On Reimagining America

By LANCE MORROW

In 1835 the inevitable Alexis de Tocqueville called America une feuille blanche, a blank page, upon which history waited to be written. History has been scribbling away ever since. So have generations of traveling writers. It became a sort of religious obligation, like the Muslim hadj, for European journalists, geniuses and hacks to make their way to the New World and there test their sensibilities upon the peppy and savage Nova Zembla that interrupted Columbus on his way to the Orient.

America has always been a splendid subject--and a fat target. For years in the 19th century, visiting writers could not decide whether the Americans were a vigorous new race, the future's masters, or an interesting breed of chimps. English writers were especially bemused. They arrived the way an ex-wife might visit the home of a remarried husband, some years after a messy divorce: the exwife, dressed to kill, encases her maddened curiosity in a ladylike frost. She notices things brutally, and repeats them when she gets home. Mrs. Frances Trollope reported back to England in 1832 that Americans gorge their food with "voracious rapidity"; they swill, guzzle, spit and pick their teeth with pocket knives. In Cincinnati, she related, cows are nonchalantly milked at the house door (a predecessor, no doubt, of the great American custom of home delivery), and pigs enjoy such citizenship that they wander at will, rooting in the street garbage and nuzzling pedestrians with their moist snouts. Americans seldom declined to provide a bounteous native rubery for the satirist to exercise his superciliousness upon: according to Henry Adams, Ulysses S. Grant once told a young woman in all seriousness that Venice would be a lovely city if only it could be drained.

Foreign interpreters arrived like immigrant waves. One of the earliest, and still the genius of the genre, was Tocqueville. He saw beyond livestock and table manners; he viewed democracy with an eerily clairvoyant eye. Half a century later came Lord Bryce, whose American Commonwealth (1888) still runs a respectable second. But the visitors have rarely been that wise or objective. The interpretation of America has always been a species of self-discovery--and self-indulgence. The English novelist E.M. Forster said that America is like life because "you can usually find in it what you look for." A man did not even have to be there to conjure up the promise and marvel; from dark, medieval Prague, Kafka imagined his Amerika. He believed that everyone there always, invariably, was smiling.

America is--or was at one time--a continental mood ring, a subject sufficiently vast and enigmatic in its newness to accommodate the most extravagant fantasies. The republic of the questing amateur, because it had no prehistory (for white men), none of the cultural grids grooved by the centuries into old lands, yielded itself to an interminable amateurism of interpretation. Americans were a race of Adams rolling west across Eden, blowing the heads off rattlesnakes with their revolvers.

The great American blank page filled up as cargoes of adjectives spilled out upon it: primitive, hostile, desolate, vacant, dazing, Edenic, blessed, obstreperous, eagle-screaming, slave-driving, egalitarian, myth-stained, rapacious, naive, improvisational, hospitable, dangerous, destined, sanctimonious, shrewd, sentimental, quick, profligate, protean, complacent, oblivious, uncultured, venal, generous, banal, violent, abstracted, insecure, guilt-stricken, self-lacerating, tolerant, ultimately indefinable and sometimes nice: America.

In Imagining America (Oxford University Press; $12.95), English Cultural Critic Peter Conrad has assembled a fascinating collection of English writers' visions of the New World. Conrad tours the works of Charles Dickens and Anthony and Frances Trollope, of that bird of paradise Oscar Wilde and the doomed poet Rupert Brooke, of Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, of the futuristic H.G. Wells and the primitivist D.H. Lawrence, of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood and the satirist-turned-California mystic Aldous Huxley.

Conrad has saturated himself in his writers' work more profoundly than in the subject of their meditations. Imagining America is subtle, briskly and even dashingly learned, frequently funny (with an odd undercurrent of nastiness, like the smile of a dog about to bite) and, now and then, totally wrong. But Americans, who have always been abnormally sensitive to the opinions of others and simultaneously oblivious to them, might enjoy the bizarrely colored and refracting lenses that Conrad has gathered. They might read the book and wonder through what glass they themselves view the nation now. Conrad's exercise is literary, impressionistic and symbolic rather than sociological or historical. Through his analysis, a succession of Americas unfolds. There is, first, the dispiritingly uncouth barnyard of Mrs. Trollope and Dickens, a place, as Conrad says, without social amenity or historical depth, a land as temporary and makeshift as its shop fronts.

