Public Persons
Lippmann, Walter
BOOK REVIEW Public Persons Walter Lippmann / Edited by Gilbert Harrison / Liveright / $7.95 Joseph P. Duggan For most of the century, drowsy Americans observed a rite of daybreak: Coffee to...
...Lippmann soured to the New Deal, but rallied to the support of Roosevelt's war policies...
...Wells...
...But here readers who have learned from Frye to think of autobiography as a form of fiction may need Frye's own caveat: "I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me...
...Had Lippmann his druthers the 1932 nomination would have gone to Newton Baker, or better, to an incumbent Al Smith...
...Presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt was in Lippmann's view "no tribune of the people...
...He had won his lifelong struggle against fitting the neat ideological patterns...
...that he is puzzled by the fact that Spengler, a writer antipathetic to him, has had such a formative influence on his thinking...
...He made dis...
...The really startling thing would be twelve essays by Frye that failed to convey a unity of theme and tone regardless of the order in which they were read...
...The dreary decade did not perturb Walter Lippmann, however...
...that "the voice of music" is central to his conception of literature...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...It would be illuminating to read Lippmann's assessment of Stalin or Taft or Eisenhower or McCarthy, but no such assessments are collected in Public Persons...
...Eliot than to Harold Bloom, even though the latter's "anxiety of influence" may make him as much a loner as Frye claims to be...
...What a decade it was--a frightful time that gave even Zero Mostel the jitters...
...Indeed, as Frye says, "there is always a sense in which criticism is a form of autobiography," and one of the most important revelations the critic-autobiographer can make is that of the guru or spiritual preceptor to whom his criticism is at least implicitly dedicated...
...The two autobiographical essays alone, with their comprehensive and witty grasp of the world of literature in its relation to the worlds of academe, politics, morals, religion, and myth, make it clear that an attempt to distinguish between literature and criticism at this level is to miss the point of both...
...William Jennings Bryan's passing in 1925 gave Lippmann the rare occasion to speak ill of the dead: "It would be insincere to write as if we thought any better of Bryan's career now than we did a week ago...
...This can mean the personal dependence on a poet rather than another critic...
...He was the columnist's columnist, carried in syndication from cowtown to milltown across the land...
...The 1950s, so much in vogue among revisionists these days, are represented in this collection by a gaping lacuna...
...The preceptor-apprentice relationship is developed in "Expanding Eyes," which may be read as the apologia of one of our most important critics...
...Nevertheless, these essays include items of considerable interest for the student of Frye's work, if not for the biographer that may never be: that a Maoist pamphlet once described him "as the high priest of obscurantism...
...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977...
...He wrote clean prose without glitter or fuzz...
...he deeply admired Adlai Stevenson but stung Stevenson There j _9 LI ca...
...Above all he respected the privacy of public persons...
...that he has an introverted temperament and indolent habits...
...My guess is that most people who read this book will be most interested in the John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash...
...It brings together what might appear at first glance to be an unlikely combination of subjects: Blake, Sir James Frazer, charms, riddles, Darwin, the Elizabethan masque and antimasque, Old and New comedy, and Spengler's Decline of the West...
...Through the well-sketched portraits of public lives we can catch glimpses of the author's own remarkable career...
...Lippmann's flirtation with Lady Trend: a fleeting membership in the Harvard Socialist Club, a brief association with the grand muckraker Lincoln Steffens...
...he published Essays in the Public Philosophy which, to the consternation of his old intellectual comrades, affirmed the existence of God and presented a case for natural law...
...Of course, authors always say this about their collected pieces: who wants to believe that his incidental figures, however put together, do not make a whole carpet...
...Here we see a warm and rich appreciation of George Santayana by his pupil...
...Certainly he has done his share to make it harder to think this way...
...The tripartite grouping of the essays in this collection is, nevertheless, structurally important and is, no doubt, an indication of the best way to read the book...
...that when he published his study of Blake thirty years ago he knew nothing of myth criticism...
...Lippmann's writings have endured, however...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 27 nonetheless with an endorsement of Eisenhower...
...He denounced McCarthy but made no apology for Stalinism...
...Frye remarks in this splendid essay how easy it still is to think of literary scholarship and criticism "as somehow sub-creative, in contrast to the 'creative' writing of poems and novels, as though creativity were an attribute of those genres rather than of the people using them...
...A true specimen of Lippmann's independence is the book's last essay...
...By the time the jazz subsided and gin was potable again, Lippmann had attained middle age and universality...
...By 1938 the former young socialist of Harvard was in league with Friedrich Hayek and Raymond Aron at a European conference "pour la Renovation du Liberalisme," and at war's end, Lippmann joined with the classical liberal intellectuals who formed the Mont P~lerin Society...
...0Q~000000I0BOIIg0BB0O0gQ*0BgO0OQQOjQ000iQge0QQQ0I~0AQ0Uo00QQD000I0Q0Q0Q0IQgQQ0OIO0QOIiaOIgOIQ00QDgoDIQg0OQ0QO~0I000DIg6OigQ~QjQQQ0Qm0~QQ00 BD000O0guI BOOK REVIEW Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society Northrop Frye / Indiana University Press / $11.50 John P. Sisk Spiritus Mundi, a gathering together of twelve of Northrop Frye's most recent essays, comes with the author's promise that the individual pieces, despite differences of occasion and time of composition, "possess a unity and can be read consecutively...
