The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn: Volume 1: "A Touch of Wildness"

By Ralph Melnick

An imposing literary figure in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882-1955) struggled with feelings of alienation in Christian America that were gradually resolved by his developing Jewish identity, a process reflected in hundreds of works of fiction, literary analysis, and social criticism. Born in Berlin, Lewisohn moved with his family in 1890 to South Carolina. Identified by others as a Jew, he remained an outsider throughout his youth. Lewisohn became a notable scholar and translator of German and French literature, teaching at Wisconsin and Ohio State. Following his mother's death in 1914, he began to explore the Jewish life he had rejected, and by 1920 became a Zionist committed to fighting assimilation. Accusatory and inflammatory, his memoir Up Stream (1922) struck at the very heart of American culture and society, and caused great controversy and lasting enmity.

As strong emotional influences, the women in Lewisohn's life—his mother and four wives—helped to frame his life and work. Believing himself liberated by the woman he declared his "spiritual wife" while legally married to another, he proclaimed the artist's right to freedom in The Creative Life (1924), abandoned his editorship at The Nation, and fled to Europe. Lewisohn's fictionalized account of his failed marriage, The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), once again attacked the empty morality of this world and won Sigmund Freud's praise as the greatest psychological novel of the century.

A creator of one of Paris's leading salons, Lewisohn ended his leisurely writer's life in 1934 to awaken America to the growing Nazi threat. Poised to face the unfinished marital battle at home, but anxious to engage in the coming struggle for Jewish survival and the future of Western civilization, he set sail, unsure of what lay ahead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780814344668

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PART 1

MINNA

1

Homeless in a New World

LUDWIG’S BIRTH IN BERLIN, Germany, on May 30, 1882, was an occasion for rejoicing as his parents looked back upon the good fortune that had brought them to this moment. After centuries of exclusion from Germanic society, legislative decree in 1872 had completed the gradual transformation of the Jews’ civil (if not social) status in Germany from that of pariah to near partnership with their Christian hosts. A century of change, sustained or weakened by the impulsive tides of egalitarian struggle and the calculated risks of power brokers, had removed the legal restrictions crippling human intercourse between Jew and Christian for a millennium and a half, encouraging an unprecedented number of Jews to leave the caste-bound shelter of the small town for new lives in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and, particularly, Berlin, where the Jewish population was to double in only a decade.¹

Throughout this process, the Jewish community had undergone convulsive internal change as well. The first hint of freedom found a number of Jews more than willing to throw off a lifestyle abhorred by outsiders for centuries. Acculturation became widespread as the years passed, and total absorption into the larger society through conversion became a viable option for thousands seeking to dispense with the disabilities their Jewish status had caused them to suffer. But many more thousands persisted in their Jewishness in some form, and sought compromise between an unpleasant past and what they believed would be a better future. Flight, ironically, became both easier and less necessary as German Jewry grew more able to liberalize itself and accommodate those who might not otherwise have wished to remain within the community.

Yet few felt at ease, for the legislation that had opened the ghettos’ doors had heightened these intertwined communal and personal conflicts. In Berlin these tensions were greatest, the options more fully developed along a spectrum of choice that ranged from uncompromising Orthodoxy to a Reform Judaism influenced by Protestant modes of observance, and beyond it, to conversion itself. There was, as well, the new option of a secular life outside these structures, a conversion to the liberal ethos of a cosmopolitan Berlin, with or without Jewish communal affiliation—as much a choice against Judaism in any of its forms as it was against conversion to Christianity as a means of normalization. Legislation, it was thought, had already normalized life for the Jews. Little more was needed than to share in the growing excitement around them.

Ludwig’s parents were among those who had sought to participate in the building of this new secular order. Jacques (b. 1859) had spent all but the first five years of his childhood in the Berlin home of his adoptive parents, wealthy relatives into whose care he was placed after his father’s business had failed. Kind and educated people, acculturated, prosperous, and generous to a fault, their overindulgence would make it difficult for Jacques to understand the need for financial restraint when the time for it later arose. He wanted for nothing as a youth, and received the finest schooling in France and Switzerland before beginning his gymnasium training in Berlin’s Royal Realschule. Only his stepmother’s oncoming madness, diagnosed as incurable while Jacques was an adolescent, upset his tireless devotion to things of the mind and to the music of the German masters. To escape this increasingly erratic domestic environment and his own academic self-doubts, he chose not to attend university, but to open his own business and live away from home. Each of these factors would have a lasting effect upon his increasingly unhappy life, causing, in his son’s opinion, a habit of Utopian scheming mixed with a harsh self-assertiveness by which he strove to deaden his own sense of failure and insignificance.²

Minna Eloesser, Ludwig’s mother and Jacques’ first cousin, spent her first twelve years in East Prussia before coming to Berlin in 1872 after the death of her father, a circuit-riding rabbi. Left with six children, her widowed mother could no longer afford to keep Minna at home. Overprotected by her older brothers already residing in the city, and confined by a rigid social system that dictated a mannered and insufficiently educated life, cut off from employment opportunities as someone of middle-class status, she had an unhappy time as a child and young adult. Though she studied music privately, learned French from her mother, and received institutional instruction in literature and the womanly arts at the girls’ Hohere Tochterschule, she felt frustrated by this restrictive existence and would steal away for hours, wandering alone through the city or writing poetry that she would refuse to share.

Leaving behind the unhappiness of her early life and finding a kindred spirit with whom she could share her love of music and literature, Minna married Jacques in 1881. Together they would find a new life in this seemingly enlightened world, a life that a future inheritance would make certain. Jacques, in turn, saw in their marriage the escape that he had sought from the madness at home which even his departure three years earlier had failed to provide. But neither yet knew that much of the wealth once held by Jacques’ adoptive family had been lost in the Crash of 1873. This revelation would only add to the frustrations that soon began to mount as the initial glow of the marriage ceremony began to fade.

