A Bibliography of Quentin Anderson
Quentin Anderson came to literary criticism in the 1940s from a career on the stage. Some of his early publications (see 2 and 4) reflect this transition. His use of the words "role," "acting," "drama," and "character," for example, indicates the lasting impression this earlier career has left on him. These words are not arbitrary vestiges but indications of the conscious acceptance of society in his role as a critic. The play is incorporated in Anderson's thinking as a representation of the human drama we call history. His critical responses during the last four decades indicate that he has from the beginning assumed the full burden of his chosen role-a burden of making judgments from the consciously acknowledged limitations that such a role entails.
Anderson's stance does not derive wholly from his theater period. There are probably many sources for it: his father was the playwright Maxwell Anderson; he grew up in New York City; and he studied at Columbia College with (among others) Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, and at Harvard with Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. All of these teachers would have helped Anderson to ground his work in the human realm, especially Trilling, who placed himself in a tradition of cultural history deriving from Burckhardt. As early as 1937, in his valedictory address (1); Anderson wrote: "We exist in our perceptions and responses; these are the matter of intelligent action, of artistic organization. The ends we desire are forever implicated in our social relationships. "This is the statement of a man already committed to a point of view which is developed in subsequent publications. While critical fancy was turning to explication, Anderson was concerning himself with implication, with the involvement of individuals in their culture.
Anderson's first major critical piece, "Henry James and the New Jerusalem," (3) challenged the ascendant perspective on the work of Henry James. To a public schooled by Eliot's assertion that James's mind was so fine that it could not be violated by an idea, Anderson's thesis, that James's manner and style derived from early immersion in his father's religious, philosophical, and psychological ideas, seemed like heresy. This was a generation which did not believe in belief, and Anderson was challenging its notions of the purity of James's art. In this first essay, the basis Anderson gives for his assertions is a "truth written large in the theology of the elder James-every individual implicates a society and every society implicates a personality type." Explications based on the assumption that a work of art stands by itself or is not a response to a cultural dilemma won't help us to understand a James who 'built upon this truth' of the mutual implications of societies and persons.
The response Anderson did get (most notably from F. R. Leavis, who invited him to continue his work in the pages of Scrutiny ) led him to write "Henry James, His Symbolism and His Critics" (6). This essay, the second of two in a series, clarifies Anderson's position on James and leads us into Anderson's later works of cultural history. It amplifies the basis for the authority of Anderson's critique of James, and it leads toward an assessment of what he would later call the Emersonian urge in American culture. It was his answer for those who had responded to his first article on James, and it signaled the entry of Quentin Anderson into a public dialogue, which means that it established Anderson with a critical identity. This is due not so much to the new ideas in the essay as to the quality of the clarifications. He had entered a public forum with his first essay on James, but in this one he showed himself able to respond to others.
This is not the place to recapitulate Anderson's argument on James, but it may be helpful to look at his full statement of James's "implicated" role in culture:
Unless we perceive a continuity between the artist's moral sanctions and the rooted popular myth of his time we cannot really judge him at all. If James had not felt in himself the very impulses which he saw crystallized in American manners he could not have understood American manners. Had he not felt himself a sinner he could not have condemned self-righteousness. The courage to do this is rare. It is surprising to us that James had a belief because we seek to hide our beliefs from ourselves. Lionel Trilling has pointed out that Mark Twain's strength as a moralist comes from his sense of participation in the evils he denounced. James's critics love to think of him as alienated or uncommitted because they dare not acknowledge themselves committed. The abstractions artist and society hide us from ourselves.
James overcame the impulse to hide from himself. He was wholly conscious that he both loved and hated himself-and he knew what in himself he love and what he hated. That love and that hate were to be found in his culture as well. Its institutions and its manners expressed both. These emotions determined people's relationships to one another as they determined James's relationship to himself.
The complexity of the discourse between James and his culture helps explain why he is not adequately met by exclusively Marxian or Freudian analyses. Any treatment of our writers which does not treat their works as "perceptions [of] and responses" to their culture will fail.
