The American Adam

R. W. B. Lewis

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226219509
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"—dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man, " the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

II

The Narrative Image

The master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain—disdain of innocence—to be nothing but innocent! Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it.

HERMAN MELVILLE, Billy Budd

4

The Fable of the Critics

The admirers of poetry, then, may give up the ancient mythology without a sigh. Its departure has left us what is better than all it has taken away; left us the creatures and things of God’s universe.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
“Lectures on Poetry” (1825)

THE hopeful were ready to support and anxious to illustrate the proposition in Emerson’s The Poet (1844) that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.” An inseparable half of the hopeful program—along with the renovation of the man—was the refreshment of the word: so that it might utter the Adamic secret and contribute thereby to the Adamic career. Over the first half of the century there was a great deal of confused and repetitious talk about a “new literature,” a “national literature.” But the voices, discordant as they were, held a note of understandable urgency: for there was much at stake. It was not merely a matter of prestige; poets and novelists were not merely being summoned, in response to jibes from abroad, to enlarge the national supply of the beautiful. The new literature was to be a reflection in language of the novel and healthy facts of immediate life. It was to be a poetic equivalent of the life for which it would also be a revelation, providing, like the Revelation, some clues by which to plot a course of actual conduct.

In the critical probings of the hopeful, we may recognize a favorite undertaking of the present generation: the quest for myth, as it is called. But the myth being sought for was a sort of antimythic myth. The critics—in Arnold’s sense of those who prepared the ground for creative artists—no doubt did call upon native writers to construct imaginative statements about the new world and disclose that world’s transcendent meaning. To this extent there was a conscious search for myth. But as the world and its representative hero were fresh and underivative, so also was to be the account of them. Artists were forbidden to define their subject by analogies or recurrences; our Joyce, our Eliot, even our Yeats, would have been outlawed. In the new earthly paradise, a cleansing of the memory was prerequisite to the imaginative spokesman.

The other manner of proceeding may be represented by James Russell Lowell, who even in his jauntiest days, when he was hot from Harvard, shared the European habit of defining the present by noting its affinity with some portion of the past: of finding release for energies stifled by one tradition in the liberating life of another. It was Lowell who made the most of the historic claim that the true predecessor of the Yankee was not the Augustan Englishman, but the Jacobean; and Lowell’s invocation of a fresh and underivative literature was a command to his countrymen that they “become my new race of more practical Greeks.” This is the more familiar strategy of renaissance. It was exactly the strategy of that group in the European Renaissance that most resembled the party of Hope: the French poets calling themselves “The Pléiade.” Those colleagues of Pierre Ronsard, “signing off” from a traditional church and championing a national literature concerned with the natural man, reverted for aid, almost as a matter of course, to the imitable masterpieces of Greece and Rome. Du Bellay’s Defense et illustration de la langue francoyse, the sixteenth-century French version of The American Scholar, compiled check lists of ancient themes, genres, and even verbal devices for the aspiring native poet. And when neoclassicism had had its long day, the strategy proposed next (in an essay by Stendhal) was another backward shift of allegiance, from Racine to Shakespeare.

Emerson, of course, in his dedicated effort to extend the horizon of his provincial listeners, spoke on many occasions of the value of the books of the past. But it turned out, under pressure, to be a pretty limited value, discoverable almost entirely on the level of talent and of “the understanding,” a minor solace during “the humble Junes and Novembers of the soul,” and not essential to the creative spirit. His most resonant advice to the American scholar, concluding the lecture bearing that name, was that he had “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” and that it was high time to listen now to the new and natural music of the new continent. These were the lines in the address that won it the title of the “declaration of literary independence.” But that very phrase suggests that it was independence which was being declared, and not alternative new cultural alliances.

The instinct of the hopeful in so posing the creative problem may well have been fundamentally sound. Foreign observers, anyhow, from Tocqueville to Auden have regularly reminded us that the European practice of apprenticeship and imitation in the arts—so right and necessary for the European—can be fatal in this country. In America, they tell us, any work that tries to draw nourishment from any other is apt to choke to death in the process, though that reminder is itself a foreign judgment, and behind it there stirs a familiar anxiety lest we spoil for Europeans the image they comfortably possess of us. This much is obvious: that the serviceable relation between the individual talent in America and the European tradition is extremely delicate and painfully ambiguous.

And the historic case is that the search for forms and fables by the party of Hope began with the assumption that new ones would have to be devised, after the old ones had all been discarded. “The old sources of intellectual excitement seem to be well-nigh exhausted.” This—in the words of the editor of the first competent anthology of American prose (1847)—was the dominant attitude. And this—in Emerson’s graceful variation on the prevalent figure: “Adam in the garden, I am to new-name all the beasts of the fields and all the gods in the sky.”

