In My Good Books

by V. S. Pritchett

  No, Ireland, for all the “tender” people there and the great meetings, was a nightmare. The Leicestershire shepherd was not made for the dark imaginations which bewitched that country. He was English. One sees him, the big man from a dull flat country, a peasant shrewd and, yet, in a massive way, naif; sober yet obstinate; gentle yet immovably blunt; a man who has made his mind up, who has the inordinate pride and yet the inordinate humility of the saints.

  One of Our Founders

  Up to the early nineteenth century who were the Puritan writers of autobiography? The names of Fox, Bunyan, Defoe, Cobbett and Franklin come to mind first of all. Not all wrote their life-story in a single piece, but the character of their writing is intensely autobiographical. They are plain and homely figures; there is no getting away from that, indeed, it is their boast. Sensibility, elegance, urbanity, imagination and culture are not notable in their natures or their work, the name of Franklin excepted. (The case for Bunyan’s imagination fails, I think, because his imagination is a borrowed one, the dream of a mind gorged on the writings of the Hebrews.) If the Reformation turned us into a nation of shopkeepers, these are the men who keep the books. And here, I think, we should distinguish in our use of the words “homely” and “plain”. The sense of dull worth and stagnation which has accrued to these adjectives, came to them during the nineteenth century, when the domestic hearth was insulated from the world; but in the eighteenth century and earlier, the meaning had more of nature and less of complacency in it. Those times were nearer the dynamic period of Puritanism, times of revolution, colonisation and travel; and the reader must have noticed, with a smile, how little these prophets of the plain, domestic virtues stayed at home. In a man like Fox, the native restlessness of the virtuous Puritan is explicit: he feared to be corrupted if he stayed too long in one place. Bunyan is on the road or in prison and his Christian is on a journey. Defoe is on tour or in the stocks, and his Crusoe comes home only once every so often to beget a child. Cobbett is perpetually on horseback and Franklin is running away from his relations, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic. What a contrast there is between their precept and example! There they are warning us against the way of the world, but who is more in the world than they?

  The answer is that whatever else the ideal of Puritanism may have been, its joint aim was always success. Preaching caution, moderation, industry and sobriety to generations of shopkeepers, round whose necks they tie their moral maxims like a sack of bricks, the great Puritan exemplars pursue not the same course, but a parallel one which is livelier and more extravagant. They live—it is why we read them—not in the family and the shop, but in the world. They live to succeed extremely in the world. For even Fox and Bunyan succeed: they inherit the heavenly riches. And why should they not succeed? Remove the belief in success, material or spiritual, from Puritanism and you remove its mainspring and its political meaning. An unsuccessful Puritan is the disappointed sectary snapping sourly at his neighbours because he is unable to get the better of them.

  Still, at first sight, the great Puritan autobiographers are an unlovely crowd. They have the vitality of weeds. We read them for their realism and their eccentricity. But would we choose their company now? Only two among those names might transplant into the twentieth century: Cobbett because he might fit in with the Napoleonic pattern of our time, and the other is Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is the only certain choice. One thinks of him as the first of the civilised Puritans. With his urbanity, his humour, his sagacity, his scientific adventurousness and his political vision, he can easily be transplanted, though he would loll like some dog’s-eared and old-fashioned compendium of good sense and information in our businesslike world of isolated specialists. To entertain him would be like entertaining one of our founders.

  The Franklin literature is a large one. Among recent Lives, Carl Van Doran’s is the most thorough, sympathetic and readable. There is also an intelligent study by a Frenchman done in 1929: Benjamin Franklin, Bourgeois d’Amérique. But the reader should go first of all for the accent and flavour of the subject and begin with Franklin’s own story. The World’s Classics edition has the advantage of including a complete example from his famous Almanac of Poor Richard, which was enjoyed by thousands in America and which made D. H. Lawrence so angry. Lawrence’s attack on Franklin in his Studies in Classical American Literature ought to be read, but it is a typical misfire. Lawrence, one supposes, could not forgive another Puritan for knowing more about sex than he did, and before Franklin’s irony, urbanity and benevolence, Lawrence cuts an absurd figure, rather like that of a Sunday School teacher who has gone to a social dressed up as a howling dervish, when fancy dress was not requested. There is of course something in Lawrence’s diatribe; it is the criticism by the man whose life is all poetry of the man whose life is all prose.

