Ken Burns' American Revolution

 

     With The American Revolution everyone’s favorite documentary maker Ken Burns (aided by co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt) has done it again.  The series is entertaining and enlightening, using judiciously researched words, often from correspondence, and a wide variety of images to relate the story of this country’s struggle for independence.  The sound track is too often cloyingly nostalgic or elegiac (as it was in The Civil War) and might have used more eighteenth century tunes, and the visuals suffer from the fact that photography was yet in  the future, leading to the frequent repetition of certain portraits (such as Benedict Arnold’s) as well as an overuse of maps (though they are informative in reporting of battles).  In spite of such quibbles, the programs remain eminently watchable for their entire twelve hours. 

     And even the reasonably well-read non-historian will learn a few things.  Though every school child knows of loyalists, the traditional nationalist story of our origins is slow to admit to what an extent the Revolution was a civil war.  This has led to a vague but satisfying notion that the fight was us against them and to the suppression of incidents of vigilante action like the sadistic treatment of customs official John Malcolm who in 1774 was twice tarred and feathered.

     The most significant revelation was perhaps the fact that both enslaved Africans and native peoples had reason to expect better treatment from the British than from the colonists, leading some members of these groups to choose to fight on the side of George III.  For their own strategic reasons, even before the Americans had risen in arms, Britain had sought to minimize conflict with the indigenous tribes by forbidding settlers to cross the Appalachians.  On the other hand many Americans had significant interest in westward expansion, some in order to gain land of their own and some, who had been in a position to secure a claim to western lands, to realize huge profits.  George Washington was a leading example of this second group. 

     While the Southern colonies blocked early abolitionist attempts in the Constitutional Convention, and the issue was divisive even in the North, the British army offered freedom to enslaved persons who escaped to their lines and enlisted in their cause and a good many accepted the opportunity.  Both Indians and African-Americans pursued their own interests, just as colonists and English were doing, though both non-white groups were to suffer long past this country’s founding; indeed, neither has achieved equality yet today. 

     Further, Burns makes it clear that the rebels might never had won the war had it not been for the support of France and, to a far lesser extent, Spain.  Not because they supported the ideals of the revolution, but purely due to their centuries-old rivalry with Great Britain, these European powers played a significant role in convincing the English Parliament that they should settle this dispute in order to deploy their forces elsewhere to defend their expanding empire.   

     Some of our patriotic clichés survive.  The fact is that the American Revolution was the first major rejection of monarchy and feudalism, though the British king had lost significant authority in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  In spite of baronial Southern planters, much of America’s leadership was in the hands of middle-class tradesmen -- a silversmith, a brewer, a printer.  As long as land remained available, if one does not consider the fate of its aboriginal inhabitants, a new arrival who had nothing in Europe might become a property holder here and, before long, could aspire to gentility.  Eliminating birthright aristocrats may have made America seem crude and vulgar to some two hundred and some years ago, but it was a step forward in human rights.

     The viewer gets a lively sense of the significance of George Washington’s contribution.  His demeanor alone impressed everyone as noble and dignified, encouraging all to defer to him.  His giving up first the supreme military authority and then the presidency, though it was only to return to trying to amass a greater fortune through business dealings, was rare and praiseworthy among revolutionary leaders. 

     And the rebellion of people, most of whom were in more or less adequate circumstances but who were inspired by a call to liberty indicates what power the concept had in those days when it was so exciting and new.  Ken Burns’ The American Revolution seems timely indeed at a time when many Americans seem to be turning toward authoritarianism and it is necessary once more to raise the banner militantly declaring that in America we want no kings.

Frances Trollope: The Triumph of Snobbery

 

 

I used the 1949 Borzoi edition edited by Donald Smalley with excellent introduction, notes, and index.  How nice to see such a volume from a trade publisher!  Parenthetical notes provide page references to this edition, some of these providing the source for several successive quotations.  For the convenience of those with other editions, I append a list of the page numbers cited in parentheses matched to the chapters in which each quotation may be found.

