The We's

A PIECE OF LETTUCE by George P. Elliott. 270 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Pugnacious Poet-Novelist Elliott comes out swinging against a wide variety of targets, ranging from sex cultists to the high priests of New Criticism. The most devastating of his 15 essays, Who Is We?, concerns the 107 (Elliott's count) grand poohbahs who dominate the U.S. cultural scene from Man hattan's Morningside Heights area. They are the "Diors and Schiaparellis of intellectual fashion design," in Elliott's phrase, and include Eric Bentley, Jacques Barzun, Lionel and Diana Trilling. "What they think today," says he, "you're apt to find yourself, in a Sears, Roebuckish way, sort of thinking tomorrow." Documenting the We group's insulation from reality, Elliott notes a complaint by Mary McCarthy that when a visiting French existentialist asked to be taken to a typical American restaurant, neither Mary nor any of her friends could think of a single one in New York City. Another We, Elliott recalls, once wrote in Partisan Review that "nobody who had not been a Communist and then left the party could pretend to understand modern America." Adds Elliott: "Boy, did I ever feel left out of the swim! I was never even a Schactmanite."

THE SYMBOLIC MEANING by D. H. Lawrence. 240 pages. Viking. $5.

D. H. Lawrence, who was a We group unto himself, wrote as wittily as anybody in his generation about the works of Melville, Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman, found that they proclaimed "a stranger on the face of the earth"--the stranger being the American consciousness. America both fascinated and infuriated Lawrence, and his famed Studies in Classic American Literature was shrill, derisive, but continuingly provocative. The Symbolic Meaning, a collection of earlier versions of the same essays, is considerably calmer in tone, but both versions bear the unmistakable stamp of Lawrence's chaotic, irascible mind. He saw the underlying theme of U.S. literature as the "disintegration of the primal self." "On the top it is nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. Like Hawthorne being such a blue-eyed darling, in life, and Longfellow and the rest such sucking doves." Underneath, "serpents they were." James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels may read like adventure stories, but they are really primal myths about "the collapse of the white psyche divided between innocence and lust." Melville also "knew his race was doomed, his white soul, doomed. His great white epoch, doomed." As Edmund Wilson once ob served, Lawrence's essays will acquaint readers with an American literature few Americans have ever seen.

BECAUSE I WAS FLESH by Edward Dahlberg. 234 pages. New Directions. $5.

At 29, an unknown writer named Edward Dahlberg had the rare distinction of shocking D. H. Lawrence. After reading Dahlberg's defiantly proletarian first novel, Bottom Dogs, Lawrence predicted that its author's "next step is legal insanity." Instead, Dahlberg, now 63, became a poet, essayist, and shrewd, contentious critic who once said that he blamed T. S. Eliot "for nothing except the books that he has written." He calls Because I Was Flesh "an auto biography of my faults." It is the story of his first 46 years and of Lizzie, his mother, a Kansas City lady barber "with dyed, frizzled hair." Born out of wedlock, Dahlberg grew up sickly, sensitive and neglected; at the insistence of one of Lizzie's suitors, who could not stand him, he was packed off to a Jewish orphanage whose stunted inmates chose as a school song "We'll fight for the name of Harvard." At his best, Dahlberg describes his early life with wit, intensity and candor.

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