"WHAT, THEN, IS THE AMERICAN?"
BAZELON, DAVID T.
"What, Then, Is the American?" Reviewed by DAVID T. BAZELON PATHS TO THE PRESENT. By Arthur M. Schlesinger. New York: Macmillan, 317 pages. $4,00. THE ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND America as...
...The first leads to some of the least impressive aspects of the book, the second to some of the most...
...surely sex is one of the more significant "paths to the present,") And this essay, written penetratingly, with humor and without exaggeration, gives illustrative emphasis to a notion which always hoveis around the discussion of the special nature of American existence...
...THE ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND America as something special in history has grown to be a very engaging intellectual activity...
...Charles I. Glicksberg is a Professor of English al Brooklyn College...
...Professor Schlcsinger's submerged point of view is that modern concoction we persist in calling "liberalism" or "progressivism" (of the ADA variety...
...Yes, the future is the American necessity...
...the facts of the alternation of liberal and conservative trends in American politics...
...that, and the technical approach of the professional historian...
...Elegant and erudite in their analyses of texts, they are concerned for the most part with "influences," however elusive and indeterminate, which they feel themselves perfectly qualified to trace...
...ONE OF THE EARMARKS OF the novelist...
...A conscientious and exacting critic, he has fallen a victim to his own system of(, values...
...Putlis to the Present is actually only a collection of essays, all of which have previously appeared elsewhere, chiefly in historical journals...
...As Professoi...
...The author writes history very "objectively"— too much so, one feels...
...the democratic mass rather than our mediocre, ridiculous aristocracy...
...This is the cultural corollary of American political and economic dominance in tiie world community...
...However, many of the essays are very excellent indeed, and almost all are worthwhile and interesting— not the least of which is this first one, an histot io-graphic summary of the important works on the order of de Tocqueville's and Bryce's...
...New York: George W. Stewart...
...So that we have this emphasis on form and tradition fused with a capacity for experience and an openness for life • clearly an (doit on the part of the critic to make the best of two worlds, Yet the emphasis throughout is placed on "influence," on cultural continuity, on handing down the torch of tradition, The reasons Leavis gives for not including Dickens are unconvincing, if not specious...
...They do not add up to a fresh, com prehensive view of American experience...
...the great saga of the thirty-nine million immigrants who came here between 1776 and 1940 (in which the very interesting fact is pointed out that, before 1776, fully onehalf of the immigration was composed of indentured servants, and that the mortality-rbte on the ships carrying them here often reached fifty percent...
...The Standard of the Snob Reviewed by CHARLES I. GLICKSBERG THE GREAT TRADITION...
...The vulgar European, indulging the time honored inclination to make virtues of one's necessities, dispenses with this very interesting question by prattling about the "crass materialism" of Americans so much opposed, don't you know, to European spirituality...
...The writing of history requires a profound and challenging "point of view" no less than other kinds of writing...
...Several more are promised for this spring...
...H. Lawrence...
...here, sons instead of fathers count...
...The trouble with Leavis is that he is hagridden by definitions...
...The chief effect of this great effort has not been the very considerable satisfactions we have afforded our bodies, but rather the new cast it has given to our souls...
...4 OTHER ESSAYS...
...the foreign relations of the United States, including the story of loyalty and disloyalty in times of war...
...The point is not so much that Americans have succeeded in translating the immemorial hungei of man's soul into solid satisfactions of his very perishable body not so much that (although we are the wealthiest people in history) as the fact that they have tried so immensely to do so, have been so concentratedly oriented toward doing so...
...Schlesinger remarks in another connection: "The American glorified the future in much the same spirit as the European glorified the past, both tending to exalt what they had most of...
...but this is nothing new, since most of tlie great ninetennth century works were also the products of Europeans...
...The "classical" critics are bent on foisting their superior standards and snobbish values upon us...
...But when he sets out to determine the few really great novelists in the English tradition the signal limitations of his method are evident...
...By F. R. Leavis...
...in which case the problem posed in the first essay--Crevecoeur's question — is misleading...
...who belong to the great tradition, we are given to understand, is a preoccupation with "form...
...AS THE SUPERIOR TECHNICAL historian that he is, Professor Schlesinger makes a very telling point in criticism of the over-emphasis given to Turner's "Frontier-interpretation" of American democracy...
...One primary consequence of this fact is that here we are future-oriented...
...The only other great genius of our time, it appears, is I...
...To argue that Fielding's organization of his material was not sufficiently subtle is to set up a restrictive and mechanical criterion of value, for there are novels, large as life, as vital and exuberant, which overflow the channels of established form and defy prescribed canons of strut lure...
...Especially since American leadership, though necessary, is in many ways premature (as James Burnham has suggested...
...Compared with his work, Virginia Woolf's fiction, we arc told, is decidedly minor...
...Not a few of these books have been written by foreigners, particularly Englishmen...
