The Fate of Melville’s Pierre

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Evergreen/Grove Press edition of 1957.  (I realize the disadvantage of using an edition other than the best current standard, but I assert my privilege as a blogger outside of academic settings, without a proper library.  For a professional journal, I should certainly take the trouble of using proper references.)

  

     Melville’s Moby Dick would be, I think, America’s greatest novel were it not that the book is so intellectual, so concerned with ideas and so often occupied with the sketching and the artful manipulation of those abstractions.  Huckleberry Finn is undeniably sentimental, its comic effects of the “lower” sort, but this pandering to popular taste, not only brought the author a mass audience; it enabled the book to represent America in a way that Melville, who was busy chasing clouds in the empyrean, never attempted.  While the reading public would have welcomed from him more passably realistic tales of seamen and cannibals like those of his early publications, he turned toward giving them dramas enacted primarily on the stage of the mind.  Yet to Melville ideas had form and scent and texture and among such sensations his passions roamed wild.

     To be sure, some reviewers had praised Moby Dick.  An early British review found the writing “always good, and often admirable,” displaying “fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime.”  Another, while condemning Melville’s “thrusts against revealed religion,” yet found Moby Dick fascinating, full of “flashes of truth” and “profound reflections,” concluding that the book goes “far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction. It is not a mere tale of adventures, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds.”  In Harper’s George Ripley lauded the book’s ability to “illustrate the mystery of human life,” calling it a success because of its “richness and variety of incident, originality of conception, and splendor of description,” and adding “that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.”

      Yet the book attracted devastating criticism as well.  Another British critic called it “ill-compounded disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English, a most provoking book to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise… trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.”  A New York publication considered Ahab’s portrayal “a perfect failure,” “and the work itself inartistic,” while, to another reviewer the book excelled in nothing but “examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English,” along with “rhetorical contortions, all his declamatory abuse of society, all his inflated sentiment, and all his insinuating licentiousness” [1]. 

     In the event, Moby Dick was a flop compared with Melville’s earlier books, selling only five hundred copies in the U. K. where it was first published and less than four thousand during Melville’s lifetime.   In a letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Melville expresses appreciation for her “flattering” admiration of Moby Dick.  He says he is “amazed” at her reaction, noting that “as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea” (a subject never condemned by his most hostile critics) and promising, with Pierre in mind, that “The next chalice I shall commend will be a rural bowl of milk.”  While the author may have felt that the new novel had greater sales potential, his publisher Richard Bentley was more skeptical.  He wrote Melville saying that he felt that “editorial changes” were “absolutely necessary” to Pierre’s being well-received when published. [2]

     Though he had suggested to Mrs. Hawthorne that the new book would be an appealing pastoral, his reassurance may have been mere politesse.   To his father-in-law he had written defiantly (though with prudent qualifications) “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail’.” [3]  He largely succeeded in this ambition, the natural consequences of offering his readers metaphysical speculation and rhetorical fireworks rather than adventure stories.  A popular modern critic notes, “This is arguably the least read work a major author ever wrote” while another flatly declares Pierre “Melville’s worst book.” [4].

     Apart from his distinctive style, Melville also made little compromise with the received ideas of his day in the implications of his themes.  Pierre is subtitled The Ambiguities and, far from laying out a finished world-view, the book presents a vision everywhere compromised and often misleading in which the author’s levels of irony are subtle, even indeterminable.  One theme is certainly a profound skepticism, compounded by an equally radical dialectical tendency. 

     The repeated suggestion that we are unable to know much of anything at all is accompanied by other passages on the apparent meaninglessness of what we might think we know.  These themes appear throughout the novel; a few examples will here suffice.  Thus, the world, at least to Pierre or our narrator, is “inscrutable” (172), a mystery “wholly hopeless of solution” (180), containing “enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim cannot resolve” (195).  Dwelling in “Cretan labyrinths” (245), we encounter “mysteries within mysteries” (200).  Indeed, all that we can see is that we cannot see.  “For as we blind moles can see, man’s life seems but an acting upon mysterious hints” (246).  In theistic terms “Silence is the only Voice of our God” (284).

