THE WRITER IN AMERICA
Kramer, Hilton
The Writer in America By HILTON KRAMER THE thirteen years since Edmund Wilson first brought out an anthology called The Shock of Recognition, the number of critical works devoted to American...
...James* well-known remark in his Hawthorne book, "that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion," is echoed in Anderson's complaint'to Brooks: "It is probably true that the reason our men who are of importance, Lincoln, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, etc., all begin when they are almost old men is that they have to spend so much of their lives putting down roots...
...But his influence and example have always been more important than such dismissals...
...Wilson's own interlarded commentary stitches together into a coherent and meaningful history what might at first glance seem like an unwieldy fabric...
...Taken by itself, this selection has the virtue of putting James' artistic preoccupations into relief against a broad biographical background of family, social, and business affairs...
...With a few exceptions—notably, James Russell Lowell's "A Fable for Critics" and its even more tedious successor, Amy Lowell's "A Critical Fable"—it is an editorial achievement of real distinction...
...Emerson's essay on the death of Thoreau projects a similar isolation, of course, and the essays of Poe exhibit at every turn a brilliance and audacity which are frustrated by their provincial culture and disarmed by the mediocrity of the literary milieu in which they were written...
...The writer in an uneasy, anxious, and even hostile relation to his audience—and yet wanting the homage and confidence which only a faithful audience can bring him—is the modern condition of literature...
...and they color the whole of Emerson's relations with Whitman, an episode in our history which is comical In its postures where it is not enervating in its sadness...
...Against this fragmentary and provincial image of the American writer, the career of Henry James is the notable and beautiful exception...
...he sounds the themes which haunt us even now, the themes of alienation, isolation, and provincialism...
...The four most germinal writers of our century (in America at least)— Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway—all followed in the path of James' moral and artistic example...
...II These are the themes too of Sherwood Anderson's letters, the materials with which he was constantly creating his own (somewhat fictional) self-portrait...
...The Writer in America By HILTON KRAMER THE thirteen years since Edmund Wilson first brought out an anthology called The Shock of Recognition, the number of critical works devoted to American letters has swollen enormously...
...it is one of the merits of these letters that they reveal the extent to which this commitment was sharpened, not blunted, by James' involvements with the workaday world...
...James' career—and the whole generation of expatriates which followed his example before and after World War I—is in that respect a denouement to the drama which pervades The Shock of Recognition...
...Their work is unthinkable in its present form without the master's...
...The result is a rich survey which ranges from the critical essays of Edgar Allan Poe (1842-50) to Sherwood Anderson's letters to Van Wyck Brooks (1918-38), and includes along the way such notable items as Melville's essay on "Hawthorne and His Mosses," a section on "Emerson and Whitman: Documents on Their Relations (1855-88)," the entire text of Henry James' beautiful book on Hawthorne, Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Henry Adams' "Life of George Cabot Lodge," D. H. Lawrence's "Studies in Classic American Literature," also given in full, and important essays, memoirs, and miscellaneous pieces by Chapman, How-ells, Eliot, Santayana, and Mencken...
...The new edition which has now been issued by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy (1,290 pp., $6.50), with some new material added, once again confirms its singularity...
...and in this respect it forms a welcome appendix to his admirable biography published in 1953, Henry James: The Untried Years...
...And American literature may really be said to have begun just as this condition established itself as a social norm in the Nineteenth Century...
...Poe is an especially moving example of the fate of an American writer, if not a very Interesting writer in himself...
...The pursuit of "American studies" has, in fact, become something of a racket in the universities, but no single work has ever quite taken the place of Wilson's important collection...
...that some radical disavowal of the American scene was inextricably involved in his advancement of American letters...
...But however wide or narrow our look at James, we see him nonetheless in his passionate commitment to the writer's vocation...
...Almost the first thing that Henry James felt moved to remark about Hawthorne's literary career was that "it was passed for the most part in a small and homogenous society, in a provincial, rural community, it had few perceptible points of contact with what is called the world, with public events, with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbors...
...He was not the first great literary artist in America, but he was the first to bring to American literature a sense of literature's artistic dimension so profound—and a body of work so prodigious in its vindication of that artistic sense—that no writer who came after him needed ever again to feel shut off from the mainstream of European letters...
...The strength goes into that...
...Edel has intentionally diluted the exclusive portrait of the artist here to give us a wider glimpse of James as a man...
...Yet one cannot help feeling that it was precisely because of James' self-imposed expatriation that this commitment was allowed to fulfill itself in such generous results...
...As we look at the literary landscape today we can see that this drama still persists, but that in our time it has been agonized—but not really changed— by the gradual closing off of nearly every means of escape...
...Wilson's intention was to create "a chronicle of the progress of literature in the United States" by bringing together the documents by which our writers made their avowals of recognition to each other...
...We find them in Mencken's essays, occasioning an intense and critical indignation...
...It seems ludicrous now to think that this was the very ground on which James was dismissed only a few years ago...
...Not the least of this distinction lies in the way this documentary history brings us face-to-face with that nagging, dialectical struggle in which every writer finds himself and which has been a special affliction for American writers: the struggle which talent is constantly waging against a world which invites its compromise and dissolution...
...The image of James as a man of letters is wonderfully revealed to us again in Leon Edel's new volume of The Selected Letters of Henry James (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 235 pp., $4...
...And it is probably important for the future that we do not mistake this slow suffocation for anything but what it is...
Vol. 20 • March 1956 • No. 3
