Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

It is unusual to find a book written about life in the countryside, here or elsewhere, now or in the past, that is both objective and sympathetic, by which I mean that the book is unswervingly honest at the same time that the writer shows he or she understands and cares about what he sees. Too often, countryside books are falsified by sentimentality, or else ignorance spoils it all. I have an excellent book in mind that I think my readers would find enjoyable and illuminating. Lark Rise to Candleford is well known -- there's a Penguin Modern Classics edition -- but mainly by those interested in the history of the English countryside. In fact, it has a much wider appeal.

The book comprises a trilogy -- Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) -- written by Flora Thompson (1876-1947) about her childhood and adolescence. It gives a close account of working class life in a hamlet, and later a village, from 1880 to 1900, with shadowy glimpses of a past reaching back to the early 1800s, with hints of further changes already at work there. Its great value derives from the author's character as an observer; when she came to write about that life she understood its significance, that it represented an immemorial way of living and thinking that would soon vanish. One of the finest qualities of the book is that while the author is present as a character (called Laura), she is not thrust forward, she does not obscure what she sees. That is very rare.

The hamlet (Lark Rise) in which she is born is only a few scattered humble cottages, plus an inn, in the midst of plowed fields, but it has a history traceable in a few of the cottages and oldest inhabitants. At the beginning of the 19th century those fields were an unplowed commons where the country people had commoner's rights to graze animals and use various wild products. Laura becomes friends with Sally, an 80-year-old who can just recall the commons and whose present circumstances, a bit more prosperous than her neighbors', are ultimately due to that former life because her parents had been able, thanks to their use of the commons, to keep a cow, geese, poultry, pigs, and a donkey cart to carry produce to the market town. Sally and her husband raised all their own food, just as the other cottagers did, but the difference was the money earned and saved by her parents. Laura's friendships create a context for the present, showing the evolution of country life: a semi-independent peasantry has become a dependent working class.

Her description of Lark Rise is thorough, exact, lively, and fascinating even to one who, like myself, has known that kind of life. Inevitably, there's much discussion of food. Tea, the one hot meal of the day, consisted of a bit of bacon from their own pig, garden vegetables, and a roly-poly pudding made from flour ground from gleanings of the manor farm's wheat fields, as in Biblical times (cf. The Book of Ruth). Other meals were usually bread spread with lard and any greens from the garden (in summer) or homemade jam. After a couple of pages about poverty in the hamlet and how they struggled to make ends meet, she ends the chapter:

But for that generation there was still a small picking left to supplement the weekly wage. They had their home-cured bacon, their "bit o' leazings," their small wheat or barley patch on the allotment; their knowledge of herbs for their homely simples, and the wild fruits and berries of the countryside for jam, jellies, and wine, and round about them as part of their lives were the last relics of country customs and the last echoes of country songs, ballads, and game rhymes. This last picking, though meagre, was sweet.

The first chapters of the next volume, Over to Candleford, quickly go back over the earlier ground, but with a different emphasis, paying more attention to her parents. The scene soon shifts to Candleford, a small town where Laura has two uncles and aunts and several cousins. Her favorite, the one she spends some weeks with in the following summers, is Uncle Tom, a shoemaker, an independent craftsman whose life is described as a "halfway house between the gorgeous establishment of their other uncle and their own humble home." Laura loves to read, and Tom engages her to read to him while he works in his shop, an enlightening experience in itself, but there she also meets his eccentric friends. The interesting thing about these details is that she merely records them, sympathetically as always, but she does not push herself forward, explaining the effect of these people on herself, which is one of the reasons we trust her.

She has this very telling observation about the difference between the hamlet and Candleford:

What impressed Laura most about Candleford, on that first holiday there, was that, every day, there was something new to see or do or find out and new people to see and talk to and new places to visit, and this gave a colour and richness to life to which she was unaccustomed.

