Campaign for the American Reader: Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Europeans"

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Europeans"

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published soon. He has also just published Neumann's Last Concert, the fourth novel in a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, finally, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when

I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Henry James's The Europeans begins:

No one remembers John Jay Chapman; scarcely anyone still remembered him in 1938 when Edmund Wilson, the twentieth century’s most important literary critic, reviewed a volume of Chapman’s letters published in 1907. Only Henry James, according to Wilson, “had anything like the same sureness of judgment, the same freedom from current prejudices and sentimentalities” as Chapman, who wrote of the “debasement of our politics and government by unscrupulous business interests,” which is “the whole history of America since the Civil War.”

Everything had changed, and nowhere with more tragic results than among those who were educated in the American university.

“In the seventies, the universities were still turning out admirable professional men, who had had the old classical education, a culture much wider than their professions, and the tradition of political idealism and public conscience which had presided at the founding of the Republic.” Ten years later, “the industrial and commercial development which followed the Civil War had reached a point where the old education was no longer an equipment for life.” Those who “had taken it seriously, were launched on careers of tragic misunderstanding. The rate of failure and insanity and suicide in some of the college ‘classes’ of the eighties shows an appalling demoralization.”

It was the world of business, Big Business, a world in which “seriousness about man and his problems was abrogated by Business entirely in favor of the seriousness of Business about things that were not serious.” A man who had been educated for the old America could either “become the slave of Business at one extreme or drink himself to death at the other, but in any case absorb, perhaps unconsciously, enough of the commercial ideal to neutralize any other with which he might have started out. For one of the most depressing features of the American world of this period was that it hardly knew what was the matter with it.”

Something fundamental had changed. Henry Adams, the great-grandson of one president and the grandson of another, thought to find the cause.

“The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900,” he wrote in 1909, “but, measured by any standard known to science - by horse-power, calories, volts mass in any shape - the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were full a thousand times greater in 1900 than 1800; - the force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time.”

None of this could have happened, this astonishing acceleration in the rate of movement, had there not been an acceptance, a belief, that wealth and its pursuit were more important than anything else. The predatory values of business could become the motive power, the driving force, in the new American Empire only if materialism was no longer thought a sin. That meant, if the question were seriously pursued, that what had happened to America, what had become by the end of the nineteenth century clear evidence of a world unhinged, had been there from the beginning, that America had been unbalanced from the start.

Henry James wrote about the tension between the idealism and the greed of Americans when it first appeared, when the speed of things first began to change the standards and the conditions of American life. The Europeans, published in l878 when James was thirty-five, is...[read on]

About Buffa's recent novel Neumann’s Last Concert, from the publisher:

Neumann’s Last Concert is a story about music and war and the search for what led to the greatest evil in modern history. It is the story of an American boy, Wilfred Malone, who lost his father in the early days of the Second World War and a German refugee, Isaac Neumann, the greatest concert pianist of his age when he lived in Berlin, but who now lives, anonymous and alone, in a single rented room in a small town a few miles from San Francisco.

Wilfred has a genius for the piano, “a keen curiosity not yet corrupted by vanity” and “a memory that forgot nothing essential.” Neumann, alone in his room, is constantly writing, an endless labyrinth of questions and answers, driving him farther and farther back into the past, searching for the causes, searching for the meaning, of what happened in Germany, trying to understand what had led him, a German Jew, to stay in Germany when he could have left but instead continued to perform right up to the night that during his last concert they took his wife away.

Neumann’s Last Concert is a novel about the great catastrophe of the 20th century and the way in which music, great music, preserves both the hope of human decency amidst the carnage of human insanity and the possibility of what human beings might still accomplish.