Fred Lewis Pattee and American Literature by James J. Martine (review)

Studies in American Fiction245 unjustly neglected or partiaUy misread. Charles R. Metzger obstensibly is writing about "Steinbeck's Mexican Americans," but to do so and to conclude that this ethnic group lives with dignity and in harmony with its environment, he focuses on TortiUa Flat and concludes that while it is consciously and effectively romantic, it is is not sentimental. Robert DeMott in "Steinbeck and the Creative Process: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown Against Su;ee< Thursday" sets out to provide a "new and profitable approach to one of Steinbeck's most maligned and neglected novels" (p. 157). The cutehucksterism of DeMott's style and the exaggeration of his "case" for the novel cannot completely offset the interesting point he makes that there is a parallel between the artist and the creative scientist and that Doc (of Stiieef Thursday) is an artist-surrogate and the novel pays homage to art. University of North DakotaRobert W. Lewis Martine, James J. Fred Lewis Pattee and American Literature. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State U. Press, 1973. 192 pp. Cloth: $10.00. In the words of Professor Martine, Fred Lewis Pattee, the pioneer teacher-critic of American literature was "a colossus . . . with one foot in the Victorian period and the other in the modern" (p. 151) . Indeed, few literary critics encompass as large a span of time and taste as he. He was born during the year of Lincoln's GettysburgAddress and Longfellow's Tales of A Wayside Inn, and he died one month before the outbreak of the Korean War. Rather than shaping American literary taste, he chose to reflect it. His criticism of Melville, for example, is a barometer of popular opinions of the author: in his 1896 History of American Literature, Pattee placed Melville in a literary group that included Catharine Maria Sedgwick, John Neal, John Pendleton Kennedy, and WiUiam GilmoreSimms;inhis much admired American Literature Since ¡870 (1915), he barely mentioned Melville; in Century Readings in American Literature (1919), he hadn't yet quite discovered him, though he chose excerpts for the book from Typee and Moby-Dick, in the latter praising only Melville's "pictures of life on the ocean" and "chapters of stirring action" (p. 92). I lowever, Raymond Weaver's revolutionary reappraisal of Melville having been published , Pattee referred to the novelist in 1927 as "a genius born a generation toosoon" (p. 105); and, finally, in TAe New American Literature, 1890-1930 ( 1930) , Pattee wrote of Melville: "For two generations he lay dormant until, watered by the appreciation of a new era, he sprang to life and like the fabled beanstalk filled the whole sky" (p. 135) . In contrast to the rising arc of his estimation of Melville was the decline in his enthusiasm for the genteel tradition. His reappraisal in the 1930's of Bryant, Lowell, Whittier and Cooper reflected again the tides of popular taste. Yet Pattee never abandoned his integrity, even when it revealed critical myopia. His estimate of Emily Dickinson remained low. He consistently dismissed her poems as "mere conceits, vague jottings of a brooding mind" (p. 75). Resisting the New Criticism, he continued to believe in poetry that sang to the soul and elevated the spirit. He was never moved by Pound or Eliot. Perhaps his greatest weakness as a critic was his unwillingness or inability to explicate, especially poetry. But the affirmative side of this defect was his lifelong commitment to the study of literature "under the agencies of race, environment, epoch and personality." Taking the first three "agencies" from Hippolyte Taine's 246Reviews History of English Literature, he added the fourth, which he believed "gave diversity to a literature" (p. 12). He stressed always that literature grew out of national life and was influenced by nonliterary events. Although he probably overestimated the importance of the Civil W ar to American literature, Pattee's influence Ls felt to this day in the academic tendency to divide literature for courses into historical epochs. To the very end of his career, Pattee maintained that extra-literary forces shaped the literature of a country. If that theory seems today truistic and platitudinous, and antithetical to the critical mode of Tate, Ransom and Bowers, it was seminal to the creation of such far-reaching and massive works as Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought, CargiU's Intellectual America, Kazin's On Native Grounds, and Matthiessen's American Renaissance. Pattee's value, like Van Wyck Brooks', lies in his connecting American literature to American life. In an age when American literature was shunned as thebastard offspring of an unacknowledging parent, he broke with tradition and fought earnestly and successfully to prove its legitimacy. To do this required an awesome amount of selection and evaluation. In the words of Susan Wilbur, writing in the Chicago Post in 1916, Pattee had gone through "a mass of reading dreadful to contemplate. . . . From a veritable ragbag of literary castoffs he proudly sifts out little odds and ends of merit for the reader's more or less reluctant admiration" (p. 66). To his satisfaction and the satisfaction of those who admired him, he lived to see the fruits of his work rewarded. Professor Martine has written an indispensable study of a critical pioneer who was frequently wrong but who never wavered from his ultimate goal. The book is scrupulously researched. Martine quotes extensively from interviews and from Penn State Yankee, Pattee's autobiography. He has the advantage of teaching at Pennsylvania State Universiry where Pattee did his work as a scholar and teacher. He gives us glimpses too of Pattee as a man, trying without success to make his mark as a poet and novelist, although he wrote poetry to the end, and caught in departmental and administrative politics. Pattee's life was uneventful, but, in the remarks of Gay Wilson Allen, quoted in the closing pages of this book, he was lively, humane and vivacious, more valuable for the spirit he imparted to the study of American literature than to the content of his writings. Kean College of New JerseyBernard Weinstein ...