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his communal role, Anderson quite cunningly tried to re-establish
something of this atmosphere of ritual in his stories." After a while you
begin to look around for Anderson the existentialist and Anderson the
Neo-Thomist.
It is not so much that all these observations may not be true–
though that is certainly doubtful enough to make Mr. Howe's dogmatic
assertion of them dangerous-as that they are so remote from the im–
mediate question and so much at odds with one another. In some
ultimate judgment, "the development of American industrial society"
may be our only criterion of value; but at the moment it does not '
appear to be. Even
if
we go along with Mr. Howe in this kind of
thing, we find ourselves struggling to reconcile Anderson the reflector
of "the development of American etc." with Anderson the dipper into
the unconscious resources of the race, and all the other Andersons.
I
think
we ought not to blame Mr. Howe very much for all this;
he has tried to do what any biographer who takes his job seriously must
try to do; namely, to find a frame of ideas which will enable him to
understand his man. That he comes up with a handful instead of one
is only in very small part his fault.
If
we have to choose between his
method and Matthiessen's, I expect we will all choose his. Perhaps he
might have been a little more suspicious that our muse has turned
wench, but it is not his fault that she has.
Arthur Mizener
DICTATORS AND MOBS
THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM.
By
Hanneh Arendt. Harcourt,
Brace. $6.75.
Hannah Arendt's subject has played so large a part in our
lives, it comes as a shock to awake to the awareness of how little we
know of its nature. Perhaps in this last decade the imminence of the
threat was too great to allow us the pause in which we might recognize
the antagonist we wrestled in the shadows. Mostly, the fragmentary
items, in the nature of testimony by those who have themselves suffered
the blows of the struggle, have given us impressions of the intensity of
the crisis rather than understanding of the underlying forces involved.
It is Hannah Arendt's achievement to bring us a long way toward such
understanding.
This volume consists of three loosely connected essays, each deal–
ing with an aspect of the emergence of totalitarianism. A survey of the
development of European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century
