The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo (review)

I met the late Tony Tanner for the first and only time in 1970, when he was writing what is still, thirty years later, the best critical study of “contemporary” American fiction, City of Words (1971). He had already written a book on Conrad (Conrad: “Lord Jim” [1963]) and The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature and Culture (1965), one of the three or four best books on American writing. He went on to write many more, preeminently, perhaps, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (1979). I do not recall what Tanner said in our conversation so much as my impression of an immensely intelligent and charming young Englishman who knew more about American literature than anyone I knew or was likely to know. This impression was no doubt based in part on my reading of The Reign of Wonder; it was to be amply confirmed by City of Words; and it has been reinforced through the years by Tanner’s books on Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, and various nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics. It is confirmed for the last time in this posthumous collection of Tanner’s essays of the 1990s on American writers ranging, as the subtitle tells us, from Emerson to DeLillo.

Most of the twelve essays in The American Mystery were first written as introductions to new editions of works by Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Howells, and Fitzgerald. The final two pieces are extensive reviews of Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (the latter published here for the first time). The collection begins with a wonderfully concise reconsideration of the “essential” Emerson and concludes with a deft summary of the Emersonian presence in Pynchon’s latest novel. In between, Tanner displays something like mastery of all his authors, with special attention to Melville, who is the subject of three essays. Tanner’s fondness for Moby-Dick produces a remarkable review of the novel’s essential features, its intellectual connections with the transcendentalists and Nietzsche, and its most plausible political implications. It says something about Tanner’s range that while I think his essay on Moby-Dick is the best thing in this collection, my second choice would be his piece on Howells’s Indian Summer. Moreover, the essay on Mason & Dixon should remind us that Tanner has returned again and again to Pynchon’s works, which have attracted a host of our best critics but none quite so perceptive and erudite as Tanner.

In his foreword to this collection, Edward Said remarks that Tanner represents “the best that the profession of letters has given us at the end of this century of extremes” (xi). I can only agree. Tanner offers a model of the traditional literary critic, now concerned with thematic analysis, now developing philosophical content or implications, now devoting full attention to technical matters. There is perhaps nothing remarkable about his methods—nothing except the excellence with which he employs them. We shall not see his like any time soon.