in November 1917, the tanks could not hold the ground they had won, and almost all the gains were lost a few days later, with approximately forty-five thousand casualties on each side. 63 Despite these failures, the tank appeared to offer protection to the vulnerable human body. Many writers describe the Great War as a war of machines against men, with the machines always winning. The tank seems, however ineptly, to provide a shield--to protect soldiers from the terrible damage of machine-gun bullets and artillery. In short, the tank promises to reduce the hideous abjection of the war; this alone altered the fantasmatic relationship between the human body and modern warfare, both for soldiers and for civilians.
The Great War is often discussed as if it were a complete break with the past; an abyss which separates the nineteenth century from modernism or modernity. 64 This re can be traced in a number of writings from the period, but equally we find the war and its objects placed in an almost seamless continuity with the past, especially in military writings. A bizarre range of antecedants was discovered for the tank: the Roman testudo, knights in armor, armored elephants, Leonardo's lost drawings of a horse-drawn tank, Dante's invention of the tank in the Divine Comedy, H. G. Wells's land ironclads. 65 Even today, the Bovington Tank Museum locates its objects in antiquity; its exhibition of First World War tanks opens with a quotation from the Bible: "And the Lord was with Judah: and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain: but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." 66
The first successful tank was named Little Willie. Little Willie was too short, and was replaced by a larger model: Big Willie. 67 The larger model was the basis of all the early tanks which were used in battle, and was immediately renamed Mother--"as it was the first of all tanks." 68 Here the language becomes extremely complex, for Mother came in two forms: male and female. (There were also "hermaphrodite" tanks.) The sex of the tank was determined by relatively minor variations: the male was a little larger and weighed twenty-eight tons; the female weighed twenty-seven tons. The male had two kinds of guns; the female only one (though both carried a total of six guns). Perhaps most significantly from the crew's point of view, in the early models the male had a narrow door in the side, allowing men to escape, with difficulty, if the tank caught fire. The female by contrast had only a small trap door, only two feet high, out of which it was almost impossible to escape. 69 This was soon modified, but in the earliest tanks, being inside a female Mother was one of the men's worst nightmares: it was a place in which they could be trapped and burned alive. Tank driver Jenkin notes that the men "most favoured" the male Mothers. 70
Drivers took up the terminology, but were inclined to refer to "my bus" or "my Willie" rather than "my Mother." 71 The language of Willie and Mother, male, female, and hermaphrodite, is scattered throughout the early tank writings with an air of ironic innocence. Mitchell for example writes of the "adventurous male"; "determined male"; "all-conquering female"; "female man-killers." "Would the old 'Willie' break down suddenly when in the midst of the enemy?" worries a driver before his first attack. On her first trial, reports Mitchell, Mother "behaved splendidly." 72 The Illustrated London News presents a picture of a female Mother--"'The Perfect Lady' about to cross a trench." A book by the engineering firm William Foster and Co. reproduces several photographs of Mother: "'Mother' negotiates her first trench," "A Supply Tank . . . evolved from 'Mother,'" and a banner from Foster's factory: "Welcome to the Birthplace of the Tanks." 73 Many of the early tank writings employ an excess of metaphors of birth, conception, evolution, and fathering of the tank; the men who will later squabble over the money and glory allocated to the inventor of the tank claim to have given birth--to Mother. 74 Once she is invented, "Mother" becomes a highly mobile and at times perverse re in the language of the tank--a source of simultaneous pleasure and terror, protection and violence and even a bizarre kind of tenderness. In a piece written long after the war, Henry Williamson tells a tank anecdote from Field Marshall Hindenburg's autobiography. Hindenburg, says Williamson, recalls the sight, towards the end of the war, of "a British Tommy sitting wounded by a knocked-out tank, holding the hand of a dying sixteen-year-old German boy, and saying, as the lad cried out 'Mutti--Mutti,' 'It's all right chum, Mother's here with you.'" 75
The tank produced new ways of imagining warfare, the human body, and structures of difference. For most British people, both soldiers and civilians, the tank represents an idea. Industrial warfare produces new terrors. In theory, at least, you can hide inside a machine known as both Willie and Mother and drive through a dangerous landscape, crushing your enemies in your path. At the same time, you worry that Willie or Mother is threatening to mutilate or destroy you, and possibly take all your money, in uncanny anticipation of the work of Melanie Klein. Such fantasies are available to both women and men as fantasies, and are articulated repeatedly in the writings, films, and photographs of the tank. The crucial difference between subjects in an industrial war is located less in sexual difference than in the distinction between combatants and civilians. 76 Or, more precisely, between those inside and those outside the sublime object of the tank. Those inside often wrote about their experiences. Tank memoirs and tank histories appeared throughout the 1920s and 1930s; many were reviewed in journals such as the TLS. 77 In the final section, I will look briefly at Arthur Jenkin's A Tank Driver's Experiences , F. Mitchell's Tank Warfare , and the autobiography of tank driver and psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion. These works offer gripping accounts of how the early tank was imagined long after its technology had been superseded.
All the weapons of the Great War were to some extent spectacles, but none more so than the tank. Unlike machine guns or artillery, the tank actually killed very few people. Its early engagements hinged largely on the question of theater: how could it best exploit how it looked? The drivers' memoirs are fascinated by the implacable body of the tank and the differences it produces between inside and outside. Both positions are extremely dangerous and each provides a new fantasy relationship between the soldier's body and the sources of danger. Most of the crew are devoted to the machine and determined to make it work; at the same time it inspires a profound terror and rage when it fails to protect them.