Ludwig’s birth in the first year of their marriage and in the tenth year of Emancipation forestalled the inevitable for them both, as Jacques and Minna took it as a sign that they were soon to enjoy a new life in this age blessed with human progress. At first moderately prosperous and relatively happy together after a stormy beginning was somewhat quelled by Ludwig’s arrival, their acculturated lifestyle came to resemble that of most non-Jewish, progressive, middle-class Berliners whose world they, like so many other Jews of their social group, hoped to join. Mercantile interests, the enjoyment of German music and literature, a concern for liberal ideas and values of many stripes, a love of quiet walks in the Tiergarten and carriage rides through the streets of the kaiser’s imperial city (rugged and grey with an air of homely and familiar comfort, as Ludwig later remembered them), and the warmth of close family and friends each became an important element of their broadening existence, and of the vivid memories of their child’s world that was to end abruptly with emigration to America eight years later.³

Ludwig’s formal education had begun four years earlier with a brief stay at a Berlin kindergarten. Restless, perhaps bored, he was sent home and placed under the tutelage of his grandmother, a small woman with rose-tipped wrinkles as precise as porcelain, a little white cap on her smooth grey hair, remembered by Ludwig as often seated by the window reading or doing tatting work. He later recalled that his life truly began after she had taught him the alphabet. Grimm, Andersen, and the Arabian Nights were followed by his first volume of children’s stories, Bechstein’s Maerchen. He lived to read, dwelling in the imaginative worlds of literature and fantasy. Minna, however, grew concerned that her son preferred his books and his own thoughts to the company of other children, and insisted upon daily excursions to the Tiergarten and a regimen of piano and athletic instruction (gymnastics, swimming, ice skating, and the like), which left him sturdy and broad-chested and able to withstand two severe early childhood illnesses. He clearly benefited from her persistence, which kept him not only from the ravages of difficultly managed disease, but also from the constant eyestrain and fevered brow, and the inevitable solitude, he had begun to experience with growing contentment.⁴

Such preparation provided an uncommon literary facility for the six-year-old Ludwig as he began to study at the local Gymnasium’s Vorschule. Minna, despite her earlier insistence upon moderation, suddenly grew increasingly determined that her son would fully develop his intellectual faculties. Tears of exhaustion streamed down Ludwig’s face as mother and child spent hours without end in preparation for the coming day’s lessons. For there was no question in the Lewisohns’ world that a liberal education was the necessary foundation of right and noble living, the proper preparation for a life to be built upon Gymnasium and university. To do otherwise was to court an early death. Hard work brought recognition, and by the time of Ludwig’s departure to America in 1890, his teachers saw in their pupil the makings of a scholar. Not that his entire life was occupied with his studies, for Minna made certain that a host of diversions would offer the respite she understood necessary for this academic success. Music, summer and winter sports, a social life with his peers, daily outings, and family vacations all had continued to provide young Ludwig with a rich and happy childhood.⁵

Jacques’ poor management of his textile factory and other business interests had by 1890 led to a series of business failures. Every attempt to stem these losses put even greater strain upon the modest bequest left to him by his stepfather in 1889. A final, ill-conceived venture wiped away most of what remained, and within a short time the once bright future seemed irremediably darkened. Overcome by shame and despair, as Ludwig vividly recalled, Jacques fell ill with a depression from which he would never fully recover.⁶

During this same period of financial decline, Minna’s brother Siegfried had written often of his growing prosperity in the New World town of St. Matthews, South Carolina, to which he had come a few years earlier. No longer able to bear her husband’s continuing failure or the deepening depression into which it had thrown him, she halfheartedly suggested that they join her brother. She had hoped that Jacques would be shocked into a state of emotional stability by the idea and would refuse to consider a plan that would drive him from the nation he loved. She was wrong. Instead, he latched onto her suggestion like a drowning man. He liquidated what he could of their possessions, sparing only Ludwig’s books and Minna’s jewelry. Within a few short weeks, Minna stood upon a ship’s deck, horrified at the thought of never again seeing her beloved Berlin. What should otherwise have been a storybook adventure for the overly imaginative Ludwig became an occasion marked by the foreboding grasp of his mother’s hand as she faced homeward for the last time.⁷

But tears and the sadness that pervaded their fifteen-day journey from Hamburg soon turned to momentary joy. Docking in New York’s dizzying harbor, they wandered the streets of lower Manhattan in a state of euphoria. Their first experience of this chaotic world, far from the orderly setting they had known in Berlin, proved exhilarating—if only because it was a release from the troubled weeks that had preceded their ocean passage.

The dreaminess of these days, enhanced by a week’s coastal voyage to the warm shores of Charleston, South Carolina, in that winter of 1890, was soon shattered by the unexpected roughness they encountered on their railroad trip from the port city seventy miles inland to St. Matthews. Wonder became terror as parents and child looked with rapidly growing apprehension upon the unpolished, rural world that was replacing the lost civility of Berlin. Minna was struck by the horror of it all. But Jacques, having lost the ability to deal effectively with unpleasant realities, soon blocked this scene from his thoughts, and talked only of the sugarcane and rice that his reading in Germany had told him were the truly important facts about his adopted home. Ludwig was stunned by his parents’ divergent reactions, and when they finally arrived in St. Matthews, he looked out of the car’s window in amazement upon a radically different world for which even his most beloved and frightening fairy tales could not have prepared him. At the up-country station of this squalid village of thirty-three hundred they were greeted by a large mustachioed figure. Ludwig later recalled how his uncle Siegfried, clothed in a striking red sweater, approached him and, to his disgust, heartily kissed him on the mouth. Siegfried would forever remain a symbol of the raw . . . wildness . . . and strain of violence that was to quickly transform the young Berliner into an American. Here did the descent begin in this world of white men [who] wore broad-rimmed wool hats, whittled and spat and talked in drawling tones, and of burly Negroes who gabbled and laughed weirdly, a world of hot turmoil and the characteristic odor of peanuts and stale whiskey and chewing tobacco that stood where once had been his Tiergarten filled with middle-class Berliners.⁸ For all of this, Siegfried would be a useful symbol in Ludwig’s troubled process of adjustment.

