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THE LITERARY FALLACY--Bernard De-Voto--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Indiana University (peacetime enrolment : 7,000) is the alma mater of both Paul McNutt and Wendell Willkie. Like other universities, it occasionally invites various bigwigs to give lectures under its auspices. Last year, the Will Patten Foundation lecturer was Bernard DeVoto, onetime professor, onetime editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, who looks like a bumblebee and writes like an angry hornet.

The Literary Fallacy consists of five lectures given by DeVoto. Purportedly a re-examination of the literary '20s, most of it is given over to a vehement tirade, strident as a soapbox oration, against Van Wyck Brooks and his The Flowering of New England. What may have puzzled Indiana students, and is likely to puzzle readers who pay $2.50 to share their experience, is Mr. DeVoto's belligerence. With a chip on his shoulder the size of a two-by-four, with many a dubious assertion insisted on with the finality of the village atheist, and with sideswipes at Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passes, Robinson Jeffers and others whom he oddly lumps together, Mr. DeVoto seems less a critic than a Studs Lonigan of letters, daring anybody to come out and fight like a man.

Says DeVoto: the '20s is "one of the great periods of American literature, and probably the most colorful, vigorous, and exciting period. . . . There were more competent writers in America than there had ever been before. ... In the average they were the liveliest, the most vigorous, the most entertaining writers the United States has ever had. No one who lived and read his way through the Twenties will forget the verve, the excitement of that literature, the sheer animal spirits with which it treated even its most lugubrious themes."

Nevertheless Critic DeVoto then quotes with approval Van Wyck Brooks's diagnosis of what was wrong with much of that writing: "Writers have ceased to be voices of the people. . . . Preponderantly, our literature of the last quarter-century has been the expression of self-conscious intellectuals who do not even wish to be voices of the people. Some of these writers have labored for the people; they have fought valiant fights for social justice. But their perceptions have not been of the people. . . . The literary mind of our time is sick. It has lost its roots in the soil of mankind, although it possesses a certain energy. [Writers] had broken their organic bonds with family life, the community, nature, and they wrote in a private language of personal friends; they felt nothing but contempt for the primary realities. . . ."

Mr. DeVoto then launched one of the most bitter and unprovoked attacks in the history of U.S. literature.

Principally, he told his audience that Author Brooks "did not know any American literature beyond that which academic criticism had established as orthodox." His "knowledge of the literature to which he limited himself was fragmentary and superficial." His criticism was "abstract, deductive, contradictory, unsupported by fact, not derived from either the literature or the society it discusses. . . ." His allegations "became more sweeping, more violent, more contradictory, more hysterical --and more ignorant." A few deep tributes to Critic Brooks's work are followed by angry remarks that if Author Brooks would read such & such a book his views would be improved.

To readers who recall that The Flowering of New England was the first vital reaffirmation of the American genius, after a decade of defeatism, Mr. DeVoto's attack may seem like professional rivalry or critical envy. Most of them will continue to read Brooks, with greater profit.

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