A Lion Among the Babbitts

EVERY AMERICAN, whether of the hundred per cent or the more ebullient one half of one per cent variety, complacently believes in his own capacity for withstanding any exhibition of himself "as others see" him. The Babbitt Warren is an attempted expose of the American people, American customs, and the American spirit by an Englishman, who confesses guilelessly enough that he "has not had the privilege of visiting the United States". That his indictment of us in the flesh is based on what he would admit to be hear-say evidence is perhaps the kindest thing that can be said for him.

If the present reviewer had obeyed the impulse to do his stint after reading only the first part of the book, he would have damned the product utterly; he would indeed have sentenced Mr. Joad to spend his days and his nights with the study of Addison. More persistent reading of The Citizen of the World papers and less credulous perusal of the Hearst papers might have guided this critic of our national failings toward complete triumph. In such a volume as this, the only excuse for its being is found either in clever irony or in scintillating wit. Mr. Joad rarely betrays either. His comment is bold and unrelieved. In discussing broadly the question of American worship of size and narrowly the growth of our large cities, he speaks of the commuter who "spends his half hour not in healthy exercise but in hurtling through the bowels of the earth in a little hell of ugliness and stuffiness and racket and overcrowding". Only in a few scattered phrases does he succeed in such apt description, while more nauseating metaphors such as "the toothaches and pimples of our spiritual experiences" abound.

Mr. Joad's thesis is that we are a decadent people in the same sense that Imperial Rome was decadent. And the cause for our speedy distingretation he assigns to our tendency to pursue truth, beauty and goodness. As has been already intimated, Part One--On truth--falls utterly to uphold its share in the proof. What is said here of America applies equally to any civilized country. Constantly recurring illustrations, not New York, constitute admission of inconclusive evidence.

Once Truth is left behind, the section on Beauty rises somewhat in tone and approaches the level on which one expects to find observations on the other fellow's habits of mind. None except the most stodgy Babbitt can do aught but cry "Hear, hear" to an accusation that "the films are the literature of America". So it must seem to one who is convinced that "America has no indigenous literature" and no writers of genius save four, E. A. Poe, Walt Whitman, Hermann Melville, and Mark Twain. The only other Americans mentioned are a few whose "goodness consists mainly in a protest against the prevailing badness", Sinclair Lewis et al.

In the section on Goodness, the author does not fall to include the familiar distribe on the passion in America for proyphylactic cleanliness. It is not extraordinary that our land of prohibitions both legal and moral, provides tantalizing stimulus for any sensitive observer, be he yokel or diplomat, foreigner or native wit. In this portion of the book alone does the author play the game he has chosen for though fairry adroit satire pinch-hits for the more rugged sincerity which any critical work presupposes he nevertheless concludes his observations in more commendable fashion than he approached his unfamiliar subject.

And, by the way, did not that acolyte of American criticism, William Lyon Phelps, anticipate Mr. Joads epigrammatic title by some several years?