In the spring of 1955, during my last semester as a Yale undergraduate, I took a course on twentieth-century American fiction taught by Norman Holmes Pearson. His classes were popular, and he always filled large lecture halls with his performances, theatrical but full of original observations. (He had waiting lists for his seminars, too.) When our class of about two hundred first saw his deformed body walking awkwardly down the long aisle to the stage, we had no idea of what a brilliant lecture we were about to hear. But from then on, we knew, and this class was the only one I ever encountered where the professor was given applause at the end of every lecture. In a 2005 autobiographical piece, I referred to these lectures as “life-changing.” What I meant, at least in part, was that they provided me with a more sympathetic understanding of the people around me, helping me to see that their occasional philistinism and superficiality resulted mostly from the pressures of society that favor conformity over individuality. But equally important was Pearson's idea of literature, and each person's life, as a search for order and self-knowledge—a theme that ran throughout the course. Pearson's own personal example was also an inspiration.When I took this class, at about the midpoint of the twentieth century, there would have been few college courses devoted to American fiction of the preceding fifty years. (Indeed, even earlier American literature was not widely admitted into university curricula until well into the twentieth century.) But Pearson was a pioneer in promoting American studies, and the insights in his lectures reflected his deep knowledge of modernist (and earlier) literature as well as the values conveyed by the particular works he had chosen to teach (as of course filtered through his own values). His class began, imaginatively, with a nonfiction work, The Education of Henry Adams, which he saw (correctly, I think) as the ideal introduction to the disruption in settled ways of thinking brought about by the twentieth century.What followed, at a book-per-week pace, were Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Lewis's Babbitt, E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. Pearson's judgments in forming this list (with Faulkner as the climax) stand out all the more sharply when one knows which writers taken up in his year-long version of the course were omitted for this one-semester condensation: Wharton, Cather, Dos Passos, Wilder, and Steinbeck among them.I was aware, at the time of the course, that Pearson was a friend and adviser of many prominent writers and that he often guided their papers into the Yale library. And I knew that he had become famous while still a graduate student by being coeditor (with William Rose Benét) of The Oxford Anthology of American Literature (1938), pathbreaking because of his generous selections from modern experimental writing—an anthology so ubiquitous in those years that I could scarcely have avoided hearing about it. I must have known also that, only a few years before I took his course, he had edited a five-volume anthology of English poetry with W. H. Auden (1950).But I did not know until much later—probably not until I read Robin Winks's delightfully evocative, sensitive, and still valuable seventy-five-page chapter on Pearson in his wonderful 1987 book, Cloak and Gown—that Pearson had been a prominent figure in the espionage world. (This may only show that I was out of touch with what my classmates were saying, for there may have been speculation, as there has been since, that he was at that time—or recently had been—a talent scout for the Central Intelligence Agency.) His major role in promoting modernist literature would be enough in itself to warrant a biography, but when one adds his other activities in support of American culture, he obviously deserves one. So I am delighted that Barnhisel has now produced a full biography that is learned, perceptive, judicious, and detailed, drawing heavily on Pearson's voluminous correspondence, scattered in many authors’ archives, and on his diaries and other papers at Yale. (I find it a little jarring, however, that he frequently calls his subject “Norm.”)The first seven chapters deal chronologically with the first forty years of Pearson's life, up to his return to the Yale English department in 1949, following his first Guggenheim Fellowship year; the last five chapters shift (sensibly and successfully) to a thematic approach, covering his relationships with modernist writers (including, among a great many others, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and especially H.D.), his promotion of American studies, and his roles at Yale and in the wider academic world. Barnhisel skillfully ties the book together by recognizing certain threads that ran through Pearson's life. His parents were both descended from early Massachusetts settlers, and he was proud of being a “puritan” in the sense (as he defined it) that he valued hard work, professionalism, democracy, deference to authority, and self-examination. The code name that he chose for his espionage work was “Puritan.” Another thread was persistent medical problems, including major surgeries and serious infections, which resulted from the childhood accident that crippled him and which he triumphed over in his very full social life and extensive travel. Still another strand was his avid collecting of books and manuscripts, both for himself and for Yale, in order to document modernism and often to support needy writer-friends as well. He also formed an impressive collection of earlier literature, much of it financed by Bryher, H.D.’s partner; it became another of his many benefactions to the Yale library. (Not mentioned by Barnhisel but symbolic of Pearson's lifelong commitment to collecting is his thirty-five-year membership and participation in the Grolier Club, where he delivered exhibition-opening addresses three times and curated exhibitions twice.)But the aspect of his life rightly emphasized by Barnhisel is his social skill, his ability to ingratiate himself with those he met and as a result to move ahead in any institution or organization. Barnhisel is often frank in his observations about what he calls Pearson's “networking,” as when he says that Pearson's “sly charm” did not entirely hide his “burning ambition.” But unlike many self-promoters, Pearson's actions had substance behind them (along with kindness and generosity), and they benefited not only himself but also other people—and