Friday. Nov. 20. 1959
University Daily Kansam
Page 3
An English View of American Writing
The American Imagination (A Special Issue of the London Times Literary Supplement November 6,1959)
By W. D. Paden Professor of English
Anyone of us who works in or with literature, the theater, music, or painting should hasten to read this issue of the LTS, for it affords a startling and illuminating view of America as it appears to candid alien eyes. In accordance with the paper's long-standing policy, the twenty-eight essays are unsigned.
They vary widely in immediacy of knowledge, tone, and impact; some dozen are of obvious importance. Only a few may be mentioned here. To begin, a slightly edited paragraph may indicate the scope:
The history of the world since 1939 has made all groupings much more self-conscious than they used to be. Pride or guilt or hope or anxiety have fastened, as dominant emotions, on different parts of the world, and the echoes of passionate feeling have been especially felt in countries, like the United States, which enfold dominant parcels of immigrants among a dwindling autochthonous minority. In a sense, there is no such thing as a North American of the United States except among the Indian remnants; in another sense, there is no nationality in the world so tightly embracing as that of the Union. No wonder, then, that as the pulse of the country quickens with a growing knowledge of power and responsibility, the different elements which have fused so miraculously into a single civilization wish to leave some record of special experience . . . What strikes the foreigner, however, is the amount of assured self-analysis which is purely American in tone. The volumes may be signed Chotzinoff or Behrman; they may have as their theme the discovery of the United States by a first or second generation American. But they have now the total assurance of an established literature. It seems unthinkable that within this century Henry Adams was not alone in writing of American literature as a derivative of some elder
branch. For the final test of a living tradition has by now been passed. Writers who once might have hesitated to claim their place except as novelists, or poets, or historians, now feel the authority of a tradition behind them. In the last twenty years the American writer has acquired a fresh sense of his own past; he can at last write of himself in his own way and nobody else's. It is the final sign of having grown up.
American Thought
It is rather new for Americans to read in a foreign periodical an urbane essay, such as that here given the pride of place, which celebrates the achievement of Jackson Pollock, Leonard Bernstein, Agnes de Mille, Tennessee Williams, and Theodore Roethke—and proceeds to suggest that "It might well be argued that Frost is now the greatest poet writing in English. The greatest novelist, though this is more debatable, is possibly William Faulkner." To be sure, there are any number of passages which testify that the authors are British, such as the comment that "Most American war novels, whether of the last war or of the one before, strike European readers as agonized wails of protest that in armies some must be officers and some must be men." The consciousness of difference leads to a surprising depth of perspective:
The American way of life, so much praised by its propagandists, does not seem to appeal to the American way of thought. There is certainly a profound conflict, almost unintelligible to most Europeans, between the average educated American and his background and family. A visiting professor once asked a member of his
Concentration Camp Psychology
By Kenneth King
FROM DEATH CAMP TO EXISTENTIALISM, by Dr. Viktor E.
Frankl, translated by Ise Lase, Beacon Press, $3.00.
The author is not trying to reveal the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. He attempts to show the psychological developments. The examples are drawn from his personal observations in various camps.
Nietzche says, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." These words are the motto of the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," Dr. Frankl's school of logotherapy or Existential Analysis. In the preface, Gordon W. Allport compares Frankl's will-to-meaning with Freud's will-to-pleasure and Adler's will-to-power.
"If psychotherapy and education aim to cope with existential frustration—this world-wide collective neurosis—they must free themselves from any nihilistic philosophy of man and focus their attention upon man's longing and groping for a higher meaning in life."
IN CONCLUSION, the closing paragraph of the book is worth quoting as representative of the author's thesis:
class "Why do all my students imitate Joyce and Kafka?" and received the reply—given without irony: "So that their fathers won't understand them." It takes some time for the foreigner to adjust himself to such an attitude and realize that it is part of the self-consciousness that has left the American short story supreme in modern literature.
The author divides the book into two parts: Part one presents three stages of a prisoner's camp life. In the period following the admission of the prisoner, shock is the characteristic symptom. Apathy characterizes the period where he is well entrenched in camp routine. The last is the period of readjustment after liberation.
THIS BOOK is an introduction to logotherapy, "logos' being the meaning—and, beyond that, something pertaining to the Noetic, and not the psychic, dimension of man" (page 102), and an argument for its use as a complement to psychotherapy. It was encouraging to see that it was not only written by an important man in the field but also endorsed by a leading American psychologist, Harvard's Gordon W. Allport.
