New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1931, The Contemporary and His Soul.

“Not only is a country too complex for the plans or the accomplishments of the most absolute dictator. A dictatorship within one’s own personality is an impossible mirage. Even in primitive communities life is far from a soliloquy and it is infinitely further from being one in the highly corporate life of modern communities. It is rarely within the achievement of any individual to attain by himself integrity or clarity or peace in a society all confusion and incipient or actual warfare. No psychological technique could reconstruct a truly integrated individual without reconstructing first the whole world in which and by which his individuality is formed. No Thoreauian individualism or Emersonian self-reliance will have any point for the man or woman involved in the network of the industrial and international world of today. He may flee to a desert island or to a desert island of the mind. But that flight will itself be a defeat and a surrender, it is an admission that individuality cannot be attained among the realities of contemporary social experience. And it is admittedly difficult to be an individual, much less to reconstruct one’s individuality, where all the conditions of industry, education and politics make for a standard, a pattern or type, moulds too in which it would be surprising were everyone to find his happiness. One quarrel then is between the individual desiring to be an individual and a society where individuality is increasingly at a discount. But there is a quarrel more ancient and not less alive: that between the flesh and the spirit, or, in the jargon of the day, between impulse and intelligence. That inner tumult which tormented St. Paul and plagued St. Augustine has been rendered no less intense by repressions and restrictions of urban and corporate life. The resources of the whole of modern psychiatry have not been able to cure those neuroses whose sources lie not so much in the biography of an individual as in the history of an era. Where half the neurotic troubles of the present are to be traced to the conditions peculiar to the era of cities, of corporate pressure and of speed, it is not to be expected that an individual simply by determining to be sweet and reasonable can accomplish the miracle of becoming so.l those activities which release and enhance the sense of being and, with it, the sense of joy.”

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1939, Candle in the Dark: A Postcript to Despair.

“What brief candles of hope or of resource can we find in a darkness which we are first prepared to accept as absolute? What, amid the noisy alarms and scarring disillusions, can the mind remaining at once candid and liberal hope for?”

“It may seem strange to the point of perversity to declare in an almost immitigably tragic time that a vivid sense of the present is one of the best antidotes to despair. But the fact is, so great is the impact of events upon us, that we are losing the capacity to realize the present at all. Even in quiet times most people live for the most part at second-hand, by labels and clichés passing for experience. In tense periods such as that through which we are passing, we do not so much live as we are interrupted in living by dire intimations, by signals of death and darkness. We do not experience the present at all as a poet or any free spirit or, in a word, any person completely alive feels it. Each moment is filled with such complex uncertainty that we are losing the capacity to take or to feel the moment as it is in itself — now. Haunted habitually by the thought of how all goods are threatened, we no longer have the freedom of spirit to be wholly or wholeheartedly acquainted with such goods of life as even now there are, such goods of life as persist, whatever ardors and endurances face men. These we experience at their fullest in art and play, in friendship and affection, or in our work (if we happen to be lucky), and in all those activities which release and enhance the sense of being and, with it, the sense of joy.”

(From Irwin Edman’s Under Whatever Sky, 1951.)

A macabre practical joker once appeared at the front door in the middle of a dinner party given by an older friend of mine, then a very lively dean. The man insisted on seeing the head of the house; and when the host appeared at the door, the visitor turned out to represent a local undertaking firm. He had come on a telephoned request to take charge of the body of our host, who was intelligibly not amused.

At a large university recently, an eminent scholar, who had reason to believe his writings were fairly well known, had a similar experience. The Secretary turned over to him a letter addressed to the University from a small town in California. The letter inquired whether the University would enable the correspondent to “contact” the scholar in question. “He was,” so the letter ran, “connected with your university, I believe, about twenty-five years ago. If you would give me his present whereabouts, I should greatly appreciate it. I have no way of knowing what has become of him.” The eminent thinker brooded over this missive.

Everyone broods at some time or another over the obscurity, the anonymity, the zero place of his own personality in his era. Swift is said to have remarked when he looked, years after its writing, at A Tale of a Tub: “My God, I had genius when I wrote that.” Many another writer, looking at an early work of his own, can only reflect on how long forgotten it is. Max Beerbohm once found in a secondhand bookshop a book that long ago he had “affectionately” inscribed to a friend. He bought the book, wrote in it “still affectionately,” and mailed it to the friend who had disposed of it.

How often one meets the ghosts of former celebrities, men and women whose names once meant something to practically every literate person. It is a shock that they are still alive; one feels it would have been much more decent and proper of them to have been buried with their reputations. They have no right to be perambulating in so belated a living air. They constitute reminders, too discouraging, of the transiency of fame.

