"ALL THAT LITERATURE HAS TO OFFER…"
Glicksberg, Charles I.
"All That Literature Has to Offer..." TRENDS IN LITERATURE.n By Joseph Shipley. The Philosiphical Library. 457 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by CHARLES I. GLICKSDERG GETTING AS FAR AWAY as he can from...
...To illustrate the ambitious scope and rich variety of this book one has but to mention the vast variety of figures and movements that are riiiru—oe1 in one part which deals with science, and modern movements in literature and art...
...But even American army officials—» those perennial political adolescents — soon began to sense the quite savory Plymouth Rock spirit about those Russians, and the realization that they represented millions of Russians still within the Soviet Union opened new vistas for psychological warfare...
...At long last, the general reader, wearied by talmudic expositions and baffled by Jesuitical disputations concerning this and that, can find his way with ease through the fascinating labyrinth of literature, with Dr...
...These people could only survive by hypocrisy — by aping the words and actions of • their superiors and colleagues, who themselves were living by the lie...
...THE SECTION dealing with "The Classical" brings needed clarity and wisdom to a subject that has been muddied by the pedantry of scholarship...
...He is concerned to trace a process, and he carries out this aim most successfully...
...Why be compelled to choose between the extremes of individualism and statism...
...The thought and art of each age is concerned either with universals or particulars...
...Each age, in different ways, either holds that nature is primary or that man is primary and superior to nature...
...These are examples of the first doubts — doubts which creep surreptitiously into the hearts of even the sturdiest beliewers...
...There is a chapter, for example, with the provocative title, "Sidney Carton looks at Anthony Adverse...
...Here is a volume that contains the precious distillation of a lifetime of diligent and fruitful reading...
...The tone throughout is tolerant, understanding, eclectic, humane, affirmative...
...His translations from their work (the original version is given in the notes) are both vigorous and felicitous...
...Political opposition grew — in true dialectic fashion — from the small personal resentments engendered by the Party State...
...Edited by Louis Fischer...
...Whatever reforms are instituted, the rights of the individual must be safe guarded...
...We are given a fine analysis of how these complex forces interact...
...For this book has a unifying pattern which serves to make clear what literature, despite its enorjnous diversity, attempts to do and how it succeeds in doing it...
...Plymouth Rock Russians THIRTEEN WHO FLED...
...Beneath the quarrels of schools and sects, the mutations of time and taste, the cycles of conveniton and revolt, classicism and romanticism, symbolism and naturalism, there is a central and abiding element...
...These three peaks left indelible imprints: the exile of millions of peasants, mass starvation, the arrest and condemnation for synthetically manufactured "crimes" of friends and relatives, the war-born schism in the soul between hatred for their Bolshevik government and love-for their Russian land...
...Shipley is at his best, however, in the lively section devoted to the romantic rebellion...
...There is even a rewarding chapter on the Freudian principle as applied to literature...
...Fischer and Yakovlev have rendered a valuable service to those Americans who want to grasp at the heart of Soviet life...
...The United States has shown that it can be done...
...Their pioneer work is a Strong antidote to the most subtle brand of Stalinist intellectual poison — the myth of the impregnable, monolithic state...
...Read either way, they are most useful adjuncts, a goldmine of literary information...
...Shipley boldly and brilliantly relates literature to life...
...Messrs...
...Here is a book frankly intended for the general reader, not for the hair-splitting specialist...
...Their stories have been collected by Louis Fischer and Boris Yakovlev...
...Propaganda is fleeting, but art endures...
...Why not the golden mean...
...A worker is exiled under false pretenses...
...Out of these basic thoughtpatterns, the literary expressions of the various schools take their particular shape and thought...
...Their simple narratives resound with their quest for freedom— not the blind devotion to prerevolutionary traditions, or the revolt of the outcast, but the human cry for the abolition of secret police, concentration camps, kolkhozes, and political control of every phase of life...
...Reviewed by ALLAN DANE WORLD WAR II did as much to promote the cause of Russian freedom in the West as World War I did to nourish and then destroy it in Russia proper...
...Why, he asks, must one adopt an either-or alternative...
...A girl sees her parents "repressed...
...Through the rent in the Soviet "fortress" made by the armies of Hitler, hundreds of thousands of Russians — as soldiers and i as forced laborers *- got their first glimpse of the outside world and — more important — Westerners heard from Russian lips a story that sounded — and is — far more authentic than the rosy picture of wonderland painted by foreign Communists and sympathizers...
...DR...
...As he traces the development of literature from the time of the Greeks on, we behold the recurrent opposition between the self and the world, between body and mind.linity and multiplicity, idealism and materialism, monism and pluralism—and all the other dichotomies that have bedeviled the human mind in the course of the ages...
...Shipley, in Trends in Literature, declares a moratorium on professional — and professorial — confusion...
...Shipley acting as his voluble but helpfully informative and often inspiring guide...
...Allan Dane has written for Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Higher Education, and other periodicals...
...244 pp...
