A Cultural, Not a Literary History

This book is grandiose in aims; not always so in performance.^[1] More than 200 chapters/essays are arrayed in chronological order, by date and headline, from 1507 (when the name America was found) to President Obama—five centuries in quick succession, through leaps across time and territory. You can read them sequentially or jump from one to another (I did both), moving back and forth within the loose terms of their topics. The aim is to capture, explain or suggest, in a compressed, crisp, appealing way, all that imaginatively went on to make up America—that “brave new world” so much wondered about and criticized throughout the world, in whatever field: “all range of things created in America,” all “versions of the fable of discovery and founding.” With no inherited tradition to fall back on, America had to be made up and invented; its novelty is what worries and excites and what the book sets about to discover and display. Literature is only a part, even a minor or a subservient part, of the process: “The focus is on the whole range of all those things that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it.”


Hence my uneasiness, to begin with, about the title. No quarrel, and much to praise, if it had been A New Cultural History of America. I realize that “cultural” might have seemed a limiting, inflated and used-up term. Yet the chosen title is equivocal and may raise misleading expectations. It forcibly recalls, at least for those old enough as I am, the Literary History of the United States edited by Robert E. Spiller et al. more than sixty years ago. Yet here the emphasis is not on Literary History, but on America as seen and interpreted through literary lenses. And those lenses include almost everything other than literature.


The blurring of terms is, of course, intentional and partly perverse: in this well-designed, massive volume, “cultural” is pervasively used, and “literary” tends to disappear. The introduction acknowledges it, and sets the terms. What is at issue today is speech rather than the written word—speech spoken and sung (but also, it seems, sculpted and portrayed): in an admittedly “broadly cultural history,” “literature means not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form.”


Throughout the text we are reminded, overtly or implicitly, of “perhaps the most singular fact concerning the ‘literary’ in the post- World War II era: the accelerating collapse of high and popular art into a seemingly homogeneous sphere of ‘culture’”—possibly a “populist overthrow of class-bound hierarchies, or the death knell for critical distance and aesthetic autonomy” (Bob Dylan is the case in point). What is true of our present, post-modern era is bluntly projected onto the past: a legitimate, indeed a natural thing to do, as we always look at the past through the eyes, attitudes, beliefs and concerns of the present. But here the operation is drastic. The post-modern stance calls on discontinuity, loose margins, no subordination, mimicry, desultory and ironic ways, jumps and starts, the idea that you can never really be sure of what you are talking about or dealing with: and this does not always apply to the past.


The assumption is reflected in the procedures adopted by the editors and contributors in the book, which work well for the present, but not always for the past, especially the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sometimes they court parody—a form of expression often invoked and setting the tone. Should we welcome and rejoice in the “ephemeral and transient aspects of art”? Possibly so: but isn’t writing so astutely about them a way of contradicting and counteracting the idea, giving them permanence?


Another aim is to surprise editors, readers, and contributors alike. The editors, we are told, simply rolled the dice and waited: what came up demanded attention, as long as cultural gulfs were bridged. This entails, of course, “no attempt to give every name its due”; and when contributors are artists and creative writers, rather than critics and academics, results are not always distinguished (in a couple of instances they pick a quarrel or settle accounts with critics and academics). This does not detract from the otherwise praiseworthy insistence on a quick, lively style of presentation—“journalistic” in the best sense of the word, and most welcome.


Hence my excitement in learning so many new things and facing so many new perspectives, and my unease about the cavalier way of dealing with some of those I knew and wanted to review.