Candleford is a country town, but there is a village a couple of miles away called Candleford Green, and the postmistress there, a friend of Laura's mother, hires her as a sort of apprentice, and there she goes at the age of fourteen. Laura's descriptive powers bring to vivid life the quiet country post office, the house and its inmates, and the village, which she neatly differentiates from Lark Rise:

In the hamlet there lived only one class of people; all did similar work, all were poor and all equal. The population of Candleford Green was more varied. It had a clergyman of its own and doctor and independent gentlewomen who lived in superior cottages with stabling attached, and artisans and labourers who lived in smaller and poorer ones, though none so small and poor as those of the hamlet. Then there were shopkeepers and the schoolmaster and a master builder and the villa people who lived on the new building estate outside the village, most of whom worked in Candleford town, a couple of miles away. The village was a little world in itself; the hamlet was but a settlement.

The rest of the book is her description of this "little world" until she leaves it a few years later.

Although the book's reputation is chiefly due to the observations of English country life at that time and place, its greatest virtue is the character of the author herself, implicit in what and how she sees. Every book, no matter its subject, is a picture of its author. I have mentioned her unusual combination of objectivity and sympathy. Read this:

Every day throughout the summer, she sat there "watching the bees." She was combining duty and pleasure, for, if they swarmed, she was making sure of not losing the swarm; and if they did not, it was still, as she said, "a trate" to sit there, feeling the warmth of the sun, smelling the flowers, and watching "the craturs" go in and out of the hives.

That's a true picture, certainly, but notice how the quotes -- "trate," "the craturs" -- give it not only color but feeling, conveying the warmth and simplicity of the woman. Here's another description of the same woman on the day her husband dies:

On the evening of the day he died, Edmund was round at the back of the end house banking up his rabbit-hutches with straw for the night, when he saw Queenie come out of her door and go towards her beehives. For some reason or other, Edmund followed her. She tapped on the roof of each hive in turn, like knocking at a door, and said, "Bees, bees, your master's dead, an' now you must work for your missis." Then, seeing the little boy, she explained: "I 'ad to tell 'em, you know or they'd all've died, poor craturs." So Edmund really heard bees seriously told of a death.

This is an ancient practice, whose present rarity is emphasized by the wording of the last sentence, and again, it is the deliberate quotation of Queenie's remarks, especially the one to Edmund, that gives the description its feeling for the woman.

In these remarks about herself:

After that well-merited reproof, Laura tried to be more sociable with the neighbours, but she was young and foolish, and for several years she held herself aloof from all but a few loved old friends when visiting her home. It took time and sorrow and experience of the world to teach her the true worth of the old homely virtues.

We see her judge herself without affectation or pretensions, and we recognize the qualities of honesty and sincerity that makes this such a superior account. Lark Rise to Candleford is not a great book, but it's a very good one, and I recommend it to cleanse your mind of trivia and to refresh your spirit.

Next issue: "The Incomparable Dickens" *

"When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground." --Thomas Jefferson

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer, is the most interesting and revealing book about American culture and history that I have ever read, and I guarantee that anyone who reads it will gain a new understanding of our country. The purpose is stated in the Introduction:

Our society is dynamic, changing profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable. The search for the origins of this system is the central problem in American history.

The argument is enunciated a few pages later, after the four British folkways that originally settled here are named: the Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Borderers:

. . . the legacy of four British folkways in early America remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today.

Folkways are the "normative structure of values, customs, and meanings that exist in any culture," and Fischer lists twenty-four which he will use to describe each culture, including Speech, Marriage, Child-rearing, Naming, Religious ways, Learning, Food, Dress, Work, Order, and Freedom ways. These sound dauntingly sociological but in the author's deft prose they are fascinating.

The book is organized by the different migrations: first the story of the 20,000 Puritans who came to Massachusetts from East Anglia from 1629 to 1641, then the Cavaliers who settled in Virginia and Maryland from 1642 to 1775, next the Quakers in Pennsylvania and in West Jersey from 1675 to 1725, and last the Borderers (erroneously known as Scots-Irish) who settled the southern backcountry from 1717 to 1775.

