Andrew Delbanco American literature: a vanishing subject? Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Some ½fty years after the political es- ber of men in the United States who tablishment of the United States, the are engaged in the composition of lit- concept of an American literature bare- erary works,” and he added justi½ably ly existed–an absence acknowledged that most of these are “English in sub- with satisfaction in Sydney Smith’s fa- stance and still more so in form.”1 mous question posed in 1820 in the Edin- Yet in every settled region of the new burgh Review: “Who in the four corners nation voices were raised to make the of the globe reads an American book?” case that a distinctive national literature The implied answer was no one. Anoth- was desirable and, indeed, essential to er twenty years would pass before this the prospects of American civilization. question was seriously reopened, along Literary production and learning were with the more fundamental question conceived as an antidote to, or at least a that lay behind it: whether a provincial moderating influence on, the utilitarian democracy that had inherited its lan- values of a young society where, as Jef- guage and institutions from the moth- ferson put the matter in 1825, “the ½rst erland did or should have a literature object . is bread and covering.” By 1837, of its own. Visiting in 1831, Tocqueville the most notable of the many calls for could still remark on “the small num- literary nationalism, Emerson’s Phi Be- ta Kappa oration at Harvard, with its fa- Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Profes- mous charge that “we have listened too sor in the Humanities at Columbia University, long to the courtly muses of Europe,” has been a Fellow of the American Academy was already a stock statement. By 1850, since 2001. He has written extensively on Amer- when Herman Melville weighed in ican history and culture, including books such as against “literary flunkeyism toward “The Puritan Ordeal” (1989), “The Death of England,” the complaint was a hack- Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense neyed one. of Evil” (1995), and “Required Reading: Why During this ½rst phase of national Our American Classics Matter Now” (1997). self-consciousness, there arose a corol- His latest publication is “Melville: His World lary critique of those few New World and Work” (2005). writers, such as Washington Irving, © 2006 by the American Academy of Arts 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, & Sciences vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 55–56. 22 Dædalus Spring 2006 who had achieved international recog- Then, as now, the chief business of American nition by copying Old World models– literary journalism was the construc- literature: a vanishing writers who, according to belligerent tion and destruction of individual rep- subject? democrats like Walt Whitman, imitated utations, though at stake throughout authors who “had their birth in courts” the nineteenth century were also more and “smelled of princes’ favors.” These general claims about how and what outbursts of nascent cultural pride tend- American writers should be writing. ed to take the form of shouts and slurs The essays of William Dean Howells, (Whitman spoke sneeringly of “the co- for instance, published as columns in pious dribble” of poets he deemed less The Atlantic and Harper’s and later select- genuinely American than himself ) rath- ed for his volume Criticism and Fiction Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 er than reasoned debate. They were anal- (1892), amounted to a brief for what ogous to, and sometimes part of, the Howells called “realism,” as exempli- nasty quarrels between Democrats and ½ed by his own ½ction. Frank Norris Whigs in which the former accused the (The Responsibilities of the Novelist [1903]) latter of being British-loving sycophants, and Hamlin Garland (Crumbling Idols and the latter accused the former of be- [1894]) proclaimed as universal the prin- ing demagogues and cheats. ciples of whatever ‘school’–“veritism” Literary versions of these political dis- for Garland and “naturalism” for Nor- putes played themselves out in the pages ris–they were committed to at the time. of such journals as Putnam’s Monthly Perhaps the only disinterested critic Magazine and The Literary World (New still worth reading from this period is York), The Dial and The North American John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), whose Review (Boston), The United States Mag- work belongs to the genre of the moral azine and Democratic Review (½rst Wash- essay in the tradition of Hazlitt and Ar- ington, then New York), and The South- nold. ern Literary Messenger (Richmond)–mag- But even such minor novelists as the azines that sometimes attained high lit- Norwegian-born H. H. Boyesen (1848– erary quality (in 1855, Thackeray called 1895) contributed occasional criticism Putnam’s “much the best Mag. in the that helped to enlarge the literary hori- world”). Most contributors to these zon. In Boyesen’s slight book of 1893, magazines had nothing to do with aca- Literary and Social Silhouettes, for example, demic life, such as it was in the antebel- lum United States. The literary cadres of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (a collec- to which they belonged developed ½rst tion of essays written between 1937 and 1962), in Boston; slightly later in New York; Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale (1956), and, more modestly, in Philadelphia, and Benjamin T. Spencer in The Quest for Na- Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. tionality (1957), have sketched the emergence Only a very few writers or critics, such of the literary profession in these years as part of the larger construction of American nation- as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom alism in the age of territorial expansion. More Harvard appointed to a professorship in recent scholars, such as James D. Wallace in 1834, maintained more than a tangential Early Cooper and his Audience (1985) and Mer- connection to any college. There were as edith McGill in American Literature and the yet no universities.2 Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), have deepened our understanding of the econom- ic dif½culties that writers without patronage, 2 Several mid-twentieth-century literary histo- and without much protection by copyright rians, notably William Charvat in The Profession law, had to overcome. Dædalus Spring 2006 23 Andrew he approved such now-forgotten writers derstanding of Civil War literature–ex- Delbanco on the as Edgar Fawcett and H. C. Bunner for pressed frank hostility toward academics humanities portraying “the physiognomy of New as hopelessly straitened and petty. York–the Bowery, Great Jones Street, Probably the most signi½cant body and all the labyrinthine tangle of mal- of American critical writing to date is odorous streets and lanes, inhabited by that of a novelist, Henry James, in the the tribes of Israel, the swarthy Italian, prefaces to the New York edition (1907 the wily Chinaman, and all the other –1909) of his ½ction as well as in his alien hordes from all the corners of the considerable body of literary journal- earth.” Novelist-critics like Boyesen and ism. “The Art of Fiction” (1888)– James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), James’s riposte to the English critic Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 an advocate of impressionism in paint- Walter Besant’s prescriptive essay about ing and music, were among many who the Do’s and Don’ts of ½ction-writing– tried, with a mixture of anxiety and ap- still has tonic power for young writers proval, to come to terms with the im- who feel hampered by prevailing norms pact of modernity on American life. and taste. And James’s 1879 study of Their critical writing, like their ½ction, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the ½rst signi½- was more descriptive than prescriptive, cant critical biography of an American more inquiring than inquisitorial–and writer, brings into view in a few pages therefore incipiently modern. the whole moral history of nineteenth- In short, forward-looking proponents century American culture. In that re- of American literary ideals tended to be markable book, we see how theological outside the academy. This has been so ideas were being displaced and how the from the era dominated by the Duyck- artist-observer could take pleasure in inck brothers, whose Cyclopedia of Amer- witnessing their displacement: ican Literature (1855) helped establish a It was a necessary condition for a man canon of major writers, through E. C. of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagina- Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), W. C. tion should take licence to amuse itself, Brownell’s American Prose Masters (pub- it should at least select this grim precinct lished in 1909 by Scribners, for whom of the Puritan morality for its play ground Brownell served for forty years as liter- . The old Puritan moral sense, the con- ary advisor), and Alfred Kazin’s On Na- sciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful tive Grounds (1942), a revelatory book by nature of our responsibilities and the sav- a young freelance book reviewer who, age character of our Taskmaster–these like his contemporary Irving Howe, things had been lodged in the mind of a did not take a permanent academic job man of Fancy, whose fancy had straight- until late in his career. The author who way begun to take liberties and play tricks emerged in the twentieth century as the with them–to judge them (Heaven for- central ½gure of nineteenth-century give him!) from the poetic and aesthetic American literature, Herman Melville, point of view, the point of view of enter- was championed mainly by critics work- tainment and irony.