American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

American Jeremiad

American Jeremiad h 1. The generation of American writers that came of age around 1840—the men and women who initiated what we now think of as a national literature—aspired more to youthful vigor than to the “classic” status of ancient Greece and Rome, so dear to the generation of the Founding Fathers. A sense of expanding frontiers, buttressed by expansive ideas borrowed from European romanticism, impelled them. They wrote enthusiastically of “Young America,” spelled nature with a capital N (and sometimes without an e, like some pagan divinity unleashed from the Black Forest), and refused to be, in Emerson’s pejorative word, “retrospective.”1 “The American Scholar,” Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard College during the summer of 1837, is full of appeals to youth: Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. The classics of Greece and Rome, the great books of Great Britain, were merely “the sere remains of foreign harvests.” Thoreau took the lesson to heart. “I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet,” he wrote in Walden, “and I have yet to hear the ‹rst syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my 211 seniors.” The hemlocks surrounding Walden Pond better represent these writers’ aspirations than the faux-Roman columns and obelisks on the Mall in Washington. With regard to which of their own books might survive, becoming classics in their turn, nineteenth-century American critics were youthfully con‹dent and, in our view, often wrong. Who now reads those bosky American epics “Evangeline” or “The Song of Hiawatha” except for laughs? Aside from The Scarlet Letter , recognized then and now as a masterpiece though for shifting reasons, it is remarkable that some of the books we treasure most survived oblivion. Walden and Moby-Dick were commercial failures , all but ending their authors’ careers. Emerson backed off from his initial enthusiasm for Leaves of Grass (“I should have enlarged the but,” he remarked, when he learned that Whitman had published his private letter of congratulation in the New York Tribune); Emily Dickinson, with pride or prudence, said she had not read Whitman but was “told that he was disgraceful.” Dickinson herself stowed her nearly two thousand poems, of which a mere ten were published in her lifetime, in a drawer and instructed her sister to burn her papers at her death. Such messages entrusted to bottles eventually ›oated to shore, to join our con‹dent (and probably wrong) judgments about our own contemporaries . It is striking that so many of the nineteenth-century American works we now consider unquestionably important—including four of the ‹ve books (Walden, Leaves of Grass, The Scarlet Letter, and Moby-Dick) identi‹ed by Denis Donoghue as “the American classics ”—were published during a scant ‹ve years, from 1850 to 1855. Other remarkable books, such as The House of the Seven Gables, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Emerson’s Representative Men, appeared during the same period. Two major issues dominated American society during this transitional moment, one political and one religious. The political issue was of course slavery—and many of these works have something to say about slavery. Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist and Mark Twain’s two major novels Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson look back on this period from a postwar perspective.2 The religious crisis is more dif‹cult to characterize but no less 212 signi‹cant: the breakup of the old Puritan certainties, and the consequent embrace of a new revivalism on the one hand—sometimes called the Second Great Awakening—and a new religious liberalism on the other, associated with Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. Much of the scorn heaped on their “seniors” by these midcentury American writers derived from their sense that the previous generation had botched the spiritual and political challenges of its time. “Each age,” Emerson had warned, “must write its own books,” and by the 1920s, a new group of youthful writers —Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Pound—found American literature from before the Civil War still not American enough. “Hawthorne, the others,” Faulkner told a seminar of Japanese students, “they were Europeans, not Americans .” Amid con‹dent talk of America’s “coming of age,” only Mark...