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KENNETH S. LYNN
intensity-and contributed to the tragic vulnerability of some of its
most brilliant practitioners. Who cannot hear the note of personal
urgency in F. O. Matthiessen's dedication of
American Renaissance
to
the two men "who have taught me most about the possibilities of life
in America," or in Perry Miller's account in
Errand in#o the Wilderness
of how he decided, while working in a river town on the edge of the
African jungle, to return to America and give his life to unraveling the
meaning of its civilization? Who has not felt in reading Newton Arvin's
description of Melville's alienation or in Stephen Whicher's discovery of
the unsuspected depths of Emerson's anxiety that he was in the presence
of a personal testament as well as an objective study? When Van Wyck
Brooks related, in
Days of the Phoenix,
how his years of debating with
himself about America through the medium of his books on the Puritan
spirit and various aspects of our nineteenth-century culture climaxed in
a nervous breakdown that visited upon his mind nightmarish images of
Henry
James, he indicated the force of the tensions that lies behind
much of the very best of what has been written about American litera–
ture across the last forty years.
Starting Out in the Thirties
gives a
poignant account of the alienation that Alfred Kazin felt in a period
which was crucial for him personally and for America in general. But in
failing to tell us how the dream of
On Native GTO'unds
originated in
and drew sustenance from the desire to transcend that alienation, Kazin
has deprived his autobiography of its central drama.
Kenneth S. Lynn
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
THE MOTORCYCLE. By Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. Translated by
Richard Howard. Grove Press. $3.95.
THE INTERROGATION. By
J.
M. G. Le Cl8zio. Translated by Daphne
Woodward. Atheneum.
$4.50.
Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues is a superbly evocative writer
who has only recently gained a measure of general recognition in
France. The publication in 1963 of
La Motocyclette-his
first novel
and in many ways his most accessible work--seems to have had the
admirable effect of creating a wider audience for the extraordinarily
interesting short stories he has been publishing since 1946. The tales
collected in
Le Musee noir, Soleil des loups, Feu de braise, Marbre,
and,
