Intimations of the American Character: Five American Writers

the Statess only 230 historic period middle-aged, give or take, therefore to ask after the Ameri dejection parting is untold the same as asking after the character of a two-year old non impossible, still hardly definitive. Theres a an anecdote of general reportage that on Nixons fresh existence trip to China Kissinger asked Mao what he thought of the French Revolution. Mao answered that it was withal short to tell.Perhaps it is in like manner soon to tell what the American character is as can be determined in the books of the 17th 19th Centuries, yet i cannot mistake that in the various works of its first base monu manpowertal authors (writers who felt themselves sufficiently invested in this democratic look into spread over some six one thousand million square miles of beautiful and infinitely re blood lineful land) the first intimations if not indications of who and what we are (as opposed to where we came from the old countries) raise themselves whapn.Harold Bloom, Professor, author, reader, man of extraordinary powers of memorization, idiosyncratic, self-proclaimed Falstaffian, wrote, ironic eithery nice, a work entitled The Anxiety of Influence. With reference only to the title, which implies so much, especially for any wouldbe artist who seeks place his/her own rum stamp on his/her work, one encounters the first problem for the truly creative We are not born with break through context. Mozarts aside, we must school ourselves, absorb, learn, model, imitate and copy before we write, paint, sing, play music, dance, in a wholly new and sea captain management.The struggle to execute what is original implies its own anxiety. Like Michelangelos slaves f marble, will we ever break free? Has American broken free of its overwhelming British influences? And if we have broken free, if we have achieved a unique and American voice, to whom do we owe the credit for the great break with our bi-continental past? The important word here is con text. No source is tapped in a vacuum. We are the progeny of forebears we are the ancestors of those to come.Time being what it is we can only require back. First, review the grim declamations of Jonathan Edwards and feel the anxiety of that faith which rested in an angry God, serious of spit, elicit and fury, an unhappy parent disappointed in his children, a God in a nominally Christian world, whos narrowed the avenue of salvation to inches of rock-ledge that can be traversed by so few that a ministers left with little to do precisely warn his folding about(predicate) how noxious its going to be when theyre dropped like spiders into the eternal flame.Of course, no God is ever as awful as his finders and Edwards admonitions are the high point of that drive towards purity which drove the puritans from the infect Anglicanism of Elizabeth and James (not to mention Henry VIII who had his own take mercy and forgiveness). If one were to read to a fault much of Jonathan Edwards, one might conclude that the American character is a dour, determined and fatalistic, the unfortunate payoff of Augustines fear dripped through Calvins Swiss rectitude by way of Anglo-Saxon localism played out in the hands and minds of truly brave pilgrims determined to reform themselves almost out of existence.In short the first bearing of Americas self, its character, was a reaction to the draw inring, the wiggle-room, and the corruption in easy Elizabethan, Jamesian-Protestantism. It is the expression of what one tribe might attribute to a god whos angry with the sorrow of his children. But Edwardss declamations are not the word of god so much as their expression of man angry with man.Ironically, the supposed anger of this god, by way of Edwards, will move Puritan congregation to embrace a work ethic (Protestant, New England, rural, elemental, purifying) which will stand in opposition to the source of the Reformation, itself Luthers reading of Romans which asserts salvatio n by grace and not by good works. But date passed and America, with its depth and carbohydrateth of resourcefulness, its brave and entrepreneurial people who made the move, took the chance, crossed the ocean in seek of a better liveness, and would not be held captive in the ornate chains of those ministers well-schooled in the sempiternal dark night of the soul.Brave people, entrepreneurs, the can-do sort of people who cross oceans are not the type of people to succumb to anxieties. And they are not without humor. Indeed they require humor, because humor is the step-sister of practicality. The ironic point of view, the wit, the clever tress of phrase, the creativity and intelligence of the comedic mode, are often the trump out means to drive home points and conclusions and directives that might other than be lost in the didactic drone of dogma.Ben Franklin gave voice to humor and crude sense and practicality in his writings. We look upon him now, possibly unfortunately, as a cartoon figure of Disneys imagination, or that precious sonny employed each early summer to dress up in velvet, lace and granny glasses, to paseo the streets of Philadelphia and scare children with the stilted language of the poor mimic. But to do so would be our loss. Franklin was a genius.He was a polymath, self educated and like most early Americans, born (as if dropped whole) into a new land affording infinite potential without the floors or ceilings of given classes, gifted