Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes

Book Reviews Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence. Edited by Frank G. Novak, Jr. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. xvii+383; illustrations, index. $45.00 (cloth). “How I hate writing! ... I can only talk—or work—but not write” (p. 250), wrote seventy-one-year-old Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), Scots biologist, city planner, and sociologist, to Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), forty-one years his junior, public intellectual and American critic of our technological culture. “Geddes drives me to tears; almost he does,” notes his faithful correspondent, Mumford (p. 341). Even so, Mumford can address Geddes as “Dear Master.” In spite of their fundamentally different personalities and experi­ ences, these correspondents, inextricably bound together through bonds professional and personal, exchanged more than 160 letters from 1917 until Geddes’s death in 1932. Their correspondence, conveying the sociocultural concerns and shared goals of two seminal thinkers, reveals not only their especial fondness and respect for and dependence upon each other but also a candor and intensity that their published writings do not. In partic­ ular, Geddes communicates vividly his “true genius” in “flashes of memorable eloquence, original insight, passion” (p. 3)—qualities rarely found in the “crabbed style” of his published work (p. 228). Mumford considered his own letters to contain some ofhis best writ­ ing, revealing “as much about my literary as about my intellectual and personal development” (p. 3). Frank G. Novak,Jr., professor ofEnglish at Pepperdine University, has lucidly organized, edited, and introduced this handsomely pro­ duced volume. Sidebars flanking each letter note where and when it was written as well as archival location. In addition to explanatory footnotes, Novak provides a biographical chronology for each man and a perceptive thirty-five-page introduction placing the correspon­ dence in perspective. Evocative endpapers reproduce a handwritten letter, presumably Geddes’s, making us feel that we hold the actual correspondence in our hands. Seeing Geddes’s script poignantly evokes for us a tempo of the correspondents’ era when such commu­ nications had to be sent snail mail, were usually laboriously handwrit­ ten (though Mumford typed many of his), and then as laboriously transported by ship. The letters range eclectically, fervently discussing individual proj­ ects; emotional states; financial circumstances (usually straitened); Permission to reprint a book review must be obtained from the reviewer. 828 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 829 travel plans; the state of sociology—and their intent to redirect the field; recommended readings and the difficulties of im­ porting needed books; plans to meet for collaboration; outlines of proposed books; detailed notes on town planning exhibitions; lecture tours for Geddes in America. From Geddes streamed un­ ceasing exhortations for Mumford to visit and organize the master’s writings. The only two occasions on which the two met proved disastrous. “Paradoxically, I was closest to Geddes when we were spatially far apart and had to communicate by letter” (p. 3). Although they shared interests, values, and goals, an aging Geddes, become dog­ matic and inflexible, frantically importuned a recalcitrant Mumford to give up his own work and become his amanuensis. No longer the youthful “insurgent” whose early work had later so inspired a young disciple needing an “intellectual parent” (p. 20), Geddes had be­ come an aging muse seeking a son/disciple, not a collaborator. At the same time, Mumford’s youthful literary career was gathering mo­ mentum. For the succeeding eleven-year relationship with this profoundly original thinker and intellectual authority, Mumford had to deal with ambivalences about working with him. Amid his complaints, Mumford did have the grace to acknowledge that there were “two demanding, self absorbed egos to reckon with” (p. 348). He be­ lieved that to be faithful to a master, a disciple should eventually reject him. Nonetheless, throughout the almost six decades that he survived Geddes, Mumford unfailingly acknowledged his indebted­ ness to this mentor who had given him the initial courage to forge his independent path as a cultural ecologist. He even named his son Geddes. Differing methodological styles and temperaments also generated friction between them. Geddes was impetuous, disorganized, in­ tensely visual and spatial in his thinking, gargantuan in his intellec­ tual voracity, and global in his commitment to city

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