INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN AUDACITY
IN THE SEVEN YEARS I SPENT PRODUCING THIS BOOK, I was never pestered by the awareness of being an American writer with strictly American themes to pursue—beware of those who are pushy on the point of their own nationality—and yet when it came time to confront my critical work, to cull and then shape some of it into a coherent mass, I had no other choice but to see how American I’ve been all along: in my sensibility, my concerns, my conception of literature and self. Perhaps we American writers are helpless not to pulse with our own Americanness—the national ethos is too much with us, our brief history too manifest, our media-borne manias too destructive and distracting—but my critical work didn’t necessarily begin that way. My critical work began with two Brits.
In graduate school at Boston University in the early aughts, I enrolled in a seminar with the eminent English poet-critic Geoffrey Hill, a semester-long agon with the verse and theology of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. I was the only fiction writer in a room full of poets with academic aspirations, poets who regarded me, I feared, as something of an unwelcome oddity. One told me that she didn’t quite understand what a fiction writer wanted from Hopkins and Hill. If you’re thinking how resoundingly obvious it is that a fiction writer can benefit from the intense study of a poet, I’ve found that some among us eschew the resoundingly obvious. Perhaps the bafflement emerges from the fact that the inverse won’t exactly hold: poets have less to learn from novelists, since their principal aim is the architecture of the auditory and not the agency of character and narrative.
Anyway, Hill took me aside one afternoon to let me know that I didn’t have what it took to be a tweed, didn’t have the conformist mettle and turbid prose of the average academic, but that I might have some luck as a reviewer or literary essayist for “the common reader,” as Dr. Johnson meant it. Hill sent me home that day with a pile of essays by the American poet-critics he most revered—T. S. Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom—though much of what I’d learn about literary comment would come directly from Hill himself, from taking in his mode of evaluating Hopkins’s verse, his fertile insights into how the words function in their stanzas and lines, singly and in pairs, and how Hopkins’s religio-poetical vision breathes, expands in his rhythms. It remains the most transformative classroom encounter of my life.
Hill’s was an effortlessly severe intensity, vigorous apprehending by a mammoth intellect, a man regarded by many, including Donald Hall and Harold Bloom, as the greatest English poet of his generation. His rhapsodical denunciations of inferior writing could send giddy fear rip pling through the room. He once read aloud a new poem by a much-decorated American poet that had just appeared in a much-decorated American magazine, and at the end of it declared, in that frightfully beautiful Worcestershire brogue: “There are perhaps two words and a comma which I wouldn’t be utterly ashamed to have written.” And then he went through the poem, syllable by syllable, period by period, and explained why and how each was the wrong choice. But to hear him give praise to Hopkins and the other literary giants who mattered to him—“To have written that, my God”—was an unforgettable tutorial in the efficacy of literary love.
Much of my criticism, though I write mostly on prose, has been an effort to enact the standards I learned from Hill, a struggle to become somewhat worthy of his tremendous example, and also a remembrance of the kindness he showed to me. After the seminar, he tolerated my youth’s pesky gusto for another semester, during weekly sessions at his office—he always wore a black sweat suit painted in white cat hair—where he guided me through the roiling labyrinth of Hopkins’s great long poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” When Hill died too soon in 2016, the world became a much darker, duller place for me. I still hear his voice daily.
Most fiction writers at the entrance gate of their careers quickly see that no one is all that eager to pay them for their stories, but I saw that I could cover a few monthly bills with a twelve-hundred-word review. With Hill’s help, I sold my first essay-review that same semester, on the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya, to the fabled Partisan Review, which then promptly shut down operation before my piece could be published. But a paycheck showed up in the mail anyway, indeed enough to cover a bill, and since then I’ve gone on having bills. Criticism doesn’t pay very much but it does pay something, and those of us with greedy little mouths at home will take what we can get. Still, the critic best have some other motive, some other need that’s fulfilled by entering the arena of literary comment. For some, that need assumes dignity by morphing into duty.