...to convert the sympathy we feel for his family and friends into any sort of pretense that we think he was a good influence on his generation would be to rob a thirty years' struggle of its meaning...
...BOOK REVIEW Public Persons Walter Lippmann / Edited by Gilbert Harrison / Liveright / $7.95 Joseph P. Duggan For most of the century, drowsy Americans observed a rite of daybreak: Coffee to open the eyes, a newspaper to show forth the world...
...And though the modest Lippmann (he called his profession "newspaperman") didn't look to himself as a writer of biography, to say less of autobiography, we ought to look carefully at Public Persons...
...When such clarities are in abundance I can easily forgive him for devoting an entire essay to Yeats' A Vision --a work which, he confesses, "baffled and exasperated him for many years," and which continues to baffle and exasperate me even after he has written about it...
...In our iniquitous times the mainstays cannot endure...
...however, it can also mean the personal apprenticeship of a poet to a guru poet, so that both critic and poet find their own voices in an organic tradition...
...These were Lippmann's "progressive" years, when he spoke up with early acclaim for Freud's insight, chuckled at Harding's "simple faith that any deserving fellow can do anything," and stood mildly in thrall to H.G...
...His death does not alter the record...
...The former he saw as the signalizing of events (or worse, sometimes, the telling of hearsay), while the latter was approached by analyzing both deeds and ideas...
...And here we note young Joseph P. Duggan is assistant managing editor of The Alternative...
...Beginning as a rhapsody to Eugene McCarthy, whose challenge to President Johnson's Vietnam policy Lippmann admired, it ends with the hope that the Johnson administration "be ousted by a rejuvenated Republican party...
...tinctions, separating, for instance, new...
...In the third section Frye takes on Milton's Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, Blake's illustrations for The Book of Job, Yeats' A Vision, and Wallace Stevens' letters and Opus Posthumous...
...For him the fifties were years of vigorous activity and of pronouncements both political and philosophical...
...The setting for our first glimpse is Harvard, 1910...
...While Lippmann's writings cannot be looked upon as oracular, they deserve attention from those who would take part in public discourse, and especially the younger generation that missed Lippmann the first time around...
...Shambuster Henry Mencken earned favorable reckoning: "I feel certain," Lippmann wrote during Mencken's salad days, "that insofar as he has influenced the tone of public controversy he has elevated it...
...The two-party system as Lippmann envisioned it was an instrument of conscience...
...And he was no longer clearly to be pegged a man of the Left...
...Lippmann passed on to graceful old age and death without gaining a cult following...
...His Preface to Politics and Public Opinion have become classics, and now Gilbert Harrison brings us Public Persons, a collection of short biographical pieces from Lippmann's writing for newspapers and magazines...
...Contexts of Literature," the first four essays, is largely concerned with the nature of the university, the threats to its proper function, the place of the humanities in relation to the sciences and the social sciences, and the nature of the changing vision of the universe in which the university exists...
...from truth...
...Coffee and metropolitan dailies are in dwindling supply, and Lippmann has fallen to the reaper...
...It was a time, the conventional wisdom tells us, when America's youth were pimply, sodaslurping jingoes duped by the sinister Joe McCarthy and lulled by the devious Ike...
...Lippmann graduated that year with highest honors in a class that included T.S...
...The second group of four essays, "The Mythological Universe," is perhaps the most tightly unified...
...He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President...
...Public Persons offers only one piece of Lippmann's from those years, and that on Harold Ickes, a figure whose career had ended before the fifties began...
...that despite his antagonism to the Vietnam war and to racism, he had little sympathy for the activism of the late sixties and early seventies...
...In the early pieces Lippmann wrote with a truth-seeking avidity proper to his station as an undergraduate in philosophy, an avidity that was never to leave him though he grew old and sage...
...introductory essays of the first two sections, which, says Frye, "might be described as autobiographical...
...No one who writes English prose as well as Frye does is writing anything but literature...
...Apparently Frye is closer to T.S...
...Walter Lippmann's Public Persons may lack some of the colo~ of anecdotal writing, but it is a refreshing break from the dressed-up gossip that struts about today and calls itselt journalism...
...that he went through a long period of neurotic fear of being confronted with proof that his publications had been plagiarized from work he had either not read or had forgotten...
...Or here: "Nothing happens in Plato until one person, generally Socrates, assumes control of the argument and the contributions of the others are largely reduced to punctuation...
...And then Walter Lippmann to bring the murky picture into focus...
...In one neat sentence he can throw unexpected light around a subject, as here: "Waiting for Godot is also, in one of its aspects, a parody of the vaudeville dialogues, the long shapeless rigmaroles which used to be packed around the 'feature film' of my youth...
...Eliot and Heywood Broun...
...In 1914 Herbert Croly recruited Lippmann for the original staff of the New Republic, and in 1922 Ralph Pulitzer coaxed him to New York to run the World's editorial page...
...He is no enemy of entrenched privilege...
Vol. 10 • May 1977 • No. 8
