I remember a story told me by a friend, a well-turned-out, educated lady of enormous imagination, a good writer and a good observer who had moved about over the face of the world for many years. Once in London, over tea, an English lady whose only move in the world was a yearly journey from London to a watering place in, perhaps, Dorset said to my friend, “Where are you from, my dear?” To which my friend said, “I am from California.” To which the English lady said, “Dear, dear, how you provincials do get about!”
The self-assured criticism by visitors may have angered some Americans, but mostly it made us feel shy and clumsy. We had no pattern of comparison which would have shown us that the recipients of our hospitality were insensitive, ill-mannered louts, so full of their parochial self-satisfaction that they did not bother, or were unable, to observe us. I have used the word hospitality advisedly; in a developing country where people in villages, or families in far-flung farmhouses, have little excitement outside of their daily working lives and their churches and their occasional trips to town for supplies, a visitor was welcomed as a bringer of news, an interpreter of the world over the horizon. The best we had was brought out for guests and the tables were loaded with food. Besides, in a country where hunger was always keyed to wind and weather, where danger of violence or even of being lost or injured was ever-present, hospitality was a built-in duty every man owed to every wayfarer—since he might need it himself. A man or a family always offered the best and most valued of his possessions to a passing stranger, and took in trade the interest and information the stranger brought.
My uncle Charlie told me a story about hospitality in the desolate northern plains. He was a surveyor, running a prospecting line for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and he was out far ahead of the main party. The houses in that part of the country were made of sod, half cave and half hut with grass growing on the roofs, but they were warm and they were secure and dry. One afternoon Uncle Charlie knocked on the door of a sod house, so low and overgrown that it looked like a barrow. A little old woman opened the door; the men were away hunting, she said, but yes, he could stay the night and she would cook his dinner. She rushed out, killed a chicken, and prepared it while Uncle Charlie looked about the poor little place. The floor was of earth, the furniture knocked together out of packing crates; and then he saw, to his astonishment, an upright piano. Uncle Charlie moved up on it and thumped out a few chords, whereupon the old lady whirled from her cooking with great excitement. “Professor,” she said, “can you play ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’?” Charlie could and he did; and of course any stranger who could play piano was automatically a professor.
It was the same when we entertained visitors from abroad. The fact that they accepted our gift of hospitality and then turned on us made us feel inadequate. We were asking for approval, and we got kicked in the face. It did not occur to us that our guests were not representatives of their people or nations but a selected group of hypercritical snobs. Later, in two world wars when masses of our men who had not and probably never would have traveled were transported overseas and set down in English, French, or Italian countrysides, their most common reaction was “Why these aren’t the English—or the French, or the Italians—we know; these are people just like us!”
And of course we had our share of slobs, but usually the Americans when they traveled have wanted desperately to be liked; they have over-tipped, overpaid, and overpraised, in the hope that they might, as strangers, be liked. And they—or let us say we—have not discovered that a person who so wants to be liked usually draws dislike or even contempt.
I believe the time of our insularity is over. Americans travel more than any other people today, and we are learning the rules of the road. I think the common feeling now is “I don’t give a damn whether the British, the French, or the Russians like me or not.” Once, if a so-called superior Frenchman was appalled at my failure to speak good French, I would have been shy and apologetic; now my feeling and my reply are that I am sad that my French leaves something to be desired, but how much sadder must a Frenchman be who has not troubled to learn English, which is a noble and a rapidly spreading language. It is not strange, and it is true, that this perceptible change in the American attitude makes us much better liked abroad. We no longer believe that all art, all culture, and all knowledge originate in Europe.
American literature, as it does in most countries, grew up twofold; the early, scholarly, traditional, and correct writers imitated English writing of the time and their thinking followed European trends and held in contempt the starveling, semiliterate organism that was growing up under their eyes. This attitude still obtains in many American writers, particularly in those critics who are descended from recent immigrants. On the other hand, the exotic nature of the new continent, with its unexplored and mysterious areas and its noble but savage Red Men, engaged the interest of some European writers who reported us with the childlike inaccuracy we now address to Africa and the upper ranges of the Amazon. However, we were fortunate quite early in developing some mature writers of eye, ear, and enthusiasm: Washington Irving, for instance, looked with joy on our people, our speech, stories, and patterns of thought; Cooper made up a fund of misinformation about the American Indians; while Longfellow searched for Hellenic meter and meaning in the life and history of Americans. Meanwhile, the true seedlings of our literature were sprouting in the tall tales, the jests, the boasting, and the humor of the storytellers in the forests and on the plains. Their product was printed in local newspapers and in publications fiercely ignored by the princely intellectual Brahmins of the East Coast, who felt that the indigenous must somehow be tainted. Even Edgar Allan Poe, who surely wrote more like a European than an American, had to be acclaimed in France before he was acceptable to upper-brow Americans. But the writers of America for Americans survived and expanded and, perhaps because their only outlet was in obscure and local journals, created a situation which even today exists only in America.