The critic is a reader before he is a writer, a spirited lover of literature, and criticism is one important use to which he puts his reading and his love. To sit before literature in appreciation and awe, to want to have some hand in facilitating literature’s efficacy, to comprehend that literature is, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, “equipment for living,” a means of enlargement and enhancement and understanding: these are the critic’s prerequisites. The critic should be tethered to no theory, no ideology, no asphyxiating ism. Like the poet and novelist, he should be of no party. Ideology is the enemy of art because ideology is the end of imagination. The critic’s chief loyalty is to the duet of beauty and wisdom, to the well made and usefully wise, and to the ligatures between style and meaning.
Literature is read and criticism written in defiance of the ongoing noise, the ceaseless cyber grating and reckless surrender of calm, and in defense of those solitary spots where a person desires “to conquer the great wilderness of himself,” as James Baldwin has it: the great wilderness that gives up its secrets only by way of an inquisitive hush, a whispered inwardness in which we can be wholly ourselves. “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist,” Baldwin writes, “is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” The cultivation of aloneness is the primary distinction of the reader and critic, too. If, as Goethe believed, the artist must have a “touch of audacity” in order to make art, I learned from Geoffrey Hill what I’d soon find in Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and the others who have become my loadstars: a conviction that the critic must have audacity, too.
WHAT DOES A particularly American audacity look like? In the opening essay of Nobody Knows My Name, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” James Baldwin begins with an axiom from his beau ideal, Henry James—“It is a complex fate to be an American”—and then imparts this bit of Baldwinian insight:
America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world—yesterday and today—are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “American” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we millions who call ourselves Americans.
We might not know exactly what “American” describes but we’ve gone on describing it, or trying to. Ever since a clan of audacious rebels accomplished an act of extreme imagination and wrote this nation into being, America has been pressed to define itself, to establish its selfhood, through its language and its literature and whatever character matches its outsized ambitions.
We perpetually find ourselves in a whirling state of self-invention and self-description: the American ethos, struggling for articulation and fixed on the present, is necessarily obsessed with itself. Our literature, like our vast character, puts an unswayable emphasis on what being American means. A people always seemingly sundered in our political, cultural, and regional loyalties, Americans are also, as Gore Vidal never tired of pointing out, an amnesiac nation. Wherever else they are, Americans are unapologetically in the Now, and racing toward tomorrow. Elizabeth Hardwick puts it this way: “The American situation is not so much to overthrow the past as to overthrow the future before it arrives as a stasis.” We are new and getting newer all the time.
America began in audacity. We’re a union of escapees toiling toward our own authenticity. Reach back before the audacity of Southern secession, of the westward pioneers, of Lewis and Clark, of the Revolution, of the Declaration, and look to the audacity of those first settlers, storming this already occupied Jeshimon, believing their inscrutable Lord had willed it, wanted it for them, an overdue deliverance in this New World. Seeking to create something from a perceived nothing, this land was supposedly the reward for their Puritan piety. Their suffering was otherworldly. The suffering they inflicted was otherworldly too. It takes audacity to welcome such suffering. It takes audacity to dish it. Their enthusiastic anguish was a signal of election; fulfilling God’s blueprint in the New World was supposed to be god-awful. Stained from the womb, born blighted, inclined toward what Calvin liked to call “concupiscence,” they spent both their waking and resting hours mon itored by an exacting god who created them in a state that he then instructed them to deny. It was tough work, their Pilgrimhood, but they took to it.
James Baldwin is always reminding us that America was founded from the rumblings and gratings of these Puritans, from the earnest reaching of their Calvinist soul and mind. To embrace and to deny them is our legacy. Disparaging the Puritans in his still-relevant In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams says that “their misfortune has become a malfeasant ghost that dominates us all.” Writing on Stephen Crane in 1960, Ralph Ellison argues that the puritanical brand of Christianity is not only subject matter for twentieth century literature but is “a major source of its technique, its form and rhetoric.” Remember how T. S. Eliot described himself late in life: “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritan temperament.” And when today’s Christian right-wingers gloat that America has Christianity thriving in its DNA, they aren’t exactly wrong, though they certainly are in thinking that the essential founders were Christ-drunk churchgoers who wanted the rest of us to be, too.
