AMERICAN MEMOIR (433 pp.)—Henry Seidel Canby—Houghfon Mifflin ($5).
As a veteran editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, biographer of Thoreau and Whitman, and one of the original judges for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Henry Seidel Canby has been a proficient and even an eminent middleman of letters. His reflections about U.S. life & literati are noteworthy. This book includes two revised but previously published works—one on the '905, The Age of Confidence (1934), one on Yale (1936) and a newly composed section on U.S. literature. The author refers to himself as sensitive. He is certainly observant and shrewd.
The best part of the Memoir is a critical account of the comfortable Quaker society of Wilmington, Del., where young Canby grew up at the end of the century. He describes this setting nostalgically—the leafy interpenetration of country and town, the sense of neighborhoods, the wide lawns, iron stags and idiosyncratic architecture. As for the way people lived, he says: "I believe that there were values in that period called the nineties and scandalously misdescribed in current films and novels, which were as worthy (greatness aside) as any cultural period has ever developed, and which are now lost, perhaps irrevocably."
Home Life, College Life. The values he speaks of are pretty well reducible to the "felt distinction" of good families and the security of their homes, whose quiet rhythms made a good background for growing up. Parents were willing to be mature, to take responsibility; sensing this, the young deferred to them and were content to remain young. There was, he thinks, a more serene friendliness between boys & girls when sexuality was postponed in favor of romance. "Statisticians have yet to reckon the nerve strain in American life which comes from precocious attempts at maturity and painful struggles to retard middle age."
But from this cozy society, with its unquestioning faith in business and its unconscious exclusion of other classes, other arts and ways of life, Canby admits that the young men of his time took flight in coveys to the relative freedom of college life. In college, however, they found a juvenile competitive society exactly suited to put them back where they came from. Says he: "I can still shiver with humiliation over slights remembered for thirty-odd years, and warm at the memory of unforgettable mirth," or of his more rakish classmates with "their tiny straw hats with negligible brims, and voluminous white ducks under neat little coats whose tails scarcely cover [their] waistbands.
"Yet under these comic collegiate clothes the hearts of even the careerists and the drunkards beat with romance, and could be stirred to a passion of loyalty at a hint that our college . . . was not the best in the world." His chapters on New Haven in the early 1900s explore the functions of the college, where, by his estimate, little education was given or gained, and the plight of the faculty which "never, so far as we know, got drunk, swore, fornicated, swindled, never did anything except lie, play politics and be mean. . . ."