To High Heaven

In his Trial Balance (Pantheon, $4.50)., Mr. Alan Valentine has frankly attempted to do for twentieth-century America what Henry Adams autobiography did for nineteenth-century America. This however gets him into a peck of trouble that he could well have avoided—by writing his own book, and not knocking himself out on every page to live up to Adams.

Like Adams, Mr. Valentine is no great shakes as a thinker, and knows he isn’t; unlike Adams, he has not made a profession of creating the illusion of great thought, or imposed upon himself the intellectual discipline by which a man might, given the innate capacity, make of his education a microcosm of the intellectual history of his time. Adams, in other words, at least did his homework, and made himself aware of what, intellectually, was going on around him; had the Soviet Union and World Communism grown up under his nose, for example, he would have known that the man in, search of education had to square off to them. Mr. Valentine—or “Angus, as he calls himself here—has not merely not done his homework; he seems hardly aware that there has been homework to do, and can convincingly say to the major intellectual and moral and esthetic currents of his time: “Hah! Never touched me! (Which explains, inter alia, why he thinks Adams is worth imitating.)

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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In his Trial Balance (Pantheon, $4.50)., Mr. Alan Valentine has frankly attempted to do for twentieth-century America what Henry Adams autobiography did for nineteenth-century America. This however gets him into a peck of trouble that he could well have avoided—by writing his own book, and not knocking himself out on every page to live up to Adams.

Like Adams, Mr. Valentine is no great shakes as a thinker, and knows he isn’t; unlike Adams, he has not made a profession of creating the illusion of great thought, or imposed upon himself the intellectual discipline by which a man might, given the innate capacity, make of his education a microcosm of the intellectual history of his time. Adams, in other words, at least did his homework, and made himself aware of what, intellectually, was going on around him; had the Soviet Union and World Communism grown up under his nose, for example, he would have known that the man in, search of education had to square off to them. Mr. Valentine—or “Angus, as he calls himself here—has not merely not done his homework; he seems hardly aware that there has been homework to do, and can convincingly say to the major intellectual and moral and esthetic currents of his time: “Hah! Never touched me! (Which explains, inter alia, why he thinks Adams is worth imitating.)