V2nd, C3

[alice wellintown]

In SL Intro., P provides a list of the works he read and, of course,
the list includes lots of non-American books and authors. Of course, P
doesn't provide a complete list and scholars like Grant and
Weisenburger--to name but two obvious examples, and Wiki-makers like
Ware, not to mention the P-List, have compiled a list of texts P
either read or lifted from.  The list is long and P makes a deliberate
effort to read or lift from non-American texts. We know this is his
method because of the extensive work that has been done by scholars.
We know, just to pick an odd one here, that P read or lifted from the
Opie's fascinating study, _The Language and Law of Schoolchildren_.
His use of Rilke, of Graves, of Frazer, of dozens of other European
texts makes any claim that we should understand P as an American
author, a consumer and producer of the American works, well, a claim
that asks to be either ignored or challanged. That is the idea and so
I'll stick to my thesis. I claim that P is an American as apple pie
and that his major concern is with America and its workers and its
class amd generational stuggles.  That said, when we turn to V., we
see Frazer, Graves, Adams on the same page. Two Europeans and one
American and, of course, a good deal of The Education and Adams's
other works are about an innocent and then a not quite so innocent
abroad, so we could say, the Europeans win 2.5 to .5. We could say
that. Or we could take another approach and consider why P was keen to
include those Europeans and why he set a good part of his first novel
outside America. In SL Intro., P notes that he read Victorians (and I
think it is resonable to include Dickens on this list of Victorians
for obvius reasons and, as Edmund Wilson's influence has been noted,
_Bleak House_), and we know he read Henry James, and that Wilson's
earth shattering Freudian essay on _The Turn of the Screw_ was
standard reading for a Lit student of P's generation. William James,
while mentioned, as is his brother Henry, by Henry Adams in _The
Education_, seems like a book a young man who read Frazer, Graves,
Eliade's _The Sacred and the Profane_, Waddell's _The Wandering
Scholars_ would  get reound to.

But, again, this Butt is as big as my moma's, so big that when I try
to back it up my beeper goes off, while Graves and Frazer provide the
symbolism and the word play,for example, "venery" and the "hare" or
the shell that is empty of Venus,  and the islands, Malta and the
other one where Graves composed the work, and P, as we noted mixes in
the biographies, as he does with the author of Alice, it is Adams tht
provides the character and, forgive me for saying this old Nabokov,
the ideas. Those ideas are American ideas. They could not be
otherwise.