The Martin Duberman Reader (8 page)

So many questions, most of them obviously unanswerable given how little anyone knows about human needs—indeed whether they exist, apart from what the culture (itself ever-changing) happens to say they are, or should be, at a given moment.

Wallen enjoyed his classes at Black Mountain more than any he'd
ever had. Given complete freedom to teach as he wished, he used no text at all in the introductory class, and in the other, dispensed with the usual obligation to “cover” set topics in a set period of time; instead he let each discussion spin itself out, always emphasizing the people
present
in the room, the need to “develop skills in understanding and getting along with ourselves and others.”

Wallen generally used the conceptual framework of Otto Rank, as adapted in the work of Fromm, Rogers, Allen, Horney, and others, stressing the

For one session, the class read Sophocles's
Oedipus Rex,
discussed Freud's conception of the Oedipus complex and how it had been modified by the work of Malinowski, Horney, and Allen, and then analyzed the play (as Rank himself did) in terms of will-conflict, stressing the theme that “as an individual gains increased self-knowledge, he must accept increased responsibility for his own behavior.”

The students, turned on by Wallen's youth and zeal, his knowledge of the latest literature, and his enormous interest in
them,
responded enthusiastically. Some of the older ones, returned GIs
who in several cases were close to Wallen in age, were a little uncomfortable with his easy dismissal of Freudian pessimism, with his apparent belief that human competitiveness, violence, and power strivings were not instinctive, but cultural. Wallen argued that such traits resulted from learned social behavior and that human “aggression”—that catchall term used by conservatives to cover and confuse what in fact is a wide variety of biological mechanisms, themselves variously shaped by the stimuli exerted upon them—could, with the “right” kind of learning, be channeled into a drive for self-mastery that complemented the simultaneous search for affiliative ties to other people.

Though not himself an original thinker (his formulations, in fact, could be simplistic), Wallen was an early exponent of what has been called the naive, American side of a debate on human aggression that has gathered increasing momentum since the mid-1940s and has led to a large literature and to a pronounced split within the ranks of behavioral scientists. The split has never been a clear-cut one between “optimistic” Americans (Ashley Montagu, say, or Gordon Allport or Carl Rogers) arguing for genetic indeterminacy and the possibilities of a cooperative society, and “pessimistic” Europeans (Konrad Lorenz, say, or Desmond Morris or Anthony Storr) insisting that our appetites for competition and violence are instinctive. Indeed none of the work of even those individuals should be simplemindedly categorized as pro- or antigenetic determinacy. Yet despite the subtleties in position and the fact that some of the major figures (B.F. Skinner, for example, or A.S. Neill) don't conform at all to the standard “American” or “European” divisions, that polarity
has
been an essential element in the debate from its inception.

The German-born Josef Albers's distrust of Wallen was grounded in the belief that one had to limit the number of ingredients in one's life, had to intensely preoccupy oneself with a few concerns—like color—if one was ever to master them. Albers's hope was that at Black Mountain everyone would become preoccupied, that it would become a community of artists. And if it did, then internal discipline would supersede the need for external rules. He
suspected those who elevated “dialogue” and cooperative enterprises into primary values; instead of eliminating disagreements, they eliminated the concentration needed to produce art.

Wallen, on his side, was not against “art,” and in fact was an admirer of Albers's own work. Yet if it ever had to come to a choice between, say, building a society that fulfilled the basic needs of most people or one dedicated to producing “high art,” Wallen would doubtless have opted for the needs of the many as against the imaginative works of the few. The issues really did go that deep, though when argued as they typically were at Black Mountain, in terms of whether or not to package mountain laurel, it's as easy to understand the tedium and annoyance felt by those who focused on the particulars of the debate as it is to understand the passion and anguish of those who sensed, even if they couldn't articulate it, the central thrust of what lay beneath.

“Community” was a word with a long history at Black Mountain, but it had almost always been used in a limited context: to describe the set of relationships among the hundred-odd people in residence at the college. The “other” community—the one beyond the walls—was periodically acknowledged, but a blend of apprehension (“They'll burn us down”) and disdain (“They're incapable of understanding us”) had kept contact minimal. A group of local music lovers from Asheville and its environs would attend concerts, and during the war there was considerable contact with the veterans' hospital in the area (itself, of course, another “foreign” enclave). But the overwhelming, often self-conscious emphasis at Black Mountain was interior. It centered on individual reality: “Am I growing?” “Am I fulfilling my potential?” “Do November's drawings show an advance over September's?”

For Wallen, community meant what went on
both
within the college and between the college and its neighbors; and he viewed Black Mountain's isolation from its local setting as a scandal. “At any moment,” Wallen said to me, “you are some place in time and some place in space. And it seems to me your experience ought to somehow reflect this and also manifest concern for that environment you
inhabit. . . . But Black Mountain was almost as if it wasn't any place in time and space.”

Formulated in that way, Wallen's position sounds incontrovertible:
of course
people should be involved in whatever time and space they find themselves. In fact, though, the operative choice isn't
whether
to become active but in which areas and in what ways. Unless one equates the regional environment with the total sum of “time and space” (as Wallen tended to), it's clear that all of us are always involved in a variety of “spaces,” interior as well as exterior, and that their demands often conflict. Indeed for some people—and I tend to think for
everyone,
potentially, were it not that most of us are conditioned to view ourselves as “ordinary”—the challenge is to create a time/space configuration never quite seen before, one representative of our own unique fantasies, needs, and talents. For people to concentrate their energies on reality as defined by the local social milieu (to picket the Lucky Strike plant, for example, because of its labor practices—an actual issue at Black Mountain during Wallen's stay) is perhaps to jeopardize their chance of developing that special configuration—one that needn't result in any product (like a painting or a poem) other than themselves, one that might make their own days richer and eventually, indirectly, depending on the force of that configuration, even end up by changing local “reality” as well.

Not that one can (or should) settle priorities on a fixed scale for all time. The focus of urgency shifts continuously, as now personal matters, now public ones, seem to demand primary consideration; ideally—if priorities haven't been rigidly set—energies can be readjusted accordingly. At Black Mountain, the priorities had earlier been set: individual “cultivation” took precedence over public issues, local or national, and to achieve status in the community one had to “cultivate” fiercely—to be
unusually
original, dynamic, fertile, cogent. For many—those either without special talent or long trained to believe they lacked it—terrible insecurity and a deep sense of worthlessness could develop.

Yet, oppositely, many students (
not
Albers's) could be overly indulgent
of one another's pretensions. So long as one was going through the motions of “writing a novel” or “working in oils,” s/he was often allowed the identity of artist. That could be enormously supportive for those who wanted to try on a role, a talent, or a commitment; Kenneth Noland, the painter, has often been cited to me as an example of a Black Mountain student who was allowed to conceive of himself as an artist at a time when he was not—thereby helping him to become one. Yet on the other hand, the students' willingness to validate each other's fantasies could be destructive for those who in fact lacked exceptional gifts and who might otherwise have made more realistic decisions about their life's work—thereby being saved, in the long run, a great deal of floundering and anguish.

In Wallen's view, the climate at Black Mountain could prevent authentic growth in yet another sense. People became known in such a wide variety of situations that it became difficult to separate them out, to recognize the changes someone might have undergone in one particular sector; experiences of each other were so continuous that despite their diversity, they tended to blend. Wallen put the problem this way: “The high degree of communication within the community binds you to your past, to your selves in other situations.” That, in turn, could lead to defeatism, to passivity and indifference, to a decrease in the motivation and standards of work.

These were the students Wallen most cared about: the ones who lacked the gifts, courage, interest, or brass to compete for status as “artists,” or whose tentative efforts to do so went unrecognized. They were also the students who migrated naturally to Wallen, seeing in him an alternative set of values wherein they might find some purpose, some validation of worth, which the established climate at Black Mountain denied them. One young student, who described herself to me as “more conventional than the rest” (though in her high school she had been considered the oddball), couldn't find any way to make a niche for herself at Black Mountain, not being sufficiently eccentric, original, or rebellious to attract attention; she doubted if she “would have gotten through it,” she told me, if
Wallen hadn't been around to let her know that he liked her and valued her.

Because of what they thought of as an overemphasis on individual artistic achievement, the Wallenites tended to describe Black Mountain as “elitist” and to link that orientation to European “snobbery” and self-absorption. As a counterideal, they posited a cooperative democracy “in which the discovery of meaningful aspects of the self could take place through activities designated as socially useful,” and they viewed that orientation, with its emphasis on “doing good,” as peculiarly American. Despite the numerous exceptions and objections that can validly be cited against that duality, it does seem to me to contain some truth.

Yet I think another contrast could be made, one not dependent on national distinctions, that perhaps goes deeper: between those who see the world as a stage for shaping and dramatizing the self—a world whose events are in some ultimate sense illusory if they cannot be made an occasion for individual performance—and those who accept the
world's
definition of reality, internalizing its categories and laboring in its causes with a literalness that seems to have only peripheral relation to the effort of self-definition. Those primarily engaged with the self can be comfortably dismissed as narcissistic only if one believes that the world's issues (unlike selves) are nonrepetitive
and
capable of resolution. Those primarily committed to issues can be comfortably categorized as prosaic only if one's obsession with forging a self actually eventuates in a distinguishable shape.

Black Mountain had always been dedicated to two enterprises—establishing a community in which people shared common purposes and responsibilities, and creating a climate in which art of the highest excellence might flourish. The possible incompatibility of those enterprises had never been fully exposed until Wallen's arrival because no one had been as much of a purist on the community side as Albers had long been on the artistic side. As Wallen pushed his views, the sense began to grow that a choice did have to be made between the two enterprises, or at least a set of priorities established in which the one took clear precedence over the other.

Emerson once wrote in relation to Brook Farm that “[t]he only candidates who will present themselves will be those who have tried the experiment of independence and ambition, and have failed; and none others will barter for the most comfortable equality the chance of superiority. Then all communities have quarreled. Few people can live together on their merits.” I, for one, see no reason why choice
had
to be viewed as a necessity; it can be argued that much of Black Mountain's previous history—indeed future existence as well—had demonstrated that no choice need be made, that “art” and “community” could coexist, could even be mutually supportive. But the self-consciousness and polarization produced by Wallen's presence (and above all, by Albers's negative reaction to him), for a time made “community” and “art” appear antagonistic forces. “Group process” became a dirty word to the art crowd, and “creativity” a selfish cop-out to the advocates of community.