 

     Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) fed British curiosity about the United States.  Her book sold well, ameliorating for a time her chronic financial straits.  She shared with her predecessor Capt. Basil Hall who had published Travels in North America in 1829 and her follower Capt. Frederick Marryat whose Diary in America appeared in 1839 a satirical view, mingling more or less informative descriptions with lampoons of American behavior calculated to flatter Old World readers.    

     Trollope deployed modesty tropes to deny her ambition to do anything beyond a journalistic recording what was before her eyes.  How could a lady like herself be expected to critique economics or even to write a professionally florid rhetoric?  Though this pose is faux naïf considering her constant wry irony and arch commentary, she did sketch recognizable features of American life which have little changed since her day. 

     She repeatedly stresses Americans’ obsession with money, noting how pursuit of wealth is the universal goal and the sole index of success.  She showily deplores this single-minded fascination with money which leads naturally to a philistine indifference to the arts.  She readily concedes American “activity and perseverance in all kinds of speculations, handicraft, and enterprise, which promise a profitable pecuniary result.”  An Englishman who had long lived in the United States tells her he never heard an American conversation which did not include the word “DOLLAR” (her capitalization).  “This sordid object,” she goes on, “must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind,” which she proceeds to prove by examples Yankee sharp dealing.  (301)   

     A critic might note that much of the world is likewise chasing after prosperity, but for Mrs. Trollope life in the United States was next to unendurable, though she endured more than three years in this country.  According to her, much of the landscape was literally under a miasma, resulting in chronic “ague and fever.” (33)  Cincinnati in particular she found “far from healthy.” (84)  Walking in woodlands, she finds not beauty but “congeries of leaves that have been rotting since the flood” which “infect the air.” (42)  She describes small farmers as living in barbaric isolation like Polyphemus suffering material want and a total lack of social relations, all of which they accept gladly simply in order to avoid ever saying, “God save the king!” (49-50)  “Never,” she says, has she seen “human nature reduced so low.” (21)

     Whether rural Americans were in fact different from peasants in any part of the world is surely questionable.  However, Trollope did accurately identify two central contradictions at the base of this country: the treatment of native peoples and of Africans and their descendants.  She refers to Indian policy as “base, cruel, and most oppressive,” “treacherous and false almost beyond belief” (221) and denounces the “avarice and intemperance of the white men” in dealing with the aboriginal tribes. (330)

     On the issue of slavery, she had come to America considering this “peculiar institution,” as Calhoun called it,  “essentially wrong,” (186) a sentiment she shared with many of her fellow-countrymen since the United Kingdom had turned from being the greatest engine of the slave trade to its greatest opponent.  Treating people as chattel, she realized, “strikes painfully against every feeling of justice, mercy, or common humanity.” (246)  Anti-slavery motifs are prominent as well in her novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836).

     Yet her attitude toward the monstrous institution is ambivalent, consistently muted and often undercut by her own words.  She makes light of her own sentimental sympathy for the first slave she encounters, musing “How very childish does ignorance make us!  and how very ignorant we are upon almost every subject, when hear-say evidence is all we can get!” (9)  Presumably with little experience of the treatment of field workers, she declares that “the condition of domestic slaves . . . does not appear to be bad.” Their owners often give them “much kindly attention.”  Not only are they “tolerably well fed, and decently clothed,” “rarely exposed to the lash, and . . . carefully nursed in sickness,” they receive these benefits in spite of the fact that their mode of living “seems a matter of great indifference to them.” (245) 

     She praises the “sedulous attention” with which underlings look after her in slave states, (185) making a dramatic contrast her experience of free American hired help whom she finds impossible, “poor wretches” tormented as by “a sore, angry, and wakeful pride.”  She concluded that her servant was miserable because she had “heard a thousand and a thousand times that she was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women, too.” (53-4)

