The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought

by William R. Everdell

A lively and accessible history of Modernism, The First Moderns is filled with portraits of genius, and intellectual breakthroughs, that richly evoke the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg. William Everdell offers readers an invigorating look at the unfolding of an age.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Art, Cultural, Music, Criticism

509 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite good, it is very readable, though Everdell (who teaches in a secondary school and is very smart) is a bit glib. He often tells us what Modernism is (and it sounds right), but without actually showing us (that is demonstrating in great detail) that it IS thus. Hence, the missing star. He is especially strong on science, math, music -- which he sees as key instances of the Modernist ethic of fragmentation and the ontological discrete (rejection of continua). In lieu of posting a proper review, I will simply append my notes, for whatever it is worth. The quote from Bernhard at the beginning comes not from Everdell, however -- but simply from stumbling on this passage while reading the two books together.


'When classicism says "man", it means reason and feeling. And when Romanticism says "man", it means passion and the senses. And when modernism says "man", it means the nerves'. (Hermann Bahr, The Overcoming of Naturalism: Sequel to 'Critique of the Moderns').

"Nature is parts without a whole..." (Pessoa). The notion of unity is always an illusion, says Richard Zenith. Well, not quite. A relative, provisional, fleeting unity, a unity which doesn't pretend to be smooth and absolute, or even absolutely singular, which is built around an imagination, a fiction, a writing instrument -- this was the unity that Pessoa was betting on...The Book of Disquiet whose ultimate ambition was to reflect the jagged thoughts and fractured emotions that can inhabit one man..."

Thomas Bernhard on Fragments...
"He who reads everything has understood nothing, he said. It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment. But such drastic self-restraint requires so much courage and such strength of mind as can only rarely be mustered and as we ourselves muster only rarely; the reading person, just as the carnivorous, is gluttonous in the most revolting manner and, like the carnivorous person, upsets his stomach and his entire health, his head and his whole intellectual existence. We even understand a philosophical essay better if we do not gobble it up entirely and at one go, but pick out a detail from which we then arrive at the whole, if we are lucky. Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and perfect are basically abhorrent to us. Only when we are fortunate enough to turn something whole, something complete or indeed perfect into a fragment, when we get down to reading it, only then do we experience a high degree, at times indeed a supreme degree, of pleasure in it. Our age has long been intolerable as a whole, he said, only when we perceive a fragment of it is it tolerable to us. The whole and the perfect are intolerable, he said. That is why, fundamentally, all of these paintings here in the Kunsthistorisches Museum are intolerable, if I am to be honest, they are abhorrent to me. In order to be able to bear them I search for a so-called massive mistake in and about every single one of them, a procedure which so far has always attained its objective of turning that so-called perfect work of art into a fragment, he said. The perfect not only threatens us ceaselessly with our ruin, it also ruins everything that is hanging on these walls under the label of masterpiece. I proceed from the assumption that there is no such thing as the perfect or the whole, and each time I have made a fragment of one for the so-called perfect works of art hanging here on the walls by searching for a massive mistake in and about that work of art, for the crucial point of failure by the artist who made that work of art, searching for it until I found it, I have got one step further..." (Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, A Comedy)

(For a general bibliography of Modernism, see 363n.25; ch. 2 on Austria is very good, a summary of turn-of-the-century Vienna.)

What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page . . . What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him. - William Gaddis, Albany, April 4, 1990
 
Eliot and Dostoyevski are the most significant names here; none of Gaddis's reviewers described The Recognitions as The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoyevski (with additional dialogue by Ronald Firbank), but that would be a more accurate description than the Ulysses parallel so many of them harped upon. Not only do Gaddis's novels contain dozens of "whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot," but The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon using The Waste Land as its text. The novel employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, collage, multiple perspective, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth; and both call for the same kinds of artistic, moral, and religious sensibilities. (Steven Moore on Gaddis)

There's a long cast of characters that drift in and out and we lose sight of Wyatt for long stretches. Names are changed! Identities are mistaken! Life and art are so entangled that their boundaries are not clear. We constantly, overhear fragments of conversations, catch glimpses of the characters as they hurry by....