Both Jenkin and Mitchell provide detailed descriptions of conditions inside the tank. With the crew crowded around the large engine and heat rising above one hundred degrees, the interior of the tank was, as Jenkin remarks, "a veritable hell" for the men inside:
[M]achine-gun bullets beat like hail upon the outside, from which hot splinters pricked the gunners' faces, whilst shells could be heard bursting in close proximity. Inside, above the noise of the engine, was heard the sharp cracking of our own machine guns, mingled with the groaning and whining of the gunner who lay stretched along the blood and oil-saturated floor; this, with the vomiting of our second driver, intense heat, exhaust petrol fumes, and nauseous vapour from the guns made an inferno that no outside observer would have thought possible to exist within those steel plates. 78
The crew are also terrified that the tank will catch fire. Yet the tank is also a place that--in theory, at least--will protect them from danger. Men are placed inside Mother; at the same time they are Mother--much is made of the fact that the crew of eight works as a single, disciplined body. All but one of them function as limbs, working the machine and the guns; the eighth is the brains of the outfit and does the navigating. The early tank in action is a completely self-contained unit, cut off from the outside world; a single, complex body within its own carapace. 79
Sitting inside Mother, the crew could see almost nothing outside. Paul Virilio argues that the technology of cinema began to replace the act of looking in the Great War. 80 In the tank, looking was replaced by aerial photographs, and the commander navigated at one remove. No one inside the tank could actually see where they were going. 81 To protect their faces from sparks and debris, the crew often wore chain-mail masks which reduced visibility even further. Almost blind, navigating with aerial photographs which could be out of date within hours, the tank crew were, according to Mitchell, "like an ostrich with its head in the sand" (TW. 153)--a position which he says gave them plenty of courage. Yet Mitchell and Jenkin also describe some of the horrible injuries sustained in tank warfare. When Jenkin's tank is hit with a high explosive shell, the steel plate of the tank is severed "as if it were matchwood" (TDE, 180). He loses the use of his arm, drags himself out of the tank, and finds himself "lying exhausted and alone," in terrible pain and suffering from "the indescribable feelings produced by [engine] fumes upon an empty stomach" (TDE, 182). Later, in hospital, his arm is amputated without his knowledge. 82 Jenkin provides very little description of physical suffering, yet his memoir is disturbing precisely because of its ambivalence. He loves the tank, but it has failed to save him from mutilation. 83
The tank also produces a new relationship to the notion of work. Both Jenkin and Mitchell describe the labor involved in driving and maintaining the tank. It takes days of intensive labor transporting a tank, digging it out of ditches, getting it across railway lines, repairing the engine, and so forth. Much of this work was instantly rendered futile when tanks became bogged beyond salvage or wrecked by shell fire. Many tanks never reached a battle, but had to be abandoned; in some areas the landscape was littered with these enormous pieces of expensive rubbish (see 3). 84 After one failed battle, Mitchell recalls the sight of "eight huge carcasses . . . , some battered beyond recognition, others lifting their snouts pathetically beyond the slimy waters" (TW, 125). 85 Derelict tanks blocked the road and had to be blown up--a dangerous undertaking which took about a week. The world's first industrial war generated large-scale industrial waste--a sight which was kept well hidden from the civilians buying their millions of pounds' worth of war bonds at precisely the same time. 86
The autobiography of Wilfred Bion is also preoccupied with the strange relationship between inside and outside produced by the tank. Unlike most other tank writers, Bion doesn't like the tank much. He hates being inside "the cursed thing" --and is terrified of being outside it, as well. (Early tank commanders often walked in front of their tanks into battle; as a new branch of the army, the Tank Corps was trying to establish its reputation for courage and honor, and the crews took considerable risks to achieve this.) When a civilian woman asks what it feels like when his tank runs over people, Bion doesn't know, but he does recall being "possessed" by the terrible fear that he would fall wounded and be run over by his own tank (130, 266).
Bion represents himself as an incompetent soldier and a hopeless tank commander. All his memories of battle are nightmarish: the men don't know where they are going; the orders don't make sense; men are killed, pointlessly. By the time he comes to his third tank engagement, Bion is simultaneously terrified and cynical about the plans for battle. The crew is exhausted, Bion is confused, the orders are insane. "They were not orders," he writes, "they were sentences of death" . Instead of starting at dawn, the tanks are ordered to attack at 10:30 in the morning. Here Bion provides a rare description of a tank commander's view from the outside of his tank:
The tanks were hidden, each under a small clump of trees very conveniently placed, separated by an average interval of fifty yards from each other. At 10.25 they emerged and drove to cross the front line of the division at 10.30. There was no gunfire, no machine-gun fire. As the tanks crossed the line the enemy machine guns opened up. I walked behind Greene's tank hoping, by being as close as possible, to escape the machine-gun fire.
. . . Hauser, who had gone into action sitting on the back of one of the two tanks under his immediate command, had also run back to see what had happened. It was uncanny; nothing had happened--that's what had happened. But he was unmistakably terrified; we both were--and both perfectly safe in the trench. The troops might have been sleep-walking.
We looked at the tanks; they had nothing wrong with them. They were quietly purring their way forward and were already too far away to catch up with them even if we wanted to do so. As there was no method of communication, wireless or otherwise, we could only stand and watch, the Colonel almost demented, Hauser and I ghost-ridden.
The tanks rolled up a gentle grassy slope. There was a soft muffled explosion. Robertson's tank opened as a flower in a nature film might unfold. Another thud; then two, almost simultaneous, followed. The whole four had flowered. Hard, bright flames, as if cut out of tinfoil, flickered and died, extinguished by the bright sun. One tank, crewless, went on to claw at the back of one in front as if preparatory to love-making; then stopped as if exhausted. [254]
"We stared, fascinated," says Bion. Later he learns that the Staff have ordered the tanks to carry high explosives, so they can be blown up if they are captured by the Germans, which makes them rather vulnerable if they get hit. The extraordinary vision of the tanks opening "like blossoms greeting the sun" , with his crew inside, disturbs Bion terribly, but it also teaches him something useful. In the next battle, he is inspired to tell the crew to jump out; he will drive the tank alone, steering a zig-zag course. His men leave, then Bion remembers that it takes the entire crew to steer the tank; all he can do is drive it in a straight line, under the gaze of lots of observation balloons. He opens the throttle, and leaps out. The empty tank races forwards; nothing fires on it; Bion realizes he has just made a gift to the enemy of "a fully equipped tank in complete working order." He runs after it, presumably in the hope of getting it back again. Then, he says, "mercifully a shell hit, pierced and burst. The tank stopped, flames spurting everywhere. In a moment it was a total wreck" . Bion knows that he (and the crew) should have stayed in the tank, even though they would certainly have been killed. Yet in a way honor is satisfied; the tank went into battle on a useless mission; it was hit, as it must have been. And the crew is alive, rather than pointlessly dead. Here, as elsewhere in this book, tank activity is partly an elaborate masquerade, a simulacrum of warfare, enacted at a safe distance.