     Further complicating the unknowability of things is the tendency of feelings, ideas, and impressions to slide into their opposites, their dialectical ambiguity.   Nature itself is ambiguous (16), and we walk in “a haze of ambiguities” (212).  Even a smile is nothing but a “vehicle of ambiguities” (117).  “Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness” (253).  Green signifies both new life and decay (9), sadness is “delicious” (73), Pierre is at once alive and dead (132), there is no distinction between knowing and not-knowing (410), and this world’s incompatibility with God is really correspondence with Him (297).  Such bipolar oppositions recur in every context: the two incompatible paintings of Pierre’s father somehow merge into each other (118), in a mysterious figuration the inmates of a mental hospital convert each other (170), Pierre “is learning to live by rehearsing the part of death” (425).

     In an oddly convoluted sentence the reader is told that the “peculiar” relationship between Pierre and Isabel could scarcely be understood “were there not here thrown over the whole equivocal, preceding account of it, another and more comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all minor ones in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only possible explanation for all the ambiguous details.” (312)  Does this not add up to (using the fourteenth century phrase) a “cloud of unknowing”?

     Inscrutable as life may be, Pierre is certain that he is caught up in an inescapable predetermined fate in which “all events” are “the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences” (92).  He directly envisions “those Three Weird Ones” who had woven his immutable life-course (96).  A prisoner of “Fixed Fate” (254), he feels primarily Fate’s cruelty or rather its terrifying indifference.  “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.  Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate, a mere heartless trader on men’s joys and woe.” (148)  Toward the book’s end, the plot is epitomized in the brief formula: Fate made Pierre a “desperado” (468).

     The protagonist, then, feels quite helpless, caught in the tides of destiny which, though they have no regard for human well-being, yet seem always to tilt toward the tragic.  In Pierre “all the ages of the world pass as in a manacled procession,” a continual “mournful mystery” (156).  Fate often seems positively hostile rather than impartial.   Henry A. Murray calls the book a "spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" [5], all the more dramatic a claim since Pierre’s deterioration into what looks very much like madness makes his story seem more a third-person study in psychopathology.  Yet Melville’s own subjectivity was not the only source of his or of Pierre’s pessimism.  His view was theoretically informed by his reading of Schopenhauer (the importance of whom is clear in his extensive notes on the philosopher) and by the Hindu and Buddhist texts both Schopenhauer and Melville’s Transcendentalist friends had read. [6]

     The attitudes represented in the book, however, arrive to the reader already complicated by multiple distancing.  Are the views expressed those of Pierre, of the narrator, of Melville, of everyone with open eyes?  The reader views truth through Pierre’s consciousness further refracted through the problematic prism of words, after filtering yet again through an omniscient narrator capable of piling irony upon irony in a text which repeatedly insists from the outset that knowing another person is impossible.  After all, in the test cases most significant to the protagonist, Pierre doubts both his father and Isabel. 

     Whatever the origins of Pierre’s profound pessimism, likely a compound of temperament, neurosis, and philosophy, his end is self-destruction.  The response of the text, though, is altogether different: a retreat into language, but language animated by a carnivalesque energy of all-but-redemptive vigor.  The sense that tragedy is held at bay or at times ameliorated by aesthetic display is ancient.  The chorus of Oedipus Tyrannos associates the very sight of a beautiful performance with an orderly explicable world.  [6] Whatever ruin encompasses Oedipus, the viewers of the play may feel protected by the poise and indeed the beauty of the lines of poetry. 

     Melville similarly erects a grand rhetorical structure, sufficiently lush to displease some critics.  The language is from the start literary, clearly removed from non-aesthetic uses.  Pierre opens with a scene of pristine countryside, praised for its still perfection which turns then into an altogether conventional love scene, followed by references to other writers.  Cooper is evoked by the description of an upstate New York ancestral estate, Poe by the peculiar incestuous love between Pierre and his mother (and later between him and his supposed sister), and Hawthorne in the references to earlier generations seizing of the land (5, 39).  One unmistakable sign  of literarariness is Pierre, Lucy, and Isabel’s regular use “thou,” much as the Romantics had done, though the word by the  nineteenth century was used only in dialect, in liturgical settings, and among the Society of Friends. 

     Melville feels free to insert bravura rhetorical set-pieces at liberty, among them the paean to love (45), address to a tree (55), address to “ye Invisibles” (150), the Memnon stone story (190), and the dream-vision of Enceladus (476).  The voice of Plotinus Plinlimmon whose very name trumpets his imaginary nature, intrudes with his lectures on “Chronometricals and Horologicals” (292).  Allusions beyond the opening tribute to American literature include mentions of Spenser (6), Dante (236), the Laccoön (257), Shelley (476, 480, 489), as well as language evoking Shakespeare (269, 444). 