Modernism was global and transnational. There were five postal deliveries a day in Munich in 1900.

It began by rejecting the heroic materialism of the 19th cen., as also Positivism, scientific determinism, and the idea of Progress (as well as the moral faith that went with it).

Whereas the 19th century (cf. 9f.) believed all change was smooth (continuous; legato, rather than staccato in tempo) -- like the forbiddingly complex, but entirely harmonic development of a Brahms symphony -- Modernism introduced the idea of discontinuous change, leading to the conclusion in all fields that statistical and probabilistic descriptions of reality were truer than the old deterministic dynamics. Modern thought then gave up the stubborn belief that things could best be seen as "steadily and whole" from some privileged viewpoint; the belief in objectivity so crumbled that phenomenology and solipsism took over in every field and area. And finally, as looking at oneself produced a sense of consciousness that took an axe to formal logic and the belief that anything could be viewed simply. These things, then: statistics, multiple perspective, subjectivity, and self-reference...all devolved from the collapse of the ontological continuity assumed by the 19th cen., and led to the non-logical, non-objective, non-linear and essentially causeless mental universe we inhabit today.

Modernism, then, was a culture of analysis, at home with the bits and pieces and contradictions, the social and cultural and psychological and ontological fragmentation of modern science and society. But what Modernists did not accept was the 19th century assumption that one could analyze nature without also analyzing the means we use to become aware of it (mind).

Ch.3: Dedekind on continuity and discontinuity. Zeno's paradox and the infinitesimal calculus; Positivism saw the "observer" as a "fixed point", separate from the material reality he observed. Because Positivism was resolutely materialistic, it fell into conflict with mathematics, which (being wholly abstract) was still bedeviled by the problems of continua. Though the real number series (whole, rational, irrational) -- even between the integers 1 and 2 -- seemed to be unlimited, it was not (apparently) continuous. This problem of numerical continuty was solved by Dedekind's Cut. Then, Cantor's ladder of infinite sets... and Frege's not inrelated definition of number (as a set of sets). After this attack on the continuums of the calculus, and this focus on set theory -- which is (atomic), we enter a new era: the atomistic thermodynamics of Boltzmann, stop-motion photography, colorplane 'Cloisonnism' of Gauguin, the "divisionism" of Seurat; the continuities of the old calculus were banished, along with fields in physics, fluidity of motion, the transitional browns of chiaroscuro in art. The digital had been born.
 
Ch. 4: In Physics, the 20th century began with three transformations: (1) the digitizing of matter and energy into atoms and quanta [Planck]; (2) dealing with particles statistically and stochastically (probabilities and averages) [Boltzmann]; (3) the restructuring of space [Einstein]. (The idea of continuous fields in physics had been "proven" by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.) The real consequence of Boltzmann's probabilistic physics is that the universe was no longer strictly deterministic, for the state of the system was no longer simply a function of the state of the parts. The implications were colossal, and involved the postulate of complete disorder of molecules. Boltzmann's atomism (Boltzmann thought even 'time' might be discrete, rather than continuous) was challenged by the view that energy is prior, and that atoms were but knots in the energy fields, which were continuous. But Boltzmann's atomism was about to enjoy a revival (including Josiah Gibbs and, even, Wittgenstein) -- eventually leading to Bose-Einstein (statistics of sub-atomic particles). Particles are discontinuous and unpredictable, Physics only a science of probabilities. There is no certainty.

Ch. 5: Seurat and 'Divisionism'. By dividing optical perceptions (not the objects themselves, but the optical perceptions of them) into their discrete elements, Seurat created a form of artistic atomism. For the mechanics of "simultaneous contrast", see the concise, but excellent discussion at 70ff. The result, ultimately, was a complete fragmentation of colors, planes, and parts.

