Books: Reformer’s Letters

THE LETTERS OF LINCOLN STEFFENS —Edited by Ella Winter & Granville Hicks—Harcourt, Brace ($10).

Lincoln Steffens’ Autobiography was published in 1931, became an immediate best-seller despite Depression, its price of $7.50 and the fact that its author, then 65, had been virtually forgotten. By 1938 it has sold 94,577 copies, and is generally accepted as the definitive account of: 1) the great reform movement that swept the U. S. before the War, 2) the birth of modern magazines, 3) the dilemma of liberals facing such post-War phenomena as Fascism and the Russian Revolution.

Its weakest side is its picture of Steffens himself. There are great gaps in it, years passed over in silence. What was Steffens’ real connection with the McNamara dynamiting case? What part did he actually play on his mysterious visit to Russia in 1917? And was he as deeply involved in world affairs as he claimed? Last week a two-volume edition of his letters answered these questions and many more. Coveringthe period from 1889 to his death in 1936, they give a better characterization of Steffens than he was able to evoke in all his perplexed self-probing.

In his autobiography Steffens pictured his development as a logical process, which had the effect of making him seem egotistical, self-assured, didactic. His letters show him to have been emotional, genial, affectionate, often bewildered, but with a lively awareness of his own contradictions. In one of his periodic hunts for seclusion, hewrote: “I am alone as I wished, and … I can hardly stand it.”

Steffens slurred overin his autobiography his lifelong fears that he was drying up as a writer, that his talents were failing just when he had most to say. He also left out the biggest emotional complication of his life: his love affair with a married woman (called G. in his letters), who could not divorce her invalid husband.

To his sister, who protested against this affair, he wrote the most impassioned letters in the book, demanding that she receive his mistress and condemning artificial moral standards: “Do you think I have been insincere in what I have written all my life? Do you think that my contempt for law, society and conformity are not genuine? Well, I can tell you I am no faker. I shall always try to appear to conform, but I shall not do so to,—well, to avoid the disapproval of others.”

Writing in a minute, almost unreadablescript, which he explained made it difficult for people to detect his errors in spelling, Steffens jotted down a few paragraphs of his letters every morning, sometimes forgot to mail them. With their air of being written for himself rather than for the people who received them, they are unique in published correspondence—as if Steffens had kept a diary, but found life too interesting to hide its record away, tearing off a few pages from time to time and sending them to his friends.