To walk the streets of St. Matthews today is to step back into the past of Ludwig’s rural South Carolina hamlet. Though the pavement now runs in new directions, and electric lights have replaced the oil lamps that lighted his way on quiet country evenings over a century ago, many of the sights that greet the contemporary traveler would seem quite familiar to him. For shops, homes, and churches have only slightly changed in the older section of town, and the social patterns of settlement—with the more prosperous and better-educated Methodists to one side of the dividing railroad tracks, and the Baptists and blacks to the other (though more rigidly contrived today than it was then)—would have appeared normal to the undersized immigrant child who gazed upon it all in wonder as he set out to explore this whistle-stop corner of America.

Yet St. Matthews, despite the developing social and racial strictures of the post-Reconstruction era, was still an accepting society, with a white population of notably diverse national origin and of seemingly little overt anti-Semitic feeling. Jews had rapidly become an integral part of this rural society after the Civil War. Bennett Jacobson, one of St. Matthews’ leading Jewish citizens, had migrated from Germany in 1868, and had opened a small shop that quickly prospered. He had built the village’s first brick structure in 1879, and by the turn of the century would be elected to the town council.⁹ Other Jews had followed his lead, among them Ludwig’s uncle Siegfried. Together, this small group of Central and Eastern European Jews comprised much of St. Matthews’ merchant class. If Jacques’ business eventually folded, his failure was the exception, for his co-religionists rose to positions of economic and social prominence—positions still held by the few descendants of these families living in and around St. Matthews.

To the Lewisohns, this openness was evidence that their thoughts in Berlin had not been totally unrealistic. Given the world they discovered upon their arrival in America, Jacques and Minna’s desire to seek a place outside of the small Jewish enclave in St. Matthews and to reestablish the socially integrated pattern of their former lives seemed perfectly justified. While in Berlin, they, like countless other Jews who had abandoned their strong Jewish communal life for the wider world, had counted among their social acquaintances a good many Christians with whom they had enjoyed the Christmas and Easter holidays. Germans before all else, they had treated these occasions as national celebrations, while continuing only marginal observance of a few major Jewish holy days. Ludwig recalled in his first memoir, Up Stream, the sight in his Berlin home of his very own Christmas tree, standing in it’s glimmering splendor and around it the gifts from my parents and my grandmother and my uncles and aunts. Led toward this taste [of] glory by his mother, he felt as though I myself were walking straight into a fairytale. Far less native and familiar to the heart of the child that he had become was the experience of the synagogue he entered one Berlin Yom Kippur. The penitential scene was wonderful and solemn, he remembered, but weird and terrifying and alien, for Judaism had always played but a secondary role in his parents’ married lives. Not that they would ever assimilate through conversion. Not in Berlin, nor in St. Matthews. Minna’s ties to the past were far too strong for that, while Jacques considered himself a freethinker and condemned all religion as part of the dark and superstitious past that had been exposed by the light of reason. Rather, it was for reasons of social acceptance and personal preference that Ludwig’s parents now sought out those few Methodists who comprised St. Matthews’ more prosperous and educated class.¹⁰

With their assistance, Minna believed she would find the means to help her child avoid becoming one of the uneducated and uncultured masses by whom she felt surrounded. Seated in Berlin amidst the trappings of cultural sophistication, she could not have foreseen the challenges that awaited her in this rough new land. How was she to nurture the mind of a young child, barred as she was from any real center of learning and culture? The challenge, it seemed, only strengthened her resolve, perhaps morbidly, as the same emotional tenacity that had caused her to retain something of a Jewish identity amidst the pull of a promising assimilation and left her to yearn very bitterly for her native land, her friends and kin, for music and for all the subtle supports of the civilization in which she [was] so deeply rooted, now forced an unflagging determination upon her to secure for her son what she had always aspired to provide for him.¹¹

The task, she soon realized in despair, was further complicated by her need to learn a new language and to adjust to a new way of life. Jacques, with a fair knowledge of English acquired years before in Berlin, soon found himself befriended by a young lawyer with whom he played chess and from whom he borrowed Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, and other English authors. Minna, however, had to learn her neighbors’ tongue while securing the same skill for her son. To do so, she sought the friendship of several prominent individuals, among them an elderly physician who brought her flowers each week to lift her flagging spirits, and a Mrs. Cain (identified in Up Stream as Mrs. C.), who, as a member of a leading Methodist family, acted as Minna’s chief guide through these first months in America, before the culturally claustrophobic life of the rural countryside and Jacques’ continuing pattern of business failures brought this small family of urban-dwellers back to Charleston in search of the civilization they had left behind in Berlin and the economic opportunity that continued to elude them.

It was Mrs. Cain who advised Minna concerning the proper steps needed for the completion of her son’s Americanization.¹² In St. Matthews, where public education only began in 1895, the Jewish child from Berlin soon found himself enrolled in a rural Southern Baptist day school (the Methodists had not yet established their own). Minna’s choices for Ludwig were limited to this church-related institution and to an inferior one conducted by an impoverished former Confederate major of Huguenot descent, a member of the class that had ruled the region for generations before the War for Southern Independence. It was Mrs. Cain’s recommendation that had brought Ludwig to the church-run school. His stay there was short, however, as was his subsequent time under the major’s tutelage, evidence of Minna’s feelings of desperation.¹³ Dissatisfaction with both ultimately forced Minna to withdraw her son and to devise her own program of study for him, including English instruction, with a German-English dictionary in hand. Apparently they learned together, exploring their first fragments of English literature. I have never had instruction more accurate or solid, Ludwig later recalled in tribute to his mother’s earnest efforts.¹⁴

To supplement this personal attempt to teach Ludwig his new language, Minna, again following Mrs. Cain’s suggestion, sent Ludwig to the Methodist Sunday School. Having withdrawn him from St. Matthews’ two day schools and taken upon herself the role of educator, she thought Ludwig would benefit from this increased exposure to spoken English. She could not have imagined how rapidly her son would absorb those religious ideas to which his impressionable mind was further exposed, when he remained after class to attend worship services.¹⁵

The degree of confusion and frustration all this change was creating within him made the process of Americanization a not altogether pleasant experience for Ludwig. So traumatic was it, in fact, that much of this first year in St. Matthews forever eluded his memory. He spoke more readily of the earlier years in Berlin than he did of this later period. The experience of being thrust into a world where daily discourse was at first impossible was particularly trying for someone as verbal as he. Forced to develop a rapid facility for English to avoid being cut off from the world, he would never be able to reconstruct the events that led to the development of this skill. His earliest memory of using the language was of a time when he was already capable of communicating with the people of St. Matthews: My next memory . . . shows me in my little German velvet suit and cap seated aloft sacks of cotton-seed in the postmaster’s shop and explaining, in some sort of English, the peculiarities of German life to a crowd of tall, rough, tobacco-spitting but evidently tender-hearted yokels. Tender-hearted! For they asked the quaint little German boy to come again and again and never teased him but were, in what must have been their amusement, unfailingly gentle and considerate.¹⁶ Not that he was altogether ready to abandon his mother’s tongue. His German soul fought hard to dominate the emerging speaker of English that first spring and summer in America. But the transformation was occurring too rapidly for him to control it, or to allow him to properly integrate the old with the new. Instead, it was for him an upheaval of shattering proportions.

