A Little History of Literature (23 page)

The western is one of the few genres one cannot credit to the author Edgar Allan Poe, father of science fiction, ‘horror’ and the detective story, notably ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (the orang-utan did it). Along with the idea of ‘genre’ it was in America that, in 1891, the first bestseller list was established. Eight of the top ten bestsellers on the first all-fiction list were novels by English hands. It settled down, with an ever more prominent American content, after the literary world came to terms with international copyright regulation.

‘
E pluribus unum
’, says the inscription on US coinage: ‘out of many, comes unity’. It's as true of literature as demography. America is a tapestry of regional and distinctively different urban literatures. There is Southern literature (such as William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter), New York Jewish fiction (think Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud) and West Coast literature (the Beats). Reading widely in American literature is like a road trip across that immense continent.

‘Make it new’, Ezra Pound instructed his fellow American poets. They have done just that, embracing modernism and post-modernism more enthusiastically and adventurously than their British counterparts. Any anthology demonstrates the point, from Pound himself, through Robert Lowell's
Life Studies
(Chapter 34) to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poetry, whose poets, as their name indicates, open up language like an orange into its many segments. This obsession with the new can be seen, from another angle, as an impatience with the old. America, as any frequent visitor will observe, is a country that tears down its skyscrapers to build even newer ones. So too in literature.

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was, among all else, an Anglophile, and one of the things that American writers have made new, in a small but important way, is the literature of the ‘old country’. Writers born and brought up American – such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath – who lived, worked and died in Britain, injected into its literature new, vital and essentially ‘American’ ways of writing and seeing the world. James, ‘the master’ as he came to be called, ‘corrected’ English fiction, which he believed had become formless and (his word) ‘baggy’. He was a stern master. T.S. Eliot established Modernism as the principal voice of British poetry. Plath's poems, with their controlled emotional violence, smashed what one critic called ‘the gentility principle’ which was strangling English verse. British literature gave much to American literature, and has received a lot in return.

Had he been addressing American writers of fiction, Pound might have rephrased his instruction, ‘Make it
big
’. There are a whole host of candidates, more of them every year, for the title of
‘Great American Novel’. Big themes have always attracted American writers, more so, one could plausibly argue, than their British counterparts, for many of whom Jane Austen's ‘two inches of ivory’ will suffice.

There is also an energy, verging on aggression, in American literature, which can be seen as different and distinctly of that country. Few novels, for example, have been angrier – or more effectively angry in terms of bringing about social change – than John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). It tells the story of the Joad family in the great ‘Dust Bowl’ disaster of the 1930s who, when their farm parches up, leave Oklahoma and take to the road towards the promised land, California, only to discover, when they get there, that it is a false Eden. In the lush farms and orchards of the West they find themselves as exploited as were the slaves transported to America from Africa 200 years earlier. The family breaks up under the strain.

Steinbeck's novel, which is still widely read and admired although the circumstances that gave it birth have long passed, is not merely social protest at the ruthless exploitation of farm workers. Running through
The Grapes of Wrath
is the sense that what happens to the Joad family is a betrayal of what America stands for, the principles on which it was founded – the better life that, centuries before, people like Anne Bradstreet came to the New World to find and make. There are, of course, angry novels to be found in all literatures (Émile Zola in France, for example, and Dickens, of course). But it is a peculiarly American kind of anger one finds in
The Grapes of Wrath
.

So, to sum up. What makes American literature peculiarly American? Is it the Puritan heritage, the constant battle to extend the ‘frontier’, the geographical and ethnic diversity, the aspiration for ‘newness’ and ‘greatness’, the constant innovation, the belief in America which underlies even denunciations of America, like Steinbeck's?

Yes; all of these things. But there is something else, even more important. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) put his finger on it when he proclaimed, ‘All modern American Literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
’. What is definitive,
Hemingway contended, is ‘voice’ and what Twain himself called ‘dialect’. You hear it in Huck's first sentence:

There is an American idiom that only American literature fully captures. It carries with it the sense of something more in ‘the American grain’ (as the poet William Carlos Williams called it) than ‘accent’. The detective-story writer, Raymond Chandler, who gave great thought to the subject, called it ‘cadence’. Hemingway's own fiction bears out his point about the American idiom but the novel which, for me, most perfectly encapsulates the wholly distinctive modern American voice is J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951). Read (and ‘hear’) its first wonderful sentence, with its if-you-really-want-to-know challenge, and see if you don't agree.

CHAPTER
24

The Great Pessimist

H
ARDY

Imagine you could create something called the ‘Literary Happiness Scale’, with the most optimistic authors basking in sunshine at the top and the most pessimistic authors sunk in gloom at the bottom. Where, to name names, would you put Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, George Eliot, Chaucer and Dickens?

Chaucer projects the happiest vision of life, most would agree. The band of pilgrims riding to Canterbury are a merry crew, and the tone of their tales is comic. Chaucer would surely top the scale. Shakespeare is also pretty upbeat – with the exception of a handful of tragedies (especially
King Lear
) which seem to have been written in the terrible aftermath of losing his only son, little Hamnet. A critic who undertook a census of good versus bad characters in his drama came up with a 70/30 ratio on the plus side. Shakespeare's world is not, on the whole, a bad place to live in. Seven out of ten people would be good to know.

