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book charm is not in Mr. Kazin, whose ¥irtues are rather wit, exuberance
and an extraordinary aptness for dramatic exposition. He does not try
to transform our attitudes towards the period he writes about, as Brook&
did in connection with the New England period. The writers of the 20s,
for example, are evaluated substantially as they were in the symposium,
After the Genteel Tradition
(1937). Yet though
On Native Grounds
is chiefly notable as a chronicle of recent literature it is nevertheless
studded with fresh emphases and perceptions. Some particularly good
passages that occur to me at random are the discussion of Veblen's
oddly formal style in connection with his self-consciousness as an immi–
grant's son; the account of Ludwig Lewisohn's peculiar abilities and
dilemmas; the structural analysis of
U. S. A.;
the account of the in–
fluence of the camera on the sensibility of the 30s; the explanation of
Faulkner's grand incoherence as an effect of his unclarified relation to
the Southern community.
I want to question, however, some of Mr. Kazin's arrangements in
the book. It seems to me that the long introductory chapters on Howells
and the Muckrakers contain little that is new and might better have
been summarized. Similarly, aren't the denunciations of Cabell and
Hergeshiemer spun out to lengths unjustified by those writers' present
reputations? I feel that all these pages, · admirable as they are, ought
to have been devoted to poetry and drama, which Mr. Kazin excludes
from his study on grounds of convenience. In a book which is, despite
his disclaimers, really a history of the modern American mind (the
literary mind, at any rate), the absence of any treatment of these two
arts is a serious disadvantage. To mention only one example of the
difficulty which results: the so-called "lost generation" mentality is duly
analyzed by Mr. Kazin, but what of the so-called "wasteland" mentality
which in many ways ran counter to it and which expressed itself chiefly
in
verse?
Poetry gets into Mr. Kazin's study principally through a discussion
of those critics who have specialized in the analysis of
it,
the "Formalists"
as Mr. Kazin calls them. But I question whether justice can be done
these writers when no attention is given to the medium they worked on,
or to its very special importance as a discipline and
via vitae
in recent
literary experience. These critics are discussed in an eloquent and con–
troversial chapter called "Criticism at the Poles," the contention being
that,
in
obedience to the social crisis of the 30s, criticism rushed to two
opposite extremes, one of heedless estheticism the other of crudely urgent
sociology. This is true enough as a formula, but in the application of
it
Mr. Kazin takes such an extreme view of the sins of both schools,
judges each of them so exclusively in terms borrowed from the other,
that he ends by merely exacerbating the "polarity." (The very word
"Formalist" which Mr. Kazin uses of the poetry critics was the Marxists'
somewhat opprobrious term for them.) So both groups are left classified
not according to their actual achievement in illuminating literature for