The first thing that impresses the reader is the continuity of culture between East Anglia and Massachusetts. The austere cuisine of the Puritans (e.g., baked beans) came from their anti-sensuous religious principles and from East Anglia, where baking was a major cooking way. Similarly, the well known Yankee twang is the "Norfolk whine" in a New World guise, and the saltbox house came from England, too. In the distribution of land, Puritans generally followed patterns among freeholders in East Anglian villages, except that the American distribution, in keeping with the leveling principle embedded in its founding, was more equal. Fischer is careful to show how each culture did not simply duplicate Old World ways but creatively adapted them to a new environment.

The author's discussion of the Puritan's freedom ways or ordered liberty is full and nuanced as he demonstrates its manifold meanings. In one sense it was collective as in the "liberty of Boston," where public liberty meant that they could impose restraints on themselves in their own ways (by town ordinance, for example) but would fiercely resist outside interference. A second meaning was "liberties" extended to individuals or classes but not to all. Soul liberty was freedom to serve God in the world (in a Calvinist way, of course, and no other). There was also freedom from the tyranny of circumstance -- poor laws, for instance, guaranteeing freedom from want. This Puritan conception of ordered liberty was very important in the history of America as it interacted with different conceptions of the other colonial cultures.

To move from Puritan Massachusetts to Cavalier Virginia is a very real shock, because Sir William Berkeley, royal governor for more than thirty years, deliberately shaped the colony in a royalist, hierarchical way by encouraging emigration by Royalist refugees during the English Civil War, granting them large estates, and making them the ruling class in the colony. They came from another part of England, the southwest, marked by deep inequalities and powerful oligarchies of large landowners. The immigration pattern was very different from New England, where families had predominated; in Virginia males predominated by four to one and seventy-five percent were indentured servants. This was a colony for a small elite and a large underclass.

As in the description of Puritan folkways, the reader is surprised and amused by some of the information, for example that the well known southern accent, pronunciation, and dialect came originally from southwest England where these speech ways predominate: lick for beat, bide for stay, howdy, shuck for husk, woebegone, grit for courage, flapjack, moonshine, get shut of for get rid of, jeans, chitterlings or chitlins for entrails, holler, no-count for worthless. And so the account continues, tracing the roots of vernacular architecture, family ways, predatory attitudes to women (which predated slavery and were not caused by it). Let me quote the book on cooking:

. . . highly seasoned, with much roasting, simmering, and frying . . . methods of [English] preparation called "Dorset fashion" or "Dorset cooked."

On slavery:

Virginia's ruling elite . . . required an underclass that would remain firmly fixed in its condition of subordination. The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without this rural proletariat. . . . The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.

As for liberty, the Virginia idea was hegemonic -- control of oneself, the power to rule and not be overruled by others. Fisher explains how this is only explicable in a society that conceives relations in hierarchical terms. Applied to the self -- a "truly free man must be the master of his thoughts and acts" -- hegemonic liberty was a noble ideal, and although the hierarchical elite is long gone, "the idea of an autonomous individual, securely in command of self, is alive and flourishing."

We think of Pennsylvania and West Jersey as Quaker settlements, not only because of William Penn's foundational role and the numerical preponderance of Quakers there, but because their ideas and principles guided the colony long after their control lapsed. In fact, the area was something of a melting pot, with Welsh, Irish, German, and Dutch settlers recruited by Penn for their compatibility with Quakerism. Like the other colonists, the Quakers came from a distinct part of England, the North Midlands, where the culture made a virtue of simplicity and plain speech, and the values of both a region and a class affected the Quaker emigration. The author works through the folkways, describing Penn's background and purposes, the nature of the Quaker family, marriage and the equality of women, child raising, diet, work attitudes, wealth ways, and so on. When he tells of their dialect, I hear the speech of my childhood, for we lived in New Jersey although we are largely of Puritan descent. The culture, especially what might be called thrifty business ways, is familiar.

The Quaker way of order is particularly interesting, based as it was on mutual forbearance, social peace in which each individual was restrained from intruding on the peace of others. They were the only American colonists who believed in, and practiced, freedom of conscience. The great Liberty Bell, which we associate today with the War of Independence, was actually installed in 1751 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Penn's Charter of Privileges which guaranteed their liberty, reciprocal liberty that embraced all humanity: every liberty demanded for oneself should also be given to others.