     Thus the root of America’s problems is, for Trollope no mystery.  She traces all of the country’s ills, its deficiencies in the arts and education, its vulgarity, so repulsive to her finer sensibilities, to the democratic form of government.  In her view “common sense” revolts at the “mischievous sophistry,” that “false and futile axiom” “all men are created equal.”  For this fatal national foundation she blames Thomas Jefferson whom she rightly labels a hypocrite for his keeping slaves (and with them engendering children). (71)  His “hollow and unsound” doctrines “would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.” (316)

     However, her political point is misleading.  In fact her fundamental criticism is less political than social and aesthetic, though the causes are mingled since for her Americans’ disagreeable manners arise from their ill-advised system of government. 

     In part of course Trollope’s attitudes are national ones, arising from British pride and suggesting the superiority often claimed for Europe over the young country, reinforced by British rivalries in the Revolution and the War of 1812.  Her argument for a stratified, even a semi-feudal, society is one that many, including some Americans, would have made in her era.  The issue of democratic reform was certainly much discussed in the United Kingdom. The Reform bill of 1832 had expanded the franchise by fifty percent, but, as a net worth of £10 remained a requirement, more than four-fifths of the male population still could not vote, and agitation continued, sometimes violently repressed.   Those favoring more progressive political ideas often looked across the Atlantic, while those defending the status quo found negative examples in the same place. 

     While hers may have seemed the voice of the ordinary respectable Briton, her own class status was more unstable than her readers probably suspected.  The daughter of a clergyman, she had been well-educated and made a middle-class marriage to a barrister, yet she was never wealthy, and, when her husband proved a failure both in his law practice and his attempts to farm some leased property, the family found themselves in serious financial straits.  More than once they were evicted, with sheriff’s agents dragging their belongings to the street.  Following the American sojourn, the Trollopes moved permanently to the Continent to escape debt collectors and imprisonment.

     Frances Trollope soon realized that she would be more likely than her husband to generate a decent income, and her residence in the United States was part of a scheme to launch a business on the Western frontier.  Though the shop did not last long, her book turned out to be her salvation, proving so popular that she was able to continue writing and in  fact to support herself with her pen, eventually publishing something like a hundred volumes and in her later years enjoying a prominent position among the English expatriates in Florence. 

     Frances Trollope, though, disclaimed political theory.  “I am in no way competent to judge the political institutions of America, and, if I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a women, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to reason back from effects to their causes.”  (47)  Nonetheless, she thought a tour of the United States would be enough to cure any English radical of sedition.  (44)

     With such decidedly anti-democratic attitudes, she seems an unlikely emigrant, but she arrived under the influence of Frances Wright and, less directly, Robert Owen, whose principles were nothing short of radical.  Her horror at the sight of the ramshackle Nashoba Commune (which she had referred to as Miss Wright’s “estate” [14]) arose not from Wright’s egalitarian ideals which entailed utopian socialism, free love, and rejection of Christianity, but the “desolation” (27) and lack of fresh food.  Apart from the expectation of making money by establishing a business on the Western frontier, she had liked the idea that her children could be educated at her friend’s school free of charge.  Though she ridicules Owen and others associated with the New Harmony Commune such as William Maclure and Mme. Fretageot (10) and found even her dear friend Frances Wright in the wilds of America to have nothing whatever in common with “the Miss Wright I had known and admired in London and Paris” (27), she seemed to feel no reservations about casting her lot with them. 

     If her class pride served her poorly in Nashoba where she rebelled against a diet of corn bread and rain water (28), it likewise proved her undoing in Cincinnati.   Without going into the details that biographers have recorded, it is sufficient here to say that she stumbled from one project to another, meaning to earn her living by her taste.  She became involved with the Western Museum, an institution that mixed natural history exhibits with side show attractions, becoming a key figure in designing one of its more popular exhibits, a room-size view of Hell populated by wax figures of the damned.  This show ran for twenty-five years, often the prime support of the Museum.  Another exhibit that appealed to the taste of the town was the “Invisible Girl,” voiced by her son Henry, posing as a spirit who would speak to paying visitors.  Located at the end of a spooky corridor, the “Invisible Girl” supported the Museum for decades. 