Ch. 6: a good, brief essay on how Symbolism (Mallarmé) emerged (c. 1886) from the Decadénce of Le Chat Noir of the '70's, via Rimbaud's "Voyelles" (89ff.), though this was still metrically conventional (in rhyming sonnets), unlike (1873) Une Saison en Enfer (which was metrically wild, partially even in prose). But it was only with Les Illuminations (1875), the manuscript Rimbaud handed to Verlaine at their final parting in Stuttgart, and which was not printed until 1885 (when everyone assumed, wrongly, that Rimbaud was already dead), that was the REAL breakthrough into Modernism came -- extravagant, discontinuous, incoherent, barely metrical... "A kind of poetry that says nothing, made up of bits of dreaming, without coherence...the inexhaustible unexpectedness of the always adequate images" (as Laforgue had put it in 1882). But unlike Rimbaud, who was maniacal (like the old Romantics), Laforgue was cool, polyphemous (in tone, not in topic), ironic.

"Aux armes, Citoyens, il n'y a plus de raison!", wrote Laforgue... thus embracing the Modernist epistemology that holds that "ambiguity is more than a style, and irony more than an attitude.... Emotions superimpose themselves in the minds of the poets without predictability, logic, or coherence, but cannot be rendered by rant or monologue. Probing for that incoherence and evoking it with words... is the poet's work" (p. 100).

Ch. 7: Ramón y Cajal (brain smudges). Of all the sciences, taxonomy (Adam's task of distinguishing between things and naming them) is probably the least distinguished. Rutherford had said that all science was either physics or stamp-collecting; well, taxonomy is stamp-collecting. Biological taxonomy was put on a sound basis by Linnaeus (18th century).

Ch. 8: The Concentration Camp; Ch. 9: Freud; Ch. 10: Modernism on the Verge, 1900; chs. 11-15: Planck, Russell, film (montage); St. Louis (Twain, Henry Adams, Scott Joplin); Einstein; Picasso.

Ch. 17: Strindberg. For the idea of Modernism as a mixing and splicing of fragments of character, of scenes, for character as theme and variation (rather than substance), see pp. 258f., p. 261f. "As he explained it in the play's [Miss Julie] preface, he had deliberately broken the personalities and motivations of his characters to pieces so he could put them back together again in a way that would seem more real:

'....my souls (characters) are conglomerations...of past cultures as well as present wants, Scraps from both books and newspapers, fragments of mankind, torn-off samples of Sunday best clothing that have become rags, just as though soul is patched together...as modern characters, living in an age of transition, an age more restless and hysterical at any rate than the preceding one, I have portrayed them as unstable and split...The dialogue therefore meanders around supplying themes in the first scenes, which are then developed, taken up, repeated, expanded, repeated like the themes in a musical composition.'

"....he was right about this mixing and matching of slices of life. It was the essence of what was to become the ultimate Modernism of composition. Eventually Strindberg would figure out that he could do this kind of mixing and matching with scenes, and thereafter it would be only a matter of time before he would discover how to mix in slices of what happens only in memory or imagination -- the discovery we now call theatrical expressionism...fragmented characters and disjunctive dialogue of Miss Julie..., the Ghost Sonata broke through in to a new theatrical space, discontinuous in all its parts,whether spatial, temporal, internal or external...

'The characters, double, redouble, evaporate, condenser, scatter and converge. But one consciousness remains above them all, the Dreamer's:for him there are no secrets, no inconsequence, no scruples, no law. He does not judge, he does not acquit, simply relates.'"

Ch. 18: Schoenberg, Music in no key. According to Schoenberg, his atonality involved two things -- "first, to formulate ides in an aphoristic manner, which did not require continuations out of formal reasons; secondly, to link ideas together without the use of formal connectives, merely by juxtaposition" (i.e, fragmentation and parataxis).

Ch. 19: Joyce -- the novel goes to pieces. "A mosaic of jagged fragments," wrote H.G. Wells of Portrait. 'Wrestling with the sheer size of the modern world and the centerless, forever expanding universe of undifferentiated human experience, they came up with the fiction we now call Modernist. The failure of focus and the collapse of traditional narrative is part of their discovery' (301).

Ch. 20: Kandinsky - art with no object. At 315ff., on Abstract (or non-representational) Art.

Ch. 21: 1913 (Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg).

Ch. 22: Heisenberg, Bohr, Gödel, Turing, Merce Cunningham, Foucault.

