Fred Allen On Cape Cod. - 'Writing New England: An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present' - book review

Writing New England
An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present
Edited by Andrew Delbanco
Belknap Press Harvard University,
$29.95, 459 pp.

In his preface to this handsomely produced book, Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia and a well-known critic of American literature and history, imagines the anthology's readers to be "house guests spending time in the company of pictures and furnishings that matter to me and that seem to belong together." The ninety or so items he has chosen make up, he hopes, "a book for reading" rather than for the coffee table--and for reading that will reveal "a kind of family history." The doubleness in the title, Writing New England (the region didn't just produce writers, it got written by them) is typical of Delbanco's circumspection and sophistication in taking on a daunting task: that of being properly representative, various, and unobvious in assembling his house of materials.

The construction of the house is imaginatively done, with eight sections, each titled to comprehend a variety of items within. For example, "The Examined Self" moves from John Cotton, through Henry Adams, to Elizabeth Bishop and Dorothy West (the last represented by a chapter from her autobiographical narrative about growing up in Boston's middle-class black community). "Dissident Dreamers" starts with John Winthrop and moves through Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott (a very amusing sketch titled "Transcendental Wild Oats") to John F. Kennedy and A. Bartlett Giamatti addressing, respectively, the 1963 Civil Rights crisis in Alabama, and a yet-again failure of the Boston Red Sox in 1977. Yet one needn't and shouldn't take the divisions too solemnly: Delbanco wanted to include Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" and did so in "Strangers in the Promised Land," a section composed mainly of writings by "outsiders"--minority voices such as William Apess and Frederick Douglass. But the Lowell poem could have gone just as well in "The Examined Self" or "Dissident Dreamers" sections--as could other pieces in the anthology.

In his introduction Delbanco more than once invokes Henry Adams (pages from whose Education describe his memorable walk to school with his grandfather are included in the "Education" section) by way of noting qualities of "New England nature"--self-criticism, chastisement, resistance--that have characterized its writers. One might wonder, though, whether such self-critical scrutiny of the social imperative couldn't also be found in the literature and criticism of nineteenth-century England, even of other parts of the United States--Dreiser in Chicago, Faulkner in the Deep South. When one remembers Wallace Stevens's notion of poetry as "imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality," we see how, necessarily, something like resistance is central to any verbal expression, whether encountered in story, poem, memoir, or sermon. So Adams's declaration in the Education that "resistance to something was the law of New England nature," may be the law of other natures as well.

That said, one sees how rich a field Delbanco had before him. In deciding, for example, to have a section titled "A Gallery of Portraits," which features a number of "exemplary" lives in fact and fiction, the choice must have been excruciating. The gallery that survives is composed of characters from the novels of H. B. Stowe and Elizabeth Stoddard; Miss Birdseye from James's The Bostonians; the "Cambridge ladies" of E. E. Cummings' poem; E. A. Robinson's Miniver Cheevy; fictional portraits from Marquand, Edwin O'Connor, Updike, and Cheever; plus a Thoreauvian writer new to me, Timothy Lewontin, who wrote about working in a Vermont sawmill. All these examples are fresh, usually unexpected. It also pleased me that a book beginning with seventeenth-century heavy-gun preachments like John Winthrop on Christian charity and Samuel Danforth on New England's "Errand into the Wilderness," should conclude with E. B. White writing appositely about Maine speech, and Fred Allen teasing the vocabulary of his local Cape Cod newspaper. And finally with Donald Hall's sardonic poem "Scenic View" in which he imagines how "In fifteen years / Monadnock and Kearsarge, / the Green Mountains / and the White, will turn / invisible, all / tint removed / atom by atom to albums / in Medford and Greenwich."

In his headnote to Hall's poem, Delbanco quotes the poet as saying in an interview, "I want to be a poet by myself, not a New England poet or a deep image poet or what have you." I wonder if others represented in Writing New England might not have similar sentiments: why, for example, should Frost's "Out, Out--" or Stevens's "The Snow Man" be singled out for inclusion here? Granted Delbanco's insistence that "New England is more than a geographical term," but how much space does that "more" give you? Enough evidently for him to include the second chapter of William James's Pragmatism. But if James, why

not his colleague and rival George Santayana, writing on Harvard College or the genteel tradition in America? Why Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy" instead of his sonnet, "New England"? Was the latter too obvious a candidate? It would have been a nice way to introduce or conclude the volume. And since the reader Delbanco imagines has been invited to spend time amid some of the anthologist's favorite "pictures and furnishings," I can report that for this imperfect reader the items from Cotton Mather gave no more satisfaction or enlightenment than I received decades ago in graduate school, trying to make my way in his Magnalia Christi Americana. Nor did the seventeenth-century poet Edward Taylor, always remembered (as here) for one overquoted line ("Who in this Bowling Alley bowled the Sun?"), speak to me at last. (Could it be that New England writing got better as it went along?) But every reader has his blind spots; overall the anthology succeeds admirably in conveying, in Delbanco's words, "how New Englanders have come to live in different and distinct regions of cultural inheritance." It manages also, in its inclusions and rediscoveries, to extend Thoreau's remark in his "Ktaadn" section from The Maine Woods printed here: "I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is."

William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College. Among his many books is Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews (University of Massachusetts Press).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group