The I of the Beholder

By Melvin Maddocks

THE IMPERIAL SELF by Quentin Anderson. 274 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

The American writer, poor chap, gets blamed for all sorts of mischief from corrupting grammar to corrupting minors. But the decline and fall of the republic has seldom been laid at his study door. Nobody has flattered a man of letters by calling him a major danger to the state since the time during World War II when Archibald MacLeish, Van Wyck Brooks and others accused T.S. Eliot & Co. of demoralizing the fighters for democracy by having scribbled so depressingly about the "Waste Land" 20 years before.

But now here is Quentin Anderson, professor of English at Columbia, patrolling American literature with a new set of Wanted posters for an even more heinous offense. Citing it as a "creeping apocalypse," Anderson points to the crime of the century: the hundred-year collapse of America's "communal ties." And he knows who did it. For undermining "the authenticating offices of the family and society" and putting a wobble in America's "sense of direction since the mid-nineteenth century," Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry James.

How exactly was the crime committed? By enshrining the transcendental ego, the "imperial self." The three culprits substituted I for we as the national pronoun, making the concept of community "almost un-American."

Emerson masterminded the "beginning of the dissolution of society." With him, "society was not spurned; it was judged irrelevant." As the ultimate Protestant, Emerson liked to boast that "a great man should occupy the whole space between God and the mob."

If Emerson was in love with the vibrations of his soul, says Anderson. Whitman was even more narrowly self-concerned: he was in love with the smell of his armpits. Whitman swallowed cities, rivers, people in a sort of king-cannibal self. The firmament existed only to serve as his drum.

After roasting the proudly remote metaphysics of Emerson's essay Self-Reliance, after deploring the enchanted navel gazing of Whitman's Song of Myself, Professor Anderson confronts James' The Golden Bowl. The Jacobin crime, as he draws it up, was to take European culture, abstract it, then reconstruct the abstraction as a kind of kingdom in the novelist's mind, with Mad Henry as its tyrant.

The book's case against James seems the angriest and least clear. Anderson's debatable point is that as an arch-"imperial-self novelist" James made the artist more important than his real subject: life. Anderson gets even grouchier when dealing with his fellow critics, who have been "emotional collaborators" in all this madness. "It is a well-kept secret essential to understanding the cultural moment," he writes bitterly, "that those over thirty who are occupied with literature believe works of art to be more real than life."

Anderson's detailed readings can be brilliant, as in his exposition of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." But for a man who keeps demanding context and more context, he seems remarkably provincial. He acts as if the disintegration of "communal ties" were a problem invented by 19th century America. He is guilty of a crime of his own: thesis protecting. He neglects to point out that Emerson's "imperial self" was bred, after all, with the help of German philosophy. Every Zen trender can spot for himself the Oriental mysticism in Whitman, but as far as Anderson is concerned, it all comes f.o.b. Brooklyn and New Jersey.

A framework is missing. Anderson's reader will never know that Marx popularized the word alienation; that Freud supplied most of the vocabulary Anderson must use to discuss the "imperial self" in the first place. The last poet unaffected by an "imperial self" was a medieval troubadour, the last philosopher, Thomas Aquinas. Would Anderson blame Stendhal's The Red and the Black for the disintegration of "communal ties" in Europe?

The self as a problem, if not a disease, is at least as old as the Renaissance. One deplores with Anderson that "we have fallen out of love with society on this continent." But it is only another form of self-obsession to put the blame on a three-headed monster ego named Waldo Whitman James. . Melvin Maddocks

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