The Letters of Gamaliel Bradford, 1918-1931
edited by
[Houghton Mifflin, $4.50]
To one who knows Gamaliel Bradford, either through his portraits of others or through that remarkable self-portrait., the Journal, published a year ago, this volume of his letters might seem to offer little of discovery. Yet actually it reveals another aspect without which that portrait was incomplete. For the Journal portrays a solitary soul, isolated in its own sufferings and creations. The Letters show him still questioning, creating, but always reaching out to kindred spirits; they throw new light on the story of his struggles and successes.
These letters belong indeed to the classic, the almost vanished tradition of letter writing; they spring from leisure and from the twofold concern with ideas and with individuals. It is true that they lack the abandon, the magic of those great letter writers whom Bradford loved and portrayed: Keats and Lamb and Fitzgerald, Voltaire and Flaubert. Yet Bradford’s letters not only keep their distinctive quality, but, like all real letters, they take color from their recipients: grave and meditative to Robert Frost, brilliant and racy to Mencken. Hence the style has a variety, a shading that is lacking in the Journal, even in many of the portraits. The letters, selected from an immense number, — Bradford’s correspondents numbered some five thousand, — range from boyhood friends to scholars, editors, critics, and poets. Those reviewers who have condemned Bradford for his aloofness from contemporary literature may be amazed to find him writing with keen appreciation to Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, Percy Mackaye, Leonard Bacon, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson. He who longed above all to create in poetry entered eagerly into their creations, especially into the soul probings of Robinson, so like and so unlike his own psychographies. That Bradford, ‘the very image and incarnation of the Puritan spirit gone to seed,’ as he described himself, could delight in Mencken, ‘the champion stirrer-up of the world,’ might give some of his critics pause. And his dissents are as generous as his praises. His letter on the first copy of the American Mercury is a masterly rebuke of cocksureness and railing and intolerance: ‘ I know you will think that I ooze and drip fatally with the milk of human kindness. . . . Nevertheless, for a home-brew, it appeals to me more than some others.’ There is the fine irony of his repudiation of ‘the superb negations of the Association for the Advancement of Atheism’: the wit of his description of politicians, ‘so busy with the external gesture that their souls run terribly to seed’; the wisdom of his recipe for style: to think and feel and live with passion and power, ‘then let the result pour out of him with all the richness and beauty that it can find for itself.’
The Letters of Gamaliel Bradford complete his own portrait by showing him not only as an artist in biography but as an artist in human relations.
FRANCES W. KNICKERBOCKER