The last and largest (one quarter million in 60 years) colonial immigration was that of the Borderers, and it was the only one launched without a consciously articulated purpose. Driven by material need from their home grounds -- England's northern borders, the Scottish lowland borders, Ulster across the Irish Sea -- in an area that had been fought over for 700 years. There was a very small elite, but most were farmers, farm laborers, and semiskilled craftsmen, a group humbler in rank than any of the other colonists, but they were remarkable for their fierce pride, an important characteristic they would carry into the backcountry -- western Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah and East Virginia, the frontiers of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. They were tough, belligerent people, as they had to be in the Border country, united for protection in clans, and their ethos served them well in the backcountry where they had to face fierce Indian antagonists, like the Cherokees. The American frontier did not shape the Borderers' culture, but it reinforced it. The archetypal frontiersman of our literature and iconography is actually a Borderer.

Fischer makes this astute observation about their childrearing ways:

Its primary purpose was to foster fierce pride, stubborn independence, and a warrior's courage in the young [male]. An unintended effect was to create a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in their way.

Anyone who has lived in the backcountry knows about that. Girls, of course, were raised to be self-denying, consorts and helpmeets to their warrior husbands.

Anti-clerical but religious (Presbyterian) in a way, derived from practices on the borders, that favored camp meetings and an emotional, personal, evangelical faith. Their cuisine, modified by back country conditions (changed mutton for pork and corn for oats), was in the old tradition. So clabbered milk, potatoes, griddlecakes (unleavened dough, baked on a griddle on the open hearth) were staples. Whiskey was also an import. Another surprising revelation is that what we think of as "country western" dress style -- shirts with a yoke, tight pants, etc. -- also came from the borders, as the "dress ways of backcountry were designed to magnify sexual differences." Backcountry farming, derived from the old country, was mainly herding, but they substituted pigs for sheep and developed what became the Texas longhorn from border progenitors. It was extensive farming, herding animals in woodlands, eventually driving them long distances to lowland markets, the kind of work that's intense for short periods and then slack, which led to their much-noted "indolence." The image of the hillbilly sprawled on a cabin porch with a jug of moonshine expresses this. For all their self-reliance, land distribution was very unequal, the most extreme of all the colonies, just as it had been in the old country. As recently as the 1980s, two-thirds of the land in Appalachia was owned by five percent of the population.

There was a large rural underclass of tenants or squatters called by names -- hoosier, redneck, cracker -- derived from old border usage (surprise!), terms that meant the same mixture of poverty and pride. The question of liberty, a central concept of each colony, among such men meant "natural" liberty: minimal government, light taxes, the right of armed resistance to authority when it infringes liberty, but intolerant of dissent or disagreement.

The Conclusion, just as fascinating as what has gone before, moves forward into our history after the Revolution and so on up until the 1980s (when the book was published), demonstrating the persistence of the regional cultures by analyzing events like the Whiskey Rebellion, the Constitutional Convention, and presidential elections. Fischer adds a new dimension to our politics. And he shows how they moved out from their original settlements to spread across the continent (Borderers to the Southwest, Puritans settling the old and new NorthWest, etc.), and how later immigrants assimilated to the regional cultures where they settled. Fischer has some very interesting things to say about how cultures persist:

[It] is not the same as stasis. Many things must happen if a culture is to be transmitted from one generation to the next. . . . [It] has to be recreated anew in each generation.

Which is why we should be trying hard to restore the teaching of American history in our schools.

Let us end this essay on a note befitting the real achievement of this wonderful book.

The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another . . . [creating] a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be . . . the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States. In time, this plurality of freedoms may prove to be [our] most enduring legacy to the world.