Modernism has, as ingredients, five major interrelated ideas:

(A) There is embedded in every system at arriving at truth a recursiveness or self-reference that automatically undermines the consistency of the system. At first only mathematicians understood the importance of the paradox of recursive self-reference (Everdell is talking here about Russell's Paradox); but as soon as writers began to talk about writing, artists to make art out of art, and language to describe only language, it was seen that every general proposition would undermine itself through self-referentiality.

(B) That objectivity, the possibility of mutual agreement on "reality", gets no closer to truth then its contrary, a radical subjectivity bordering on solipsism. For non-mathematicians self-reference turned towards subjective solutions to the problem of knowledge. Positivism (for whom the observer was separate from the material reality that he 'observes') gave way to a revived subjectivity of the Romantics (Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Husserl), into stream-of -consciousness in literature (Woolf, Proust, Joyce), the dream in theater (Strindberg), and subjectivism in art.

(C) That every truth implies the subjective perspective from which it was derived, and that no one of those perspectives is privileged. Subjectivity, however, was no guarantee of a singleness of vision. Narrators like Stephen Dedalus were no longer omniscient, perspectivism ruled from Nietzsche to Manet (Bar at the Folies Bergère) and Van Gogh (Bedroom at Arles), Cézanne's multiple visions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, to literary irony (like multiple exposure in photography, to the spatial perspectivism of Cubism and of collage, to the temporal perspectivism of the Futurists (in painting) -- as, of course, in contemporary physics.

(D) That any "objective" truths there are to be found are inductive in the extreme, seeming all to lie in statistical regularities..., that Is, statistics and stochastics... abandoning the bright, precise proposition for the "fuzzy" statistical approach, and the return of randomness.

(E) And finally, most importantly of all, the premise from which they all drive, the assumption of ontological discontinuity -- which Everdell calls "the heart of Modernism" (p. 351) -- that is, fragmentation and atomism, digital rather than analog, a denial of the evolution, fields, seamlessness, and Entwicklng (of the 19th cen., and of Leibniz' Principle of Continuity). Everdell discusses this first in terms of early 20th cen. science and mathematics, then turning to the arts. This particulate idea led, in painting to Divisionism, those separable 'snags of perception'; sfumato (Rainaissance) became unfashionable, yielding to color blocks in Manet's 1863 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe', or the use of color, tones, dots, and patches (Impressionism and Post-Impressionism), in Cloisonnism, in Cézanne and Fauvism, as likewise in Modernist music (Schoenberg) and dance. In poetry, transitions were abandoned, favoring the abrupt (as in collage). For Rimbaud, poetry is a juxtaposition of discrete fragments or remembered details, or simply of words shaken loose of their meaning...non-representational poetry. Stream-of-consciousness in the novel, too, is not made up of continua, but of these atomic 'snags of perception'. And finally..., Modernism is an "Age of Analysis". Everything is dissected, reduced, fragmented..., leaving unadorned hard edges...., nothing is smoothed over... Fragmentation and analysis, asynchronous, atonal...the very failure of the integrity of modern life, and modern lives, fragmented, unharmonious, divided against themselves..., the derangement of the senses and of reason, bemoaned by Modernist, but celebrated as the ultimate virtue by Postmodernists...a long-term objective consequence, presumably, of industrial modernity (p. 356)..., a digitization of ontology and aesthetics. Dance came late to Modernism; the dance of Isidora Duncan was fluid; one has to wait for the aperiodic, staccato choreography of Merce Cunnngham.

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

To what period can we trace the origins of Modernism, the seminal cultural shift that blossomed during the early half of the twentieth century and at whose occasionally nebulous feet are lain the credit for many wonders and the imputation of many horrors? William Everdell firmly places it in the period in and around the fin-de-siècle of the nineteenth century: commencing circa 1872 with the discovery of the proto-binary Dedekind Cut by the German mathematician Richard Dedekind and continuing to unfold and develop through the final quarter of the nineteenth century and those early years of the twentieth prior to the opening of the First World War.

