Seeds and tree-souls, precious things,
Feathered with microscopic wings
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Love’s orchards climbed to the heavens of the West
And snowed the earthly sod with flowers.
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He saw the fruits unfold,
And all our expectations in one wild-flower written dream.
The most significant thing about the American frontier, proposed the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was that it lay “at the hither edge of free land.” As long as there was land ahead, there was cause for optimism. There was also need for it. The early pioneers, said Turner, were an essentially hopeful people: “As they wrested their clearing from the woods … as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy. They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic faith was responsible both for their confidence in their ability to rule and for the passion for expression. They looked to the future.”
From the harsh and unpredictable conditions of life on the frontier came certain traits that would, according to Turner, mark the American pioneer: a “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” a “practical, inventive turn of mind,” a “restless, nervous energy … and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.” Unexplored land required active imagination, energy, and a belief that insurmountable problems were surmountable. America, said Edward Harriman, the owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, had been developed by pioneers “flush with enthusiasm, imagination and speculative bent”; its success, he contended, was owed to individuals who had seen into the future and “adapted their work to the possibilities.”
For the pioneer who could work backbreakingly hard, improvise nimbly under pressure, and imagine a sustaining harvest before the land had yet been seeded or even cleared, the West promised open opportunity. If the pioneer would strip himself of assumptions and habits better suited to the drawing rooms of the Atlantic seaboard, the West would deliver him into new space and freedom. It would reward expansive ideas with expanding horizons, value enthusiasm over restraint, and encourage entrepreneurial will over mindless hewing to established ways. Such freedom of spirit and movement was pealed out by Whitman in his “Song of the Open Road”:
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
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I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought.
His was the exuberance held by those bound for the West.
Neither freedom nor the West was easily won, of course. The struggle for the land cost greatly in both lives and sanity, a reality darkly and beautifully told in O. E. Rölvaag’s classic saga of the Dakota prairie, Giants in the Earth. It is a tragedy, a story of the fullness and failures of human temperament played out against the killing moods of nature. The Norwegian immigrants Per Hansa and his wife, Beret, move west from Minnesota to settle in the Dakota Territory, bringing with them different dreams, energies, and imaginative capacities. Beret is fragile, filled with biblical foreboding, and unseverably tethered to what she has left behind. Her initial reaction to the prairies is bleak and it remains so: “Here something was about to go wrong.… How will human beings be able to endure this place? she thought. Why, there isn’t even a thing that one can hide behind!”
Per Hansa, on the other hand, is physically vigorous and exuberant, and he lives in and for the future. His response to the land is one of passion: “This vast stretch of beautiful land was to be his—yes, his.… His heart began to expand with a mighty exaltation. An emotion he had never felt before filled him and made him walk erect.… ‘Good God!,’ he panted. ‘This kingdom is going to be mine!’” Beret sees only a punishing land and a graceless, godless existence; she cannot imagine being a meaningful participant in its development. “This formless prairie had no heart that beat,” she despairs, “no waves that sang, no soul that could be touched … or cared.… How could existence go on, she thought, desperately.”
Life, however threatening, however impossibly hard, is different for her husband. “Where Per Hansa was, there dwelt high summer,” it was said. He imagines his land not as it is but as it will become; his resilience matches the prairie’s:
Now it had taken possession of him again—that indomitable, conquering mood which seemed to give him the right of way wherever he went, whatever he did. Outwardly, at such times, he showed only a buoyant recklessness, as if wrapped in a cloak of gay, wanton levity; but down beneath all this lay a stern determination of purpose, a driving force.…
As Per Hansa lay there dreaming of the future it seemed to him that hidden springs of energy, hitherto unsuspected even by himself, were welling up in his heart. He felt as if his strength were inexhaustible. And so he commenced his labours with a fourteen-hour day.… [H]e accordingly lengthened the day to sixteen hours, and threw in another hour for good measure.… [A] pleasant buoyancy seemed to be lifting him up and carrying him along; at dawn, when he opened his eyelids, morning was there to greet him—the morning of a glorious new day.
