Philosopher's Holiday
by
[Viking Press, $2.75]
IT was Louisa May Alcott who defined a philosopher as a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. Mr. Irwin Edman. belonging to the terra firma school of philosophy, has perhaps never given similar concern to his family and friends; all the same, a philosopher of this school out on a self-confessed holiday may be the cause of some legitimate Concern to readers who look to a philosopher for wisdom even on his flay off.
A philosopher who has left his categorical imperatives behind — or perhaps his particular school does n’t recognize such things — is indeed one who, to reverse the process, has gone up in a balloon, and seems perplexed us to what to do while drifting rudderless in the murky chaos which hovers above this troubled earth. He has left his sense of order behind, philosophy is taboo, pure literature beyond him, — there is the Bomb, he cannot help seeing, that threatens the Ivory Tower, — and it does not become a philosopher to be personal. At the very outset he rules out autobiography, though in the preliminary essay he hints that he might have written a whale of a one — had he wanted to. But he does n’t want to, or rather he makes it clear that it is an act of self-abnegation on his part not to do so. Still, what is one to do? A philosopher on a holiday is a philosopher with his occupation gone.
To be sure, he might, not have written at all. It should be so easy — at any rate, for a philosopher—to refrain from writing. Yet, since his holiday has disposed of this title weighing so heavily upon a mind that in April wishes itself on a cruise instead of in the schoolroom, the human itch to write becomes all the greater, and the philosopher willy-nilly turns truant. It is an unaccustomed rôle, and the result, in book form, is an odd conglomeration of going off on tangents, a pell-mell collection of thoughts and half-thoughts, of character sketches seized in glimpses, of essays and attempts at essays, of reminiscences of teachers and students, of travel, of pink intellectuals at New York cocktail parties (to whose vaporings he attaches perhaps exaggerated ‘symptomatic’ importance), of fragments of current history, of slender crumbs of autobiography, and even of occasional efforts at verbal flippancy.
In short, Mr. Edman has adopted more or less the method of a conversationalist, who casually — often too casually—gets things off his chest, trusting that the best will be remembered and the worst forgotten. He is often amusing enough, as in ‘M. Platon’ and ‘Love Observed in Luxembourg’; persuasive in ‘Sane Englishmen and ‘The Bomb and the Ivory Tower’; inconclusive in ‘Former Students’ and ‘Former Teachers’; mentally confused in ‘Coteries of the Mind. He is at his best when he is most completely the holiday-maker or most completely the philosopher. Apart from that, you have the spectacle of the unloading of so much ballast, but the balloon never really soars.
JOHN COURNOS