HAWTHORNE ISOLATED
HICKS, GRANVILLE
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Hawthorne Isolated NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE By Mark Van Doren. The American Men 0/ Letters Series. New York: William Sloane Associates. 285 pp....
...TODAY, in the relation of the church and the state — the role of the church in regard to the advance of liberalism in politics, to scientific progress, to the growth of civilization — may well examine this study of Frederick II, a rebel among the Holy Roman Emperors, The author believes history, in the thirteenth century written wholly by the clergy, has maljgned and misinterpreted this early and vigorous opponent of the church...
...Granville Hicks is the author ot Small Town...
...The problem is not to curtail technical progress, but to direct it along proper -lines...
...His Hawthorne is as isolated and alienated as the Hawthorne revealed to us by Newton Arvin twenty years ago...
...Arrhidaeus...
...He expresses no desire to return to a premechanical age...
...This leads the technician on to the goal of perfectionism and ever more efficient functionalism...
...The present edition is a translation by F. D. Wieck...
...THE STILTED ENGLISH of the translation does no credit to the original prose...
...A novel about this extraordinary character will have one of two purposes: to pare away the encrustations of legand and depict Alexander in the realistic surroundings of his time, or, to accept the mythological implications as leavening by which to interpret philosophically the career of the her...
...The man is a comment upon his writings, as they are upon him...
...The Macedonian king who carried the light of Hellenism into Asia, and then died of ennui, has exercised a continual fascination on the human imagination...
...By David G. Einstein...
...One wonders what those German intellectuals who have somehow managed to survive the brutalities of the Nazi regime and the Soviet occupation are thinking and writing today...
...It was not published, however, in Germany until 1946...
...In criticizing Hawthorne's Work, Van Doren is consistently severe, conceding true greatness only to The Scarlet Letter, but he always writes with the warmest kind of affection, and lavishes insight and sympathy on the least of the tales and sketches...
...As a man his Alexander is unreal and inflated, as a demigod wooden and unconvincing...
...Told by a friar, this story is supposed to hold Frederick up "to horror...
...A Medieval Philosophe EMPEROR FREDERICK II...
...Wassermann achieved his international renown with The World's Illusion and The Maurizius Case, but in recent years his name has fallen into undeserved obscurity...
...Van Doren is not taken in by this nonsense, though of course he realizes that there has been some distortion on the other side...
...The style is heavy, mystical and obscurantist —quite in the Nietzschean tradition...
...The higher the level of mechanical productivity, the higher the standard of living mankind can enjoy...
...THE STORY OF HAWTHORNE'S life is surprisingly full, in view of the brevity of the volume, and is told with apparent simplicity and with _ great skill...
...There is no room for moral and cultural considerations...
...He belongs, as Newton Arvin said at the end of his study, not only "among the greatest ot American writers but also among the greatest of Americans...
...In the book's own words: "The drive for technical perfection is a self-impelled and irreversible process which, if left to itself, must end in a completely regimented and mechanize i society that lives in a state of exhaustion, both of natural and of human reserves...
...Juenger does not consider technical advance to be progress or even capable of serving the ends of progress...
...his weakling half-brother, replaces him as king of Macedon...
...Juenger has no hope for the future...
...3.50...
...He does not recognize any of the positive contributions made by the increased use of machinery...
...There are plenty of facts in this book, of both a biographical and bibliographical kind, but each of them serves a well defined purpose...
...The second is more interesting, its success more fruitful, and it raises immediate questions about the relationship of hufnanism and power, of outward triumph and inner degradation, of divine presumption and human weakness...
...This combination of warmth and severity, so rarely achieved in criticism, gives us a peculiarly vivid sense of Hawthorne's stature...
...1 Reviewed by JOHN SHEPLEY WE HAVE COME TO RECOGNIZE that in the general history of man, mythology plays as important a role as recorded events In the study of civilizations and cultures, it has even greater significance, illuminating as it does age-old unconscious conflicts and relating these to the entire matrix of religious and intellectual belief...
...Reviewed by JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY Those who are interested...
...42j pages...
...By Jakob Wassermann...
...Juenger restates this well-known thesis...
...Unlike William Morris and John Ruskin, however, Juenger has no alternative to offer...
...He does, however, place more of the blame on the human conditions, as opposed to specifically American circumstances, and this shift in emphasis tells us something about the intellectual history of the past two decades...
...His encounter with the Delphic oracle and his cutting of the Gordian knot were divect affronts to the beliefs of his day, and' whether true or apochryphal incidents, were products of and contributed to his mythological position in history...
...Mine does so too, and cheerfully...
...king...
...The many references to philosophy and classical scholarship indicate learning, but no real insight, and in many cases are not relevant to the text...
...Van Doren's success is of the highest order, for he never lets us lose sight of Hawthorne the man, nor are we permitted to forget why the man is important...
