WORLDS OF STYLE
639
American books---these are what demand our attention altogether
more than do ideas or themes extracted by critics in the interest of
tidying up what is mysterious or confused. Marius Bewley's title for
a book on American literature,
The Eccentric Design,
therefore
promises that he will come much nearer the central problems of that
literature than does the title of a more recent book by Tony Tanner,
The Reign of Wonder,
with its implied emphasis on intentions, on
ways of perceiving in American literature rather than on ways of ex–
pressing what is perceived. However, Mr. Tanner's book turns out to
be full of very rewarding speculations; it traces important continuities
among American books with tact and unusual discrimination. What
is more, he is alert to the problem of stylization, notably in vernacular
literature and in the prose-poetry of Gertrude Stein and Henry James.
But while showing us how "nearly all American writers have found
it difficult to move beyond the first step [of seeing like children] to
find satisfactory forms," he then admits that "this phenomenon poses
a problem which is obviously beyond the scope of this book."
Meeting the problem, I share Mr. Tanner's nervousness. The critic
who offers the most help is D. H. Lawrence in
Studies in Classic
American Literature,
probably the crucial study of American literature.
Such a claim can be justified even though the book manages to
ignore Emerson, Mark Twain and Henry James. It illustrates how
a work of critical genius can cover a subject even while neglecting
large areas of it. The explanation, in this instance, is that Lawrence
was himself by temperament a n "American" writer working within
the conventions of English literature. He was not only responsive
to the main lines of force in American literature; he himself ac–
celerated them.
In
Lawrence, with a degree of consciousness never
attained by any American writer, are the struggles, difficulties and
tensions that went into the writing of the best American books. So
much did he feel these tensions that perhaps his clearest expression
of them comes when he is talking not about American writing at
all,
but about his own. Thus in describing what he is trying to do
in
Women in Love,
he speaks of that novel as an effort to find a mode
of expression for ideas that are struggling into a life which language,
and only language, can give them:
Man struggles with his unborn needs and fulfilment. New un-