George Eliot, as her novels reflect, believed in a world that was getting better (‘ameliorating’ was her word) but in a very bumpy way. Human costs were paid – some of them, as with Dorothea
in
Middlemarch
, sizeable costs – but on the whole the future looked brighter, to this author, than the past. The Eliot universe is a moderately hopeful place: sunshine breaks through. All her novels have a happy ending, however glumly they start. It would, she suggested, be a long time before humanity reached the sunny uplands, but they were getting there.

Dickens is difficult to locate on our happiness scale because his earlier work (
Pickwick Papers
, for example) is so much jollier than the novels produced in what is called his ‘dark period’, some of which project a very gloomy view of things indeed. It's hard to close the covers of, say,
Our Mutual Friend
feeling jolly. There are, one concludes, two Dickenses, at two different points on the scale.

Dr Johnson was pessimistic but stoic. ‘Human life’, as he surveyed it, was ‘a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’ But he believed life, if you were lucky, had what he called its ‘sweeteners’: friends, good conversation, buckets of tea, good food and, above all, the pleasures of intercourse, through the printed page, with great minds of the past. (He did not much enjoy the theatre and his eyes were not good enough to appreciate fine art.) The sunshine glimmers between the clouds in the Johnson universe.

At the very bottom of the happiness scale, indeed arguably below its zero point, would be Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Hardy liked to tell the story of his birth on the kitchen table in a little cottage in rural Dorset (the county he would later immortalise as his invented region of ‘Wessex’). When he popped out into the world the doctor took one look at the shrivelled little thing and declared him to be stillborn – dead before he lived. He was put on one side for Christian disposal. Then he cried. It saved his life and, arguably, for the rest of that life Thomas Hardy never stopped crying.

The reader can, like Little Jack Horner, stick a thumb anywhere in Hardy's mass of fiction and poetry and pull out a pessimistic plum. Take, for example, his poem ‘Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?’ The question is asked by the corpse of a woman, lying buried in her coffin. Not a cheerful scenario, you may think, but it gets even less cheerful. She hears a scrabbling in the dirt above her. Her
lover? No, it's her little dog. A dog's fidelity, she thinks, is so much nobler than a human's. And then the dog explains:

The summaries of any of Hardy's major novels are chronicles of depressiveness. Someone once said every novel of his should have a cut-throat razor attached. One thinks, for example, of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
(1891), and its noble young woman, lying on the sacrificial slab at Stonehenge, waiting for the police to arrest her, the court to declare her guilty, the hangman to execute her, and the gravedigger to throw her body in quicklime and an unmarked grave. Who would not shake their fist at the heavens, thinking of the fate of Tess, whose only fault was loving unwisely?

Should we see Hardy's pessimism, as expressed in his poems and novels, as merely the reflection of his own peculiarly unhappy feelings about life, or something more serious? If it were merely a lifelong grump, who would bother reading him? And why, in spite of his glum view of things, do we rank him as one of the giants of English literature?

There is a simple answer to those questions. What Hardy expresses in his work is not just the personal opinion of Thomas Hardy but a ‘world-view’ (literary critics often use the German term for it, ‘
Weltanschauung
’, which sounds more philosophical). The dominant world-view into which Hardy was born was that things were ‘progressing’. Life was getting better. A young Victorian born in 1840 could confidently expect a better life than his parents and grandparents. For most people born in this period, that was indeed their life experience. Hardy's father was a stonemason, and a self-made man. His mother was a great reader. Both wanted more for their only child than they had had, only a generation or two away
from being peasants. And, indeed, Hardy soared far above the social level into which he was born. He died an honoured ‘Grand Old Man’ of English literature, his ashes laid alongside the greats in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. His heart was buried separately, in his beloved Dorset, alongside the graves of the peasants he wrote about.

Even those whose careers were not as starry as Hardy's could expect to rise, and to enjoy a more comfortable life than their parents. The mid-Victorian, when Hardy was growing up, had clean water, macadamised (tarred) roads, a network of new railway lines and a better school education, culminating in the Education Acts of the 1870s, which ensured schooling for every child to the age of twelve, or thirteen in Scotland. There was social mobility. Dickens's career, for instance, is one of rags to riches and eternal fame. He could not have done it a hundred years earlier. He would have died, unknown to posterity, in rags.

But there were flies in the Victorian ointment. The south-western counties of Hardy's ‘Wessex’ were still, in the early 1800s, the ‘bread basket’ of England and the region prospered on the cereals it supplied to the nation. Then in 1846 came the repeal of the so-called Corn Laws. What that meant was international free trade. Wheat and other cereal crops could now be imported more cheaply from abroad. The region Hardy was born in, and loved, entered a long economic depression from which it has never entirely recovered. That depression infected Hardy and every word he wrote.

There were other flies in the ointment. Hardy felt the stuffing had been knocked out of ‘his’ world by a book published when he was nineteen years old: Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
(1859), with its closely-argued case for evolution. The British had always believed that theirs was ‘a nation under God’ but what if there was no God up there? Or it was not the benevolent God described in Genesis but a mysterious ‘life force’ with no particular interest in the human race? What if the system of belief on which the whole of life used to be based was simply not true?