Expression in America

[Harpers, $4.00]

FOR expatriates the clocks of their native lands usually stop in the year of their departure. Perhaps that is why Mr. Lewisohn’s recording of his opinions about American writers from Benjamin Franklin to Eugene O’Neill seems so ‘dated’ —as if written during the hopes and confusions and grievances of 1922. Certainly he establishes his new work on the optimistic cant of American intellectuals in the days when we were thought to be initiating a Renascence. ‘Many an intense small novelist to-day,’ says Mr. Lewisohn, ‘has more to communicate concerning man and nature and human life than Gottfried von Strassburg or even the great Dante,’ and later he declares that ‘the modern writer stands or falls by an infinitely higher, more exacting, more flexible standard than his predecessor’ in earlier ages. We are beginning to revolt against such flattery of our age, just as we have turned against that use of ‘the organon or method of knowledge associated with the venerated name of Sigmund Freud,’ on which Mr. Lewisohn prides himself. Where has Mr. Lewisohn’s mind been during the last decade?

Mr. Lewisohn’s book is, in fact, far inferior to Mr. John Many’s The Spirit of American Literature or Mr. Henry S. Canby’s recent Classic Americans. Indeed, for a while this reviewer thought of it as a competitor of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, but, thanks to a touch of common sense, Mr. Lewisohn is not in the running with that author for fatuousness — exception being made for Mr. Lewisohn’s commentary on Thoreau and Melville. Least of all is Expression in America a thorough book. The first part, covering the beginnings of American letters and the polite tradition, reads like a collection of notes for a university course by a professor somewhat bored with the theme, and the second half of the book, devoted to recent American literature, is sheer weekly journalism. On the Transcendentalists, Hawthorne, Howells, and Henry James, an effort has been made to come up to the mark of the serious essay.

Everywhere Mr. Lewisohn’s air of self-importance intrudes, and on page 425 he practically tells the reader what the reader would in any ease prefer to find out: he claims to possess a purged and considerate mind. But is it a purged and considerate mind which travesties Puritanism or thinks that Vachel Lindsay’s verse is comparable in quality to Blake’s or can say of Poe, ‘As a critic he does not exist,’ or can so coarsely misinterpret the intentions of difficult writers like Mr. Waldo Frank, Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Mr. Ezra Pound?

GORHAM MUNSON