American Portraits in Paperbacks
UNTERECKER, JOHN
WRITERS and WRITING American Portraits in Paperbacks By John Unterecker "THERE is one thing one has to I remember about America," Gertrude Stein once remarked; "it had a certain difficulty in...
...And then one decides that the truth may not even lie between them...
...The author, of course, was John Dewey...
...and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say 'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is conversing...
...But in the last fifty years—and particularly in the last twenty—the American Character has been a subject for historical research and literary analysis...
...Once that civilization was understood, it could give one little but joy...
...Americans were too busy evolving into themselves...
...Burlingame's book, which tries to see Ford as a uniquely American product, is simultaneously both a horror-vision of rampant capitalism and a hymn to native ingenuity...
...There is no question that he was lucky...
...Tocqueville's great effort of definition and prophecy, written well over a hundred years ago for a European audience, still remains miraculously accurate in its picture of what we were and are...
...For Kazin is always after the "larger picture," and in the process the "lives and hearts of individual Americans" are sacrificed to the ideal book they never intended to write...
...But he was not after geography...
...When the shades are drawn, when—stripped naked of illusion?we stand before the mirror of the mind, what image do we see...
...That difficulty?that anguished search for a unique national personality—still troubles Americans...
...But perhaps the larger picture will always evade us...
...But this public speaker of the 1830s, Tocqueville saw...
...Missouri, each house the replica of the next even to the geraniums in the window boxes and the cat asleep on the window ledge...
...all were marvelous...
...Yet, it is precisely in our lack of systems that Santayana sees most hope for us: "This soil is propitious to every seed, and tares must needs grow in it...
...but he could not, of course, map out the precise route that we would follow...
...Twain's retrospective picture of mid-century mid-America was finished in 1894...
...Tocqueville saw the country, saw more of it, probably, than any of the Americans he talked to...
...America was too busy "becoming" to ask what Americans were...
...A hundred years ago, there was no such problem...
...Most of Tocqueville's snapshots find the American with his mouth open: "An American cannot converse, hut he can discuss: and his talk falls into a dissertation...
...it had a certain difficulty in proving itself American which no other nation has ever had...
...Yet, the limitations of Dewey's optimistic faith can be nowhere more clearly seen than in such a book as Roger Burlingame's Henry Ford (Signet, $.25...
...Five years later, the first of two very important little books, The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society (Phoenix Books, $1.25), was published...
...conformity would be: "It may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become a species of religion there, and the majority its ministering prophet...
...And for twenty years afterward he must get along outside his profession...
...Though one admires Kazin's industry (the sheer bulk of reading he must have done before writing the book at the age of 27 leaves one breathless), it is Cowley's book that —in the long run—lets us see a portion of America...
...George Santayana, in Character and Opinion in the United States (Anchor, $.75), studies the development of that thought, first as it appeared at Harvard under William James and later Josiah Royce, and then as it broadened out to a general American rejection of almost all traditional philosophical systems: "Never was the human mind master of so many facts and sure of so few principles...
...And exactly this is what distinguishes Cowley's book from Kazin's much more ambitious story of modern American prose...
...Perhaps no one definition can any longer encompass America...
...and it is a fact new to the world—a fact which the imagination strives in vain to grasp...
...When, as a middle-aged man, he wins his first important law-case, the defense of a young Frenchman falsely accused of murder, public opinion spectacularly reverses itself: "Troop after troop of citizens came to serenade Wilson, and require a speech, and shout themselves hoarse over every sentence that fell from his lips—for all his sentences were golden now...
...it was still not too big for an energetic traveler to tour it in a year...
...If we don't discover ourselves this year, certainly it will not be the fault of the publishing houses...
...an understanding of the whole process is the least of his needs...
...And though Cowley's book seems at first only an anecdotal record of a group of writers who found traditional values meaningless and who could replace them with no new ones, it is not the melancholy tale of failure which Kazin's book eventually seems to add up to...
...And even this Tocqueville anticipated: "The time will therefore come when one hundred and fifty millions of men will be living in North America, equal in condition, all belonging to one family, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms...
