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Sunday, January 29, 2006
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The Mumford Letter Exciting events around here last night. Mr UD came home from a used bookstore with a 1956 hardback edition of Lewis Mumford’s The Transformations of Man. He came home with a bunch of other books too. We already have the Mumford, in a later paperback edition. And our little house groans under the bulk of our books. So UD was berating the man a bit for hauling more bound material into the house. Then, as Mr UD thumbed through the Mumford, a letter slipped out of its pages. It was in longhand, on good stationery, with LEWIS MUMFORD : AMENIA : NEW YORK in stylish black print across the top. …What a pleasure it was to get your letter, dear Alice ---  it began (click on the letter for a nice big readable image), and Mumford’s strong hand covered the front and back of the sheet. There was personal stuff, political stuff, a mention of his upcoming trip to Europe, a complaint that his publisher hadn’t published but “buried” the book, and this: I think that it is my best book: or at least the best brief summation of all my books. If necessary it might stand as my last will and testament. Mumford, who went on to live almost forty more years and write many more books, has long been one of UD’s heroes - a great prose stylist, self-educated, passionate about many things, intellectually ambitious. Politically and spiritually engaged. To find his own self in one of his books! And in a book he sent to Alice Decker, an old lover… For a little sleuthing turned up the identity of the recipient, details of Mumford’s messy sex life, and more… ***************** Universities have never had much use for Mumford, by the way: "In light of his sins against pedantry and obscurity, it comes as no surprise that Mumford's name is almost never heard on American university campuses, except, perhaps, in the architecture and urban studies departments. The fact remains that Mumford was a greater sociologist than most of his contemporaries; who now reads Pitirim Sorokin or Talcott Parsons? And a page of history from Mumford is worth any number of tomes by today's Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, or race-and-gender theorists." |