American Literary Culture in Decline

There is the grand truth about NathanielHawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but theDevil himself cannot make him say yes. For allmen who say yes, lie.

—Herman Melville

When I was young, writers were objects of awe to me, an idealization that still lingers in spite of all I have come to know about the ignoble side of the literary world. I dared to enter into authorship only through the back door—translation. Since then I have come to think, and argued as much in an essay, that translations deserve better than the servants' entrance. It's obvious why they were—are—held in low regard. Translation falls into the service sector: it serves to bring writing over from an original language, very unsatisfactorily ("Traduttore, traditore," goes the saying), into one's own language. That isn't the common opinion anymore, but neither is it uncommon. Once you give up the expectation a translation should provide the very poem or story as it is found in the original, only transposed into English (an impossibility by definition), you are able to appreciate the skill and imagination good translation demands.

I grew up in English literature and found that it led me, with no sense of fundamental difference, to French, German, and Italian literature. Literature is international through and through. English literature, American literature—all of Western literature—have their origins in the ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman poets. Chaucer was long regarded as the epitome of Englishness—homegrown, honest English roast beef, like the Host of The Canterbury Tales: "Boold of his speche, and wys, and wel ytaught / And of manhod hym lakkede right naught." But that view of Chaucer is now being corrected by an understanding that sees much farther back than the spectacles of nineteenth-century English nationalism—that views him as a European poet, one who wrote four centuries before anything like what we mean by nation had made its appearance.

Nineteenth-century America was also nationalist, vociferously so. Whenever boastful patriots happened to think about it, they would champion a native poetry and letters. The patriot Melville thought about it often. "An American [is] a man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature," he writes in his famous essay on Hawthorne. "Believe me, my friends, that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio." But England dominated in literary matters, as in all matters of taste. Emerson, a poet, profound thinker, and no boaster, in his Phi Beta Kappa address in 1837, said: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." However hard men and women worked in the mostly rural, agricultural United States before the Civil War, however acquisitive Americans notoriously were—literature had an acknowledged place in people's lives. Small-town America was crude but, for all the Protestant mistrust of the intellect, not mindless. People read—of course the Bible and Bunyan, and almost of course Shakespeare, also some current American and English poets and writers. They got together in circles to discuss politics and religion, literature and ideas, open-mindedly. What a telling fact it is that Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell, two prose writers and a poet, were appointed to diplomatic posts in European countries. The very idea of such a thing seems legendary today.

In the postwar period of expansion and industrialization the country was transformed; the energies of her ever-greater population of newcomers and not-so-old oldcomers went into building more and more railroads and factories, and into more and more buying and selling. Making money, lots of money, as much money as possible, became the national project. The United States is no longer a young nation: she even feels a little old. But still the national project remains what it was.

The truth is the U.S. is a country that doesn't rate her poets and writers very high, nowhere nearly as high as she rates automobiles, tv, football, basketball, movies, and popular music. American culture is popular culture, more and more, and...