     The introduction of Pierre’s celebrity as an author which has seemed a deformation to many readers is yet another way for Melville to insist on the literariness of his own text as well as allowing him to gripe about the contradictions of writing for a popular audience.  Any access to the reality of lived experience is mediated though still by a highly problematic transformation in to words.  Plain speaking will not do.  According to Pierre the quality of experience requires an “irregular sort of writing” (32) which justifies his persistence in his idiosyncrasy: “I write precisely as I please” (341).  Even granted such freedom novelists in general are said to be capable of nothing but “false, inverted attempts at systematising eternally unsystematisable elements” (198).  While Pierre finds Isabel’s “mystic” guitar-playing enthralling, it remains “eternally incapable of being translated into words” (393).  

     Yet, in spite of its limitations, the narrator assures the reader that “poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life” (191).  In the end, whether art can make Truth accessible or not, no one can deny that it is a distracting amusement, serving thus a value more profound than it seems.  “It us pleasant to chat; for it passes the time ere we go to our beds” (361).

     In one of the immense, interwoven, periodic flights of verbiage that periodically rise from the page, in a sentence running fifteen lines, “swayed” both by “the profound events that had lately befallen him” and by his need to raise some cash, Pierre proclaims his intention to write a book (394).  The combination of sublime and mercenary motives reminds the reader that the narrator’s earlier claim that he might, at least on occasion, “drop all irony” (358) is itself richly ironic.

     Pierre is a text made up of texts.  Art, which for some seems a means of penetrating appearances to a deeper reality, here is simply another mediation, a further refraction, a heightening of ambiguity, the nearest approach to reality, though profoundly insufficient.  Paradoxically, it is precisely because poetry can lie, that it can also speak the truth. 

     Pierre hurtles into an abyss opened through his own idealism, a sort of nineteenth century Don Quixote, a belated believer in ethics and in truth whose lofty values lead him astray, while other Americans grab for the main chance.  Poor Pierre is clinging to an apparently hostile deity as he is washed away in Fate’s flood.  The whole drama is enacted on a darkened stage on which the actors cannot quite make each other out and the audience is as often as not misled.  Once the tragic trajectory of the story-line is clear, the reader finds it at once agonizing and uplifting, resembling in a way grand opera, as Pierre sings lovely songs that mark his own ruin.  The verbal show as the hero collapses toward disaster sustains the reader who, lofted into imagination, walks in an elaborate and formal garden of language, the one controllable element in life.  If Pierre marches on to his own destruction, he does it on a pathway marked on every side with water-courses drawn from subterranean wells and fountains spouting from dolphins and mermen and ewers held by nymphs, accompanied by the soundtrack of a string quartet.  Should the stroller gazes at the sky, feux d'artifice blossom there.  The stage at the end of Pierre remains littered with corpses, but the scene has grandeur.  The final horror is mitigated if not denied by the masterful glory of the author’s language.  To adopt a more modest figure, whistling in the dark is whistling still.

 

   

1.  London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851; London John Bull, October 25, 1851; George Ripley, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December, 1851; Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25 1851; William Young, New York Albion, November 22, 1851; New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January, 1852; available online at https://bookmarks.reviews/the-original-1851-reviews-of-moby-dick/.

 

2.  Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville ed. 1960, to Richard Bentley, p. 151n; to Sophia Hawthorne, page 146. In this letter to his publisher, Melville suggests that the book might best be published anonymously or under a pseudonym.

 

3.   Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville ed. 1960, to Lemuel Shaw, p.92.  

 

3.  The first phrase is from Richard H. Brodhead, “The Book That Ruined Melville,” New York Times, January 7, 1996; the second from Darrel Abel, Democratic Voices and Vistas: American Literature from Emerson to Lanier, p. 412.

 

4.  Introduction, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, 1949.

 

5.  Among the many studies that explore the influence of Asian thought on Melville are Daniel Herman, Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick; Hemant Balvantrao Kulkarni, Moby-Dick, a Hindu avatar: a study of Hindu myth and thought in Moby-Dick; and Mark Backus, “Call Thee Ishmael” in Sophia Philosophia 1, iii.  For Schopenhauer, see melvillesmarginalia.org, edited by Peter Norberg and Steven Olsen-Smith.

