The Professor And the Frog

By Otto Friedrich

A scholar turns to parables

There once was a family of Hungarian frogs that went on a hopping holiday to the mountains of Transylvania. The mountain forests were aswarm with wolves and wildcats, so the mother frog warned her children to keep quiet. Her youngest son defiantly boasted, "I am proud to be a frog, and it is in the nature of a frog to croak." He hopped off one day to the bank of a pond and croaked so loudly and so long that a mountain goat spotted him and killed him. "I told him not to croak," the mother frog mourned. "Do not scold your dead son," said the father. "He had the courage to be himself."

The various possible meanings of that story are the essence of an odd but ingratiating "documentary" novel called The Frog Who Dared to Croak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $11.95). The author, as odd and ingratiating as his book, is Richard Sennett, 39, better known as an omnivorously brilliant professor of sociology at New York University. Sennett's hero, Tiber Grau, finds the folktale version of the frog story "pessimistic" and "not entirely clear." Grau is at this point a propaganda official in the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary regime of 1919, so he has the authority to rewrite the nation's folklore. In his revised version, the frogs croak so loudly in unison that they frighten less organized animals away. Says Grau: "A society which does not possess its people's dreams is not a society in control of itself."

Tibor Grau still has much to learn. The son of a Jewish banker named Von Grau, a furtive homosexual, a teacher and philosopher of sorts, he survives wartime exile in Stalin's U.S.S.R. by following the principle: "You must lie to survive. But what is a lie?" The tale of the frogs keeps reappearing in new forms. Military Interpreter Grau tells it to some German war prisoners as a parable of how an arrogant team of jumping frogs lost at the Olympics. During the Hungarian revolt of 1956, finally, Grau becomes one of six Hungarians designated to negotiate with the Soviets, and instead of appealing for freedom, he argues that Hungary, like the frog, is too small and weak either to fight or to be independent. For this futile croak, the aged survivor is expelled from the Communist Party. "Yet, miraculously, I am still alive and well," says the last of his posthumous papers.

An enigmatic and unsatisfying conclusion? "But I didn't want, to write a book about the great rebels, who are really heroic, but about some more ordinary being," Sennett says with a smile, as he pours white wine for a visitor to his Manhattan home. "Grau thinks he has told the truth, finally, and taken a risk. But he's so warped by the system that what appears to him a risk is in fact a defense of the system. And yet he has dignity, because under those conditions of self-deception, he has done what he thinks is a courageous act. And that's life, you know?"

The reactions to Sennett's Frog since its publication earlier this summer have also been somewhat ambiguous. Prize-winning Author Donald Barthelme praised it as "a most thoughtful meditation on the sociology of power," but the New York Times said that the "brilliant" Sennett "knows too much for a novelist." Sennett disputes the contradiction. He not only sees Frog as a counterpart to his previous book of social criticism, Authority (1980), but sees both as the beginning of an eight-part series (four of them novels) on the main emotional relations underlying modern society: authority, solitude, fraternity and ritual.

Though Sennett once considered himself part of the New Left, Authority begins on a quite different note: "The need for authority is basic. Children need authorities to guide and reassure them. Adults fulfill an essential part of themselves in being authorities; it is one way of expressing care for others." To demonstrate what authority is, Sennett portrays not a politician dominating a crowd but Conductor Pierre Monteux, whose "ease at being in control" was so complete that a raised eyebrow was enough to cue the French horns.

Until the 18th century, says Sennett, such authority was accepted as a natural consequence of an inherent inequality among men. When the American and French revolutions outlawed that inequality, they undermined all authority, making it seem shameful to take orders. New techniques had to be devised. Sennett skillfully traces the modern evolution of authority from paternalism, which falsely promises to take care of its subject, to the impersonal modern manager who controls his subordinates by politely treating them as unnecessary. Says Sennett: "It is not so much abrupt moments of humiliation as month after month of disregarding his employees, of not taking them seriously, which establishes his domination . . . It is a silent erosion of their sense of self-worth which will wear them down." Sennett concludes that domination is a "necessary disease the social organism suffers." It cannot be cured but can be resisted, made to pay a higher price in care and nurturing for the obedience it demands.

"Everybody has a mid-life crisis," says Sennett, "and mine was seeing two very big things I could do and not being able to manage between them. I wanted to describe the contradictions in the emotional relations that people have in our society, which wasn't a matter of personal psychology but of social forms. But having announced this grandiose project, I found that I was ambushed from within. I realized that lots of the things I felt and saw in social life really broke the bounds between social commentary and fiction.

"Now I'm halfway through this non-fiction book trying to describe the ambiguous experiences of solitude. On the one hand, it's seen as a punishment, in the sense that you've failed to establish relationships with other people. On the other side, solitude is a kind of freedom. But I'm writing a novel about that too, about those same themes of isolation. It's called An Evening of Brahms. It's about New York in the '60s. The story is very simple. The young woman is a pianist, and she contracts cancer, and her husband leaves her, in a rage, before she dies. And after she dies, he conducts a performance of the Brahms Requiem, and the last part of the novel is entirely about what's going through his mind. And it's a novel about the fact that there is no day of judgment after death."

Music is a natural metaphor to Sennett, for he spent his boyhood training to be a professonal cellist. While getting his A.B. at the University of Chicago, he also was accepted as a student of conducting under Monteux. At the age of 21, as he came onstage to begin a cello recital, the nervous tension became too great. "I vomited into my cello," he recalls with a grimace. "I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was . .." Words fail him.

Sennett walked off the stage, leaving his musical career in ruins behind him. He fled to Harvard, began graduate studies under Sociologist David Riesman and so, in his words, "sort of wandered into doing sociology." He started teaching at Brandeis, at Cambridge, at Harvard, at N.Y.U.

Sennett's earliest books on the conflicts of urban life suffered from a surfeit of youthful idealism, but he struck a more original lode in The Fall of Public Man (1977). In the 18th century, according to his theory, men enjoyed a public life that was quite different from their private lives; they dressed in street costumes that identified them not only by caste but by profession; they felt at ease in talking to strangers but keeping them at a distance. During the 19th century, partly as a result of the pressures of industrialization, private life came to be exalted as a sanctuary, then began to provide the standards for public life as well. The age of civility became the age of charisma and false "intimacy." Politicians were judged as personalities and acted accordingly; so did musical virtuosos. Narcissism became the basic mental illness of modern times. This may sound overly schematic, but Sennett ornamented his provocative thesis with a rich array of illustrations on what kind of makeup French ladies used under the ancien regime and why London theater audiences wept when a hero died, and why the malls of modern shopping centers often stand empty.

By now Sennett has come a long way from the New Left. "It did seem to me then that out of all this turmoil, we might produce a different kind of society, more complicated, more civilized," he says. "But in fact I was totally deceived. The vision that I think has informed all my books is a radical critique of the way ordinary American life goes on. I suppose I've become an old-fashioned 19th century liberal--without the belief in capitalism."

The 19th century liberal lives in a beautifully preserved row house in a cobblestone mews just off Washington Square. Geraniums blossom in the window boxes. Two gray-and-black cats frolic around the harpsichord. Near by stands the cello, on which Sennett has been practicing Beethoven's A-Major Sonata.

"I've got a lot of unfinished business in my life," says he. "I've started taking cello lessons again, and I'm going to start playing in public again. I've already played some in orchestras. It still terrifies me, but I'm going to force myself to do it. Because I think it's one of the nice things about middle age that you know that even if it's a disaster, you don't have to kill yourself." Croak.

-- By Otto Friedrich

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