One fantasy generated by the tank was that future wars would be fought entirely by machines, who would do the dying for us. The tank seems to promise new kinds of agency--enabling the human body to enter zones which were previously impenetrable--at the same time as it negates agency and displaces the human subject from the narratives of war. This human subject, like evolution, is imagined as moving simultaneously forwards into the machine age and backwards into the primeval slime--a movement both terrifying and pleasurable. Bion's memoir, written in the 1970s, is written against this fantasy through the knowledge of what war actually did become; he reads the Great War backwards through the human suffering of Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War, Hiroshima, Fascism, and other disasters of the twentieth century, all of which owe a good deal to the technical, political, and imaginative developments of 1914-1918.
Trudi Tate is a lecturer at the University of Southampton. She is editor of Women, Men, and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (Manchester University Press, 1995) and co-editor, with Suzanne Raitt, of Women's Fiction and the First World War (Oxford University Press). She is currently completing a study of modernism and the First World War.
1. John Gould Fletcher, "The New God," Egoist 5 (March 1918): 45-6. My thanks to Gillian Beer, Harry Collins, Con Coroneos, David Dickinson, Maud Ellmann, Geoffrey Gilbert, Bernard Harris, Ian Patterson, Lawrence Rainey, Suzanne Raitt, Karen Seymour, Helen Small, and Lyndsey Stonebridge for comments and references. All photographs courtesy the Imperial War Museum, London.
2. Recent studies include: David Fletcher, Landships: British Tanks in the First World War (London: HMSO, 1984); David Fletcher, ed., Tanks and Trenches: First-Hand Accounts of Trench Warfare in the First World War (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1994); George Forty and Anne Forty, Bovington Tanks (Wincanton, Dorset: Wincanton Press, 1988); J. P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903-1939 (Manchester University Press, 1995); A. J. Smithers, A New Excalibur: The Development of the Tank 1909-1939 (London: Leo Cooper and Secker and Warburg, 1986); A. J. Smithers, Cambrai: The First Great Tank Battle 1917 (London: Leo Cooper, 1992); and Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity, 1986). I have drawn my military-historical material from these sources and from F. Mitchell, Tank Warfare: The Story of the Tanks of the Great War (1933; Stevenage: Spa Books, 1987), hereafter abbreviated TW; and E. D. Swinton, Eyewitness (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932).
3. Fletcher, Landships, 15.
4. See TW, 344. Immediately after the First World War, there was considerable debate as to whether the tank could ever be developed into a useful weapon. Later tanks were of course very successful in battle; this has tended to efface the early failures.
5. See for example Irene Cooper Willis, England's Holy War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928); Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928); Philip Taylor, Munitions of the Mind (Manchester University Press, 1995); Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914-18 and After (London: Batsford, 1989).
6. W. Beach Thomas, Daily Mail, 18 September 1916, 5. This article is parodied in "Teech Bomas," "How the Tanks went Over," B. E. F. Times, 1 December 1916, reprinted in The Wipers Times, with an introduction by Patrick Beaver (London: Papermac, 1988), 133. An article in Punch also claims that tanks can climb trees: "The Watch Dogs," Punch, 27 September 1916, 214. Mitchell complains about the "weird and fantastic" press reports which exaggerated the tanks' abilities (TW, 36, 63).
7. The Times, 16 September 1916, 8; The Times, 19 September 1916, 10.
8. "St. George Out-dragons the Dragon," cartoon, Punch, 28 November 1917, 367.
9. See also Swinton, Eyewitness, 12.
10. Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (1924-28; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 576.
11. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (1945; London: Brilliance Books, 1984), 5.
12. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 291.
13. The Times, 19 September 1916, 10.
14. Southern Daily Echo [Southampton], 4 January 1918, 3. The Nation quotes an unnamed newspaper report which praises the tanks for making the British army "laugh as it fought" ("The New-Born Tortoise," Nation, 23 September 1916, 784-5).
15. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Macmillan, 1911), 37.
16. Arthur Jenkin, A Tank Driver's Experiences: Or Incidents in a Soldier's Life (London: Elliot Stock, 1922), 14, hereafter abbreviated TDE; Mr Punch's History of the Great War (London: Cassell, 1919), 110, an edited version of a piece in Punch, 27 September 1916, 214.
17. For Bergson, "Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social signification" (Laughter, 8). On Bergson's war propaganda, see Geoffrey Gilbert,A Career in Modernism: Wyndham Lewis (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1995).
18. Mrs. Humphry Ward, Towards the Goal (London: John Murray, 1917), 31.
19. Roger Smither, ed., The Battles of the Somme and Ancre (London: Imperial War Museum, 1993), 21, referring to the film The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks. Nicholas Reeves notes that 112 London cinemas booked the film. Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War (London: Croom Helm and IWM, 1986), 225.
20. "The Prince Sees Himself: War Photographs that Pleased the King," Daily Express, 4 March 1918, 3; see also "The War in Colours," The Times, 4 March 1918, 10; 5 March 1918, 9; 6 March 1918, 3; Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1918, 5; Daily Chronicle, 4 March 1918, 3; Daily Express, 4 March 1918, 3. The exhibition was organized by the Ministry of Information.
21. Advertisement in Daily Express, 27 November 1916, 2, "A weird model that goes lumbering fearlessly along" with "guns which shoot from inside." The toy tank costs 8/11.
22. These objects (or photographs of them) are on display at the Bovington Tank Museum, Wool, Dorset.
23. Daily Mail, 1 March 1918, 5. "It is to be the greatest financial push of the war, and everybody, rich and poor, should join in this great offensive" (Weekly Dispatch, 3 March 1918, 1).
24. See for example The Times, 1 March 1918, 3.
25. Ibid.; Daily Mail, 1 March 1918, 5; 2 March 1918, 6; Daily Express, 4 March 1918, 3.
26. The Times, 19 January 1918, 10; 21 January 1918, 3.
27. "'Tanks, London': Business Houses' Support," The Times, 1 March 1918, 3. Similar reports appear in other papers: "Flying Cheques: Pigeon Post to Tank," Daily Mail, 1 March 1918, 5; "'Chequer' Pigeons: A Novel Way of Investing in War Bonds," Daily Express, 1 March 1918, 3; "Tanks Week: A Fine Start," Daily Mail, 2 March 1918, 6. According to one report, only those investing more than £10,000 were entitled to use a pigeon (Weekly Dispatch, 3 March 1918, 1).