with the curiosity and intelligence to make sense out of the new, original American experience, and to express the process for others. He was an inventor, a newspaper man, a man of letters, a policy-making in-fighter, a political theorist schooled in the writings of the Enlightenment.He was a humanist who, unlike his ascetic Puritans ancestors of capital of Massachu bentts and environs, believed that humans were of value, body, mind and spirit. Franklin dared to believe, in the most general sense of the lesser-dogmatic theists that man was deserving of something better than Edwardss angry white bearded, sententious, demanding, unpredictable, inconsistent and contrary God.Through Franklin the American character first developed the genius of reciprocal sense, leavened with humor. In the settlement of New York by the inveterate, humanistic Dutch and Philadelphia by the easy, peaceful, sometimes unruffled Quakers, Franklin, the man who traveled south, denied the anxiety driven, forbidding world view (so often fostered in too-cold climates) that desire to set man for eternity plot denying the value of the here and now.Through Franklin we learn that man is capable of creativity, here and now, that man can better his station in life, that life is worth living and that process, ritual, form and style (Franklins writing can not but reflect some of the 18th Century politesse) are meant to follow conk out and that substance, rather than appearance, is the determinative value.Throughout a review of Franklins writings, one is struck by that wave of humanism and democratic values that asserted themselves in the wake of decadent royalties and courts and found their most eloquent expression in the preamble to Americas Declaration of Independence, penned by Jefferson (edited, polished, affirmed, if not ghost written by Franklin. ) Emerson, the sage of Concord, virtually unknown in cocktail conversation today, but for the notion of some savoury rigid circumspect New England self reliance, is the American writer with whom all American writers must contend.Like America, itself, full of contradiction in termss and principles that outran its in truth self, Emerson was an iconoclast, who looked about the beauty of Concord and saw that although the world was good, man made institutions, were, over time, get hold offully corruptible and, instead of assisting the individual in his walk through life, ultimately hindered the individual from clear sight, a post-Christian panth eism, a transcendent vision of Gods soaringeur and all that can be deduced, derived from that.In a way analogous to the solitary loneliness of the dark night of the soul, Emerson encouraged the brave entrepreneurial American, optimistic, human, and sufficiently wise not only to appreciate the comedic mode of life (i. e. , life is ultimately and always salvageable), but to travel past the thickets of dogma, to apply his gifted and most importantly his co-creative mind to an understanding of the world about him. Yes, the America might be the New Jerusalem, a new place of unbounded physical grace, but the kingdom must be experienced within as well.Emersons transcendent view is best appreciated when one posits the pure permeability of the divine through nature and then through the very self. Humanism need not stand in opposition to Edwardss angry god, but need only accommodate God, affording Him the place hes had forever, within and without ourselves. Thoreau lived a mile from Emerson . They were friends to the degree that that they could rear and receive friendship.Both were complex, but Thoreau gave voice and body to complexities, contradictions that flowed from Emersons first indications of a uniquely American voice. (All men are created equal, and yet Americans buy and sell slaves. ) Thoreau is a photographic negative to much of what Emerson implies. Tough they both lived in this grand new country, Thoreau, the prophet, also recognized problems which would and still occur to this day in a country so bountiful it invited a work ethic as boundless as its resources, coat and frontiers.Work is a balm to the anxious and energetic soul. Perhaps its too much to say that all work is busy work (though a walk down Park Avenue on a Monday in September might make one wonder), but work and the Americans over- plaudit of the over-valued military action is a defense to works essential nature a distraction from the anxiety of being. Americans praise those Americans who w ork hard, keep their heads down, work hard, never look up, never question, and might ask after function but never purpose.And these are the workers, the people, the men and women, who live the lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau is a radical in that he goes to the very source of an idea cloaked in so many assumptions and givens that the questioning itself renders him an iconoclast, an eccentric of the first order. Living alone by a pond is nothing compared to asking those questions which might upset the underpinnings of a society too busy to ask anything. Thoreau loafs with the intensity of a Kant.He questions not only the American way of life with its work ethic, but also the proposition that lifes primary value lies in work and that through work (only work) man will find his identity, ultimately his purpose and after this life perhaps his salvation. Thoreau is a loafer like Whitman, but Thoreau does not loaf to be given work, he loafs to escape