In the American Jungle

In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

American Jungle, by Waldo David Frank, is a collection of essayistic portraits and polemics surveying American civilization in the 1920s, framed by an autobiographical opening in which Frank narrates his own escape from a Europe-saturated upbringing on the Upper West Side, through Yale, Paris expatriation, and finally a deliberate immersion in Kansas farms, Midwestern mines, the South, and Southwestern pueblos to "discover" America last, as its culmination. From this vantage he indicts the era's "American myth" — the flattering fantasy of a comfortable, cultured, universally prosperous nation peddled abroad and swallowed at home — contrasting it with the raw, unfinished, often brutal reality he finds on returning: squalid streets, sullen faces, and a national temperament he diagnoses as adolescent, mechanized, and desperate for quick solutions. The book proceeds through discrete essays and character sketches unified by this diagnosis. Frank dissects American murder as a "folk art" born of the cult of instant success; anatomizes the automobile as a literal narcotic that severs Americans from meditation, resistance, and organic life; and reads a Philadelphia prize fight, a Polo Grounds ball game, and Florida's real-estate boom (haunted by ghostly conquistador counterpoint) as spectacles revealing a crowd starved for authentic contact and substituting mechanized "success" for lived experience. He argues American vulgarity is not spiritual emptiness itself but misplaced aggressive striving without a container, and that American Dada is redundant since the nation's chaos already exceeds anything the European avant-garde could invent — what America needs instead is disciplined seriousness. A running theme is the press and mass media as purveyors of comforting fictions, with sports pages ironically offering the only "facts" a "highbrow" can trust. Interwoven are biographical-critical portraits functioning as case studies in the search for organic American wholeness: Calvin Coolidge's face read as the degraded caricature of Puritan New England virtue turned into shrewd nullity; Charlie Chaplin analyzed as an "atom" perpetually escaping union with the world, his art the disciplined incarnation of that flight; D. H. Lawrence and Randolph Bourne as men caught in painful transition toward unrealized wholeness; Herbert Croly praised as a rare figure who kept growing, humbly working through and beyond false political creeds toward the "great tradition"; Sherwood Anderson embraced as a naive, flame-like prophet of an inchoate new American scripture; Hart Crane's poem "The Bridge" examined at length as the most ambitious modern attempt to weld industrial machinery and cosmic myth into unified vision, though undermined by the era's weak sense of realized persons; and Sigmund Freud positioned as the last of the nineteenth-century Titans, a rationalist hero who maps the unconscious yet cannot fully account for the "x" of human wholeness. Two essays on Native American pueblo culture and rectilinear city planning argue that Indian civilization's curved, accepting relationship to the land prefigures the integration America's own angular, resistant culture must eventually achieve. A polemical exchange with Malcolm Cowley over Dada, and an essay defending metaphysics against H. L. Mencken's anti-philosophical journalism, round out Frank's case that America possesses immense, still-fermenting spiritual energy — misapplied into commerce, speed, and violence — awaiting the "great bonfire" of a mature, unified culture that his own essays are written to help kindle.

By Waldo David Frank · First published 1937 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Cultural Criticism, Essay Collection · 40 chapters · 105,626 words

First lines

CHAPTER 1. I Discover the New World a. The most important room at home was the library. Our house was the usual four-story brownstone segment in the unbroken wall of an upper West Side block. There were plenty of windows. Those to the north looked out upon the street where grocery wagons rattled by day and by night the gas lamps dimly slumbered. Those to the south gave a broad view of another wall of houses which at dark became fantastic with lighted windows holding many secrets and black silhouettes mysteriously alive behind drawn blinds. And beyond the houses was the glow of the great city. The library had but a single window; it was too little for so large and low a room. Even by day the library was dark and, since the window opened on a strip of yard choked by an ugly ailanthus, I never looked through that window. When I was in this room New York did not come in; New York stayed distant and silent. The real world became this world of books; and almost all the books had come from Europe.

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cultural criticism · machine culture · American modernism · spirituality · materialism critique · modernist essays · Marxist analysis · jazz age · great depression · intellectual history · pan-Americanism · social commentary

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