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

4. An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure

{ 4 } An Idle Industry Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure In the 1790s, Joseph Dennie had described himself as a lover of “the desultory style,” a perennial “lounger,” and the author of works read by those wishing “to waste time.”1 Dennie’s leisure was an ironic, comical affair, but it was also never far from Dennie’s aristocratic hauteur and his conviction, shared by Federalist men of letters, that their literary efforts constituted “service to the state.” The “lounger,” Dennie announced , belongs to “‘the privileged orders’ in society.” If he adopts a “capricious,” “airy” style, if he seems to be renouncing the “toils” of wisdom , it is not to abdicate the lofty duties bestowed upon gentlemen of rank, but rather the better to instruct the “lower orders” in a language they will understand.2 By the early 1830s, when the northern United States was fully in the throes of what Charles Sellers calls “market revolution,” the aristocratic ideal that Dennie venerated had been cast into the waste bin, rejected on principle by a newly nationalistic culture infatuated with ideals of democratized opportunity and social mobility. Dominating the popular fancy were self-makers and overreachers—Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, the Common Man who worked his way from rags to riches—men who, like Emerson’s scholar, conversed in the rough-and-ready language “which the ‹eld and work-yard made.”3 And yet the “idler” did not disappear . At this same period there rose to prominence a signi‹cant num154 ber of American authors who apparently refused to relinquish the standards of Dennie’s day. Almost all professional essayists, novelists, and editors , these writers were centrally involved in the Northeast’s increasingly competitive and rationalized literature and entertainment industry, but from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who liked to think of his mind as a sluggish river on whose unrippled surface the world was perfectly re›ected, to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who claimed that God did all her work for her, they insisted on their exemption from the bracing rhythms of labor and accumulation. With considerable justice, scholars understand these idle authorial constructs as protective, consolatory structures, envisioning them as powerful imaginary antidotes to industrial-era literary ghettos. In the opinion of many twentieth-century critics, for example, including William Charvat, Michael T. Gilmore, Lawrence Buell, and Michael Newbury , protestations of authorial idleness were defensive, self-de‹ning gestures ; faced with a rapidly industrializing society and an increasingly commercial, mass-audience-driven literary ‹eld, antebellum writers sought refuge in fantasy worlds reminiscent of old Federalist Boston and Knickerbocker New York.4 In the opinion of Gillian Brown and Cindy Weinstein, the cult of idleness was not just an instrument of authorial protection; it was part of a society-wide, defensive abstraction of the genteel self from the political and economic circumstances of its constitution within the emerging orders of industrial capitalism.5 In more recent studies by Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray and Leon Jackson, which highlight conditions of literary production rather than prevailing ideology , the air of luxurious hobbyism that clings to genteel idle authorial ‹gures implicitly speaks of the extent to which writers continued to conceive of themselves as agents in sociable or symbolic literary economies in the face of an increasingly corporate, market-oriented arts and entertainment landscape.6 However, if fantasies of idleness and leisure did indeed protect writers from the brutal orders of industry and market capitalism, it is not clear that writers were always in need of the amount of protection they got. In almost all studies of the nineteenth-century cult of genteel leisure it is taken for granted that writers in this tradition were invested in what Pierre Bourdieu famously calls art as “symbolic capital”—that is, in the transcendent purity and charisma of the aesthetic object as against its merely mechanical or commercially functional production and circulation . Even in recent studies that emphasize the genteel literary object’s continued implication in older “public sphere” models of culture, these An Idle Industry { 155 } objects are understood to be endowed with a kind of artifactual or use value that similarly transcends the commodity form. Yet neglected in these arguments is the degree to which writers working in the United States between 1820 and 1850 were invested in ‹gures of idleness and leisure for professional and commercial purposes. The conundrum these writers faced did not lie, as we might expect, in the dif...