Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860

2. Personifying Vernacular Eccentricity: Joseph Dennie and the American Lounger

{ 2 } Personifying Vernacular Eccentricity Joseph Dennie and the American Lounger In a series of letters he wrote to his mother in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Joseph Dennie, the American author and editor of the prestigious Philadelphia journal The Port Folio, referred to himself repeatedly as a kind of geographical error, an Englishman at heart who was accidentally born in the Americas and was now consigned to eking his life out in what he called “this execrable Country.” “[A]t bottom,” he said in one letter, “I am a malcontent, and consider it a serious evil to have been born among the Indians & Yankees of New England. Had it not been for the sel‹sh patriotism of that hoary traitor, Adams, and the bellowing of Molineux . . . I might now, perhaps, in a Literary Diplomatic, or lucrative Situation been in the service of my rightful King and instead of shivering in the bleakness of the United States, felt the genial sunshine of a Court.”1 “Had not the Revolution happened,” he said in another, “had I continued a subject to the King, had I been fortunately born in England or resided in the City of London for the last 7 years, my fame would have been enhanced; and as to fortune I feel a moral certainty that I should have acquired by my writings 3 or 4 thousand pounds.”2 Dennie’s Anglophilia, which found public expression in his zealous Federalism, his abhorrence of “democracy,” and his yearly printing of birthday wishes to George III in the Port Folio, has been taken by scholars as the indication of his vexed relationship to various nationalist formations . Traditionally, Dennie was understood as a still-colonial ‹gure, incapable of coming to terms with the democratic modernity that was the 59 condition of the new American nation-state.3 More recently, Dennie’s Anglophilia is understood as the logical result of the fractured and imperfect processes of nationalization occurring in the decades following the Revolutionary War. Instead of being understood as the product of a colonial past, Dennie is seen here as the product of a present in which American literary activity is continuous with the intellectual and cultural life of the larger Atlantic world. In the words of William Dowling, Dennie addressed “scattered souls on both sides of the Atlantic” who fancied that they had “more in common with one another than with members of their own societies whose minds ha[d] been seduced by jacobinism and democracy.”4 Similarly, for Laura Rigal, Dennie, with his restlessness, his fatigue and disaffection, is symptomatic of the placeless souls wandering “the extended stage of a global industrial market.”5 And yet Dennie’s expressions of exile, I would suggest, were never entirely separable from his elaboration of what was very much a vernacular literary personality whose chief feature was its alienation from American life.6 In chapter 1, I looked at the extent to which Romantic author constructions ›ourished within early American literary cultures and were ultimately internalized as tropological elements in early national biographies of authors. In this chapter, I want to suggest two things: ‹rst, that in the case of certain writers this process of internalization went well beyond a merely discursive incorporation of Romantic author constructions into local biographical materials. Instead, Dennie’s case suggests the extent to which these ‹gures of autonomy were internalized by writers as performative and self-postulative principles, though not in a way that encouraged the development of autonomous cultural ideals. In Britain and Europe in the late eighteenth century, discourses of writerly persecution and social withdrawal played a crucial role in the imagining of a rari‹ed culture sphere, contributing to the idea of the modern literary ‹eld as, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, “a world apart.”7 But in the United States the eccentric, nonconformist writer, far from playing an adversarial political or cultural role, emerged as himself a ‹gure of entertainment , and thus, I will argue, as a ‹gure peculiarly amenable to the in‹ltration of America’s unusual publishing economies. In this sense, eccentric author ‹gures, for all their seeming not to belong to American literary landscapes, acquired a kind of double materiality within their horizons, not only achieving actualization in authors but also in the mechanics and economies of book and periodical publication. Second, the peculiar formation of Dennie’s literary personality sug- { 60 } industry and the creative mind gests...