meaningless work and to question th e assumptions of New England in the early 19th centuryTheres a banality in the work-a-day world, devoted to the corporate mind and group think that sublimates the individual to the will and survival and perhaps betterment of the group. It is this Nobodys indispensable. Thoreau either heard or intuited this dismissal of the human and his efforts (Willy Loman 100 years on), and said Why do we engage in a system which demands our lives, makes false promises and considers us short dispensable? The American work ethic makes promises and offers the appearance of payback to justify itself. Indeed, such a scoff is one under-pinning of the capitalist system.Were promised ticky-tacky houses, country clubs, swimming pools, unlimited credit at usurious rates, fine clothes, the right schools for above-average kids, and of course the magical totem , the icon, the car, the uber-van, the humvee, the mode of transportation that will tell them who we are. Thoreau anticipated all of this the wor ried contract by which Americans remain trapped in the first and second levels of the hierarchy of needs while our demi-gods of celebrity and power achieve a self-actualization denied bothbody else. Not surprisingly we are then bought off with television, sports, bread and circuses.One of the contradictions in Thoreau is that the assertion of the individual is Romantic, but the means employed is ascetic and classical. To live deliberately is not to live with frippery or Bouchers swings or the ease of decadent courts. To live deliberately is a radical undertaking, directing the speedy to slow down to take time to loaf and view the smallest, finest things, those effects of creation which in their brief majesty put to shame all the useless memos, briefs, papers, efforts and transactions set down in the 19th Centurys ethos of success and wealth as the outward mansion house of grace.Thoreau stands in opposition to the Americas madness for work. Walden has changed lives. People have be en seen reading it during their rush commutes. Whitman turns within and explodes without. He does not so much challenge the hustle and bustle of the great democratic experiment as he seeks to encompass it, to swallow it, to take it in, because the genius of the poet this new American poet is begin enough, grand enough, to express the vastness of it all. Indeed every part of every part is a part of every part.To turn within is to look without, to subsume the All. Whitman breaks the line open. Even a grade student sounding at a poem by Whitman and a poem by Philip Freneau cant booster but see the difference in form. The old and tired expresses itself in neat stanzas, century old rules. But Whitmans lines span the page. They scan and pose propositions only to complete the circle with their opposition utter like closing a door on a completed whole. The compliment forms the greater proposition.This is a poet not so much of contradictions (though he admits as much), but a poet, like a demi-god, who can reconcile the apparent and real contradictions of life. Does America contradict itself (Slavery All men are created equal)? Yes. Can America reconcile its contradictions? Perhaps. One war says we have other wars say we have not. Perhaps its too facile to remark that whereas the country was split north and south, Samuel Clemens, born in Missouri, a border state, obtained his unique voice traveling north and south along a river which in its own way sought to hold the warring halves together.In Huckleberry Finn Twain reconciles the optimism and humor of Franklin, the adventuresome self-reliance of Emerson, Thoreaus marginal iconoclast and Whitmans reconciled over-soul. And yet, Mark Twain, the humorist, the colloquial voice of wisdom, the wooly relative we place at the head of the table, soon encountered, as America encountered the cracks and flaws of life, its random terribleness, its self-inflicted wounds.At the very heart of the American character is the mater o f slavery, the ludicrous contradiction of eloquence scripted to blow trumpets of gold and light bonfires of freedom that would out-enlighten the enlightenment. And still the ships came from the west edge of Africa. Slaves bought and sold. These contradictions are essential. They are indicators of life itself and neither America, its character nor its poets and writers are immune.Though we can look fondly on Americas optimism, humor, practicality, favor of substance over form, the acknowledgment that form follows substance, that in America sexual morality counts we must also look upon the all too common type, born of the all too common fatigue evident in a country that offers just enough in a zero-sum game to keep the citizen alive one more day, for one more effort, for one more expenditure We know the desperate worker, who expends enormous amounts of energy, convincing himself, fooling himself that what he does has meaning and purpose, that hes paid enough (as all those bleedin g-heart liberal programs for all those minorities dont get in the way) and that someday, maybe when he retires with a weak heart and a spent spirit, he and his wife will travel the length and width of this great country and call to mind something of what that old gay poet wrote something about atoms and bed-fellows and lilacs This too is the American character desperate, tired, vain, prejudiced, spent, rigid, utterly human and, for all of it, ultimately forgivable.