Andrew Delbanco, ed. Writing New England: An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2001. £19.95. 463 pp. ISBN 0-674-00604-8.

Reviewed by Peter Rawlings, University of the West of England, Bristol.

This curious collection of material is mired by a skewed sense of its readership, a highly diffuse focus, and some eccentric editorial decisions. Fear sets in when Andrew Delbanco announces that this is ‘a volume’ for that ill-defined and elusive entity ‘the general reader’ (x). It is immediately apparent that a book with a lamentably thin index, without explanatory notes, and with an introduction that is rarely informative (and often self-indulgent), can hardly have the reader at large in its sights. Literary allusions, historical events, key figures in the texts, and foreign phrases are bereft of the references, glosses, and information that might have made this a useful book for readers, ‘general’ or otherwise.

The first task for a compiler of an anthology is to establish a focus for the selection on offer. ‘One purpose of this book,’ we are told, ‘is to convey how New Englanders have come to live in different and distinct regions of cultural inheritance’ (ix). Whilst the editor is aware of how ‘foolish’ and ‘unconvincing’ it would be to impose ‘one unitary meaning on New England,’ he remains committed to the notion that ‘New England is more than a merely geographical term’ (x). That ‘more,’ however, is precisely what the book struggles to specify in its introduction, and to imply in its subsequent sections. Some impressive anthologies, Perry Miller and T. H. Johnson’s The Puritans (1938) for example, have had, by their nature, to grapple with competing demands of coherence and diversity, but they are articulate in ways Delbanco is not about both the myths of terrain and period involved, and the essentially synthetic business of ripping texts, untimely, from their womb. Concepts such as the ‘New England mind’ (ix), the ‘New England conscience,’ and what Henry Adams called ‘New England nature’ (xxiv), have long been regarded with deep suspicion. The cohesion of New England, held if anywhere, as much at the rhetorical level as elsewhere, arguably failed to withstand the siege of the modern and the forces of western expansion. The ‘New England Mind,’ like the ‘myth of the Old South,’ and the ‘myth of the lost cause’ is as much post hoc as ad hoc. Its residues, on the evidence of much of this anthology at least, are sepia-tinted poems and fables, and a good deal of strident, embarrassing, and vigorously hypocritical and self-regarding oratory. There is also the random appearance of some of Emily Dickinson’s incomparable poetry, and a few mystifying raids on Robert Frost. Quite why we have this poem rather than that, or why poets as popular at the time as Charles Sprague are simply ignored in favour of, yes, ‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic’ (available free, in various musical forms, on the internet) is ultimately imponderable. Throughout, poetry is scattered as a kind of confection.

Undeniably, once the reductive nature of this kind of discourse is taken for granted, ‘self-criticism of the most stringent kind’ (xxiv) and the ‘inward turn toward self-admonition’ (xxvi) have been necessary elements in the compound of New England; but they are far from being the product of New England alone. To name five among hundreds, Washington Irving and the ‘Knickerbocker Group,’ Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (despite his co-option here) were not New Englanders.  The Atlantic Monthly, however influential in the mid-nineteenth century, had increasingly to contend with a surge of rival periodicals: Lippincott’s Magazine (Philadelphia) from 1868, the Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond, Virginia, 1834–1864), Harper’s Monthly Magazine (New York, 1850–), and a host of others.  From the 1830’s on, Daniel Drake, in his Discourse on the West (1834), and Isaac Appleton Jewett, were proclaiming the cultural distinctiveness and independence of the West. ‘Henceforth,’ clamours Hamlin Garland in 1894, ‘when men of the Old World speak of America, they will not think of Boston and New York and Philadelphia, they will mean Chicago and the Mississippi valley’ (‘Literary Centres’). Similarly, and as early as 1822, W. H. Gardiner (in reviewing Cooper’s The Spy) argues that:

in no one country on the face of the globe can there be found a greater variety of specific character, than is at this moment developed in these United States of America. Do any of our readers look out of New-England and doubt it? Did any one of them ever cross the Potomac, or even the Hudson, and not feel himself surrounded by a different race of men?

New England, in ways the amputations assembled here cannot signify, had outlived itself long before it became the subject of saccharine and lachrymose poetasters and spinners of magazine yarns, thus rendering highly dubious the belief that it made an ‘inestimable contribution’ to the ‘American national character’ (xxviii). New England ideology, as Henry James unforgettably expressed it, was preoccupied not with forms of contribution, but with the ‘picturesque view’ of its ‘internal possibilities’ (Hawthorne, 1879). Even if New England is allowed some of the cultural primacy and influence claimed for it by Delbanco, there are many writers who see the Puritan legacy of New England’s usable past as an affair of verbose suffocation. In the interests of maintaining an atmosphere of intellectual responsibility, then, an anthology of New England writing needs the ventilation of external voices such as that of William Carlos Williams in his In the American Grain (1925).

In his introduction, Delbanco seems to have identified a need in his spectral ‘general readers’ for the consolations of popular history. Riding roughshod over the work of Perry Miller, Donald Pease, and others, Delbanco identifies ‘resistance,’ taking his cue from Henry Adams, as the ‘law of New England nature’ (xiv). In considering why the Pilgrims came to New England (and Delbanco certainly believes that this is a considerable issue), he moves to reject the ‘schoolbook answers’: ‘religious freedom’ or ‘economic opportunity’ (xix). His account goes on to emphasize, in ways that remind the reader how odd it is that there is not at least some engagement with the work of Sacvan Bercovitch, New England senses of divine providence and, much later, ‘Manifest Destiny.’ This familiar, and superficial, narrative involves lapses in tone also evident elsewhere, presumably a casualty of Delbanco’s finding a voice for that vexing general reader: ‘the founders of New England were drop-outs—with all the indignation, idealism, and wounded righteousness that the term implores’ (xxii).