Out of the psychic adjustments needed to master this unevenly paced re-creation of self came his first literary expression. With the aid of the language of his past, he gave the first breath of life to the American writer he was to become. In relieving the unendurable pressure of this process, he created those autobiographical images that would forever crowd his imagination, images of a disastrous sea voyage and of endless wanderings in search of an island of peace. For if he was too young to fully understand the dramatic changes taking place within himself, his thoughts had developed far enough to offer some expressive outlet for the passions they aroused.

Suddenly upon a day amid the steady radiance of that Southern summer a blind, imperious impulse took hold of me. Though always clumsy with my hands and careless of manual skill, I hastened into our little yard, gathered some abandoned boxes and built me a rude, shaky little desk. It was too high to sit at. So I stood and wrote—for the first time—verse and prose: tales of disaster at sea, of ultimate islands, of peaceless wanderings. The prose and verse were mixed indiscriminately, assonance sufficed in the place of rime, all I felt was an intense inner glow. It was all instinctively done in German. And I emphasize this fact in the development of an American since that childish outburst marked the first and last time on which I used my original mother-tongue in writing as a matter of course. . . . That first impulse lasted, with daily but decreasing passion, for some weeks. Then it died out. I neither wondered nor regretted it. To me it was a solitary game, and most of my amusements were solitary. Perhaps the shifting from one language to another caused this, perhaps a momentous change in my inner life which now took place.¹⁷

Even the physical environment of the South, strangely affected by sudden tempests and blinding sun-filled skies, had begun to transform him, awakening an intense joy and fascination with nature’s powers that was coupled with a sharp nostalgia for the land of my birth and my life. The very sight of an unfamiliar grove would recall the lost forests of his native land, and he would be overcome by a sense of grief. . . . Somewhere beyond those dark trees, beyond leagues of country, beyond the ocean, lay our home . . . and I wept bitterly—as he would years later for the peace I have sought in vain. So enduring was the effect of this new world upon him. As he himself fully realized, Both my intelligence and my instincts ripened with morbid rapidity and I attribute many abnormalities of temper and taste that were mine to that sudden transplantation.¹⁸

Confronted by these sweeping cultural and environmental changes, Ludwig clung to the memories of his Berlin childhood. It was a part of his past to which he could retreat for security, with Minna accompanying him on many of these excursions, for she experienced the same needs and ambivalence. Though fascinated by this strange new world, she was often overcome by a yearning for the quiet peacefulness of her former home, whose culture she diligently transmitted to her son as a leavening influence upon the English lessons she prayed he would absorb.

But if her tie to Germany was firmly entrenched, and her desire for Americanization stridently pursued, her identification with the Jewish people was no less of a motivating factor in her confused and crowded life. Minna’s family, the Eloessers, had included many rabbis through the generations. Having spent her early years amidst the Jewish community of a small East Prussian town, she had continued to feel a deep sense of ethnic identity. And though her father had adopted the outward appearance of an emancipated Jew and had abandoned much of traditional Jewish life, his acculturated adherence to the ways of his ancestors remained constant as he ministered to the religious needs of several communities.¹⁹

Despite her avowed cosmopolitan attitudes, she sought to pass this heritage on to her son as well. Late in life, Ludwig recalled his mother’s continuous observance of certain basic Jewish ceremonies in the privacy of their home, to the constant displeasure of her husband. Apparently, Jacques could do little to force Minna into completely abandoning her Jewish heritage. In her own home, with Ludwig at her side, she covertly hoped to counteract those forces that would otherwise have destroyed any remnant of Ludwig’s Jewish memory.²⁰

Ludwig thus came to suffer the confusion of an eight-year-old child asked to live in three worlds at once. Competing truths in one so young led to an undying skepticism that destroyed any possibility of intellectual or emotional certainty in his early life. For Ludwig, it was a devastating time. The inner turmoil he experienced further deepened the insecurity known by all émigré children, and forever colored his perception and memory of the people and events of this time. Though Up Stream was to have been an indictment of the puritanical America against which he was struggling, Ludwig, even in his fortieth year, was unable to overcome his bitter memories of Siegfried and his family. Of the forces at war within him as a child, his Jewish identity, so foreign to this new land, became the most difficult to assimilate. As practicing Jews, the Eloessers remained an unconscious symbol of all that had caused his earliest experience of discomfort and profound sadness.

The recollections of Siegfried’s daughter Cora provide an important basis upon which to judge the accuracy of her cousin Ludwig’s memory, and the depth of his trauma. Though the years undoubtedly affected her ability to recall the past, as they had his, the extent of their perceptual differences is most telling. The gruff, sweater-clad uncle who became Ludwig’s earliest memory of St. Matthews was, according to Cora, a very educated gentleman, graduate of two colleges . . . [who] to his last day never wore a sweater. Siegfried, in fact, had been greatly upset by reading in Up Stream what he considered a grossly inaccurate description of his first encounter with his nephew.