I learned a great deal about the Winchester rifle and the linotype machine, films and filmmakers, the visual arts from Charles Wilson Peale to Warhol, photography and the “art of telephony” (which does not tolerate separateness?), Buffalo Bill and Tarzan, blues and musicals, jazz in its various forms, hot and cool (I was delighted to find it connected with Castiglione’s sprezzatura), from ragtime to hip hop, rock ’n’ roll and rap, the radio (a democratizing influence) and pro football (that fostered camaraderie and unified cities), Dr. Seuss and boxing (through Liebling’s masterful reports), graffiti and “wild style”; about Thomas Edison, the Ford Model T and the Hays Production Code, the Nevada gambling and divorce laws, skyscrapers and Alcoholics Anonymous, Life and Fortune, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Superman and Spiderman, the screenplay as genre; the atom bomb and the military, the Internal Security Act and the Hollywood blacklist, cybernetics and cyberfunk, Linda Lovelace (of Deep Throat) and the “culture of public exposure,” in its double sense, stretching to Watergate. More appropriately and to the purpose, I learned plenty about national anthems, Presidential addresses and speeches, debates on the Constitution and Civil Rights, Supreme Court rulings, racial conflicts, philosophical and intellectual controversies, political issues and battles, and The Book of Mormon (really “the most controversial text in American literature,” appealing to a nationalistic ethos, “a pivotal document in nineteenth-century cultural history”?).


All this (and much more) accounts for more than half the book. It is meant to provide not only the background, but the foreground, for the writers who made up, and, above all, are making up America and its literary tradition. Yet no cogent or strict connection is made: it is rather subsumed, left for the “cultural citizen” (the common reader?) to make or to surmise. This is a heavy task, difficult to bring to focus even for “experts,” displaying a post-modern attitude with a vengeance—unless we accept the premise that all these cultural facts and aspects, concerns and issues, went to create directly American expression, and, especially after World War II, dominated it or took its place.


The procedure of the book, too, is basically post-modern: a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of interesting, often crucial, facts strung together, intersecting with writers and their works, that are made part and parcel of it. In an essay dealing with the visual arts towards the end, we are told that in “the egalitarianism of such experiments—the artist scarcely seems necessary.” Or: in the self-reflected purity of dematerialized art, “The work need not be built.” The individual artist can be dispensed with, and the underlying wish appears to be that it might be so from the beginning. We are familiar with the current idea that literary works are “negotiated” by writers with the social, ideological, and cultural currents of their times, rather than “invented” by them. Here, however, the constructing role of the artist is downsized.


We are also told that we must go beyond literature; but then literature is left behind (some contributors seem to feel the strain). A great forerunner in the field, F. O. Matthiessen, is quoted on the critic’s primary function: “He must judge the work of art as work of art. . . . Judgment of art is unavoidably both an aesthetic and a social act.” True. Dianne Johnson writes on books for children that “this literature should be celebrated for its literary quality in concert with its content.” This in our book is seldom done, or is done reluctantly, when it cannot possibly be avoided. The word aesthetic is anathema (I believe I found it used only once), just as the word “successful,” which seems derogatory for a writer: one contributor is startled that one can write for money, and that it did and does happen.


Some of the consequences are disturbing. No unified view of a writer is allowed: they are split and splintered, “distributed” in different chapters as the case demands. It works well in some cases, especially those dealing with historical or political matters, when the essays can leap and move quickly and adroitly from one time to another, from one manifestation of an issue to another (say, from the Salem trials to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Arthur Miller, to give just one example). But there is too much glee and satisfaction, even a wilful and blissful touch of perversity, in dismembering authors of renown, reducing them to one or two significant books for the purpose at hand, and ignoring the rest of their productions. The idea of an oeuvre, of the “personality” of an author, of her or his integrity, in both its etymological and ordinary sense, is rigorously eschewed. (Would any humble practitioner of the craft of writing, would any of the contributors to this book, for instance, like to have the work of a lifetime assessed for just one essay in this book?)


At a presentation of it at the University of Venice, Italy, it was reaffirmed that the essays are meant to be suggestive, to arouse curiosity, so as to send readers back to read and discover for themselves the authors and the works under review, especially now that the facts and texts are amply (even too amply) available in electronic and Web resources, and need not be rehashed in a History where space is limited. This was always the aim of the best forms of criticism; here the “imp of the perverse,” as Poe called it, shows in denying even the greatest writers a sense of the full spectrum of their oeuvre. The auteur as such, if only “literary,” adding no fables of invention and revelation of America, seems to have no place.




The book shows the prevalence of current concerns: class, race and gender are the relevant issues, and writers are chosen and dealt with in accordance with their awareness of or contribution to them. It is legitimate, and welcome; but it works well for some, less for others.


