Our Literature Through British Eyes:
MANLEY, SEON
Our Literature Through British Eyes The Literature of the United States. By Marcus Cunliffe. Pelican. 384 pp. $0.85. American Writing Today. Times Literary Supplement. 100 pp. $0.50. Reviewed by...
...Such a statement is many years away from Sydney Smith's declaration that Americans had no literature...
...George Orwell said that a writer's subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in??and, we may further qualify it, by the place...
...Is there an American literature, or, as Matthew Arnold implied, is it all English literature, or is it just plain literature...
...As Americans, we are well aware that our literature has come of age, but we would be churlish or cynical not to admit that we are pleased when others discover it...
...An American may wonder if the literary sterility did not go deeper...
...James T. Farrell could not have reared Studs Lonigan in New York, let alone London...
...It has not always been good...
...It is difficult to see our 400 years of literary accomplishment dispatched in an equal number of pages??particularly when American critics have seen fit to devote a library to the re-examination of our literary gods...
...William Faulkner, Esq., Yorkshire gentleman, might have developed into a great writer, but he would not have found the world of Yoknapa-tawpha County...
...Every American writer in greater or lesser degree has been shaped by two forces: English literature and the ferment of his own country...
...An American must fill in the associations, sift his own memory, secure his own identity, all while he turns the pages...
...It is a goodly inheritance...
...Our ancestors lost more than their old homes, their traditions and their libraries in the move to a new, uncivilized land...
...Reviewed by Seon Manley Editor, "James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism" WITH an appreciative spirit of inquiry and true enterprise, Britain has made available to us an excursion into our literary past and an evaluation of our present that cannot help arousing the interest of everyone who attains to "the quality and condition of being an American" ??which, the Times Literary Supplement wisely reminds us, "is not something to be inherited but something to be achieved...
...more important, they lost for a while their emotional moorings...
...No matter what country they left, the immediate reality of the "somewhere else," now our United States, demanded more pressing concerns than accomplishments in the arts...
...It is a state of mind which is unfortunately still prevalent, a defense against the "useless...
...As W. C. Williams once pointed out, "They found that they had not only left England, but that they had arrived somewhere else...
...The mere fact that there is no blueprint for the creation of literature has made an entire area of human expression somewhat suspect to a great part of our population...
...A lecturer in American studies at Manchester, he also worked for two years at Yale...
...Naturally enough, we Americans preferred our own sense, science and genius, even our own hogsheads...
...The hundred closely-packed pages of the Supplement devoted to American writing and Marcus Cunliffe's admirable little book can help reveal us to ourselves...
...Why should they, he went on to ask, "when a six-weeks passage brings them in our own tongue our sense, science and genius, in bales and hogsheads...
...Nonetheless, he is an Englishman, and the mere fact that he has braved such a book makes him suspect...
...From Anne Bradstreet to any contemporary writer, we are creatures of our American landscape for good or ill...
...True, colonial America once proposed that England be compelled to speak Greek, but our independence, shackled so long by hostility, finally emerged from its protracted adolescence...
...But our own maturity in literature has been obtained less by an obsessive search for a national identity (despite the fact that we share Mark Twain's desire to know our business from Alpha to Omaha) than from a reconciliation with our past and a confidence in our future...
...We can now fully recognize our differences and our similarities...
...Cunliffe begins his survey, unfortunately, by justifying the existence of his book...
...Yet, despite its shortcomings, the book is a fascinating reading experience??more interesting, one would suppose, to an American than to the British reader for whom it was intended...
...The Supplement, in an article entitled "The Passing English Influence," answers these old scholastic questions most effectively: "What matters most in the world of letters today is the extent to which all nations, independent but united by a common devotion to the truths of art, can mint from the metal of experience, observation and emotion a literary coinage which can nowhere be devalued...
...The language of Hawthorne and Lincoln and Mark Twain," said F. L. Leavis, "is the language of Shakespeare...
...Cunliffe's task was a hard one...
...Writers and artists have looked upon this phenomenon with hostility, but it becomes more apparent, as our perspective on the turmoil of our past gains in depth, that the conflict within the American culture is not something to storm against in sterile manifestos, but rather a rich generative force which continues to inspire us...
...Our literature is our own, but our language we share with England...
...Cunliffe would hold the popular view that our earliest colonial literature did not have the necessary traditions to fall back upon, and that literature thrives on such tradition...
...Only that combination has made possible the "independence and vigor" that the Times Literary Supplement applauds (one might almost say a little enviously) in its exhaustive survey of our literary horizon...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 50