These two essays were to become the germ for The American Henry James (11&18), a book which is still causing critical reaction. And the larger concern of these works on James-the implications of individuals and their culture-is the theme which informs the historical appraisals Anderson would later make of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and those who followed them. Emerson is cast as an enabling predecessor to James in some of Anderson's early work, but it is his The Imperial Self (42) which most fully puts our great nineteenth century writers into a historical context. With the exception of Hawthorne (whom Anderson had early called "a far greater moralist" than James [3]),the writers he deals with are imperial selves, "imperial" because they sought to conquer history by dissolving it in consciousness. Anderson suggests that at their most powerful, Emerson and Whitman, along with James, Thoreau, and, to a lesser extent, Melville, were able to surmount the difficulties posed by the stubborn materials of life (what Fitzgerald's Gatsby would later call the merely "personal"). The thesis is dynamic in that it shows that a tendency begun in the early works of Emerson receives impetus in Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and culminates in Henry James's The Golden Bowl . The problem in this for us, who inherit the "emotional and intellectual consequences" of their struggles to become "fully conscious" Americans (see 57), is that we are not aided in our own different moral struggles by their work. Instead, they offer an all-too-tempting avenue of escape (which is not what they were up to at all; they were contending with different circumstances). Only an historical perspective like Anderson's can show us this.
By the early 1970s, when The Imperial Self appeared, it had long been clear that Anderson's own work emulated in its moral awareness the work of Hawthorne and Trilling, both of whom made it a characteristic of their work to acknowledge the presence of societies as historical facts involving (and limiting) the individuals within them. This moral awareness is present in Anderson's reviews as well as in the essays and books. He has responded to many of the recent critical and biographical treatments of American writers. His basis for judging the merit of these works is the same as his basis for judging our imaginative writers: he examines the ways in which they are implicated in their culture. His assessments are helpful because they do not immerse themselves in the terminology of the books at hand but rather put the books and their writers into a historical frame. Read through in sequence, they give evidence of a lifetime of thought. The reviews dovetail into the essays and the latter in turn complement the books. The best are responses to a culture which seems to have lost track of itself by a mind which has not.
It should be worth restating that the mind writing these responses came to us from a background in theater. He tells us that we are playing a role, that the role we play is the thing we are to be judged by, and that this role is, in fact, our character. He began by telling his fellow graduates that "the ends we desire are forever implicated in our social relationships." And he has since shown us how this must be the basis of our response to literature just as literature, if it is worthy of our notice, is based on the involvement of a writer with his culture. If he has been the first to notice the imperial urges of our cultural figures, that tendency of selves toward hypertrophy, that is because, like Henry James before him, he has not hidden from himself. We cannot ask more of a person than that he implicate himself in his work, but we should recognize that it takes courage, the courage required for gaining self-knowledge, to be able to do so.
Anderson is now working on a book on American views of personal identity. He has already given us his own view of the origins of personal identity in many different ways, but the most startling, perhaps, is this on (from 45): "My relation to other people is what made me, if I had none I wouldn't be a person at all. The babe leaps up on his mother's arm in response to her and the world she proffers; there isn't any escape from the conditioned character of our lives." This is a long way from the infinitude promised by Emerson, Whitman, and James. It has the ring of hard-won victory. We should be grateful to have this sort of critic about. He reminds us who we are.
I am indebted to Quentin Anderson's family for giving me most of the information contained in this bibliography.
Bibliography
1937
1. "Valedictory: An Undergraduate Appraises Education." Columbia University Quarterly 29, no. 3 (September 1937): 144-47.
1946
2. "Notes on the Theatre." The Kenyon Review 8, no.3 (Summer 1946): 477-83
3. "Henry James and the New Jerusalem." The Kenyon Review 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1946): 515-66.
1947
4. "Theatre Letter." The Kenyon Review 9, no. 3 (September 1947): 481-86.