For all their gaudy humility, the Puritans were an audacious lot, convinced that they were central to God’s concerns: savage concerns they were forever trying to divine; savage concerns that frequently killed them. Here is Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, and please do pardon his modesty: “Some of us are under special advantage to understand these mysterious truths of God.” As to what Mather called their “exiled condition in this wilderness”? They chose the exile and they chose the wilderness. By the Puritans’ strangling of logic, God harassed them in the New World not because he despised them but because he loved them: just look at what he did to his darling Job.
Today, it’s difficult for us to fathom how pressingly immediate God was to these people. He was their Internet, everywhere and inescapable, watching them as they slept. The Gospels were their Google. Original sin was not a detail of dogma: they could feel it in their blood and lungs. You can glimpse the frontier lonesomeness and ecstatic Calvinist self-abnegation of the first American poets of note, colonials Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. Bradstreet is a special case in American letters: an over-doting wife and mother of too many children, she was determined, against the outrageous strictures of her time, to invent herself as a poet—and she did.
We know precisely what harassed and heartened the Pilgrims because we have William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, composed between 1630 and 1650, the first outright literary work penned in America in English, a supernal story of survival, piety, death—“It pleased God to visit us then with death daily”—and eventual failure after almost fifty years of some truly fervid trying. We have written accounts from the older Jamestown and the stouter Massachusetts Bay Colonies, too, but neither of those was blessed with a Bradford. What ended the strivings of the Plymouth settlers was perhaps what’s become a stereotypical American flaw: ardent individualism, a breakdown of communal duty, everyone’s concern for himself, his own property, his own pocketbook. America the self-begotten, land of the career individual and moneymaker: we are all of us Adams in the morning. Noah Webster in 1825: “American glory begins at the dawn.” Yes it does: a hemorrhage of sun and blood and hope.
American literary sensibility evolved from an artful collision of several forces: the ambitions and dreads of the Puritans, the newness and menace of the land, the values of the European Renaissance, and, later, the unignorable notions of the European Enlightenment. There was a pregnant tension there from the start, and in the eighteenth century that tension was embodied in Jonathan Edwards on the one side and Benjamin Franklin on the other. Edwards’s species of Romantic Puritanism would later influence the American transcendentalists and also the ecstatic terror in Moby-Dick: that reliable Puritan itch to allegorize, to behold everything through the vista of cosmic significance. Personal Narrative, Edwards’s own foray into Augustinian confession, makes a tidy antithesis to Franklin’s Autobiography: the one a hymn to the individual soul’s responsibility, the other an homage to the individual mind in society; Edwards wrapped in the ideal and spiritual, Franklin in the actual and practical.
Jay Gatsby, says Nick Carraway, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”: it’s our most enduring cliché, the prevalence of which has derived, in large part, from the enterprising flair of Franklin, his shrewd self-mythologizing. In America you get to make yourself, and then make yourself anew if you want—if you must. (D. H. Lawrence: “Franklin was the first downright American.”) We’re not cubicled by class or title; democracy allots us an enlarging sense of personal agency, and never mind if that sense is mostly illusory; never mind if a galling number of Americans can’t be bothered to vote. Gore Vidal’s dauntless cynicism enjoyed saying that America is run by neither the plain people nor the politicians but by the banks and corporations, and you’ll have to decide for yourself how accurate that is, how democratic we actually are.
If William Bradford commits himself to “a plaine style, with singular regard unto the simple truth of things,” two centuries later Emerson in his Journals refers to “the plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world.” Compare that to Whitman’s “One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person.” It’s curious to see early American writers concerned with plainness and simplicity when we think of ourselves, or should, as toweringly complex and multiform, and when many others around the globe now look on us as ostentatious, obnoxious, narcissistic—and simple as in simplistic. Emerson’s guiding creed says that the self’s individual agency is the principal characteristic of Americanness, which is why Whitman believed that Emerson is “the actual beginner of the whole American procession.” He’s not, or not exactly, but you see what Whitman is getting at. After being influenced by a battalion of European poets and philosophers, Emerson was loudest in admonishing our writers to find spark from within our own feral Americanness: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” Melville would come to believe much the same thing.