In the next issue: Lark Rise to Candleford. *

It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In this essay I shall discuss two writers, celebrated in their limited genres, who would never be thought of as major figures. E. F. Benson (1867-1940), one of those English men of letters who could turn his hand to any writing task, is known today for the Lucia books, six very funny novels about the rivalries and contentions among a small group of well-off citizens in a small English village. Our other author, Dornford Yates (1885-1960), wrote more than thirty novels of two types, lighthearted farces and adventure stories. We shall be concerned with the latter because they are remarkable for qualities that make them unusual in that genre.

I also want to investigate suspension of disbelief: how does a writer make us believe in, or accept, his world? That is, after all, the first task of any writer, because if the reader doesn't believe, the show's over before it has begun.

In a perceptive introduction to the Harper and Row collected edition of the Lucia books, Nancy Mitford notes a characteristic that helps to establish their reality -- their sexlessness. If you think about it, you must realize that through even the most staid novels there runs a thread of sexual interest because it cannot be avoided: the species is divided into two sexes, and nearly everything else flows from that fact. Remove all traces of sexuality and replace it with intense interest in quirks of personality, and you create a world that mimics ours, minus its one essential quality. The characters are not nullified by the absence of sex, but all their thoughts and actions are redirected, energized by their concern for trivialities as they move in a toy world. They play out their lives as caricatures where they must obey the conventions of that sort of world. They must never stand back to observe or judge it, but must relentlessly act out their allotted roles, no matter how often they repeat their lines or actions. So Irene must always be outspokenly sarcastic, Major Benjy on the lookout for a drink, Susan must always wear her sables and the Order of the British empire, and we never tire of the repetitions because we know them as puppets in a toy theater.

The central figure, the animator, in that world is Lucia, a cultural pretender who manages, by her energy and cleverness, to dominate her circle. The others often resent her, but they know that without her life would lose its savor. The readers' pleasure lies in observing her maneuvers and her pretensions. Whenever music is being played, for instance, she "puts on her Beethoven face," and she makes up Italian phrases to show fluency in the language, wholly spurious. The first book, Queen Lucia, establishes her and her set, but the second, Lucia in London, is not so successful because her magic works best in a limited provincial setting. Miss Mapp, the next volume, shifts to another village and another protagonist, the title character, a schemer like Lucia but without her good nature. This again treats the trivial happenings among a small group of middle-aged persons, but the readers feels that Benson is really setting up Mapp for conflict with Lucia, which takes place in the next book, Mapp and Lucia, continuing in the last two volumes, The Worshipful Lucia and Trouble for Lucia. These three are the best of the series, thanks to the duel between Lucia and Mapp, antagonists with "Napoleonic brains."

"Things are beginning to move, Georgie," said she . . . "Night marches, Georgie, maneuvers. Elizabeth [Mapp], of course. I'm sure I was right; she wants to run me, and if she can't (if!) she'll try to fight me. I can see glimpses of hatred and malice in her."

"And you'll fight her?" asked Georgie eagerly.

"Nothing of the kind, my dear," said Lucia. "What do you take me for? Every now and then, when necessary, I shall just give her two or three hard slaps . . ." --Mapp and Lucia

What Lucia does is to "render the trivialities of life intense for others," and so it is for the reader, who follows her Machiavellian moves with delight. "Never before had Tilling known so exciting a season."

Benson cleverly introduces two realistic characters, stand-ins for the readers, Olga Bracely, an opera singer, and Contessa, sister of one of the toy characters, and both are greatly amused by the characters' antics, impatient to hear the news on their occasional visits. Their amusement assures us of the fictional reality of Lucia et al., at the same time that it reinforces the mimic quality of the scene. Significantly, the characters are puzzled by their amusement, because it is one of the conditions of this society that they can never stand outside it, never see themselves as puppets. It is a measure of our suspension of disbelief that we never tire of the limited repertoire of the characters because we do not expect them to be of any depth. We accept them because they fit so well in their stage world. Benson achieves this by plunging us immediately into its petty intricacies which the characters never see as petty.

Tastes will differ widely over such unusual books. My wife watches me reading, laughing until the tears run, and she shakes her head sadly. But try them. If you don't begin with Queen Lucia, start with Mapp and Lucia.