My friend replied to the inquiry as to what had become of him that he presumed he was still identical with the person being sought. But was he? Are we not all distant echoes of earlier selves, of transformed personalities going by the same name? “Whatever has become of so and so?” we ask. Whatever has become of me, one sometimes asks himself or should ask. But — the consoling thought comes to us — our essential being, our authentic self, has changed no more than (until very old age) our own familiar voice changes. It is only the public mask of one stage of our lives that has vanished. Thus, the modishness of a given art critic may have disappeared, but his delight in art itself may last freshly and happily through his obscure last years. Marcus Aurelius warned us against relying upon the externalities of wealth, of friends, of fame. He followed his own warning and retired into the fortress of his own soliloquy. It is not his fault that by so doing he insured his future fame. While he was still alive, there must have been someone in some remote corner of the Roman Empire who asked, “What has become of Marcus Aurelius?” — or, when he passed by in some place remote from Rome, “Now who on earth is that?”

Jacques Barzun on Anne Goodwin Winslow: “Mrs. Winslow’s reputation as a novelist is based on an exquisite specialization. She writes about the Southern gentry at the turn of the present century. This might well prove trivial or suffocating if it were not for the author’s astonishing power to make life pulse vigorously in the constricted places, situations, and people that she chooses.” Anne Goodwin Winslow at IWP Books:

 1925, The Long Gallery
 1943, The Dwelling Place
 1945, A Winter in Geneva and Other Stories
 1946, Cloudy Trophies
 1947, A Quiet Neighborhood
 1949, The Springs
 1949, It Was Like This

Reviews at the Neglected Books Page.

(From Irwin Edman’s Under Whatever Sky, 1951.)

“And what do you think of the election of Reuther to the U.A.W.?” I heard the gentleman ask.

“Well, really, I haven’t thought about it at all,” replied the candid young non-thinker opposite him.

And I was led to reflect on the number of times, confronted with a sudden question about one of the thousand things a well-bred contemporary is supposed to have some opinion about, I have invented one on the spot, ad hoc and ad lib and ad nauseam. Nor am I alone. I have seldom observed anyone instigated by such an immediate and searching interrogation refuse to give a reply and, often in quite grammatical form, a judgment — on Russia, on the atom bomb, on existentialism, on socialized medicine.

Judging by myself, I suspect I know what happens. It is only civil to answer a question. It seems blunt and rude, as well as mildly shameful, not to have a spontaneous reply concerning the major issues that are troubling mankind or the minor problems that are agitating the local parish. It seems as absurd to say: “I haven’t made up my mind,” in answer to an inquiry concerning Argentina, as it would to say the same words in reply to the question: “Isn’t it a nice day?” And once one begins a reply, the rest is all too fatally easy. One begins not quite knowing what it is one intended to say, or what actual opinions, if any, one does have on the subject that has been broached. The theme gathers momentum in the soliloquizing mind. Within a few moments the odds and ends of anything one has read on the matter begin to come together. The idea develops almost of itself. It is a tune that begins to complicate itself in the mind. And the first thing one knows, there is a flow of sentences; and as they flow, the tone of conviction grows more emphatic.

The more one talks, the more one feels in the internal equilibrium of one’s being: “This is deeply what I believe.” And more than that. Within two minutes, it becomes quite clear to the speaker that these notions which he has quickly marshaled out of the radio commentaries, the editorials, the brochures he has read in the last year, are opinions of his own — long, deeply, and painfully pondered. They are offered now with the weight of conclusions that have grown out of months of industrious and conscientious study and reflection.

“What do you think of Niebuhr’s theology, of the new president of Vassar, of the future of air transportation, of book clubs, of the new women’s hats, of Truman’s chances in 1948, of the nature of happiness?” At the drop of a hat, or of the handkerchief of the lady who asks the question, I would blush not to have a reply. And like many others, I become so absorbed in developing the music and dialectic of my answer that I have no time to blush at the fatuities the answer may contain.

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1951, Under Whatever Sky. From Hiram Haydn’s Words & Faces: “He [Edman] was perfectly capable of systematic philosophy, but his true métier was the informal essay — full of charming anecdote, shrewd observation and fresh and penetrating speculation. I proposed to him that he contribute a regular column to the Scholar. He accepted. The first installment ran in the spring 1945 number, and the department — which he named, in honor of his beloved Santayana, ‘Under Whatever Sky’ — continued until his death in 1954.” From Under Whatever Sky:

Like everybody else, I have been increasingly impressed by the fact that so much of what we read about public affairs, or even affairs that are relatively less public, is propaganda. By this time it is almost impossible to read a headline about Russia, Israel, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, not to add Guatemala, Ecuador, and Heligoland, without wondering who has wished to say what why. A century ago liberal thinkers regarded the press as a great instrument of democratic education; and newspaper publishers, addressing dinners of the NAM today, still repeat these pious optimisms. But we have been informed, perhaps over-informed, that practically everything is propaganda. The other night over the radio I heard what years ago I might have thought was an innocent weather report. The announcer said that a depression had settled over Iceland and was moving slowly south. A canard, probably put out by Moscow.

Most of us, I think, rather smugly feel that if there is propaganda in any alleged news item or even in some meditative nostalgic reminiscence by Sir Osbert Sitwell, we are so alert and alerted that we can recognize it. I myself have the comfortable conviction that by careful and sophisticated reading, and by a nice and expert discounting of obvious propaganda, I can get the substantial truth about Russia, Israel, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Heligoland. It is a little as if all the talk about propaganda had proved a self-corrective for distortion, so that one is about where one was.

