Books: Never Mind

THE AMERICAN MIND (476 pp.)—Henry Steele Commager—Yale University ($5).

Most first-rate historians of the U.S. would not have had the temerity to use the title, The American Mind. Most critical readers of U.S. history will approach it warily. The American Mind moves in on an area that tempts and needs exploring, but Columbia Professor Henry Steele

Commager’s fast look through the library stacks results in just what might have been expected: an academic catchall of social, literary and economic interpretations that illustrate the American mind less than they indicate Professor Commager’s lack of time.

At 47, Author Commager is that rare, ebullient campus commentator who seems ready for anything. Besides paying his careful respects to a busy teaching schedule, he has found time to write half a dozen books, edit a few others, review at length whatever comes to hand, scale the Sunday magazine sections under such banners as “What Makes for Presidential Greatness” and “Great Mysteries of World War II.” Not since Yale’s late, loquacious professor of English literature, Billy Phelps, has the normally reserved academic world sent forth so exuberant and confident a guide to intellectual taste.

The American Mind begins with a jaunty essay on “The Nineteenth-Century

American”, which darts from the observation that “the American was always taking a short cut to freedom, a short cut to fortune, a short cut to learning, and a short cut to heaven,” to the professorial whimsey of “He [the American] knew that through pleasures and palaces though he might roam, be it ever so humble there was no place like home.”

Author Commager then suggests, un-originally but reasonably enough, that the decade of the 18903 is the watershed in U.S. moral, intellectual and economic history, a time when old certainties began to crumble before the blows of science and the resulting new philosophies. After that, he is understandably content to give up trying to frame the mind of the most complex of all nations and moves rapidly through such routine academic assignments as William James and Pragmatism, Thorstein Veblen and the New Economics, the Literature of Revolt.

Those who are well read in these recondite fields will find their reading boiled down to generalizations which are part routine observation, part unbending classification. Those who are not so well read will flee to the mercifully straight evidence of more self-circumscribed historians to escape such tortured, huffy judgments as this one on “the cult of irrationality” (in literature, Hemingway, Faulkner, et al.) : “Its inspiration was science, and it raised the question whether any philosophy could be longer tolerated in a universe wholly without meaning and as indifferent to any meaning that the paltry mind of man might read into it as man himself was to the response that the ephemera might make to his own conduct.”