Per Hansa has “such a zest for everything” that he scarcely sleeps; in the blaze of his first prairie summer, he “plow[s] and harrow[s], delves and [digs]”; he builds a house, weaves fishing nets, and plants saplings and potatoes. “He was never at rest, except when fatigue had overcome him and sleep had taken him away from toil and care. But this was seldom, however; he found his tasks too interesting to be a burden; nothing tired him, out here.… Per Hansa could not be still for a moment. A divine restlessness ran in his blood; he strode forward with outstretched arms toward the wonders of the future, already partly realized. He seemed to have the elfin, playful spirit of a boy; at times he was irresistible; he had to caress everything that he came near.… But he never could be still.… Endless it was, and wonderful!”
To Beret, however, the facts of the prairie are “unchangeable—it was useless to juggle with them, or delude oneself; nothing but an eternal, unbroken wilderness encompassed them round about, extending boundlessly in every direction.” The desolation of the land, she feels certain, “called forth all that was evil in human nature.” The bleakness of the prairie and the assault of nature—its ferocious summer storms and unrelenting winter blizzards, locusts that ravage their crops, prairie fires, famine—as well as Indian attacks, take their toll on her and the other settlers. Beret goes mad: she “heeded not the light of the day, whether it might be grey or golden. [She] stared at the earthen floor of the hut and saw only night round about her.… [S]he faced only darkness. She tried hard, but she could not let in the sun.” Her entire appearance, writes Rölvaag, “seemed to reflect a never-ending struggle with unreality.”
Per Hansa, on the other hand, meets the prairie with hope and a keen appreciation of its terms for survival. He grows “even louder in his optimism.… There were moments, even, when he felt confident that he would live to see the day when most of the land of the prairie would be taken up; in such moods, there was something fascinating about him; bright emanations of creative force seemed to issue out.… [W]henever he spoke a tone of deep joy rang in his words.” But for Beret the future is only grim: “they would all become wild beasts if they remained here much longer. Everything human in them would gradually be blotted out.… They saw nothing, learned nothing.… Couldn’t he understand that if the Lord God had intended these infinities to be peopled, He would not have left them desolate down through the ages?”
Each failure, each onslaught, extracts a bit more of Beret’s sanity. Per Hansa, however, not only holds on to his high spirits but finds them sustained and generated anew by the cycles of nature: “the power to create a new life over this Endless Wilderness, and transform it into a habitable land for human beings. Wasn’t it wonderful? … As the mild spring weather set in, a feverish restlessness seized him.… He walked so lightly; everything that had life he touched with a gentle hand, but talk to it he must; his voice sounded low, yet it thrilled with a vibrant energy.… [Beret] felt a force that made her tremble, emanating from him.… Per Hansa became more restless, but it only seemed to fill him with greater joy.”
Raw optimism is a defining element not only in Per Hansa’s life, but in Rölvaag’s portrayal of pioneer life in general:
It was as if nothing affected people in those days. They threw themselves blindly into the Impossible, and accomplished the Unbelievable. If anyone succumbed in the struggle—and that happened often—another would come and take his place. Youth was in the race; the unknown, the untried, the unheard-of, was in the air; people caught it, were intoxicated by it, threw themselves away, and laughed at the cost. Of course it was possible—everything was possible out here. There was no such thing as the Impossible anymore. The human race had not known such faith and such self-confidence since history began.… And so had been the Spirit since the day the first settlers landed on the eastern shores; it would rise and fall at intervals, would swell and surge on again with every new wave of settlers that rolled westward into the unbroken solitude.
Himself an immigrant and a pioneer, Albert Einstein once said that America is more capable of enthusiasm than any other country. It is certainly the case that America seems particularly to value exuberance and optimism. Not surprisingly, perhaps—in a country that gave birth to Walt Whitman and John Philip Sousa; invented jazz, square dancing, and rock and roll; gave the world Chuck Yeager, Ted Turner, and P. T. Barnum; created Oklahoma!; and glories in Louis Armstrong and Theodore Roosevelt—Americans see enthusiasm as an advantage. When asked which emotions they most like to experience, Americans are far more likely than people from other countries to say that they favor enthusiasm. They are also far more likely to say that they believe enthusiasm is a useful and constructive emotion in their lives. (Optimism is a related and defining American trait. The results of a Pew Carter poll conducted in 2002 of 38,000 people in forty-four countries found that more Americans [65 percent] than respondents from any other country disagreed with the statement “Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.”)
Interestingly, high rates of manic-depressive illness have been observed in American immigrant groups, which suggests the possibility that individuals with mild forms of the illness, or temperamental variants of high energy and exuberant mood, may have been selected for. Individuals who sought the new, who took risks that others would not, or who rebelled against repressive social systems may have been more likely to immigrate to America and, once there, to succeed.
