GREEN, Martin (Burgess) 1927-

PERSONAL: Born September 21, 1927, in London, England; son of Joseph William Elias (a shopkeeper) and Hilda (Brewster) Green; married Carol Elizabeth Hurd, 1967; children: Martin Michael, Miriam. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: St. John's College, Cambridge, B.A. (with honors), 1948, M.A., 1952; King's College, London, teacher's diploma, 1951; Sorbonne, University of Paris, certificate in French studies, 1952; University of Michigan, Ph.D., 1957. Politics: Labour. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Department of English, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155.

CAREER: College Moderne, Fourmies, France, teacher,1951-52; Konya Koleji, Konya, Turkey, teacher, 1955-56; Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, instructor in modern literature, 1957-61; Tufts University, Medford, MA, assistant professor of American literature, 1963-65; University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, lecturer in American literature, 1965-68; Tufts University, Medford, MA, professor of English, 1968-94, professor emeritus, 1994—. Military service: Royal Air Force, 1948-50; became sergeant.

AWARDS, HONORS: Three Avery and Jules Hopwood Creative Writing Awards, University of Michigan, 1954.

WRITINGS:

Mirror for Anglo-Saxons, Harper (New York, NY), 1960.

Reappraisals, Hugh Evelyn (London, England), 1963, Norton (New York, NY), 1965.

Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry, Norton (New York, NY), 1965.

The Problem of Boston, Norton (New York, NY), 1966.

Yeats's Blessings on von Hugel: Essays in Literature and Religion, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1967, Norton (New York, NY), 1968.

Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1972.

The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love—Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D. H. Lawrence in the Years 1870-1970, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1974, 2nd edition, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1988.

(Editor, with Philip C. Ritterbush) Technology As Institutionally Related to Human Values, Acropolis Books (Washington, DC), 1974.

Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1976, revised edition, Constable (London, England), 1977.

Transatlantic Patterns: Cultural Comparisons of England with America, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1977.

The Earth Again Redeemed: May 26 to July 1, 1984 (science fiction), Basic Books (New York, NY), 1977.

The Challenge of the Mahatmas (first book in "The Lust for Power" trilogy), Basic Books (New York, NY), 1978.

Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (second book in "The Lust for Power" trilogy), Basic Books (New York, NY), 1979.

Tolstoy and Gandhi: Men of Peace (third book in "The Lust for Power" trilogy), Basic Books (New York, NY), 1983.

The Great American Adventure, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1984.

The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: The Doom of Empire, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1985, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1987.

(With John Swan) The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1986.

The Origins of Non-Violence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Setting, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1986.

Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins—Ascona, 1900-1920, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1986.

(Editor) Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi in India: In His Own Words, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1987.

New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant, Scribner (New York, NY), 1988.

The Mount Vernon Street Warrens: A Boston Story, 1860-1910, Scribner (New York, NY), 1989.

A Biography of John Buchan and His Sister Anna: The Personal Background of Their Literary Work, Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, NY), 1990.

The Robinson Crusoe Story, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1990.

Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1991.

Prophets of a New Age: The Politics of Hope from the Eighteenth through the Twenty-first Centuries, Scribner (New York, NY), 1992.

The Adventurous Male: Chapters in the History of the White Male Mind, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1993.

Gandhi: A Voice of a New Age Revolution, Continuum Publishing (New York, NY), 1993.

Otto Gross, Freudian Psychoanalyst, 1877-1920: Literature and Ideas, Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, NY), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: According to Jonathan Raban in the New York Times Book Review, Martin Green is a "merchant venturer in the commerce of ideas, a wickedly clever cultural historian at whose approach disciplinary frontiers seem to melt into thin air. He has the gift of making himself appear equally at home in literature, anthropology, social history, politics and gossip." Green, a British expatriate, has written several books on English cultural and social history, often using literary figures to illustrate his point.

In Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918, Green explores the post-World War I cultural phenomenon of dandyism among the young, wealthy socialites and artists of the period. Focusing on such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, and Harold Acton, Green sets out "to describe the imaginative life of English [high] culture after 1918 and to trace the prominence within it, the partial dominance over it, established by men of one intellectual temperament," as Gerry C. Gunnin quoted Green in his World Literature Today article. According to Hilton Kramer in his New York Times Book Review contribution, "Among much else that Mr. Green's book accomplishes, it gives us a new and vivid understanding of what the concept of the Establishment in England truly signified. . . . He has. . . written a very important book."

