Innocent Abroad

FROM THE HEART OF EUROPE (194 pp.) F. O. Matthiessen--Oxford ($3).

Harvard Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen is a bald, mild-mannered little bachelor who thinks the job of U.S. intellectuals is to "rediscover and rearticulate" the need for Socialism. He spent the last six months of 1947 lecturing on U.S. literature in Salzburg and Prague and writing a book "about some of the things it means to be an American today." But From the Heart of Europe never gets close to that subject. It is one of those embarrassingly naive excursions into politics and world affairs that show the academic critic (Matthiessen is the nation's most assiduous Henry James scholar) with his judgment cap off and his hair shirt on.

Song in Salzburg. As his oddly reckless vocabulary shows, the trip must have been a heady one for the footloose professor. Flying to Europe he sat beside "a very burly guy," agreed with him that the Hearstpapers were "lousy" and chatted "with a last shot of Canadian Club under our belts." In Salzburg, he showed that he could be one of the boys by riding through the streets late at night, singing with a truckload of students. And he had "one gay moment" at a beer party when fellow U.S. Lecturer Alfred Kazin led the group in singing the Internationale.

Professor Matthiessen believes that Harvard, where "the individual teacher is scarcely more than a hired hand," falls short of what "American society has a right to expect." He also decides, after a quick look around Paris, that "if I lived in France, I don't quite see how I could help being a Communist." But he glibly disavows Communism in the U.S. on the grounds that "it has made hardly any progress." (His compromise is the shrill and not unexpected determination "to vote for Wallace, even if I had to write in his name on the ballot.") And with the kind of disingenuousness that would have appalled another of his heroes, Psychologist William James, Author Matthiessen insists that he cannot become a Marxist because "I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction . . ."

Sudden Sweat in Boston. Seldom has the gullibility and wishful thinking of pinkish academic intellectuals been so perfectly exposed as in this little book. The months Matthiessen spent in Prague were months when the Czech Communists were openly preparing for their seizure of power. Yet Matthiessen derided the idea that the Czech people faced a "loss of Czech freedom." Several months later, when he was back at Harvard and events in Czechoslovakia forced him to reconsider, he added a footnote to his book blaming the U.S. press for helping to bring on "such pressures from the Communists."

Few readers will share Author Matthiessen's sense of the abominations "behind the golden curtain" of the U.S.; more (conceivably including Mrs. Oksana Kasenkina) will find it ludicrous that an American can write: "I admit that my first night home [in Boston's Louisburg Square] I woke up in a sudden sweat of fear ... I was back in a very uncertain battle." Christian, Socialist, non-Marxist Professor Matthiessen's idea of certainty: "It [Soviet Russia] knows what it wants, and brutalized as much of its practice may have been, it still points toward a goal that gives the dispossessed their only hope."

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