The Martin Duberman Reader (6 page)

T
o the extent that Black Mountain is known today it's as the site of a now-defunct experimental college/community located in the foothills of North Carolina, the forerunner and exemplar of much that is currently considered innovative in art, education, and lifestyle. It's known, too, as the refuge, in some cases the nurturing ground, for many of the singular, shaping talents of our time: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Paul Goodman, and Robert Rauschenberg. The life of Black Mountain and the work of these people have often been discussed as if they were interchangeable parts; the tendency has not been to delineate a relationship but to contrive a parable.

During Black Mountain's twenty-three-year existence (1933–1956), the famous were indeed there—sometimes for long periods (fifteen years in the case of Josef and Anni Albers) and sometimes engaged in exploring dimensions of their work (like John Cage's mixed-media event in 1952) that have significantly affected the actuality as well as the mythology of American cultural life. Such individuals did much to create the aura of originality and flamboyance ever since associated with Black Mountain's name. But in most cases—Albers and Olson are the chief exceptions—they were only
peripherally connected with the continuities of daily life in the community.

A full history of Black Mountain is more intricate and poignant than a recitation of the famous names associated with it. It's the story of a small group of men and women—ranging through time from a dozen to a hundred, most of them anonymous as judged by standard measurements of achievement—who attempted to find some consonance between their ideas and their lives, who risked the intimacy and exposure that most of us emotionally yearn for and rhetorically defend but in practice shun. Black Mountain shifted focus, personnel, definitions, and strategies so often that its history is unified by little more than a disdain for life as usually lived and some unsettled notions—sometimes confused and self-glamorizing, sometimes startlingly courageous—as to how it might be made different and better.

At its best, Black Mountain showed the possibilities of a disparate group of individuals committing themselves to a common enterprise, resilient enough to absorb the conflicts entailed, brave enough, now and then, to be transformed by its accompanying energies. At its worst, the community consisted of little more than a group of squabbling prima donnas—many professional, others in training. Black Mountain proved a bitter experience for some, a confirmation of Emerson's view that “we descend to meet”—that close human association compounds rather than obliterates the drive toward power, aggression, and cruelty. For others Black Mountain provided a glimpse—rarely a sustained vision—of how diversity and commonality, the individual and the group, are reinforcing rather than contradictory phenomena.

As I went through the 100,000 documents relating to the community that are housed in The State Archives at Raleigh, North Carolina, and as I traveled the country tape recording interviews with people, the particularity of each experience startled—even overwhelmed me. I consider such diversity a tribute to Black Mountain—to the innumerable possibilities it called out. But others may prefer to ascribe it to my conceptual deficiencies, or to my temperamental
distrust of sociological generalization. In any case, this is yet another individual response to Black Mountain; it is not the last word or the whole word, but
my
word. Researching the history of Black Mountain has generated feelings in me that have subtly affected the balance I've struck on every page. Since all balances are to some extent a betrayal, I've felt the final responsibility of letting
myself
be known. My conviction is that when historians allow more of themselves to show—feelings, reactions, fantasies, not merely skills at information-retrieval, organization and analysis—they are
less
likely to contaminate the data simply because there is less pretense that they and it are one.

Some will take exception to that last as self-indulgence. Yet the issue is not, I believe,
whether
the individual historian should appear in his books, but
how
s/he should appear—covertly or overtly. Every historian knows that s/he manipulates the evidence to some extent simply because of who s/he is (or is not), of what s/he selects (or omits), of how well (or badly) s/he empathizes and communicates. Those fallibilities have been frequently confessed in the abstract. Yet the process by which a particular personality intersects with a particular subject matter has rarely been shown, and the intersection itself almost never regarded as containing materials of potential worth. Because “objectivity” has been the ideal, the personal components that go into historical reconstruction have not been candidly revealed, or made accessible to scrutiny.

I believe it's time historians put their personalities as well as their names to their books—their personalities are in them anyway, however disguised and diluted by the profession's deceptive anonymities. To my mind the harshest indictment that can be made of academic historical writing is its refusal to acknowledge, other than in the most pro forma way, that a person is writing about other people—a person, not an IBM machine or a piece of blotting paper.

To say that a historian is inescapably in his/her own books and that s/he has the obligation to admit it, is not yet to show how s/he could include themselves in a way that might better serve the
documentation and the reader. This book is an effort at such a demonstration.

There have been many pitfalls along the way. The most constant struggle has been to avoid mere self-revelation, belaboring the personal to the point where it eclipses the narrative. I've preferred to run that risk, however, rather than adhere to the traditional pretense of nonexistence. I believe (to paraphrase Fritz Stern) that although we may not learn from history, we
might
learn from historians—might, that is, if historians put themselves into relationship with their materials whereby each is explored in conjunction with the other.

For historians to use themselves in such a way, would make historical writing a considerably more risky enterprise than is currently the case. Risky not because the subject would be revealed less, but because the historian would be exposed more. To try to show up in one's work instead of distancing oneself from it, to remove the protections of anonymity, can be searing. Yet harnessing one's emotional resources to one's academic work can help to release them in one's life—or can make one aware for the first time of how limited those resources in fact are.

