SomeNew Viewsof American Literature
This issue of SPAN is devoted to a 36-page Special Section on Ameri<;:anLiterature-new views of new writers, fresh views of old writers. The strength and richness of America derives in large part from its ethnic diversity. So, too, its literature. In the opening article "Modern American Ethnic Literature" (page 10), U.S.LS. Resident Specialist Jacob Sloan, who is well-known throughout India as an itinerant lecturer on American letters, discusses those American writers who are not of white Anglo-Saxon extraction, including the only true Qative Americans, the Red Indians. Sloan also develops the controversial thesis that playwright Eugene O'Neill is basically an "ethnic" writer whose inspiration came from his Irish immigrant roots. Of all the ethnic schools of American literature today, perhaps the most varied and vital is Negro writing. In "America's Black Novelists" (page 15), Negro writer-editor Mel Watkins introduces a host of young and promising black authors. He argues that first the Anglo-Saxons dominated American literature, then the Jews. "Now," he says, "it's our turn." For a change of pace-and a proof that literary criticism can be fun to read-one of India's most distinguished humorists, V.D. Trivadi, tells what happened "The Night I Decided to Write Like Thurber" (page 18). One of Trivadi's conclusions: Until James Thurber came along, it was believed that the humorist's chief function was to make the world a less frightening place to live in; Thurber took the opposite view. Lest we neglect poets, SPAN interviews William Stafford (page 23), who gave lectures and poetry readings in India late last year. Stafford offers some new ideas about his craft-and about the difficulties of translating poetry. How well he himself has surmounted those difficulties may be seen from his translations (page 24) of the Ghazals of Ghalib. For an intimate view of "a new and disturbing" writer in American fiction, Alfred Kazin reports on his visit with Joyce Carol Oates (page 26). He suggests that one reason fO,rher growing appeal is that her characters, like most 20th-century people, are caught up in the "avalanche of time." They "live through terrifying events but cannot understand them." They live lives where "too much" is happening. Sometimes not enough is happening in Ernest Hemingway's novels, but the inactivity is an artistic device. This is the controversial thesis of Dr. Cham an Nahal, one of India's most distinguished scholars of American literature, in his article on page 28. Hemingway is "the first Western novelist," in Nahal's opinion, "to use inactivity-physical or mental-as part of the structure of the novel." Seeing the typical Hemingway hero as a passive person, Nahal defies the long established "party line" of literary criticism that Hemingway heroes are men of action. His article is also a human interest travelogue on what it was like to live and do research on Hemingway at Princeton University. In a sidebar on page 31, Dr. Nahal applies his new theory to Hemingway's posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream. People challenged us to come up with a "new view" of Mark Twain, and we met the challenge with pictures. Twain grew up in the little Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. His boyhood life there was eventually transformed by his art into Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What do young boys do today in Hannibal, Missouri? The picture essay on page 32 shows they do much the same things Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did. Life on the Mississippi hasn't changed all that much. Finally, New York Times critic Richard Locke takes issue (page 35) with those who think that John Updike, though a craftsman of the elegant phrase, is not a great and serious writer. Locke feels there are only two American writers working in a professional way to help us come to an "understanding of our human and cultural predicament as we slide into the 'seventies." Norman Mailer is one. John Updike is the other. The "Updike Sampler" beginning on page 39 contains a selection of his humorous poems as well as two short stories so different in character from each other that they demonstrate Updike's virtuosity as a writer of fiction.