Siegfried’s wife, Fannie, suffered a similar fate in young Ludwig’s mind. Despite some pleasing qualities, Ludwig found his aunt guilty of being a Jewess of the Eastern tradition, narrow-minded, given over to the clattering of pots and pans—‘meaty’ and ‘milky’—and very ignorant. But the very ignorant Aunt Fannie of Ludwig’s memory little resembled the woman Cora remembered as her mother—a native Charlestonian, graduate of its well-respected Memminger High School (for young ladies), with an excellent command of English, a little knowledge of German (acquired from her husband), and not the slightest familiarity with a single word of Yiddish, the language Ludwig recalled her using on numerous occasions to scold her children.²¹

On the other hand, Cora’s portrait of her uncle Jack little resembled Ludwig’s picture of his gentle father. She remembered him as a man of anger, resenting Judaism and that my mother kept up the Tradition, lighting Friday night candles, Passover, High Holidays, etc. He thought himself above every body and my mother was nothing compared to his intelligence.²² Minna, however, was warmly thought of by Cora—the only point of agreement between her and Ludwig.²³

Cora’s parents saw how greatly the continuous tension between Jacques and Minna had disturbed Ludwig, who witnessed their many bitter quarrels over the issue of religion. There was little they could do, however, aside from offering Minna words of comfort, for Jacques was unapproachable.²⁴ If enlightened in other ways, he remained thoroughly unprogressive in his attitude toward family life, believing that he had to maintain the image, if not the fact, of ruling over his household as a restricting, autocratic husband and father, to be obeyed by a dutiful wife and a submissive son. He would accept no outside interference in his private affairs. But Minna was no more anxious to please Jacques than she was to see her son find a place within the American milieu by losing the diverse heritage she valued so highly. She attempted a compromise between these conflicting desires, only consenting to church-related activities for Ludwig after asserting her right to maintain some minimal level of Jewish observance within her home. One can only imagine the degree of frustration that led her to so quickly remove Ludwig from the school he attended, favoring her own instruction, untutored as she was in the refinements of English. And if she found it difficult to endure her son’s education in Christian day schools, she must have agreed to his Sunday School attendance with only the greatest reluctance and with an even more overwhelming sense of frustration at not being able to fully provide the language skills he needed for his future in America.

Siegfried, knowing of his sister’s frustration, could only watch as Ludwig attempted to cope with these familial and personal tensions, and the beginning of anxieties that would plague him throughout the years ahead. Such inner turmoil would cause Ludwig to suppress memories, to recall the past inaccurately, to believe unswervingly that culturally we really felt closer to the better sort of Americans in the community, and so there began in those early days, as he would later write with remorse, that alienation from my own race from which he would spend much of his life recovering.²⁵

Yet, however great the degree of alienation he may have experienced at this time, it was never as deeply seated as he later imagined it to have been when he spoke in Up Stream of having found his relatives and their friends so distasteful that he quickly and totally withdrew into the exclusive company of Mrs. Cain’s children.²⁶ Even by his own admission, this had not been the case, as evidenced by a letter to Cora written shortly after the completion of Up Stream. You must remember that [cousin] Ida was the first little sweetheart of my childhood [in America] and as such I have often thought of her in later years, a closeness that Cora herself later confirmed.²⁷

Such an exclusive relationship with only one Jewish child in St. Matthews was but a repetition of a pattern of behavior Ludwig had established during his years in Berlin. If this pattern already fulfilled needs in a satisfying world, how much more fulfillment might it now afford him in an unpredictable one. As he would do again in St. Matthews, he had rejected most of his playmates in Berlin because they simply interrupted his life of fantasy. The only child he had permitted to enter his private world was a young female cousin.²⁸ Withdrawing into his imagination and seeking only the most intimate contact in St. Matthews with one other child, a family member, now provided a part of the security he had lost during the voyage to this new world. It was a pattern more fitting to his experience than any into which he would later try to force the events of this time when the continuing pain of these days persisted in clouding his memory.

In the end, however, it was Minna alone whom Ludwig later described as the victim of an emotional tenacity which made her road the harder, and who became the only truly constant and integrating link to the diversity and trauma of his early life. Far more than Jacques or his cousin, she was his source of security. Throughout the years, she would remain, either in life or in memory, an intimate part of his search for a meaningful peace. She was the comforting mother who felt what he suffered, and her image would become the protective womb within which he could escape from the dangers of external change and inner disruption.²⁹

Jacques, by fully accepting this new world, shared none of the conflicts experienced by Ludwig and could offer little comfort to his son (as he could not for his wife). Instead, he felt at home immediately, settling into the unpainted wooden back house to which they first came and then in the small apartment above one of the town center’s few brick shops, content with the many extraordinary virtues he found in his adopted country. Nor could he appreciate how unsettling his own continuously uncertain business career was to Ludwig. Though Jacques saw a profit, his grocery was never to become overly prosperous, in part because he paid little attention to his mostly black customers, preferring instead to read, play chess, and discuss politics with his few friends.³⁰ So inattentive was he to his business affairs that he would leave his shop in the care of his eight-year-old son, whose similar, but more excusable, lack of commercial acumen added little to the family’s prosperity. Returning one day after a long walk through the countryside, he was astonished, delighted to see a crowd in front of the store. A new fortune has begun, he thought to himself, as he would later recount the incident. But as he entered, he found Ludwig happily bestowing the last of our small stocks of cakes and apples on the eager crowd of young negroes. When Jacques objected to his son’s largesse, Ludwig cried, Oh Father, how could I refuse when the little black children told me distinctly that they were hungry?³¹

The early but moderate success of his shop had temporarily relieved the depression that had brought Jacques to America. Impulsive by nature, and growing more so as a symptom of his developing mental illness, he suddenly decided to speculate on his recent invention of a nonrefillable bottle, believing it would make him rich. Minna, refusing to recognize her husband’s emotional imbalance, deliberately indulged herself with this dream of instant wealth. But when his design was stolen by the patent attorney who had advertised for such a device and to whom Jacques had sent his idea, all seemed lost. (Might this theft of his father’s design have influenced Ludwig’s lifelong aversion to business and technology?) Only escape seemed open to them. They auctioned the shop’s contents, sold Minna’s jewelry, paid their debts, and left St. Matthews on February 22, 1892, carrying with them four hundred dollars and Jacques’ unreliable ideas for another fresh start.³²

