The American Scholar

...But what made his death on June 24 at age seventy-eight so hard to take was the fact that, contrary to the universal pattern, his work was actually getting steadily better...

...He produced countless articles, essays, and reviews, and thirteen books, including important studies of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlie Chaplin...

...The same was true of Kenneth Lynn himself...

...His was in no sense an unfulfilled talent...

...So I expected to find him an efficient, highly methodical teacher, disciplined, conservative, and hierarchical in his methods...

...Unlike many of his Hopkins colleagues, he had no interest in training people, no interest in creating disciples, no interest in building an empire...

...Whether about the essays of Emerson or the journalism of Walter Lippmann, the causes of the American Revolution or the effects of the Greenwich Village counterculture, Lynn’s work converged on the lives and psychologies of his subjects...

...And there is one image of my last visit to his home just before his death that remains in my mind with especial vividness...

...I can remember exactly when I first encountered his name...

...Not everyone came to appreciate the treatment...

...But he was not that way at all...

...And here, by God, was a genuinely provocative piece of writing by a live-wire scholar who wrote like a dream, was free of the smelly orthodoxies, was ready to take on the eminences of his field, was willing to make waves, and was able to make the study of American history the exciting thing it deserves to be...

...Like many warriors, he had a profound reticence and rarely spoke of personal matters...

...After reading "The Regressive Historians," I knew I wanted to go to graduate school where Kenneth Lynn taught...

...When I found him at Johns Hopkins, he turned out to be not at all what I had expected...

...Frederick Crews, writing in the New York Review of Books, stated the scholarly consensus when he remarked that Lynn’s Hemingway (1987) was “a model of the way biographically informed criticism can catch the pulse of works about which everything appeared to have been said...

...He thought the literary establishment’s derision of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin outrageous, and he enthusiastically (and successfully) promoted the book’s reconsideration through the publication of a definitive edition...

...Disciplinary identity was irrelevant to him...

...He revived interest in the rich but neglected works of folklorist Constance Rourke...

...Undergirding it all was a desire to grapple with the meaning of the nation and an unending fascination with what Matthiessen called, in a phrase Lynn loved to repeat, “the possibilities of life in America...

...And then about ten seconds later, he paused and looked up, staring into space for a moment to give the matter more serious thought, as the music blared away in the background...

...His retirement from Johns Hopkins, which came not long after the appearance of his prize-winning Hemingway biography, occurred almost entirely without fanfare, at his insistence...

...When he was right,” he said, that confident gleam in his eye, “there was none better...

...I asked, knowing that was wrong, but wanting to give him one last chance to correct me...

...It was an old, scratchy, but wonderfully frenetic recording of Fats Waller playing “Honeysuckle Rose...

...The Dream of Success (1955), a critical study of five fin de siècle realists (the novelists Dreiser, London, Phillips, Norris, and Herrick), established the pattern of his work...

...Kenneth Lynn seemed only to be gathering strength, until the very moment leukemia appeared at his door and stayed until night came...

...It was, and remains, a characteristic intellectual dilemma...

...and the youthful Oscar Handlin, whose work was soon to revolutionize the study of American social history...

...He refused to reduce teaching to a didactic process and maintained an almost improvisational air...

...It was mid-morning, and Kenneth walked into the living room, pulled out an old LP, put it on his antique turntable, turned it up full blast, and sat down in his favorite chair to read...

...He seemed from the start to have a knack for biography, not only as a means of discerning the shape of a life, but also as a way of integrating a variety of disciplines...

...But he cannot prevent us from remembering him...

...For a student, this way of doing things could be immensely flattering, and immensely intimidating...

...He had been in the English department at Harvard and history at Hopkins, and he was equally at home, and equally not at home, in either setting...

...Matthiessen, whose equally magisterial American Renaissance had become a key text of the new “American Studies” movement...

...As his death approached, he insisted that there was to be no public funeral, no memorial service, no ceremony outside the confines of the family...

...Academics love to use the word "provocative" as a term of approbation, but they scream bloody murder whenever something genuinely provocative actually comes along...

...BY WILFRED M. MCCLAY Kenneth Lynn enjoyed a long and productive career as a scholar of American literary and intellectual life, first at Harvard, then in a quixotic attempt to turn Washington's Federal City College into a serious university, then at Johns Hopkins, and then in a very active retirement...

...And there was every reason to believe the large-canvas biography of Rudyard Kipling on which he was hard at work at his death—a bold departure for a man whose entire previous career had focused upon the study of American figures—would be his finest work yet...

...What he wanted to do was write and think...

...Although the po-liticization of historical scholarship was not yet as advanced in 1979 as it is today, narrow academicism and dreary prose were plentifully in evidence, and the ideological deformations now so familiar were taking hold...

...The project was about to move into high gear...

...Kenneth Lynn was not an easy man, and not an easy man to know...

...In fact, this lack of a method turned out to be one of his greatest strengths...

...In that discouraging context, Lynn's essay came as a sheer astonishment...

...And it could be daunting to receive his criticism, precisely because his standards were so high...

...Flattering, because he was, by implication, treating us as equals...

...It meant that he didn’t so much teach us as let us in on his thoughts—which were infinitely more interesting and instructive than merely “covering the material...

...Hemingway lovers objected to Lynn’s challenges to the Hemingway myth and his relentless exposure of Hemingway’s cruelty and dishonesty...

...The books, along with his fiftythree- year marriage to his wife Valerie and his three children, were legacy enough...

