Volume 28, Number 20 · December 17, 1981
Wolfe in Wolfe's Clothing
By Janet Malcolm
From Bauhaus to Our House
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 143 pp., $10.95
'I've got Europe off my back. You've no idea how it simplifies things and how jolly it makes me feel. Now I can live, now I can walk. If we wretched Americans could only say once for all, 'Oh, Europe be hanged!' we would attend much better to our proper business.' So declares Marcellus Cockerell, a young American in Henry James's early comic story-in-letters 'A Point of View,' who has just returned from a long obligatory trip abroad. Over there he felt 'bored and bullied,' and this has only confirmed him in his feeling that 'the future's here, of course. But it isn't only that—the present's here as well.' Tom Wolfe, in his jolly new polemic against modern architecture, attributes the rise of the International Style in America to our chronic inability to say no to the Europeans. If only we had said 'Europe be hanged!' when Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus colleagues Marcel Breuer, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Albers, and Herbert Bayer, fleeing Hitler, appeared here in the late Thirties with their Teutonic good looks and their sachlich carpetbags, how differently things might have turned out. We might have been spared the 'row after Mies van der row of glass houses,' the 'worker housing' that has spread over our land like the elm blight. Instead, as Wolfe writes with delicious malice,
Review, 3197 words
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