Imaginary Americas

Of Sir Walter Scott’s ornamental waterfall in the gardens at Abbotsford the Earl of Rokeby remarked that he could make a more respectable one from his own person. Peter Conrad, the English literary scholar, setting out to study versions of America (by which he means the United States) invented by various Englishmen who came here to find Utopia, themselves, the confirmation of their worst suspicions, Paradise, or the spearhead of technological advance, begins his analysis, as a warm-up for more thorough demonstrations, with a round of views of Niagara Falls from the sniff of Mrs. Trollope in 1827 to Bertrand Russell’s blank stare in 1914.¹

That sensibilities are predisposed to see what they want to see is the almost too predictable formula for precipitating the details of this lively book. Lively it is, as America is big and the English are accomplished observers and exiles with a purpose. There is nothing here of those travellers wholly unprepared for surprises. No Feisal of Arabia who, seeing his first waterfall (in Switzerland) asked politely of his companion Colonel Lawrence if they could remain until all the water had run over, no Sarmiento in Ohio in ecstasy at the towns and farms and well-behaved people, no Jardiel Poncela utterly appalled by California in the 1930s, no Marianne North having the time of her life (a sophisticated Alice in a real Wonderland) with Longfellow in Cambridge and General Grant in the White House, wondering in old age if both weren’t a madcap dream.

The British have habitually chosen foreign places as scope for one crotchet or another (Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, Norman Douglas in Capri, Anthony Burgess in Malta). Peter Conrad is at his best with exiles like Auden, Huxley, and Isherwood whose visions of America scarcely correspond to anything at all, and who, with consummate eccentricity, made up Americas and lived quite imaginatively in them.

Conrad’s approach to all of this is one of bright seriousness, an intellectual probing, a vigorous curiosity constantly turning up new information. His subject, helplessly, is so much the raw material of comedy that the glints of satire we perceive on every page shine alternately from Conrad’s wit and from a ridiculousness innate in the careers being scrutinized. The psychedelic Huxley, a filthy Auden dabbled with snot and more than half-mad with buggery in his second childhood, Isherwood living in the upper reaches of the higher Hindu consciousness, Lawrence dithering about the phallic sunshine in New Mexico—they are a Thomas Love Peacock novel come true, a satire by Waugh, a set of Beerbohm cartoons, or Wyndham Lewis at his most outrageous.

It is all, however, quite real. These caricatures—men of genius, all—are exemplary experiments, a kind of pioneering in the spiritual dimension. In one sense, Conrad is analyzing America’s reputation abroad by finding its sources in intelligent makers of opinion. Think of the many who know America from Céline’s account of Detroit and Chicago, of those who trust Wells to know what he was talking about, of the goodwill between England and America created by Kipling. These articulate reports, however distorted, have an authority over rumor and clichés.

Jessie Whitehead, the daughter of Alfred North and friend of Gertrude Stein, once noted when she had lived half her life in England and half, until then, in the United States, that she preferred Americans because of their unfailing kindness. “What a boor Dr. Johnson would be at an American cocktail party.” This is a clue to Conrad’s choice of Englishmen in America: they were all outsiders in their own country, men of self-invention. They came here for the same reason that brought the Puritans, the Huguenots, the Anabaptists, and the Hassidim. Freedom from constraint and sanctions was not the only reason; Conrad is far more interested in the supposed America that fetched over his exiles, and in men in quest of something Europe lacked. Lawrence made up his America ludicrously out of the whole cloth of his lurid imagination.

Kipling was looking for a country in its epic stage of development, and proceeded to see America that way. Captains Courageous is a transparent hymn to derring-do, to sea captains on the Grand Banks and captains of industry. If America is also (in imitation of Europe) effete, we have heroic models to set us right. His novel discovers two heritages for an adolescent boy, one decadent (and significantly requiring a voyage to Europe), the other epic. Kipling tosses his protagonist off the depraved ocean liner taking him away from America, and has him rescued, reeducated, and remade by rough, manly fishermen.

Conrad spends a lot of energy studying Captains Courageous, and in his method inadvertently exposes the way he cuts corners and commits the very sin of his subjects in gazing with such raptness that he fools himself as to what he sees. He is particularly interested to take apart and inspect the scene in Captains Courageous where the tycoon Cheyne receives word in San Diego that his son Harvey is not after all dead, but has been picked up by a fishing boat and is safe in Gloucester. In his paraphrase, Conrad transfers to Cheyne actions belonging to his typist and telegrapher, as well as all the Chinese junks in San Diego harbor. Conrad rehearses the fine passage about Harvey’s parents’ transcontinental train journey, noting how Kipling is obsessed by facts and figures. (In America, by the way, we do not write $3,665.25 as $3,665¼, and in any case it should be, as in Kipling’s text, $3,676.25.) Of Kipling’s “The six-foot drivers were hammering their way to San Bernardino and the Mohave wastes …” Conrad says, “The narrative is so intent on numerical precision that Kipling even calculates the height of the engine driver (which is six feet), as if that were part of the equation.” The “six-foot drivers” in question are the locomotive’s shafts, which impart linear motion from steam-pushed pistons to the rotary motion of the wheels. Conrad’s received opinion of Kipling as a perhaps pathological worshipper of tall and masculine men (for which Wells and Beerbohm berated him) blinds him to the text he is reading for us, and converts machinery into an idée reçue.

Conrad, in fact, has to be watched when he summarizes. Kipling’s “almost bait up a trawl” (Harvey recounting his skills as a fisherman) becomes in Conrad “bait up a trawl.” That “the representatives of $63 million worth of railroad interests cooperate in” Cheyne’s record crossing of the continent is a sloppy way of combining two things: that the pertinent railroads involved were cooperative, and the worth of all American railroads. And so on. Conrad is apt to be wide-eyed in his reporting, and careless of details.

