PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

From Sinclair Lewis,
South Pomfret, Vermont.

AMERICA UNABASHED

Reviewed by Sinclair Lewis

THREE WORLDS by Carl Van Doren, Harper & Brothers, New York, $???

The thin gray line of human veterans, remaining from the Battle of Intellectual Irritation, which lasted through most of the 1920's, when the jeering rebels led by Mmmmmmm, a man known only by his name, such bewilderingly assorted anarchists as Mencken, Edna Millay, and Edgar Masters, unalike even in alliteration, plunged pitchfork or tuning-fork into the tenderest exposures of all that were human rotund and respectable, has thinned almost to disappearance. Some of the literary guerillas, mmmmmm, half Jesse James and half Henry, are dead, some are retired to gardening, in Connecticut, some have turned Bourbon. One of the few who has till now remained apparently so recalcitrant that even Isidore Schneider and Robert Forsythe -- the new and improved American models of Borodin and Trotzky -- might not be expected to write of him as almost decent has been Carl Van Doren, mmmmmm, while to him also has adhered some smell of Connecticut gardens, he has persisted in not caring a hoot whether this writer or that of his own time, when he appraise has been been recommended by the Customers and by Successors, the Cansons of Yesteryear, now, in his autobiography, "Three Worlds," by Mr. Van Doren, though he still shows himself critically independent, goes and gets independent of the Reds just as much as he always has been of the

WHEN THE WHISTLE Began to ring, I went to the door. When the door opened, there stood before me a man in black who said, 'White, I am Independent, like Free Speech, must never be allowed to work both ways.'

Thus, in part, I am Van Doren on his dubious doctrine.

(1):

Having worked with hay-fork and plow some eleven hours a day through the summers of his boyhood, he does not bravely resent it, though every one knows, now, that any one of any age who works more than six hours a day, when he works five days a week, is put upon, ever, for so much as a month, a week and any one who works over forty-eight hours a week is just the same as a galley-slave or a victim of dungeon torture, and, if he live more than a year or two under such horror, will turn into a criminal, a cow, or a reader of Bruce Barton.

(2): He pretends that his boyhood was happy, and that he really liked his family, when it is everythwre admitted that all decent and sensitive persons have so rotten a boyhood that they live through it, and that all fathers, mothers, and brothers are at once dumb as dough and fiendishly brilliant in devising torments for the heroes of autobiographies.

(3): He does not, even in this enlightened day, feel that he missed so much in lacking movies, radios, and enlightenment from leftwing modern schools where the pupils are taught to write sonnets and compose concertos (at fourteen). He managed to get along with Hawthorne, Plutarch, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Mark Twain, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Washington Irving, and Ik Walton.

But think of what Van Doren might have become if he had only had Clark Gable, Gertrude Stein, and Walter Pitkin instead! Then he might really have become educated!

(4): He not only liked his home -- he even liked, and obdurately still likes, America in general! He admits that our

orphan land is different equally from Stalingrad and from Blenheim
Palace, that it has been rebuked and kicked out equally by Ezra
Pound, Nancy Astor, and Joshua Kunitz; he seems to be an intelligent
enough fellow to perceive that here it is equally difficult to have
tea, etc., with General Balbo, H.R.M. Edward VIII, or André
Gide, but an American apparently he is so Laodicean, etc., that he simply
doesn't intend to do one or other thing about it. This is so
sour, so disloyal equally to Fascist and Communist, that he actually
likes this world, this country, and this family, instead of sensibly
going to sleep and dreaming himself a set of new ones.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS? BECAUSE I WANT TO TELL YOU WHAT HUMANITY
HAS BEQUTED, AND WHAT IT MANKIND, AS A SPECIES, CAN DO ABOUT IT.

THESE DAYS, I even likes us American Americans. America was, though, like
or James Truslow Adams
Edith Wharton, or Roger Baldwin, Americans. He is a Typical 100 %
Anglo-Saxon American -- being compounded of English, Dutch, German,
and Indian -- and the least that George Bernard Shaw expects of us as a human
being, such people is that they should repent, and do something
about it, as Mrs. Wharton and Mr. Adams and Mr. Baldwin, gradually,
then, in their individual ways, have done.

******

Carl Van Doren, reared on the Midwestern farm of his doctor
father, acquainted with the University of Illinois, then with
Columbia, where he got his Ph.D. in English literature and taught
that same nebulous subject, author of editor
Literary Guild, America of "Swift," "The Ninth Wave," "Contemporary
American Novelists," "The Cambridge History of American Literature,"
venturer into Greenwich Village, into New England hermitage, into
European wandering, brother of the Mark Van Doren
and more or less related to all the editors in New York, possibly

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

excepting Walter Winchell and Charles Angoff, at fifty one sets down what he has found interesting in life and what it has done to him. It is distinctly different from the volumes of literary recollections by such men as Ford Madox Ford, Frank Harris, and Sisley Huddleston, who have devoted the magnificent inexactitude of their www memories to listing all the literary persons they have ever met, with some account of what they would have been like if they had only been just a little different.