The focus on religion is unassailably important, of course; but the account of Puritanism and Calvinism that emerges in this introduction is misleading in the extreme. The reader, any reader, surely needs to know about the secularising process in New England, and the Enlightenment, and deistic, refractions of Calvinism? Jonathan Edwards is here; but there’s no discussion of the democratic attitude towards the availability of salvation that began to pertain in the eighteenth century and beyond. Correspondingly, Delbanco sees seventeenth-century Puritans as much less free of the doctrines of predestination and the ‘elect’ than they were. The introduction is wholly wrong when it argues that for the Puritans

human beings are helpless and doomed unless and until they obtain a glimpse of what it means to love without regard to self-interest, as Christ loves them. (xxiv)

The doctrinaire Calvinist was either ‘helpless and doomed,’ or elected to salvation, whatever he or she happened to glimpse.

New England, like America at large (and as the introduction rightly notes), has always manufactured with ease the enemies it needs, and Shirley Jackson’s story ‘The Lottery,’ included here, chillingly dramatizes this process, and its intricate Biblical undertow. Again, though, Delbanco writes in a vacuum. Tony Tanner’s analysis of paranoia, in relation to Pynchon (Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men) is the locus classicus; if Delbanco’s concern for his reader made him squeamish about such material, he might at least have included a guide to further reading.

In confronting the routine problem of whether to include well-known and easily accessible writing, Delbanco has an inconsistent policy. He claims in the ‘Preface’ to have favoured the ‘letters, poems, stories, and essays’ that ‘can be feasibly printed without truncation’ (x), and to compromise on the Emersons and Thoreaus by including less common instances of their work. Does the world (in a direct contradiction of the announced policy, incidentally) need another chunk from Emerson’s Nature? Just how many more ‘transparent eyeball’ moments are future anthologizers going to inflict on the long-suffering reader? In ways, again, out of step with the stated editorial policy, there are far too many excerpts from novels, including the hackneyed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the hardly unfamiliar The Bostonians; even more egregiously, some of these extracts amount only to two or three pages. If the reader knows Uncle Tom, the only possible reward for re-reading it here is for any critical light that may be shed on it from its intertextual situation in the anthology. Uncle Tom, however, is in a section entitled ‘A Gallery of Portraits’; there, a range of texts is cannibalised simply to entertain the reader with character sketches that can add up to little out of their contexts. Should the reader be unfamiliar with any of these short extracts from fiction, then it is difficult to see what the yield can be. Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons is an interesting inclusion; but three pages will not necessarily, if at all, lure the reader into its full-length delights.

An editor in Delbanco’s situation has really only two choices when it comes to organizing his material: chronological sequence or thematic sections. In plunging for the latter, though, the responsibility to organize continent sections that correspond in provocative and significant ways with the rest of the book is acute. ‘God Speaks to the Rain,’ after an opening section, ‘The Founding Idea,’ with only two items in it (Samuel Danforth’s A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness, and wearyingly, Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity) is an odd continuation; ‘Strangers in the Promised Land,’ in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, has some of the best writing in the book. But so much of the material in ‘Dissident Dreamers’ and the ‘The Examined Self’ could migrate into other sections. It is ludicrous to include William James on pragmatism in ‘God Speaks to the Rain,’ when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s superb essay on ‘Natural Law,’ bizarrely enough, is in ‘Dissident Dreamers.’ As a new section begins, the reader lurches back two or three hundred years; this problem is compounded by the increasingly capricious nature of the later inclusions. The final section, ‘The Abiding Sense of Place,’ is the least logical. James’s The American Scene, relegated in the head-note to the realm of ‘gnarled and wonderfully reflective prose’ (445) is reduced to one paragraph on New Hampshire, whereas its extraordinary meditations on the ‘shy spectralities’ of Concord and the ‘exquisite melody of everything unuttered’ there are omitted. Missing are section on, say, ‘Utilitarianism and Transcendentalism’ (not a selling title, perhaps) or even on the Civil War, the crisis of masculinity, women’s rights, and so on. The scope for counter-proposing section themes is always immense; but Delbanco seems to have succumbed to some pretty cheap perfume for most of his.

There is also the question of the whimsical head-notes. Emerson’s Nature falls victim to prose whose inflated dimensions are far from uncharacteristic: what we have there, we are told, is ‘quasi-religious ecstasy’ in the presence of the ‘fecundity and benignity of nature (36). In formulations ever close to the journalistic, William James is praised, rather gratuitously, for his ‘lucidity and grace’ (80), John Quincy Adams for ‘pure … expression of the ‘New England conscience,” and so on. Henry James’s Miss Birdseye is the severest casualty of these notes, however. James’s description in The Bostonians of Miss Birdseye as a ‘confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman’ with a ‘delicate, dirty, democratic little hand’ (169) is, for Delbanco, ‘clear analysis and warm sympathy’ (168).

There is some good material here—and among it are a well-chosen extract from The Education of Henry Adams, Daniel Webster’s 1850 speech to the United States Senate, (familiar as it is) Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats,’ and F. O. Matthiessen’s profoundly disturbing ‘Journal Letters’ (although something from American Renaissance might have been more apposite)—but it has to survive chaotic organization and savage, sometimes irrational, excision. Regrettably, much of Writing New England, with its plethora of ‘bleeding-heart chunks’ as they are known in the music business, comes perilously close in genre and sentiment to that odious series, Chicken Soup for the Soul.

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