The exquisite Oscar Wilde, in his overcoat of bottle-green otter fur, made his scented way through America in 1882, scattering epigrams and languidly outraging the locals. "Mrs. Trollope had hoped to redeem America by making it well mannered," writes Conrad. "Wilde hoped to redeem it by making it stylish." Wilde lectured the miners at Leadville, Colo., on the Florentine painters; he hired secretaries to distribute locks of his hair. Aesthetic in a different way, Henry James once viewed Niagara Falls and, like a fastidious critic, pronounced it to be "thought out" and "successfully executed."

Amid the literary swags, Conrad locates a theme that may be the most profound in American history: the story of man subduing a continent of vast distances and danger and, so it seemed, divinely bestowed wealth. H.G. Wells admired the fierce mechanical aspiration of the Americans: "Cerebral technocrats who will inherit the earth."

If Wells saw the future in American technology, the mystagogic D.H. Lawrence drew a distinction between primal America, which appealed to his fancy sense of atavism, and "the mechanical empire of Uncle Samdom." Auden picked up at least a part of the theme. Wrote Conrad: "The economic vice of Europeans, in Auden's view, is avarice, while that of Americans is waste." Nature, vast and promising, exists ultimately to be conquered and transformed into the benisons of the shopping mall. But at the far end of the interpretation, God's plenitude and bounty begin to be exhausted. What then?

Foreign writers have rumbled across America in buckram and paperback trying to conquer it, to understand it. But Americans themselves now seem to have trouble imagining their country. The terms and arrangements of the American enterprise are changing. The entire American proposition has been built upon the premise of ever expanding opportunity, upon a vision of the future as a territory open-ended and always unfolding, upon ascendant history. "We are the heirs of all time," said Herman Melville. What happens if the future seems to be closing down, to be darkening? If nature, first an enemy to be subdued and then a resource to be exploited, is now an endangered victim of technology? The classic American salvation (clear the land! build! disembowel the mountains!) threatens to invert to damnation. Acid rain pelts the Adirondacks, destroying their fish. Smog blows east from the Pacific Coast and eats the vegetation off the Sierras. The Love Canal and Three Mile Island and Kepone in the Tidewater all make mothers anxious in their genes. The once almighty dollar shrivels. Productivity dips to zero, and the national wealth, at the rate of $90 billion a year, departs, never to return, to pay for foreigners' oil.

All the furniture of the American myths is being dismantled and stored. Psychologically, if not yet financially, a stale air of foreclosure has wafted around. It is not that the U.S. is broke or now bereft of such resources as its grain, its amazing capacity to nourish life. But Americans have always needed to know the point of it all; that has been part of their peculiar national "innocence" and residual Puritan sense of themselves as the new elect of God. Without such grace or rationale, without the comfort of their demonstrable virtue and uniqueness, Americans feel themselves sliding toward triviality, and beyond that, toward an abyss that might swal low the whole experiment like a black hole. "Either America is the hope of the world," one dogmatically friendly French man wrote 20 years ago, "or it is nothing."

Perhaps Americans are suffering merely the discomfort of joining the human race. Perhaps they will be better for it. In August 1943, after a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT109, John Kennedy wrote to his parents: "For an American, it's got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it's in the middle, then there's trouble." Americans have been rattling around fecklessly in the middle, but now are rolling toward the awfully tough.

All of this moral drifting has complicated the way Americans imagine their country. Many of them remain sunnily confident. But the old interpretations, the old American theology, no longer work very well. Americans invented themselves in the first place, and then were interminably reinvented by the rest of the world. Perhaps more than most peoples, they need to possess an idea of themselves, a myth of themselves, an ex planation of themselves. It is time for them to start inventing and imagining again.

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