...But in the end, the effect has been the opposite, and the book has been widely credited with revitalizing Hemingway studies...

...Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga...

...He just wanted to write...

...He had a superb stage presence and one of the most extraordinary reading voices I have ever heard, extraordinary less for its sonority than for the remarkable blend of intelligence, structure, and weight he imparted to the words as he spoke them...

...At Harvard, Lynn soon came under the influence of three giants of Americanist scholarship: Perry Miller, a legendarily tough-minded literary historian known for his magisterial revisionist studies of New England Puritanism...

...There was one standard, one law for the lion and the ox, and no allowances made for youth...

...In the book Lynn demonstrated that his five writers were riven by a glaring and profound contradiction: They ardently sought the same “Bitch- Goddess” of worldly success that their books condemned...

...When he needed, of course, he could be a polished and entertaining formal lecturer...

...There was another enduring theme one can already detect in The Dream of Success: a deep suspicion of the anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois elitism of many American intellectuals, with their selfcongratulatory illusion of superior separateness...

...Like many in the original American Studies movement, and like such forerunners as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, Lynn felt that the native grounds of American culture were underappreciated national assets, and he had a warm but unsentimental appreciation of the possibilities of democratic culture...

...His trademark prose combined keen psychological insight, sensitivity to literary forms and meanings, and a sophisticated sense of historical background...

...But his real gifts as a teacher were evident outside the classroom...

...What on earth had this man said, to produce such bile in response...

...Some of Lynn’s conservative admirers were uncomfortable with his use of psychosexual themes to explain the strange persistent motifs of androgyny and sexual ambiguity in Hemingway’s work, fearing that such analysis eviscerated Hemingway the writer...

...A couple of years later, when I suggested putting together a Festschrift in his honor, he firmly rejected the idea...

...All through his years as a university professor, he encouraged the serious study of American popular culture...

...He did not grade on the curve—not with Richard Hofstadter and not with me...

...Fats Waller...

...Then he turned to me and smiled...

...I had never found anything written by a contemporary American historian that was so forceful, pithy, graceful, funny, and fearless...

...Lynn loved his country passionately and deplored academia’s transformation of American Studies into what he only half-jokingly called “anti-American studies,” a development that became the target of many of the essays in his exhilarating 1983 collection, The Air-Line to Seattle...

...No,” he said distractedly, flipping through the pages of his book...

...By 1954 Lynn had finished his doctoral work and joined the Harvard English department, and his first book appeared the following year...

...Nor did he have much of a commitment to the discipline of history in itself...

...He taught mainly by intellectual example...

...He had already sketched out ambitious travel plans, not only to do research but to visit many of the places Kipling had been...

...The offended letter-writers made the article so intriguing I had to go back to the previous issue—and once I read it, I was hooked forever...

...There were times when no one—perhaps including him —knew exactly what was coming next...

...His literary, biographical, historical, and masscultural interests all converged in the massively researched Charlie Chaplin and His Times (1997), a book that celebrated the brilliance of Chaplin’s popular art while relentlessly exposing his moral foibles and political fatuities...

...The result, he averred, “is an admirable combination of justice and compassion,” which had made Hemingway “interesting again...

...His study of Mark Twain demonstrated how deeply Twain was rooted in a robust and unique American tradition of Southwestern humor...

...A lunch with Kenneth in the Levering Hall cafeteria—he always preferred that more plebeian setting to the Hopkins Club—especially when he was working on something and wanted to bounce his ideas off you, was worth three semesters of seminars...

...The personalities of the authors,” he later wrote in his 1973 book of essays, Visions of America, are where “history and literature intersect interestingly...

...Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga...

...Lynn was born in Cleveland in 1923, and his facility as a writer may well have derived from the influence of his father Ernest, who was a newspaperman and author of such novels as the 1930 Jealous Wives...

...We all were playing in the same league...

...He was never interested in creating such memorials to himself...

...It was in a 1979 issue of the American Scholar, in a clutch of irate letters about an article Lynn had written called "The Regressive Historians...

...Many would argue his single finest achievement was his acclaimed biography of Ernest Hemingway...

...It was with a similar aim in view that Lynn’s 1971 biography of William Dean Howells sought to restore the fallen literary reputation of his subject—fallen because Howells had been a successful man, whose success branded him as a genteel lightweight who looked upon “the smiling aspects of life” rather than groan about the horrors of America...

...But the crucial elements in his early intellectual formation came into play at Harvard after World War II, where the interdisciplinary American Studies movement was in its heyday, and an unusually mature generation of students, many of them returning veterans like Kenneth Lynn, streamed into the lecture halls, eager to make sense of the character and destiny of their newly predominant nation...

...Indeed, he always seemed to me slightly uneasy in the teacher’s role, partly because his approach to teaching was so unorthodox and intuitive, but also because he was so often preoccupied with whatever questions he was writing or thinking about...

...I still remember conferring with him once in his office, about a draft of something I’d written, and getting some fairly astringent criticism, culminating in his saying, with a certain disgust, “Bill, this is the sort of approach that Hofstadter might have used...

...A ruggedly handsome, athletic man then in his late fifties, with finely chiseled features, jutting jaw, penetrating blue eyes, and an impressive head of wavy brown hair, he looked every inch “The Professor from Central Casting,” even down to his old-fashioned woolen tweed suits with their antique lapels and baggy straight-legged trousers...

...Art Tatum...

...Intimidating for the same reason—he was treating us as equals, not as insubstantial graduate students, used to being indulged, and from whom nothing much could be expected...