While Ludwig would later remember the move to Charleston as a bright adventure, it did not, in reality, add to his sense of well-being. Coupled with the fascinating bristle of packing and departure . . . [that] engaged my imagination³³ were his anxious memories of the horror-filled train ride from Charleston of a year earlier, soon to be repeated, while concerns common to all nine-year-olds encountering a similar change were made more acute by the singularly eventful odyssey of these last years and by an incident that preceded his departure. A half-century later, he would recall for his wife the story of his mother’s gold and diamond watch as an explanation for the incurable insecurity he had experienced throughout his life. Behind in their rent, Jacques asked for the watch to sell, which Minna, in resignation, brought to him. You may as well take this, she stated with utter defeat in her voice. I’ll never go any place where I can wear it again. Ludwig, near enough to hear his parents’ exchange, trembled with fear and terror, only able to calm himself twenty minutes later.³⁴

Minna, on the other hand, having steadily hoped for fairer conditions in some larger center of American civilization, was perhaps encouraged by thoughts of a better life to come despite her personal losses during this latest transition. It was the last time she would experience such excitement. For if the Lewisohns had left behind in St. Matthews the painful reminders of repeated failure and of their former lives in Berlin (through the presence of the Eloessers), they had also abandoned their one experience of what Ludwig would later speak of as that honest simplicity, that true democratic kindness which we like to associate with the years of the primitive Republic.³⁵ The apparent openness of this new land had left an idealized mark upon its new subjects’ imaginative inheritance as Americans. The society they were about to confront in Charleston would be far, far different. Ahead lay those bitter days which thirty years later would elicit from Ludwig a woeful lament as he looked back with the heaviest of hearts upon this pristine time—those things are gone he would write in Up Stream during another difficult period of his life.³⁶ A dozen years later, his life having taken a somewhat better turn, he would look back upon St. Matthews as an idyllic time when held up against all that was to follow. What a quaint world it had been and an easy-going world!³⁷

The Charleston to which they came was a world in obeisance to its self-image and to a mythic past that is still carefully nurtured. It is a land where nature’s sirens and man’s creative hand have seemingly conspired to distort and distill, romanticize and capture for eternity the essence of a past wished into existence by those who came after it. What better place could there have been for Ludwig to continue the purposeful re-creation of himself as an American?

The seeds of this image were planted in those early days of 1670, when the first English settler went ashore through the muddy marshland to establish an outpost of European civilization upriver from the peninsular city of present-day Charleston. Charles Towne, reestablished a decade later on this narrow lick of land deposited by two rivers pouring forth from the interior, became a village by the sea, a magnet for the rejected of the Old World—second sons, disinherited by a patriarchy too strong to break; those down-and-out, hoping for one last chance; a steady stream of religious dissidents, Jew and Christian alike, in search of free expression; scattered but strong-willed political adventurers, seeking a new system of self-rule; and the inevitable economic speculators, investing in the future with slave and indentured capital. French Huguenots, German shopkeepers, and Jewish outcasts all added to the mix of African slaves and British Islanders from whom an aristocracy would develop, grow, and prosper, intermarrying with members of other ethnic groups to form a class system unique to the country.

Charles Towne became Charleston as colonial dependence passed with revolution to national confederation. The village had grown over the intervening century into a major port, rivaling northern population centers in wealth and culture. It was, perhaps, the most cosmopolitan city of the new Republic—surely the most European—marked by a leisurely gentility that only an immobile servant class could provide. But if the slave was bound by law and chain, his master was chained by luxury become need, and by a mean social structure that often forced the denial of kinship to one’s chattel, if not of one’s basic humanity.

Single-crop economics and its slave underpinning slowly tarnished the facade of gentility that shone so brightly from African polish. The pressure and friction of a century and a half of servitude, regional pride, and the spurious issue of states’ rights all fanned the long-smoldering fires that broke out with the deathly glow of civil war in 1861.

The period of Reconstruction that followed was more a process of reshaping the old order than of building anew. The leading families of the past were now money-poor but had retained their status, and after a decade they had reestablished their position of dominance by denying the right of self-direction to those seeking a new life. Past glories now lay buried beneath Charleston’s rubble, and those responsible for them had passed with the generations before the war. Only the tale remained. Cultural roots languished and became distorted memory as Charleston became a land of dreamers and mythmakers, of old families desperately clinging to an increasingly distorted image of the past with which they hoped to ensure the survival of their social order. And for generations it did. Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian and a descendant of Charleston’s early settlers, fell under its spell while on a pilgrimage to his ancestral home. In paying homage to the city, he wrote in his novel of Charleston, Lady Baltimore, that he had been mystified by the most wistful town in America and by a handful of people who were like that great society of the world, the high society of distinguished men and women who exist no more, but who touched history with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and letters that we read today with a starved and homesick longing in the midst of our sullen welter of democracy.³⁸

Yet despite this idealized vision, Charleston had never been a monolithic society of servant and served. The great struggling mass of native-born, like the immigrants entering the port city in the late nineteenth century, had experienced in its streets a world quite different from the land of perfumed gardens and high brick walls, of stately old houses and church bells that rang with predictable rhythms, all sanctuaries to those stirred by discomfort and the fear of change. The peoples of the streets inhabited a world of vibrancy, of movement, of chaotic liveliness. It was this world that Leon Banov, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and the city’s first public health physician, later recalled as the setting for his own childhood during the period of Ludwig’s stay there.

