America in 3-D

The Public Arts: America in 3-D Author: Patrick D. Hazard Source: The English Journal, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Mar., 1958), pp. 170-172 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

The teaching of American literature has been at a serious disadvantage for the few generations it has been a standard subject. This is because our technology achieved the feat of mass-reproducing print a century before it could do the same with color pictures and sound. Literature has sister arts--of architecture, music, painting, sculpture; together they form that rich and comprehensive network of meaning we call a country's culture.

Cold print by itself can sometimes get through to a new generation's special sensibility, but only at great waste of time and teaching talent. However, once technology makes it possible to recreate the community of arts, in all their variegated ways of attracting the attention of the intelligence and imagination, then a really balanced study of a culture is at last possible.

Added to the engineering miracle must be the results of scholarly investigation and explication of examples from each of the various arts. We are just reaching that point of convergence in American Studies, and this means that our textbooks must be redone from Jamestown to the Newport Jazz Festival--i.e., unless we want to tolerate the absurdity of having our classrooms less competent guides to culture than the mass magazines.

The new Harcourt, Brace "Olympic Edition" of The Adventures in Literature Program may be taken as a firm step, if not very long stride, in the necessarily new directions we must take. I have been examining a copy of their fascinating American volume, edited by John Gehlmann and Mary Rives Bowman. It has a number of new features that push it at once ahead of the standard anthologies. First of all, it has built the use of LP recordings right into the book by printing the texts that appear on 2-12" LP's read by first-rate artists and performers.

There are picture essays of distinction: I especially liked one on young poet-professor Richard Wilbur (pp. 320-325), which will surely take the hex off many teen-age stereotypes of poets (if less is made of the rhymed jingles of the sentimental nineteenth century versifiers). It is a mistake, too, not to print more of Wilbur--or if his verse is too metaphysical for high school students then try Philip Booth or Donald Hall or Kim Kurt or some other writer under forty, the criterion for admission to the anthology, New Poets of England and America (Meridian, 1957, $1.45).

The proof of the poet is in the reading, after all, and pictures showing what a regular guy the poet is are beside the point if his poetry doesn't ring true to young readers. The hex that this photo essay will probably take off the image of the poet was put on him in the first place because for too long we have been trying to prod our students into deep reactions to superficial poetry--Longfellow, Whittier, et al.

But the Harcourt, Brace volume makes a good start, even though eighteen selections from the Cambridge Poets against six from the New Voices in American Poetry (Wilbur, Eberhart, Rodman, Bishop, Shapiro, Jarrell) is for me a bad bargain, esthetically and pedagogically. Some day we'll all find out that students respond more deeply to Karl Shapiro's "Auto Wreck" than they do to Longfellow's trite "Hymn to the Night"--a good sign of their potential poetic sensitivity.

I should not leave the impression that the book is short on "modern poetry": there are selections from Frost (9), Masters (5), Lindsay (4), Wylie (5), Sandburg (8), Millay (6), and others. The book has other splendid features: selections from student writing, in the sensible tradition of Scholastic Writing Awards; essays on new art forms--Paddy Chayefsky's "Television Craft"; Budd Schulberg on writing a novel from an original film scenario; and a good, if cluttered,
word-and-picture essay on "The American Tradition" by Clifton Fadiman.

But this Fadiman essay does have serious weaknesses as an attempt to use color photography to illustrate a half-descriptive, half-hortatory lay sermon. The graphics are amateurish: any issue of Life magazine makes this fumbling use of a new form of expression (the photo-essay) worse than none at all. The same criticism applies even more to the first Fadiman essay, "What Do Americans Write About?" The two-color spread on people in America is an artless abuse of color: full of clutter and incoherence.

There is something ironic about a textbook for taste that is tasteless, in terms of the best that is being designed and drawn in American graphics today. It may be that this expensive color work ought to be left to magazines that can afford to do it well: black and white photography when used with both flair and restraint (as in Life full-page bleeds) communicates more effectively than poorly deployed color.