Dornford Yates's novels have their flaws -- the endgame is often spun out to unconscionable length, some plot devices are overused, the involvement of women is sometimes cloying -- but, like Benson, he certainly creates a fictionally believable world, despite its essential unreality, and he does it by establishing its tone. The adventurers are Jonathan Mansel, the leader, Richard Chandos, who does the heavy lifting, and George Hanbury, supernumerary, plus their manservants Carson, Bell, and Rowley who can handle a pistol or drive a Rolls nearly as well as their masters. Upperclass gentlemen of leisure, their manners are impeccable and their behavior towards women chivalrous. Their wives, sometimes involved, are paragons of beauty, gentility, and sensitivity. The small touches of class are never ostentatious, but are part of the casually elegant tone.

And then at table one evening, after the cloth had been drawn, he bade us fill up our glasses and listen to what he said. --(An Eye for a Tooth)

"But I don't want to lie low for the next three months. Neither do you, William -- cubhunting's coming on." --(Were Death Denied)

The servants are great creations -- loyal, unobtrusive, super competent, essential parts of an upper class world.

Bell was a splendid servant. Whenever I wanted something, he always seemed to be there. --(An Eye for a Tooth)

Bell deserved his name, for he was the soundest man with whom I have had to do. In times of stress he was my rod and staff . . . he set my life above his, because, perhaps, he knew that I set his above mine . . . But Carson had caught from his master the precious trick of foresight . . . Working together, the two were incomparable: indeed, without their service, Mansel and I would never have taken the field. --(Cost Price)

A conspicuous and endearing feature is the use of cars. Sometimes there's a race across southern France as the rogues try to escape their pursuers or the reverse, a race that involves one or more Rolls Royces and perhaps a Lowland or Vane, for the novels take place in the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of exotic cars.

Mansel rounded a bend at eighty, passed a car which was passing a charabanc, cut in between two waggons of six wheels each, and put the Rolls at a hill at 96.

The cars are always in use, quartering the countryside as they close in on the rogue's lair. They tend them lovingly, and notice the fastidious tone.

While . . . Carson set out some sandwiches, Bell . . . began to wash the Rolls; for the way had been long and, at times, the dust had been thick, and no one of us four could endure that a car which was travel-stained should await attention.

The most remarkable feature of the novels is the air of self-assured calm, bolstered by the details I have mentioned, that pervades them and radiates from the characters, especially Mansel. This is the self-assurance of a ruling class, of gentlemen who, although they can drop Latin tags, wear their sophisticated knowledge and mores lightly, never insisting on their superiority but showing it in everything they do. Correspondingly, the villains are usually coarse. Our heroes respect their cleverness and do not underrate them as adversaries, but they are contemptuous of them. The villains, on the other hand, hate the heroes with great intensity, as inferiors to superiors.

Once we accept the assured tone of a Yates novel the rest follows, and we believe in that world and its values.

It was, I remember, in the summer of 1930 -- that Jenny (my wife) and I had taken a villa at Freilles and that Jonathan Mansel was spending some days with us. Freilles was a little resort some thirty miles north of Bayonne on the Bay of Biscay. It was simple and quite unspoiled, but its sands were the finest for bathing I ever knew: they were broad and firm and they sloped very gently seaward without any "steps," thus making smooth the path of the great Atlantic rollers, that came prepared to do battle and played a pageant, instead.

How we three came to be there, I need not say; but Mansel and I were both tired and were glad to take it easy and, so to speak, put up our feet. Carson and Bell, our servants, were taking their ease with us, and indeed, our quiet establishment was more like a rest-camp in warfare than anything else.

And then, one summer everything, without the slightest warning, we found ourselves involved in a matter of life and death. This was the way of it.

That last sentence is perfect -- a gentleman reasonably explaining things.

The mistake of many writers of adventure stories is to try to make them too dully realistic. There's very little pleasure for the reader; far better to be swept up in a Rolls and borne away with some sterling gentlemen and their respectful manservants.

