Arts and Letters

Waldo Frank's career was part of the coming-of-age of American letters, which his contemporary, Van Wyck Brooks, prophetically described. He was one of the group, including Randolph Bourne, Paul Rosenfeld, Lee Simonson, and Brooks himself, who made The Seven Arts, despite its brief life, a landmark in our literary history. And in so far as his work spanned the entire area of literature—novels, short stories, critical essays, dramas, cultural interpretations—he stands forth as a central figure in this whole literary movement, though in his final decade he experienced the bitterness of premature death, for the new generation hardly knew his name.

Waldo (David) Frank was born at Long Branch, New Jersey, on August 25, 1889, and died in New York on January 10, 1967. A precocious youth, who read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky at a time when most of his contemporaries still were reading Henty and Oliver Optic, Frank became a brilliant student at Yale and was graduated in 1911 with a master's degree, as well as a B.A. Like most of the other members of his generation, at least in New York, he was equally at home in the Old World and the New, though it was partly through his own efforts that he uncovered and revalued the major American literary tradition, that of Emerson and Thoreau, whose names he bore, but even more that of Poe and Whitman, whose successors formed Our America (1919), the first of his prophetic books about American culture.

Frank's literary outlook was based on an intuitive perception that the culture of the Old World, which had reached a climax of unity in the Middle Ages, was in process of disintegration; and that the artist must take the lead in giving birth, through new forms of art, to a new culture not yet "conventionalized into simple word and concept." In Salvos (1924) he made an attempt to lay the ideological groundwork for such a culture, and the greater part of his literary opus was an attempt to give substance to a new "vision of being," essentially religious in character.

For Frank, religion had economic and social as well as ideological and personal implications: hence his sympathetic effort to ally himself with the revolutionary political forces of his time, without being caught in the automatism of Marxian dialectic or the regimentation of official communism. Unlike so many of his generation, he was saved from such stultification both by his unwavering belief in the New World as a cultural concept—Jefferson's New World, and Bolivar's—and by his adherence to the prophetic religious tradition of Israel, part of his own consciously formulated Jewish inheritance.

Waldo Frank's novels, beginning with his autobiographic first novel, The Unwelcome Man, constituted a large portion of his literary effort: almost a dozen books in all. As a novelist, Frank sought to explore further those psychological depths that Hawthorne and Melville had first dared examine. But perhaps the most successful of his literary works is one of his earliest and least known, City Block (1922), a collection of stories with an inner unity, so unusual in both their method and their substance that his publisher would not bring them out under his own imprint.

For all the vivid passages of thought and characterization in Frank's novels, his special gifts as an imaginative writer flourished best, perhaps, in the series of cultural interpretations that began with Virgin Spain (1926) and continued in a series of books, America Hispana (1930), Dawn in Russia (1932), South American Journey (1943), culminating magnificently in his biography of Simon Bolivar (1951).

Perhaps the best introduction to every phase of Waldo Frank's thought is The Rediscovery of America (1929), an essay whose title allies it to the more general rediscovery which was the work of his generation. Here one finds Frank, the cultural historian, deeply grounded in the values of the past, Frank the stylistic innovator in prose, Frank the relentless critic of the baseness and shame of commercialism, likewise the superficiality and the perversity of contemporary technics, bent on exploiting power instead of serving life; and here finally is the religious prophet, re-stating in terms of our own age, the personalism and cosmic wholeness of Whitman. But since Frank's religious values were not embodied in any existing orthodoxy, Christian or Marxian, his reinstatement of religion as the central theme of life was lost to most of his contemporaries.

No life and work so copious, so vehement, so full of active experience as well as reflection as that of Waldo Frank, can be summed up, much less appraised, in a few sentences. Yet it would be an unforgivable error to say nothing of the towering place he occupied, for more than a generation, as the great mediator between North America and what he properly called America Hispana, since it includes Mexico and Central America, too. Frank's Virgin Spain, which became a classic in Spain itself, formed a preface to what might have become a true dialogue between the two cultures. Though this dialogue was eagerly carried on by some of our southern neighbors, it lapsed because of the muteness and intellectual inertia, to say nothing of indifference and hostility, of our own countrymen, who sought to export machines and packaged goods to South America, not ideas and works of art.

Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican diplomat and man of letters, said in his Introduction to Virgin Spain that Frank had become "one of the most eminent tragic characters in the great Dialogue of the Americas." The tragedy lay partly in the personal fact that, as his affiliation with our Hispanic neighbors became deeper, his alienation from his own countrymen, and their alienation from America Hispana, became more permanent. Not even Frank's friendly presence or his passionate efforts to maintain contact, could turn the monologue of power and wealth into a true dialogue between equals, ready both to give and to take.

One cannot do justice to Waldo Frank's work without saying a word about his personality; for though he was at times the victim of his own intransigence, his imperiousness, his demanding self-confidence—all qualities that go familiarly with genius—he was also capable of an impersonal love that asked no further reward than its own expression. His physical courage was more than once proved under brutal assault, once when visiting the striking coal miners of Kentucky, again, when physically attacked by official fascist gangsters in Buenos Aires. But his intellectual courage was equally notable; so that he never wavered or hesitated to express opinions that flouted those of the Establishment, even during the sinister period that gave scope to McCarthyism.

All in all, then, Waldo Frank stands out on any just estimate as one of the major figures of his literary generation: a generator of fresh ideas and forms, one of the bearers of a new consciousness that expressed his own sense of oneness with all created being. That a writer of such heroic mold should at the climax of his life have been neglected by his countrymen can be explained, perhaps, by the fact that heroism is momentarily out of fashion, along with those higher qualities of mind and culture that all of Frank's works express. The underworld of Pop Art and 'electronic massage' has no place for such a writer. But the re-discovery of America is the task of each generation and the rediscovery of Waldo Frank will, I venture to predict, give him a future role that will make up for the neglect and rejection that darkened his final years. The memoir of his own life which he was writing just before his death should, when published, re-establish him as the significant writer and personality that he actually was.