Part two explains the basic concepts of logotherapy. Dr. Frankl said that he cannot mention techniques in this brief presentation (111 pages), but that he has dealt with them in a series of books written in German.
THE BOOK is well written and in good taste. Dr. Frankl uses good prose style and keeps the book interesting by stating specific examples of cases to back up his statements. However, two anecdotes (pages 24, 41), in which the author boasts about befriending a Capo (trustee), appear unnecessary. Several interesting facts about camps are revealed which may clear up misconceptions held by those who have read too many war novels.
Self-consciousness
The remark stands in the conclusion to an informed and penetrating discussion, which must be represented here by a patchwork of quotations:
In almost every writer of the time we can see how the American self-consciousness had added intensity to the short story. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited would be a remarkable story, whoever wrote it... But it is not in his work that we find the story reaching the high degree of formal organization that seems to be its distinguishing mark as an art. It would appear that the storyteller's problem was not to dispense altogether with the elaborate organization of material imposed on the serious novelist, but to reduce this to its appropriate scale in a miniature art... In a story like Eudora Welty's Why I Live At the P.O. the use of dialect leads directly to the dramatization of the narrator, and gives the writer all the freedom of dramatic irony he would have in writing for the stage... In the early Hemingway and Saroyan the reorganization is both stylistic and formal. "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more." The opening sentence of a famous Hemingway story at once shows his preoccupations with problems of style and his debt to Joyce and Gertrude Stein; and the monotonous deadpan dialogue ("Two more brandies, he said") inked in over a seething background of melodrama and hysteria, is one of the most remarkable achievements of twentieth century storytelling... At the same time Mr. Salinger's extraordinary creation of a whole Jewish-Irish family, of abnormal sensitiveness — with footnotes
blandly referring us to members of it we have not yet met, like the brother who is a Carthusian monk—is a formal achievement as remarkable as that of Mr. Hemingway, and the intellectual gravity is of the same order.
A half-dozen of the contributors speak with deference of Salinger. So far as I am aware, no American critic has so far attributed to him intellectual weight; and it will be some time before any American asseverates that The Catcher in the Rye is "a work of almost magical charm."
Educational Criticism
And turning to another aspect, the essay on American higher education must be termed required reading, for several reasons. A passage of particular pertinence may be given: It has been easy, in the recent past, to ignore the steady rise in content and competence of the instruction given in the colleges. This rise has been hidden, especially from long-suffering instructors, by the flooding of the colleges with the great semi-literate masses often, naturally enough, ill-taught in any intellectual sense by the flooded high schools, often ill-prepared for more than life adjustment by some of the more foolish products of the more foolish Schools of Education. Faced with semi-literacy, a great state university like Illinois has
firmly announced that it will NOT any longer give instruction in "remedial English." Students will be expected to be able to read and write before they get to college. The universities have had to do much work that in other countries is done by the secondary schools, a state of affairs which has led Dean Barzun to give them somewhat acid praise: "This is not to say that the best liberal arts colleges do not achieve remarkable results as remedial institutions. In four years they often manage to reawaken the highschool graduate narcotized by the special dullness of the eleventh and twelfth grades."
An Amendment
Most Europeans and many Americans dismiss the rush for college education as a mere childish infatuation with a status symbol, or a prostitution of the noble idea of pure scholarship to the idiots of the market place. A cynic may suggest that a constitutional amendment making all American citizens A.B.'s at birth would meet the case.
The essay, the longest of the twenty-eight, may be critical; it is also serious, highly intelligent, and friendly.
(Copies of "The American Imagination" may be ordered through the Kansas Union Bookstore.)
Manet Painting Acquired
By Jack Schrader
In an era when Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings have gained so immensely in
public appreciation that their auction prices have soared to almost unbelievable heights, the Museum of Art has been fortunate in acquiring Edouard Manet's "Portrait of Line Campineanu." The painting, acquired from Charles E. Curry of Kansas City, Mo., is at present being shown in the Museum's permanent collection of 19th and 20th century European Art.
Manet began the work in his studio at 70 rue d'Amsterdam; but finding dissatisfaction in the pose of the sitter, he scraped the Lawrence portrait with his palatte knife and began another and final version. This latter version, the only one of the two compositions signed and dated by Manet, is now in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City.
Despite the fact that the Museum of Art's Line Campineanu does not appear "finished" by many people's standards, it nevertheless serves to emphasize the freshness with which Manet approached his subject. The little blonde girl seated in an armchair is caught for us in a fleeting moment of time, her eyes gazing into space as if pre-occupied with some pleasant and whimsical thought.
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