From that Emersonian angle, Melville’s Ahab is the most audaciously American character in our canon: his steely self-belief won’t be weakened by water or fire, beast or man—to his own detriment, he won’t be influenced. Melville might have confected Ahab from the grammar of the King James Version, the heft of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and the lightning of Milton’s Satan—to say nothing of Homer and Virgil—but Ahab is touched with Puritan New World fire in that his quest is a holy quest: a holiness of blasphemy, but a holiness just the same. There’s a Puritan wandering in the wilderness, a seeking after whale-sized truths, a passing through terror and death in order to fulfill God’s plan in the world—Ahab is the satanic god of his ship—in order to bolster the belief in Providence: an ode to struggle and woe in which the world is shot through with divine and demonic signals.
In its antinomian tenor, its tremendous seeing, Moby-Dick takes the Pilgrim conception of a “howling wilderness,” a murderous natural arena of creatures and savages, and transposes it to the sea. With its volcanic tongue, its deadly exuberance of expression, the novel contains what William Carlos Williams calls, in a different context, “the whole weight of the wild continent.” Camille Paglia refers to its “operatic gigantism,” which could be describing the country itself. It’s exceedingly American to need the Great American Novel, and lucky for us we have it: Moby-Dick is the Great American Novel because it is the only American novel whose vision is enormous enough, and religious enough, to contain our American enormity and prevailing religiosity. Paul Bowles once said that he couldn’t abide Moby-Dick because one needs to be religious in order to do so, and perhaps that’s true enough.
The Pilgrims might have been very bent Christians but they were not, of course, American at all; they were stubbornly English and European, though not for long. We might recall here Twain’s calumny against our former countrymen: the English are people who do something because it’s been done before; Americans are people who do something because it hasn’t. (Hardwick says that Americans are forever trying to make a rock out of a waterfall.) It would take another generation or two after the Pilgrims for our American individuality, our staunch otherness, to emerge, and another century before that staunch otherness led to revolution and war. This is what D. H. Lawrence means in Studies in Classic American Literature when he speaks of “the true myth of America”: “She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin, towards a new youth.” That remains the urgent American appeal: a vaunting juvenescence forever renewable and always stretching for self-actualization. America’s youth, says Wilde, is our best and oldest tradition. We’re obsessed with youth, yes, but to be obsessed with youth is to be in awe of life.
Lawrence’s influential little book on American literature is a typically Lawrencian performance, largely ridiculous—American writers are serpents and demons; Emily Dickinson isn’t worthy of mention; Edgar Poe is a vampire, Walt Whitman a knave, etc.—but it’s peppered with acute insights only an outsider could have made, an understanding of a key aspect of American character. What’s so distinctive about American literature? Lawrence speaks, with grudging esteem, of an American extremity of consciousness, typified by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman: an American intensity of apprehension joined to a robust seeking of selfhood.
But there’s something else: violence. The American, says Lawrence, “has got to destroy. It is his destiny” because “the essential American soul” is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Just look at the “Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise that amounts almost to mad ness.” Just look at the “menace in the landscape.” He could have gone further with that assertion because our nation was founded in violence: the violence the first settlers inflicted upon natives and the violence those natives returned; the violence of climate; the violence of revolution; the violence of slavery and the violence of the war that ended it. Perhaps no nation can be carpentered without the dumping of blood, but the young American soil is particularly soaked with it. (“This brute youth,” Emerson calls us, and how fitting that what have become the two most glaring symbols of Americanness are also causes of staggering violence by the hour: the firearm and the automobile.)
That violent legacy is vivified in Melville and Stephen Crane, in Faulkner and Hemingway, in Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright, and among living writers most triumphantly in Cormac McCarthy. Violence wed to rootlessness: the pathological quality of our most vital literature—Dickinson and death, Whitman and democracy, Ahab and the whale, Huck Finn and the river, Cather and the frontier, O’Connor and Christ, Bellow and the intellect, Ellison and whiteness, Baldwin and the soul, Cormac McCarthy and murder—derives from an essential rootlessness (Melville’s “landlessness”), from always being recently born. Call it the neuroticism of national youth, of having to create your total being from such short history, from such a pulsating inheritance.