     Saying that Cincinnati needed a dome, Trollope invested her family’s limited resources in constructing on Third Street an exotic edifice which included Moorish and Egyptian decoration as well as a dome.  In a city where livestock ran in the streets, e she meant to establish a cultural center with a coffeehouse, an “elegant Saloon” for refreshments, a bar room, an exhibition gallery, and a ballroom, as well as a bazaar for upscale goods.  Perhaps she was not as sharp a trader as she describes Americans as being, but her entrepreneurial effort was unsuccessful, and the establishment closed.  She continued to try to make her artistic judgement marketable.  She staged musical and dramatic events, always thinking that she could be the missionary, bringing fashion and beauty to a benighted region.

     As with others clinging to gentility by their fingertips, for Trollope social forms became exceedingly important.  All she had was her education, her wit, her taste and refinement which she emphasizes at every opportunity.  To her democracy’s worst sin is its ugliness.  Her recoil from her crude surroundings is the sign of her superiority.  Ignoring the brutal lives of English workers at the time, she is horrified at their American cousins.  To her it is the “higher” human wants (45) which cannot be satisfied in the United States due to the people’s “lack of refinement.” (47).   It is civilized leisure that she looks for in vain.  “I never saw people who lived so much without amusement as the Cinncinatians”; it is a “triste little town,” (74) she says, deploying her French as evidence of her own cultivation.   She wonders encounters a German woman who laments, “They do not love music.  Oh no!  and they never amuse themselves, -- no, and their hearts are not warm . . .they have no ease.” (266)  She wonders how, in such a barbaric place, taste might ever be formed.  “How can a correct and polished style, even of speaking, be acquired?” (328)  Alas, she concludes Americans have certainly “not the same besoin of being amused.” (339)

     Her fundamental objections are matters of taste.  She attacks America for its want of “polish” (46) and “chivalry,” “the unbought grace of life.” (257)  Though an American can satisfy animal wants “profusely” and “at a very easy rate,” “there is no charm, no grace.”  “I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.”  (45) 

     With almost shocking ease, she looks past the monstrous historical inequities to conclude that the single most offensive aspect of American life is the men’s “incessant, remorseless” use of chewing tobacco.  (16)  To her the habitual use of this “loathsome herb” has literally deformed the faces of Americans’ lips, lending them a “remarkable peculiarity.” (234)  Adding to the Americans’ grotesque appearance is the sprawling posture in which they dispose themselves over chairs and other furniture, sitting in “the most unseemly attitudes” (226) even in settings where greater gentility might be expected such as the theater or even the Congress. 

     When her fellow passengers on a riverboat are not “gambling and wrangling,” (17) they eat dinner with a “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth with a pocket knife.” (18-19)  She finds her  steamboat accommodations worse than “the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs.” (16)

     Just as the problem with democracy in her view is not so much that it is unworkable or unjust as that it produces ugliness.  Similarly, she is horrified at fundamentalist religious practices, describing with horror, revivals, camp meetings, and prayer sessions in private homes.  She finds the religious enthusiasm he observes in America to be “frightful” (80) and “detestable” (81).  A service makes her “sick with horror” (172).  To her the guarantee of respectability offered by a national church more than compensates for any loss of freedom of conscience.  She simply finds American spirituality to be in poor taste.     

     For a good portion of her career Frances Trollope might have seemed a prisoner of her class identity, stubbornly looking for something in the United States that the country did not offer.  Everywhere she looked, the sights of the Western frontier disgusted her.  She was attracted to a life-style she could often not afford and, while ridiculing the taste of Cincinnatians who could not appreciate true works of art, she nonetheless curated shows of hokey magic and wax figures to try to turn a profit.  Yet her snobbery triumphed in the end.  It was specifically her distaste for the rough raw life she saw around her that made her Domestic Manners of the Americans a best-seller, and launched her on a very productive and sufficiently profitable writing career and landed her eventually where she had always wanted to be, in a fashionable set of her fellow-countrymen in the prestigious and highly artistic city of Florence. 

