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STEPHEN DONADIO
were set out against the enemy, dressed in the colors of the wood. The
vegetable pretense."
From the looks of this book as a whole, however, it seems apparent
that American writing has taken a terrific, albeit subliminal, beating
at the hands of the mass media, and that the practice of making junk
sculptures in the vacant lot of language behind the Advertising Factory
is no longer even amusing. The two alternatives of commercialism or
isolation are eating away at the core of fiction:
the will;
and if this
book is at all typical in the obliteration by experience or numb acceptance
of lifelessness evidenced by so many of these writers, the damage has now
reached tragic proportions. To survive, writing will have to become a
weapon against, not a symptom of, senseless tedium and cultural outrage;
American writers will have to resist, not help sell, the internal invasion.
Stephen Donadio
THE NEW HISTORY
HISTORY AS ART AND SCIENCE. By
H.
StUllrt
Hughes. Horper end
Row. $3 .95.
The philosophy of history was once a major concern of the
great philosophers, but what they wrote never seems to the practicing
historian to have much to do with his craft. The historians who specu–
late on the philosophical assumptions of their discipline are too often
philosophical innocents. Typical of their ruminations are the tedious
addresses given annually by Presidents of the American Historical Asso–
ciation- dreary and banal "philosophical" performances by historians
who are, in their own bailiwicks, respected and often brilliant scholars
and craftsmen.
H. Stuart Hughes may tum out to be the most notable American
exception to these strictures. The five essays in this volume are slight–
they were originally informal talks. The fourth essay, "The Sweep of
the Narrative Line," is the kind of thin philosophizing which would do
for one of those Presidential Addresses. But the essays as a whole are
the work of a distinguished historian talking sense about what the his–
torian does and what the study of history is. Hughes, a propagandist of