Exuberance is a part of the national vision, as well as its character. Whitman proclaimed, “My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,/I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision,” and Lindbergh took this exultant notion to the skies. He weighed risk against adventure and chose freedom with a vengeance. “I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground,” he wrote, “one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”
What happens, though, when the wine of the gods disappears, or if nothing matters enough to stake one’s life and dreams on? What happens when enthusiasts become jaded? A passion for life is essential to the renewal of life. If passion is lost, the future itself is diminished. Scott Fitzgerald made this point well. There are no second acts in American lives, he said, but he made an ironic exception for New York in the boom days of the 1920s. The first act had been dazzling. “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world”; it was an age of miracle and promise. But it was also, glaringly, an age of excess. The city and its inhabitants had become restless and careless: “The buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper,” he wrote. The city was “bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses.”
By 1927, “a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet.” (There was a brief burst of hope in the midst of the decay, but it proved ephemeral. “Something bright and alien flashed across the sky,” Fitzgerald wrote. “A young Minnesotan who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more.”)
The Lost City’s second act, when it came, proved a tragedy. “We were somewhere in North Africa,” Fitzgerald recalled, “when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.” The 1929 collapse of the stock market capped a decade of hollow euphoria and overextension, years that had drawn from the city far more than they ever gave back in hope or vitality. Exuberance, ginned up to such an unnatural level, was brittle and could not last. Fitzgerald’s contemporaries were jaded and doomed, he wrote, and “had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence.” A classmate killed his wife and himself, “another tumbled ‘accidentally’ from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York … still another had his skull crushed by a maniac’s axe in an insane asylum where he was confined.”
Fitzgerald’s own moods swung with the city’s. In his autobiographical essays, The Crack-up, which he wrote in the decade following the crash, he described the toll. “I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, but I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” Like the desperate jubilation of the Jazz Age, his mind, as he had known it, could not last. He was paying the piper for “an over-extension of the flank, a burning of the candle at both ends; a call upon physical resources that I did not command, like a man over-drawing at his bank. In its impact this blow was more violent [than his earlier psychological crises] but it was the same in kind—a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down.” Before that time, his happiness, he said, had “often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books—and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural—unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.”
Exuberance is an assailable thing, as is the hope that rides with it. Exultant mood often forewarns a harrowing fall. Champagne will go flat, passion burn itself out, and optimism be trimmed by experience. The ecstasy that beguiles, even as it ascends into madness, will plunge, shattering its bearer. “It’s not much fun writing about these breakdowns after they themselves have broken,” observed Robert Lowell in the aftermath of a manic attack. “One stands stickily splattered with patches of the momentary bubble.” He took the image and emotion into verse:
It takes just a moment
for the string of t
he gas balloon
to tug itself loose from the hand.
If its string could only be caught in time
it could still be brought down
become once more a gay toy
safely tethered in the warm nursery world
of games, and tears, and routine.
But once let loose out of doors
being gas-filled the balloon can do nothing but rise
although the children who are left on the ground may cry
seeing it bobbing out of human reach.
On its long cold journey up to the sky
the lost balloon might seem to have the freedom of a bird.
But it can fly only as a slave
obeying the pull to rise which it cannot feel.
Having flown too high to have any more use as a plaything
who will care if it pays back its debt and explodes
returning its useless little pocket of air
to an uncaring air it has never been able to breathe.
Savingly, nature teaches that joy can be replenished, life can succeed death, and joy find its way out of sorrow. Nature gives of its exuberance in remarkable ways, at extraordinary times. In 1918 a scientist described the flowers emerging from the Somme battlefield, a place where death had so recently been all-dominant: “In all the woods where the fighting was most severe not a tree is left alive, and the trunks which still stand are riddled with shrapnel and bullets and torn by fragments of shell, while here and there unexploded shells may still be seen embedded in the stems. Aveluy Wood, however, affords [an] example of the effort being made by Nature to beautify the general scene of desolation. Here some of the trees are still alive, though badly broken, but the ground beneath is covered with a dense growth of the rose-bay willow herb (Epilobium augustifolium) extending over several acres. Seen from across the valley, this great sheet of rosy-pink was a most striking object, and the shattered and broken trees rising out of it looked less forlorn than elsewhere.”
Exuberance: The Passion for Life Page 30