Books: State of the Nation

AMERICA Now—Edited by Harold E. Stearns—Scribner ($3).

The year 1922 was a big year for modern literature. In that year appeared T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses, Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, the first (English-translated) volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The other literary landmark of that year was a startling encyclopedia, edited by Harold Stearns, called Civilization in the United States, the collective work of some 30 outspoken “young intellectuals,” including such names as H.L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford. The startling thing about the book was the contributors’ pessimism. While the press, economists and politicians glorified U.S. prosperity, these intellectuals croaked of U.S. economic shakiness; while others were snuffing the dawn of a U.S. cultural renaissance, these contributors found U.S. culture chiefly distinguished by shallowness, immaturity, vulgarity. At the time this diagnosis seemed harsh and cockeyed. When the literary “renaissance” of the 20s petered out, and prosperity vanished in 1929 even more completely, these gloomy critics were seen to be on the, right track.

Last week Editor Stearns brought his anthology up to date, and the 36 contributors (six of them the same as before) reflect a greatly changed U.S. In the new volume there is less discussion of sex and more of economics, politics, sociology, religion, psychiatry. More serious, it is less unified in tone, as a whole more searching, better documented, more thoughtful. The unabashed praise of advertising, written by Roy S. Durstine, president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, is at odds with the entire book.

Industry. Best essay of the collection is E.D. Kennedy’s piece on industry, dramatizing the march of monopolies. With John T. Flynn, who ridicules the proposition that Business can govern itself, Kennedy calls for government regulation of monopolies, not their dismemberment. “Let us not,” advises Kennedy, “mistake the monopolist for a poor boy trying to get along.”

Labor. The New York Times’s crack labor reporter, Louis Stark, concisely reviews Labor since the New Deal, foresees that industrial unionism will win out, bringing with it, probably, a new farmer-labor political party.

Radicalism. General agreement is reached by George Soule, Evelyn Scott, Harold Stearns that the organized left-wing movement has progressed slowly, in politics as in literature, partly because it has misread the spontaneous revolutionary forces in U.S. life, partly because Leftists have not put their personal lives in order.

Literature. Clearest, best-reasoned chapter on the cultural impasse of the Left is John Chamberlain’s essay. Why, he asks, has the promised “proletarian” renaissance of contemporary fiction fizzled out? His answer: Because writers, with few important exceptions, can no longer find a moral basis for their characterizations; they cannot make up their minds whether to be evolutionists or revolutionists; their values shift constantly with “radical morality, in a world of Moscow trials, undeclared wars, ‘Trojan-horse’ tactics, and political ‘timing’ that frequently works out into two-timing.”

In spite of the grave social dilemmas they point to—the threat of fascism, war. increasing nationalism, moral confusion—the contributors to America Now are optimistic about the future. They see science, rapid communication, the “prophylaxis of ideas” working for international good will faster than the forces of reaction can work against it. If, they suggest, reactionaries persist in running counter to the people’s deep-seated desire for progress and peace, their newspapers will go unread, their movies will be shunned, their broadcasts unheard, their advertising ignored and, if they resort finally to force, their necks broken. Though pessimists may call this wishful thinking, readers will hope that this optimism is as well founded as was the pessimism of their predecessors 16 years ago.