Popular Responses to Classic American Writers

Abstract

The writing of Henry Nash Smith has a number of distinct characteristics: it is meticulously careful, patiently moving towards lucid conclusions through a scrupu lous attention to the relevant material; it is never flamboyant, and never seduced by what seems to be fashionable; it is, rather, economic, pared-down, even at times austere, and always immensely, though quite unobtrusively, authoritative. Since the publication of Virgin Land, his benign influence has been an endless source of strength for the developing field of American Studies, and if we have had fewer books from him than we would have liked, part of the reason is the amount of time and care he has spent in encouraging the works of other people in the field. He is probably indirectly responsible for more good books in the field of American Studies than any other individual. So it is a pleasure to greet another one from his own pen. The subtitle of the book is Popular Resistance to American Writers, and this, together with an early pronouncement I have long been fascinated by the solidity, the durability, the imperviousness of the secular faith or ideology lying at the base of American popular gives an idea of the main pre occupation of the book. For it would seem that the authors we regard as Classic American Writers Smith takes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James, with William Dean Howells as a particularly interesting problem case have all written their work not in, but against, the American popular grain. They were only artists to the extent that they failed to gain popularity; and when they did achieve any popularity it was often at the expense of their art. Indeed, to be an artist (with all that after the Romantic movement implies of singleness and privacy of purpose, autonomous works, a privileged and unique sensibility) in a country overtly committed to extreme and often crude notions of democracy is in itself always a potential paradox and problem, as writers like Alexis de Tocqueville were quick to note. Now of course we all knew this, vaguely. But that is where the work of a man like Henry Nash Smith is so valuable. He is not satisfied with a vague sense of the history or problematics of a culture or indeed of anything else. So he has looked into the matter more closely and the result is a book which perhaps does not radically alter our sense of the development or history of American literature but which greatly enhances our perception of some of the crucial issues and problems which are part of that development. By the judicious deployment of often rather obscure (i.e., forgotten) material, Professor