The Libertarian Review March 1980 - Libertarianism.org

20fully reflect the old-the English. "Neither Poe nor Whitman,"says Mencken, "made the slightest concession towhat was the predominant English taste, the prevailingEnglish authority, of his time. And neither yielded in theslightest to the maudlin echoes of English notions that passedfor ideas in the United States.... What happened?Imprimis, English authority, at the start, dismissed themloftily, they were, at best, simply rare freaks from the colonies.Secondly, American stupidity, falling into step, camenear overlooking them altogether."Poe, of course, never really ran any risk of going entirelyunnoticed. But as Mencken argues, though "itis true enoughthat he enjoyed, during his lifetime, a certain popular reputation,... that reputation was considerably less than the fameofmen who were much his inferiors.... Not many native criticsof respectable position would have ranked him clearlyabove, say, Irving or Cooper, or even above Longfellow, hisold enemy. A few partisans argued for him, but in the main,as Saintsbury has said, he was the victim of 'extreme and almostincomprehensible injustice' at the hands of his countrymen.It is surely not without significance that it took tenyears to raise enough money to put a cheap and hideoustombstone upon his neglected grave, that it was not actuallyset up until he had been dead twenty-six years, that no contemporaryAmerican writer took any part in furthering theproject, and that the only one who attended the final ceremonywas Whitman."Whitman himself met with little better. "Nothing, indeed,"says Mencken, "could be more amazing than the hostilitythat surrounded him at home until the very end of hislong life. True enough, it was broken by certain feeble mitigations.Emerson~ in 1855, praised him-though later veryeager to forget it and desert him.... Alcott, Thoreau, Lowelland even Bryant, during his briefBohemian days, were politeto him. A group of miscellaneous enthusiasts graduallygathered about him.... But the general tone of the opinionthat beat upon him, the attitude of domestic criticism, wasunbrokenly inimical; he was opposed by misrepresentationand neglect. 'The prevailing range of criticism on my book,'he wrote in "A Backward Glance on My Own Road" in 1884,'has been either mockery or denunciation-and ... I havebeen the marked object oftwo or three (to me pretty serious)official buffetings.' 'After thirty years of trial,' he wrote in"My Book and I," three years later, 'public criticism on thebook and myself as author of it shows marked anger andcontempt more than anything else.' "And the story was not far otherwise with Hawthorne orMelville or Emerson or Thoreau. Everyone of these menconsciously confronted the issue of literary nationalism, theissue ofwhether it was wiser to court popularity and criticalacclaim by slavishly imitating the English·or to risk literaryignominy by trying to capture a distinctively Americanflavor in his writing, and every one ofthem lost by his choice.Hawthorne endured penury and neglect for 20 years whileproducing, in certain of the short stories collected asTwice-Told Tales (1837, 1842) and Mosses From an OldManse (1846), a distinctively American and original fiction.When, at the age of 46, finally, belatedly, he began producingnovels in the approved English manner(s) - the first ofthese, a gothic historic with an American setting called TheScarlet Letter (1850) made his name and his fortune and thesecond, a gothic called The House of the Seven Gables(1851), made both all over again-it is not difficult to guesshis motives. He had been denying himself too long. Melvillelaunched his career with a series ofseafaring adventure talesin the approved English manner- Typee (1846), OmooTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW(1847), Redburn (1849), and Whitejacket (1850)-and hadachieved a not inconsiderable criticaland popular followingwhen, in 1850, he read Hawthorne's Mosses from an OldManse and became converted, so to speak, to American literature.The fiction he wrote after this conversion-including,of course, his great transitional work, Moby Dick(1851), although Pierre (1853), Israel Potter (1856), ThePiazza Tales (1856) and The Confidence Man (1857),are insome ways even more genuinely American-destroyed hiscareer in the space of a mere seven years. He who had beenan established and popular professional writer found himselfunable to support his family by his pen; he who had wonthe praise of all the critics saw his books go unnoticed andunreviewed. "Seldom," says Willard Thorp in his article onMelville in the Literary History ofthe United States, "has asuccessful author dropped so suddenly from his pinnacle offame."The case of Emerson and his protege Thoreau is a morespecialized one, but no exception to the rule. It is specializedchiefly in that it presents us with two bodies of work whichmust, for certain historical purposes at least, be thought ofasone. Emerson himself did not want for popular or critical acceptance.As has been noted, he made a sensation in 1837with his demand that America free herself from cultural andintellectual bondage to England; and from that time on, hisfame and influence only grew. Yet, as Mencken has argued,his "reputation, to the end ofhis life, was far more that of atheological prophet and ethical platitudinarian, comparableto Lyman Abbott or Frank Crane," or, we might say today,Norman Vincent Peale or Billy Graham, "than that of a literaryartist, comparable to Tennyson or Matthew Arnold."