A review of Donald Hensley's critical biography of Burton Rascoe:
This is a slight biography of Burton Rascoe, a man about whom very little has been written. Hensley makes a convincing case that Rascoe should be better known. Since this book was published in 1970, though, history seems to have decided otherwise.
Rascoe was a writer, much more importantly, a literary critic. Born in 1892, his family moved Kentucky to Oklahoma and, from there, Rascoe went to Chicago. He was at the University for a while but dropped out to be a journalist--and journalism would define his particular version of literary criticism: "As a critic, he is a wonderful newspaper man," one commenter said. "If he goes down in history at all, it will be an an encourager of new talents. He semlls them out not by their artistic fragrance but by virtue of as a keen a nose for news as ever anyone was gifted with." (87) (It's worth noting here that when Rascoe started writing journalism while at the University of Chicago, he frequently read through academic journals for ideas and material 21). He was in the windy city during its literary Renaissance and then--moving back and forth between Chicago and New York--was an important advocate for emerging literary voices from the late 1910s into the early 1930s, before fading into irrelevance and crotchety conservatism (writing for Human Events). He died in 1957.
As reviewer, chief reviewer, and eventually literary editor for the Chicago Tribune Rascoe opened the paper to the literary renaissance then on-going. He reviewed Ben Hecht's early work, and praised the incorporation of Nietzsche into American letters. He championed Dreiser's work and, most famously, James Branch Cabell. He also sought to bring to the attention of America's reading public work being done in Europe, particularly France--Rascoe said he wrote about Proust four years before he was translated into English (24). He derided the criticism of Stuart Pratt Sherman, an influential literary critic of the time who held a torch for Victorian literature. He was an important interpreter of Mencken, praising his style but later chastising him for his poor appreciation of literature (72).
He disliked the Algonquin group, including Alexander Woollccott, for their pretensions (76) and was an early champion of both Eliot and Pound before becoming embroiled in fights with them--Eliot over the New Humanism, which Rascoe saw as snobbery disguised as literature, a marketing opportunity for the sale of books. (80). Pound attacked Rascoe in 1932 for only writing about established authors. Of course, that had not been true of Rascoe' early work, but by the 1930s, it was--although Hensley does not really admit this. It was a sign of Rascoe's declining fortunes as a critic. A new generation of critics--L.B. Hessler, Margaret Marshall, and most famous of all, Mary McCarthy--attacked Rascoe as an anti-intellectual, a 'bad boy' who sticks out his tongue at thoughtful literature (100-102). Rascoe was well read--in many languages--and had in fact heaved stones at Mencken for being anti-intellectual when it came to literature, but his highly subjective form of criticism left him open to such attacks. Here was a man who said one could get by without reading Virgil's Aeneid, but wrote an encomium to Charles Fort's Lo!
Rascoe's critical theory was personal, by his own reckoning. He said he liked what he liked, and proclaimed it greatly to get noticed, sometimes to the point of over-praising it (41). He also liked to pick fights in order to gain notice for authors he appreciated. (He thought Dreiser a bad writer, for example, but an interesting thinker, and so championed him; 24). Nonetheless, Hensley argues that there were certain qualities of writing to which Rascoe was drawn--so a rudimentary theory. These were a Romantic belief that reality exists only in the imagination (42): he appreciated realism, but recognized that it was still a set of conventions, and the point was to stimulate the imagination. And this was true of historical and non-fictional writing, as well--both were primarily aesthetic problems (44). He also believed that the primary duty of art was to transmit an emotional experience; political and social and intellectual points were to be secondary (49). This was one reason why he did not always approve Dreiser's writing, which could be quite ugly. He also took issue with Ben Hecht's Gargoyles because Hecht was given too much to editorial comment in the course of the story (51). Finally, he believed that criticism itself was a separate art form (53)--that it was, as Anatole France had it, the record of a soul in the presence of masterpieces. This accounted for his highly personal approach to writing about literature.
Rascoe could turn a phrase and like today's literary bloggers had a penchant for irony, parody, and satire (61); (He renamed some chapters from one of Sherman's books, for example: 'Wherein I curry favor with the boston back bay set' and 'wherein i demonstrate myseklf a superior person and a conceited prig'; 59).
Hensley has done a great deal of research putting together this book, going through Rascoe's papers at Penn and the University of Virginia as well as reading widely in the literature of the time and following Rascoe's copious output. The major complaint about the book is that, slim though it is, because of the thematic arrangement, it is highly repetitive. Perhaps, then, when it comes to Rascoe there is less to be seen than there appears.
