Living With Books

...They have to do with such qualities as unselfishness, wit, creativity, imagination, objectivity, intelligence, capacity for love, for work, for identification with something higher or greater than the self—in other words, with the values of the self not only for itself but for others, with values which have been recognized for a very long time and given expression in the high cultures of many countries and periods...

...They talk about their country and its culture, high or low...

...After the Lamb selections, appropriately enough, comes Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up...

...Dazzled and shocked by what he sees, the student will probably not think of the contents of this stout volume as "art" at all...

...Most space, about three-eighths of the volume, is devoted to "Mass Culture...

...The essayists turn brilliant but intermittent beams of light on the dark world around us...

...George Orwell in "Raffles and Miss Blandish" and A. J. Spectorsky in "A Weekend in Exurbia" are thoroughly frightening...

...Our friends and acquaintances talk about themselves...

...Among them are Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, James Agee, Mary McCarthy and Dylan Thomas...

...It is preoccupied with the environmental, the contextual, the changing social mood...

...Auden, in "The Guilty Vicarage," does the same for the detective story...

...Hawthorne's account of trying to administer a custom house, his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, is followed by Henry Miller's "Soiree in Hollywood...

...Most of the section on America is arranged as debate between keen visitors, who dislike the country, and even keener residents, who zestfully defend it against them...

...The essays on places—Montana, Princeton, Brownsville—are sociology, high sociology, written by gifted and observant amateurs...

...Reading a collection of familiar essays in those days, the student who wanted to write usually felt profoundly discouraged...

...The other seven are devoted exclusively to American writers of the 19th century, with two essays each on Huckleberry Finn and Leaves of Grass...

...Of the eleven pieces on high culture, four are general discussions of the nature of fiction...

...Robert Warshow defines with wonderful precision the balance of forces, the accepted limitations, the unexamined conventions which have kept the American Western movie what it is and has to be...

...There are earlier writers too, but they are assimilated to the later ones...

...Although Charles Lamb is here, he is not represented by "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" or "Mrs...

...The idea seems to be to set him standards of intelligence and taste by showing how they can operate on materials which he enjoys or knows something about...

...But when they talk about each other, they do not analyze only, they also judge...

...Why so much attention to mass culture and to the most "American" of American writers...

...Some of the judgments are favorable, or at least affectionate—James Agee's, for instance, on early screen comedy and Weldon Kees's on popular music between 1920 and 1936—but both are nostalgic and record a decline...

...In The Art of the Essay there is little charm and almost no gentleness...

...Russell Lynes's "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" provides basic orientation, as does Dwight Macdonald's "A Theory of Mass Culture...

...If a few lines of Shakespeare or Dante or Virgil were discussed with as much sophistication and perceptiveness as is here lavished on Moon Mullins, Steamboat Stomp and the city of St...

...Like so many American textbooks, The Art of the Essay is a Here and Now book...

...Paul, the student presumably would be overwhelmed...

...Since the editor is Leslie A. Fiedler, the collection is particularly well informed, particularly sensitive to the best and worst that can be said about us...

...Times have changed...

...Battle's Opinions on Whist...

...In two letters to Coleridge, Lamb tells how "my poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity" killed her own mother, how he himself snatched the knife from her hand, and what this experience did to him...

...More than two-thirds of the essays were published in the last twenty years...

...But the volume gives the impression that what is most striking about America is the pervasiveness of mass culture, and that what is most striking about American intellectual self-consciousness is the fascination with which mass culture is analyzed, and the subtle discriminations which permit its analysts to judge it from within by standards different from—but quite as exacting as—those which they apply to high culture...

...Lord Byron describes his troubles in trying to get rid of a splendid, violent, married peasant woman who was his mistress—or one of his mistresses—in Venice...

...America" and "High Culture" each occupy about a quarter of the volume, and "The Discovery of the Self" occupies one-eighth...

...It is an exact chart of certain areas of modern self-consciousness, drawn by those who not only understand this consciousness most fully, but have helped to create it...

...If the essays in this volume, however, are regarded as supremely good talk—which they certainly are—an important omission becomes noticeable...

...And they talk about each other...

...Indeed, no...

...Most of the language is so precise and flexible and subservient to its ends that at first he will not notice it...

...These judgments are not merely personal or derived primarily from the culture around us...

...Fiedler's proportioning is as interesting as his individual choices...

...Fiedler's arrangements suggest that we first discover the self, by acknowledging its tensions and disorders, and then place it in relation to country and culture...

...But there is inevitably the suggestion that mass culture is more relevant, too, perhaps just because it is more threatening...

...Thirty years ago, such a book would have begun with Lamb and Hazlitt, and ended with Agnes Repplier, Samuel McChord Crothers and Christopher Morley...

...They show how inseparable, in our contemporary imagination, cruelty and intensity have become...

...He will feel that he is confronting truth directly, terrifying truth about the environment which we have made for ourselves and which we cannot control...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Robert Gorham Davis 'The Art of the Essay,' Contemporary Collection Edited by Leslie A. Fiedler A textbook called The Art of the Essay (Crowell, $4.25) sounds innocent enough, especially when it is edited with an introduction, notes and exercise questions by a professor of English...

...How could he, with his limited store of words, ever make his own minor thoughts and lesser adventures sound so literary, so amusing, so gently charming...

...Fiedler's essayists are all extremely bright, all observers on whom nothing is lost...