In Transatlantic Patterns: Cultural Comparisons of England with America, Green discusses the contemporary cultural differences between the two countries on the basis of their literature. Examining writers as diverse as Dorothy Sayers and John D. MacDonald, Norman Mailer and Doris Lessing, Green tries "to define the difference between England and America in terms of attitudes toward marriage, humor, detective stories, Marx and Freud. . . . What he is after is extremely subtle and pertinent—not cultural—caricature," explained Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times. Lehmann-Haupt went on to say that this book "will not come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed Mr. Green's lively and original intellectual career."

Green focuses on two revolutionary events in what Chicago Tribune Books critic Ron Grossman called a "masterly study of America's earliest rebels-with-a-cause" titled New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant. In February, 1913, Greenwich Villagers presented the first exhibition of modern art in the United States at the 69th Regiment Armory. For the first time, Americans encountered modern paintings by such artists as Matisse, Duchamp, and Picasso. A few months later some of these same revolutionaries helped demonstrate with striking textile workers of Paterson, New Jersey. Although neither of these events was a critical success, Green illustrates that "once upon a time in a certain place, revolutionary art and politics did appear to go hand in hand . . .," noted Lehmann-Haupt; "their leaders knew one another, being of the same class and sometimes sharing the rebellious culture of Greenwich Village. They were saying no to certain things. . . . [Green] traces the tangled thread connecting the events and the people who figured prominently in them. . . . He makes us see what these people shared, where they came from and why they wanted to overthrow the old order in its various forms." In the opinion of Richard Snow for the New York Times Book Review, New York 1913 is a "complex and intriguing book. . . . [It] is sometimes repetitive, and one may quail a bit at the outset when Susan Sontag's esthetic vocabulary is introduced to help clarify the analysis to follow. But the book is full of fascinating things, and alive with the vigor of the eloquent men and women who were so sure they were about to create a renaissance through the fusion of art and politics. It is greatly to Mr. Green's credit that he never patronizes them in their ardent certainties and that he is able to resurrect so sympathetically an era whose 'gay, inclusive, experimental spirit' seems as distant from us today as the Greenwich Village that fomented it."

Green once told CA: "I was taught, at Cambridge, by the literary critic, F. R. Leavis, who laid a heavy stress on the difference between criticism and scholarship. My first books were not much like his, but they were 'criticism' in that sense, and shaped by his teaching. My later books were shaped by a reaction against it. I came to aim at a more liberal serving of the imagination—scholarship as much as criticism—which involves crossing subject frontiers—implicitly defining imagination to cover history, sociology, psychology, et cetera. (Seeing likenesses between D. H. Lawrence and Max Weber was the major step.) To put it farcifully, I have been a nonfiction novelist.

"A risk involved in such a service of 'imagination' is falling into bland frivolity. Leavis's criticism began as a protest against that, and the danger will always be there. So I have kept my eye on the theme of violencenonviolence as a guarantor of seriousness—a greater seriousness than criticism could ever be. But to keep my eye on it means to keep recurring to it, not steadily to stare at it and speak for it. These two poles, the serious and the playful, can be seen as complementing forms of intellectual conscience."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), July 21, 1984.

New York Review of Books, April 15, 1976.

New York Times, June 29, 1977, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Transatlantic Patterns: Cultural Comparisons of England with America; June 11, 1986; December 8, 1988.

New York Times Book Review, January 25, 1976, Hilton Kramer, review of Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918; August 7, 1977; May 27, 1979; August 28, 1983; June 29, 1986; July 13, 1986; December 11, 1988, Richard Snow, review of New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant.

Spectator, June 4, 1977.

Times Literary Supplement, July 18, 1980; February 22, 1985; February 6, 1987.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 18, 1989, Ron Grossman, review of New York 1913.

Washington Post Book World, November 27, 1988.

World Literature Today, spring, 1977, Gerry C. Gunnin, review of Children of the Sun.