Everdell discusses this during the opening sections of his first-rate, rapid-fire, and occasionally overwhelming sojourn through a variety of disciplines that, sooner or later, became caught in the modernist flow and and shed whatever remained of the restraints that kept them tethered within the systems and memes of the Victorian Era; and, according the the learned author, the common theme running through these nineteenth-century ballasts was a firm belief in the continuity of the material world and the universe in which it was located; a smooth continuum that—whether implicit within a geometric line, the hue of a painting, the wave-form of energy, fluid whorls of the ether, the inherent solidity of matter, the networked nervous system of the body, precisely-metered lines of French verse, the evolutionary progression of life upon earth—told of a connectedness, a progression or movement without pause or break, a time-directed, deterministic march into a future in which everything seemed to be leading towards the best of all worlds. This prevalent belief in an ontological continuity was a critical component in the many successes of the nineteenth century; and where it couldn't be made to fit with the evidence before one's eyes, it accounted for its major failures.

As against this is the author's contention that Modernism, at its core, was the growing and pervasive realization—perceived at the empirical level but resonating without to the aesthetic and logical—across these fields of human endeavor, that life was actually a discontinuous environment, a theatre broken into a multitude of individualized compartments; and that this discontinuity extended from incomprehensibly small and stochastic particles all the way through to the infinite, affected the invisible realm of mathematical formulations and the very cellular structure that made up human flesh and bone; and was possessed of an unnerving tendency towards springing paradoxes upon an increasingly discomfited world whenever a particular box of its mysteries was pried opened. Thus the former ontological continuity began to be displaced and replaced—proceeding from the initial trouble spots located within atomic properties—by one in which the very essence of existence was determined to be of a probabilistic and stochastic nature; the whole affected by and broken into its component parts. As Everdell posits, with the spread of this discontinuous outlook, objectivity began to be replaced by solipsism and phenomenology, and this infiltrated literature, art, psychology, and music, as well as science. This inward peering at consciousness also created the environment that kicked the stool out from under formal logic; once consciousness began exploring itself, the very foundations of truth, of the knowability of objects, collapsed upon itself; and it became clear that we could never get beyond telling and hearing each other's stories, our own—and other's—perceptions of the reality that surrounded us and endlessly bombarded us with sensory data from which each could fashion an individual—but no objective, no absolute—truth.

The names flew by fast and furious, a combination of those I am familiar with; those of whom I have heard but know little; and those who are completely new to me—of the second, the likes of Georges-Pierre Seurat, whose captivating paintings I have been spending far too much time drinking in on-screen, and of the third Jules Laforgue, for whom the same can be said of my attempts at tracking down English translations of his disjointedly playful and ironic poetry. Everdell has laid out his opus into chapters that proceed in rough chronological order whilst focussing upon one or more names who were pivotal in the thematic discipline under examination—such as Husserl and Phenomenology; Boltzmann and the statistical formulation of Entropy; Arnold Schoenberg and the first Keyless Music; Freud and Psychoanalysis; and Russell and the fall of Logic. There are also three chapters that deliver sparklingly superb summations of the Modernist impulse and its effects via intellectual drive-throughs of Vienna, Paris, and St. Louis at the fin-de-siècle—and each of these city-scape murals trace the intermingling and path-crossing and destiny-making lives of both the renowned individuals featured in the other chapters as well as secondary players, several of whom were of crucial importance in either laying the foundation for the former, or in following up upon their initial discoveries and/or achievements and seeing them through to fruition. Almost madcap when the energy is crackling on full, these urban tours, with their glimpses at how important such centres were in the development of Modernism and the appetites they whet for names and stories still to come—or the further elaborations they provide on figures whose puzzle-solving tale has already been unfolded—feature some of the most brilliant moments, and most inspired writing, in the entire work.

