City Boy

By Donald Morrison

SKETCHES FROM LIFE: THE EARLY YEARS

by Lewis Mumford

Dial; 500 pages; $19.95

"The Port of New York became my Walden Pond," Lewis Mumford recalls in this luminous autobiography. It still is. With unflagging energy and unfailing memory, Mumford, 86, assumes the tone of an urban Thoreau, ransacking the familiar for overlooked truths. His principal turf is the city; his main object of study, himself. Born in 1895 in Flushing, Queens, raised in the precincts of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, educated at City College and the New York Public Library, Mumford was ideally prepared to become one of the great critics of the modern metropolis. He is also one of the most prolific; this book, begun in 1956, is his 27th since The Story of Utopias in 1922.

Many of Mumford's reasoned humanist views are by now as familiar as his name. He favors planning, gardens, cities and, best of all, the planned garden cities of late 19th century England. (He put his mortgage where his mouth was, living from 1924 to 1935 in the carefully structured community of Sunnyside, just across the East River from Manhattan.) Mumford dislikes automobiles, real estate developers, skyscrapers ("towering urbanoid anthills") and, to the distress of less punctilious planners, the untidy vitality of immigrant neighborhoods. For more than half a century he has railed against the gracelessness and alienating giantism of housing developments. We shape our buildings, Mumford believes, and thereafter they shape us.

What environments shaped Mumford? As he tells it, a procession of boyhood New York apartments so dark and cluttered, in the late Victorian style, that he acquired an early appreciation of the austere forms of 20th century architecture. With affectionate detail he recalls his maverick mother, a shabby-genteel domestic in the house of a New York lawyer, who met the man's nephew and bore young Lewis out of wedlock. The boy's German grandfather, a retired headwaiter at Delmonico's, became the dominant figure of Mumford's early years, taking him on long walks about the city.

As a young man, Mumford dreamed of a career in the theater and wrote a couple of unproduced plays. He became, instead, an editor and contributor for the Dial, an important literary and political journal of the interwar period, and married a fellow staff member, the independent-minded Sophia Wittenberg of Brooklyn. (Sixty years later, he still offers sonnets to her.) Mumford took up the study of cities in earnest after a stint at a municipal job in Pittsburgh. A 1929 book on Herman Melville established him as a literary critic, and his 1938 The Culture of Cities made him a national celebrity.

Perhaps because he never knew his father, Mumford collected a number of tempestuous mentors, including Economist Thorstein Veblen ("a strange combination of the austere, seemingly superobjective scholar and a passionate, willful human being"), Critic Van Wyck Brooks and, above all, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish social theorist recognized as the father of town planning. Geddes later drove his student away by insisting that Mumford turn his teacher's brilliant but chaotic mental processes into limpid prose. But Mumford never repudiated what Geddes stood for: "The regional outlook, the urban focus, the unification of all the dispersed and dissociated aspects of our present jumbled technocratic culture."

Fifty-five years later, Mumford still displays the same hatred of the mechanistic and the totalitarian, whether promulgated by a ruling junta or a local zoning board. He swears by "the fusion of the emotional and the intellectual, the equal awareness of past and future . . . the unwillingness to put any part of life in a separate compartment detached from the whole."

All his long, exemplary life, Mumford has resisted such tendencies, writing with equal facility about art, technology, politics, social theory. Throughout, the old observer has remained a child of the city, disappointed that grownups have made such a mess of his world, but intoxicated with life and its possibilities. He recalls a transcendent moment when, as a young man, he gazed at an evening sky over Newport, R.I., and decided "that the world had meaning: and life itself even at its worst was more wonderful than anyone had been able to say in words." In recalling his own career, Mumford has found the words. --By Donald Morrison

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