    

 

 

 

 

The following list identifies the chapter in which each of the cited page numbers is located in the Borzoi edition.

14 II

16 II

17 III

18-19 III

21 III

27 III

33 IV

42 IV

44 V

45 V

46 V

47 V

49-50 V

53-4 VI

71 VII

74 VIII

84 IX

186 XVII

221 XX

226 XX

234 XX

246 XXII

257 XXIII

266 XXV

301 XXVIII

316 XXIX

328 XXIX

330 XXIX

339 XXX

John Brown Speaks to Us

 John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois

      W. E. B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown, though it relies on first-hand and documentary sources, is less a work of historical scholarship than a passionate polemic first published at a critical moment in American history.  Even as the mythic Lost Cause ideology was developing and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erecting monuments in courthouse squares and city parks throughout the South, the NAACP was formed and Du Bois published this biography. [1]

      The book contains a detailed and sympathetic account of Brown’s career and includes lengthy quotation from writings by his family members and associates.  The reader can see not only the vicious motives and tactics of the slave-owners, but also the fragmented rivalry of those on the side of freedom.  In Du Bois’ account it is clear that Brown’s moral clarity, couched throughout his life in the rhetoric of the Separate Baptist Church in which he had been raised, was shared by very few Americans before the Civil War.  The greater part of those who opposed the expansion of slavery did so because they wished to avoid the competition of slave labor with free or because they supported the political sway of the North over the South.  Even among those who argued against slavery itself, a good many benevolent souls such as those in the American Colonization Society supported not integration but the return of slaves to Africa or their settlement in a new country in Central America. 

     One reason that few shared the “clear, white light” of Brown’s moral certainty is that, for all their charitable feeling, most white Americans kept their Black brethren at arm’s length.  Brown recalled from his childhood an incident in which he received hospitality in a householder’s home as he drove his father’s cattle to market.  There he met a Black slave of his own age who impressed him as “fully if not more than his equal,” yet who was treated harshly by his owner.  This personal acceptance was apparent in Brown’s adult life as he consistently practiced social equality, inviting Blacks into his home and visiting in theirs, informally adopting a Black son, and seeking to include Black collaborators in his work. 

     Brown is an excellent example of a man who sought progressive change, not out of pity but because he considered their freedom a necessary precondition for his own.  His education had been primarily from the Bible, and Biblical values and language were woven throughout his own thinking.  This orientation was not only in tune with broadly shared American standards at the time, but religion’s claim to universal authority is appropriate since slavery, like murder and the oppression of women, is condemned by virtually all modern moral standards.  Brown’s prophetic voice, while thoroughly Christian, can still appeal to all.

    For those who contemplate a life like Brown’s, historical fact and partisan view may be considerably entangled.  Du Bois clearly has an interest in maintaining not only that Brown was sane (if fiercely single-minded) but also that his plan to attack the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry had a reasonable prospect of success. [2]  Whether this point of the plot’s practicality is so or not must remain controversial and speculative, but for the modern reader the point is that Brown’s opposition to slavery was exemplary and his zeal cannot be faulted. 

     John Brown tells us that the price of repression is greater than the price of freedom, that violence is far more pernicious when it is institutional and habitual than when it is a matter of an evil-tempered individual.  Every day that the slave system persisted people became inured to its crimes against humanity, more accepting of its outrages, and thus more brutalized.  A more or less benevolent master remains a master.  In Brown’s opinion the solution must lie, not in the reformation of individuals as John Woolman had attempted in the eighteenth century, but in the alteration of society.  To allow an exploitative system like slavery, or, one might add, colonialism or capitalism, to continue is to sanction violence whether or not one is personally wielding the whip.  Lincoln eloquently argued in his Second Inaugural that the moral debt of slavery was always increasing and, painful though it be, must in the end be paid.  “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"  Now, long after the Civil War, after the attempts by racists to perpetuate injustice have produced a hundred and fifty years of violence, lynchings, Jim Crow, and daily exploitation and repression, the cost is evident to all, and still rising. 

