Showing papers in "American Literature in 1966"

The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography

Abstract: Henry David Thoreau is generally remembered as the author of Walden and "Civil Disobedience, " a recluse of the woods and a political protester who once went to jail. To his contemporaries he was a minor disciple of Emerson; he has since joined the ranks of America's most respected and beloved writers. Few, however, really know the complexity of the man they revere--wanderer and scholar, naturalist and humorist, teacher and surveyor, abolitionist and poet, Transcendentalist and anthropologist, inventor and social critic, and, above all, individualist.In this widely acclaimed biography, the eminent Thoreau scholar Walter Harding presents all of these Thoreaus. Scholars will find here the culmination of a lifetime of research and study, meticulously documented, while general readers will find an absorbing story of a remarkable man. Writing with supreme lucidity, Harding has marshaled all the facts so as best to "let them speak for themselves." Thoreau's thoughtfulness and stubbornness, his more than ordinarily human amalgam of the earthy and sublime, his unquenchable vitality emerge to the reader as they did to his own family, friends, and critics. The new afterword evaluates new scholarship about Thoreau.Henry David Thoreau is generally remembered as the author of Walden and "Civil Disobedience, " a recluse of the woods and a political protester who once went to jail. To his contemporaries he was a minor disciple of Emerson; he has since joined the ranks of America's most respected and beloved writers. Few, however, really know the complexity of the man they revere--wanderer and scholar, naturalist and humorist, teacher and surveyor, abolitionist and poet, Transcendentalist andanthropologist, inventor and social critic, and, above all, individualist.In this widely acclaimed biography, the eminent Thoreau scholar Walter Harding presents all of these Thoreaus. Scholars will find here the culmination of a lifetime of research and study, meticulously documented, while general readers will find an absorbing story of a remarkable man. Writing with supreme lucidity, Harding has marshaled all the facts so as best to "let them speak for themselves." Thoreau's thoughtfulness and stubbornness, his more than ordinarily human amalgam of the earthy and sublime, his unquenchable vitality emerge to the reader as they did to his own family, friends, and critics. The new afterword evaluates new scholarship about Thoreau.

Hawthorne and the Sublime

Abstract: N THE STUDY OF HAWTHORNE S FicTION, ttle attention has been given to the ways in which his work draws upon the traditions of the picturesque and the sublime.' In broad terms, these conventions are the poles of Hawthorne's art. The picturesque determines the spatial finiteness that typically governs his form. His subdued landscapes and fanciful imagery are largely derivatives of picturesque style.2 As a way of looking at landscape, the picturesque views nature through the perspective of the Claude-glass or the aperture, throwing into relief a group of attributes extracted from the whole of nature for aesthetic contemplation. Irregularity of line, roughness and ruggedness of texture, the massing and graduation of light and shade, intricacy and variety of effect-the hallmarks of picturesque style first codified and popularized by William Gilpin-are deeply woven into the fabric of Hawthorne's fiction. Certain classes of objects which become standardized items of picturesque regard, such as fractured rocks, blighted trees, winding streams, and ruined buildings, appear repeatedly in his writings. The thoroughness of Hawthorne's adaptation of this graphic convention to literary art distinguishes him from Irving, Cooper, and Thoreau, among other writers of the romantic period in America, who also responded in a variety of ways to the picturesque tradition. The peculiar value of this mode for Hawthorne seems to have been its power to organize the visual experience of nature in a relatively static pattern.

Young Goodman Brown's "Heart of Darkness"

Abstract: rHE CRITICAL CONTROVERSY WHICH HAS CENTERED on Hawthorne's 11 "Young Goodman Brown" seems to have reached an impasse. Critics have usually seen the story as an allegory embodying Hawthorne's suspicions about man's depravity.' This interpretation implies that the Devil's words to Goodman Brown-"Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness."-echo Hawthorne's own attitude. R. H. Fogle, for instance, writes, "Goodman Brown, a simple and pious nature, is wrecked as a result of the disappearance of the fixed poles of his belief. His orderly cosmos dissolves into chaos as church and state, the twin pillars of his society, are hinted to be rotten, with their foundations undermined."2 Hawthorne, Fogle says, "does not wish to propose flatly that man is primarily evil; rather he has a gnawing fear that this might be true."3 And Harry Levin has unequivocally stated, "The pharisaical elders ... meeting in the benighted wilderness, are doing the devil's work while professing righteousness."4 On the other hand, F. 0. Matthiessen and W. B. Stein have resisted the majority consensus and suggested that it is Goodman Brown who purposely seeks for evil.5 Recently David Levin has attempted to void both points of view by insisting that Goodman Brown is misled by the Devil who conjures up apparitions to befuddle his innocent victim.6 The idea is comforting but not convincing. To take guilt away from human beings in order to place it on infernal powers is not a satisfactory explanation of the 'Among them: Q. D. Leavis, in "Hawthorne as Poet," Sewanee Review, LIX, 179205 (April-June, 1951); Harry Levin, in The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958); and Roy Male, in Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Tex., I957). 2 Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman, Okla., 1952), p. 79. 31bid., p. i6. The Power of Blackness, p. 54. 6 Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expresision in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 283; and Stein, Hawthorne's Faust: A Study of the Devil Archetype (Gainesville, Fla., I953), pp. 6-7. Unfortunately, neither of these critics offered a sustained analysis of his reading. "Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown,'" American Literature, XXXIV, 344-352 (Nov., I962).