...In the picsent volume the Harvard historian, Arthui M. Schlesinger, famous father of a famous son, makes his contribution to an answer to Crevecoeur's question, "What then i-: the American, this new man'.'" Unfortunately, Professor Schlcsinger's effort is neither exhaustive nor wellpointed...
...Insights of this order are genuine contnbutions to the great effort of creating a new image of our past, one more useful to our modern industrial sensibilities...
...As might be expected, it is on Henry James, the supreme artist in fiction, that he lavishes his greatest store of handsomely finished encomiums...
...It is apparent that we are in for a period of critical "reaction...
...Witness the number of books on the subject in the past few years...
...Leavis attempts to define the great tradition, to show how it is maintained and perpetuated, and finally how to apply the essentials of critical discrimination to the complex art of fiction...
...Arid in another connection, writing of the American's great propensity for joining organizations of all kinds, he says: "By comparison, the muchvaunted role of the New England townmeeting as a seedbed of popular government seems almost negligible...
...As a result of adhering strictly to his critical principles, he is forced to leave out some of the most vital and distinguished names in the history of the English novel...
...26G pages...
...And further, • of course, one does not escape having a point of view by being "objective" - one simply submerge it, thus allowing it to become vague, eclectic, and to remain undepended...
...And I suggest that in this matter we Americans stand at the very center of, carry the full burden of, the quintessential problem of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is to make livable, for man's soul, as well as his body, a naturalistic rather than a religious approach to th* quality and significance of human life...
...Equally suspect is his exaltation of the genius of Conrad...
...But the novelist's predominant interest, it seems, is not in form as such but in moral values as embodied in character arid acted out in life...
...So great is his admiration for the art of Eliot that he considers Meredith far inferior and Hardy......this is the most unjust gibe of all—"a provincial manufacturer of gauche and heavy fiction that sometimes have corresponding virtues...
...THIS STUDY OF THREE NOVELISTS, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, first appeared as a series of articles in Scrutiny, the English critical magazine...
...IT IS FORTUNATE THAT the dynamic novel, sprawling and unruly, refuses to conform to academic conceptions of form and follows its own irrepressible bent, like a river in flood violently overflowing its banks, sweeping everything before it...
...Possibly Professor Schlesinger did not intend that they should...
...Also, Professor Schlesinger elaborates a really excellent bibliography ut the end of the book...
...Each of George Eliot's works of fiction is studied to decide which belong to the great tradition and which xdo not, and why...
...now, to be free, all we must do is give de jure recognition to this state of being...
...He directs our attention to the overwhelming importance of the growth of cities (even quoting a late statement of Turner himself which pointed to the need of an urban re-interpretation of our history...
...The example of this special approach brings to mind the question: Who is going to write a sexual history of America...
...For this reviewer, the best, the freshest and most suggestive essay is the one on foocU~"Food in the Making of America...
...OTHER "PATHS to the present" which the Professor traces, concern Americans as "a nation of 'joiners...
...Objectivity is a very special literary value, often achieved at the expense of more essential qualities...
...What shall we say of a critic who exalts Jane Austen not only above Fielding but also above Dickens and who persists in drawing a genealogical line of influence, a chart of literary continuity, as if each novelist, by virtue of his method, passes on a definite heritage to his successors...
...True enough, the great novelists, like the truly great poets, are significant in terms of the enriched human consciousness they promote, the awareness of the possibilities of liftthat they help to expand, but highly questionable is the assumption that only three novelists have succeeded in doing so...
...Now, however, we can expect the work of achieving selfconsciousness to devolve more and more upon Americans themselves...
...4.50...
...It is good to know that the future course of the novel will be virtually unaffected by such counsels of purity of form and such donnish reverence for "the great tradition...
...Judged by this standard, Conrad is made out to be a greater novelist than Flaubert...
...The question of icliat we are offering the world when we offer leadership is rightly becoming all important...
...I mean the suspicion that what truly distinguishes us Americans is that we practice a peculiar relation between (let's continue to call them) the body and the soul...
...Any scheme of critical values is bound to be arbitrary, pedantic, and futile which ignores such figures as Sterne and Fielding, Hardy and Joyce...
...the institution of the presidency...
...and other factors, among which, the city, food, and the history of the attempt to predict the future in America...
...Not even Joyce is included in this jealously guarded pantheon...
...Fundamentally, then, what draws him to a novelist and leads him to pay lofty tribute to his greatness is a scrupulous preoccupation with form...
...In the case of Conrad, he seeks to demonstrate that Conrad is one of the great masters of the art of fiction, a writer who makes us see things, hear them, feel them, all the details cohering to form an organically related whole...
...The reason for this is easily understood: just as Europe discovered its own selfimage in the mirror of classical GrecoRoman culture, so America is initially dependent on European' consciousness of its view of itself...
...David T. Bacelon has written for Commentary...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 13
