America is on the move (many Americans have said to me) but has no idea of its destination. Does a nation have to have a destination? How can you define a temper that will fit New York and Texas, the Deep South and California, the large half-assimilated populations—the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans and above all the Negroes? Look at the holiday mob at Pennsylvania Station in New York; there is no homogeneity. Even one’s friends seem to live on islands against which the vast mass of America washes like an incomprehensible ocean. The violence and intolerance in American life show that people have shut themselves up in groups for self-defense. This is unanswerable and yet, though I accept the picture, I suspect the reasoning. There may not be an “American character,” but there is the emotion of being American. It has many resemblances to the emotion of being Russian—that feeling, traditional in both countries, of nostalgia for some undetermined future when man will have improved himself beyond recognition and when all will be well.
Only two regions of the United States (according to the historians I have read) offer marked variants of that emotion: the Deep South and, strangely enough, Texas. The Deep South has retained a colonial, pseudo-aristocratic tradition—to reverse Henry James, everything for the person and nothing for the people. Texas seems to have been on the verge of becoming a naturally independent nation and without the difficulty of “rejecting the father”; there was no father to reject. I offer the fantastic suggestion that the Texan is the nearest thing to a European the United States can supply. He could easily come from Barcelona.
In spite of the enormous changes in American life during this century—the great increase of wealth, the rise of the masses and the assumption of a financial world empire and its military commitments—is there anything in the modern scene that is not simply a huge extension of what Henry James had found in 1907, when in old age he came back to the United States and wrote The American Scene? His psychological observation is, at any rate, still very telling. My opinion is that there is a deep, even defensive dislike of definition among Americans because it would limit and work against the American sense of possibility and becoming. It is profoundly part of the energetic and moralistic American tradition that a man may, indeed must, become something else and that he not only has the right but must have the resilience necessary to the heartrending pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
A heterogeneous, thinly spread nation, living in a land where nature is unfriendly to man, where climates are, in most places, extreme, a nation at odds with the principle of authority, is kept together by a paradox: a deep emotional sense of freedom, generated by the extent, opportunity and wealth of the land, has to be adjusted to its opposite—the standardization of human beings. This yea-saying country, emotionally free, is mentally the most conformist. The “good guy” who never questions is enshrined. An English friend of mine in California was given a friendly warning that he was “too individualist.” And, in fact, when I return to Europe from the United States I am myself almost irked, for a while, by the obstinate individuality of Europeans. In them the private, personal life is strong and concern for “the sense of the meeting” is far less so.
But the basic difference of character between the Americans I have met and the Europeans is that the former are indoctrinated and the latter grow organically in their species. Americans—even those who live on private islands in the American ocean—are conscious, walking contradictions. Their habit of mind was formed in the eighteenth century: the American tradition is an abstract idea. Puritan teaching, especially in its Calvinist aspect, encouraged one to examine minutely the approaches to perfection and the lapses from it: in the engine room of Puritanism there is a machine whose function is to produce moral and material success. Failure must be sin. In a new country it was indispensable that the community should succeed, and when the great immigrations began, it was essential that the newcomers be indoctrinated and made to conform. There were grave spiritual losses in the process, but these losses introduced the immigrants to pragmatic American humanism: the belief that you can build your life and work it out, conscientiously, bit by bit. The task is enormous; it is often dulling; but that is the price you willingly pay for believing in the perfectibility of man. There is no conception of tragedy; something just went wrong.
One unexpected result of rejecting the father, and believing in the freedom to construct consciously one’s own life, has been the rise of the mother and the establishment of a formidable matriarchy. During the last war, when I was among American soldiers, it struck me that they often talked about their dads but never about the sacred figure of mother; among British and French soldiers the talk was always about her. Father was the ruling figure they did not often mention. I have heard anthropologists argue that the American male is often at a loss through having to carry about with him a “feminine conscience.”