 

6.  Lines 893-896 in Jebb’s translation: “For if such deeds [showing arrogance or disrespect to the gods] are held in honor, why should we join in the sacred dance?”

Notes on Recent Reading 34 (Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley)

The House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne)

     Hawthorne took the Gothic novel toward sublimity with this Protestant New England tale in which the role the supernatural plays in the plot while essential is always secondary to the moralizing. The modern reader may find Phoebe a bit cloying in her sweetness and Judge Pyncheon too vicious, but the narrative is gripping, the roots in American history are deep and authentic, and the rhetoric is a pleasure. Hawthorne has the leisurely way of old novelists of lingering over the trees or the weather and yielding to distraction by village side scenes, but these pauses are virtually all lyrical, and they build together to an image system that reinforces the whole in a way that few novelists can achieve. Though Phoebe, Holgrave, Hepzibah enjoy a happy ending,, sweeping even Uncle Venner with them, their unmixed bliss might ring hollow after the earlier concentration on sin which has generated the curse that oppressed the Pyncheons for generations. Their suffering occurs in a context of a town regularly portrayed as venal, gossipy, and ruled by selfish hypocrites. The economic theme of the ruling class oppressing the poor governs the conflict between Pyncheon and Maule even if it is magically dissolved by marriage in the end. Hawthorne provides as good an answer as most to the question of how one may live in an irretrievably fallen world. D. H. Lawrence found a “diabolical undertone” in The Scarlet Letter, and he would doubtless have sniffed the same sulfur in the Pyncheons’ Salem, but in fact Hawthorne was neither of the devil’s party nor on the side of the institutional angels. He was caught between, a dilemma that describes most of us, and there his strength lies.


The Herbert Huncke Reader (Huncke)

     Though I have been fascinated by the possibilities in life and literature offered by the Beat writers since my adolescence, I had never read Huncke. Having just finished this sizable, anthology, I don’t feel unhappy about my long neglect. Huncke is no stylist. Ginsberg’s praise of his writing illustrates generosity to an old friend more than a literary judgement. Yet I am susceptible, as were the Beats when they met him, to his outsider charm. As junkie, thief, and sexual hustler he is as demi-mondaine as they come. And he doesn’t make it easy for his buddies, lovers, or readers; he is completely upfront about his readiness to rip off whoever was available when he needed cash without worrying about hurting friends or strangers. Still, in the life he led he accumulated countless stories and he is a decent story-teller, leaving his narratives so unembellished that they seem as though they must be true. Readers with a taste for the scene will relish these tales from a very real and genuinely dangerous edge of experience. I would not have cared to go straight through, but in small doses most of his sketches have their rewards. Those who are fascinated by the Beat scene will find a great deal here, even if much is unprocessed. I will doubtless retell such moments as Bill Burroughs’ first taste of opiates. (Huncke suspected Burroughs of being a narc and noted his Chesterfield overcoat, already fifteen years out of style.)


A Modern Tragedy (Bentley)

     Phyllis Bentley was a bestselling author in Britain (and did very well in the USA) from the thirties through the fifties. Much of her fiction was centered in her region, the West Riding of Yorkshire where the textile trade dominated the economy and the author’s father was a mill owner. This 1934 novel, basically a love story about inadequate love, is shadowed by the Depression, and Bentley, though conservative in her sympathies, reveals considerable insider detail about the manufacturing processes of the industrial firms that produced cloth and the class structure that supported the economy. Characters are clearly sorted into upper class, among which one finds “proper” operators with old-fashioned integrity and a sharp dealer who does not shrink from fraud; middle class, striving to rise while fearing a fall. The workers, who include a fiery radical union activist reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, seem tacked on for the sake of completeness. The primary market for the book, of course, lay largely with the first two groups. While expressing distress at the suffering of the poor, for instance in Rosamond’s reaction to the hunger marchers, the novelist accepts the whole system and suggests that the left-wing Milner Schofield is an activist for reasons more psychological than political while the aged mill owner Henry Clay Crosland is morally exemplary. A few romances cross the upper and middle class lines; the workers are in this way neglected.
     I would not be as harsh as the Kirkus reviewer who, at the novel’s publication called it “weak in plot and unconvincing in characterization.” The prose is straightforward for the most part, ignoring the radical innovations in fiction that had appeared well before its publication. Bentley goes in more for moments of pathos or insight into character than for flights of rhetoric, but the story is well-designed with an opening scene that accumulates significance as the narrative proceeds. Walter’s descent into collusion with crime is quite believable, though I can’t swallow Tasker’s return to face prosecution. Not a bad read, this is the sort of book once called “middlebrow,” the sort that can still bring works of fiction to today’s market, glutted as it has become with self-help and glib celebrities.
     I suppose it is a sign of its lasting appeal that A Modern Tragedy survives in audiobooks today. Many critics seem to prefer Bentley’s earlier Inheritance.

