Books in Brief: Reading America

Reading America: Essays on American Literature, by Denis Donoghue (Knopf, 320 pp., $22.95)

The brilliant Irish critic Denis Donoghue writes densely, but seldom turgidly. He does risk turgidity, however, in the lead-off essay for this collection. “America in Theory” is particularly odious as a demonstration of good Irish wit in thrall to mere pedantry. Donoghue more than half knows it himself, and quickly gets on with the main job of providing some well-focused sketches of such American luminaries as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, James, Eliot, Stevens, and Lionel Trilling. That’s approximately the first half of the book, the second being a collection of 17 book reviews (on Moore, Crane, Lowell, Plath, Ashbery, et al.), which, on the whole, are more humane and accessible than the decalogue of formal essays on the acknowledged Masters of Amer. Lit. At least Donoghue is correct in recognizing the guru Emerson as the key to it all, but he fails to make the most of it. Few have ever recognized the most salient and astonishing fact about our literature: that these United States, this most powerful inheritor of civilization in the Western world, have not managed to produce a single major Christian writer—excepting, of course, T. S.Eliot—who can stand with the greatest figures of European culture. We can pinpoint the day and occasion when Emerson ceased to be even a nominal Christian. And though Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson drew heavily and even richly from Biblical sources, they were not Christian in the sense in which we are ordinarily compelled to use the term. Our most authentic American writer, Mark Twain, was in fact bitterly anti-Christian and generally irreligious. We are misreading America, indeed, unless we acknowledge this.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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Reading America: Essays on American Literature, by Denis Donoghue (Knopf, 320 pp., $22.95)

The brilliant Irish critic Denis Donoghue writes densely, but seldom turgidly. He does risk turgidity, however, in the lead-off essay for this collection. “America in Theory” is particularly odious as a demonstration of good Irish wit in thrall to mere pedantry. Donoghue more than half knows it himself, and quickly gets on with the main job of providing some well-focused sketches of such American luminaries as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, James, Eliot, Stevens, and Lionel Trilling. That’s approximately the first half of the book, the second being a collection of 17 book reviews (on Moore, Crane, Lowell, Plath, Ashbery, et al.), which, on the whole, are more humane and accessible than the decalogue of formal essays on the acknowledged Masters of Amer. Lit. At least Donoghue is correct in recognizing the guru Emerson as the key to it all, but he fails to make the most of it. Few have ever recognized the most salient and astonishing fact about our literature: that these United States, this most powerful inheritor of civilization in the Western world, have not managed to produce a single major Christian writer—excepting, of course, T. S.Eliot—who can stand with the greatest figures of European culture. We can pinpoint the day and occasion when Emerson ceased to be even a nominal Christian. And though Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson drew heavily and even richly from Biblical sources, they were not Christian in the sense in which we are ordinarily compelled to use the term. Our most authentic American writer, Mark Twain, was in fact bitterly anti-Christian and generally irreligious. We are misreading America, indeed, unless we acknowledge this.