Something that I found to be particularly interesting was the chain of events that lead a sizable number of these trail-blazers to their elusive goals. One of the principal themes of Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers was that much of the inspiration, the creative sparks that brought the visions of such legendary cosmologists as Koepler and Copernicus into focus sprang from the wells of the subconscious—torches from the darkness that, in a flash of revelation, pointed the way forward where previous reasoning had stalled or become mired. Everdell makes the point of emphasizing how certain key discoveries made by thinkers earlier in the eighteenth century couldn't be exploited until a certain cultural mindset had been achieved; and, when such had come into bloom, that the discoveries often mushroomed, one following upon another in rapid succession and from minds that were separated from each other by hundreds or thousands of miles. An exemplar of this was Gregor Mendel, a Moravian scientist-turned-monk who, by the patient cross-breeding of certain varieties of garden peas, discovered key laws of inheritance, including a crucial whole number ratio in the passing along of traits, that revolutionized our understanding of genetics. Although Mendel's work was completed by 1865, it was not until 1900 that its revelatory results were fully comprehended and used as the basis for further elaboration by three biologists—the Dutchman Hugo de Vries, the German Carl Correns, and the Englishman William Bateson—who all submitted similar papers announcing their newly formulated laws on the discontinuous nature of evolutionary genetics, including hybridization and stochastic mutations in genes, within a span of several weeks. These kinds of odd coincidences, both in what comes into being and what is overlooked, redound throughout the years prior to and during the development of Modernism.

Everdell's knowledge is astonishing in its breadth and depth; the man is equally at ease discussing set theory and differential calculus, biology, psychology and neuroscience as he is impressionist and symbolist painting, chronophotography, French vers libre and Joycean literature; but he expects the reader to bring his own understanding to the table and spends little time on the basics of any of these before eagerly diving headfirst into the waters below. I found it a brilliant, well-ordered feast of information, analysis—the chapter on the development of concentration camps is a masterpiece of wry deconstruction—and, particularly, fascinating figures, whose life details are unerringly decanted into well-rounded snifters by the steady (and ofttimes admiring) hand of the author. One of those superb tomes at the end of which one emerges not only having been educated and enlightened, but energetically entertained along the way.

[John David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books of intellectual history with this size and scope are always difficult to talk about. I’ve read some that were abysmal failures, while others were highly successful. If I had to place this one along a spectrum, it’s certainly close to the latter for a couple of reasons. First, a point which has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself, but that I admire nonetheless: it was written not by an academic with narrow scholarly interests, but a wonderfully eclectic generalist, William Everdell, who has taught in the Humanities Department at St. Anne’s School (yes, a private high school) in Brooklyn for the last forty years. There’s something about the passionate amateur that I’m perennially attracted to. I don’t think we have enough of them.

“The First Moderns” is good not only for what it covers just as well as other related books of intellectual history, but also because it covers a lot of relatively new territory. We know the usual suspects: Einstein, Rimbaud, Whitman, Russell, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Picasso, and several dozen others. The names of Edwin Porter, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Valeriano Weyler, however, usually don’t make it into books of this kind. Do people even recognize these names anymore? Everdell also widens the scope of the book by covering not only names, but topics that usually don’t get mentioned. We are used to hearing Modernism defined in terms of music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Very rarely do we see mathematics and science discussed, let alone the invention of the concentration camp.

The theme into which Everdell successfully manages to fit most of his vignettes is that of discreteness, continuity, and discontinuity. One doesn’t ordinarily think of something like mathematics as being potentially Modernist, but the discussion of Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege makes wonderful sense in this context. They explored topics like infinity (actually, infinities), set theory, and the theoretical fundamentals of the field, including questions like, “What is an integer?” All of this work blurred the traditional lines of continuity and discontinuity that earlier logic and mathematics had felt so confident with. We also get a wonderful and highly intelligent, though non-technical, account of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work with statistical mechanics and his defense of atomism. If matter is made of atoms – millions of them – how do we discover anything about a concept as abstract as “energy”? Everdell details the ways in which Boltzmann invented new mathematical tools to think about energy and entropy as statistical averages of extremely complex states. The work of Boltzmann and the people after him showed how, when multiplied by trillions and trillions, tiny, individual discrete atoms can have physical properties en masse like temperature, energy, or entropy (which are all, in fact, related to one another). Again, we see how the information about discontinuous atoms can in fact yield useful information about matter when thought of as continuous.

And even when we get lessons from art history, or music, or poetry with which we are perhaps almost familiar, Everdell adds new contexts, new names, and new layers that enable each chapter in the book to potentially morph into a book of its very own. He gives a beautiful account of Seurat’s invention and exploration of pointillism, the “invention” of blank verse with Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, and a whole chapter on Hugo de Vries’ discovery of the gene and Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory.

