BOOKS
THE ANT ON THE GRASSHOPPER
THE TWENTIES: AMERICAN WRITING IN THE POST-WAR DECADE.
By
Frederick
J.
Hoffmon. The Viking Press.
$6.00.
I am a little ashamed of the difficulty I have had in getting
through this book. I tell myself that it is orderly, well-documented, im–
mune to the more ridiculous prejudices about the period with which it
deals; a combination of the most admirable attributes of old-fashioned
scholarship and newfangled criticism.
It
scants neither political and so–
cial background nor close textual analysis; its acknowledgments range
from Mike Gold to Ezra Pound, and it makes no concessions to Commu–
nist-baiting on the one hand or to the ill-humored exposure of anti–
Semitism on the other. Its canon of admired works rests on a consensus
of the liveliest critical minds as of the very latest report (Eliot, Pound,
Tate quoted highly-Robert Frost and Edith Wharton falling fast) ; but
it is not unreasonably up-to-the-minute, and tempers some of the harsher
current assessments.
It
is, in short, good-tempered, well-informed, inclu–
sive, balanced-and thoroughly unreadable.
There are faults one can find with the book even on its own terms.
However one rates him finally, one cannot ignore Frost utterly in a
comprehensive history of the twenties; nor fail to say a word about that
redemption of Melville which was the period's most important and revo–
lutionary revaluation of our past; nor treat Faulkner quite so cavalierly.
Nor can one really discuss Stevens' "Sunday Morning" without mention–
ing the word "Christianity," or confront Pound's Brennbaum and Eliot's
Bleistein without saying the word "Jew." Mr. Hoffman is the victim
of his own genteel anti-polemicism, as well as of his literary prejudices.
But the chief point is not that the book is sometimes not as objective
as it pretends to be, but that too often it
is.
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool
analysis, but I have tried plunging through the book doggedly in the
order Mr. Hoffman has imposed on it; skipping about on the basis of
selected references from the index; opening it at random. Always I
am bored. It is, I suppose, partly my own unregenerate nature. I long
for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love. When I cry in protest,
"But you
can't
be sensible all the time-not about this silly, annoying
