Portions of Wisdom

REMEMBRANCE ROCK (1,067 pp.)--Carl Sandburg--Harcourt, Brace ($5).

The plan and scope of this book are magnificent. It is a vast epic of common American life, beginning before the landing of the Pilgrims; an attempt to state the meaning of what has come to be known as the American Dream. The first book is the story of Plymouth; the second is laid during the Revolution; the third, and most interesting, begins in 1825 and continues through the Civil War.

Each of these works runs to some 300 pages and each is as long and as closely packed as a novel in itself. Finally, there is a prologue and an epilogue, laid in 1944 and 1945, explaining that the three books are a manuscript left by a great American, a former Supreme Court Justice, Orville Windom (obviously modeled on Oliver Wendell Holmes), as both his concept of family history and his testament of the American heritage.

Freedom & Fog Ghosts. Windom is sentimental, liberal, vague in his speech, tremendously learned in American history. He has lived through the administrations of 14 Presidents, and has shaken hands with nine of them. He holds long, philosophic-poetic conversations with his granddaughter-in-law--his grandson is a flyer--in a language which, with its mixture of slang and Walt Whitman grandiloquence, is unlike anything in American life or literature.*

As the book opens, Justice Windom is preparing a radio address for the troops overseas, trying to define what they are fighting for: the founders of the nation had had a vision--"unity and common understanding there had been ... but the mockers came. And the deniers were heard. And vision and hope faded . . . yet there always arose enough of reserves of strength, balances of sanity, portions of wisdom, to carry the nation through to a fresh start . . ."

The novel that Orville Windom's grandchildren find in his strongbox after his death is not a very good novel. In fact, a reader not sharing their family interest might be tempted to say that it is the worst novel he has ever read. It is, however, the sort of novel a distinguished Supreme Court Justice might write. It is an extraordinary mixture of learning and naivete, of self-conscious poeticizing and shrewd observation, with dim characters wandering about in a grey, dreamlike fog, bumping into ghosts bearing the names of historical personages.

He introduced characters and forgot all about them, started exciting episodes and neglected to say how they turned out, and put in entire historical documents--such as the Mayflower Compact and the text of Roger Williams' defense of freedom of conscience. Otherwise, it is the story of the Windoms, Winshores, Winwolds and the rest; of scoffers and cynics doing the devil's business in Plymouth Colony; of divided loyalties in Revolutionary days; of great talkers, doers, doubters and drinkers in the days before the Civil War.

Prayers & Freight Rates. In its broad outlines, Remembrance Rock seems the sort of book that U.S. critics have always asked for. It is an attempt to find imaginative meanings and an emotional reality in the sweep of U.S. history, to evoke that "usable past" which critics have felt might be a New World substitute for the age-old traditions and usages of Europe. No one would seem better equipped than Carl Sandburg to write it, both because of his own poetry and the historical knowledge that went into the composition of his life of Lincoln.

But it is in its attempt to fulfill the epic sweep that Remembrance Rock fails. To a considerable extent it fails because of it --the grandiloquent language, the heroic characters, the poetic prose that on re-examination turns out to be well-nigh meaningless. Its failure is so complete in this respect that it may be that Sandburg's greatest service to American literature will be to have ended this sort of imaginative effort--"the great American novel"--once & for all.

It may be that part of the trouble is in the feeling that the attempt should be made. Lincoln did not start out to write a statement of democratic faith in the Gettysburg Address, but to dedicate a graveyard. The American epic, if it is ever written, may have as unpretentious an origin.

Throughout Remembrance Rock there are the sort of things one has come to expect from Sandburg--the jokes and popular songs, the historical information on revival meetings and freight rates, the extemporaneous prayers, some of which are simple and moving. A book composed of them might actually have been what Remembrance Rock attempted to be.

*Example: "Kiss your husband one last kiss he can take around the world before you give him another . . . Now I'm going to give you a big geographical kiss that'll bring you good luck and keep you warm in the Aleutians and keep you cool in the Caribbean."

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