Two Notes on Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance

1. The Idea of the Romance

     After the sixteenth century, entries in the OED define romance as a story very remote from ordinary life, “an extravagant fiction.” Though the very title of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance implies a fanciful unrealistic story, the novel, more than most, is entangled with the author’s biography and with the history and ideas of his time. The setting in a commune similar to Brook Farm, only one of hundreds of similar nineteenth century American experiments, has inspired considerable comment on the author’s motives for joining the community and on the era’s utopianism.
     This focus on Brook Farm by critics may slight other aspects of the novel. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the narration is the oblique construction of the character of the narrator, Miles Coverdale, surely to some extent a self-portrait. Though he is described as a mild, somewhat reticent poet of indifferent achievement, an observer more than anything else, it is within his soul that a psychomachia is staged. The book, like much of Hawthorne’s oeuvre, is deeply concerned with fundamental ethical questions and includes a diabolic figure in Westervelt without any counterbalancing savior. In addition Blithedale certainly fails as a Garden of Eden, for all that it has Adam, Eve, and Satan in attendance. In this fallen world, Coverdale imagines Zenobia “in Eve’s earliest garment” and notes her flower, said to signify pride. He observes Westervelt’s flaming pin and serpent-headed staff. In the grand attempt to reestablish Eden “…the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us to live in.” (Chapter 3) A reenactment of the fall then occurs, again through the temptations of a distracting female, as the men’s high ideals collapse into selfishness, lust, and ennui.
     D. H. Lawrence, in his brilliant Studies in Classic American Literature, accepts the polarity of good and evil, simply preferring to cheer for the other side. He considers this book as the work in which Hawthorne, the great writer of romances, “came nearest to actuality.” Of course for Lawrence what was real, what mattered, was not the history of his times, but rather a deep engagement with the gods within. To him Hawthorne was a “serpent,” a “demon,” in spite of his image as “a blue-eyed darling.” “You must look through the surface of American art and see what demons [its authors] were.” For Lawrence the book records the impossibility of salvation for those who have both lost the vision of the Heavenly Father and who fail to conform to their own nature, figured as the Holy Ghost.
     Lawrence’s counter-cultural eroticism may seem miles apart from Hawthorne’s belated Puritanism which, with all of its Biblical imagery, sometimes makes the reader feel momentarily adrift in some new adventure of Bunyan’s Christian, but the fact is that Lawrence’s lower-case gods comport well with Hawthorne’s troubled nineteenth century sensibility. His critique of his own society’s hypocrisy had a good deal in common with Hawthorne’s. The descent of the well-meaning intellectuals and artists of Blithedale is the more catastrophic as they plummet from the lofty height of their own set of principles. The high-minded Transcendentalist philosophers are seen “all going slightly rotten” through infidelity to their own natures which Lawrence has good fun calling “the Holy Ghost.” Lawrence’s sarcasm is too good to pass up. He says that Brook Farm is where “the famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber by the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp. . . . Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. . . .And all the music they made was the music of their quarreling.” As the spiritual and the psychological are for Lawrence as closely identified as they were for Hawthorne, his reading works admirably. (His essay ends with an anticlimactic finale ridiculing spiritualists which may yet retain some bite in this era of New Age charlatans.)
     The use of the term “romance,” as Hawthorne explains in his preface, is meant to allow a “conventional privilege,” to stray from the mimetic path,” which would otherwise require putting the work, as he says “side by side with nature.” He seeks instead a “strange enchantment,” but this is not inconsistent with the representation of lived experience. Indeed, his time at Brook Farm, he says, was “essentially a day-dream,” and, in his reminiscence, it has an air of exotic mystery and of adventure comparable to George William Curtis’s accounts of Egypt and Syria.
     But such a paradox is entirely consistent with Hawthorne’s quest for transcendence while working the manure pile. Lawrence mocks Hawthorne saying “I never felt more spectral” than while doing manual labor, but the fact is that Lawrence felt the same way about having sex. For him there is no contradiction between the spiritual and the carnal, only a need for balance. “Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit toward spirit, and body towards body in the joy of creation.” (“Love”)
     When the psyche is too far out of balance, drastic relief may be attractive. Coverdale shocks the reader when he says, “If I choose a counsellor, in the present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman.” (157) The reader may be excused for blinking momentarily and wondering whether the words were written by Hawthorne or by Allen Ginsberg yet both sought experience out of the common way in pursuit of a deeper, a truer experience