Previously unknown or marginalized writers, active in all sorts of genres, are rightly brought to the surface, indeed to the forefront and to predominance: blacks, Indians, women, Hawaiians, Asian Americans, political and protest writers, singers and lyricists, essayists and commentators, of earlier as well as modern times. Examples would fill pages of dispassionate presentation. Authors confined to scholarly publications and/or small presses, cult and niche authors, who were mostly resorted to for ethnic and identity-building purposes, are now made available for consideration and review by the general public. Given the pleasures of discovery and sometimes the limited number of their published works, the previously downtrodden fare better than others, even in ethnic, black or gender studies (Italian or Irish Americans, for instance: did they already make the mainstream?). Gays and lesbians are soberly presented and discussed, with no particular axe to grind. This is a sign of achieved maturity and critical balance, not often found in present-day academic discourse.


As for the great writers of the past and authors of masterpieces (I still use, I am afraid, such out-of-fashion terms), I note some of the drawbacks they are exposed to. Washington Irving is here for his History of New York, not his tales and sketches; Benjamin Franklin for his early satires, not the Autobiography; Hawthorne for the Salem trials and his utopian and historical probings. Herman Melville is given his due for Moby-Dick_—a critique, as we say today, of entrepreneurial _hubris_—and much more for _The Confidence-Man (a book I particularly like and translated) on account of its varied ethnic population and its indictment of mid-nineteenth-century America. All very well: but nothing about his early encounters with Polynesian life, as I expected, or Billy Budd (with its sexual undertones and its questioning of authority).


Henry James appears for The Portrait of a Lady_—adroitly related to some of his other works—as well as in a masterful essay on _The American Scene, a crucial book, duly reassessed for its novelty, resonances and prophetic importance. But the rest of his massive literary and critical oeuvre goes unnoticed. No consideration is given to the well-known truth that a writer evolves, changes, moves from one kind of literary expression to another: variety is often the sign of his or her greatness, especially as we approach, as James does, Modernism and the twentieth century, when the dictum became “Make It New.”


The writer’s technical tools and formal expertise are never really acknowledged or taken up in A New Literary History. The avoidance of any technical and formal discussion of craftsmanship (though it is deftly introduced for jazz, films, the visual arts, or the language of post-modernists) is to be regretted, and I wish some of it might have crept in. (Would A New Musical History of America, say, be possible without discussions of bars and keys, timbres and quavers, notes, scores or sonata forms? If this kind of awareness may not be needed in a cultural history of America, where words mostly count for what they say, I still consider it necessary for literary works: language as such, style, techniques, and formal concerns are unavoidable.)


A few more examples. Ernest Hemingway fares better, though in a desultory and wayward way: he keeps reappearing and resurfacing as the case may require, and most of his works get mentioned. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby is summarily, I should say, disposed of, and Tender is the Night_—certainly much more crucial for the 1930s than so much of Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos and Steinbeck—is totally disregarded. This kind of listing may be tedious and off the point. Yet such a book invites the ratings game of who’s in and who’s out. Why is Billy Wilder there and not Thornton Wilder? I don’t particularly like _Our Town, but it has as much to say about expressing, creating and founding America as other cases so carefully presented.


Early American literature seems to fare better, with an expected emphasis on rebel Roger Williams at the expense of the sombre Mathers, on Samuel Sewall, the first to denounce slavery, on Quakers and even Jesuit relations. Indian and slave narratives, nature writing and sentimental fiction are highlighted. The Civil War is rightly seen as the crucial, central concern and inspiration for writers of very different approaches, from Walt Whitman (very well represented) to Emily Dickinson (less so, in her case), from Melville to Stephen Crane (though he is rebuked for not contextualizing his war novel). But nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers are taken up as pretexts (in all senses) mostly for historical, social and political issues. The context tends to overwhelm the text.