5. "The Two Henry Jameses." Scrutiny 14, no. 4 (September 1947): 242-51.
6. "Henry James, His Symbolism and His Critics." Scrutiny 15, no.1 (December 1947): 12-19.
1949
7. Review of The James Family , by F. O. Matthiessen, and The Notebooks of Henry James , ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock. Modern Language Notes 64 (February 1949): 116-19.
8. "Second Trip to Byzantium." Review of Melville's "Billy Budd ," ed. Baron Freeman. The Kenyon Review 11, no. 3 (Summer 1949): 516-20.
1950
9. Introduction to Selected Short Stories , by Henry James. Rev. ed. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1950; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961.
1953
10. Review of The Philosophy of Henry James, Sr. , by Frederic Harold Young. American Literature 24 (January 1953): 556-57.
11. "The American Henry James." Ph.D. diss., sponsored by Lionel Trilling, Columbia University, 1953.
1955
12. "Emerson Changed His Mind." Review of Freedom and Fate , by Stephen E. Whicher. The Kenyon Review 17 , no. 4 (Autumn 1955): 642-45.
1956
13. "George Eliot's Adam Bede ." Broadcast on CBS Radio Network, 18 March 1956 (discussion with Quentin Anderson, Gordon S. Haight, and Alfred Kazin); pub. in The Invitation to Learning Reader: The Victorian Era: Discussions of Great Books and Significant Ideas as Broadcast Weekly on the CBS Radio Network 6, no. 1 (no. 21).
14. Review of Young Henry James , by Robert Charles Le Clair. Modern Language Notes 71 (June 1956 ): 457-60.
15. "The Context of Criticism." Review of The American Adam , by R. W. B. Lewis. The Sewanee Review 64, no. 4 (Autumn 1956): 651-57.
16. "Treasures of Literature." The New Wonder World Encyclopedia 8 ( Parents' Magazine , 1956).
1957
17. "Saints or Single Hounds?" Review of New England Saints , by Austin Warren. The Kenyon Review 19, no. 2 (Spring 1957): 300-02.
18. The American Henry James . New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957; London: John Calder, 1958.
1958
19. "George Eliot in Middlemarch ." In From Dickens to Hardy , ed. Boris Ford, 274-93. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958/ rpt. in Discussions of George Eliot , ed. Richard Stang, 85-94. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1960; rpt in A Century of George Eliot Criticism , ed. Gordon S.Haight, 313-24. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965; rpt. in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. George R. Creeger; 141-60. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970.
1960
20. "All Discontents and No Civilization." Review of Love and Death in The American Novel , by Leslie A. Fiedler. Columbia Daily Spectator 1, no. 6 (27 April 1960): 1ff.
21. Introduction to Twice-Told Tales and Other Short Stories , by Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1960.
1962
22. "Henry James." The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature , by Max J. Herzberg and staff. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Co., 1962: 527-34.
23. "American Literature." Collier's Encyclopedia , 2, ed. William D. Halsey, et al . London: The Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., 1962: 43-74.
24. Introduction to Wuthering Heights , by Emily Brontë. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
25. Introduction and annotated bibliography for The Deerslayer , by James Fenimore Cooper. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
26. Introduction to Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life , by George Eliot. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
27. Introduction to Moby-Dick, or The White Whale , by Herman Melville. New York: Collier Book, 1962.
28. Co-editor with Joseph A. Mazzeo. The Proper Study: Essays on Western Classics . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962.
1963
29. Introduction to Lord Jim , by Joseph Conrad. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1963; New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1963.
30. Introduction to Portrait of a Lady , by Henry James. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1963.
1965
31. "The Critic and Imperial Consciousness." Review of An Autobiography , by Van Wyck Brooks. The New Republic 152, no. 16 (17 April 1965): 15-17.
32. "Willa Cather: Her Masquerade." Review of Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction , 1892-1912, ed. Mildred R. Bennett. The New Republic 153, no. 22 (27 November 1965): 28-31.