In Europe, a journalist is looked upon as a second- or third-rate writer. “Journalist,” to a European aspirer to belles-lettres, is a dirty word. In America, on the contrary, journalism not only is a respected profession, but is considered the training ground of any good American author. The disciplines of clarity and simplicity imposed on writers by newspapers, far from being considered limiting and low, are held with considerable justification to be valuable in cleaning out the gaudy trash most new writers bring to their early work. The list of American writers of stature and performance who took their basic training and found their first outlet in newspapers is ample proof that for us, at least, the proposition is tenable. Alphabetically, beginning with George Ade, Maxwell Anderson, Benchley, Bierce, Crane, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hammett, Hearn, Lardner, London, Norris, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, Thomas Wolfe, are only a few. And apart from the disciplines, newspaper work has other advantages. It sends the writer to the people to hear, see, and understand and report to peoples of all kinds, on all levels. Recently, in the Soviet Union, I was asked how a capitalist country like America produced so many of what the Russians call “proletarian writers.” I replied that in the USSR when a writer is accepted by the Union—in other words, is underwritten by the state—he associates only with other writers and lives on a plane far above other people. In America, on the other hand, an aspiring writer is forced by the threat of starvation to learn his trade in the mass media and to keep his contacts with his people. Some, of course, escape into the esoteric towers of advertising or the semipaternal cloisters of teaching; but these are considered, and consider themselves, to have failed in the pattern of American literature.
At the time when the Golden Age of classic writing was flourishing in the East Coast centers of learning, when the accepted were members of an establishment endowed with the keys to the heaven of literary acceptance, at this very time Herman Melville was writing Moby-Dick, the first edition of which did not sell out for forty years; Stephen Crane was writing The Red Badge of Courage; Walt Whitm
an was printing his own Leaves of Grass and being fired from his job because it was a dirty book. The incredible ear and eye and sense of form of Mark Twain were in communication not with classic Greeks but with Americans. He got by because people thought he was only funny and therefore not dangerous; and nobody of any importance considered that America had or ever would have a literature. The successful members of the Establishment lived and had their being on and sometimes physically emigrated to the Continent.
Perhaps someone knows how the great change came which elevated American writing from either weak imitation or amusing unimportance to a position of authority in the whole world, to be studied and in turn imitated. It happened quickly. A Theodore Dreiser wrote the sound and smell of his people; a Sherwood Anderson perceived and set down secret agonies long before the headshrinkers discovered them. Suddenly the great ones stirred to life: Willa Cather, then Sinclair Lewis, O’Neill, Wolfe, Hemingway, Faulkner. There were many others, of course—poets, short-story writers, essayists like Benchley and E. B. White. Their source was identical; they learned from our people and wrote like themselves, and they created a new thing and a grand thing in the world—an American literature about Americans. It was and is no more flattering than Isaiah was about the Jews, Thucydides about the Greeks, or Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal about the Romans; but, like them, it has the sweet, strong smell of truth. And as had been so in other ages with other peoples, the Americans denounced their glory as vicious, libelous, and scandalous falsehood—and only when our literature was accepted abroad was it welcomed home again and its authors claimed as Americans.
Generations of social historians have assessed and assayed the past with the purpose of finding out what happened and why. The what is difficult enough to pin down, since records and reports tend to favor the recorder; but the why is almost impossible to come by. Individuals have a hard enough time finding a reason for their actions and thought; how much more difficult it is to determine what gives rise to group actions and attitudes. Reasons are usually arrived at after the fact, when the need arises for explanation.
When I was a child growing up in Salinas, I found in the attic of our house boxes of the Atlantic Monthly—almost a complete file—for the 1870s and 1880s. Apart from the charm that old advertising has, these magazines fascinated me. At the time of their publication the Civil War was near enough to be remembered and far enough in the past to be wondered about. In issue after issue, general officers of both the North and the South wrote descriptions of the actions in which they had commanded, and set down the reasons for their decisions and orders, many of which had turned out disastrously but all of which had been arrived at for the best possible reasons. In no case had a commander made a mistake or an error in judgment. Even as a child, I can remember wondering what really happened and realizing that I could never know; for if the men who had been there were confused, what chance had I, a child, or a historian, of finding out? And in the thousands of books written about that war right up to the present time, the guessing has grown more assertive and quarrelsome as the subject matter has become more remote.
