Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America. Bill Kauffman
if some rube dared put on a Merle record at one of your artyparties you’d laugh, derisively, do mock hillbilly sounds, then put on better haircuts like the Pet Shop Boys.
Merle was right. A Cold War and a paternalistic state have sapped our manly energy, left us a pitiful, bullying nation whose belleslettrists resemble the limp villains sketched so acidulously by Populist hero Tom Watson: “lolly-pops, vegetarians, grape-juicers, and sissy-boys.” Go fist yourselves.
Partisans of Thomas Wolfe have been amply warned to hibernate these days. Wolfe, the ravenous descendant of Whitman in the American bardic tradition, instructed the aboriginal writer to “make somehow a new tradition for himself, derived from his own life and from the enormous space and energy of American life.”
The presence of the frontier, the awareness of space and sprawling open lands, shaped the American character and instilled in us the craving for freedom, Frederick Jackson Turner argued in his definitive essay. For Wolfe, as with others in the American bardic tradition, that frontier was a double-edge sword: it offered endless opportunity for redemption, yet it attenuated the ties that ought to bind us to family, community, hometown.
At one point in Of Time and the River he despairs, “We are so lost, so naked and lonely in America. Immense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on forever and we have no home. . . . For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the streets, we walk the streets forever, we walk the streets of life alone.” Two paragraphs later, America’s naked possibilities transport him: “It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country. . . .”
Try to imagine the pallid and weary ironists, self-conscious crucified Jesuses of my generation, Wolfe-like with thick and effusive love/hate for America. Or for anything beyond the poisonous vials and pink teenage asses their dentist/psychiatrist/arbitrager daddies spring for via the unspoken trust fund.
Gore Vidal, whose mordant Mugump historical novels impress me as beautiful expressions of elegant Americanism in the only admirable and indigenous sense of that haughty adjective—the Henry Adams tendency—says that “Wolfe was to prose what Walt Whitman was to poetry.” Yes! A free Transcendentalist man of open spaces for whom unexceptional incidents of deracination unleash torrents of American longings, smack dab in the turbulent main current.
One sees, in the New Visions of our privileged oracles, no fascination with, or awareness of, the vastness and awful empty beauty of America. Gone is the enchantment with open spaces—even the freeway is a fetter. Gone is the sense of liberating freedom and terrible loneliness that our continent’s amplitude inspired. The disappearance of Turner’s frontier is indisputable fact for the wealthy young. The glorious Roman candle Kerouac, who sought to redefine the frontier in order to revive it, is irrelevant in Greenwich and Hollywood, and in those ivy enclaves barred forever to the Visigoths of Middle America.
One of your better hippie bands, Jefferson Airplane, requested yesterday’s UMCs to “tear down the wall, motherfucker.” Never mind that the group ended up tearing down the wall separating protest rock and corporate rock (“turning rebellion into money,” as the sell-outs of my generation, The Clash, so presciently put it). There’s nothing wrong with the destructive (and implicitly reconstructive) sentiment. And that, God willing, is exactly what we’re gonna do.
Tear down the complacent, effete walls that all you goddam Lionel Trilling epigoni built. Resentment ain’t unhealthy for sharpening the writer’s eye—just ask Vernon Parrington, if you haven’t flushed Oklahoma U’s greatest football coach-English prof down the memory hole.
There are a thousand new American songs on the tips of provincial tongues, ready to resume the glorious chronicling of Norris, of Whitman, of Wolfe, of Kerouac, of Garland, of London, of our forefathers. A regeneration is at hand, a rebirth of revolutionary spirit that will take us far beyond the narrow, constricted boundaries of the neurasthenic rich and into the verdant, fertile fields of new realism.
Politics be damned, but call us the Reagan Generation if you like, our formative years spent under his rule. Or don’t call us anything. I ask just one favor, dear reader: Do not call sexually confused collegiate velvet jackets the Voice of My Generation. That voice screams unheard in Fargo, in Anniston, in Batavia, and if you uncover your ears the clamor begins.
Frank ’n Nat
The American Enterprise, 2001
In the summer of 1821, two young men met on a stagecoach bound for Bowdoin College and struck up a fast friendship that would last throughout their lives. Fourteen-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may have impressed his classmates as Bowdoin’s Most Likely to Succeed, but stagecoach passengers Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne did all right for themselves.
As midlife approached, Pierce was elected to the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire, while Hawthorne scratched along as a purse-poor writer of fantasies. The author had a recurring dream: “I am still at college . . . and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake.”
Things got better. Hawthorne’s tales began to earn notice, if not royalties, and the solicitous Pierce sought a government position for his friend, finally helping Hawthorne land the post of surveyor in the Salem Custom House.
The fortunes of the Bowdoin buddies peaked in the early 1850s, when one wrote the imperishable Scarlet Letter and the other secured the Democratic nomination for president in 1852. After the candidate asked the now-estimable novelist to bang out a quickie campaign bio—surely an infra dig assignment for a genius—Hawthorne nobly acceded to his old friend’s request, toiling for ten weeks to produce The Life of Franklin Pierce.
If the book was a dutiful production, it did evince a genuine fondness for its subject. This was no mercenary job: Hawthorne told a friend, “I have come seriously to the conclusion that [Pierce] has in him many of the chief elements of a great ruler. . . . He is deep, deep, deep. . . . Nothing can ruin him.”
Such high hopes reposed in Pierce, the “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills.” He defeated the Whig candidate, General Winfield Scott, whose supporters jeered that the bibulous Pierce was the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.”
“No one pretends that writing the life of General Pierce is its own reward,” snidely remarked one Boston journalist. The cynic! Such suspicions wounded Hawthorne, who was a conservative Democrat—his skepticism of reformers is on display in The Blithedale Romance—and generally disdainful of politicians. He said, charmingly, of his powerful friend, “I do not love him one whit the less for having been President.”
But virtue has its rewards, too. A grateful Pierce named Hawthorne to the lucrative consulship in Liverpool; never again would the author want for money.
As a Northern man with a genuine respect for the South, Pierce might have averted the great calamity of the Civil War, but his administration was doomed from the start. In January 1853, as the Pierces prepared to move to the White House, their beloved son and only child Bennie was killed in a freak train accident. Mrs. Pierce, an extremely morbid woman on her best day, told her husband that Bennie’s death was God’s exaction for Franklin’s ambition.
Pierce was paralyzed by fear that his wife was right. The First Lady would spend the next four years secluded in her room, writing notes to her lost boy, while the oft-drunken and guilt-wracked Pierce sleepwalked through his presidency.
The war whose coming Pierce had been powerless to stop filled both Pierce and Hawthorne with dread. As faithful New Englanders, they were Unionists, but halfheartedly so, for as Hawthorne wrote, “The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.”
Both men were suspected of disloyalty; Pierce was eventually so execrated that Hawthorne’s publisher tried to talk him out of dedicating his 1863 volume Our Old House to the former President. The author’s reply was a classic statement of friendship. “I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery