One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
WHITMAN, “One’s-Self I Sing”
This book offers an interpretation of some major figures in American writing during the crucial century that began in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson left the church and founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution. I end my book on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—and with the revelation after the First World War of the “postponed power” among those who had been “modern” before their time—Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.
The literary century that began with Emerson’s Nature (1836) closed (but not entirely) when the free spirit of the moderns was dissipated by war, depression, political ideology, academicism, “post-modernism.” My book encompasses the two greatest periods in our literature. The first was before the Civil War; the second, just after what John Dos Passos unrelentingly called “Mr. Wilson’s War.” The earlier period includes the transcendental idealists (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman) and the great romancers (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville). The later period includes the modernist poets, novelists, and critics—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke—too many for me to do justice to in a book that ends with the 1920s. This literary century also encompasses our great realistic novelists of the period between the Civil War and the “Great” War—Mark Twain, James, Crane, Dreiser. And Emily Dickinson, the greatest realist in our literature of the “internal difference,/Where the Meanings, are.
This period of literary creation, unprecedented expansion, and national promise was to Henry Adams, who lived it all from 1838 to 1918, to be the most eventful and decisive period in the recorded history of the West. America from Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson seemed unparalleled in its concentration of material power and the challenge this represented to the intellect. The rise of the United States was a planetary event and one by no means to be welcomed blithely even by those fascinated by the “challenge.” This concern with power on a scale previously unknown to men is one reason why Adams the great observer plays a large role in my narrative; he was always near the seats of power. Another reason is that Adams, the most original, imaginative, and provoking of American historians, was a bolder and more accomplished literary artist than William Dean Howells and other tame excellences of the period.
Emerson, in leaving the church and other mere “institutions,” gained an individual sense of power that now seems primordial. He found the universe an “open secret.” I begin with Emerson because Whitman (thereby giving me my title) predicted correctly that “America in the future, in her long train of poets and writers, while knowing more vehement and luxuriant ones, will, I think, acknowledge nothing nearer [than] this man, the actual beginner of the whole procession.…”
We have certainly known more vehement and luxuriant characters in the procession of American writers since Emerson’s day. Emerson is still “nearer” because the astonishing sense of self that he incarnated in his early writings created many a writer’s confidence that the individual in America is by himself equal to anything. And this at a time when the most penetrating observer of America from a European, aristocratic, Catholic point of view, Alexis de Tocqueville, recognized that democracy was the revolutionary proposition of the time and that democracy in America was founded on a faith in the individual that was unprecedented, wonderful, and dangerous.
Americans acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
This now-legendary sense of self in America is a principal character in my narrative, along with the hopes of a “free man’s worship” that came with it, before the aggressive and ever more concentrated forces assimilated this sense of self into capitalism as a theology. (As the end of “Self-Reliance” shows, Emerson did not always know the difference.) But what Emerson called his “one” doctrine—“the infinitude of the private mind”—nevertheless gave a special radiance to Nature, Walden, “Song of Myself,” and even Moby-Dick, a radiance that has allowed millions to remember “morning in America” and that sustains some sense of self in our very different world. The world is always new to those who can see themselves in a new light.
Emerson was a central source of that light. As Wright Morris has noted, “the simple separate person … is still our one inexhaustible source of energy.” Emerson was Romanticism with a difference. Blake and Wordsworth remained outside English life and development. Karl Marx in his youth had the same revelation that “God” would at last “actualize” himself in man, but for some reason this has had no echo in the Soviet Union. Emerson, the radical romantic of Nature, The American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet,” was a fomenter of social hope before the Civil War and the founder of a national idea. He was an intellectual father to men of genius from Thoreau and Whitman to William James; an extraordinary proof of mental solidarity to Nietzsche; a lasting figure in the minds of those who opposed him—Melville, Poe, Hawthorne. Emerson’s faith in the self was inseparable from his hope that America would have an original destiny. In this “revolutionary age,” as Emerson always called it, Emerson became another name for this expectation.
Near the end of the twentieth century it is necessary to remind literary critics that Emerson was not first and foremost a literary critic but a “God-intoxicated” man possessed by the spirit of innovation. His admirer Nietzsche summed up the paramount anxiety of their century as “the death of God.” Nietzsche promptly offered up the thinker-as-hero as one who could allay that anxiety, filling up the vacancy with the figure of Zarathustra, the “overman”-who-must-now-be-more-than-man. Emerson and Whitman had created that Promethean figure for themselves. It was above all Melville who, writing to Hawthorne in the exultancy of finishing Moby-Dick, described them both as titanic figures, God’s sentinels around the world.