2. The Fall of Communes

     The most successful enterprise at Brook Farm was, not surprisingly, the school, which attracted students from a considerable distance. Like many more modern communes and back-to-the-land projects, the farm’s residents were educated members of the bourgeoisie lacking agricultural experience. Hawthorne generates comedy in the comments of the “uncouth” Silas Foster, the genuine Yankee farmer who directs the group’s farming activities. The account in Blithedale Romance provides a range of miscellaneous motives among the communards: Hollingsworth sees it as a pool for recruits for his own plans for the reform of felons, Priscilla is passively brought there, Coverdale himself has only the foggiest idea why he has come. Hawthorne himself according to his biographers, saw Brook Farm as the likeliest and most practical way he might support himself and a wife. The book would have been an unconvincing romance indeed if the social experiment had been represented as succeeding.
Most activists for social change are motivated by self-interest. Workers campaigned for unions, women for suffrage, and African-Americans for civil rights. Others, however, join in the struggle for progress out of sympathy, caritas or karuna , if you will. Early settlement houses were supported by affluent patrons, and people in the developed world donate money for the suffering children of poor regions they will never visit. Yet a third category is discernible as well: those who may be themselves comfortable, yet feel their own freedom is dependent making gestures at least directed toward moving society forward. I used to say in the sixties, “Liberals are motivated by compassion; radicals seek their own liberation.”
     A good part of the radicalism of intellectuals and artists arises from this last sort of motive. Apart from the obvious role of highly-educated revolutionary leaders such as Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Ho, the fact is that ever since the Romantic movement, a significant share of writers have been adversarial critics of the social order as they found it, mostly on the left but sometimes on the radical right. In my own era, and indeed in my own life, the American movement has been based in this group more than any other. While labor unions lost their broader social vision and became bureaucratized, and socialism has been forgotten by the proletariat, college-educated youth and veteran progressives have continued to campaign on feminist, environmental, and peace issues, and against imperialism in spite of their own often comfortable circumstances.
     Marx himself recognized the contradiction when he declined the presidency of the Internationale in favor of the candidacy of the cobbler George Odger. Part of what marks the gap between the left organizations of the 1930s and those of the 60s is that, apart from the African-American element, the later movement was composed for the most part of people of bourgeois origins. The founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron Statement (1960) declares at its outset, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” To its authors the “contentment amidst prosperity” one would have expected from American wealth in fact might “better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties.”
     George Ripley, at whose home the first meeting of the Transcendental Club was held, was a liberal Unitarian whose social ideals were shaped by his theological orientation, not his own exploitation. Even after Fourierism became the ideology of Brook farm, there was little attempt to shape the society at large. Members sought their own liberation in the supportive context if a group of the like-minded (as the Transcendentalists sometimes called themselves). If they could not alter the structure of society, they could at least feel convinced of their own righteousness. If they could not successfully challenge the growing capitalist power of their day, they could contend against factions of their own comrades.
     The history of communes indicates that those that lasted were most often those with authoritarian, often religious structure : the Amana Colonies, the Bruderhof, the Shakers (and the Farm and Lama among groups originating in the 1960s). Freer aggregations such as Brook Farm and Drop City were more short-lived, arising as they did from the conjunction of the politically radical with the intellectual and artistic elite, a distinguishing mark of the post-Romantic era. In the United States the socialist sympathies of advanced thinkers were recorded in Blithedale Romance, but the narrative contains also sufficient explanation for their failure to advance that cause. The fact that the author’s interests were far more moral and psychological than social goes far to explain why the experiment which he joined could not survive.

References are to the 1958 Norton paperback with an introduction by Arlin Turner.