American Lit Blogged

Weaned as I was by Bob Spiller’s ”Literary History of the United States” at 50’s Penn, the ungainly megabook from Harvard University Press, Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’ ”A New Literary History of America” ($49.95, 2009) 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 I got “You Tubed” as he introduced his project to an academic audience really tuned in. No hipster here. Coherent. Penetrating. Beguiled!

The first “take” was Toby Lester’s, identified as an “Atlantic” contributing editor. Hmm. He 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: a rough count revealed an astonishing 40 percent female. And reps from every continent but Antarctica! Holey Moley. This was what I had idealistically called for in 1968 in my chapter in Marshall Fishwick’s innovative book on American Studies. Spiller’s LHUS (1948) after all was meant 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 were trying to deal creatively with the uniqueness of Am Lit.

In the seventeenth century it was theology, in the eighteenth politics, and not till the middle of the nineteenth 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 was passing somewhat stormily from childhood Catholicism to Marxism!) and two fields of Am Lit (from start to Civil War; Civil War to the present.)

As I riffled through this humungous 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 did the River Rouge murals in the Detroit Institute of Art. (My first exposure to great contemporary art in situ!) Courtesy of son Edsel and William Valentiner, the German immigrant who made the DIA big time. THIS BLOG written by a Jebbie from my alma mater named John M. Staudenmaier! Heh, I was feeling more and more at ease in this strange collocation of small bits with wide perspectives.

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, he goes 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 he ever leave Wyoming? Now I get it! ANLHOA is a collocation of Ph.D. bloggings.

Even gossip can illuminate. Take my old mentor Gilbert Seldes (then the managing editor of The Dial) squabbling in 1922 with T.S. Eliot over a stingy payment ($150) 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 UK, D.H. to USA. Hello, Mabel Dodge. Howdy, Victoria!

And 53 years after being PhD-afied, it’s comforting to know it’s never too late to learn. About, say, Theodore Rosengarten, Jewish working class Harvard graduate student, with the same gear Richard Nixon used to tape his own mouth shut, invents oral history by interviewing black freedom fighter Ned Cobb’s heretofore unknown struggle, forty years after his white master in Alabama sold him into jail. “All God’s Dangers” (2000).

It took Robert Cantwell (American Studies, U of N. Carolina) to blog us this. Indeed, it’s the mesmerizing mix of old Chestnuts and unseen treasures that gives this communal blog its intellectual weight. And it triggers memories: take 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 he was 29 and should have known better! It caught my roving NPR ear that Vanderbilt was celebrating a Golden Jubilee of the book’s publication of that Manifesto of the New Critics. I decided to enter their devil’s tent in Nashville with my trusty Uher recorder, going by way of Lexington where the University of Kentucky Library was celebrating Warren’s 75th birthday with a major exhibition. The 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 his early racist rant, I replied “Langston Hughes.” (The Louie Armstrong of black American poetry.) He laughed. “Not even close!” “Well how about Ralph Waldo Ellison”? (I remembered how his father had named him after the poet!) “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.

When it came to make the NPR interview, I wondered how to approach his racial enlightenment. And I had a personal question to ask. One of my filmmaker son Michael’s first films was on the North Dakota Marxist Tom McGrath. He had studied under Warren at LSU. Tom was as far from AngloCatholic “last stands” as I could imagine. So I began with my Malcolm X experience the day before in Lexington. “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, he allowed as how “Life is for learning! I would say black writers turned me on! Malcolm most of all.” He gave me a dazzling mini-lecture on 20th century black American literature.” I knew my NPR program director at Sewanee would be thrilled. I know I was! And then I asked this High Anglican what he thought of Tom McGrath. His eyes blazed! “Oh, Tom! He was the best student I ever had at LSU.” He wanted to know how to get my son’s film.

The next day I rented a car to drive down into northern Kentucky to visit his birthplace, Guthrie, population 1,449 in 2003. It was a Sunday morning, and not a creature was moving, not even a mouse. Except that there gas station/restaurant. So I took a break. A couple of coffees over the Lexington Sunday paper. After a refill, an old man decided to allay his longeurs 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 sixty years ago! He’s the biggest thing to come out of this here town! Nice to meetcha, Mister. You see Penn Warren again tell ‘em Harry said hello!” So there’s my AM LIT blog: GO ANLHOA!