Becoming What One Is. - book reviews

Christian Century, Nov 8, 1995 by Robert Drake

By Austin Warren. University of Michigan Press, 172 pp., $32.50.

THIS LONG-AWAITED autobiography of the distinguished literary scholar and critic Austin Warren, with a perceptive foreword by Russel Fraser, one of Warren's former colleagues at the University of Michigan, is an account of a search that ended perhaps only with the author's life. Born into a middle-class New England family, Warren was never at ease with his identity. Was he a gentleman, a genius, a musician (primarily on the organ), a mystic--or something else? It took his whole life to put the diverse parts of himself together. in his concluding chapter Warren comes to see that throughout his career his profession was teaching but his vocation was writing.

This book traces him from Wesleyan where he did his undergraduate work, to Harvard where he got his M.A., and to Princeton, where he earned his Ph.D. under Robert Kilburn Root. His great mentor at Harvard was Irving Babbitt, and his bete noire was the great George L. Kittredge, whom he found a "combination of pedant, tyrant and exhibitionist ... with no method of teaching and no theory of literature."

Warren taught briefly at the University of Kentucky and the University of Minnesota until he came to rest for some years at a sort of women's secretarial college affiliated with Boston University. Only after that did he go on to his academic achievements at the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan.

Warren's encouragement of the young and the restless was rare in his profession. "Bring me a new story every Monday," was his charge to me. He lived with tremendous gusto--a quality he admired and sought out in others. Fraser cites him as calling himself an apostle to the Midwest, and I remember his saying he was an apostle to the gentiles. He was always something of an evangelist for his views of life and art.

The book contains a couple of inexplicable howlers: "Framingham" rather than "Farmington" as the seat of Miss Porter's exclusive school for girls in Connecticut and Edward VIII rather than Edward VII as Mrs. Keppel's royal "friend." But they are minor blemishes on an otherwise admirable portrait.

Reviewed by Robert Drake, professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.