Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing by Lewis P. Simpson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 165 Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing. By Lewis P. Simpson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. ISBN13 :978-0-8071-3202-9. $45.00. As one of the most eminent intellectual historians and literary critics of the twentieth century, Lewis P. Simpson focused his major critical writings on the life of the mind as exhibited by "men of letters" in the modern Western tradition, particularly in America. This collection of essays records Simpson's profound meditations on the problematic vocation of the modern writer as man of letters, represented by Eric Voegelin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Penn Warren, Lionel and Diane Trilling, Allen Tate, Eudora Welty,Walker Percy and others. His method is to begin with a personal recollection about the writers, several of whom he knew as friends and colleagues, then analyze their oeuvre in terms of his larger theme. Two seminal thinkers inform Simpson's perspective: Julian Benda and Eric Voegelin. In his controversial essay,"La Trahison des clercs," (1927), Benda argued that in the twentieth century a crisis was occurring in the life of the mind, a crisis which "originated in an exodus of the clerks (i.e, men of learning) from a world in which they were a cohesive part of a church-state structure to a world in which they would conceive of themselves as belonging primarily to a realm of secular letters and learning independent of church and state" (27). Beginning at least in the fifteenth century, this "treason" and redefinition of vocation is now, Simpson argues, "the universal homeland of the modern Western mind" (27). Benda claimed that in their treason the clerks abandoned their true vocation as dispassionate guardians of universal transcendent values and instead identified with "all that portion of the human species .. , whose whole function consists essentially in the pursuit of material interests" (6). Fueling this betrayal was the decline of a unified Christian social and moral order, the increasing secularization of the spiritual (and vice versa), the rise of the modern nation state, and the emergence of the autonomous secular self beset by the terrors of solipsism and alienation. Simpson sees Eric Voegelin as one of the "good" and faithful modern clerks, a brilliant philosopher who in his monumental works Orderand Historyand TheNew Science of Politics analyzed the intricate connection between mind, history, and the process of symbolization to show how secular "men of letters" became the primary interpreters of history and tried to "recover for the existence of men in society and history a meaning which he could substitute for the lost meaning of Christian existence" (15). Voegelin traces the process by which modern secular clerks-from Voltaire and Comte to Hegel, Engels, Marx, and finally Hitler-presumed to "save mankind by divinizing their particular existence and imposing its law as the new order of society" (19). Using Benda and Voegelin, Simpson points to what he sees as the fate of the modern secular mind: 166 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Ultimately, through its will to analytic interpretation, the human mind would transfer God and man, nature and society, and even mind itself, into mind. The radical subjectivity of this process ... the movement of existence into mind ... makes it impossible for the human mind to deal with itself save on its own terms of self-interpretation. (30) As Allen Tate said: "Without his mythologies, man becomes an interpretant," (30) Using this broad intellectual framework, Simpson analyzes how several major American "clerks"wrestled with this crisis in the lifeof the mind. In "The Betrayal of the Clerks in America:' he sees Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as pivotal representative figures in this crisis. Both imagined the university as a "republic of letters" that would be "the embodiment of a transcendent realm of humanistic letters and learning:' a home for the enlightened secular mind (41). But this ideal ran afoul of the undermining pressures for an egalitarian "democracy of letters;' propelled by the development of the printing press and the spread of literacy. This egalitarian movement, coupled with the materialistic thrust of American culture and the betrayal of the clerks, destroyed the ideal of a Republic of Letters. Simpson believes that now the university has "lost...