Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature

To the Reader

T o t h e R e a d e r In the 1950s, reading William Faulkner, Toni Morrison began to detect “a special kind of courage,” the courage demonstrated by any writer who sets out to tell the secret history of his country. This was a courage she herself would demonstrate when it came to her great rewriting of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in Beloved (1987). The Faulkner-Morrison relation is one of the more dramatic examples of American literature as the result of what Faulkner termed “a happy marriage of speaking and hearing,” where the speaker is the precursor who calls forth in the later listener-reader-writer an answering act of creation. “My reasons, I think, for being interested and deeply moved by his subjects,” Morrison says, “had something to do with my desire to find out something about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but sometimes history refuses to do.” When Morrison claims that fiction can do something that history sometimes refuses to do, she speaks directly to the exigence behind my project, to my deep belief that American literature is the secret history of the United States. I mean by this nothing fancy or obscure, but simply that in reading American literature we are given the chance to recognize and refeel the emotional, cultural, and political burdens of a specific and collective past. Our novels, poems, plays, and short stories provide a medium for imagining how it felt—then—to be alive in our country, and to see how that experience plays out—now—in the present in which we happen to be reading. This book grows out of the changing experience of teaching, over more than thirty years, a course entitled “Twentieth-Century American Literature.” These were the years in which the opening of the canon was the major intellectual event, and I have attempted to capture some of the richness of this ever-expanding universe by offering commentary on fifty-four twentieth-century American authors. The length of the list has been determined, in part, by the physics of bookmaking; this is a big book, and at some point one needs to stop. Indeed, at one point I x To the Reader determined that it was necessary to remove chapters about American poetry and drama, and to center this project on fictional and nonfictional prose. Even given this genre limitation, I regret the exclusion of many who still deserve to be read. I take some comfort, however, in the thought that any selection from such an embarrassment of riches is bound to be partial in the end. In writing the story of a secret history, I have tried to honor the meaning to be found in sequence; to this end, the chapters succeed each other in a rough chronology . Within each chapter the author remains the focal principle. Some authors get as little as a page, some many more. Although the quantity of attention paid to a particular author does argue for a sense of relative importance, each choice also reflects my sense that here is a writer who uncovers something crucial in our national story. I group writers by way of obvious affinity, although Chester Himes, for instance, appears in a chapter on the Depression when he might just as well fit into the pages on the Second World War. Conceived less as a reference work than as an internally coherent narrative, my book is structured so that a reader who chooses to dip in, say, to sample the few pages on Toshio Mori can do so, I hope, and leave it satisfied. Each chapter—except those on Hemingway, Faulkner, Morrison, and Roth, authors for whom, surely, relations stop nowhere—consists of a set or series of clustered authors, and some of the clusters involve juxtapositions that may seem unlikely . The juxtapositions—or any of the moments in which I find myself reminded of a kindred text—are meant to dramatize how one reader’s memory of his reading works. When T. S. Eliot says “I associate” about his mental leaps in The Waste Land (1922), he provides a model for this activity. Although in no way duplicating Eliot’s achievement, my book, like his great poem, invites a reader to follow out the associative pathways grooved by years of reading in another human mind. By this method I mean to invoke the process by which...