Hawthorne never thought of himself as a demi-god. Quite the contrary; he was convinced that the literary career in America was a futile battle with greedy publishers and an unheeding public, and his career ended in a “crack-up” infinitely more sorrowful and paralyzing than the one Scott Fitzgerald recounted in the 1930s. Emerson was to have trouble reconciling the unfettered self with his later discovery of “Experience.” He was to have greater trouble presenting his early “dream” with the national experience. Whitman, the omnipresent “I” in “Song of Myself,” and especially Melville, playing the despot Ahab off against the dreamily passive Ishmael in Moby-Dick, showed that the emancipated American self was not above the pressures of society and the contradictions in human nature. Thoreau never worked out the consequences of the unlimited self. One reason for his early death, during the Civil War that despite his enthusiasm for John Brown he was too peaceful to support, may well have been his inability to reconcile his romantic genius with American power.
Melville, the greatest working mind in the literature of the period, was not afraid to seek truth in the confrontation of man with the elemental and in the terrors of his own heart. He thought this ruined him as a popular author, and he was right. But Melville had that peculiar awareness of whatever is everlastingly “crossed” and “subterranean,” as he liked to say. Whitman, for all his boundless ego, had that awareness on the plane of “solidarity.” He owed this to his eroticism; as Auden was to say, Eros is the father of cities. Whitman the New Yorker knew everything that goes on in a great city. A dramatic sense of relationship haunted Whitman all his life as “the fusing explanation and tie—what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me … and the (conservative) Not Me …?”
Just to pose that “relation” shows political imagination. It brought Whitman through the Civil War despite his public “failure” as a poet. The “shut-in” Dickinson, with her wonderful contrast of “boundary” and “circumference,” of the “body” and the “immortality” that is “the mind alone without corporeal friend,” had a more concentrated, more sibylline awareness of woman’s relation to the nineteenth century than many a more active and worldly woman. Mark Twain’s greatest achievement in his best book may very well be the contrast between Huck on the raft and Huck on shore peering around the edges of a society at once genteel and murderous. What must always fascinate us in Henry James is his sense of the entanglement of New World types with the enduring character of the Old World.
Imagination on this level is so unlike ideology that it cannot tolerate ideology. This is no doubt what Eliot meant when he said that James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. And ideology is so much the rival and destroyer of literature that, beginning my studies in the 1930s, I came to know all too well why even an artist like Dos Passos could not function with two contradictory ideas in his mind at the same time, so turned sharp right after his disillusionment with the left. Scott Fitzgerald said that he could live with the contradiction. He proved this not only in the mingled romanticism and satire of The Great Gatsby and in the self-exposure and remorselessness of Tender Is the Night but in the unequalled subtlety about Hollywood and its “dreams” that he brought to the unfinished The Last Tycoon.
Those who have such imagination find others who have it. Whitman said of Emerson that “his quality, his meaning has the quality of the light of day, which startles nobody. You cannot put your finger upon it yet there is nothing more palpable, nothing more wonderful, nothing more vital and refreshing.” Henry James sought the most ideal, the most receptive side of his talent in Balzac as well as in George Eliot, in Turgenev as well as in Hawthorne. Hemingway knew that he owed everything to Cézanne, Gertrude Stein—and Huckleberry Finn. T. S. Eliot as a youngster in St. Louis found the future ground of his poetry in foreign poets he could barely understand.
“For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” Melville’s great tribute to Hawthorne no longer gets much “recognition.” A debased Freudianism is used to exaggerate the natural rivalry of writers. But writing Moby-Dick, which he would dedicate to Hawthorne, Melville in a letter to him spoke “now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.” In another, “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life?… I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”
Emily Dickinson summed up her era and much of my argument when she wrote in a letter: “We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee.” The death of “the old God” and the rise of “a new man” put the writer in America on his mettle. Thoreau, who was certainly jealous of Emerson and had reason to resent his Olympian serenity and detachment, perfectly described his bond to Emerson. He told a friend that in Emerson he had found “a world where truths existed with the same perfection as the objects he studied in external nature, his ideals real and exact.”
ALFRED KAZIN
August 1983