28. The Times, 1 March 1918, 3; Daily Mail, 1 March 1918, 5.
29. Daily Express, 4 March 1918, 2. The advertisement details the pledges received for various items of military hardware: twenty-two cities and towns have promised to pay for cruisers at £400,000 each; thirty-two towns will buy destroyers at £150,000 each; sixty-seven small towns will buy submarines at £100,000 each; hundreds of little towns will buy aeroplanes at £2,500 each. The advertisement appeared in several other papers as well.
30. Daily Express, 4 March 1918, 2.
31. The Times, 5 March 1918, 7.
32. The Times, 5 March 1918, 7.
33. Daily Mail, 1 March 1918, 5.
34. The Times, 8 March 1918, 7. Other prizes are offered "with the idea of stimulating buying on the part of the working-classes" (The Times, 5 March 1918, 7). The Daily Express argues that the public is attracted by the "sporting chance" of winning certificates or prizes (6 March 1918, 1).
35. The Times, 8 March 1918, 7.
36. "The Best 'Tank Smile.'" Daily Express, 13 March 1913, 3.
37. The Times, 9 March 1918, 7.
38. "Right through the Great Hindenburg Line: Cavalry, Tanks, and Infantry," Daily Express, 22 November 1917, 1; "The Tank-Bank: Attractive Scheme for the Sale of War Bonds," ibid., 3. On Cambrai see Wilson, Myriad Faces of War, 491-2; Fletcher, ed., Tanks and Trenches, 70; A. J. Smithers, Cambrai.
39. Enormous sums were collected in all the major cities; the largest amount was collected in Glasgow: £14 million pounds in one week.
40. Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 131, entry of 5 April 1918.
41. John Gould Fletcher, "The Death of the Machines," The Egoist 4 (April 1917), 45.
42. Fletcher, "The New God," 45-6.
43. "Tank Week Items," Daily Express, 8 March 1918, 3. See also Daily Chronicle, 8 March 1918, 3. The Daily Telegraph reports: "About two o'clock the animal, with stately step, drew up at the Royal Exchange, where its gorgeously arrayed Eastern attendant handed in a cheque for £10,000 to be invested in National War Bonds, and after a tour of the walks they left by the western steps" (8 March 1918, 5).
44. "All the Fun of the Tank Fair," Daily Express, 8 March 1918, 3; see also "London Sets the Pace," Daily Express, 5 March 1918, 3. Land and Water noted that some people "object to what they call 'the circus business' in connection with national finance," implying that the state's money ought to be treated with greater dignity. But, it declared, "the end has justified the means," and British people are beginning to recognize their "individual responsibility" to pay for the war ("The Outlook," Land and Water, 14 March 1918, 4). Land and Water also published regular propaganda articles by Hilaire Belloc (including attacks on peace proposals) and serialized John Buchan's Greenmantle.
45. "Have you Tanked?" editorial, Daily Express, 4 March 1918, 2.
46. This campaign raised £29 million in 8 days in October 1918 (Wilson, Myriad Faces of War, 647).
47. This threat was in fact realized shortly after the war, when tanks were used against striking workers in Glasgow early in 1919 (Marwick, The Deluge, 313).
48. Daily Mail, 19 September 1916. John Gould Fletcher suggested sarcastically that when the tank was bored with raising money, it might go "to the houses of food-hoarders and force them to disgorge for our benefit" (Fletcher, "The New God," 45).
49. "Tank Draws First Blood," Daily Express, 27 November 1917, 3.
50. "Making the Tank Purr," Daily Express, 28 November 1917, 3. The fantasy investment in the tank was acknowledged in many reports; one paper commissioned cartoonists such as Heath Robinson to imagine the new machine before pictures were made available to the public ("My Dream of Tanks," Weekly Dispatch, 24 September 1916, 7).
51. Advertisement for Eagle Star and British Dominions Insurance Co., Daily Express, 11 March 1918, 1; advertisement for Eagle Star and British Dominions Insurance Co., Daily Express, 11 March 1918, 1.
52. Siegfried Sassoon, "Blighters" , in War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, arranged and with an introduction by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1983).
53. Smithers, Cambrai, 5-6. See also Buitenhuis on the importance of propaganda during this period in The Great War of Words.
54. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919; London: Macmillan, 1984), 11-3.
55. Nearly two-thirds of the new voters (8.4 million) were women. Martin Pugh, "Domestic Politics," in Stephen Constantine et al., eds., The First World War in British History (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 22-3.
56. Southern Daily Echo, 31 December 1917, [3].
57. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), 248. Lippmann is referring mainly to the United States, but the term is extremely apt for British political processes during and after the Great War. See also Lippmann, The Political Scene: An Essay on the Victory of 1918 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919).
58. The rise in postage was significant because working-class people were writing to relatives at the front, whereas before the war they rarely used the postal service (Wilson, Myriad Faces of War, 646).
59. See TW, 12.
60. See TW, 18.
61. Borden, "The Hill," The Forbidden Zone, (London: Heinemann, 1929) 176.
62. Smithers, A New Excalibur, 6-7.
63. 476 tanks were used on 20 November 1917: 378 for ting, ninety-eight for supplies, wireless, etc.; 179 were lost that day (Wilson, Myriad Faces of War, 485-92).
64. The continuities and discontinuities of the Great War are a matter of contention among historians. For a recent discussion of the question, see J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
65. "Dante the Inventor of Tanks!" Daily Express, 30 November 1916, 4; Wells, "The Land Ironclads" . See Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks, 4-8; George Forty, The Royal Tank Regiment (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount, 1988), 11; Smithers, A New Excalibur, 3.
66. Judges 1:19-20; quoted on notice at the entrance of Bovington Tank Museum, Wool, Dorset.
67. See TW, 8. "Big Willie" and "Little Willie" were common nicknames for the Kaiser and Crown Prince, but it is also worth noting that "willie" was documented slang for "penis" by 1905.
68. See TW, 9.
69. Ibid., 17, 21.
70. See TDE, 18, 170.
71. Smithers, A New Excalibur, 50.
72. See TW, 9, 29-31, 33, 39, 107-8. In 1927, the Tank Corps settled on its official marching tune: "My Boy Willie" (Forty and Forty, Bovington Tanks, 46-8).
73. Illustrated London News, 1 December 1917; William Foster and Co., The Tank: Its Birth and Development (1920; Hinkley: TEE Publishing, 1977), 24, 53, 70.