     Brown tells us, then, that the time to act is now.  Hesitation is complicity.  No shrewd calculation of odds can alter the facts that racism is wrong, that its ill effects consistently harden and deepen, and that it entails consequences that spare no one. [4]  Others may be depended upon to criticize, to temporize, to offer only financial support, but some feel called to take action.  Further, Brown speaks for the harder truth of his own day, that slavery’s foes must use “any means necessary,” and the price it seemed could be payable only in blood. [5]  He had abandoned the faith in political pressure and moral suasion to which his friend and associate Frederick Douglass still clung.  He sought to have a wider effect than Harriet Tubman had managed with her daring raids. (Tubman, in fact, supported Brown, joined with him in planning the assault on Harpers Ferry, and during the war served in the Union army.)   

     Du Bois seems to be straining just a bit when he enumerates the positive effects of the raid in spite of its military defeat.  He quotes Douglass: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he at least began the war that ended slavery.”  Du Bois argues that his raid aroused the slave population leading to incidents of rebellion and presaging the hundreds of thousands of Black recruits that served in the United States Army.  The fear of insurrection from within and the conviction that Brown had brought a mere taste of the potential for armed Northern intervention created a sense of crisis that, Du Bois argues, hastened the conflict.  Finally, he says, Brown presented a moral dilemma to Americans in the most fundamental terms.  People heard of a good, indeed a Christian man, who sacrificed himself out of love for others, killed by the advocates of a system built on the sins of greed, cruelty, and lust. [6]       Few would question that Brown’s actions shifted the political parameters in his day.  Whereas anti-slavery propagandists had seemed the South’s chief antagonists, they now had to deal with the fact of armed opposition.  Just as the rise of Black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (later Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) made the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King seem suddenly more acceptable, even those who did not approve of Brown’s actions became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, so his actions had a clear effect of hastening the end of slavery.

     Though many moderns may lack the fire and the courage of “the old man,” as he was often called in the days of his greatest action, he clearly advanced the cause of freedom.  Brown’s passion for justice is inspiring, and much of his analysis remains viable today.   Today, no less than in his era, racism remains a great evil, the pursuit of racial justice continues, and the movement’s most vigorous partisans feel as he did that action is imperative regardless of short-term consequences, whether for the nation or for the activist.  One need not share the rhetoric of Brown’s Calvinist theology to applaud his militance.  Right is right.

 

1.      1.  The book was published in 1909.  My copy is an International Press edition from 1962 including comments by Du Bois indicating his view of the book’s relevance after almost half a century.  It remains no less useful now when the work is more than twice as old. 

 

2.      2.  He claims that the primary reason for the defeat of Brown’s party, small though it was, was the failure of the timely arrival of supplies from the farm a few miles distant.

 

3.      3.  Lincoln had long been a supporter of such plans.  One hears little these days about his plan to establish Lincolnia, an African-American colony in the Chiriquí Province of Panama which foundered in the face of opposition by Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

 

4.      4.  The murder rate among both white and Black remains highest in the states of the Deep South, for instance, where slavery was most brutal.

 

 5.     5.  I am reminded of the turn from its fifty years of pacifism taken by the African National Congress in 1960.

 

6.      6.  I find a parallel in the effect of photographs of early civil rights demonstrations in journals like Life and Look.

Notes on Recent Reading 38 (London, Vonnegut, Cather)

John Barleycorn (London)

London’s account of his lifelong use of alcohol is at the same time a revealing story of the economic conditions of his youth, reminding the reader yet again of how recently a person could work hard in America and yet suffer genuine need. He takes one strenuous and unrewarding job after another, including an illegal entrepreneurial venture as an “oyster pirate” on his own boat at the age of fifteen. His physical powers and discipline are not quite enough to lift him from the slough, but his mind can. He becomes radicalized, and eventually manages to acquire the rudiments of education. After very little time he is selling short stories and lands a book contract. In what seems temporarily almost a fairy tale denouement he acquires not just comfortable but substantial wealth, and establishes his estate in the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma County.

