ON AMERICANNESS

Along with a special issue on American literature, the London Times Literary Supplement last week paid the U.S. a handsome compliment. "Nowhere," it announced, "in the modern world is there a more rewarding literature than that which America has to offer." But in its ensuing lengthy analysis, the Times also had some sharp observations--and a few reservations--about U.S. culture and character in general. Among them:

WITH Hawthorne the exploration of Americanness, as something mysteriously different from any other national quality, is well under way . . . Its existence conditions the whole of American literature . . . The Englishman takes his Englishness for granted; the Frenchman does not constantly have to be looking over his shoulder to see if his Frenchness is still there. The difference is simple . . . being an American is not something to be inherited so much as something to be achieved. This is the complex fate; and the history of the United States has been such that for each succeeding generation it has meant a beginning again."

ON U.S. POETS

POETS and critics of approved standing now function as teachers in colleges and universities throughout the land, and 'the summer writing conference' has rapidly developed into an educational phenomenon . . . There is no doubt that the stiffening mark of writing learned by rule . . . has begun to show up in the work of young men and women who, in the United States, have passed through English Departments. A kind of graduate-school poetry has come into being: well written, beautifully organized, and nicely centred at some 'norm' of excellence, but at the same time, dead, dry and without a spark either of feeling or originality . . . Young poets in America tend to sit at the feet of their elders, imbibing technical knowledge and dedication by argument and the laying on of hands. Young poets in England associate with each other, often forming schools whose design is the overthrow of elder schools . . . The American almost cynically sets out to do as best he can what he can do best: he might describe himself as a technician who can think."

ON THE SOUTH

SOUTHERNERS are always being asked to account for themselves in general; it's a national habit . . . Now that the 'Southern Renaissance' is a frequent term, and they are being asked to account for that, some try, and others just go on writing. In one little Mississippi town on the river, 17 authors are in the national print and a Pulitzer Prize winner edits the paper.

It is also true that nobody is buying books in that town, or generally in the South. It seems that when it comes to books they are reading the old ones and writing the new ones."

ON LITERARY REVIEWS

TO pick up one of these magazines is to be at once delighted and confounded--delighted by the skill of the writing and confounded by the fact that we have nothing to equal them in this country."

ON HISTORY

COMPARED with the United States, historiography in England is a minor matter, a hobby, a respectable activity but not big business, not one of the pillars of the state. We have no real equivalents to the State historical societies . . . no great scholarly enterprises . . . on the scale of the Washington or Jefferson papers or the promised edition of Franklin's works . . . The United States is, in a special sense, a creation of history . . . Then, in a country of such diverse racial origins, 'history' is an historical necessity . . . Polish tobacco farmers in the Connecticut River valley must be given by history a spiritual kinship with the East Anglians who shook the dust of Massachusetts as well as of Lincoln shire from their feet . . . But [American history], because of its prominence, is also in danger. It is called on, too often and too loudly, to perform specific patriotic tasks . . . The danger is . . . that the American people will seek in the past, not merely an explanation of the present, but a kind of Sibylline book in which ready . . . answers will be found to problems, some of which are so novel that no answer can be found in history."

ON PHILOSOPHY

THE most fruitful purely American element in recent philosophy has probably been the gradual discovery of [Charles Sanders] Peirce. His persistent concern with logic has joined with the stimulus of the Russell-Whitehead investigations into mathematical logic in provoking a vigorous development of logical studies . . . There is certainly life in American philosophy. Although no second thinker of the calibre of Peirce has yet made an appearance, there is no reason why one should not turn up at any time."

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