Joseph Wood Krutch: Persistent Champion of Man and Nature

P A U L N. P A V I C H Fort Lewis College Joseph Wood Krutch: Persistent Champion of Manand Nature In the fall of 1967 I had the good fortune of taking a class in Emerson and Thoreau from Dr. J. Golden Taylor. During the semester I chanced upon the desert writings of Joseph Wood Krutch and became interested in the connections between him and the Transcendentalists. Golden Taylor was a perfect mentor as we worked together on an analysis of Krutch’s work. We discovered that Krutch’s writing portrayed a persistent humanist. His critical works and philosophical essays reveal an intellectual evolution centered around a concern for man’s role in nature. In his early writings Krutch showed that he was on the side of humanity. The Modern Temper, published in 1929, inveighed against the proponents of experimental psychology and political systems which placed man on the level of a machine to be stimulated to certain responses. However, at this time, Krutch was very pessimistic about the future for mankind and the work is tinged with a tone of existential gloominess and alienation. The closing words of The Modern Temper are those of a discouraged humanist, “Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should rather die as men than live as animals.”1 With the publication of his work on Thoreau in 1948 Krutch moved a step closer to the philosophical position which was to inform his thought for the next twenty years. After studying the transcendentalist 1Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), p. 169. 152 Western American Literature concept of nature, Krutch himself became interested in a closer inspection of the world around him. However, he did not give himself over to a utopian theory that humanity was in a state of perfection when it put off the trappings of technological society and “returned to nature.” He knew that human existence was a struggle toward idealistic, perhaps unattainable, goals. In attempting to achieve these ends individuals had to utilize all the faculties which they possessed and to stand firm behind their convictions. Jacques Barzun found Emerson, Thoreau and Krutch alike in their assessment of human nature: “They are all antideterminists, although alive to necessity when she looms; they believe that men make institutions and that attitudes matter; they believe that emotion and choice are real, not delusion — hence, that man is responsible for his acts and has a duty to perfect himself.”2 By the early 1950’s Krutch had moved even further from the posi­ tion of alienation from nature that he took at the end of The Modern Temper. His work on the Transcendentalists came out in his volume of essays, The Measure of Man. In these studies he repudiated much of his earlier pessimism in favor of an active stance against the dehumanizing forces of contemporary society. He believed that men had given up their ability to think and act in favor of being led by an ecclesiastical authority, a laboratory researcher or a political demagogue. At the same time he struggled against that type of existentialist thought that left man alone in a meaningless universe. In “Modernism” in the Modern Drama Krutch set down three principles which he believed were being negated by con­ temporary society: “First, man is a creature capable of dignity. Second, life, as led in this world, not merely as it might be led either in the Christian’s City of God or the Marxist’s Socialist State, is worth living. Third, the realm of human rationality is the realm in which man may most fruitfully live.”3 Krutch was outraged by the tendency in various institutions to put man on the level of an automaton. Like Thoreau before him he hoped that each man would try to perfect himself. However, he would never deny an individual’s worth simply because he had not reached that elevated state. Likewise, Krutch was unhappy with all types of utopian 2Jacques Barzun, “An Uncommon Carrier of Truth,” The American Scholar, 39 (Autumn...