33. "Wilson's Canadian Junket." Review of O Canada , by Edmund Wilson. The New Republic 152, no. 22 (29 May 1965): 26-28.
34. Foreword as General Editor, American Literature Series , to The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919 , by Warner Berthoff. New York: The Free Press, 1965.
35. Review of The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James , by Laurence Bedwell Holland. English Language Notes 3, no. 1 (September 1965): 76-83.
1966
36. "Nabokov in Time." Review of Despair , by Vladimir Nabokov. The New Republic 154, no. 23 (4 June 1966): 23-28; rpt. in The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books, 1920-1970, with some Preliminary Ruminations by H. L. Mencken , ed. Gilbert A. Harrison, 16-26. New York: Liveright, 1972.
1967
37. "Frost's Way: Making the Most of It." Review of Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915 , by Lawrence Thompson. The Nation 204, no. 6 (6 February 1967): 182-84.
38. Co-editor of Adventures in English Literature . New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1967.
1971
39. Review of The Early Tales of Henry James , by James Kraft, The Fictional Children of Henry James , by Muriel G. Shine, and Henry James: Dramatist , by Rudolph R. Kossman. American Literature 43, no. 2 (May 1971): 294-96.
40. "Thoreau on July 4." Review of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden , ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, The Annotated Walden: Walden, or Lift in the Woods , ed. Philip Van Doren Stern, Thoreau's World: Miniatures from His Journals , ed. Charles R. Anderson, and The Best of Thoreau's Journals , ed. Carl Bode, 1, 16-18. The New York Times Book Review , 4 July 1971.
41. Foreword as General Editor, American Literature Series, to The Middle Distance: A Comparative History of American Imaginative Literature, 1919-1932 , by John McCormick. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
42. The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History . New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
1972
43. "Devouring the Hemingway Corpus." Review of The Nick Adams Stories , ed. Philip Young. The New Leader Spring Book Issue 55 , no. 10 (15 May 1972): 13-15.
44. "Leon Edel's 'Henry James.'" Review of Henry James the Master: 1901-1916 , by Leon Edel. The Virginia Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1972): 621-30.
45. "National Character." Review of Ten Versions of America , by Gerald B. Nelson, Democratic Humanism and American Literature , by Harold Kaplan, and The Novel of Manners in America , by James W. Tuttleton. Commentary 54, no. 4 (October 1972): 84-88.
1973
46. "Arms (the Civil War) and Man (the American Writer)." Review of The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War , by Daniel Aaron, 4, 26. The New York Times Book Review , 11 November 1973.
47. "Did Marx Come Over on the Mayflower?" Review of Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World , by Larzer Ziff, 4. The New York Times Book Review , 16 December 1973.
1974
48. "Whitman's New Man." Introductory essay to Walt Whitman: Walt Whitman's Autograph Revision of the Analysis of Leaves of Grass (for Dr. R. M. Bucke's Walt Whitman) , ed. Stephen Railton, 11-52. New York: New York University Press, 1974.
1975
49. "The Emergence of Henry James." Review of Henry James: Letters, Volume I: 1843-1845 , ed. Leon Edel, 498-500. TLS , 9 May 1975.
50. "It Was Not Easy to Be or Become Edith Wharton." Review of Edith Wharton: A Biography , by R. W. B. Lewis, 1-2. The New York Times Book Review , 31 August 1975.
1976
51. "Classical Landscapes." Review of The Classic , by Frank Kermode, 371. TLS . 2 April 1976.
52. "Practical and Visionary Americans." The American Scholar , 45, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 405-18.
1977
53. "The Liberal Imagination." Review of The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society , by Lionel Trilling, 30-32. The New Republic , 23 April 1977.
54. "Co-editor of Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling . New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977.
55. "On the Middle of the Journey." Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling , ed. Quentin Anderson, Stephen Donadio, and Steven Marcus, 254-64. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977.