74. John Gould Fletcher comments that the tank's "birth was somewhat ridiculous," and that the "part taken by Winston Churchill therein has never been sufficiently cleared up" ("The New God," 45).
75. Williamson sees the act as evidence of the "gentle and kindly . . . attitude towards what was hellish"; a "virtue" extended even towards the enemy. "It is a charity which links those who have passed through the estranging remoteness of battle . . . men who were not broken, but reborn" (foreword to facsimile reprint of The Wipers Times, x).
76. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see my forthcoming study of modernist fiction and the Great War (Manchester University Press).
77. Early tank histories include D. G. Browne, The Tank in Action ; J. F. C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War, 1914-1918 ; John F. Lucy, There's a Devil in the Drum ; G. Martel, In the Wake of the Tank ; Murray Sueter, The Evolution of the Tank ; Albert Stern, Tanks 1914-1918 ; E. D. Swinton, Eyewitness . Journals included Journal of the Royal Artillery, Tank Corps Journal (later Royal Tank Corps Journal) and I Was There! Tank writings were often reviewed in the TLS.
78. See TDE, 179.
79. See TW, 122.
80. Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).
81. Various experiments were tried with slits and loopholes for viewing, but they allowed bullets into the tank under heavy fire, and often had to be blocked off completely.
82. See TDE, 188.
83. Jenkin's modest book irritated the TLS reviewer, who called it "morose" and "egotistical" and accused Jenkin of "bitterness" (11 May 1922, 310).
84. In a letter of 31 August 1917, Ivor Gurney remarks on the "ruined tanks" in a landscape "like the last Hell of desolation" (Gurney, Collected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton [Manchester: Carcanet, 1991], 318-19).
85. Mitchell also details the work involved in salvaging 190 derelict tanks after 3rd Ypres in chapter ten.
86. The problem of waste continued long after the war had ended. Some tanks were turned into war memorials; many others were broken up for scrap metal, a process which took until 1932 to complete (Forty and Forty, Bovington Tanks, 36).
.
The publication of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) in May 1903 evolved within a few months into one of those literary events that bring apparently disparate cultural trends into striking focus, that gather the inchoate anxieties and obsessions of an age (or its literate, self-styled spokespersons) into provocative, synthesizing outline. The book quickly became an international bestseller and a reference point for countless diary entries, journal articles, and coffeehouse discussions, going through twenty-five editions in twenty years. 1 The short and unhappy life of its twenty-three year old author, who shot himself in melodramatic fashion in October, 1903, in the house in which Beethoven had died, added the celebrity of scandal as well as the seductions of a personal tragedy lived out in radical authenticity to the exemplary qualities of this mirror of the age. Reading Weininger's work in the 1990s, however, it is difficult to imagine how such a cartoonishly hyperbolic, pretentiously philosophical, maniacally simplifying book, throbbing with uncontrolled misogynist and anti-Semitic feelings, could become the focus of intense concern for a broad and sophisticated audience of artists, writers, and scholars. This audience included the Austrian modernists Arnold Schoenberg, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oskar Kokoschka, Sigmund Freud, Georg Trakl, Franz Kafka, Heimito Von Doderer, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil, as well as modernists outside of Austria and Germany, like August Strindberg, D. H. Lawrence, and the Italian Futurists. 2 Wonder at the Weininger phenomenon spurs historical questions and invites us to reexamine the connections between the three issues that were welded together in his work's distorting and simplifying mirror: the production of masculine identity out of universal bisexuality; the definition of the boundaries of community or "home" through the projection of psychic division on to the relations between social and cultural groups, and the problematic resolution of the intractable polarities of historical existence in aesthetic or philosophical transcendence, in the translation of life into art, of impure material and historical existence into abstract, spiritual form. 3
The most obvious and dominating of these three dimensions in Weininger's text was his conceptualization of sexual/gender polarization. Sex and Character was organized around the principled assertion that the difference between masculine and feminine natures did not arise as a generalization from observed attributes of male and female individuals but constituted a polarity of ideal-typical modes of being (or "characters") emerging from a duality of biological, "vital" substances unevenly distributed across the whole spectrum of plant, animal, and human life. "Living beings cannot be described bluntly as one sex or the other," Weininger wrote. "The real world from the point of view of sex may be regarded as wavering or oscillating (schwanken) between two points. No empirical individual being actually exists at either point, but somewhere between the two." 4 What began in the first part of the book as a scientific theory of biological bisexuality in which the relative ratios of "M" (masculinity) and "W" (femininity) in any individual could be quantified in mathematical terms, was transformed in the second and major part of Weininger's study into a speculative, theoretical (philosophical) construction of a dynamic dualism of essences. "Masculinity" designated the pole of conscious subjective agency, rational control, ethical individuality, freedom and spiritual transcendence (all epitomized as "being") and "femininity" designated the pole of unconscious objective passivity, sexual determinism, amorality, and material de-individualized immanence (summarized as nonbeing or "nothing").
The logical rigor of this polarization (essentially a pseudo-scientific stylization of conventional sexual stereotypes) was combined with an ethical puritanism in which the feminine operated as that which needed to be expunged in order for the self to attain the essential, human ideal of pure masculinity. Conceptual femininity did not refer to actual women, Weininger insisted, but was a projection of the negative other constructed by the masculine within men as they struggled to overcome the effeminacy of sexuality within themselves. "Woman" existed only as long as "man's" guilt remained unexpiated, his sexuality unconquered (GC, 456; SC, 344). Weininger denied that his theory was directed against actual existing women; the average bisexual woman was also presented with the existential possibility and moral task of vanquishing her femininity and attaining the ideal of pure masculinity. But his allegedly scientific theory of the relative bisexual ratios in men and women made his text appear like an attack on women in the contemporary battle of the sexes rather than a universalizable theory of ethical transcendence. The text moves with breathtaking ease from the analysis of abstract types to the critique of existing individuals and groups. 5 Masculine identity within any particular individual, though supported by quantitative ratios of biological substance, emerged as primarily a human construct, an ethical and cultural achievement. Femininity was also a construct, but always and only in a negative sense; it was not a true identity, not a goal of human achievement or a potential product of a process of self-determination, but "something which can be transcended, which ought to be transcended" (etwas, das aufgehoben werden kann, und aufgehoben werden soll [GC, 456; SC, 344]). Masculinity was also contingent, but only in the sense that it's fulfillment was marked by its disappearance into the universal essence of humanity.
