Q&A with Peter Gay

A formidable historian takes on the birth of the new

(James Hamilton for The Boston Globe)

PETER GAY WAS born in Berlin in 1923, fled with his family in 1939, and arrived in America in 1941. Almost immediately, he set about immersing himself in the academy, and ever since he's been churning out intellectual histories so formidable that the work for which he's "best known" changes with each decade. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, it was his National Book Award-winning "The Enlightenment: An Interpretation," which was overshadowed in the 1980s by "Freud: A Life for Our Time," which might have taken the 1990s as well if not for his five-volume "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud." These days, he's most often associated with "My German Question," a memoir of his youth, which he wrote after retiring from 45 years of teaching, most recently at Yale.

Gay's new 600-page tome, "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond," is the fifth book to come out of his very active retirement, and his 25th book overall. Though it covers the revolution in creative thinking that flourished between 1890 and 1930, it doesn't attempt to be a comprehensive survey. Nor does it press down and address questions one might expect to vex an intellectual historian: Can the shock of the new persist in this postmodern age? How did an outlook infatuated with liberation come to harbor the totalitarian-minded within its ranks? Instead, the book looks at modernism part by part - prose and poetry, music and dance, architecture and design, drama and the movies - and tells the story of each genre through its most influential figures.

It's a book, then, not for experts, but for general readers looking to reacquaint themselves with a profoundly influential period. And it's done so gracefully, and engagingly, that even as I raced to finish before our interview, I couldn't make myself skim; each sentence demanded that I slow down. When I reached Gay's apartment on New York's Upper West Side on a recent fall evening, I learned that he was as winningly erudite in person as he is on the page. In his sitting room, surrounded by 17th-century Dutch paintings and a wide view of the Hudson River, he held forth with refreshing humility, eager to make sure I understood his references and answering my questions with a scope and breadth impossible to re-create in this short space.

IDEAS: I understand that Bob Weil, your editor at Norton, gave you the idea to write this book. Why did you decide to go with it?

GAY: It's a monstrous, big book, it really is, and goes so far away. I read it and I think to myself, "Did I really write this?" I'll tell you something: Bob flattered me. He said, "You're the only person in the world who can do this." So what could I do? I said I'd give it a try. But it took quite a while. Six years.

IDEAS: Rather than being all-inclusive, you carved a path through a mountain of material and information by focusing on individuals. How did you arrive at this approach?

GAY: Mostly it was a matter of reading around. Some things I knew pretty well: modern fiction was not a big chore for me. And Walter Gropius I was very familiar with, because in 1976 I published a small book called "Art and Act," a series of lectures, and he was one of the major figures.

IDEAS: I was surprised that T.S. Eliot was the only person you used for poetry.

GAY: Well, Wallace Stevens scared the hell out of me. I thought to myself: What would I do with him? Eliot, however, I could do something with, even if anti-Semites are not my favorite people.

IDEAS: And why so much emphasis on Corbusier?

GAY: Corbusier had to be included because he was so powerful, in spite of my disliking his ideas very, very much; that he loved Vichy was something I didn't even know when I started. So I have people in there that I don't much care for, but do seem to me important. That said, there are a number of good architects I never mentioned. Well, tough luck for them!

IDEAS: How did you decide where to pinpoint the start of modernism?

GAY: You could write a book about modernism and start half a century earlier. I thought about starting with the Romantics. I used to teach all that stuff, and I certainly got very interested in them again - they're very complicated - but though they might have rebelled against morality, they didn't exactly rebel.

So I said no, what I want is someone who really says the hell with it all. And Baudelaire says never mind the dignity of literature - I'm going to write about my mistress. The court thought it was obscene. And of course Flaubert was doing the same thing. So I thought these guys would be good to start with.

IDEAS: Modernists were a small band with a huge influence. How exactly do we trace that influence?

GAY: It's a very good question, and one I only follow in a rather intermittent way; somebody could write a very good book on modernism asking that question. What's the percentage of people who think that President Bush is great? Thirty percent. Well, that 30 percent probably wouldn't care one damn about Mondrian.

IDEAS: You write about how modernists needed an opponent, and if none were available they could invent one. It seems to me that the field of architecture is especially combative. How come?

GAY: It's probably a mixture of things. One is the, shall we say, "honesty of the material." They used language like that. If you use brick, show it; don't cover it over with paint. I suppose it was very tempting to cover things, because 19th-century architecture, before some of the moderns got going on it, is really kind of boring. It was a lot of banks made to look like Roman temples, lots of columns. So then Frank Lloyd Wright said, who needs it? Let it show, let it show. (Again, another very unpleasant character. I mean, he gets married and has six children and runs away with somebody else. Though the woman he would have married eventually was murdered.) Of course, when he did furniture, he didn't seem to care whether you were comfortable. You would try to sit down in one of those things - very stiff and square.

IDEAS: How about the public resistance to modernism?

GAY: Painting became accessible fairly quickly. By 1900, impressionists like Monet were selling for very decent money. Some people, such as the poets, were very pleased with being difficult. Really, what would my own family - my cousins and all that, who were not university people - have done with Eliot's poetry? It's not easy.

IDEAS: What could you imagine a new avant-garde as being?

GAY: A very strange thing about the book is that I don't have an ending. I have two endings: "Eccentrics and Barbarians" and "Life After Death?" I'm very proud of myself for ending the title of the last chapter with a question mark, because I just don't know.

Kate Bolick is features editor of Domino magazine. Her interviews appear monthly in Ideas. E-mail kbolick@globe.com.