But there is no point in generalizing in a void like this; I fall back upon my own fantasies of American life, and out of the confusion there emerge three or four vaguely human shapes: American prototypes. I see bits of them in most American men and women I know.
The first I will call Sam Robinson. We met forty years ago in Tennessee, in the middle of a stream. He was crossing by stepping on stones from his bank, I from mine. In the middle we balanced unsteadily, with the water splashing into our boots, and challenged each other. He was an oldish man in black clothes, with white hair bushing from under a broad-brimmed black hat, and he shouted out in a singsong voice words which I carefully wrote down afterward. I was collecting speech, and I found it curious that he used a noun as a verb:
“Howdy! Pretty day. Yessir. What’s your name? Where do you all come from? Where do you all expectation to end? I am Sam Robinson. I am a preacher. I go everywhere. I belong to no one and no one belongs to me. I belong to myself. Sam Robinson—remember—he don’t belong to no one. There’s right smart of Robinsons in the next creek. They raise hogs.”
Samuel Robinson—the perpetual, quintessential American Pilgrim, though less dry than the usual Pilgrim Father. Independent, religious, a ruthless old cuss, restless—the prototype of the wandering American who moves on, scrapping things, answerable to none, the custodian of the famous American libertarian Dream, knotty in conscience and yet issuing the jaunty, general optimism of the country, an optimism that survives disillusion. When that occurs he strikes camp and leaves his litter behind him—a ghost town, a dust bowl, the rocky fields of New England; in modern times, an exhausted oil well, a wife or two. He is a complete man, a wiseacre perhaps, but not an eccentric. His community does not like the nonconformist: a slight deviation from scriptural norm and he may be called a Communist. He is, you notice, practical and he likes a deal. And he likes to announce it: remember—his family raises hogs. As T. C. Haliburton’s New England peddler, Sam Slick, put it in The Clockmaker, “Braggin’ saves advertisin’.” He is far more conscious of other Robinsons (his family) than his opposite number in Europe is.
Hundreds of thousands of Sams now are moving to California, the Promised Land of sun, electronics and the bomb. And there, the Dream manifests itself in strange religions, strange theories of education and behavior: in violence, but also in an extraordinary dreamy soft-voiced gentleness of manners. They are the best automobile drivers in the world. They are churchgoers. I am always astonished, after the empty churches of an English Sunday, to see how packed the American churches are. I do not know if Americans are more pious than the British, but the American community likes church attendance. Sam Robinson hangs on to the Victorian Sunday; but, unlike the Victorians, he is cheerful about it, and devotes another part of the day to the real American religion: shopping. Henry James said that an American would lose his self-respect if he failed, on any day, to shop. On second thought, he was referring to Mrs. Sam Robinson, not to her husband.
Sam Robinsonism, in its serious sense, is responsible also for expatriation. He does not always move West: he often moves East. Just as he left Europe for America, to realize, in freedom
, the beautiful American Idea, so many other Sams leave it and return to Europe to find the lost reality. They feel the ideal Republic has been betrayed and that America is a wilderness. These Sams are very often intellectuals, for the American intellectual complains bitterly of his isolation in the American community—with some justice. He is not in business and is often made boisterous fun of by the businessman. He objects to the commercialization of values and to fanaticism, and he has one great achievement to his credit: he helped (if he stayed at home) to make the American Civil Liberties Union one of the strongest in the world. He is the American conscience. If America is now emerging from a long period of intolerance, it’s due largely to the influence of the egghead. When they are stirred to face fundamental problems, Americans do face them.
