If the re-examination of this starting-point is a necessary regular
exercise for the American historian—that and the inquiry into its working- out in practice—the future implications of the American idea are no less a concern for all those who feel solicitude about the American experi- ment. This numerous class of persons has always, of course, transcended that of the Americans themselves. Even before the United States had risen to might amongst the nations of the world its future was felt to carry implica- tions for the rest of mankind; when to the dynamism of an idea was added the potency Which comes from vast natural and human re- sources tirelessly exploited, the concern became well-nigh universal. !Dans l'Amerique j'ai vu Plus que l'Amerique,' avowed Tocqueville; `j'y ai cherchd une image de la ddmocratie elle- rn6me.' What we see in America is not only the exact historical contours of the country of Lyndon 'Johnson and Cassius Clay; we look there no less often to see the next bend in the road we are all treading, in technology, in demo- cracy, in most of what is implied in the relation of the individual to mass society. The US has not a monopoly as pace-setter or path-finder, but the centrality of its main ideas and the loose texture of its social fabric incite it to face the future more readily than any other land on earth. At the same time the national addiction to the explicit makes Americans the most compre- hensive reporters of the day after tomorrow. Paths of American Thought is a collection of essays by various hands, all good, some brilliant, Ming together in a loose chronological sequence The remaining twenty-one essays deal with the past century and a majority treat developments after 1918. The main emphasis of the book thus falls not on the traditional keystones of 'Ameri- canism' but on the projections into present and future of American ways of thinking and behav- ing. Here the significance of the American ele- ment shifts; we are less concerned with the traditional New World thinkers than with the home, the soil which America has provided for • usable ideas wherever originating. Thus The New Economics' turns out to be an essay on the influence of Keynes, and 'Science in America' is largely a record of the impact and adaptation of the refugee European scientists of the Thirties. This is no longer America as the with- drawn, exclusive, 'different,' chosen land; it is PATRICK WHITE'S The Aunt's Story (Penguin Books, 4s. 6d.) is the outstanding book of the new Penguin fiction. First published in 1948, before Voss established and Riders in the Chariot confirmed White's genius, The Aunt's Story is a tightly woven, poetically conceived novel. The savageness with which White dissects character, leaving no feeling unexamined, is already in evidence; and Theodora Goodman's longing for metaphysical truth foreshadows Voss and Himmelfarb in their journeys in pursuit of their own selves; like them, she is physically ugly and is possessed by a vision of spiritual beauty.
Some of the other new Penguin novels, A Ballad of Love, by Frederic Prokosch (4s. 6d.), The Sun Doctor, by Robert Shaw (3s. 6d.), Thomasina, by Paul Gallico (4s.), There is a Happy Land, by Keith Waterhouse (3s. 6d.), and The Premier, by Georges Simenon (3s.), lack White's intellectual depth, but are absorbing read- ing nevertheless. To these one might add P. H. Newby's The Picnic at Sakkara (Faber, 6s. 6d.) and Harry Bloom's Whittaker's Wife (Fontana, 3s. 6d.). For total, uncritical absorption, there are The Nose on My Face, by Laurence Payne (4s. 6d.), and The Half Hunter, by Joan Sher- wood in the Penguin Crime list, and Death- world, by Harry Harrison (3s.), a coldly thrilling piece of science fiction. And, for these days when Rubashov himself is on the point of that long- promised rehabilitation, Koestler's Darkness at Noon (3s. 6d.). Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning and A Walk on the America as the screen on which issues and ideas, wherever germinated, are seen in life size, America as the proving ground in relation to the mass society of the future for whatever de- vices and contraptions may be thrown up by the still fertile societies of the Old World.
Various American institutions have been the vehicles for these ideals—the school, the philan- thropic foundations, the church, the firm. One of the most remarkable has been the political party, especially that omnivorous chameleon, the Democratic Party. The Whirligig of Politics is a well-observed though not very well-written depiction of the Democrats in one of the purest (chemically speaking, of course) phases of their evolution. It is not for those who care for the politics of opinion, but it has a lot to say to those with a taste for sawdusted saloons and tired convention hall rhetoric and the deals needed to keep an institution alive in an age of sagging moral and intellectual vitality.
One American institution that shamelessly flouted American ideals, yet clung and throve with the tenacity of a Virginia creeper, was `the peculiar institution' of slavery. Professor Stampp's learned study of this massive excres- cence upon the. face of American, or, more properly, white civilisation, has been familiar to all students of the American South since its American publication in 1956. It is a pleasure to welcome it in British dress. Here for most purposes is the definitive social and economic survey of American slavery. Its focus is on the slave, but in explaining his status, his profitability, his tractability or intractability, the book tells almost as much about the masters themselves. It is the tragedy of the South that Stampp's book is not merely a historical record; it is directly pertinent to the America of 1964.
H. O. NICHOLAS
Wild Side (Corgi Books, 5s. each) may reveal- ingly be complemented by his Book of Lonesome Monsters (Panther, 3s. 6d.), which is an anthology purporting to suggest that action, whether peaceful or violent, is an assertion of humanity. We learn nothing new about writers like Joseph Heller, who are included, nor about Mr. Algren, whose The Man With the Golden Arm still remains his enduring testament.
Highbrow paperbacks never fail to excite, representing, as they often do, the books one read in high-ceilinged reading rooms as an under- graduate or the gaps one left in one's learning. Kingsley Martin's French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Harper and Row, 14s.) is one such. Still stimulatingly fresh, its analysis of the ideas of the French Enlightenment is in- valuable today in its relevance to the politics of the emerging nations. • Western Civilization Since the Renaissance, by John U. Nef (Harper and Row, 18s. 6d.), examines the development of industrialisation, relating the economics of industry to the recur- rence of war. In America and the Atlantic Com- munity (Harper and Row, I Is.), Frank Thistle- thwaite considers Anglo-American relations of the early nineteenth century. Both these books, scholarly in their exposition and copiously documented, may profitably be read by the in- terested layman, for they possess a warm, philosophical wisdom. With what suffering, misery and ultimate happiness the New World was populated, may be read in The Great Migration, by Edwin C. Guillet (0.U.P., 24s.), in which the ordeal of eleven million nineteenth-
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