March 2: Birthday of 3 Literary Icons

March 2 is an illustrious day in the annals of American literary culture. Theodor Seuss Geisel, infinitely better known as Dr. Seuss, author and illustrator of such beloved children’s classics as Horton Hears a Who!, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and The Cat in the Hat, was born on March 2, 1904. I can claim a single degree of separation; my mother once cooked dinner for him in the 1970s. Seuss’s oeuvre appears very different in the cold light of adulthood: many of his most famous works emerged within a Cold War framework of anxiety over a perceived “crisis” in American education. The Cat in the Hat is, as Louis Menand discusses in a fascinating article from the New Yorker, “Cat People” a response to 1955’s infamous Why Johnny Can’t Read, which advocated both a more active, “masculine” literature for children and a phonics approach to reading.

March 2 is also the birthday of Tom Wolfe (b. 1930 or 1931), who, in typical self-effacing style, describes himself on his eponymous website as “our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive.” Wolfe is a founding member of the school of “New Journalism,” a movement that brought literary experimentation and aesthetics into uneasy alliance with journalism’s creed of factual accuracy and impartiality. Wolfe would no doubt claim that his work, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), The Right Stuff (1979), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and I am Charlotte Simmons (2004), captures something of the American zeitgeist across a broad historical range; critics (and there are many) would demur, suggesting that instead of chronicling or critiquing American culture, Wolfe has instead adopted the stance of a sardonic but unapologetic cheerleader for its worst excesses. Wolfe’s ongoing conflict with other American literary lions (one of whom shares his birthday, below) sets his commitment to “full-blooded realism” against the presumably ex-sanguinated aesthetics of the literary elite: John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Irving. It also sells books, reanimates the “popular” vs. “literary” division, and provides endless fodder for the chattering classes. See a recap here. [In the interests of full disclosure: I have a degree of separation here, too–while at Berkeley, I lived in the house made infamous in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as Owsley’s LSD manufacturing locale. Direct evidence of his presence was long gone.]

I’ve not as yet discovered any personal “degrees of separation” I share with John Irving, but March 2 is his birthday, too (1942, for those of you doing the math). His most famous works, The World According to Garp (1978), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), offer quirky and somewhat self-conscious portraits of New Englanders, and (generally) disrupt the sentimentalist clichés of Americana through moments of absurdist irony. As one of of Tom Wolfe’s Literary Nemeses, Irving’s most noteworthy contribution to the feud has been to state that Wolfe’s work makes him “gag.” This clear grasp of the proximity between the sublime and the ridiculous is characteristic of his work at its best, and otherwise.

Tempest in an (Antique) Teapot

PBS is promoting a new edition of “American Masters” featuring The American Novel. Great, no? You’d think that your dedicated English Department members would be ecstatic.

And we are, sort of. Because if you poke around the site a bit, something quite strange begins to emerge. Take the Timeline feature. Nifty, no? Scroll to the left…all…the…way…back…to……1826.

Yes, folks; apparently the PBS “Experts” have decreed that 1826 is the year of origin for the American novel, during a period known as “Romanticism.” (Perhaps the fact that they are celebrating “200 years” with a timeline that includes only 186 years should have alerted me to potential problems). Presumably, the outpouring of novels that succeeded the Revolution is unworthy of critical–or popular–attention. Sorry, Charles Brockden Brown, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, Royall Tyler. You don’t count. James Fenimore Cooper makes it into the series, but just barely, and in a clearly subordinate role as precursor to the good stuff.

Clearly the earlier works are far less well known, and yes, we English profs are always happy to see programs that encourage, feature, or acknowledge books.

But still, it concerns me that a series presumably interested in exploring the substance and breadth of a rich American literary tradition so closely resembles the reading list I had in my AP literature course, lo these many, many years ago.

To be fair, it is obvious from the website that the producers have made an important and necessary effort to acknowledge the tremendous influence writers of color have had on the American novel, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries; Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Gish Jen, Zora Neale Hurston, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Ralph Ellison are there alongside predictable figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand (!), Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck. And, of course, no series can or should try to do all things; I appreciate both the limits of the genre and the need to create a coherent and engaging set of programs, rather than attempt an impossible comprehensiveness.

But in its conception, the series appears to hew pretty closely to the party line established by F.O. Mathiessen’s The American Renaissance (1941), which canonized the writings of a select group of male authors (Thoreau, Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman) at the expense of far more popular women writers of the era. His book articulated the values that dominated the study of American literature for decades: the notion of the great writer as a brooding, alienated, masculine genius, whose work dramatized the individual’s psychological turmoil set against a backdrop of nattering, unappreciative, stultifying (feminine) society.

For those of us who spend most of our time trying to draw attention to the rich, complex, multi-faceted novels that emerged in the eighteenth century, the PBS series looks like a disappointment in the making, reinforcing curricular biases that neglect an important part of the story of the American novel. I’m hoping, however, to be pleasantly surprised. You can check for local airings of the episodes here.

A new “reference” for American Lit and Culture

File this one under “I’ve-got-to-get-this-book.” Academic odd couple Greil Marcus (a cultural critic known for his groundbreaking work on the intellectual antecedents of rock music) and Werner Sollors (erudite, German-born race theorist) have joined forces to bring out a “new” look at the great moments and monuments of U.S. culture. A New Literary History of America promises to offer a fresh take on the significant events in our literary past, writ large, and to unseat the stodgy, establishment approach to some of our “great works,” ranging from Gatsby to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Jackson Pollock, and hip hop.

It’s an ambitious undertaking of nearly 1100 pages, broken down into some 200+ essays, so I expect it to be somewhat uneven in approach and idiosyncratic in its historical coverage. Still, the project of re-imagining our shared past from some new vantage points–and especially the prospect of Ishmael Reed taking on the vexed racial politics of Twain’s Huck Finn is enough to get me to add this to my bookshelf.

Here’s a review essay from the LA Times, and here’s the Harvard UP link, which includes a full table of contents.

Have your review on my desk by the end of next week.