Books: John Applegate, American

MAINSTREAM—Hamilton Basso—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

In six of his seven books Hamilton Basso has written of the South. The region of his novelist’s imagination is a sullen and moldering domain, full of crime, where malicious clubwomen exchange poisoned compliments in honeyed Southern accents and where somber husbands carry in their pockets rattlesnake rattles which they buzz as their speechless comment on the life of their times. In Courthouse Square, revolving around a lynching, ana in Sun in Capricorn, about the rise of a worse Huey Long, Author Basso drew as bitter a picture of his native section as Sinclair Lewis drew in Main Street and Babbitt.

From Cotton Mather to F. D. R. In Mainstream Hamilton Basso has a new character in a new scene. The character: John Applegate, an average American. The scene: his mind. An uneven and diffuse book of ten chapters and 246 pages, Mainstream contains thumbnail biographical sketches that run in time from Cotton Mather to Franklin Roosevelt, in variety from John Calhoun to Phineas Barnum. Also included are a brief exposition of their ideas or of the aspect of American life they represented, good quotations from their works and a wandering argument that appears and disappears through the pages like the ne’er-do-well son of an old Southern family returning home for a visit.

What holds the book together is Hamilton Basso’s industrious attempt to prove that the theoretical works of American statesmen have a practical, working, constant significance in the daily lives of average Americans. The quality that makes it of contemporary value is its reminder of the distance U.S. intellectuals have traveled since Sinclair Lewis’ first works: between Main Street and Mainstream there is the difference between an indictment for murder and the studying of a will. Where the plain American appeared to Mencken and Lewis—and to Author Basso in his early works—as a power well-nigh malignant in his complacency, John Applegate now emerges as the first guardian of the virtues that should be preserved. In Mainstream Author Basso goes farther than anyone: the plain American is also an intellectual whose mind is charged with the lessons, half-forgotten or neglected, from the great works of the American past.

But John Applegate is a difficult pupil. He may sit at night before his radio while echoes from a more fruitful period of American thought surge against his troubled mind. But he is a sensible, good-natured individual with a wife, two children, a job, a home, a piano, a pair of slippers, a comfortable chair and a fading determination to “do something, be somebody, get somewhere in the world. . . . It is quite useless to harry or browbeat him. He is a man, his character has been formed, his human nature will not be changed at the crack of a pistol shot.” Political Astronomy. Yet deep in John Applegate’s political consciousness ideas persist as to what American life is, should be and can be, ideas which the Americans in the past worked out in theory and fought out in their lives. Many of the ideas, he cheerfully admits, are over his head. Some of them are as familiar to him as the North Star and the Big Dipper. Lincoln and Jefferson stand for something definite in his everyday life. Around these two fixed stars are the distant clusters of ideas on government, states’, rights, equality, industrialism, whose patterns have not been made clear to John Applegate, and whose practical application to his daily work have not been shown him by the intellectuals, the novelists, teachers, historians, journalists, preachers, who should be the professors of his political astronomy.

But whether he comprehends the ideas clearly or at all, they give their mysterious guidance to his political and social life. By his understanding of them he answers yes or no in the polls of his opinions. By their light he accepts or rejects, chooses his party, his candidate, the place where he votes and the community he wants his children to flourish in. The plea of Mainstream is that he needs more, not less, of the subtleties and complexities of political thought to fuel his mind. The purpose of Mainstream is to give them to him. Author Basso fulfills that purpose most successfully in his sketches of John Calhoun, champion of states’ rights, and Abraham Lincoln, the man who undid Calhoun’s lifework. Samples:

Calhoun. “Growing up on a frontier farm with solitude as his greatest teacher, he had learned to reason before he could read. He lived in the intellect because he could not afford the luxury of living in a library. Things had to be thought out for himself, slowly, painfully, with infinite groping. . . . Time after time he recorded his own awareness that his name and reputation might go down to ruin. . . . There was still the bounden duty of speaking what he saw in the only language he knew. And in all those crowded years, in all the swollen passages of debate, there was no one capable of truly answering him. … He dreamed of being the architect of a new kind of society and instead designed, room by room, the house of his own disaster. . . .”

Abraham Lincoln “did for the American language what Dante . . . did for the Italian—making it, that is, a medium of major expression. … It still may be wondered why he has been so infrequently recognized as one of the major American writers. . . . What … is comparable . . . to the words spoken by Lincoln to his Springfield neighbors from the platform of the train that was waiting to take him to Washington after his first election? ‘No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.’ ‘