"Three Worlds" -- it is unfortunate that the title is so close to Miss Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" -- is important not in anecdote but in its serious portrayal of the several backgrounds and eras the author has seen: Hope, Illinois, and its cornfields and humble church, a great university, editorial offices, sober talks in unsober speak-easies, the miracle play of seasons on the Housatonic, a pilgrimage with Stuart Sherman to British shrines; three changes from the age of mm sparse innocence to the age of even more innocent opulence to the nervous terror of the depression; the shy youth of the teens, flaming youth of the twenties, sulky and questioning and rather too young flaming youth of the thirties. Through all this, the discovery of new American writers, not just as surprising accidents but as persons knowing what knowing who have affected and sharply been affected by American's growing pains.

It would be profitable to compare this revelation of a mind and of a way of living with the revelations in Sheehan's "Personal History," and Farson's "The Way of a Transgressor." Any one who knows Van Doren will be certain that, had he desired, he might equally have been an adventurous observer among foreign revolutions, among the dramas of street-fighting and truck-parades of soldiers and plotters in secret rooms. That he has chosen the quieter adventures of the library has made his chronicle not less but conceivably more dramatic -- certainly more important. And (but this is no criticism

those diverting books) he has not in found that lines spoken in Russian or Arabic are any more dramatic than lines in Illinois Yankee or East Side Jewish. Lewisohn, also, and Gertrude Atherton, Harold Stearns and George Seldes and Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Mowrer (to take as ill-assorted a group of roving American observers as may be assembled) have apparently found their greatest thrills in the already too-well publicized idiocies and nobilities of the Pyrenees or the Cotswolds. Lewis Gannatt and his group But Van Doren, like Thomas Wolfe, has preferred making America an American story, a history to rereading European history. He finds it unnecessary to turn either to the old London or the new Moscow for inspiration, and he discovers it, rich and pulsing, in an Illinois cornfield or a New York penthouse.

Throughout his book Mr. Van Doren breaks entirely away from the special literary field to contemplate the recurrent comedy of Youth, and the confusing miracle whereby the Son, without consciousness of having changed, yet becomes the Father.

"But affection, indulgence, and humor alike are powerless against the instinct of children to rebel," It is as essential to their minds and wills as exercise to their bodies. If they have no reasons for it, they will invent them, like nations bound on war. It is hard to imagine families limp enough to be always at peace. Wherever there is character there will be conflict. The best that parents and children can hope for is that the wounds of their conflict may not be too deep or too lasting." And: "The black melancholy of young men has many apparent causes, but the many are really one: that the young men wish and will more than they can do."

of

And, the contrast, in homes and in literature, between Youth of the two recent decades, Mr. Van Doren says: "The young after the war wanted to live freely. The young after the crash wanted to live at all. The villain in the drama of the twenties had been

-6-

dullness. The villain of the thirties was poverty."

Unlike the Youth of either, Mr. Van Doren perceives that there
generations of the
will, incredibly, he, forties and fifties also; that the fight is
everlasting -- but Youth everlasting, also, to do that fighting.

###

Though this autobiography is not, like certain trusty examples,
an effort to get as many notorious names as possible into the index,
there are significant names enough, and particularly are there full
portraits of those extraordinary poets, Elinor Wylie, who saw Shelley as her nearest companion, as of Edward Arlington Robinson, who in Brooklyn yet lived on a Sabine Farm, and of Stuart Sherman, a devout modernist who nevertheless failed to measure Mencken and Dreiser, a shy campus classicist who ventured into the dummest maelstrom of New York -- to edit the book section of the *Herald-Tribune*. As nearly as any autobiography or biography that I know, this gives a notion of what It has been about, in America since the war, and that deals mostly with the makers of books does not keep it from being equally pertinent to scientists or politicians or intelligent merchants or simple people who read without any vanity of careerism at all.

In the whole chronicle of this bestseller, which is like a book of
discoveries about one's self which is likely to be found in a book
as in one's own most heightened experience, that is

"If this were fiction I might say that I went into a retreat to think things out. It still is history. I have never in my life thought things out, nor have I known anybody who ever did. I have always had to live them out, thinking as I went along. In my pent-house I was less a philosopher than a bear licking his wounds while nature healed them."

-7-

This discovery I commend equally to myself and to all others who are accustomed to go off and brood with the most picturesque self-pity about their incomparable wrongs, in the belief that they will just "get things straight" before they pop into the psycho-analysts' shop or the next Buchman station or thin police headquarters.

