LIBRARY OF PC AMERICA?

Containing Multitudes: The Politics of the "Library of America" (Peter Wood, August 29, 2003, The Claremont Institute)

Last year, the now-defunct Partisan Review held a conference on the 50th anniversary of its seminal "Our Country, Our Culture" conference. The 1952 event marked a sea change among many American intellectuals who had begun to sense some of the deep attractions of American life and were finding ways to back out of the reflexive scorn for their country and their culture that had long been the identity badge of the American Left. In the year following 9/11, a similar re-discovery seemed to be in progress. At the opening dinner, I found myself at a dinner table with Gerald Weissmann, distinguished physician, biomedical researcher, and eloquent man of letters. I knew him, however, only by reputation and had never turned a page in The Woods Hole Cantata, Darwin's Audubon, or any of his other discursive books on the shoreline between science and literature. Perilous, those chance conversations with luminaries you know to be luminous but about whose actual work you are as ignorant as a sea cucumber.

We chatted about a project whose origins lay in that earlier rapprochement between America and the Left: the Library of America (LOA). Edmund Wilson in 1958 called on the United States to follow the example of the French, who had their Pleiade editions of great French writers. Americans had been notoriously more fickle towards their best writers. Not only had Moby Dick sunk to the cold depths of obscurity but, scandalously, William Faulkner's works at one point had all gone out of print. Here was a noble cause: gather the best American prose and poetry and publish it in uniform, reasonably priced editions that would stay in print for as long as the Republic would stand.

Wilson didn't live to see the realization of his dream, which came in 1979 with the help of the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. LOA was seen by many as a victory of Wilson's dream over a rival scheme favored by the Modern Language Association, but the series soon went in directions that Wilson never could have imagined.

I observed to Weissmann that the Library of America had started well but in recent years it had begun to pad its list more and more with writers of little real distinction. Some, like Kate Chopin, had been added to please the feminists. Some, like Zora Neale Hurston, appeared to be diversity hires. Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locusts and Miss Lonelyhearts? Gay icon, I guess. A volume of John Muir's writings registers the environmentalist sympathies of our age. And then there is Gertrude Stein, who merits two volumes. Stein is a writer whose entire range lies between monotonic and moronic. Weissmann murmured in stern disapproval, and our conversation died away.

A week later I read in Darwin's Audubon Weissmann's tribute to a remarkable mind, "Gertrude Stein and the Ctenophore." Stein, he says, "changed forever the way we read the English language."

Personally, I think Hurston should be there, though Chopin, Stein, & West are sketchy. Anyway, it would be nice to see an LOA edition of Albert Jay Nock, but we conservatives do already have the Liberty Fund. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 29, 2003 7:44 PM