Books
OLD METHODS- NEW HORIZONS
The Wind Blew From The East: A Study in the Orientation of American
Culture. By Ferner Nuhn. Harpers. $3.
Writers In Crisis: The American Novel Between Two Wars. By Maxwell
Geismar. Houghton Mifflin. $3.
In this case the publishers' blurbs are relevant. Van Wyck Brooks
pronounces Nuhn a writer of "real vision," while Edmund Wilson gives
his approval to Geismar. This makes an appropriate alignment, since
The
Wind Blew from the East
is a kind of corn·fed
America's Coming of Age,
and
Writers in Crisis
uses a method certainly learned in part from
The
Triple Thinkers.
It will be as instances of critical method and its appli·
cation that these two books chiefly command our interest, as ambitious
efforts to re-orient and extend our livinl? tradition.
Nuhn's study is the first installment of a projected trilogy. His lead·
ing assumption is that "our main tradition is not 'romantic,' in any useful
meaning of the word,'' that Franklin and Jefferson, Emerson and Whit·
man, Twain and Garland and the later Middle Western novelists, have all
been "realistic" in their assimilation of experience. But these writers are
not his subject here. He has reserved them for another volume, as he has
also the treatment of the "tragic strand" in our literature. Here he has
concentrated on "our minor 'aristocratic tradition'," more specifically on
Henry James, Henry Adams, and Eliot, more generally on speculations of
"how to accommodate in our tradition the Atlantic Ocean!" He gives the
first full-length literary account of a phenomenon which our historians
have often noted, the so-called back-track movement. While our economic
pioneers were driving ever more rapidly westward throughout the nine·
teenth century, our cultural curent was often drawn eastward. We can
note this as early as Washington Irving and Longfellow, though the pil–
grimages became more frequent after the Civil War. Howells and then
Garland went reverently from the Middle West to Boston, while James
was just leaving Boston for Europe and leading the way in turn for Eliot
and the post-war expatriates of 1919. Nuhn's mode of symbolizing this
phenomenon is suggested by his chapter-title, "East Wind-Western Star,"
and a characteristic instance of his evocative style reveals his thesis: "West
for work and money, back East for ease and grace. West for profanity,
East for piety. West for action, East for status. West for function, East
for ornament. West for democratic color, East for aristocratic form. That
is what the East Wind says."
When he descends to particulars, Nuhn's work is very uneven.
He
makes the most extended application of his variegated thesis to James, but
422