In a 1967 lecture called “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy,” Ralph Ellison says this: “As I see it, the novel has always been bound up with the idea of nationhood. What are we? Who are we?” And if that’s mostly true for all nations, it’s especially true for America, though of course that truth is not limited to the novel only: our poems, plays, and essays also confront the conundrums of nationhood; and in the case of Whitman, without Leaves of Grass American selfhood would be a fallow affair. Ellison also believes that “the American nation is based upon revolution”—it certainly is, though revolution is only one-third of the American triumvirate that includes independence and democracy, a triumvirate most ecstatically at work in Whitman. He and Dickinson remain our most audacious poets.
Dickinson’s nerve in the grimace of death, her daring within what she calls the “Dark Parade,” has not been equaled in our literature: she looks the Reaper in the black hole of his hood and will not blink. For sheer literary guts, Whitman has nothing on Dickinson. (I once overheard Derek Walcott say that although Whitman has become our national bard, Dickinson is more deserving of that title.) Her metaphysics heave within the strictness of her form, such a supreme poetic discipline, such deliberate craft, all those gravid dashes. Because she is our great poet of death she understood that she must also be our great poet of God, whom she calls “our Old Neighbor” who “cannot be found.” It takes something more than audacity—it takes Greek-level hubris to be the great poet of God when you will not believe in him.
In his shimmering American Renaissance of 1941, F. O. Matthiessen remarks that the five-year sweep from 1850 to 1855 hosted the publication of seven essential books: Representative Men, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Walden, and Leaves of Grass. “You might,” says Matthiessen, “search all the rest of American literature without being able to collect a group of books equal to these in imaginative vitality.” Before that onslaught of imaginative vitality—and let’s remember that phrase—readers had to content themselves with the derivative thinness of Washington Irving and with the breathless frontier romances and criminal verbosities of Fenimore Cooper, to say nothing of his legion of lagging imitators. It’s a bit of a chore now to read Irving and Cooper next to Poe; with Poe, something truly Other, truly disruptive burst to life in American letters, a conceptual quake from which we’re still recovering. Poe’s is a boldness so discomposing we’re still trying to figure out what to do with it, his interment of the familiar and his corpus-wide denial of daylight. The preceding era of Irving seems a yawn, gossamer in comparison.
When Hemingway uttered that oft-cited line about all modern American literature stemming from Huckleberry Finn, he wasn’t being factual but you take his point: he means Twain’s prose, that waltzing American dialect and its folksy versatility, the first true instance of our literature fully embracing the linguistic grit and pitch of Americanese. The unprecedented nativism of Huck’s tongue is a songful animation of William Bradford’s “plaine style” of two centuries before. See the demotic fuse burning from Huck to Ring Lardner and Sherwood Anderson, to Hemingway himself and Robert Frost, and to the two Raymonds, Chandler and Carver. The novel’s satirical boldness would help incite the following century’s two boldest American comedies, Catch-22 and Portnoy’s Complaint.
Just as crucial, Huckleberry Finn employs the most binding affirmation of morality in all of American letters, when Huck refuses to turn Jim over to the scoundrels hunting him and instead consigns his own soul to hellfire: the uncut audacity of that decision, the humanistic punch of it. There was not before and has not been since a more gladiatorial American critic of America, not even Mencken or Baldwin. Twain wields his humor as a comedian should, as both bludgeon and gavel: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Add to his artistic achievement his foxy cultivation of celebrity and you have the most American author ever to pick up a pen: he makes Henry James look French. If Hemingway’s language revolutionized American fiction, and if his own celebrity out-testosteroned Twain’s, neither the language nor the celebrity would have been all that likely without Twain’s example.
We all have our personally vetted lists of daring ones, the Faulkners and Flannery O’Connors, the Dorothy Parkers and James Baldwins who refused to compromise their visions, who dared not just to make it new but to make it true, make it lovely and wise, allying the enigmas of spirit to the avowals of heart and mind, and always in a prose that knows it must do double work, reaching within and without. One must write into the language as a bird takes off into flight, discovering itself in the act of its own soaring. The daring ones are always helpless to do otherwise.