The Sam Robinsons who return to Europe are indignant, idealistic and pernickety. They idealize foreign cultures, they join foreign political causes: they are always searching. Yet they still “belong to themselves” in whatever territory they “light out” into. Years ago, walking in short, skipping steps down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, a pale, spry, shabby American used to pass me with a cigar in his mouth. I knew he was an American because he wore lighter clothes and lighter-soled shoes than a European does. He was a disillusioned fighter from some old Balkan War, now a punctual, efficient yet dreamy journalist. Poor—what a lot could be written about that little-known type, the “poor” American—he lived frugally, respectably and chastely in a modest hotel that was a notorious house of assignation. He was amused and concerned about me because I was young and he wished to cure me of any tendencies I had to be a capitalist, imperialist enemy of the ideal Republic and the brotherhood of man. He was kind to the whores and to people down on their luck; he was always helping people out with small loans of money. He was never without a cigar, he was always taking pills, he always had an ulcer and a wintry smile.
He had one secret passion into which he flung himself with true American romantic enterprise: on Saturday afternoons he got in touch with “the other side,” so full of notabilities and (no doubt) the final home of the ideal Republic. Usually he got in touch with Shakespeare, and with American thoroughness he typed out what Shakespeare said. Although a dedicated atheist who deplored the way things had gone in the United States, he played the organ in the American church on Sundays and Wednesdays.
I have met such seekers of the ideal Republic all over the world. They often run into a dilemma if they marry a fellow seeker in Europe. For the European seeker is bound to believe that the Republic is in America; and this kind of American is bound to think it is in Europe. A very American secondary trait is marked in these Sams, who impress Europeans by their innocence and idealism: perpetually disappointed, they manage to be innocent and cynical at the same time.
I have said that Sam Robinson was “poor.” Really, he was simply not well-off. The real poor in the United States are the Negroes, the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans and the cotton peasantry of the Deep South. One of the evils of an affluent society is that it shuts out the real poor, blaming them—as the British Victorians did—for being unindustrious; also the affluent are in terror of them. Yet in terms of sensibility and civilization I have often found, say, the Puerto Rican elevator man, barman and so on, a more rewarding individual, more thoughtful and imaginative company than his standard customers. And better mannered.
A second fundamental character-shape comes groping toward me out of the fog of my American fantasy. He is none other than Hiawatha as we see him in Longfellow’s poem, the hero who can do anything: crush rocks with his magic mittens, stride miles at a step, create maize, build a canoe, destroy disease, install the reign of peace and culture. In contemporary form he is the practical man and technician who—under Longfellow’s guidance—tells you how he does everything. There are university Hiawathas; there are Hiawathas in bars, planes, trains, ships, libraries, laboratories and at evening parties. Like Longfellow (his apologist), he has the mastery of slow, deliberate, inexhaustible utterance. He is a founding figure of the American Saga who inherits his art from the long lonely evenings of the log cabin. It appears that every American is born with the inalienable right—if he cares to insist on it—to total monologue. Hiawatha’s influence on vernacular literature is enormous; indeed he invented it. On a higher level, he manifests himself in the novels of Melville, Faulkner and the later works of Henry James.
He also has had an influence on American social habits, for he has made the anecdote supreme in American talk. There is no common ground between anecdote and conversation, for the latter depends on interruption, whereas the anecdote demands reverent attention. In private life American manners are notoriously good, and the European who forgets himself and interrupts the slow blossoming of an anecdote by saying, for example, that he, too, knew a man who filled a jumping frog with lead pellets and induced a mutation in the spawn—the European who commits this kind of outrage will be kindly treated; but by the patient looks on the faces of the company, and by the fact that the original anecdote will be taken up at the precise point at which it was interrupted, he will know he has committed a ghastly solecism and that Longfellow is turning in his grave.
Hiawatha is basic American because he loves a fact. “The fact,” Robert Frost has written, “is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” (I may be asked if Frost was being ironical. I doubt it; but on the exalted face of a poet there is sometimes a smile.) Hiawatha’s facts are dreams: there lies his spell. I would be willing to speculate on the influence of Hiawatha on the pragmatism of William James, but I will take the humbler example of a Texas oilman with whom I spent a few days at Manaus on the Amazon.