For the most part, history is what we wish it to have been. A friend of mine, sent to England as a correspondent for a Midwestern paper in World War II, to vary his dispatches conceived the idea of visiting the seat in Ireland of the Cornwallis family, and of finding what recollections or records remained of the service of Lord Cornwallis in the American Revolution and of his surrender at Yorktown—certainly one of the most important events in our history. My friend found a monument to Lord Cornwallis, recounting his activities in the European wars of his time; but there was no mention on the monument, nor any memory among his descendants, of his ever having served in America—let alone having surrendered to the Americans. In that area, our slice of glory did not exist.
Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked him what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, economics, and law.
“How about fiction—novels, plays, poetry?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I have never had time for them. There is so much else I have to read.”
I said, “Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time. I don’t know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I had only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it.”
My friend nodded gravely. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact.”
But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Finn, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. And if you want to know about Pennsylvania of the last hundred years, you’ll read O’Hara or you’ll know less than you might.
This is no plea for fiction over history, but it does suggest that both are required for any kind of understanding. It is safe to say, I think, that the picture of America and the Americans which is branded on the minds of foreigners is derived in very large part from our novels, our short stories, and particularly from our moving pictures. To a certain extent this has been unfortunate; America is so enormous that our writers, of their own experience, could know only a small part of it. Because of this, the so-called sectional novel developed. The American novelist wrote almost exclusively of his own home countryside, and if he wrote interestingly enough or powerfully enough his picture became, in the European mind, the picture of America. Because the West of the Indians and cowboys was exotic and exciting, this became America—so that until recently travelers from abroad expected to find painted savages in war bonnets on the outskirts of New York and Boston. Also, because American novelists in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and forties attacked social injustices and inequalities with a savagery aimed at reform, conditions which have since changed and improved still linger as truths in the foreign mind. This is a compliment to the force of American writing, but it does not contribute to present truth. Finally, the American films in the golden early days of Hollywood, having no purpose but to excite, to amuse, to astonish, and thereby to sell tickets, created a life that never existed, based perhaps on the dreams and the yearnings of the inexperienced and ill-informed.
The films of the early days, like the great European cathedrals of medieval Europe, opened a glory to people who had none in their lives. For the price of a ticket, a person whose life was dull, sad, unexciting, ugly, and without hope could enter and become part of a dream life in which all people were rich and beautiful—or violent and brave—and in which, after the storied solution of a foretellably solvable problem, permanent happiness came like a purple and gold sunset. These films helped to create in the minds of foreign people a dismally untrue picture of an America of gangsters, penthouses, and swimming pools and an endless supply of elegant and available houris very like those promised by the Prophet to the faithful in heaven. The least informed American knew that he would emerge from the glory, the vice, and the violence, and return to the shrieking street, the eventless town, or the humdrum job; but poor immigrants were drawn to our golden dreams and the promise of happiness.
This naïve time is over, but it has left its mark—perhaps a deeper mark than we realize—both at home and abroad; for advertising has taken over where the dream film stopped. And any night of television commercials can convince a plain and lonely girl that a hair rinse, along with false eyelashes and protuberances, can magically transform her into an exciting, magnetic sex kitten and guarantee her entrance into the garden of happiness.
But these frills and trappings are believed and not believed at the same time. What all these exploding dreams have contributed, it seems to me,
is a kind of sullen despair and growing anger and cynicism, which is another kind of escape. Perhaps the urge toward happiness has taken the place of the urge toward food and warmth and shelter.
Americans and the Future
I FIND I have been avoiding or at least putting off one of the most serious problems, if not the most serious one, that Americans are faced with, both as a people and as individuals. In very many people this problem is a gray and leaden weight heavy to all and unbearable to some. We discuss it constantly and yet there is not even a name for it. Many, not able to face the universal spread and danger of the cancerous growth, split off a fragment of the whole to worry about or to try to cure. But it seems to me that we must inspect the disease as a whole because if we cannot root it out we have little chance of survival.
First, let us try to find something to call this subtle and deadly illness. Immorality does not describe it, nor does lack of integrity, nor does dishonesty. We might coin the word “anethics,” but that would be too scholarly an approach to a subject that is far more dangerous than anything that has happened to us. It is a creeping, evil thing that is invading every cranny of our political, our economic, our spiritual, and our psychic life. I begin to think that the evil is one thing, not many, that racial unrest, the emotional crazy quilt that drives our people in panic to the couches of the psychoanalysts, the fallout, dropout, copout insurgency of our children and young people, the rush to stimulant as well as hypnotic drugs, the rise of narrow, ugly, and vengeful cults of all kinds, the distrust and revolt against all authority, political, religious, or military, the awful and universal sense of apprehension and even terror, and this in a time of plenty such as has never been known—I think all these are manifestations of one single cause.
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 44