THE CITY IN HISTORY (657 pp.)—Lewis Mumford—Harcourf, Brace & World ($ 11.50).
Lewis Mumford has probably staked out as good a claim as any to being the U.S.'s leading critic of its cities, towns and cultural highways and byways. In the 1920s, when Van Wyck Brooks was discovering the unrecognized richness of the U.S. literary past and Poet Hart Crane was apotheosizing the Brooklyn Bridge, Mumford's Sticks and Stones, A Study of American Architecture and Civilization was the first, brash exploration of American town planning and building, ranging from the New England Common to the glories of Bridge Builder John A. Roebling. Mumford's fresh eye saw in the heavy, Romanesque masonry works of 19th century Architect Henry Hobson Richardson (Boston's Trinity Church), the work of "our first truly indigenous master-builder." With The Brown Decades (1865-1895), Mumford mined another overlooked lode, set in perspective Chicago Skyscraper Poet Louis Sullivan and his great pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright.
In the tradition of homespun philosophers (Mumford proudly possesses no university degrees), his esthetic judgments are liberally laced with moralizing. Though Manhattan-raised, Mumford has a gardener's love of greenery, likes to weed in the vegetable patch between paragraphs. And the less a city becomes like a village, the more it rouses Mumford's wrath. In a prescient 1922 essay, The City, he warned: "The movies, the White Ways and the Coney Islands, which almost every American city boasts in some form or other, are means of giving jaded and throttled people the sensations of living without the direct experience of life—a sort of spiritual masturbation. In short, we have had the alternative of humanizing the industrial city or dehumanizing the population. So far we have dehumanized the population."
The Constant Vision. Almost 40 years and 20 books later, Mumford's perspective has broadened, but the vision has scarcely changed: it is still Cassandra's, ominous and unheeded. Writes Mumford in The City in History: "Another century of such 'progress' may work irreparable damage upon the human race. Instead of deliberately creating an environment more effective than the ancient city, . . . our present methods would smooth out differences and reduce potentialities, to create a state of mindless unconsciousness . The polite name for this creature is 'man-in-space,' but the correct phrase is 'man out of his mind.' "
Mumford's theme is thus the ceaseless struggle between modern civilization and modern man, massively and often turgidly argued in the pioneering tetralogy-on which he labored, heedless of the paradox that as his reputation has grown, his influence has diminished. Now, in an intricate synthesis of his past output, Sociologist-Art Critic-Litterateur-Town Planner Mumford has written a densely composed history of that struggle on its most bloody battlefield—the city. The interpretation may not be fresh, but simply as a Portable Mumford (if 576 pages of narrative, 56 pages of annotated bibliography, and 114 pages of photographs and extended captions can be called portable) The City in History is a remarkable achievement: a scholarly chronicle on a noble theme—man's fate in the city of man.