American practicality occasionally meets a challenge. The town of Manaus, in Brazil, is such a challenge to all Hiawathas; it is the practical man’s dream, for every stone of it was brought across several thousands of miles of sea, river and forest from Portugal. My friend’s name was Wilkins, and his parents, foreseeing in their shrewd American way that they had brought a master technician into the world, and wishing to free him from distracting personal inconveniences, efficiently named him Wilk. Wilk Wilkins: it is like sleeve and piston, nut and bolt. Wilk Wilkins was expert in building oil refineries. And as we chugged up the Amazon, Wilk uttered the saga—and Longfellow could not have done better—of how one built an oil refinery. From the foundations upward. Indeed, Wilk could be said to have built a whole refinery for me that morning, pipe by pipe and girder by girder. I was exhausted by the amount of concrete we put in. If ever I build an oil refinery single-handed it will be because of the thorough grounding he gave me. At the end—remembering some affront he had received from one of his employers—Wilk went into reverse and pipe by pipe, girder by girder, pulled the whole thing down again. If ever I pull my refinery down I shall do it exactly as Wilk taught me.
After a short lunch, we moved on to other feats. Wilk could build houses, so we had How Hiawatha Built Him a House, not omitting radiant heat, water supply and drainage, and we did it room by room. That done, there was How Hiawatha Built Him a Better House. This brought up the subject of why you want a house. And so, inevitably, we moved on to Minnehaha, Hiawatha’s Wedding, or rather to his Next Wedding—there had been more than one Minnehaha in Wilk’s life—and, to get that straightened out, we had to go into his Other Wooings. With the same technical skill he took these ladies to pieces to show how they worked, and since he had an impartial mind he did the same for himself. We had Hiawatha’s mother, Wenonah, another dominant American type, whose husband had not done right by her; in true American style, Hiawatha fought and defeated his father. But that left him with Wenonah trouble: Hiawatha’s Problem with his Mother, his consequent Drinking and Not-Drinking, his Illnesses; and so on to Psychiatry and Time Off for Fishing and Hunting. Finally we got to that very un-American problem, Hiawatha’s Plan to Prevent his New Minnehaha from having a car of her own. His solution was, characteristically, constructional. Hiawatha Built Him a One-Car Garage.
I believe the Kinsey Report is now out of date, but an interesting ambiguity appeared in the character of Wilk Wilkins and I have often asked myself whether it has any bearing on the love of activity, the strong development of will, the feeling for enterprise and power that lie behind the technological and constructive genius of Americans; and especially whether it has any bearing on their relations with Minnehaha. The ambiguity came out in this way. There is a famous opera house in Manaus and Wilk Wilkins worshiped it. The sight of its dome made his buried emotional life burst out. We would turn street corners and he would look back to see how the dome looked now. We gazed at it from the river, we gazed at it from the forest. He adored the thing helplessly. It would come into view as if it were following us, and once more he would exclaim—and he must have done this fifty times a day—“There she goes, the old son of a bitch.”
That seems an odd conjunction of noun and pronoun.
The function of Hiawatha’s imagination (Tocqueville has written) is “to devise what may be useful and to represent the real.” He faces situations frontally, in the classical manner, and mistrusts the oblique approach. He will build, he will pull down, he will change. His emphasis on the will exposes him, under stress, to breakdown—hence the outbreaks of hysteria in American life—but he is equal to that. He thinks failure is wicked, so he turns to psychiatry, for in it he finds another kind of engineering—one for treating the psyche as if that, too, were a machine. More and more consciousness is what Hiawatha admires, and in this he builds on the traditions of humanism; though, by a paradox, psychiatry can easily be a way of evading moral issues: to be told one has an ill-adjusted ego is flattering to one’s self-regard; to be told one is self-destructively selfish is not so flattering. Mechanical repair seems more practical than moral overhaul; and Hiawatha is a practical optimist.
At Home and Abroad Page 26