causes such as literary modernism and even American democracy. It was this trait, as Barnhisel knowledgeably explains (but in less detail than the Winks book), that enabled him, within a few months of entering the Office for Strategic Services, to become one of the creators of OSS's counterintelligence espionage program and then to be made its London chief and later the chief of operations everywhere except China and Burma. With his widely admired style of conducting meetings and his captivating teaching manner, he also developed the training program for counterintelligence officers, and his methods were later adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency.When in 1946 he returned to the United States after three years abroad, he was offered a position with the State Department to chair a committee on intelligence, but he declined in favor of staying in New Haven with his wife (whom he had married only a short time before his war service) and pursuing his Yale career. As Barnhisel makes clear, he was eager to support modernism through teaching, writing, collecting, editing authors’ drafts, directing dissertations, and mounting exhibitions, as well as to join his mentor Stanley Williams (another of my favorite teachers) in campaigning for the acceptance of American studies as an academic field and making Yale its center. For Pearson, this field was also an element in Cold War national security and postwar American leadership (as indeed it became for a while with foundation help). These connections (and the changing political and academic worlds they were part of) are analyzed by Barnhisel with evenhandedness and extraordinary thoroughness.During the last dozen years of Pearson's life (before his death in 1975 at the age of sixty-six), his promotion of American studies (and America) was effectively expressed in extensive teaching and lecturing abroad, primarily in East Asia and Australia. Barnhisel's account of Pearson's visits to Japan contains a misleading statement that I will clarify here because doing so will strengthen his depiction of Pearson's influence. He says, “Pearson contributed an introduction to Takuwa's 1963 History of American Literature, a Japanese-language anthology that helped form Japanese understanding of American literature and culture.” What happened was that Pearson's prominent 1960 article “American Literature” in the Encyclopedia Americana was reprinted in 1964 by a Tokyo publisher, Eihosha, as a small book entitled American Literature, with a one-page introduction by Pearson and notes in Japanese by Shinji Takuwa (who dated his preface 1963); after Pearson revised the article for the 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia, a “revised and enlarged edition” of the book, now titled The History of American Literature, came out in Japan in 1969, with two more paragraphs of introduction, fifteen more pages of text, and a great many additional notes by Takuwa. The book had a wide circulation in Japan and through United States Information Agency centers (but not in the United States itself, where it is a rare book). Because it consists primarily of Pearson's eighty-page overview of American literature—his most comprehensive assessment of America's literary achievement, with trenchant comments on dozens of authors—the book made his ideas more widely known abroad than simply introducing an anthology would have done. Among its characteristic pronouncements are two striking sentences in the introduction (not quoted by Barnhisel) that reflect Pearson's belief in reading literature in context: “Man writes with the blood of his own time, but in his bones is the inheritance of his grandfathers. . . . A history of American literature is a footnote of explanation for any American book.”I still have the notes I took in Pearson's course (which did not have an English department designation but was labeled American Studies 59b). Looking over them now, after reading Barnhisel's book, I see connections with Pearson's life that I could not have known about then. For example, at the beginning of the semester, in discussing Henry Adams, Pearson talked about what “education” meant to the Puritans (being enlightened and having self-understanding, he believed). His perennial concern with contexts came up in the first few sentences of the opening lecture when he said, “Fiction is a chapter of history presented dramatically. . . . No book exists entirely of itself. All are history, and all history is interwoven.” He claimed explicitly (a few weeks later in discussing Anderson) that knowing authors’ lives is important for understanding their writings, and he felt (as he said in connection with Dreiser) that the structure of a novel reflects the structure of the author's life. “Art,” he stated in a Cummings lecture, “is recognizing oneself and expressing it.” He clearly did not fit into the popular image of the Yale English department, which at that time was considered the center of New Criticism, a movement that did not place a high value on connecting literature with authors. (Pearson became a peripheral member of the department, despite his fame outside of it, partly for this reason but also because he never completed his project to edit Hawthorne's letters and never published a scholarly book—though some of the essays he did publish were important and eloquent.) The course was artfully constructed with Adams as a recurring reference point, and it was brought full circle with the discussion of Faulkner at the end: What Quincy, Massachusetts, was for Adams—the symbol of an ordered past—was what the plantation was for the post–Civil War South. The experience of reading Faulkner, he said, is a way of structuring one's own life, of finding order in it; verbal artifacts help us to learn to live. The last sentence of my notes—presumably the last sentence of the last lecture—is “Man's dignity is shown by his ability to criticize himself and to try to understand himself.”Although my association with Pearson was only as a student who took notes in a large class (notes that now connect me with a time seventy years past), I am glad to have been able to witness this remarkable man in action. Even people who have no personal reason for being interested in Pearson will find Barnhisel's book fascinating: it convincingly shows that Pearson was a significant figure in twentieth-century cultural history through his influential roles in the overlapping worlds of literature, academia, and government service.
G. Thomas Tanselle (Mon,) studied this question.