  The reader of Franklin’s autobiography must be struck by the way the Puritans hang together. Defoe and Bunyan were Franklin’s first instructors. Defoe and Franklin have also similar origins; they were both the sons of tallow chandlers, and Defoe’s Essay on Projects was one of the books which had a lasting influence on Franklin’s mind. The resemblances between their careers are simply resemblances of class. The chief difference between the two shopkeepers appears when we observe the benevolence of the American’s mind, the flow of imagination that transforms the pawky philosophy of go-getting and self-interest. Defoe was a retailer to the end; Franklin was a wholesaler. His plans, his experiments, his political actions are not part of his career; they flow beyond himself upon society. We feel that with all its toughness, resource and courage Defoe’s character was a narrow one and incapable of growth, and there is, in fact, his dubious middle phase as a spy. Franklin, on the other hand, expands. His life reminds one, as the life of Cobbett does, how good the American climate was for the English character at this period; for if Franklin got ideas from Defoe, his style from Addison, his irony from Socrates and the stimulus to his genius from France of the eighteenth century, he owed the enlargement of his nature to America. Without that he might still have been thought one of the greatest savants of his time, but he would not have been thought the most able or the most likeable.

  As a life story the Autobiography is interesting for its events. It is far more interesting as a remarkable piece of amusing and considered self-portraiture. The best autobiographies are those which draw the writer’s character full-face, and Franklin adds to this the capacity to describe the growth of his character. In one sense (the sense that D. H. Lawrence hated) the book is another success story, an early instalment of Samuel Smiles. How he sat up late to study, how he became a vegetarian to save money for books, how he watched his chances at the printers, twigged a trick or two from the Socratic method of innocent enquiry, bargained over an offer of marriage and at last earned enough money to eat his porridge out of a china bowl with a silver spoon, after years of earthenware and a wooden one—such stuff is apt to be despised by those who find themselves deeply interested by it against their wills. And if Franklin had left his narrative like that he would have been just one more successful mayor. But his belief in self-improvement, though deep, has an ironic inflection:

  It would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.

  Such intimate and persuasive asides give a leisured shade to the blatant walls of Self-Help where, too often, one is asked to admire the placing of each unweathered brick. But there is more than the irony of an experienced old man looking back on his life in this story. We are shown the making of a mind, the formation of a temperament. The two qualities of Franklin are the variety of his interests and the originality of his intellect. He is always performing feats. There are the feats of brain, like the decision to learn the French, Spanish and Italian languages in middle age in order to prepare himself to learn Latin—and a very good short cut to Latin that is, too. There are the feats of citizenship: he started the first fire brigade, the first police force, the first syst
em of street lighting in the American colonies, the earliest philosophical society and the earliest public library. His edition of Pamela was the first novel to be published there also. And there are the feats of invention which are famous, such as his investigation of dyes and his invention of a heating stove; an invention which pops up impishly between the great affair of the lightning rod and his theories about the paths of storms and earthquakes. And, all the time, this is the man who once swam from Chelsea to Blackfriars, working out a new system of swimming as he went, and was only saved by chance from setting up for life as a swimming instructor. Franklin’s inventive faculty was directed even to working out a system, rather like book-keeping, for improving his moral character. He invented even new prayers.

  Being a romantic, Lawrence imagined that Franklin’s devotion to Use, Method and Order indicated the dreary objectives of his genius. They were its starting points, its immense stimulus. Against egotism—Lawrence’s “the self is a dark forest”—Franklin put the citizen and the savant, and the emotion generated by being a lively citizen in a new society released an exuberant creative capacity in Franklin which was certainly no less than the creative force which Lawrence and many others have thought to lie in sex alone. The jeers of Lawrence might have struck home had they been directed at estimable and lesser Self-Helpers, for the Self-Helper is usually a copyist only who ends by being all help and no self. Franklin was never a copyist. Least of all was he a copyist in sex—Lawrence’s own speciality. Here (far from being the prudent shopkeeper) Franklin entered upon a marriage which was only “a common law” marriage and which may have been bigamous, not out of self-interest, but because his moral sensibility demanded it. Franklin understood the dangers of repressing the moral sense. And then, lest one be deceived into thinking the considerate, the businesslike and the robust are incompatibles, there is his famous letter to a young man who is worried about women. Prudence directs (Franklin says) that if a young man must, for his health’s sake, have a mistress, it is better that she shall be old, for she will be past child-bearing—and besides, the older a woman the more grateful she is! One would need to be very cynical indeed to think that remarkable advice wholly cynical. One may hardly blame the age of Reason and Order for being reasonable and orderly, or the first of the modern planners for believing that all plans should be practical and should produce concrete benefits for society—stoves for the draughty New England rooms, fire brigades for wooden cities, political union for threatened states, prayers that will guide us “to our truest interest”, and even discreet happiness for ladies past the prime of life.