II

The task of the new Adam as poet was at once grandiose and simple. According to one listener (in 1849), this is what the hopeful seemed to be saying: “We want a national literature commensurate with our mountains and rivers. . . . We want a national epic that shall correspond to the size of the country. . . . We want a national drama in which scope shall be given to our gigantic ideas and to the unparalleled activity of our people. . . . In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies.”

The speaker is not Walt Whitman, though the speech is a fair caricature by anticipation of some of the sentences in the Preface to Leaves of Grass. The speaker is Longfellow; or rather, it is a person named Hathaway in Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh. And his interlocutor—a Mr. Churchill—also anticipates one of the famous responses to Whitman, when he reminds Hathaway that “a man will not necessarily be a great poet because he lives near a great mountain.”¹ In the chapter-long exchange between the two men—the brash spokesman for an “honest” and uninhibited nationalistic magazine and the genteel schoolmaster who is all his life to be on the verge of composing a romance in the great tradition—Longfellow has given us an image of the typical failure of communication between the literary representatives of hope and memory.

He has also, very likely, given us an image of the contradictory tendencies he noticed in himself. For if Churchill is no doubt closer to the familiar Longfellow, Hathaway was a part of him too, and so was the novel’s hero, young Kavanagh, who was busy at that moment learning from the old masters in Italy that great art consists in the imaginative heightening of the immediate. These were the conflicting elements in the emergent culture, and we may expect to find symptoms of each of them even in so nostalgic a writer as Longfellow; all the elements were at work in Hiawatha. This may be why Longfellow (surprisingly, as the story is usually told) remained friendly toward Margaret Fuller, even after she reduced him to the status of a minor figure, on the grounds that “he sees life through the windows of literature”; for this is exactly what Kavanagh returns to say about Churchill. Kavanagh is in some small degree confessional, as well as satiric; there is a little wistful sincerity in the otherwise clownish exaggeration of the nationalist’s table-thumping conclusion: “We do not want art and refinement. We want genius—untutored, wild, original, free.”

No one outside Longfellow’s novel was talking quite like that—unless it was Bronson Alcott, who talked as unguardedly as the English language permitted. But Hathaway was merely a distortion and an extension of many a hopeful critic; and if he sounds a trifle ridiculous, it is because his raucous voice has lost the bold seriousness of much of what actually was being said. Emerson’s appeal, for example, to the giant striding down from “unhandselled savage nature,” to destroy the old culture and to build the new, was similar in kind to Hathaway’s view; and so was the question explored at the first meetings of the transcendentalists: why “on this titanic continent, where nature was so grand, genius should be so tame.” Longfellow may have had in mind the unmodulated lines of Lowell, published the year before (1848), in an all-out attack upon derivative writing launched at the peak of Lowell’s hopefulness:

You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thoughts,

With their salt on her tail, your wild eagle is caught:

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion

To what will be thought of it over the ocean. . . . .

Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,

To which the dull current in hers is but mud.

Lowell’s program (he was to change his mind in a couple of years) for a total replacement of memory by hope—“Forget Europe wholly”—had been enunciated for more than half a century, though it had accumulated nervous intensity over the years. Similar sentiments had been advanced endlessly on lecture platforms and in the little magazines; they reached summits of pride, anger, and hope in Fourth of July orations. It was estimated somewhat drily, by Duyckinck’s moderate Literary World (in 1847), that if all the documents relating to “this prolific text . . . of a native authorship” were collected, they would constitute “a very respectable library.” Lowell, in his Fable for Critics the following year, only contrived a sprightly digest of that library.

The critical noise, however, was not all denial and protest; the content of the new song was being hinted at simultaneously. A typical summary and message of hope may be drawn from the editorial introduction to Rufus Griswold’s anthology, The Prose Writers of America (1847). Griswold was the very type of insecure and uncreative hanger-on in the literary world; even his contemporaries recoiled from the shrillness of his support of novelty; Duyckinck commented that “the thought [of nationality in literature] seems to have entered and taken possession of [Griswold’s] mind with the force of monomania.” Griswold tried to dissociate himself from the “absurd notion . . . that we are to create an entirely new literature.” “The question between us and other nations,” he went on, “is not who shall most completely discard the past, but who shall make the best use of it.” His summary, however, was an inventory of themes to be discarded: “Courage, such as is celebrated by the old poets and romancers, is happily in disrepute; Religion, as it has commonly appeared in the more elegant forms of literature, has not been of a sort that ennobles man or pleases God; and Ambition, for the most part, has been of a more grovelling kind than may be looked for under the new forms of society.” Under the new forms, Griswold wound up, the principle of letters, as of life, religion, and politics, was to be—and his volume illustrated the theme—“Peace on earth and good will to men.”