Matthiessen, the father of us all, is given his due for constructing a view of an American Renaissance in which literary excellence was combined with a belief in democracy. Later on, however, the view is blatantly exposed that the second part—democracy—must converge with the first. This is unfortunately not so: when they diverge, as they did in Dostoevsky or Céline, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among others, we still have great masterpieces. Matthiessen also showed America’s deep connection with, and dependence on, European literature: this doesn’t come into the spectrum of A New Literary History, which leans towards dispensing with anything European (“the played-out Eurocentric tradition of the lumbering, significance-heavy, status-seeking masterpiece [an oppressive artistic behemoth trampling everything in the path of its single-minded pursuit of prestige and intellectual respectability],” paraphrasing Manny Farber on film). I believe it’s a pity: no need to be Eurocentric, yet the relationship with Europe is unavoidable. Both literary and cultural facts suffer from such deletions.


The book, we saw, wants to highlight what is invented, made up as an expression of America, and one feels the excitement of its contributors in doing so. But what is there to be gained, for instance, in having T. S. Eliot in for his early works, up to The Waste Land, and leaving out the achievements of his later “British” period, culminating in Four Quartets? He was contributing to the invention of America there as well (“The Dry Salvages”). To counterbalance his going to England, he is paired with D. H. Lawrence coming to America. It works in favor of globalism, which is however compromised by a kind of “American exceptionalism” creeping in here, too. The strain tells on some contributors. Wallace Stevens is presented as a “self-conscious American poet,” in an otherwise excellent essay, mostly on account of some of his uncollected poems: but he is much more than that, imbued with internationalism and European reverberations.


I spoke earlier of perversity and glee. There is joyfulness in this enterprise, and in many essays. There is also, however, much somberness, a fury of denunciation of the negative aspects of America, of its political, cultural, and literary exploits through the centuries, much self-satisfaction in finding so much to object to and to complain about. There is deep enjoyment, paradoxically, in “all these fragments I have shored against my ruins”; in critique, a cherished word, taking the place of criticism; in an oppositional strain, in what Lionel Trilling had mildly described as “adversary culture.” The transition from Hurricane Katrina to the final graphic chapter on President Obama’s epoch-making election, is only a late moment of hope, after so many tears have been shed and so much indignation has been vented.


What I am implying is that once the issues of class, race, and gender (with so many artists and writers rightly refusing the limitations of hyphenated labels) recede into the background, integrate and dissolve into mainstream culture, one must recapture what is disregarded here. Writers still want to be called great and successful: it seems unfair to deprive them of a recognition of the intrinsic value of their works. This has nothing to do with equating high and low culture, as is done here and around us. It is a plea for respect due to singular, individual and personal achievements.


This touch of perversity may then dispel glee and joyfulness, the excitement of so many discoveries and new perspectives. The single chapters/essays, too, so crisp and taut and thankfully brief (never more than 4 or 5 pages), betray at times a sense of un-fulfilment: when the issue at hand has been presented and rounded up, they tend to stop and fall short, while we would want to see all its potentialities pursued and explored (“The chapter ends without arriving,” as we read). Closure does not, admittedly, belong here: the book is meant “to open questions, not to close cases”; but, ah, for more . . . as James would have wished.


Two final points. As a foreigner (some of the contributors to this volume are as well), and as a lifetime student of American literature who had to work hard to distinguish and separate it from its British heritage and European models, I value in particular its being explored as much as possible from the inside. The book does this even too satisfactorily, and that is why I wish for its writers to be given their due in literary, aesthetic, artistic terms as well as in their social, historical, political and cultural contexts. I prefer F. O. Matthiessen to Leslie Fiedler as an acknowledged master, and agree on the inspirational force of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain. I relish fresh air, a non-academic approach (with all the scholarly thoroughness of research and background that is here displayed). This New Literary History has re-awakened my wish to see its writers in full bloom and full exposure.


I am prepared for the stigma of which I was forewarned in these pages: “The challenge, for conservatives, has been to sponsor literature as a living branch of contemporary culture.” Fine. But what follows: “The literary imagination thrives on the left, where utopia has long been at home” is wishful thinking, verging on self-delusion. History is strewn with “leftist” utopias turned into oppressive nightmares and terrible art, and it is precisely such cocksureness and sternness, such muted arrogance, that alienate and jeopardize the cause of the left in the world we live in. I also plead guilty of trying to mimic here and there the style and procedures of the book—leaping from one topic, issue or writer to another, and within them. Accept me, brothers.