The narrative has in part the outline of a simple success story more inspirational than those of Horatio Alger that were popular in London’s youth and more real since it was not through charity or accident but his own energy and ability that he rose, but the author is pursued by a demon. He is stalked at every turn by John Barleycorn who, as he says, appeared everywhere that “chesty” men gathered, eventually weakening him and doubtless hastening his death. He is so clear-sighted about alcohol’s seductive power that he wishes to be rescued by circumstance. For this reason London enthusiastically supports women’s suffrage, certain that voting women will bring about Prohibition, which would redeem him whether he assented or not.

The book is a candid report of an individual’s addiction, and, as a study of chemical dependence, London’s evasions are as significant as his admissions. He insists countless times that he is not constitutionally or physically an alcoholic but succumbed due to alcohol’s accessibility, particularly on the “adventure-road” of masculine milieux. At the book’s end, he confidently reports his having overcome the temptation to overindulge as well as his tendency to “pessimism,” his term for depression. Essential as it is to a self-help book, London’s biographers would term that a rosy view.


Deadeye Dick (Vonnegut)

In those days when Vonnegut star was rising, I half-way tried to keep up with contemporary fiction, but I tended to prefer Barthelme and Barth and Coover. I was never taken by Vonnegut, though he was popular among the youth of my generation, and I certainly applauded his tendencies to pop culture, left-wing politics, and the counterculture. His vogue, after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, transformed his career, but his work never attracted much of my attention.

Reading Deadeye Dick now, I feel still dull to Vonnegut’s appeal. The book seems like a series of little routines, the more satisfying of which end with a snap something like a damp firecracker. The author’s considerable inventiveness rarely goes beyond what Coleridge might have called fancy. Reflecting this fact, his prose is simple and colloquial, matter-of-fact even while relating dramatic events.

Admittedly, this attitude consistently maintained through an accumulation of sketches amounts in the end to a Weltanschauung, which I would describe as a sort of youthful wonder at all things more or less equally, which, for this reader, eliminates the better part of the wonder. Perhaps I am too much reminded of the late sixties overuse of “wow.” (Its epigone “awesome” is flourishing, I believe, yet today.)



Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather)

Willa Cather’s last novel is her only work set in Virginia, the state of her birth. She is said to have based the central incidents of the story on whispered family lore she overheard from her elders. In the epilogue a first person narrator suddenly appears whom one might well take to be the author.

Cather’s descriptive prose is straightforward and quite precise. Descriptions of the changing seasons form a sort of lyric interlude every now and then in an episodic novel. Lit by righteous indignation overt slavery eighty years after abolition, she does deserve credit for making her case nuanced and engaging.

She is not portraying the plantation slavery more common in literature. In the western part of Virginia, in the hills among poor and struggling whites, Sapphira’s inherited slaves brought her not social prestige but her neighbors’ distrust. Her husband himself is opposed to slavery, but does not wish to make problems or diminish his wife’s wealth, so he does nothing. When he does raise the possibility of manumission to a slave who serves as his skilled assistant, the man asks to remain in servitude. Nancy, the slave “girl,” is virtuous but sufficiently boring to be annoying, though the reader can only be pleased that she comes to a good end.

Rather than description or theme, the real triumph of the book is the development of the character of Sapphira, whom one encounters as a snobbish and suspicious woman. Despite her social pretensions and her often small-minded and self-interested actions, the reader comes to appreciate her dignity and strength and to realize that, of course, she, too, has emotional capacity. Her bearing through her crippling dropsy and her approaching death make her in the end a hero, a feat that might have seemed unlikely after the first fifteen or twenty pages of the book.