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FROM THE HEART OF EUROPE (194 pp.) F. O. Matthiessen-Oxford...
Harvard Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen is a bald, mild-mannered little bachelor who thinks the job of U.S. intellectuals is to "rediscover and rearticulate" the need for Socialism. He spent the last six months of 1947 lecturing on U.S. literature in Salzburg and Prague and writing a book "about some of the things it means to be an American today." But From the Heart of Europe never gets close to that subject. It is one of those embarrassingly naive excursions into politics and world affairs that show the academic critic (Matthiessen is the nation's most assiduous Henry James...
Professor Matthiessen believes that Harvard, where "the individual teacher is scarcely more than a hired hand," falls short of what "American society has a right to expect." He also decides, after a quick look around Paris, that "if I lived in France, I don't quite see how I could help being a Communist." But he glibly disavows Communism in the U.S. on the grounds that "it has made hardly any progress." (His compromise is the shrill and not unexpected determination "to vote for Wallace, even if I had to write in his name on the ballot.") And with...
Sudden Sweat in Boston. Seldom has the gullibility and wishful thinking of pinkish academic intellectuals been so perfectly exposed as in this little book. The months Matthiessen spent in Prague were months when the Czech Communists were openly preparing for their seizure of power. Yet Matthiessen derided the idea that the Czech people faced a "loss of Czech freedom." Several months later, when he was back at Harvard and events in Czechoslovakia forced him to reconsider, he added a footnote to his book blaming the U.S. press for helping to bring on "such pressures from the Communists...
Also William C. Greene, Albert J. Guerard, Mason Hammond, Eugenia Hanfmann, Arthur N. Holcombe, H. Stuart Hughes, Howard Mumford Jones, Charles L. Kuhn, Harry T. Levin, Donald V. McGranahan, Kirtley F. Mather, Francis O. Matthiessen, Arthur T. Merritt, Perry G. E. Miller, and J. Carrell Morris...