Sex and Character combined this radical polarization of masculine and feminine with a racial/cultural theory built on a parallel polarization of Aryan and Jewish types. Jewishness in Weininger's theory was the collective form of femininity as it operated in the history of Western culture. The historical goal of constructing a community of autonomous, rational, self-legislating subjects (the Kantian Kingdom of Ends) was tied to the attainment of Aryan masculinity and the repudiation of Jewishness. Jewishness, as femininity's historical/cultural form, was also not identical with a particular biological population or nation, but presented as the ideal-type of a "psychological constitution, which is a possibility for all humankind but which has found its most grandiose actualization in historical Judaism" (GC, 406; SC, 303). 6 Anti-Semitism as a cultural and political movement was thus grounded on a psychological displacement of the struggle against the Jewishness in everyone on to a struggle against a specific group of individuals whose relative quantity of Jewishness was particularly high; it emerged as an expression of the general human struggle to attain the goal of autonomous moral selfhood. To achieve the emancipated human identity of autonomous individuality was to repudiate the woman and the Jew in oneself. The true home for "Man" was, by definition, an Aryan fraternity in which femininity and Jewishness had been repudiated and expunged. The sexual, moral and political dimensions of this quest for autonomy were difficult to disentangle: Jewishness "was saturated with femininity" (das Judentum durchtränkt scheint von . . . Weiblichkeit [GS, 409; SC, 306]).
To achieve pure masculinity, to progress in the task of overcoming mere existence and attaining a genuinely human essence, to be a self-sufficient, autonomous human being--these goals were approached in the historical, human activities of art and philosophy. In both art and philosophy, at least as produced by the genius--the human exemplar who approached most closely the translucent autonomous self-consciousness of the purely masculine--attention was focused on the transcendent, on the timeless forms from which all existence in time derived its meaning. In Weininger's universe, the realm of high culture was a product of higher beings who incarnated the highest in everyone, who educated their fellows in the moral task of repudiating their sensual being (femininity and Jewishness), and who interrupted the causal and functional networks of material/historical existence with epiphanies of timeless spiritual form. Such activities had been corrupted, become decadent, in those fin-de-siècle artistic and philosophical movements that surrendered to the seductive pull of the sensually contingent. Drawing heavily on artistic heroes such as Wagner and Ibsen, Weininger called for a more purified and autonomous art, an art that mirrored, articulated, and thus helped to achieve the redemptive goal of spiritual transcendence, of purified masculinity.
For Weininger the achievement of identity was not tied to the incarnation of meaning in time through narrative coherence, but through the repudiation of time in the achievement of timeless truths. Yet inevitably some of his contemporaries tended to see meaningful connections between Weininger's theories and his suicide. They thus turned his repudiation of existence in time into a story about a failed struggle for meaning in time. It became either a pathological case of identity shipwreck, or an exemplary story of a heroic and tragic struggle for masculine and national identity within the apparently intractable contradictions of a fallen world. In this paper I will analyze the texts of a number of Weininger's Austrian contemporaries who were able to transform the polarities involved in this modernist crisis of identity into stories of the refashioning of masculine identity that were both diagnostic and exemplary, that found a problematic meaning in processes of constructing personal and cultural identity within the contingencies of embodied temporal existence. Weininger was not viewed as a solution in these writings (as he was at times in the works of August Strindberg or Karl Kraus), but transformed into a case whose conditions of possibility required critical analysis before its materials could be shaped into meaningful narrative form. In texts published by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), and Robert Musil (1880-1942) in the decade before World War I, Weininger's drive to achieve masculine identity and his search for a communal home were not in any way resolved through the discovery of true masculinity or of a satisfactory homeland. Literary art and systematic reflection on the conditions of experience were mobilized not as instruments for resolution or transcendence but as a means to portray, as the distinguishing core of the modernist identity itself, a conception of the interminable, experimental, contingent, conflicted processes of constructing gendered and communal identities. These exemplars of early Austrian modernism were thus not marked so much by a consciousness of the end of the story or the collapse of the narrative, the absence of meaning in time, as by the reconstruction of narrative coherence and meaning in time in a new, open, and self-reflexive form. Moreover, the construction of narrative meaning was not perceived as an act of transcendence, but placed in the service of a this-worldly ethical task, the practical yet interminable work of constructing autonomy.
The emergence and development of psychoanalysis as a distinctive theoretical perspective, therapeutic method, and scientific movement in the first decade of the twentieth century was inextricably entangled in the complex crisis of masculine identity so starkly portrayed in Weininger's book and played out in his life. Such entanglements involved both the psychopathological material which was the object of psychoanalytic diagnosis and therapy and the motivating intentions and organizing categories of this theory and practice. The problematic construction of human subjectivity as a construction of either masculine or feminine subjectivity was at the very center of the unconscious psychosexual structures, mechanisms, and conflicts which Freud presented as the discovery of a new continent mapped by psychoanalytic knowledge. The five classic Freudian case studies which Freud investigated and prepared for publication in the decade before World War I were, among all of the founding psychoanalytic texts of the early twentieth century, the most revealing of the ways in which the Freudian theories of the dynamic structures of unconscious mental life and convoluted pathways of sexual desire merged in the subjective problematic of constructing masculine and feminine identities. In these cases Freud not only worked out the conditions for the constitution of a workable or livable gendered identity within the psychopathological conflicts of his patients, but wrote out and worked out his own struggle to establish a satisfactory masculine identity as well. An investigation of three issues within these stories seems particularly relevant for a historical reconstruction of the relations between the psychoanalytic science of gender construction and modernist fictions of masculinity in crisis--the connections between biological bisexuality and the cultural construction of individualized gendered identities, the repudiation of femininity in the construction of masculine identity, and the repression of passive homoeroticism in the production of masculine autonomy.