The propagandists have overdone it so much that the fairly intelligent reader feels that by taking a little trouble he can get at the facts pretty well, even now. He feels he has learned to translate double-talk into single-mindedness, and knows on the whole exactly what everybody means, no matter what he says. It is the same technique that people pride themselves on mastering when with a smattering of psychoanalysis they manage to pay no attention to the surface meaning of what people say, but substitute complete awareness of what they know, in the now-obvious recesses of their subconscious, people really mean. Fooled by propaganda? Indeed! What! Me?

Tristram Shandy on Writing: “That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident that my own way of doing it is the best. — I’m sure it is the most religious, — for I begin with writing the first sentence, — and trusting the Almighty God for the second.” (Book VIII, Chapter II)

A Birthday Wish by Aldous Huxley (G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Works)

Erasmus was the best-seller of the sixteenth century; all Europe read Voltaire; all the world has read or listened to George Berand Shaw. Works of art having a reasonableness-appeal can, if good enough, achieve a popularity almost equal to that accorded to sex-appeal and sect-appeal. The fact may seem surprising. But homo, after all, is sapiens as well as amans, credens and bellicosus. When an enormous talent places itself at the service of sweet reasonableness, the sapient and asthetic sides of human beings respond with enthusiasm. As artists, the apostles of rationality are admired and loved; as practical teachers, alas, they are ignored. If people had been content not merely to read Erasmus’s books, but to take his advice, there would have been no wars of religion, perhaps no revival of polytheism in its form of nation-worship; if they had done what Voltaire so brilliantly implored them to do, there would have been no French revolution, no Napoleonic imperialism, no universal military conscription; and if, instead of just applauding Mr. Shaw’s plays and chuckling over his prefaces, we had also paid some serious attention to his teaching, what remains of our civilization might not now be lying under sentence of death. But, as usual, homo amans, credens and bellicosus has proved to be a great deal stronger than homo sapiens. Reason continues to be used, in the main, as the instrument of passion. Science and technology are still the servants, not of truth, or liberty or happiness, but of nationalistic idolatry and the lust for political or economic power. As in the past, first-rate minds proclaim by their actions that they are ready to forward policies of unspeakable silliness and wickedness. According to the investigating psychologists at Nuremberg, Messrs. Schacht and Seyss-Inquart have IQ’s of over 140 and must therefore be placed in the “genius” category. Field-Marshal Goering is a close third, with a score of 138. Like patriotism, intelligence is evidently not enough. Then what is enough? Let us all wish Mr. Shaw as many happy returns of the day as will suffice him to distil his ripened wisdom into the answer which our world so desperately needs.

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1947, Philosopher’s Quest. From the book:

I think the finest of human beings are the true humanists, the true relativists. They are those who, like Montaigne, see the possibilities of all human points of view, who are convinced only that there is no absolute single set of convictions that are absolutely provable and true. Perhaps another name would be better for the more benign species of the unconvinced, I’d rather call them the unchained. They subscribe to no orthodoxy, cling to no doctrine, cram no literal faith down other people’s throats. But they have the tentative faith of the true humanist, they have the audacity of hope and the daring of adventure. They win converts by persuasion, by opening up horizons which they invite others to explore with them. They know… that:

…All experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Ulysses didn’t wait for logic to force him to go on; he needed only a distant gleam. Drink to the gleam!

From Jacques Barzun’s Clio and the Doctors:

Assuming receptivity, history exerts its many-sided formative and reformative effect. It heightens resistance to the superstitions of the day, the flood of conventional knowledge — all of it plausibly wrong — that the surrounding sources of information keep spreading like a sterile sort of manure over contemporary thought. To believe that the persecution of witches was rife in the early Middle Ages “before the rise of scientific ideas”; that France was not prosperous but impoverished in 1789; that ancient Greece was a peace-loving democracy, peopled entirely by artists and patrons of art; that murder has for centuries been punished by death, and property similarly protected because valued as highly as life; that Magna Carta is the original charter of democratic rights, that scientific discovery precedes technological advance; that the first universities were established to teach the liberal arts and did teach them; that Roman law is the antithesis of the English Common Law and contributed nothing to it; that Machiavelli was a ruthless, immoral cynic, Macaulay an apologist for the Whig interest, and Plato a liberal rationalist; that until Darwin nobody knew about evolution and that only after him did religious faith begin to totter; that Hegel was the theorist of Prussian state tyranny and Nietzsche an advocate of world conquest by Nordics; that as the year 1000 approached all Europe feared the end of the world — to believe these and a hundred other pieces of “common knowledge” causes error and blindness in current decisions about science, religion, art, education, criminology, revolution, and social action generally. There need be no conscious reference to the beliefs; they act as the accepted base, or rather as the springboard, from which “educated” thought takes flight.