1978
56. Review of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature and Henry James , by Strother B. Purdy. American Literature , 50, no. 1 (March 1978): 124-26.
57. "Legend with Buttons." Review of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 13, 1852-1855 , ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson, 12, 42. The New York Times Book Review , 19 March 1978.
58. "New Critic Back Down South." Review Of William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond , by Cleanth Brooks, 7, 31-32. The New York Times Book Review , 21 May 1978.
59. "Property and Vision in 19th-Century America." The Virginia Quarterly Review , 54, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 385-410.
1979
60. "American Classics, American Readers." Review of Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers , by Henry Nash Smith, 9, 22-23. The New York Times Book Review , 11 February 1979.
61. Review of Educated Lives: The Rise of Autobiography in America , by Thomas Cooley. English Language Notes , 16, no. 3 (March 1979): 266-68.
62. "John Dewey's American Democrat." Daedalus , 108, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 145-59.
1980
63. "Notes on the Responsibility of the Critic." Partisan Review , 47, no. 2 (1980): 264-68.
64. "Sweet Democratic Despot." Review of Walt Whitman: A Life , by Justin Kaplan. The New Republic, 183, no. 21 (22 November 1980): 27-31.
1981
65. Foreword to Camus' Imperial Vision , by Anthony Rizzuto, ixx. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.
1982
66. Review of Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 . Intellectual History Group, Newsletter , (Spring 1982): 29-33.
67. Review of After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture , by Joseph J. Ellis. Early American Literature , 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 87-89.
1983
68. "Henry James's Cultural Office." Prospects: The Annual of American Cultural Studies , 8 (1983): 197-210. (Original version delivered to the Henry James Society at the MLA Convention, Houston, 1980).
69. "Making It Alone." Review of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, Volume 1, 1837-1844 , ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer, and Thomas Blanding, Review , 5 (1983): 17-30.
70. "When the Singer Found His Song." Review of Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet , by Paul Zweig, 1, 43-44. The New York Times Book Review , 6 May 1984.
Notes on Contributors
JACQUES BARZUN is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and the author of many works in cultural history and criticism, ranging widely in subject from aspects of romanticism to issues in contemporary education. His most recent book is a study of the thought and sensibility of William James.
STEPHEN DONADIO is Professor and Chairman of the Department of American Literature and Civilization at Middlebury College, and Director of the Program in Literary Studies there. Among other works, he has published a study of Nietzsche and Henry James, and he is currently engaged in completing a cultural history of the United States in the period between 1941 and 1961.
DENIS DONOGHUE taught for many years at University College, Dublin, and currently holds an appointment as the Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University. He has published studies of Yeats and Swift, and is the author of numerous works concerned with modern English and American poetry and with developments in contemporary literary criticism.
AARON FOGEL is a poet and teacher of English at Boston University. His first critical book, Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue , will be published in 1985.
CARL HOVDE teaches at Columbia, where he was dean of Columbia College from 1968 to 1972. He has edited, with others, the Princeton edition of Thoreau's Week on the Concorde and Merrimack Rivers .
STEVEN MARCUS who has served for many years as Associate Editor of Partisan Review , is Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
Post Festschrift Bibliography
1986
"Individualism and Commerce." Festschrift for Yehoshua Arieli, June 1986.
1987
Review of "Look Homeward: The Life of Thomas Wolfe" by David H. Donald. The New Republic , March 1987.
1988
"American Literature and The Emergence of Modernism." Columbia Literary History of the United States , 695-724. 1988.
1992
Making Americans: An Essay on Individualism and Money . New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992.
1993
Review of Henry James, The Imagination of a Genius: A Biography , by Fred Kaplan. The Henry James Review , 14 (1993): 223-233.
Expected Publications
2000
"Living Legacies: An Essay on Lionel Trilling." Columbia Magazine .
2001
"Why Blackmur Found Henry James Inhumane." English Literary History , 68, Johns Hopkins University. (Written in 1998-99.)