"A New Literary History of America'

Since I was weaned on Bob Spiller's Literary History of the United States at Penn in the '50s, this ungainly new megabook made me nervous. Almost 250 short takes, three to four or so 50-line pages, to run from 1507 to 2008? Ph. D. Tweeters? And one editor a rock critic and the other an ethnic revisionist from the Free University of Berlin?

Risking hernia, I dug in. I Googled Greil Marcus to test his bona fides and got YouTubed as Marcus introduced his project to an academic audience really tuned in. No hipster here. Coherent. Penetrating. Color me beguiled!

The first " take" was offered by Toby Lester, identified as an Atlantic contributing editor. Hmm. Lester tells how two Alsace scholars, in their fresh cartography of the newly discovered, feminized in 1507 the Americus of Vespucci to fit with the already recognized geographical parts of Europa, Africa and Asia. The final take was Kara Walker's wordless but exuberant six pages of graphic welcome to Barack Obama in 2008. If all the moving parts were this interesting, I had a big read ahead of me.

Then I screened the list of contributors: My rough count revealed an astonishing 40% female. And reps from every continent but Antarctica! Holey moley. This was what I had idealistically called for in 1964 in my chapter in Marshall Fishwick's innovative book, American Studies in Transition.

A new intellectual movement

Spiller's Literary History of the U.S. (1948), after all, was intended to be the Bible of the then new American Studies movement, quartered as it was at Penn under Hennig Cohen's editorship. Spiller et al sought to deal creatively with the uniqueness of American literature. In the 17th Century it was theology, in the 18th politics, and not until the middle of the 19th was it honest-to-God belles lettres.

Harvard celebrated its tercentenary in 1936 by fielding the first interdisciplinary Ph. D. in American studies, freeing each future scholar to approach this subject with his own idiosyncratic choice of prelims. To illuminate the American lit I wanted to teach, I chose American philosophy and Its European antecedents (I majored in philosophy at the Jesuit University of Detroit), American art and architecture (Albert Kahn and Cranbrook had turned me on), American economic history (as a Depression-era Detroiter, I passed somewhat stormily from childhood Catholicism to Marxism) and two fields of Am lit (from start to Civil War, and Civil War to the present.)

As I riffled through this humungous Marcus-Sollors volume, I was pleasantly surprised to read a take on Henry Ford's Model T factory in Highland Park, which I passed each day on the bus trip from my home in Northeast Detroit to U a D, as we then called it colloquially. We see Henry Ford as he visits with Diego Rivera, who painted the River Rouge murals in the Detroit Institute of Art (my first exposure to great contemporary art in situ), courtesy of Ford's son Edsel and William Valentiner, the German immigrant who made the DIA big time. This blog was written by a Jesuit from my alma mater named John M. Staudenmaier. An impressive ecumenical spirit. Heh, I was feeling more and more at ease in this strange collocation of small bits with wide perspectives.

Willie Stark and George W. Bush

I was enchanted by a fresh take on an old favorite, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, by no less a witness than Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times. After slickly illuminating the ironies of the novel's narrator, Raines brings us up to date: "And Warren the ironist would have to appreciate the Washington of George W. Bush: a capital presided over by a rich fake-populist dedicated to the protection of the ruling class from taxation, and a powerful Stark-like vice-president who, unlike Willie, was perversely dedicated to punishing the working class from which he rose." Wy oh Wy did Cheney ever leave Wyoming? Now I get it! A New Literary History is a collocation of Ph.D. bloggings.

Even gossip can illuminate. Take my old Penn mentor Gilbert Seldes squabbling in 1922 (when he was managing editor of The Dial) with T.S. Eliot over a stingy $150 payment for a year's work: The Waste Land! In a piece by Anita Patterson (English, Boston U.) on how Eliot and D. H. Lawrence were simultaneously shipmates passing unseen in the avant-garde night— T.S. to the UK, D.H. to the USA. Hello, Mabel Dodge. Howdy, Valerie!

And 53 years after I was Ph.-deified, it's comforting to know it's never too late to learn— about, say, Theodore Rosengarten, Jewish working-class Harvard graduate student, who invented oral history by taping black freedom fighter Ned Cobb's heretofore unknown struggle, 40 years after his white master in Alabama sold him into jail. It took Robert Cantwell (American studies, U. of North Carolina) to blog us this.

Indeed, it's the mesmerizing mix of old chestnuts and unseen treasures in The New Literary History of America that gives this communal blog its intellectual weight. And it triggers memories.

Warren mellows

Take Robert Penn Warren and Willie Stark. I had been upset by the blatant racism of Warren's chapter in I'll Take My Stand (Vanderbilt, 1930), written when Warren was 29 and should have known better. It caught my roving National Public Radio ear that Vanderbilt University Press was celebrating a Golden Jubilee of the book's publication of that manifesto of the New Critics. I decided to enter Vanderbilt's devil's tent in Nashville with my trusty tape recorder, traveling by way of Lexington, where the University of Kentucky Library was celebrating Warren's 75th birthday with a major exhibition. My NPR card persuaded the head librarian to lead me about.

About halfway through, he posed a riddle: "Which black American writer do you think Robert Penn identifies with today?" Mindful of Warren's early racist rant, I replied, "Langston Hughes" (to me, the Louie Armstrong of black American poetry!).

He laughed. "Not even close!"

"Well, how about Ralph Waldo Ellison"? (I remembered how Ellison's father had named him after the philosopher!)

"Naw!"

"I give up!"

"Malcolm X!"

"You gotta be kidding!"

"No, Honest to God."

"He sure mellowed," I concluded.

"He's a great soul, and he grew," explained the librarian.

Racist no more

When it came time for my NPR interview with Warren the next day, I wondered how to approach his latter-day racial enlightenment. "How," I inquired, "did you move so far and so fast from your racist position in I'll Take My Stand?"

In that charming Southern accent, Warren allowed as how "Life is for learning. I would say black writers turned me on. Malcolm most of all." He gave me, on the spot, a dazzling mini-lecture on 20th Century black American literature.

The old codger's secret

The next day I rented a car to drive down into northern Kentucky to visit Warren's birthplace, a small village named Guthrie. It was a Sunday morning, and not a creature was moving, not even a grouse. Except that gas station/restaurant over there. So I took a break: a couple of coffees over the Lexington Sunday paper. After a refill, an old man decided to allay his longueurs by jabbering. "Where ya from?"

"Philadelphia."

"That's a fur piece! Whatcha do there?"

"Teach English."

"How's biznuss?"

"Slow!"

"What brings you here?"

"Robert Penn Warren."

"Penn Warren!" He was suddenly interested. "Why, I gave Penn Warren his very first job. Carrying water to my construction crew. That's was over 60 years ago! He's the biggest thing to come out of this here town! Nice to meetcha, mister. You see Penn Warren again, tell him Harry said hello!"

So there's my own Am Lit blog, suitable for the next edition of A New Literary History of America.