BOOKS
495
come . Not every production of the language of the period would
kindle that interest.
SONYA RUDIKOFF
DENIS DONOGHUE'S AMERICA
READING AMERICA: ESSAYS ON AMERICAN
LITERATURE. By
Denis Donoghue. Alfred A. Knopf.
$22.95.
Anyone who reads in the larger realm of letters knows
that Denis Donoghue is a critic of formidable resource . The au–
thor of eleven previous books,including last year's
We Irish-the
first panel of a tripytch, of which
Reading America
is the second–
Donoghue is at once energetic, thoughtful and erudite, some–
thing of a one-man task force on literature. I tender this last as an
assertion essentially positive. But I am aware, as I write, that the
phrase can be twisted, not unfairly, into an oblique pun. For
Donoghue all too often asks us to accomplish the task of his prose
before we can fully register the force of his intellect.
Reading America
is a case in point. Indeed, his section division
into "Essays" and "Brevities" could be rechristened "Chores" and
"Rewards." Two very different kinds of prose share a single set
of covers. The longer pieces-on Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman,
Dickinson, Henry Adams, James, Eliot's "Gerontion ," Stevens
and Trilling-are mostly essays for solemn occasions; they are
contributions to symposia or else meditative excogitations for
stately, plump journals like
The Southern Review
and
Nineteenth
Century Fiction-and
they read like it. The shorter, sprightlier
"Brevities" were done as reviews, mostly for
The New York Times
Book Review
and
The New York Review of Books.
In these Donoghue
deals with American modernists like Aiken, Moore, Crane,
Ransom, Tate, Lowell, Plath, Berryman, and H. D. Reading the
collection straight through reveals a great deal not just about
Donoghue's own strengths and weaknesses as a stylist (and, dare