For all its historical sweep and tracking of changing English views of America, Conrad’s study will stick in most readers’ minds, I suspect, for its full-length portrait of Auden. He gives as much attention to Huxley and Isherwood, but their adventures are odd and atypical. Huxley the satirist ended by glorying in what he had once knocked, and Isherwood, who once sought an environment congenial to his nature in the Third Reich, found it in the California of Gerald Heard, bronzed lifeguards with a vocabulary of up to sixty words, and Swami Ramakrishna (who instructed him how to achieve “the ocean of perfection”). I once, to be polite to a lady, heard Gerald Heard lecture in St. Louis. He looked very El Greco, and spoke in long, suavely delivered sentences rich in names like Alyosha Karamazov, Epictetus, and St. Gregory of Nyssa, and in facts about the salinity of blood and seawater, evolution, and probably the transmigration of souls. Only in some high-toned Methodist preachers have I ever heard such beautiful rhetoric wrap itself around absolutely nothing.

Auden, however, belonged to this world, was an accomplished poet, was conversant with our culture in a way very few people are, and returned with irony and anguish to the Church of England. He came to America, or rather to New York, to be lonely. I think he came to insure that he was among humanity at its worst in this century. He could have gone to more terrible places, Rome for instance, but he wanted a place he could not romanticize. He recognized New York for what it is culturally, a trade center, a crossroads where everybody turns up sooner or later. It is also a city as European as it is American. It is our Alexandria, our Byzantium.

Here Auden fulfilled a desire (Conrad calls it a childish desire) to be of things while being apart from them, to live in his nursery of an apartment (by all accounts an incredibly nasty fox’s den), outside of which (in bedroom slippers and unclean clothes) he delighted to play the spoiled brat to see, like an impossible child, how much he could get away with. He got away with everything, of course, as he was Auden. He became a monster of paradox, a social bully, an arrogant Christian, a foulmouthed old man with one of the most ravaged faces in history. The more awkward to be around he became, the more people sought him out, pleaded with him to speak, and valued his acquaintance.

He would, let us guess, have been quite a different Auden if he had remained in England. He annoyed the hell out of Oxford when he returned there to die. (He didn’t die there, but in a hotel room in Austria, where he was buried to the strains of Wagner, as if he were an adjunct to Teutonic culture.) Auden and Isherwood, Conrad tells us, came to America together. Their paths diverged, both in search of liberty, “romantic privacies,” to nurture their alienation. Conrad gives a brilliant analysis of the distance that developed between the two: Isherwood’s love of health, cleanliness, and the sun; Auden’s contrasting plunge into senility, dirt, and darkness—California and the “lawless marches” of New York City streets.

We begin to wonder as we follow Conrad’s splendidly readable text what all this has to do with America. Is it not simply that stock device of novelists, the boardinghouse or ship or island where it is convenient to corral one’s cast of characters? Conrad admits that America is so large and diverse that it will accommodate any questing soul who cares to arrive. It is still both a wilderness and a system of megalopolises, a backward and an advanced country, a mixture of its own and practically all other cultures.

America from the beginning was a promise of renewal for every human endeavor. It was an activity of the Renaissance, whose scholars and merchant princes effected its discovery and its first exploitation. Thereafter it exhibited an innocence (and concomitant ignorance) unavailable to Europe. Compare the American and French revolutions, Washington and Napoleon. What is pristine and a bit colorless in America is experienced and vastly more colorful in Europe. Looked at the other way around, what is weary and worn in Europe is spanking new in America.

Though we are now the oldest continuous government on the planet (with the possible exception of England, if you want to argue the point), we must still play the part of a recent arrival in politics and culture. Hence our appearance in the imagination of Wells and Kipling as a clean-hearted young giant from whom energy and hope can flow to the rest of the world.

Why did Ralph Hodgson and Ford Madox Ford end their days in Ohio? Aleksandr Kerenski spent the large part of his life here. There are immigrants and immigrants, and we tend to think of them as donations to our culture, shooed to Liberty’s feet by the tyrannies of other lands. Thus we got Stravinsky, Audubon, Lipschitz, Ernst, Steinmetz, Fermi. Conrad is interested in quite a different kind of immigrant, one who has come uncompelled and had other choices. The purest example of this type is Heinrich Schliemann, who became an American citizen for the sheer panache of it.

The country is rich in such people, drawn here for reasons which we cannot appreciate (such as Jessie Whitehead’s preferring American manners). The real lesson for us in Peter Conrad’s study may be precisely to see qualities we are blind to, or take for granted.

There is nothing in this book, for instance, that fetched over Conrad’s Englishmen which would tempt me to leave my backyard. It would be a cruel and unjust punishment were I obliged to live in Taos, Los Angeles, or New York City. I have, without actually going there, seen Niagara Falls.

Spiritual transplanting is not easy; strange things (as Conrad shows) happen to uprooted people. America didn’t work for Kipling, or Hearn, or Mann, or Brecht. Napoleon, when the British nabbed him, was on his way to become an independent American farmer. I like to imagine him as having made it, as mayor of Cincinnati. Someone should study the psychology of coming to America. Conrad has pointed the way and set the example. Would Capone have been a somebody in Sicily? Would Hitchcock have made Psycho in England? Would Auden have shouted to guests in his bathroom not to use more than two sheets of toilet paper?

¹Peter Conrad, Imagining America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).