Consider Dreiser, jumping in to correct the often sentimental and anodyne social record put down by novelists such as William Dean Howells. Henry James gives us consummate interiorities, pasts and wills so intricate, so exquisitely honeycombed, he makes many previous novelists look lacking in their tiny, fitful revelations. The sheer artistic impudence of William Faulkner, the sass and swagger of it: he begot the twentieth century’s most triumphant American fiction from the incalculable humiliations of the South’s defeat. Flannery O’Connor clutches her Roman Catholicism and into the Protes tant South unleashes her primal howls of understanding. Eliot drops the tremendous bomb that begins American modernist poetry, that frontal assault on poetic propriety and our whole mode of cultural comprehension: The Waste Land. Ralph Ellison annexes a trope made popular by H. G. Wells and gives us a man so elaborately invisible we can never again not see him. That is the potency of our most lasting literature: a revolution in apprehension.
THERE’S A PREVALENT and false golden-age nostalgia which wants us to believe that America used to be a more literate and literary land: before the Internet, before television, before radio, before photography, before the phonograph. But Hawthorne thought the reading public suckers for trash and the publishing industry a gaggle of greedy cynics. Emerson was of the view that “people do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.” Melville passed his last decades in a cobweb of obscurity; Newton Arvin, still Melville’s best critic, says that the public’s treatment of him is the most appalling literary crime in American history. One of Henry Adams’s pet phrases is “the public be damned,” because it is neither literary nor intelligent enough. Poe was forever starving; he couldn’t earn a living with his pen, and railed against the crooked market feeding low appetites. Longfellow got rich from his jingles, yes, but he was rich anyway, thanks to his marriage, and the money he made from his poems he made mostly because he was a cunning businessman, not because he was a sublime and daring maker of verse.
Here’s James Baldwin in 1961:
There are long moments when this country resembles nothing so much as the grimmest of popularity contests. . . . My point is involved with the great emphasis placed on public approval here, and the resulting and quite insane system of penalties and rewards. It puts a premium on mediocrity and has all but slaughtered any concept of excellence.
Literary daring involves the principled repudiation of that insane system—much more insane now than in Baldwin’s day—and a return to excellence. One need not be an alarmist to understand that the danger is real now, godlike and unprecedented, all-powerful and everywhere. The Internet has zapped us all into obliging zombies; it makes yesterday’s threat from television look whimsical and rather cute.
In the sordid smoke of this e-bombardment, American literature must reach back as it works ahead. It must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness, interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication and complexity. Writers must exert an archaic mindfulness; they must resist a relinquishing of the past and a disprizing of standards; they must insist on memory and they must insist on influence. F. O. Matthiessen speaks of “imaginative vitality,” and that’s precisely what American literature in the twenty-first century must aspire to: mystery, ecstasy, theodicy, the sublime manifest in language.
The Scarlet Letter, says Hawthorne, performs its magic “somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbues itself with the nature of the other,” and that seems to me the right recipe for fiction. Ralph Ellison writes that the novelist has an “obligation to tell the truth, to describe with eloquence and imagination life as it appears from wherever he finds his being.” I want to underscore Ellison’s pairing of eloquence with imagination because for the novelist, as for the poet, each is neutered without the other.
Literature both leads us forth from ourselves and returns us to ourselves; it cares nothing for the validation of identity, only for the upending of it. Great books are not echo chambers for our own personalities. We go to them precisely because in their most sublime moments they allow us to partake of what we are not and can never be. We go to them for the fact of their humanity, and for pages that croon of our rescue from the pat and patently false.
We can recall here Ishmael’s immortal dictum aboard the Pequod: “To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme,” but of course theme alone won’t do, just as experience alone is not enough. If writers must undertake an Eliotic retreat from experience or personality in order to make art—recall Eliot’s program in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: literature is a shunning of mere personality—then they must also accept that without a vibrancy of language, without an assertive style of mind, theme means nothing. James Baldwin makes that admonition again and again: What good are “protest novels,” he asks, if they are shoddily built, if the prose is a tangle of platitudes?
A necessary distinction must be drawn between those American books that are important for social reasons—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—and those American books that are important because they are aesthetically audacious, daring in their form and mind, ferocious in their beauty: because they are, in a word, literature. Without its literature a nation is an impotent actor in its own drama. American stories and poems are the engine of our national myths that show us ourselves and through which we begin to understand the pith of our character and the boundaries of our striving and sin. Ralph Ellison in 1957: “The novelist must take chances or die.” Yes he must.