If the charge that John Andrew Rice wore a jockstrap on the beach had come earlier in the hearings, it might have seemed bizarre. But it was so much of a piece with the preceding allegations that it hardly caused a ripple. Among the charges already leveled at Rice was that he had called a chisel one of the world's most beautiful objects, had whispered in chapel, had proposed that male and female students be paired off on arrival at college, had labeled public debates “a pernicious form of intellectual perversion,” had put “obscene” pictures on the walls of his classroom, had an “indolent” walk, had left fish scales in the sink after using the college's beach cottage, and—
reductio ad absurdum
—had helped to alienate one young lady from her sorority.

Hamilton Holt, president of Rollins College, read these and other complaints aloud, hour after hour, before a two-man investigating committee from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1933. No one doubted that Rice was iconoclastic and outspoken (Rice paid others the great compliment of acting as if they, like him, were eager to question the guiding assumptions of their lives, and to that end would be willing to dispense with the usual protective discretion of polite conversation), but Holt had fired Rice as professor of classics on the grounds that he was “disruptive of peace and harmony” on the campus. Rice had appealed his case to the AAUP, and, after prolonged deliberations, the AAUP representatives decided in his favor, concluding that Rice had been “an unusually stimulating and effective teacher.”

Rice nonetheless concluded that he had no place in a conventional college and decided, along with a small group of dissident faculty and students, to start a new college in which they could try out their innovative ideas. Nestled in the low hills overlooking the town of Black Mountain they discovered a set of buildings, dominated by the huge, white-columned Lee Hall and with an extraordinary view over the valley, available for a modest annual rental of $4,500. The religious group, the Blue Ridge Assembly, owned the buildings but used them only during the summer as a resort-conference site for its members. “Mac” Forbes, who came from a wealthy New England family and had been on the Rollins faculty, came up with the needed funds.

Classes, however, couldn't begin until it first became clear how the community saw its purposes and then decided what procedures would best implement them. The process of clarification began immediately, since living, unlike classes, couldn't wait. A variety of vague ideas were afloat as to how an ideal community should organize itself, and in the opening weeks these were presented, argued about, and voted on—though in fact votes were few, since it was widely agreed that organization and structure should be kept to a minimum lest Black Mountain go the way of most institutions, achieving codification at the expense of aliveness.

It was intended from the start that the students share in the power and responsibility for running the community. The search for ways to implement this began immediately. By spring of the first year, formal amendments had been introduced into the bylaws entitling any member of the college to inspect all records of the corporation, establishing the right of the student body to adopt a constitution for its own governance, guaranteeing all student officers the right to be present and heard at regular faculty meetings, and assigning its chief officer (the student moderator) actual membership on the Board of Fellows.

There was no pretense, at least on Rice's part, that this amount of student representation was the equivalent of pure democracy. Though students from the start had a larger formal voice in decision making than was (or is) true at most colleges, they didn't have an equal voice with the faculty—indeed some faculty members, namely those on the Board of Fellows, were more equal than others. All that Black Mountain College (BMC) ever claimed was that in at least one sense Black Mountain came as near to a democracy as possible: individual economic status had nothing to do with one's standing in the community. The guiding ideal was the Quaker “sense of the meeting”: the community achieving consensus on a given issue, and the decision then implemented by its chosen representatives. As long as the community felt an identity of interests—as long as faculty and students felt their views were genuinely represented by the governing board—no major problems would arise.

From the first, there were few rules at Black Mountain and no social regulations beyond the implicit and difficult injunction to “behave intelligently,” to assume individual responsibility for all relationships entered into—regardless of their duration or intensity. A “Do Not Disturb” sign on a study door was all that one needed to guarantee privacy—that and the limitless woods. Sex was not one of Black Mountain's major preoccupations during the thirties either as a topic or an activity. Testimony on that account is pretty much unanimous. There were, of course, romances and pairings-off, and also, of course, the usual intense speculations about them. One male
student who arrived at Black Mountain in the late thirties put the matter to me flatly: there was “practically no casual or promiscuous sex at BMC the years I was there—we were much too serious about everything, including each other, and I think there was a certain puritan quality about much of the life.” Continual contact between males and females probably helped to put sex into perspective: when so many facets of living are shared, when affection and energy find numerous outlets, sex is asked to do fewer duties, is more likely to become an aspect of relating.

But before many months had passed, the local people of Black Mountain village let it be known that they were upset by the “goings-on” at the college. To the suspicion that the community was a godless place practicing free love was soon added the rumor that it was a nudist colony as well: students often wore shorts in warm weather, and several appeared in town, at a movie, a square dance, or while shopping wearing sandals that revealed bare feet.

Although there were few rules—legislated procedures—freedom was circumscribed by a strong sense of what was or was not acceptable form. A favorite comment, widely and approvingly quoted in the community, was that Black Mountain stressed “informality within a form.” Unspoken canons proved as strongly regulative in some areas of community life as any formal set of rules would have. It was understood (though never formally agreed to in a community or student meeting) that on Saturday evening everyone would dress up for dinner; that one would regularly attend classes unless actually sick; that one would not leave the college while it was in session for more than an afternoon or an evening; and that one would not indulge sexual appetites promiscuously, homosexually, or bisexually.