...Opening in the 1830s, exactly those years in which Tocqueville was traveling through America, the novel offers a picture of the "whitewashed exteriors" of the houses of Dawson's Landing...
...Cowley's perceptive study of the Twenties manages beautifully to show exactly what in those violent years drove the young American intellectuals abroad and what, in exile, they found to draw them back: "What the exiles wanted to portray was the lives and hearts of individual Americans...
...Public opinion" decides that a young lawyer...
...His project was to discover the relationship between the individual American and the democracy he lived in...
...For the worker on the modern assembly line is only one more part in the machine...
...We, looking back, can see more clearly the places where the road forked...
...The country had already gone through its formative period, and it was growing rapidly...
...American thought, too, moved in a clear main channel, and Dewey was only one manifestation of what now seems the inevitable growth of a pragmatism that gave the American intellectual of the turn of the century a rather rough and ready feeling of courageous well-being...
...Born with the mind of a trained sociologist before the word was even invented, he traveled through America—an infinitely sophisticated Margaret Mead, observant, analytical—in the early 1330s...
...To do that, he had to discover the American as he really was and not as he pretended to be: he had to catch him when he wasn't looking...
...They thought that if they could once learn to do this task superlatively well, their work would suggest the larger picture without their making a pretentious effort to present the whole of it...
...but why should it not also breed clear thinking, honest judgment, and rational happiness...
...David Wilson, is a '"pudd'nhead" when his first effort at wit backfires...
...Each year, the stream of books explaining what we were, what we are, and what we will become has swelled toward flood-crest...
...and his project was to fit men into, if not to justify, the America he saw evolving before him...
...How are we different from all the conglomerate ingredients the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries threw into the melting pot...
...We feel American, all right...
...Though Wilson's story is only a small part of a plot that involves female impersonation, miscegenation, robbery and murder, the real villain of the piece is public opinion itself, which is almost always either completely wrong or right for the wrong reasons...
...The dangers of a religion of public opinion are fully illustrated in Pudd'nhead Wilson (Grove, $1.25), Mark Twain's brilliant but critically neglected novel of one evolving town...
...Individualism would not be an American problem, though America had been founded by individualists...
...Thomas Wolfe, consequently, comes off better than Faulkner—not because he is a better writer but because his vision is the larger one while Faulkner confines himself to individuals in a region...
...was only one step from the demagogue who parrots whatever the majority dictates...
...For Cowley, in seeking value not in society but in the individual, reveals great reserves of human warmth, of dignity, of "truth" which Kazin's cold search for the larger picture fails somehow to uncover...
...They wanted their writing to be true—that was a word they used over and over —and they wanted its effect to be measured in depth, not in square miles of surface...
...J. Franklin Jameson's The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Beacon, $.85) demonstrates how in those critical days the major patterns of our modern civilization were already being sketched in: a broad suffrage, rigidly separated church and state, small landholdings and growing cities, and rapidly expanding industry and commerce...
...Kazin judges his authors against their faithfulness to the "larger picture" as he sees it...
...Like the houses, the minds of the citizens are set in one pattern...
...He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting...
...One of these was at the Revolution itself...
...it may lie somewhere altogether else...
...Tocqueville rightly saw America headed toward Ford's industrial world...
...One balances such simplifications as Peter Viereck's "a country of unhappy and untragic pleasure-seekers" (Conservatism, Anvil, $1.25) against Dewey's cheerful optimism...
...Dewey's solution for America was to try to make of it an infinitely perfectible materialist's paradise in which children, learning how machines were developed, would be happy operating them...
...Of those reprints, the one which, I suspect, will be most widely read is Richard D. Heffner's first-rate abridgement of Alexis de Tocque-villo's Democracy in America (Mentor, $.50...
...Education put one in touch with one's civilization...
...And this year's contributions to the search have been augmented by a whole deluge of paperback reprints of the best earlier studies...
...The search for the essential America is the theme also of Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return (Compass Books, $1.25) and Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds (Anchor, $1.25...
...but what exactly accounts for our feeling that way...
...who scans the new paperbacks for us, teaches English, at the City College of New York...
...The rest is uncertain, but this is certain...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 18