In the essays and reviews that follow I’ve tried always to take my own chances, and to deal, in some way, with how a book is made: its sentences, its narratives, its notions, and how they coalesce to form a book’s armature. I’ve tried to have an acute responsiveness to style and mind. If I can be said to have a method as a critic, it is Matthiessen’s in American Renaissance: “The critic’s chief responsibility . . . is to examine an author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form.” I’ve tried always to praise attempts to fashion the world anew, to hail daring and a commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language. In many of these pieces I come to an identical conclusion: that weak language is proof of weak ideas, that style is welded to substance, that the writer’s fate is birthed by the writer’s prose. When I see “sum total” or “outward appearance” or “vast majority,” “unsolved mystery” or “centered around” or “end result,” my ink goes red. Such formulations announce that the writer doesn’t mind sounding like everybody else.
Fairness for the critic means giving a reliable, disinterested assessment of a writer’s mind and prose, of how that mind and prose function in relation to literature, to the vibrant complexities of the canon. We must not speak of imaginative literature only in terms of the thematic; we must also attempt to confront the semantic, which includes the syntactic and the rhythmic. The technical and the ethical are not separate issues. Criticism endeavors to maintain the difference between mere disposition and strong argument, between simple opinion and hard-won judgment: decisiveness is the thing—has always been the thing. It helps to have the heft of the canon behind your views.
These essays proceed from the conviction that the right words matter. I’ve striven always to do writers the tremendous dignity of considering their minds—since the culture wants to do them the tremendous indignity of considering only their feelings—and language is our most accurate embodiment of mind. Henry James: “The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.” With fiction writers, whatever else lies waiting in their toolbox (narrative, characterization, setting, dialogue, moral reckoning, etc.), it is secondary to language, is rendered mute without first being in possession of the right words: vigorous, exact, original.
My title American Audacity is not meant to indicate that this is a catchall compendium of American literature. Rather, it is a volume of essays and reviews concerned with American authors and with those American subjects I am interested in as an American author myself. A writer’s interests, alas, are nonnegotiable; nor are they always entirely explicable. I haven’t been able to assent to Susan Sontag’s ostensibly good definition of a writer as someone who’s interested in everything. That’s neither feasible nor advisable; imagine the whiplash involved in sustaining an interest in everything.
After being interested I’ve tried to be interesting. What’s interesting in a literary critic? Precisely what’s interesting in any language artist: force of vision, torque of phrase, depth of knowing, seriousness of humor, moral intelligence, a repudiation of herdthink, a dynamic assessment beyond the blurber’s pet clichés of “fascinating” and “brilliant,” beyond the culture’s prevailing platitudes and sophistry and insincerity—the language Mary McCarthy unforgettably calls “a gruesome mass of rubble”—and perhaps also a willingness to say what others will not in a manner others cannot.
The topics and writers I deal with here are those I’ve been asked to write about by editors at various publications I esteem, and are those I’ve been attracted to because I thought I might have something useful to say about them. In some cases I’ve had a fierce personal connection to the writer or topic—such as my piece on Catholic novelists, or the bibliophile, or the Boston Marathon bombing, or James Baldwin—though I’ve tried always to maintain the disinterestedness Matthew Arnold says is essential to the critic. In other cases—such as my piece on Cynthia Ozick, or Katie Roiphe—I was delighted to have the opportunity to appreciate their work after long years of admiration. And in still other cases—such as my piece on Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance—I had to provide myself with a mini-education in the months before writing, since I had only the most rudimentary knowledge of the writer or subject. Indeed, I accepted many of these assignments because they afforded me the chance to correct a gap in my learning.
When you write for magazines, you have to get used to certain compromises you might not like: paragraphs get flipped or cut, prose gets fiddled with, punctuation fouled. Some essays appear here as I originally wrote them, others have been shortened, others lengthened. Some titles have been changed. These days the tag “American” appears to be stuck to every third book, TV show, or movie, but all American writers must, I think, at one point or another, pen their “American” book. This is mine. I seek to convert no one; my only wish is that fellow lovers of literature might find something here to argue with or admire.
—Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018