This is a slight biography of Burton Rascoe, a man about whom very little has been written. Hensley makes a convincing case that Rascoe should be better known. Since this book was published in 1970, though, history seems to have decided otherwise.
Rascoe was a writer, much more importantly, a literary critic. Born in 1892, his family moved Kentucky to Oklahoma and, from there, Rascoe went to Chicago. He was at the University for a while but dropped out to be a journalist--and journalism would define his particular version of literary criticism: "As a critic, he is a wonderful newspaper man," one commenter said. "If he goes down in history at all, it will be an an encourager of new talents. He semlls them out not by their artistic fragrance but by virtue of as a keen a nose for news as ever anyone was gifted with." (87) (It's worth noting here that when Rascoe started writing journalism while at the University of Chicago, he frequently read through academic journals for ideas and material 21). He was in the windy city during its literary Renaissance and then--moving back and forth between Chicago and New York--was an important advocate for emerging literary voices from the late 1910s into the early 1930s, before fading into irrelevance and crotchety conservatism (writing for Human Events). He died in 1957.
As reviewer, chief reviewer, and eventually literary editor for the Chicago Tribune Rascoe opened the paper to the literary renaissance then on-going. He reviewed Ben Hecht's early work, and praised the incorporation of Nietzsche into American letters. He championed Dreiser's work and, most famously, James Branch Cabell. He also sought to bring to the attention of America's reading public work being done in Europe, particularly France--Rascoe said he wrote about Proust four years before he was translated into English (24). He derided the criticism of Stuart Pratt Sherman, an influential literary critic of the time who held a torch for Victorian literature. He was an important interpreter of Mencken, praising his style but later chastising him for his poor appreciation of literature (72).
He disliked the Algonquin group, including Alexander Woollccott, for their pretensions (76) and was an early champion of both Eliot and Pound before becoming embroiled in fights with them--Eliot over the New Humanism, which Rascoe saw as snobbery disguised as literature, a marketing opportunity for the sale of books. (80). Pound attacked Rascoe in 1932 for only writing about established authors. Of course, that had not been true of Rascoe' early work, but by the 1930s, it was--although Hensley does not really admit this. It was a sign of Rascoe's declining fortunes as a critic. A new generation of critics--L.B. Hessler, Margaret Marshall, and most famous of all, Mary McCarthy--attacked Rascoe as an anti-intellectual, a 'bad boy' who sticks out his tongue at thoughtful literature (100-102). Rascoe was well read--in many languages--and had in fact heaved stones at Mencken for being anti-intellectual when it came to literature, but his highly subjective form of criticism left him open to such attacks. Here was a man who said one could get by without reading Virgil's Aeneid, but wrote an encomium to Charles Fort's Lo!
Rascoe's critical theory was personal, by his own reckoning. He said he liked what he liked, and proclaimed it greatly to get noticed, sometimes to the point of over-praising it (41). He also liked to pick fights in order to gain notice for authors he appreciated. (He thought Dreiser a bad writer, for example, but an interesting thinker, and so championed him; 24). Nonetheless, Hensley argues that there were certain qualities of writing to which Rascoe was drawn--so a rudimentary theory. These were a Romantic belief that reality exists only in the imagination (42): he appreciated realism, but recognized that it was still a set of conventions, and the point was to stimulate the imagination. And this was true of historical and non-fictional writing, as well--both were primarily aesthetic problems (44). He also believed that the primary duty of art was to transmit an emotional experience; political and social and intellectual points were to be secondary (49). This was one reason why he did not always approve Dreiser's writing, which could be quite ugly. He also took issue with Ben Hecht's Gargoyles because Hecht was given too much to editorial comment in the course of the story (51). Finally, he believed that criticism itself was a separate art form (53)--that it was, as Anatole France had it, the record of a soul in the presence of masterpieces. This accounted for his highly personal approach to writing about literature.
Rascoe could turn a phrase and like today's literary bloggers had a penchant for irony, parody, and satire (61); (He renamed some chapters from one of Sherman's books, for example: 'Wherein I curry favor with the boston back bay set' and 'wherein i demonstrate myseklf a superior person and a conceited prig'; 59).
Hensley has done a great deal of research putting together this book, going through Rascoe's papers at Penn and the University of Virginia as well as reading widely in the literature of the time and following Rascoe's copious output. The major complaint about the book is that, slim though it is, because of the thematic arrangement, it is highly repetitive. Perhaps, then, when it comes to Rascoe there is less to be seen than there appears.