Books like this, in their inexhaustible attempt to explain what a concept (like Modernism) might mean to wide swaths of human experience and creativity inevitably can be as a bit listy. “He was important … and so was this, but don’t forget her…” et cetera, and Everdell hasn’t fully escaped that here. But if that bothered me, I would never read this kind of book – a kind of book which I love very much. I read this sort of stuff to learn about new connections between ideas they already knew of, and I can handle the narrative jumpiness if the information is presented in an intelligent way, and Everdell is certainly the kind of intellectual cicerone who is going to teach you something fascinating. If you’re interested in this time period and intellectual history as a field, I would recommend William M. Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” To be honest, it’s dry as hay and not nearly as interesting as Everdell’s book, but his sense of curiosity and the amount of sheer information covered is truly impressive. It complements the information in here nicely.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ne kadar boğucu bir kitap yahu. Bitirinceye kadar kurdeşen döktüm. Can sıkıcı, bir türlü akmayan isim ve eser bombardımanı, Joyce’un komşusu, Schoenberg’in emmisi, entelektüel magazin, üstüne bir de Avrupamerkezcilik. Yıprandım.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining-quite in depth with various people involved in the idea

[Tobias A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everdell paints for us a wonderfully enchanting history of modernism. He manages to craft his story through light and agile prose, crafting lively stories while maintaining scholarly rigor. I was particularly pleased with this aspect of The First Moderns, as books that manage to balance rigor and narrative appeal are not easily found (consider Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club, which is wonderfully written, but lacks nuance in describing pragmatism). Everdell essentially tells us stories, and in them, he showcases genius, bringing Seurat, Boltzmann, Wittgenstein and countless others to life. His mastery of the subject is impressive, and his love and sheer passion for history is abundantly clear. The book does well to break down artificially-imposed boundaries -- and takes modernism to a fully interdisciplinary context, which was refreshing in a world of specialization.

Everdell posits that modernism began in number theory rather than the arts, in the works of German logician Frege -- a bold assertion, but not one without merit. For him, the motif that unites modernists is a sense of discontinuity, one that can be observed in mathematics, the physical sciences, politics, as well as literature, music and the fine arts. A true gem, and one of the best books on modernism I've come across.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally engaging overview of the author's idea of the process and reach of Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century and how it spilled over throughout the first half of the century. A great cultural/intellectual history told in stories. Sightly outdated due to its 1997 publication date, but the arguments are solid and well-articulated. Obviously some of the physics, math, and philosophy went over my head, but that's not the author's fault; rather my ignorance and the depth of the ideas. I enjoyed the hell out of this book, despite the fact that it took me months to read it.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modernism didn't magically begin in 1900. Many so-called modern ideas began in the 19th-century instead of the 20th. Everdell's views of the arts and sciences provide a complex and nuanced picture of what so-called Modernism is as a phenomenon, as well as how that concept varied in its different manifestations. I read the book when it was first published, and recall writing to the author about a few factual errors in the chapter on music: I wonder if those got fixed in the paperback edition? (My guess is not.) Well, it's hard to be an expert on everything.

[sslyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The First Moderns covers maths, physics, genetics, painting, poetry, fiction, drama and more. It is quite technical. Well told. One thing missing from learning history in school was connections. You learned one thing, then another but the two were never related. I hope that schools do a better job with that now. Mr. Everdell does an excellent job of connecting the events across all the subjects in a way one can make sense of it all.

[Jason Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Probably the best I've read on the subject of Modernism. Unlike others, it tackles the scientific and mathematical thinkers that helped create twentieth century thought. Great starting place for understanding the implications of the term, and Everdell can tell fascinating stories of the individuals responsible while breaking down complex ideas for the general reader.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was sort of the linchpin of the seminar, and now that I'm looking through it, my interest is renewed and I think this book (and class for sure) may have gone a long way towards my desire to major in European history.

[Joep · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that I read when I was grappling with just what the hell Modernism and it's loud child Post was. A far reaching subject that is dealt with across multiple disciplines refraining from holding Modernism with Romantic eyes.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good history of Modernism in the twentieth century. I appreciated the influential characters from science, literature, art and social sciences coming together in the narrative of modern trends.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly interesting book!