Dictionary of Literary Biography on Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig Lewisohn was an established writer, though a controversial figure socially and professionally, when he took up residence in Paris in the mid-twenties. Unlike the many writers then in Paris who sought to break from tradition, Lewisohn advocated a return to historical roots for "ultimate reality," but called for the reassessment of history in humanistic terms. In his autobiography Mid-Channel (1929) he wrote: "We ... must somehow have values that we create to uphold within an order that gives them meaning." Much of his writing was shaped around this principle as he interpreted it from a Judaic point of view. Another major influence in his work was Freudian psychology. Although he had "except on the ground of mere human friendliness ... little in common with the 'expatriates,'" he included among his friends and acquaintances publisher Edward Titus, British expatriate writer Sisley Huddleston, editor and translator Harold J. Salemson, critic Pierre Loving, and James Joyce. Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis visited Lewisohn on their occasional trips to Paris. (Dreiser had appeared as the character Blaffka in Lewisohn's autobiographical novel Don Juan [1923].)
Lewisohn was born in Berlin to Jacques and Minna Eloesser Lewisohn, who were first cousins. When he was seven the family moved to the United States, and Lewisohn grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite his Judaic background, he chose as a teenager, mainly through the influence of early teachers, to become a Methodist. Later he repudiated this choice vehemently, and his espousal of the Hebraic tradition colored much of his writing and led him to become active in the Zionist movement. As a boy Lewisohn read widely among the English writers; studied French, German, and Latin; and wrote poetry of his own as well as versions of Horace, one of which appeared in the Charleston News-Courier at the time of his graduation from high school. He majored in English literature at the College of Charleston, taking a B.A. in 1901, and went on to Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in 1903. In 1914 he was awarded a Litt.D. by the College of Charleston.
After graduation from Columbia, Lewisohn spent a year as an editor with Doubleday, Page and left to work as a free-lance writer for five years. In 1910 economic necessity forced him to take a position as German instructor at the University of Wisconsin. The next year he went to Ohio State University as a professor of German language and literature. During his tenure there he became recognized for his work in literary and drama criticism and translations from French and German. His opposition to World War I, however, combined with his German background to make him the target of community pressure which brought about his resignation. In 1919 he became drama critic for the Nation, then a forum for the liberal movement in criticism of which Lewisohn was a part, and he was an associate editor from 1921 until 1924. Some of his drama reviews written for the Nation were collected in The Drama and the Stage (1922). In these, according to the assessment of Alfred Kazin, "Lewisohn's exciting contribution to the postwar renaissance is seen at its best."
Lewisohn's religious belief had for some years been shifting away from Christianity. A growing feeling of isolation, aggravated by academic racial discrimination and particularly his experience at Ohio State University, led him to believe that he could find roots only in the Jewish heritage he had been deprived of by his Southern Protestant boyhood. This spiritual loneliness was closely related to his disgust at what he felt to be America's provincialism toward art and morals. Lewisohn described these feelings in his autobiography Up Stream (1922). Although his viewpoint softened considerably after his years in Europe, his moral indignation gave him for several years an attitude of superiority that often weakened both his critical work and his fiction.
Domestic problems dealt the final blow that convinced Lewisohn to go abroad. Unable to obtain an immediate divorce from Mary Arnold, whom he had married in 1906, Lewisohn left the United States in 1924 with Thelma Bowman Spear, a singer and aspiring writer. After lengthy travel in Europe and the Near East and extended stays in Berlin and Vienna, Lewisohn and Spear settled in Paris. During their sixteen-year alliance, they had a son, James, who became the center of a custody dispute when Lewisohn married Edna Manley in 1940; the child was awarded to Spear in 1941. Lewisohn's marriage to Manley ended in divorce, and he subsequently married Louise Wolk, with whom he lived the rest of his life. The publicity resulting from Lewisohn's divorces and related legal disputes had a damaging effect on the general public reception of his work.
When he was settled in Paris, Lewisohn quickly wrote The Case of Mr. Crump, a tragedy about a young man who has been trapped into marriage by a scheming older woman and can extricate himself only by killing her. Because of certain similarities between Lewisohn's first marriage and that described in the book, the manuscript was rejected by Liveright on legal advice that its publication would result in a libel suit against the firm. Lewisohn went to Titus, whose Black Manikin Press was just getting started, and Titus agreed to publish an edition of 500 copies. In the early winter of 1926 advance copies sent to Carl Van Doren, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Sisley Huddleston were favorably received, and subscriptions began to come in; but the book was declared unmailable on grounds of obscenity by the United States Post Office. It was subsequently published in French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Dano-Norwegian. In 1931 Titus republished the book with a preface by Thomas Mann and a prefatory note reading in part: "The recent appearance in America of a pirated edition of the Case of Mr. Crump has induced the author and publisher to abandon their original intention not to reprint the book after the first edition of Five Hundred copies had been disposed of." The first authorized American edition did not appear until 1947.
Lewisohn's work appeared in the first two issues of transition, founded by Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul. "The Defeated," described as "Opening Chapters of Work in Progress," was published in installments in the April 1927 and May 1927 issues. Reviewing the opening issue for the European edition of the Chicago Tribune (frequently called the Paris Tribune), Robert Sage described Lewisohn's prose as "conservative but richly woven." The work in progress had long been forming in Lewisohn's mind as a preliminary study toward a Jewish "epic narrative" he hoped to try. It became The Island Within (1928), a novel which follows several generations of a Jewish family from 1840 to the present and demonstrates Lewisohn's belief that the Jew cannot deny his heritage, either deliberately or through loyalty to his country, and remain spiritually whole. Critical reception of the book was generally very favorable. A skillful blending of history and fiction, The Island Within lacks the sermonlike quality that mars some of Lewisohn's work.
Lewisohn's "Introduction to a Projected History of American Literature" was published in This Quarter (July-August-September 1929), and subsequent issues contained essays from this work in progress on Melville, Whitman, and Henry James. The history, published in 1932 as Expression in America, had been inspired by a teacher Lewisohn had at Columbia. In a preface he explained his approach to the subject:
The book is not, in any hitherto accepted sense, a history of literature. Scholars who look in vain for a name, a date, a work, are asked to believe that these were not slighted but eliminated. For what is here attempted is a portrait of the American spirit seen and delineated, as the human spirit itself is best seen, in and through its mood of articulateness, of creative expression. To this end selection under the appropriate guiding principle was inevitable. It was equally inevitable that I use the organon or method of knowledge associated with the venerable name of Sigmund Freud.
Although the book later came to be criticized in some quarters for its narrow view, its initial reception was very good. It was republished in 1939 in a Modern Library edition as The Story of American Literature.
Lewisohn returned to the United States to live in 1934. With the rise of nazism he embraced the Zionist cause and became active in its leadership. From 1943 to 1948 he was editor of the New Palestine, a Zionist magazine. In his last years he taught English at Brandeis University and served as librarian there. Although personal publicity and changing critical values later adversely affected Lewisohn's literary reputation, his reassessment of the American literary tradition helped insure the public and critical acceptance of many of the American writers who worked in Paris during the twenties and thirties.
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