Hemingway and the Pale Cast of Thought

Abstract: fHE CHARGE THAT HEMINGWAY is an "anti-intellectual" writer has, in one formulation or another, echoed through some decades of criticism and, by dint of much repetition, has emerged as a critical commonplace. It is a characteristic often observed of commonplaces that they are much asserted and little examined. By a tacit gentlemen's agreement they are granted a sort of diplomatic immunity to search and scrutiny, and not the least consequence of this is that they may smuggle into critical discussions meanings which their users neither recognize nor intend. Further, their use often conveys to the unwary a greater sense of unanimity and certainty than may in truth exist. Thus, those who glory in Hemingway's "anti-intellectualism" and those who deplore it seem equally to affirm it, to endow it with all the solidity of fact. There is, I believe, one very important sense in which Hemingway's work is clearly anti-intellectual, and I wish to consider this in some detail. There are a number of other senses in which this charge is either false or else trivial and irrelevant. I shall dismiss these latter briefly, but with the cautionary note that, for all their flimsiness, they have been the central props in many a discussion of Hemingway's work, and their influence remains out of all proportion to their validity. For those critics who cannot resist the seductions of the biographical approach, Hemingway's private life affords many examples of anti-intellectual behavior. His celebrated quarrel with Max Eastman, his declared contempt for Proust and Mann, the color and violence of his recreations-each has added its brush stroke to the portrait of the artist as anti-intellectual, and the hirsute barrel-chest, the grizzled pre-beatnik beard, the scars of old wounds have likewise been pressed into the service of the legend. The superficiality of this "evidence" and its irrelevance to any reasoned judgment of Hemingway's work are so apparent that all who run may read, and I do not propose to belabor a dead horse. Attempts are still made to saddle the old jade and flog it

The Flower and the Fountain: Hawthorne's Chief Symbols in "Rappaccini's Daughter"

Abstract: rHE SYMBOL IN "Rappaccini's Daughter" which over the years i has received the least satisfactory explication is the flowering shrub growing in the garden fountain, while the significance of the poison so inextricably associated with the flower has, of late, given the cue for interpretations more disturbing than enlightening. In tracing the pattern of isolation and the related imagery which Hawthorne applies to Beatrice and Giovanni and to two other pairs of lovers, I hope to bring the questions of Hawthorne's method, intention, and sources in "Rappaccini's Daughter" closer to a resolution.

The Fallen World in Nick of the Woods

Abstract: AA ;1HEN ROBERT MONTGOMERY BmD prepared his Preface for the I853 revision of Nick of the Woods, he addressed himself to the animadversion with which critics had met the original publication of I837. He denied any motivation other than that of writing a work "to amuse himself, and-if that might also be-the public" (p. 6).' But one cannot read Nick of the Woods without observing that Bird's depiction of frontier life, particularly those scenes which portray Indian characters, is colored in hues of darkness and gore. It is not accidental; rather, it is, as he tells us, a deliberate attempt to draw "Indian portraits with Indian ink, rejecting the brighter pigments which might have yielded more brilliant effects" (p. 7). And, in adding an "Indian-hater" to the frontier dramatis personae, "it was because he aimed to give, not the appearance of truth, but truth itself-or what he held to be the truth-to the picture" (p. 7). The novel, then, is ostensibly a "true" picture of the Kentucky frontier designed merely to entertain, but the reader across the years may continue to observe that the Indians in Nick of the Woods are neither noble nor good, nor is there any hope for their improvement. Moreover, there are none of Nature's noblemen among the white settlers: all members of the human race appear to be fallible sons of Adam in a fallen world.

Sentimentalism in the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams

Abstract: M ORE THAN ANY OTHER RECENT AMERICAN POET, William Carlos Williams bridged the gulf between the technical innovations of modern poetry and the particulars of ordinary life. A full participant in the American discovery of modernism, he remained an innovator until he died. He shared the general modernist hatred of the industrial-urban debasement of traditional culture, of art, the "word," the "poem"; he was as concerned with social chaos as Eliot and Pound; he felt deeply the cubist urge to re-form things into independent patterns. Like Gertrude Stein or Wallace Stevens, he expected his work to be a new extension of reality, just as "Braque would take his pictures out of doors and place them beside nature to see if his imitations had worked."' The resulting poems, fascinated with the expression of familiar moods, things, and speech, are deeply playful in feeling. They are written under the impulse of a constant friendly curiosity, "always indiscriminate, always unashamed,"2 rather than from indignation or a search for identity. They are intensely confident in their own directions. They use forms developed by avant-garde craftsmanship, and for the moment to be read by other avant-garde craftsmen, but they are ultimately addressed to the renewed common reader like manifestoes: All thiswas for you, old woman. I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can't understand it? But you got to try hard-3