REQUIRED READING:
Why Our American Classics Matter Now
By Andrew Delbanco
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 226 pages, $24
This book ought not to be as wonderfully unusual as it is. By that I mean that the appearance of a nicely crafted collection of essays on major American writers, all grounded in their respective historical contexts yet capable of levitating to higher regions where a few abiding truths make glimpsing appearances, ought not be a rare occasion.
But it is. An explanation of this sad state would require a diagnosis of the various pathologies, academic lunacies and self-inflicted stupidities that have afflicted literary criticism for the last two decades. The good news is that Andrew Delbanco has somehow developed an immunity to all such academic illnesses. “Required Reading” is–Can it be true?–a serious survey of several American literary classics that is also a delight to read.
The very notion that we can talk in an unembarrassed way about “American classics” is also uplifting. Mark Twain once defined an American classic as a book that everybody talks about but nobody actually reads. Twain’s joke does not work anymore, since now even talk about books is rare. But dated as it is, Twain’s definition blends with my own: A classic is a book that I read in high school or college before I was old enough to understand what it was all about. Delbanco’s title plays to those promises we make to ourselves further down the road of life–to pull our copies of “Moby Dick” or “Walden” off the shelf and discover what we missed before. His central assumption is that certain books still have something to teach us. In Emerson’s phrase, they still possess “a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration.”
This assumption flies in the face of the reigning orthodoxies in the lit-crit world, where an American classic is regarded as an odious depository of racist, sexist and other hegemonic excretions, left behind by our predecessors as exhibits of how bad it was back then. “Required Reading” is Delbanco’s impassioned declaration of independence from all forms of such erudite nonsense.
His list of authors includes some names we would expect: Melville, Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Richard Wright and Stephen Crane. His method entails an assessment of their major works within the context of their lives and times, invariably discovering a core message that still resonates because of its searing honesty and defiance of formulaic labels. The more surprising entries include Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Delbanco’s chapter titles convey his irreverent impatience with politicized readings of these female writers: “Was Kate Chopin a Feminist?”, “The Political Incorrectness of Zora Neale Hurston.” His essay on Stowe does a brilliant job of explaining why “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had such a huge impact on white readers: No novelist before Stowe had created black characters who were not alien “others.” She forced her contemporaries to recognize, for the first time, that slaves were fellow human beings.
Delbanco also focuses our attention on two prominent Americans not customarily regarded as literary figures: Henry Adams and Abraham Lincoln. The Adams essay, perhaps under the spell of self-inflicted gloom it tries to explain, did not tempt me to break open my old copy of “The Education.” The Lincoln essay, on the other hand, is a tour de force, brimming with insights into felicity in the midst of the greatest crisis in American history. Here we are in the hands of a critic with the feel for language and sense of history not seen since Edmund Wilson wrote “Patriotic Gore.”
“Required Reading” does not purport to offer a definitive list of books for enshrinement in the American canon. Delbanco is less interested in entering the Great Books debate than in sharing his pleasure with certain authors and their words. The authors included here just happen to be the ones Delbanco has been asked to review of late, mostly in The New Republic. Several obvious candidates for enshrinement are missing altogether–Hawthorne, Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner come to mind. Delbanco will presumably get around to them in good time, whenever a new edition of their works or some anniversary occasion prompts a shrewd magazine editor to request a review.