America may be called upon, and soon, along with Scandinavia, to the hideous labor of trying to preserve in the world a little of the tradition of civilization. For that偉偉偉偉偉 Straining task it is necessary that we should learn a little about America, and "Three Worlds" gives us more than a little. It is the more important, too, that among all the autobiographies which it presents a sane andzentrumalem enormously talented American who has not found our fields and our cement canyons hag-ridden but full of a normal and joyous living.

******
****
**

From Sinclair Lewis
South Pomfret, Vermont

AMERICA UNABASHED

Reviewed by Sinclair Lewis

THREE WORLDS by Carl Van Doren, Harper & Brothers, New York.

The thin gray line of veterans remaining from the
Battle of Intellectual Irritation, in the 1920's, when the
jeering rebels led by such bewilderingly assorted anarchists
as Mencken, Millay, and Masters, unalike even in alliteration,
plunged pitchfork or tuning-fork into the tenderest exposures of
all that were rotund and respectable, has been scattered. Some
of the literary guerillas, half Jesse James and half Henry, are
dead, some are retired to suburban gardening, some have turned
Bourbon. One of the few who has till now remained so recalcitrant
that even Isidore Schneider and Robert Forsythe --- the improved
American models of Borodin and Trotzky --- might be expected
almost to approve of him has been Carl Van Doren, for while to
him also has adhered some smell of Connecticut gardens, he has
persisted in not caring a hoot whether this writer or that has
been recommended by the Customers and by the Censors.

Yet now, in his autobiography, "Three Worlds," though
he still shows himself critically independent, Mr. Van Doren goes
and gets independent of the Reds just as he always has been of
the White. Independence, like Free Speech, must never be allowed
to work both ways.

-2-

Thus, in part, are his dubious doctrines:

(1) Having worked with hay-fork and plow some eleven hours a day through the summers of his boyhood, he does not bravely resent it, though every one knows, now, that any one of any age who works more than six hours a day, five days a week, is put upon, and any one who ever, for as long as a month, works over forty-eight hours a week is just the same as a victim of dungeon torture, and, if he live more than a year or two under such horror, will turn into a criminal, a cow, or a reader of Bruce Barton.

(2) Van Doren pretends that his boyhood was happy, and that he really liked his family, when it is everywhere admitted that all decent and sensitive persons have so rotten a boyhood that rarely do they live through it, and that all fathers, mothers, and brothers are at once dumb as dough and fiendishly brilliant in devising tortures for the heroes of autobiographies.

(3) He does not, even in this enlightened day, feel that he missed so much in lacking movies, radios, and the enlightenment of leftwing modern schools, where pupils at fourteen are taught to write sonnets and compose concertos. He managed to get along with such poverty of nourishment as Hawthorne, Plutarch, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Mark Twain, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Washington Irving and Ik Walton.

Think of what Van Doren might have become if he had only had Clark Gable, Gertrude Stein, and Walter Pitkin instead! Then he might really have become educated!

(4) He not only liked his home --- he even liked, and

-3-

obdurately still likes, America in general! He apparently knows
that our orphan land is different equally from Stalingrad and
from Blenheim Palace, that it has been rebuked and kicked out
equally by Ezra Pound, Nancy Astor, and Joshua Kunitz; he seems
to be intelligent enough to perceive that here it is equally
difficult to have tea with General Balbo, H.R.M. Edward VIII, or
André Gide, But apparently he is so Laodicean that he doesn't
intend to do one thing about it. He is so sour, so disloyal
equally to Fascist and Communist, that he likes this family, this
country and this world, instead of sensibly going to sleep and
dreaming himself a set of new ones.

He even likes America though, like Edith Wharton, or
James Truslow Adams or Roger Baldwin. He is a Typical 100% Anglo-
Saxon American --- being compounded of English, Dutch, German, and
Indian --- and the least that George Bernard Shaw expects of such
people is that they should repent, as Mrs. Wharton and Mr. Adams
and Mr. Baldwin in their assorted ways have done.