...It is unfortunate, however, that the author, in the midst of a most revealing survey of romantic tendencies, will stoop to puns, not always of the highest quality, which break the spell and distract from the value of the discourse...
...This whole part is extremely well done, rich in substance, well documented, interestingly set forth...
...he also takes up general semantics, psychology, the conflict between free will and determinism, vitalism, the psychoanalytic theories of Jung, and even Existentialism...
...E. K. Cummings, Basic English, James Joyce, sociological fiction, Marxist criticism, Agrarianism, the proletrian novel, the literary aims of the Soviets, industrialism in poetry, Neo-Humanism, Expressionism, Ultraism, dada, Surrealism, D, H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, Jules Romains, Ezra Pound, music, relativity, the dance, painting, sculpture, critics like Mencken and Burton Rascoe, the drama: these are but a selected sample of what this section covers in its animated and somehow connected discourse...
...At first, Westerners were contemptuous and aloof towards those Russians who fled to freedom...
...Today the individual seems anachronistic, a dying, discredited figure, shadowed with guilt...
...What is fascinating in these simple tales is the graphic way they describe the genesis of opposition...
...3.00...
...Reviewed by CHARLES I. GLICKSDERG GETTING AS FAR AWAY as he can from the tendency to discuss literature in a specialized jargon, Dr...
...Shipley's sane views on the subject...
...In the last part the author examines some of the manifestations of the social, the national, and the universal in fields other than art, discussing, among other things, such matters as the collective emphasis making itself felt in advertising and scientific pursuits...
...At the first opportunity — the war — the floodgates burst, and the thousands refused to go home...
...it seeks to trace their course of evolution, to reveal the unity within the variety, the pattern of universality that emerges in the flux of phenomena and fashions, the permanence within the heart of change...
...That is the note on which this highly stimulating and valuable book ends...
...In presenting the voices of thirteen who fled, they have spoken for the millions who had to stay behind...
...A soldier wonders if all the privations are really necessary...
...If he reviews the achievements of the past, it is largely in order to discover what light they throw on the pressing problems of the present...
...Shipley is convinced, and presents cogent arguments :ind impressive evidence to support his thesis, that there is no necessity for such an extreme choice...
...For many of these thirteen were enthusiastic Communists in their youthmembers of the Pioneers, Komsomol, Communist Party...
...There is a section dealing with the vexed problem of censorship, the ethics of bowdlerism, the question of pornography, and all this is treated in its historical range and complexity, neatly disposed of in a few compact pages...
...here are insurgent forces, movements of thought and sensibility, which can be brought into fruitful relation with the temper of his own age...
...weren't they "deserters" and wasn't that slightly unsavory...
...SHIPLEY ALSO TACKLES the perplexing problem of the relation between the individual and society...
...It is amazing, the swiftness and sureness of touch with which he spans a century of time and thought, extracts its essence, effectively illustrates its loading trends, and then passes on...
...former Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Architecture...
...Whatever limitations the book may suffer from, when judged by the exacting standards of what is known as the "new criticism," are more than offset by its lucid and engaging style, its wealth of apposite and illuminating quotations, and its incisive, ingratiating method of presentation...
...He prefers democracy, which represents the middle path...
...It clarifies the aims and achievements of the Symbolists...
...Such considerations inevitably force the author to take up the political situation...
...Thirteen Who Fled introduces the American reader to a cross-section of these Russians who fled to freedom...
...Harper and Brothers...
...e e e THE HIGHLIGHTS OF SOVIET experience were collectivization, purges, and war, and only naturally, they dominate the accounts of these refugees...
...Shipley docs his most distinguished writing in appraising the work of Baudelaire and the poets of various talents who came after him...
...Those who are at all confused on the issue of "propaganda" and its relation to literature, would do well to read Dr...
...This volume, in its firm denial that obscurity is necessarily a sign of profundity, thus marks a "reaction" against the ponderous pontifications of critics like Kenneth Burke...
...A young man is fed up with the endless party meetings and peptalks...
...Not quite, for the notes, about fiftyfour pages of them, can be read either separately (some of them constitute delightful essays) or in conjunction with the points raised in the text...
...Charles Glicksberg is a professor of English at Brooklyn College...
...In our time the emphasis is preponderantly on collectivism, and one is asked to belong to one of two camps: Fascism or Communism...
...A peasant clashes with the kolkhoz administration...
...All that literature, philosophy, and science have to offer us in the way of beauty and wisdom, are soundly appraised and effectively presented, so as to reveal the essential unity within variety, the permanence within the seeming chaos of change, the ordered rhythm of continuity that characterizes the literary heritage of the race...
...Shipley possesses a darting, assimilative, relational mind, capable of summing up whole movements, of bringing relevant and vital evidence to bear on eaeh case, and to compare the critical ideas of the past with those of the contemporary scene...
...It is unfortunate, too, that this book should have been given such a nondescript, academically neutral title, for it does vastly more than Survey a number of literary trends...
Vol. 32 • July 1949 • No. 29
