To the Editors:
When I heard from a friend that The Heath Anthology of American Literature was the subject of an editorial in The New Criterion (Notes & Comments, October 1990), I looked forward to being engaged by a challenging, perhaps provoking, conservative view. Alas, what I found instead was shrill and trite rant about “affirmative-action thinking.”
I challenge any reader of the anthology to show me one single work chosen on the basis of whatever your editorialist means by “affirmative-action thinking.” I would not claim that all the hundreds of texts in the anthology are masterpieces. No museum—and anthologies are, among other things, literary museums—hangs nothing but masterpieces. On the contrary, works are included in any collection because they are historically interesting, because they represent significant artistic trends, because they have done well commercially —and for less edifying motives. It was our intention to represent the range of the cultures of the United States at many stages of development, and I think we have done reasonably well at it. We have even included far more of the traditional “masterpieces” than could be taught in any two-term American literature sequence. In fact, had your editorialist done his or her homework, what would have been clear is that The Heath Anthology contains as much or more work by the authors you list as important than most other American-literature anthologies.
Furthermore, the notion of what constitutes a “masterpiece” changes significantly over time. Let’s remember that in 1920 Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” would have been so acclaimed, whereas the work of Melville was all but forgotten. When I was in graduate school in the 1950s, no self-respecting student would have written a dissertation on Edith Wharton, whom your editorialist mentions with special approval. She was a “woman writer,” and to many 1950s critics the two terms of that phrase were substantially contradictory. By contrast, James Gould Cozzens’s novels were then hailed as “masterpieces”; where is he now?
Your editorialist expresses pious contempt for my account of the racial and gender mix of the editorial board of The Heath Anthology. What he or she fails to recognize is that in the ninety or so years in which academic anthologies of American literature have been published, never once had a scholar who is not white served on an editorial board. In fact, until late in the 1980s only two white women had so served. Perhaps these facts are unimportant; perhaps the white men who created all the anthologies did display the catholicity of taste and the breadth of scholarship necessary to determine what constituted “American literature” for all of us. If you believe that, you will believe that George Wallace spoke for all Alabamians when he stood in the schoolhouse door to block integration. In fact, the diversity of that editorial board forced all of us, unlike your editorialist, to rethink our criteria for what to include in an anthology and for how to organize texts in interesting and useful ways.
A great many members of the professoriat seem to approve of what we have done: the anthology is already in a second printing, adopted within this, its first year, at over 350 colleges and universities, and more coming aboard every day. No doubt your editorialist would mark that as a sign of the degeneracy of the times. But perhaps even readers of The New Criterion might wish to determine for themselves whether The Heath Anthology is a symbol of cultural decay or, rather, a thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally provoking, pedagogically challenging text that displays as well as anything has the wonderful diversity characteristic of American civilization since its beginnings.
Paul Lauter
Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English
Trinity College Hartford, CT
The Editors reply:
We are grateful to Professor Lauter for favoring us with this specimen example of contemporary academic multicultural piety. We particularly admire the way he has managed to adduce George Wallace, the Zunis, and “the genocidal practice of whites on this continent toward Indians,” thus evoking that halo of political self-righteousness without which a good multiculturist feels bereft, even in a discussion of literature.
We recognize of course that literary values are not the sort of thing that Professor Lauter and his fellow champions of “diversity” are in the habit of taking seriously. Nevertheless, we must point out that the tide of the fifty-five-hundred-page work that this professor of English edited is not The Heath Anthology of American Ethnography. Nor is it The Heath Anthology of American Anthropological Curiosities. It is The Heath Anthology of American Literature.
Readers—and, especially, readers who are students—therefore had a right to expect that the contents of these tomes would reflect the exercise of literary judgment. That is, they had the right to expect that the primary principle of selection in a book advertising itself as an anthology of American literature would be literary excellence, not membership in one or another perceived “victim” group.
It is precisely this expectation that Professor Lauter and his colleagues have consistentiy disappointed. For them—as for all of our new multiculturalists—the issue is not literary quality but statistical representation and political moralizing. This substitution of political imperatives for artistic or intellectual quality is at the very heart of the “affirmative-action thinking” to which Professor Lauter refers.
Such imperatives are also at the heart of the editorial policy of The Heath Anthology. As a glance at its table of contents reveals, deference to the dictates of political rectitude has required that every population group be represented, whether or not it has made a genuine contribution to American letters. The Zunis, alas—like many of the groups and many, many of the authors included in this misconceived work—conspicuously did not make such a contribution. To pretend otherwise may soothe one’s multicultural anxieties; it is certainly to abdicate one’s responsibilities as a teacher, an editor, and a critic. To counter that literary tastes have changed over the years—and we do thank Professor Lauter for that novel insight—does nothing to alter those responsibilities.
Professor Lauter is naturally delighted that a “great many members of the professoriat seem to approve” of The Heath Anthology. Who would doubt it? We are sure that his publishers are at least equally delighted. But Professor Lauter is correct in surmising that we count the widespread adoption of The Heath Anthology as a textbook “a sign of the degeneracy of the times.” More to the point, we count it a sign of the triumph of the multicultural ethos that is currently sweeping our campuses and transforming the teaching of the humanities into a species of left-wing political activism.
We titled our editorial on this irresponsible production “The Heath Travesty of American Literatrue.” Professor Lauter’s letter reminds us why.