Freud's explicit encounter with the author and text of Sex and Character actually occurred before its publication in 1903 and became the center of a complicated controversy over scientific priority in the discovery of bisexuality, a controversy in which differing conceptions of the meaning of bisexuality played a prominent role. 7 In July 1904, Wilhelm Fliess, the Berlin sexual biologist who had been Freud's closest friend and confidante in the late 1890s, accused Freud of breaking confidence and passing on Fliess's theory of organic bisexuality to a friend of Weininger's (Hermann Swoboda), an indiscretion which eventually produced its effect in Sex and Character, where Fliess's intellectual property was claimed by Weininger as his own. Although Freud acknowledged that he might have provided Weininger with the key used to rob Fliess's house, his exchange with Fliess revealed the extent to which Freud differed from both Fliess and Weininger in his understanding of the significance of bisexuality. On the one hand, Freud seemed to think that the general biological theory of a constitutional, organic bisexuality was both widespread in the scientific literature (Fliess's originality was thus reduced to details and implications that others might themselves have been able to deduce from the principle without stealing his ideas) and not particularly relevant for explaining the ways in which the body's energies were lived out in the psychosexual conflicts of gendered identity formation. 8 Already in 1901 Freud had felt insulted by Fliess's insinuation that Freud's psychological analysis of the neurotic articulations of psychosexual conflict constituted subjective projections of Freud's own wishes and thoughts on to evidence that could be explained quite adequately through knowledge of the bisexual nature of vital processes, such as periodic biorhythms. 9 Although Freud begun using the concept of bisexuality in his analyses as early as 1896, he persistently and increasingly relegated biological bisexuality to the category of an organic predisposition, a precondition of psychosexual conflict, but not in any way a principle that could explain the particularities of that conflict. When Weininger presented Freud with an early version of his text in 1901, in the hope of gaining his support in finding a publisher, Freud had criticized the work for the same kind of speculative and dogmatic reductionism he had discerned in Fliess. 10 A decade later Freud would discern a similarly reductive tendency in Alfred Adler's claim that an inherent "masculine protest" against the threat of feminization was the key to understanding psychosexual conflict. Any such masculine protest, he insisted, would have to be explained as itself a product of the complex conflictual relations of psychosexual wishing, contextualized within the history of desire. 11 In the claims of Fliess, Weininger, and Adler, Freud detected a reductivism which threatened to undermine the legitimacy of his own emerging science of unconscious psychic reality. At the core of these claims was a view of identity formation, a story of how humans came to be encultured men and woman, which submerged the historical contingency of the individual life story in the conflictual processes of vital substances or cultural essences. In each case, moreover, the theories had a tendency to become symptomatic, neurotically self-alienating, rather than analytical and reflexive, because they ignored the participation of the theorist in his theory.
Freud's own case histories can be construed as attempts to produce convincing stories of the struggle to construct gendered individual identities which would avoid the reductivism of his rivals. At the same time they were the textual sites on which he established his own identity as the knower of these psychic processes, an identity which was itself entangled in his battle to achieve masculine self-control and autonomy. The first properly psychoanalytic case study, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (commonly known as "Dora"), was written during the first weeks of 1901, at the critical moment of Freud's decisive break with Fliess and his assertion of the autonomy of psychoanalysis, and it displays some of the distinctive components of the Freudian story of gendered identity formation in exemplary form.
In "Dora" the achievement of gendered identity is described not as an expression of biological nature, the fulfillment of a preordained metaphysical essence, nor as a socially imposed role, but as an effect constituted in a network of culturally conditioned relations. Although Freud assumes an organic bisexuality as a starting point, his analysis is focused on the ways in which Dora's conflicts are formed by her unconscious desires for, and identifications with, an overlapping multiplicity and confusion of relevant others of both genders. Dora's psychological conflicts relate partly to her difficulty in conforming to unconsciously assimilated cultural norms of femininity imposed through these desires and identifications, partly to her hostility to repudiating the masculine and homoerotic tendencies which prevented her from becoming a normal woman.
Freud's account of Dora's struggle to achieve self-consciousness and control of her unconscious conflicts concerning her gendered identity is entangled in the often inadvertent telling of his own struggle to impose his control (as a masculine, paternal, scientifically disciplined subject) over her. The case history is a story of Freud's (failed) attempt to assert his masculine identity by convincing Dora to take upon herself the construction of a normative femininity as a self-conscious ethical task. "Dora" is not just an account of Dora's illness, but also a story of the therapeutic encounter, which is as much a story about Freud as about her. 12
In writing "Dora," Freud was acutely self-conscious of the problems involved in constructing a convincing narrative account of the psychological history of an individual subject. He differentiated the psychoanalytic story, which reconstructs and examines the conditions of narrative coherence in its own telling, from those kinds of stories that simply assume an unproblematic coherence in the representations of external biological or social realities. Such glib and smooth accounts, unaware of the problematic nature of their own telling, were in fact symptomatic. They displayed a disavowal of the unconscious psychic conflicts which underlay the construction of coherence. Further, Freud was intent on distinguishing his own construction of coherence from the fictions of novelists. The imaginative writer's need to create a coherent story, he insisted, involved censorship, simplification, and abstraction. The complicated structural layering of psychic life and the overdetermination of events within the realm of unconscious relations (the synchronic rather than diachronic relations between pasts and presents) could be represented only through the analytic hypothetical models of the scientist. In the same way, the impersonal and dry language of the scientist assserted its superiority over the concrete language of the storyteller in the telling of stories that contained within themselves an analytic perspective on the conditions of their own story-making. 13
The analytic perspective which Freud saw as providing the necessary reflexive distance in constructing stories of identity formation, however, was itself organized as a kind of meta-story of various oedipal relations. By 1909 Freud had begun to define the aggregate of complexes which came together at the moment of the infantile enculturation of desire as the nuclear complex of psychosexual development. It was from the perspective of the Oedipus complex that Freud, in 1909, was able to view Weininger's Sex and Character as a symptomatic work of a "sexually disturbed young philosopher" and "neurotic." Weininger's uncontrolled hostility toward women and Jews, Freud stated, was a product of his neurotic regression to the unconscious infantile relations of the castration complex, in which circumcised Jews and penis-lacking women both gave imaginary shape to the fear of castration. Weininger's text made sense within the story of a little Oedipus who felt threatened with the loss of his very existence if he did not renounce his sexual desires and submit to the "spiritual" authority of the father's law. 14