Carl Van Doren, reared on the Midwestern farm of his
doctor father, acquainted with the University of Illinois, then
with Columbia, where he got his Ph.D. in English literature and
for years taught that same nebulous subject, long editor of the
Literary Guild, author or editor of "Swift," "The Ninth Wave,"
"Contemporary American Novelists," "The Cambridge History of
American Literature," venturer into Greenwich Village, into New
England hermitage, into European wandering, brother of Mark Van
Doren and more or less related to all the editors in New York,

-4-

possibly excepting Walter Winchell and Charles Angoff, at fifty
one sets down what he has found interesting in life and what it
has done to him. It is distinctly different from the volumes of
literary recollections by such men as Ford Madox Ford, Frank
Harris, and Sisley Huddleston, who have devoted the magnificent
inexactitude of their memories to listing all the literary
persons they have ever met, with some account of what they would
have been like if they had only been just a little different.
"Three Worlds" --- it is unfortunate that the title is so close
to Miss Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" --- is important not in
anecdotage but in its serious portrayal of the several backgrounds
and eras the author has seen:

Hope, Illinois, and its cornfields and humble church,
a great university, editorial offices, sober talks in unsober
speak-easies, the miracle-play of seasons on the Housatonic, a
pilgrimage with Stuart Sherman to British shrines; change from
the age of sparse innocence to the age of even more innocent
opulence to the nervous terror of the depression; the sky youth
of the teens, flaming youth of the twenties, sulky and question-
ing and rather too unflaming youth of the thirties. Through all
this the discovery of new American writers, not just as surpris-
ing accidents but as persons who have affected and sharply been
affected by America's growing pains.

-5-

he might equally have been an adventurous observer among
foreign revolutions, among the dramas of street-fighting and
truck-parades of soldiers and plotters in secret rooms. That
he has chosen the quieter adventures of the library has made his
chronicle not less but conceivably more dramatic --- certainly
more important. And (but this is no slur upon those other two
diverting books) he has not found that lines spoken in Russian
or Arabic are any more dramatic than lines in Illinois Yankee
or East Side Jewish.

Lewisohn, also, and Gertrude Atherton, Harold Stearns
and George Seldes and Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Mowrer (to take
as ill-assorted a group of roving American observers as may be
assembled) have apparently found their greatest thrills in the
already too-well publicized idiocies and nobilities of the
Pyrenees or the Cotswolds. But Van Doren, like Lewis Gannett
and Thomas Wolfe, has preferred making American history to reread-
ing European history. He finds it unnecessary to turn either to
the old London or the new Moscow for inspiration; he discovers
it, rich and pulsing, in an Illinois cornfield or a New York
penthouse.

Throughout his book Mr. Van Doren breaks entirely away
from his special literary field to contemplate the recurrent
comedy of Youth, and the confusing miracle whereby the Son, with-
out consciousness of having changed, yet becomes the Father.

"But affection, indulgence, and humor alike are power-
less against the instinct of children to rebel," he says. "It is
as essential to their minds and wills as exercise to their bodies.
If they have no reasons for it they will invent them, like nations

-6-

And of the contrast, in homes and in literature,
between Youth of the two recent decades, Mr. Van Doren says:
"The young after the war wanted to live freely. The young after
the crash wanted to live at all. The villain in the drama of the
twenties had been dullness. The villain of the thirties was
poverty."

Unlike the Youth of either, Mr. Van Doren perceives
that there will, incredibly, be generations of the forties and
fifties also; that the fight is everlasting --- but Youth ever-
lasting, also, to do the fighting.

*****

Though this autobiography is not, like certain trusty
examples, an effort to get as many notorious names as possible
into the index, there are significant names enough, and particul-
arly are there full portraits of those extraordinary poets,
Elinor Wylie, who rightly saw Shelley as her nearest companion,
of Edward Arlington Robinson, who in Brooklyn yet lived on a
Sabine Farm, and of Stuart Sherman, a devout modernist who never-
theless failed to measure Mencken and Dreiser, a shy campus
classicist who ventured into the maelstrom of New York --- to edit
the book section of the *Herald-Tribune*. As nearly as any auto-

-7-

biography or biography that I know, this book gives a notion
of what It has been about, in America since the war, and that
the story deals mostly with the makers of books does not keep
it from being equally pertinent to scientists or politicians
or intelligent merchants or simple people who read without any
vanity of careerism at all.

In the whole chronicle I happen to like best this
discovery about one's own self which illustrates, incidentally,
the lucidity of his apparently easy style:

"If this were fiction I might say that I went into a
retreat to think things out. It still is history. I have never
in my life thought things out, nor have I known anybody who ever
did. I have always had to live them out, thinking as I went
along. In my penthouse I was less a philosopher than a bear
licking his wounds while nature healed them."

This discovery I commend equally to all who are accus-
tomed to go off and brood about their incomparable wrongs, in
the belief that they will just "begin to get things straight"
before they pop into the psycho-analyst's shop or the next
Buchman station or police headquarters.

America, along with Scandinavia, may be called upon, and
soon, to the hideous labor of trying to preserve in the world a
little of the tradition of civilization. For that straining task
it is necessary that we should learn a little about ourselves, and
"Three Worlds" gives us more than a little. It presents a sane
and enormously talented American who has not found our fields and
our cement canyons hag-ridden but full of a normal and joyous
living.

******
***
**