In the American Grain

PENN STATE YANKEE (384 pp.) -- Fred Lewis Pattee--Pennsylvania State College ($4.75).

Professor Fred Lewis Pattee had a conviction that he drummed into the heads of his students year after year: there is such a thing as American literature. Any green instructor can say it now with confidence, but when Pattee began to teach at Pennsylvania State College in 1894, it was gospel to consider U.S. letters as merely an inferior branch of English writing. In such books as A History of American Literature Since 1870 and Sidelights on American Literature, Pattee set about to change all that. When he died in 1950, it was plain that he had done as much as any one man to end the notion of U.S. literary colonialism.

2 x 8=16 Hours. Pattee's autobiography, Penn State Yankee, does not refight old literary battles, is in fact curiously lacking in literary recollections and ideas. What it does have is a homely, and finally moving, story of a typical New Hampshire farm boyhood, the kind of hard, grinding, yet character-shaping beginnings that nowadays seem as remote as the stories of Horatio Alger. No Alger hero ever made the grade a harder way. Pattee's mother had been a mill hand; his father wore himself out on a hillside farm whose fullest crop was stones. There was family loyalty but no sentiment in the Pattee home. Fred never heard anyone called "dear" or "darling," and kissing was frowned on. Right from childhood, he worked the "eight-hour" farm day alongside his father, "eight in the forenoon and eight in the afternoon." The Bible and prayer were the cornerstones of morality; novels were considered the work of the devil. Yet when Fred's mother persuaded his father to let her read Uncle Tom's Cabin aloud in 1861, father Pattee rushed out to enlist in the Union army.

No one seemed less likely to become a teacher of literature than Fred. In the whole history of his township, only two boys had gone to college. One old Yankee summed up the prevailing attitude toward higher education: "If you had all the money in one bunch that four years in college would cost, why in hell would you need a college education?" Fred's own reading, aside from school texts, consisted largely of stories from the Youth's Companion, the subscription paid for by selling muskrat skins. He was 19 years old before he heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

$172=A Dartmouth Year. When Pattee finally got to Dartmouth, the president made him sign a pledge that "I will on no occasion make use of tobacco or of intoxicating drinks." For someone as light-pursed as Fred was, it was an easy promise to keep. Later, he told how he had got through college on $172 a year. Part of it he earned teaching at country schools. On one of his first jobs, he found students bigger and tougher than he. When they locked him out one morning, he smashed down the door, won their admiration when he cried: "If you are men, come on one at a time. If you are yellow rats, come in a bunch."

Pattee's account of his teaching life is pedestrian. Perhaps it is simply the book of a tired old man. In retrospect most of his students seemed dull, and most professors a weak lot. Yet in his day, he had the respect not only of students and teachers, but even of such a renowned professor-baiter as H. L. Mencken. Wrote the big, bad curmudgeon of the '20s to Pattee: "Your treatise upon my own crimes and misdemeanors seems to me to be a very excellent piece of work . . . Send me your portrait. Let me have it at once. There is a place for it on my wall between Coolidge and Lillian Gish."

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