In the decade after the publication of "Dora" there was one complex in the constellation of infantile sexual conflicts that seemed to draw Freud's particular attention and to arouse his narrative productivity--the unsuccessful working through of ambivalent relations to the father re.  Freud's fascination with resolving the puzzle of such cases was a continuation of his attempts to work through his relationship to Fliess, as well as an expression of his desire to understand the unconscious dimensions in his problematic relations to the intellectual sons who gathered around him in the psychoanalytic movement after 1905. To attain a satisfactory masculine identity as an autonomous, law-abiding son was to work through the homosexual libido involved in the son's relation to the father in ways that did not encourage regression to the anal-sadistic stage and the formation of obsessional neuroses, but mobilized homosexual libido through the sublimated form of intellectual creativity and devotion to the "general interests of humanity," or at least (within the context of the psychoanalytic movement) devotion to the "cause" of psychoanalysis. 15 As a form of narcissistic love for individuals like oneself, homosexual impulses produced within the oedipal constellation formed the basis for social bonding, both between generations of fathers and sons and between "brothers," that is, they became the starting point for a human community or "mankind" defined as a masculine cultural form. 16
In 1910 Freud extended his investigation of the "effeminate," emasculating seductions of homosexual libido, shifting his attention from the therapeutic relations inside his consulting room to the construction of masculine subjectivities outside, broadening his attempts to understand the various experimental lives which could be constructed from a common nuclear constellation of psychosexual conflicts structured by the oedipal complex. In "Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood," Freud produced a speculative reconstruction, a "psychoanalytic novel" (pyschoanalytischer Roman) of the possible ways in which the working through of homosexual libidinal impulses, formed in the particular identifications and repressions that marked the transformation of the infant "into a civilized human being" (zum Kulturmenschen), could lead to the self-consciously critical, investigative activities of the scientific researcher or to the sublimated eroticism of the creative artist, or, as in Leonardo's case, to a life-long oscillation between the two. 17 Freud's Leonardo story was not simply the account of an obsessional neurosis or the transcendent power of genius to rise above the common fate, but a reconstructed story of the particular way in which the structures of a common fate could be lived. It was not a model to be emulated or rejected, but a story that could contribute to a self-understanding of the potentialities and limits of living one's life as a masculine subject.
Freud's extended commentary ("Psychoanalytic Notes") on the published autobiography of a mental patient, the "Memoirs of my Nervous Illness" written by the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, would seem to lie at the opposite end of the spectrum of possible masculine identity formations from that portrayed in "Leonardo." But in this case as well Freud thought that his oedipal key had provided a method for unriddling the mystery of a particular life. And as in the case of Leonardo, Freud was drawn to Schreber's text at least in part because it exemplified for him one of the possible ways he might have lived out his own masculine identity crisis. In letters written on the same day (3 December 1910) to Carl Gustav Jung and Sandor Ferenczi, Freud noted that, as he worked on his interpretation of Schreber's case in the late evening hours, he experienced an almost total identification with his subject. "I am Schreber, nothing but Schreber," he wrote to Ferenczi. 18 Earlier in the year he had described Schreber to Jung as "our dear and ingenious Friend" who "should have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital" (F/J, 368, 311).
Working through the Schreber case, Freud claimed, revived the whole complex of issues which had come to a head in his break with Fliess. Moreover his current difficulties with his ambivalent intellectual sons, most notably the rebellious Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel, but also the apparently loyal Ferenczi and Jung, were seen by Freud as repeating the tensions of the Fliess relationship. In psychopathological terms Schreber's illness was a paranoia, a form of psychosis in which normal psychoanalytic interaction between patient and therapist was impossible, due to the patient's unconquerable resistance to free association and transference. Paranoiacs, Freud urged, only revealed what they wanted to reveal, remaining enclosed within their own private worlds. To reconstruct the story of a paranoiac thus required an empathic reconstruction of his world. Like a voice from a foreign culture, the voice of the psychotic could only be construed from an understanding of his own language. During the period when Freud was unraveling what he saw as the riddle of Schreber's world he also referred to Fliess and Adler as paranoiacs, as individuals who had constructed closed systems of meaning for themselves which were not open to critical analysis or communicative interaction. His own task was to show that he could grasp the conditions of this paranoid stance, that he could write the story of the paranoiac's story in a way that revealed the particular conditions of its construction.
The starting point, the originating "core" (Kern) of Schreber's pathological paranoia, Freud claimed, was a "feminine (passive homosexual) wish fantasy" that could be traced to the "familiar" or commonly shared father-complex and castration-complex of the oedipal constellation ("PB," 180; "PN," 55). Schreber's story renacted the unconscious infantile wish to be the love object of the revered and feared father, to be the mother to the father. But the fulfillment of this wish implied an unmanning or emasculation articulated as the threat and fear of castration. At stake in the return of the infantile wish and its imagined consequences was the adult male ego's masculine identity. A resurgence and reexperiencing of the conflicting emotions of this infantile complex, Freud noted, was not uncommon among middle-aged men (in their early fifties, like himself) in whom the decline of heterosexual virility that characterized the male version of menopause often produced a resurgence of homosexual libido ("PB," 171-2; "PN," 45-6). In severe cases of unmasterable homosexual impulses, this crisis of sexual identity produced a regression to the stage of libidinal development in which the process of ego-formation was in its embryonic stages, the stage of childhood narcissism in which the scattered libidinal urges of the autoerotic stage were first integrated into a love of one's own embodied self, before being directed toward external objects, and thus before a recognition of the boundaries which defined the ego in relation to the world. 19 In Freud's story of Schreber's story, therefore, the beginnings of paranoia lay in a response to the threat of the collapse of masculine identity through a virtual dissolution of the bounded ego and a return to the moment prior to the differentiation of ego and external world. Schreber's crisis moved from the fantasy of being transformed into a woman to the catastrophic collapse of the distinction between self and world, and a return to the archaic, primal moment of self and world not yet differentiated. The familiar symptomology of paranoid delusion could be understood from the inside (from the "native's point of view," we might say) as a defensive response to this experience of threat and dissolution, whence regression to the self-sufficiency and megalomania of the narcissistic stage. The specific originating cause of paranoid psychopathology was a traumatizing disavowal of the homosexual fantasy-wish of becoming a feminine love-object of masculine desire. The defensive measures produced against this unconscious wish, however, were shaped by the particular stage of libidinal and ego development, infantile narcissism, within which they were originally constructed. The delusional world that the paranoid created was an alternative to the real world, a self-contained domain of imaginary (aesthetic?) objects that could be easily manipulated, a space in which the wish for feminization could be artificially or symbolically mastered and thus given coherence and meaning.