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was as much the choice of the grandson and great-grandson of
presidents - historian, novelist, autobiographer, and "stable–
companion to statesmen" - as it was that of the eccentric critic-poet–
educator who was always an outsider in the academy. But both felt a
still more profound disconnection, too. For both there was an
unwillingness to assent to ideas of cosmic unity, a suspicion that man
in general had no "place" in a universe without plan or meaning.
Blackmur also seems to have thought he heard - perhaps
because he desired to utter it himself- a Carlylean Yea amidst
Adams's Everlasting Nays. Adams was one of those, he thought,
who come back from crises of nerve or faith with "tokens" - their
writings-which represent "the impossible, whatever that is, to
which, in some part of us, we fatally shape ourselves." Represent it
however, not as an actuality , but "as a haunting echo." Blackmur
added, "When we come on the lives or works of such men, they have
the peculiar warrant of something we have experienced before, less
perfectly but more deeply; they have the persuasiveness, the
inevitable mistakenness, and the uncontrollableness of sharp
memory. The tokens have values in the actual world which we had
not known we felt, but the tokens have other values, too, which may
belie the actual and the reasonable and the desirable - values which
are precise without being recognizable - and these are the values
created between the withdrawal and the return: we feel their pres–
sure quickening the actual without knowing what they are . And
then - whether we are these men themselves or merely those who
rehearse ourselves in the works of others - then we cannot help muti–
lating, trapping, prisoning this direct central experience in the
conventions of the mind for the sake of ordinary safety."
The passage just quoted (a characteristic specimen of
Blackmur's elliptical style) was written as part of a projected book on
Adams which was left unfinished at Blackmur's death in 1965. He
had contemplated for many years a full study treating of Adams's life
as well as his achievements as historian and historiographer, the
literary monuments
Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres
and the
Education,
and the two novels,
Democracy
and
Esther.
But in the mass of notes
and manuscript now in the Princeton Library, editor Veronica
Makowsky has been able to discover only one unit sufficiently
complete and of a standard comparable to the critic's best work. This,
a continuous reading of the
Education
with an interpolated section on
Chartres,
occupies the bulk of a new volume that gives some idea of
how Blackmur had planned to go beyond the handful of articles on