  The American Puritan

  After reading Hemingway and Faulkner and speculating upon the breach of the American novel with its English tradition, we go back to the two decisive, indigenous Americans who opened the new vein—Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Everything really American, really non-English comes out of that pair of spiritual derelicts, those two scarecrow figures with their half-lynched minds. Both of them, but particularly Twain, represent the obverse side of Puritanism. We have never had this obverse in England, for the political power of Puritanism lasted for only a generation and has since always bowed if it has not succumbed to civilised orthodoxy. If an Englishman hated Puritanism, there was the rest of the elaborate English tradition to support him; but American Puritanism was totalitarian and if an American opposed it, he found himself alone in a wilderness with nothing but bottomless cynicism and humorous bitterness for his consolation. There has never been in English literature a cynicism to compare with the American; at any rate we have never had that, in some ways vital, but always sardonic or wretched, cynicism with its broken chopper edge and its ugly wound. We have also never had its by-product: the humorous philosophers; Franklin’s Poor Richard, the Josh Billingses, the Artemus Wards, the Pudd’n-head Wilsons and Will Rogerses with their close-fisted proverbs:

  “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond: cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.”

  Or:

  “Consider well the proportion of things. It is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of Paradise.”

  I say we have never had this kind of thing, but there is one exception to prove the rule and to prove it very well, for he also is an uprooted and, so to speak, colonial writer. Kipling with his “A woman is always a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke” is our first American writer with a cynicism, a cigar-stained humour and a jungle book of beliefs which, I think, would be a characteristic of our literature if we become seriously totalitarian in the future. For English totalitarianism would create the boredom and bitterness of the spiritual wilderness, as surely as Puritanism did in America.

  When Mark Twain turned upon the religion of his childhood because it was intolerable, he was unaware that it would destroy him by turning him into a money-grubber of the most disastrously Puritan kind. Fortunately the resources of the imagination are endless even when a fanatical philosophy wrecks human life, genius and happiness. Out of the mess which Twain made of his life, amid the awful pile of tripe which he wrote, there does rise one book which has the serenity of a thing of genius. Huckleberry Finn takes the breath away Knowing his life, knowing the hell from which the book has ascended, one dreads as one turns from page to page the seemingly inevitable flop. How can so tortured and so angry a comedian refrain from blackguarding God, Man and Nature for the narrow boredom of his early life, and thus ruin the gurgling comedy and grinning horror of the story? But an imaginative writer appears to get one lucky break in his career; for a moment the conflicts are assimilated, the engine ceases to work against itself. The gears do not crash and Huckleberry Finn hums on without a jar. America gets its first and indisputable masterpiece. The boyhood of Huck Finn is the boyhood of a new culture and a new world.

  The curious thing about Huckleberry Finn is, that although it is one of the funniest books in all literature and really astonishing in the variety of its farce and character, we are even more moved than we are amused by it. Why are we moved? Do we feel the sentiment of sympathy only? Are we sighing with some envy and self-pity? “Alas, Huck Finn is just what I would have been in my boyhood if I had had half a chance.” Are we sorry for the vagrant, or are we moved by his rebellion? These minor feelings may play their part; but they are only sighs on the surface of the main stream of our emotion. Twain has brought to his subject far more than this personal longing; he has become the channel of the generic American emotion which floods all really American literature—nostalgia. In that brilliant, hit-or-miss book, Studies in Classical American Literature, which is either dead right or dead wrong, D. H. Lawrence called this feeling the longing of the rebel for a master. It may be simply the longing for a spiritual home, but it is as strong in Mark Twain as it is implicit in Hemingway. One finds this nostalgia in Anglo-Irish literature which is also colonial and, in a less lasting way, once again in the work of Kipling. The peculiar power of American nostalgia is that it is not only harking back to something lost in the past, but suggests also the tragedy of a lost future. As Huck Finn and old Jim drift down the Mississippi from one horrifying little town to the next and hear the voices of men quietly swearing at one another across the water about “a chaw of tobacco”; as they pass the time of day with the scroungers, rogues, murderers, the lonely women, the frothing revivalists, the maundering boatmen and fantastic drunks, we see the human wastage that is left behind in the wake of a great effort of the human will, the hopes frustrated, the idealism which has been whittled down to eccentricity and mere animal cunning. These people are the price paid for building a new country. The human spectacle is there. It is not, once you have faced it—which Dickens did not do in Martin Chuzzlewit, obsessed as he was by the negative pathos of the immigrant—it is not a disheartening spectacle; for the value of a native humour like Twain’s is that it records a profound reality in human nature: the ability of man to adjust himself to any circumstance and somehow to survive and make a life.

  Mov
ement is one of the great consolers of human woe; movement, a process of continual migration is the history of America. It is this factor which gives Twain’s wonderful descriptions of the journey down the Mississippi its haunting overtone and which, naturally enough, awakens a sensibility in him which is shown nowhere else in his writings and which is indeed vulgarly repressed in them:

  … then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering may be. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was on the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and wasn’t black any more but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows … and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled-up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag in the swift current which breaks on it and that streak looks that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank t’other side of the river, being a woodyard likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres….