Lewis Mumford
on Patrick Geddes
Transcript from typed
material generously provided by James Wilson (in 2006) who wrote and produced
the Film on Patrick Geddes entitled
" Eye to the Future "
The following material
relates to a filmed interview with Lewis Mumford by interviewers and film
crew Recorded. 24.5.69 at BBC New York (Credit acknowledged.)
(Material used TV
Film on Geddes 'Eye to the Future')
Transmission BBC2 Colour Saturday 12th September 1970.
1. Mumford in Study
It's very hard to
place Patrick Geddes - a man like him whose while life is his work can't
be reduced to one or two features. In that way he is something like Leonardo
da Vinci. If you look at Leonardo da Vinci's life as a whole- except for
a few pictures you'd almost say he was a failure but actually he was one
of the great personages of his age, and the thought of Leonardo means
more to us today - three hundred years later - than it did to his contemporaries.
It's going to be that way probably with Geddes who made very little impression
upon people around him, but as time goes on more and more people are aware
of his work and in many different fields - he was no specialist - therefore
only part of it is known to any one section of the public.
2. Mumford
Patrick Geddes was
one of those giants whose whole life is greater than any particular part
of it. In this he is like Leonardo da Vinci or Goethe - not a specialist,
nor confined to any one side of life, but able to master the whole of
it as very few people in his time were able to even think of doing.
3.
My first encounter
with Patrick Geddes was through his books and that came about as early
as 1914 or 1915. This began our correspondence which lasted through his
lifetime but I didn't actually meet him in person until 1923 when he was
an old man, a man of 69 and yet so full of vigour, so full of immense
mental energy that no people - that no minds that I've met, had met up
to that time - could compare with him.
We got along
rather doubtfully at first. He thought of me as a successor to his dead
son, Alastair, who'd been killed in the war. I realised that I was not
his son, had no real resemblance to him, and so there was a little tension
remained almost to the end. On the other hand he was a man, extremely
generous, magnanimous, even after a quarrel he would have an insight into
our relation and speak to me with the tenderness and love that a father
might to his son.
He was hard
in some ways to get along with, he was absorbed in his own ideas, he was
a hard man to interrupt, a harder man to reply to, conversation wasn't
easy with him, and even listening wasn't easy because he had a fine voice
but a muffled one, muffled by his beard - he never could speak effectively
to an audience of more than 20 people and he was unaware of the fact that
he had to be more careful when addressing a larger group of people
So, although he was an oral teacher - did most of his teaching directly,
face to face, he'd talk to anybody and talk (at) length to them about
his most important ideas - nevertheless he never was able to put his thoughts
in order in such a fashion that they would flow easily into a book. In
fact, he somewhat distrusted books.
4.
In some ways Geddes
was very affable, very easy to meet, no one easier as a matter of fact,
always ready to fall into conversation. On the other hand, especially
in his old age, he was interested in having You listen to his ideas and
absorb them and make something of them, and other people with different
careers, with different interests from Geddes, sometimes shied away from
him, perhaps because after he'd reached his old age they'd heard his particular
message too often, or thought they had heard it. Perhaps they were deaf
to it but they didn't want to listen any more. On the other hand those
who appreciated Geddes got an enormous amount out of him and perhaps the
real difficulty was that he had too much to give.
He was a man of immense vitality - this is the thing that struck me as
soon as I met him. He had a level of mental energy that few of us are
able to maintain, so that even after a 6 hour day with him I would be
entirely exhausted and unable to go on with any other work of my own.
This extended to all his work and yet it alternated with periods of great
inertia, passivity, almost laziness, these two things very often go together
in the same temperament.
When I first met Geddes in 1923 I had the intention of getting the material
for his biography. He was a little averse to my doing this, he wasn't
patient enough to go over the details of his life at that time - he was
interested in his own thoughts and said that could wait till later - he
didn't want me to spend my time in enquiring about the minutiae of his
life. Later on the idea of writing his biography occurred to me and it
occurred to him, because in his will he appointed me as his official biographer.
On the other, in the meanwhile, I realised that I wasn't the man to do
full justice to Geddes. My own way of thinking had departed from his,
I couldn't write a biography without being critical of a certain part
of his work much though I admired it, great though my debt was to him
in almost every department of my life, he changed my whole life, my whole
future was determined really from my first encounter with Geddes - And
YET I was doubtful whether it would be possible for me to write the biography
though I never completely surrendered the idea until around 1940 when
the second world war made me see that it would be impossible for me to
visit the scenes of his life and to do the kind of thorough biography
that was necessary. In fact, I had work of my own to do. In some ways
I greatly regret that I did not live to do this. On the other hand I have
been able to be of some help to the man who is now doing a new biography
of Geddes and I think the full story of his life and a critical appraisal
of it will be made by a more objective mind than mine.
5.
It's always hard
to say what's the critical moment in one's life, but I think the most
critical moment was the time when I first read Geddes's contribution to
a book called "Evolution" which he'd written with J.Arthur Thomson,
and picked out his contribution as one that deeply stirred me. He gave
me a new view of the world in which cities and country were equally important,
where the phenomena of life in all its forms was the great wonder of man's
existence. Geddes had a sense of life that very few people could surpass,
and there again he was very much like Goethe who had the same open attitude
toward every part of life. There was nothing that Geddes rejected, he
was a thinker of the first rank but he also felt that the emotional life
was important, and he thought that neither the emotions nor ideas were
- (or) could be completely effective until they moved into action. This
was the note that struck, the note that stirred me and the very central
part of his - of his philosophy that drew me on into my own work.
6.
Geddes had an influence
in many different fields, a far greater influence than most people realise,
partly because he had no talent for publicity, he had nothing but contempt
for the usual methods of getting attention in the public eye. He preferred
to work quietly therefore other people who have achieved quite a reputation
in town planning and education and other fields have repeated Geddes's
ideas, sometimes without even knowing where they came from, without giving
Geddes the credit for being the originator. There is no doubt that his
influence has penetrated far more widely than people realise.
At the same
time it's very easy to meet someone in Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh,
the town which was the seed of his - of some of his most famous activities
- he was the man who created the student hostels which hadn't existed
in Edinburgh - he did a hundred things which should have given him a great
reputation there, but he had the good fortune to be called elsewhere to
India for - during the period from 1914 to 1924 and the rest of his life
he spent most of his time in Montpellier, so he wasn't so well known to
a new generation growing up in Edinburgh and the city has never given
him the honour that he deserves.
There was a series of events in Geddes's life which were critical for
his development. The first of them was a long walking tour which he took
as a boy of 15 or 16 with his father through the valleys of Scotland.
This gave him the original idea for the regional survey and the importance
of taking in a whole environment and not just a single fragment of it.
Then shortly after
that when he was ready for the University, and thought he was going to
become a chemist, he came upon a book of Thomas Henry Huxley's which made
him - which opened the world of biology for him and he went, instead of
studying at the University of Edinburgh which he loathed at the time,
he went down to London to study directly under Huxley, and it was in Huxley's
laboratory that he met the great biologists of his own age including Charles
Darwin.
Then as a young man
after becoming a biologist, doing everything necessary except taking a
degree, because he was one of the people who felt - one of the first students
to feel that degrees were unimportant. The real question was how much
knowledge you had and how capable you were. He went to Mexico on an exploratory
exhibition and there he was overcome by blindness and had to spend a couple
of months in a darkened room on the advice of Mexican doctors in order
to recover his sight.
It was there he invented
the method of thinking with squared paper which he was to perfect and
use as the key to many short-cuts in the organising his thoughts and ideas.
Thinking on squared paper instead of thinking serially the way we do when
we talk, was one of Geddes's contributions and again this is something
which is coming into use in our day with a much wider use of graphs and
diagrams instead of depending purely upon verbal - eh verbal organisation
of knowledge.
These were critical
things - blindness was a very important element in his life and it perhaps
made him over-value his diagrams because they were what pulled him out
of his misery and despair when he thought he might be blind for life.
Again his blindness
made him desert the microscope and turned him to the study of sociology
and he began it directly, by first-hand contact with his own city - Edinburgh
- and it was in the Outlook Tower, that he founded there, that he elaborated
his conception of a new kind of education, a new kind of sociology, a
new kind of politics, which would begin with the local region and finally
extend its survey over the entire world.
He wasn't a man confined
to a single department of life or to a single region of life. The planet
as a whole, the cosmos, was his environment although he always began with
the local neighbourhood, with the family, with the region.
In 1914 Geddes
was invited to India for the purposes of planning Indian cities. Various
Maharajahs thought the time had come to introduce town planning into
India. And on the voyage there - a long one by boat - he wrote a memorable
letter, which is still in existence, describing, at the turn of his life,
at the age of 60, what the prospects were before him, what he saw in the
landscape around and what he expected to find when he got to India - a
memorable letter which was published in one of the biographies.
When he reached India
he had an enormous amount of work to do. He planned some 50 cities in
India and introduced fresh ideas, which weren't as yet introduced in any
European country.He introduced them to India in a series of printed reports
the greatest of which is his report on Indore - a two volume classic -
in which he sets forth not merely plans for the improvement of Indore
itself but for the improvement of higher education everywhere - a critique
of the old - fashioned university and a proposal for a different kind
of university, a university that anticipated, by many years, the ones
that the students of America and other parts of the world are in a fumbling
and sometimes mindless way trying to introduce into their own countries.
In this respect India was an eye - opener for Geddes and it gave him immense
opportunity although he found the part of the Indians unresponsive, they
were brought up on formal British education, and he didn't get from them
quite the response that he hoped for. On the other he got a great deal
from India. He saw the side of Eastern thought, its innerness, its - eh
- its eh - thinking of the ultimate problems of life, putting the ultimate
problems before the immediate and practical ones. He saw this as a necessary
complement to the Western way of thought which put the practical and immediate
in the first place.
And so when he came back to India, if he hadn't been disabled by serious
illness while he was there, he was at the point of combining and reconciling
these two attitudes toward life, making them part of his own philosophy.
They'd been there nominally but now he'd had the experience of meeting
great Indian scientists, like Bose or great Indian poets, like Tagore,
from both of whom he learned a great deal.
Looked at superficially,
Patrick Geddes's whole life might seem to be a series of failures; looked
at in depth one finds just the opposite. His failures are due to the fact
that he was always 50 to 100, perhaps 200, years before his time and,
as in the case of Leonardo, it's a - it's the later generation that begins
to appreciate him. He's now more widely known, more fully appreciated
than he certainly was in his lifetime, and I think that his influence,
far from diminishing, will grow, because it's a general influence, it
doesn't derive from any single contribution of his but from the example,
the wonderful example, of his whole life.
I've had the good
fortune to meet a few men of outstanding genius in my life one of them
was Frank Lloyd Wright, another was Thomas Mann, and the third was Patrick
Geddes. Of the three Geddes strikes me as the man whose work will tower
more and more as time goes on. He was the utmost expression of life's
possibilities that I've seen in my own generation.
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