...The author's thesis, though interesting, is purely subjective reasoning and at times borders on the hysterical...
...Van Doren, rescuing Hawthorne from the pedagogues, has made his greatness clearer than ever, and he has done the task with such grace and succinctness that his book is a model of critical biography...
...By Friedrich Georg Juenger...
...Reviewed by NATHAN BELFER THE BLURB ON THE JACKET of the book says that Juenger wrote the manuscript in Germany in the spring and early summer of 1939...
...The lives of a Moses, a Jesus, a Gautama are perceived by subsequent generations in terms of such a pattern...
...Technology and the soulless drive toward mechanical perfectionism will lead us on to catastrophe...
...There are those of us who believe, in contrast, that not $ less but more machinery is desirable...
...The author furthermore feels that the* exploitation of natural resources produces not wealth but scarcity and poverty...
...Ziff-Davis Publishing Co...
...He states that the technician, the scientist, has a rational, factual, impersonal and entirely utilitarian way of thinking...
...no factual proof is offered for their support...
...John Shepley is a Harvard graduate now completing his first novel...
...But this is not completely the case...
...VAN DOREN'S PREFACE gives such an excellent account of his aims and methods that he should be allowed to speak for himself...
...Hephaestion, his companion since youth, dies of fever, and Alexander, mourning and inconsolable, gathers his followers and moves into Babylon, where he himself succumbs to the same disease...
...There is reason to believe that Alexander himself was conscious of a legendary mission guided by divine fortune...
...That Frederick II sought knowledge outside the Holy Writ is shown in many a legend...
...The author makes sweeping generalizations...
...But few secular leaders have attained the mythological stature of Alexander the Great...
...and so every book about Hawthorne has left some space between the two halves of its subject...
...This book was written in 1939...
...167 pp...
...It is unfortunate that the publishers have chosen an inept translation of a largely unsuccessful work as a means of reviving his reputation...
...but, from an objective consideration of those brutal times, it manifests an early outcropping of the scientific spirit...
...Philosophical Library...
...Educated by Aristotle, he combined philosophic leanings with a great capacity for orgiastic pleasure and cruelty...
...Price $4.50...
...We are told that, studying the digestive functions, he had two men" well fed, then had one man rest, the other work hard—and killed them, to examine their digestive organs...
...Numerous writers such as William Morris, John Ruskin and the preRaphaelites have regretted the absence of spiritual content in modern industrial technology...
...The achievement is the more impressive because some recent biographies of Hawthorne have been devoted to the amassing of facts without any apparent standard of relevance...
...So much attention has been focused on Hawthorne"s loneliness, his alienation from contemporary life, his ordeal, that some recent students, by a familiar process of reaction, have been led to argue that he was really quite sociable, took a lively interest in current affairs, and was pretty much a normal American of his period...
...this might mean, however, that he was not a heretic (he was excommunicated) but a lover of learning...
...His explanation of the causes of the failure of technology is mystical and unsatisfactory...
...He even goes a long way with Arvin in blaming Hawthorne's alienation on the cultural aridity of American life in the first part of the nineteenth century...
...Too bad Frederick didn't know about guinea pigs...
...The story covers the last two years of his life, from his return from India to his death in Babylon...
...though I have made every effort to harmonize the works and days of an unusually mysterious artist...
...2.75...
...Alexander Inflated ALEXANDER IN BABYLON...
...His mother, Olympias, was a devotee of the Samothracian mystery cult, and popular belief traced his ancestry to the gods...
...Wishing to rid himself of his grumbling Macedonian army, Alexander marries himself and his captains into the Persian aristocracy and replaces his original troops with Persians...
...Mr...
...Nathan Belfer is professor of Economics at Brooklyn College...
...This critical biography of Hawthorne," he writes, "tries to keep a balance between narrative and comment...
...The book is a lively, absorbing narrative of a period when the Pope broke free from the Emperor's power, as well as a suggested correction of a clouded page of history—that still affects interpretation of the world today...
...IN "ALEXANDER IN BABYLON" there are indications that Jakob Wassermann was-aware of these two aims, but .ir* attempting to encompass them both, he has fallen between two stools...
...1949...
...My aim, that is, was to keep the story relevant, and I hope it will seem so even when it has the air of being told for its own sake...
...Spirit and Technology THE FAILURE OF TECHNOLOGY...
...186 pp...
...Hinsdale, Illinois, 1949...
...In a wide survey of the times, Mr...
...Reviewed by GRANVILLE HICKS MR...
...Henry Regnery Co...
...Machinery can liberate mankind from the unrewarding and unremitting toil of securing the basic needs for subsistence...
...Einstein re-examines the values and the causes involved in that early struggle of church and state, and suggests new emphases...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 23