What have we learned about the suspension of disbelief? You will note that I chose two unlikely prospects, books that are, on the face of it, inherently unbelievable. But in literature nothing is unbelievable if the author can make you acquiesce, can make you temporarily suspend your disbelief. Furthermore, nothing is believable unless the author can somehow work his magic.

Realism in itself is no guarantee of success. We can all think of realist novels and stories that are unbelievable. First, the author must believe -- and you may sure that Benson and Yates, while they were writing, believed in their characters -- and then he must find the ways to make you believe. In fiction there is no truth until the author makes you believe it, and the ways he can do that are more than I can name.

These columns are not book reviews, but my attention was recently called to a book, Save the Males by R. F. Doyle (Poor Richard's Press, Forest Lake, Minn.) that deserves mention. Like all the privately published books I've ever seen, it has an amateurish tone, especially in the beginning, but once past the various prefaces, Save the Males is a thorough, sound, enlightening account of the concerted attack on masculinity (and corresponding promotion of feminism) that has been going on since the 1960s.

In the next issue: Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. *

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." --Thomas Jefferson

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In the fifth essay in this series, writing about the crime novelist Michael Gilbert, I discussed the triumph of right over wrong in such fiction, as well as in Westerns, remarking that those moral judgments are more simplistic than the ones we make in life, or than are portrayed in great imaginative fiction. Speaking just about Westerns, such moral expectations are one of the characteristics that attracts readers -- and repels those who like to think of themselves as too sophisticated for such "naivete." We suspend our disbelief in order to enjoy (among other qualities) certainties that we know we cannot expect in life. Unfortunately, modern writers striving to seem sophisticated, try to make Westerns morally complex, thus contributing their mite to the destruction of a fine genre, because a Western by definition cannot be morally complex -- it is a romance.

Before we get into an argument about that, it would be sensible to understand the shape of the subject. The West begins to grow in the American mind with the Lewis and Clarke expedition of 1804-06. Within a year, trappers were on the scene. A first rate account of the heyday of the trapping business in the 1830s is Bernard DeVoto's Across the Wide Missouri (1947), beautifully illustrated with contemporary paintings of Western Indians. This is an unforgettable description of the life and skills of the mountain men and their significance in the history of the West (the matter of skills will come up again). The 1840s and 50s are the decades of emigrants and gold seekers. All of these figures have left traces in our history and culture, but when you saw the title of this essay you thought immediately of cowboys and Indians and cattle and mustangs, and that story didn't start until after the Civil War, when Texas veterans returned to find a ruined economy and the brush full of cattle, multiplied and gone wild during the four years of neglect. They conceived the idea of driving cattle to market at the steadily advancing railheads -- Kansas City, Dodge, Abilene. That era lasted barely thirty-five years, but it was the one that produced, and keeps producing, countless thousands of books we think of as Westerns.

The first Westerns, what we should call proto-Westerns, published in the 1850s, were the crude dime novels of Ned Buntline (a pseudonym) who wrote about Buffalo Bill Cody, giving him his start to fame and fortune, but the first real Western, a classic, published in 1902, was The Virginian by Owen Wister, a prominent Philadelphian who summered for twenty years from 1885 in Wyoming and published some good Western stories in Harper's before he wrote his novel. What makes The Virginian the first real Western is its romantic quality, something that has nothing to do with the hero getting the girl in the end. Westerns are romances in the first place because Good always triumphs over Evil, and those caps are justified: as soon as a character is introduced, you know where he stands (rare equivocal characters are always killed). In the second place, the story unfolds in a natural landscape that molds and reflects the lives of the characters and helps to make them understood by the reader, the same role that Nature plays in Wordsworth's poetry. Finally, the characters are exalted, or debased, beyond customary norms; they are made heroes and villains.

Although mediocre writers sometimes turn out a good Western novel or story, the perusal of any anthology of Western stories will show how rare that is. I will say, intrepidly, that there have been only four good Western writers: Wister, Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, and one step down, Luke Short. These are men who not only write well, but write with feeling, a quality too often lacking in Westerns. There is no point in analyzing the work of any of these men; if you're a Western reader, my analysis would be superfluous, and if you aren't, nothing I can say will mean much.