The street that I lived on was paved with wooden planks adorned with a set of narrow rails for the horse cars that ambled lazily along, sharing the street with an occasional queue of mule-drawn drays carting enormous bales of cotton towards the water front. King Street was just around the corner, and to me it was a colorful thoroughfare, full of life and activity with people walking in all directions. The street vendors added vivid contrasts and sound to the picture as they gracefully balanced their wares in baskets or wooden trays on their heads. . . . I wish that I had the ability to depict the cacophony of sound to which I walked each morning.³⁹

When Ludwig later tried to recapture his youthful impressions of the city, he fell to romanticizing it as others had done. He, too, was forever caught in its spell, the faintly and beautifully old with its element of pathos which . . . accentuated so often [the] beauty and repose of the city upon which had fallen a gentle touch of decay, a faint shadow of dissolution, as he would describe it in his earliest novel, The Broken Snare. Yet he drew his own unique and curious portrait of it as well. To him, this world whose pride rested on the past glories of its statesmen, planters, and warriors remained forever veiled in the imagery of a woman: Queenshaven. I hear the sharp, quick rustling of the palmettos, the splash and murmur of the incoming tide, the melancholy song of Negroes across the bay; I see the iridescent plaster of the old walls at sunset, the crescent moon, so clear and silvery, over the lighthouse, the white magnolias in their olive foliage; I feel the full, rich sweetness of that incomparable air.⁴⁰

The Lewisohns arrived in this city of varying reflections on Washington’s Birthday, 1892, a day whose national symbolism could not have been lost on this family striving to become Americans. Taking Mrs. Cain’s advice, they settled into a respectable boardinghouse at 34 Pitt Street, where they would remain for the next five years. With their few possessions quickly unpacked, they set out to find their way in this city which they, too, had created out of dreams. But Charleston, ruled by those increasingly fearful of losing control over it, was not St. Matthews. The openness of that rural community had ill-prepared the Lewisohns for the socially restrictive walls that would soon rise before them, day by day, brick by brick, shutting them into a world they alone would inhabit. Shunning German Americans (peasants turned grocers⁴¹ who had no thought of entering the society of Queenshaven gentry⁴²) and Jews (rather ignorant, semi-Orthodox), with whom they should have felt most comfortable, Jacques and Minna sought a place among the seemingly educated and cultured of another class, as they had done before in St. Matthews. Jacques fully believed that a democratic spirit prevailed in America, that neither humble employment nor even poverty would preclude an educated man’s joining the society of his intellectual peers.⁴³ The shattering experiences of constant rejection and isolation would slowly destroy his spirit, as it would Minna’s.

In this disappointing and friendless world, the Lewisohn home became the family’s refuge. As Jacques’ final business attempt began to fail, he retreated deeper into the protective walls of 34 Pitt. And when the shop finally closed and he was forced to accept the far less socially elevating position of a furniture salesman and collector of installment payments in a business dealing with a largely black clientele, he retreated still further, abandoning all hope of acceptance by those with whom he had hoped to share his life. It was mean work, from which he would withdraw each evening into the sanctuary of his home, reading Goethe and Kant, playing the lilting sounds of Mozart on his piano, and surrounding himself with his family. In The Case of Mr. Crump, Ludwig’s fictionalized account of these early years, he (Herbert) recalled how this life had ultimately broken his father (Herman), destroying his dreams, leaving him in his middle age with only the dull and exhausting pace of unrewarding work to show for years of effort: He might have been a moderately prosperous man; he was for years, a very busy one. Herbert always kept a vision, an early one, of his father’s tall, spare figure leaning forward and peering on account of his nearsightedness, hurrying with compressed lips and a frown, half of annoyance, half of timidity, from one appointment to another. Herman Crump had nothing left him at last but his position. Often in the years ahead, Ludwig would sit and listen to the cry of his father’s frustrated life, as an ache came into his own heart that stilled his brief triumph.⁴⁴

Minna remained at home as the dutiful wife of Jacques Lewisohn was expected to, creating for her husband his private world and sanctuary, doing the best she could with the small means available to her now that Jacques had settled into the defeated but steady pattern of earning a wage. There was no money, Ludwig recalled in Crump. It was only her . . . excellent management that kept the family from the open humiliations of poverty. And as she managed their affairs through the years, she dreamed of the life she had left behind in the increasingly mythicized Berlin, never truly . . . reconciled either to the soft, fiery beauty of Queenshaven nor to the society, hoping, with growing expectation, that her son would find the success and acceptance that she knew would forever elude her and Jacques. She had begun her married life with expectation and optimism, but the years of unending disappointment had changed her mood, leaving an indelible mark upon her spirit until the end.⁴⁵

Ludwig’s world in that first Charleston year was filled with unfamiliar and exciting sights and sounds and smells, each adding to the fantasies he wove into his daily wanderings through the city, fed as they were by his readings of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels and the endless tales of Charles Dickens, all brought into his world by Jacques. The visible world intoxicated him from the beginning, he wrote of himself in describing the youthful Crump. More dearly and elementarily the world of sound.⁴⁶ But at day’s end, he too would return home to the safety of Minna’s world. If he was drenched by the phantasmagoria of his Charleston daydreams, he nonetheless felt that the center of his world, the place from which all thoughts and imaginings radiated, was the home that she had created for him. Above all, there was the house with its verandahs and its tangled gardens. . . . I played at its being a castle. . . . I was living in a magnificent world, a pageant of infinite variety and splendor.⁴⁷ But this childhood Eden had its serpents, as Ludwig undoubtedly suspected. Soon he would meet them face to face.

The tutoring begun in St. Matthews and completed during their first year and a half in Charleston had left Minna confident that her eleven-year-old son could sit successfully for the entrance examination to the High School of Charleston in September 1893. Though the high school was part of the city’s public school system, admission was competitive and attendance required the payment of tuition, with only a few of its students meriting financial assistance. Ludwig’s admission on October 2, 1893, and his award of a scholarship were to his parents signs of their son’s promise. They believed strongly that one day he would be among the school’s top graduates, destined to attend a large, prestigious university as the next step in a brilliant future.⁴⁸

As a part of this conservative society, the high school (established on May 6, 1839) stressed classical learning as a means of preparing Charleston’s best citizens for roles of leadership in the community. Virgil Cornelius Dibble, a one-armed hero of the Civil War and a strict disciplinarian, had first come to the school in 1868, and had assumed the role of principal one year later. He was convinced that a classical school, doing its work faithfully and well, exerts through its pupils an influence which will in time permeate the community. The skillful use of English was to provide the means by which the culture he cherished would be rescued from the danger posed to it through the presence of unfamiliar elements within the city.

Students were taught that no task was too difficult, no problem so perplexing that it could be abandoned. America, even in this distant corner of post-Reconstruction Charleston, was undergoing a new industrial awakening—productivity was its watchword, the cornerstone of a glorious and gilded future. The primacy of education for its own sake, a value belonging to an idler period, had been abandoned to a new spirit that afforded no happy mean between strenuous labor and slackness. Nor could much be left to the natural development of the child. The romantic spirit of the antebellum world, with its belief that even society itself had assumed its natural order, had given way to a quickened, more deliberate pace in the drive to manipulate nature to fit the purposes of man. It had always been so, but a greater awareness, a sharpening of vision, had been achieved through the disruptive influence of war and its aftermath of Reconstruction. Training, not spontaneity, would develop the child into a useful member of this progress-oriented society. Dibble saw Rousseau’s Emile as the creature of the poet’s imagination; the real Emile, nature’s petted and spoiled child, grows up an ignorant, uneducated, indolent man, and his life is a failure.⁴⁹

There was more than a spark of Emile in Ludwig, but it lay largely dormant during these years of pedagogical malaise, and through the re-enforcement accorded this educational torpor by a static society that sought to maintain the status quo by recognizing those students who would accept its tenets. For most of his stay at the school, Ludwig appeared to accept things as they were. He was to begin his open revolt only in the latter part of his final year at the institution, feeling by then too hemmed in by traditions far too alien to accept without question. Yet this revolt would be staged within an acceptable framework, remaining private and imperceptible to those around him.

Minna, meanwhile, thought this educational system to be the very best possible schooling her son could receive—cultural training and access to Charleston’s elite all accomplished in a single stroke. Hoping to please his parents and bring them the success that he, too, now realized was beyond their grasp, Ludwig began to display the industriousness that was to typify his entire adult life. From hard work soon came his reputation as a scholar among the educated of Charleston.

But it was also a time when the inner struggles of his life deepened and became more disturbing, giving impetus and direction to his often compulsive need for public self-expression and the recognition it could bring to him. For despite this success, a shadow had already descended upon the dreamworld of his early years, slowly dissolving them into the hard reality of life at a school designed for children very much unlike himself. As he later described his experience in Crump, It was school that at last created the division between day and dream. It could be dismissed no longer . . . the trouble with teachers, the atmosphere, the boys. . . . School was to Herbert a leashed chaos at best, namely in the classroom, an open pandemonium before and after classes. The boys’ spirit of raising hell for its own sake irritated him obscurely, but deeply. . . . Spit-balls and pea-shooters seemed to him, years before he could formulate such feelings in words, stupidly and nastily irrelevant to the situation.⁵⁰ Foreign-born, he was a conspicuous addition to the student body; as a Jew, he was fair game for those of his schoolmates who wished to taunt him mercilessly.

Anti-Semitism in America had its roots in the ancient world. The Merchant of Venice was among the most popular plays performed across the country throughout the early years of the Republic. Christ-killer and Shylock were images alive in the population’s imagination. Even the more sophisticated, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, were believers and purveyors of this bigotry. There sat the very Jew of Jews, the distilled essence of all Jews that have been born since Jacob’s time, he wrote a generation before Ludwig came to Charleston. He was Judas Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the same time the truest type of his race. . . . I never beheld anything so ugly and disagreeable, and preposterous, and laughable as the outline of his profile, it was so hideously Jewish, and so cruel, and so keen. . . . I rejoiced exceedingly in this Shylock . . . for the sight of him justified me in the repugnance I have always felt towards his race. Only five years before Ludwig had entered Charleston’s high school, Anna Dawes, in a treatise widely circulated throughout America, would proclaim Jews to be the most narrow of bigots because of their maintenance of a different religious culture, and offered that this makes wholesale colonization the only solution to their disruptive presence in other societies, unless you would contemplate extermination. Certainly, in the wake of a burgeoning wave of immigration of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples, there was a willingness to listen to such pronouncements. Even one as progressive as Wait Whitman could write of the dirty looking German Jews in these years, years in which more so even in the South, still unaccepting of defeat, Jews were thought of as aliens even when their fathers had fought in the Confederate armies.⁵¹

And so, each day brought with it the threat of physical violence. Outclassed in the schoolyard arena, Ludwig tried to avoid his chief tormentor, who, tall, wiry, sheer muscle and sinew, smote all the boys’ hip and thigh surreptitiously in the classroom, [and] openly on the playground. But the life of the mind one afternoon gave way as Ludwig’s rage burst forth. Summoning unknown strength, Ludwig attacked again and again until he was pulled from his bloodied victim. So formative had the incident been in his life that he used it in several of his novels. Speaking of it some three decades later in a story of passion’s ascendancy over unnatural restraint (Don Juan), he related how he could still feel the hot tingling of animal fury in his throat. He had come out of the encounter limp and rather bloody. He didn’t mind. He had been foolish. He knew it quite well. But the bruises would heal and the folly and the experience were his own. He had spoken their language, and had taken their message to heart. The external wound healed within days, but inside, the incident left a permanent scar upon his image of America. And if Minna vowed revenge against his Jew-baiting school mate, and was held at bay by Ludwig’s tearful appeal not to speak with Dibble, he came away with a second lesson, that he could defend both himself and his mother from the world’s cruelty.⁵²

If these days had their uglier side, the near-isolation they imposed upon him (he did make a few friends among Charleston’s gentler families) had a positive effect as well, offering him a welcome relief from the distractions that kept him from more meaningful activities, particularly his writing. Ever since his earliest attempts at poetry in St. Matthews, Ludwig had continued the constant scribbling that was his great secret occupation.⁵³ Filled with the stirrings of words and experiences, he would sit day after day in his garret room or on the adjoining piazza (as Charlestonians had named their porches), filling one small notebook after another with what he later admitted in Crump was chaotic and imitative verse.⁵⁴ And as the next several years passed, his writings would acquire a recognizable sophistication in style and content, if still somewhat characterized by a youth’s religiosity and sentiment.

This solitary passion, so much a part of the young poet’s life, was first recognized by others in his fourteenth year. Thomas della Torre, the fiery and dynamic instructor of Latin at the high school, suddenly turned to Ludwig one day during a sight translation of Virgil. Perhaps out of frustration with the other students, he pointed to Ludwig and exclaimed, That is the only boy who has a natural ear for verse. It was a piercing moment in Ludwig’s development as a writer. Having long admired his teacher’s sensitivity to literature, the compliment confirmed Ludwig’s deepest aspirations and dreams. "A keen strange quiver went through me.