The Soul of America
The Liberation of American Literature. By V. F. Calverion. (Scribners. iSs.)
Mn. CaLvEirrom's title is exact, but perhaps unduly re. strictive. It suggests a specialized subject. The book is, on the other hand, of the widest possible interest to all who wish to understand not merely the literature but the soul of modern America. As Mr. Calverton says, while aesthetic evaluation seems to him essential to literary criticism, and is obviously implicit in much that he has to say, what he is writing here is less literary criticism than social history. His constant aim is "to show as far as possible the relationship between litera. tare and culture, tracing in what ways American literature expressed American culture, and pointing out in' conclusion what forces in American culture to-day are changing American literature." What we have here is, in essence, a cultural—i.e., a spiritual—biography of America.
The liberation is shown as dual : on one hand from sub- servience to English culture, "the colonial complex," on the other from an overwhelmingly moralistic middle-class ideology. "If the presence of the colonial complex made it impossible for our literature .to stand on its own legs, the influence of the petty bourgeois attitude toward' art, in its Moral as well as its religious form, prevented those borrowed legs from ever moving with freedom." Until, that is, prac- tically the present day. Essential to both Mr. Calverton's theses is his conception of cultural dependence upon economic realities. Not until America stood -upon its own feet economically, took its place among the leading nations, was it possible for its "declarations of literary independence" (frequent ever since the Revolution) to have real meaning and
effectiveness.
The paradox of America, as Mr. Calverton presents it, is that, based upon " bourgeois " individualism as it has been from earliest days forward, it has achieved its national unity and international position by an industrial process which leaves, among the great mass of the workers, no place or even loophole for individualism. America is presented as embody- ing three cultural patterns—of the North, the South, and the West. In North and South the individualism of the few flourished progressively at the expense of that of the many. But throughout the nineteenth century the frontier, un- settled, ever shifting westward, offered a means of escape, and in fact it was out of its ebullient individualism that there sprang, in Whitman and Mark Twain, the first shoots of an indigenous American literature. Yet even in Mark Twain's own lifetime all was changed. The frontier, one might say, fell into the Pacific. Within a few years "America had become an industrial nation." An aristocracy of wealth emerged, and between this and the middle-class realization of the passing of its power, American literature found itself free from "the petty bourgeois censor" as well as from "the colonial complex."
Yes, American literature was liberated ; but at what a price ! For it comes forth from prison into no better than a world of pessimism and chaos, in which, unless it can discover —and quickly—a tradition and a faith, it is likely to plunge into "an even deeper chaos and despair." Mr. Calverton looks most hopefully towards the " proletarian " writers amongst whom Michael Gold and John Dos Passos are pro- minent figures, and with whom Theodore Dreiser has recently identified himself. He asserts specifically : "The only writers of importance in America to-day who have not sur- rendered to the pessimism and pathology which are pre- dominant in American literature are those who are exponents of the proletarian outlook."
One can scarcely in a column or so attempt any adequate criticism of Mr. Calverton's detailed judgements, or even his main theses, which he supports with such wealth of material. Certainly it is not necessary to accept all his conclusions to find his book of the utmost interest and value. As a Marxist critic he proves neither hidebound nor over-eager to simplify. In the earlier parts of this large volume—it runs to nearly five hundred well-filled pages—he tends rather at times to over-repetition, but at least he makes his points quite clear, and his writing is too vigorous, his matter too penetratingly
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