(2 of 2)
Old Writing, New Writing. The last part of American Memoir deals with the quarter century of Canby's experience in literary Manhattan, beginning in 1920 when Canby was editor of a Saturday supplement to the old New York Evening Post (later the Saturday Re-view). The author's affections are somewhat frigid and his sense of anecdote lacks pungency, so that much of these reminiscences of a rather raffish and effervescent period read like a sedate editorial essay. His reports of acquaintanceship with people he admires, such as Willa Gather, Robert Frost and Clarence Day (Life with Father) are too guarded and smooth to give any vivid impression of these writers. His sympathies were never deeply engaged by the new writing of the Hemingway generation, and many of his generalizations about it will seem pallid to literature's more passionate pilgrims.
Canby writes with complacency of having "stuck his neck out" in a favorable review of one of Sherwood Anderson's early books. He also held out alone on the Book-of-the-Month Club jury for Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. But such bravado was obviously rare. For Canby is not a daring or a penetrating critic. On the other hand, by his industry, fluency, and sincere impulse to "pass on sound values to the reading public," he made a place for himself in his period. He is as competent as any prophet to observe, at the end, "we .have lived through increasing intensity and its decline into fatigue, but the tranquillity, or at least the objectivity, is to come later, I fear much later. . . ."