Cult of the New

England’s secret is a simple one: compactness. The People who Matter see one another constantly; the People who Want to Matter discover whom to see. Middle-class education is homogenous enough to supply dons and radio producers with common words and common symbols. (“. . . So long as they read the same books,” said Santayana of a civilizing curriculum.) And the BBC provides regional Services from the capital; the Network, on the other hand, its impulses traveling every which way, was an American expedient to cope with diffuseness.

None of which is news; but it serves to explain the strikingly representative quality of Mr. John Lehmann’s wartime memoirs (I Am My Brother, Reynal, $5.00), a quality no American book of such low-keyed privacy could expect to achieve. “Yesterday Desmond MacCarthy came to tea. Beatrix was there, with Ahmed Ali and Willy Goldman. Desmond in great form, discussing Shaw. He said he had become very disappointed with him in recent years. . . .” Imagine journal extracts of this kind being tolerable in a book by, say, Cleanth Brooks! Yet they float as comfortably as lilypads on the surface of Mr. Lehmann’s narrative.

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Hugh Kenner

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England’s secret is a simple one: compactness. The People who Matter see one another constantly; the People who Want to Matter discover whom to see. Middle-class education is homogenous enough to supply dons and radio producers with common words and common symbols. (“. . . So long as they read the same books,” said Santayana of a civilizing curriculum.) And the BBC provides regional Services from the capital; the Network, on the other hand, its impulses traveling every which way, was an American expedient to cope with diffuseness.

None of which is news; but it serves to explain the strikingly representative quality of Mr. John Lehmann’s wartime memoirs (I Am My Brother, Reynal, $5.00), a quality no American book of such low-keyed privacy could expect to achieve. “Yesterday Desmond MacCarthy came to tea. Beatrix was there, with Ahmed Ali and Willy Goldman. Desmond in great form, discussing Shaw. He said he had become very disappointed with him in recent years. . . .” Imagine journal extracts of this kind being tolerable in a book by, say, Cleanth Brooks! Yet they float as comfortably as lilypads on the surface of Mr. Lehmann’s narrative.