The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson by Irving Howe (review)

452 Shorter Book Reviews Research Programs,'' Histm)' and Theory, Beiheft 20, 1981); but this is a minor complaint about an otherwise substantial book. George Emery Department of History University of Western Ontario Irving Howe. The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. xii + 99 pp. Irving Howe's monograph The American Newness, arising out of the 1986 Massey Lectures at Harvard, starts from a clear premise: that the form of '' American exceptional ism' '-the exemption from historical necessity-found in Emerson's early work both supplies the American ethos with an energetic starting-point and raises some serious questions about the validity as a guideto philosophical thought of its first major man of letters. Howe praises Emerson asa man of letters and celebrates the brilliance of his failure. But his sense of Emerson's failure is firm. The reliable voices of the American nineteenth century are its skeptics: Hawthorne, Melville, Twain. Howe's technique is fascinating. He does indeed recall the familiar voicesof the first academic assessments of American cultural achievement, often by wayof signature rather than by nomination-"the optative mood" for F.O. Math1essen: "the errand into the wilderness" for Perry Miller. But when Howe wants to see Emerson's utterance in perspective, he is more likely to quote Marx than the Hindu texts; Trotsky than German Romantic Philosophy; Robespierre and Ben Gurion than Plato or Swedenborg. It is a new way of seeing Emerson to contemplate his "part or parcel of God" against Marx's mention of ··man's consciousness of himself as the highest divinity" (21). The monograph is divided into three parts, corresponding, one assumes, to the lectures in the Massey series. The second part, "Disciples and Critics," divides on traditional grounds into Thoreau and Whitman as disciples, Hawthorne and Melville as critics. In addition to sharing the skepticism of Hawthorne and Melville, Howe approves of Whitman, who could indeed include a broad rangeof social types in his City of Friends. Howe concludes his discussion of Thoreau, however, by pursing his lips and declaring his treatment intentionally unfair (36). Thoreau, he tells us, "cared litile about rules or limits, and perhaps less about society" (35). Howe is right to see that Thoreau made a poor socialist, but he isa bit shortsighted in ignoring the major metaphor of Walden in which Thoreau appropriates the prevailing agrarian convention of his society in his project to '' cultivate a few cubic feet of human flesh.'' Howe's third chapter "The Literary Legacy" seems to promise an illumination . Here again he departs from our expectations: he proposes to trace Emerson\ American newness through the literature of work, the literature of anarchic bit,~. Shorter Book Reviews 453 the literature of the loss of the newness. If he has supplied a new frame of reference for comparing Emerson's utterance, we might well expect that he would supply a like new frame of reference for his later influence, on less well-known writers of labor's struggles, on obscure but illuminating blissful anarchists. Unhappily, this third chapter carries us little beyond the second. The literary legacy extends to Melville, Twain, Whitman and Thoreau for the literature of work; to Cooper, Twain and Hawthorne for the literature of anarchy; to Hawthorne and Melville for the literature of loss. By and large, Howe shows us that the loss of the sense of Emerson's a-historicity is almost coeval with its generation of major dissent in the 1850s. This monograph, then, emerges from a troubled perspective on the work of the architect of the American cultural awakening. If Emerson will not serve us today as a "moral and philosophical guide" (14) in the tearing struggles of a ''desacrilizing world," Howe seems to leave us with the feeling that his own applause for Emerson as a man of letters is but another instance of the resonance of onehand clapping. Nevertheless, coming as it does around the sesquicentennial of Emerson's first major pronouncements as a transcendentalist-and at Harvard to boot-it may legitimately revive the celebrated man of letters in its very Emersonian motive of dissent. Robin P. Hoople Department of English University of Manitoba Robert...