The ease of the formula reflected the assurance Griswold shared with the hopeful that the period of protest was over, the creative moment at hand. Yet in a peculiarly exasperating paradox, the very abundance of peace and good will in the new Eden seemed to be making creative activity almost impossible. The contention long had been that the new scene had been all too thoroughly cleansed of the old evils and the literature they produced. Without either the evils or the traditions, the new poet was having a hard time—as hard, we may judge in retrospect, as the new Adam striving to grow up.

III

American critics who have worried the question of the adequacy of American life for art have regularly looked at the same evidence and returned the same verdicts. To take only a single instance: a relatively early exchange in the North American Review between Edward Tyrell Channing (in 1819) and William Howard Gardiner (in 1822). Their subject was the possibility of fiction in the new country; but what they had to say was relevant to narrative in the broadest sense, and it partook of the same disquiet and the same hope that others would bring to the general discussion of “poetry.” It is narrative or story that primarily concerns us: the dramatic value of the Adamic vision.

Edward Tyrell Channing expressed his doubts about fiction in America on the occasion of a review of William Dunlap’s biography of Charles Brockden Brown. Channing (1790–1856) may be reckoned as hovering on the fringe of the hopeful—as much, anyhow, as his older brother, Dr. William Ellery.² It was Edward Tyrell Channing who, as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, introduced Emerson, Thoreau, Parkman, and Holmes to an eloquence more supple and more suited to the temper of the day than the conventional flourishes he made a point of rejecting in his inaugural discourse (1819). Channing’s own style had little of the sense of urgency which would kindle the rhetoric of Thoreau and Emerson; but he was a mildly resolute guide to new directions; and his reservations about fiction did not arise from any nostalgic regret over the foreseeable drift of contemporary society.

In Brockden Brown, Channing acknowledged a novelist of power and ingenuity, and for the sake of those qualities he was willing to put up with Brown’s taste for the bizarre—with the combustion and ventriloquism of Wieland and the assorted somnambulisms of Edgar Huntly. In view of Brown’s talents, Channing wanted to know why, only a decade after his death, he was already “so far from being a popular writer.” He decided that it was because Brown had tried to get his effects out of native materials. And this led Channing to explore the hypothetical reasons why the novel might not ever be born in this country. A century later, Lionel Trilling explored in much the same way the hypothetical reasons why the novel might finally be dead.³ The reasons tendered for both speculations are suggestively close and provocatively opposite.

The difficulty, Channing thought, lay partly in the nature of actual experience; but it lay even more in the sense of experience in the minds of readers—in the characteristic expectancy about the condition and behavior of men in the New World. Channing reflected on the absence of “romantic associations” in the American mind; the phrase had a technical origin in Scottish aesthetics, but it stood for what would later be called the “tragic sensibility.” “The difficulty of succeeding in Brown’s kind of fiction,” wrote Channing, was due “not to the entire absence of romantic incident, situation and characters, but . . . to the want in his reader of romantic associations with the scenes and persons he must set before us.” Romance for Channing was closely allied to darkness. What he regretted was the lack of the sense of darkness in the imagination of readers: moral darkness, and not merely the darkness of dungeons and pits. Americans, he felt, were unable to recognize, in the dungeons they read about, an image of spiritual imprisonment which a man might experience in the Hudson Valley or on the banks of the Schuylkill. Americans, Channing observed, did not like to think about “the terrible power, dark purposes and inextricable toils of the contriver.” For, as Channing went on in an especially luminous sentence: “The actions we esteem great or are prepared to witness and encourage, are the useful rather than the heroic, such as tend to make society happier, not such as disturb or darken it.” In American eyes, life appeared to be fresh and flourishing, unincrusted by history and undistracted by doubts: “the laboring and the happy are seen everywhere and not a corner or a recess is secret.”

Though Channing underestimated the continuing pull of Puritanism as well as the steady attraction of the Gothic, there were examples enough to substantiate his main thesis: among them, Emerson’s uneasy failure to make any sense of Hawthorne’s stories and the noisy misunderstanding of Moby-Dick. The Adamic temper was usually not satisfied by such dark and desperate adventures. But alongside Channing’s apprehensions of 1819 we may place the suggestion made in the mid-twentieth century by Lionel Trilling that the novel may be dead—not because of an excess of peace, good will, happiness, and innocence, but because the image of evil is so overpoweringly at work in our affairs that it has crowded every other image out of our vision. The imitation of an action (as Ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Prologue: The Myth and the Dialogue
• I. The Danger of Innocence
• II. The Narrative Image
• III. The Past and the Perfect
• Epilogue: The Contemporary Situation
• Index