But I want to introduce you to a nonfiction Western which I think you'll enjoy and from which we can learn much about Westerns. The Log of a Cowboy (1903) is the factual narrative of a trail drive from Mexico to Montana in 1882, written by Andy Adams, a young Texan who was on the five month-long drive. It is regarded by historians as the most authentic account of cowboy life on such a drive, but it is more than that: it is the most basic quintessence of the romantic Western. If The Virginian, still on the bestseller list when The Log was published, represents the highly colored Western, Adam's book is the prototype of the plainest version.

That should not surprise us, because the Western idiom at its best is terse and straight forward. Note this self-description:

. . . I took to the range as a preacher's son takes to vice. By the time I was twenty there was no better cow-hand in the entire country. I could, besides, speak Spanish, and play the fiddle, and thought nothing of riding thirty miles to a dance. The vagabond temperament of the range I easily assimilated.

The keynote is self-deprecating irony, giving an impression of forthright lightheartedness, but notice how it is done in such a low key: Adams impresses by not trying to do so.

There are often trail scenes in Westerns, but because fiction tells a story, they can be only scenes. Here, however, the trail and everything about it is the story, and it must be made as interesting and compelling as fiction. One way he deals with the problem is to say, when nothing interesting is going on, "There was no incident worth mentioning" and pass on, a good device to move the narrative along without faking something to create factitious interest. In a small way it increases our respect for the narrator. Similarly, he fills in the narrative by sketching the atmosphere around the campfire when the cowboys swap all kinds of stories, the favorites of imaginative but unlettered men on every American frontier, told in every key but never far from self-deprecating irony, the tone we remember from Huck Finn. Adam's work, on the trail and in the book, thus becomes part of the American saga, again raising our estimate of him.

Another factor that maintains the reader's interest is the demonstration of expert knowledge -- about cattle, horses, weather, men, and the landscape -- not in tedious detail, but enough to know we are in the presence of men who know their craft thoroughly. So when Adams talks about choosing horses out of the remuda, we are aware of his knowledge, but he is not showing off; we feel that he is unselfconscious about it because he does not realize its extent.

At one point a rear wheel breaks and the foreman uses a sapling to make a sort of crutch, enabling them to drive the wagon to a town where a new wheel is made. This instance of frontier hardihood and ingenuity reminds me that during General Sherman's march through the Carolinas in the late winter of 1865, his army had to cross several rivers in flood and march through drowned lands. Companies of axe-men were formed from Michigan regiments, lumbering being a main activity there then, to fell trees for bridges and corduroying roads. I have always been impressed by that (just as Bernard DeVoto impresses us with the skills of the mountain men), by the great skills of ordinary Americans, which persist today, especially in the rural working class. It was all in a day's work for a cowboy.

We also see much more of the vagaries of cattle than in a fictional Western. The stampedes, for instance, are more complicated and lengthy than the ones in novels, which are usually straight runs soon turned by the herders. Here the herd splits up and its parts go every which way, resisting repeated attempts to turn them. It is not until the afternoon of the next day that the herd is gathered -- and that's only the first stampede. The problems the cowboys have to deal with when it comes to crossing rivers with cattle will be astounding to anyone not familiar with cattle. On one occasion they, with another crew from a nearby herd, actually build a bridge to cross the cattle, and then the ornery critters won't even step on the bridge! Patiently, every device is tried unsuccessfully over a couple of days until finally a cowboy suggests lassoing a calf and leading it onto the bridge where the mother will follow -- and the rest of the herd. It works, and we are greatly relieved because the narrator, in his quiet way, has made us feel the galling frustration. Then there are quicksands and bogged cattle, and the efforts which must be made to get them out astonish us by the expertise required, again, all in a day's work for the cowboys.

They cross a river with their herd and another, swimming the cattle, and the foreman of the other crew drowns. There is a quietly moving scene at the funeral, when the man is buried on the plain by a preacher from a nearby emigrant train. Two of his granddaughters sing a hymn.

I had heard the old hymn sung often before, but the impression of the last verse rang in my ears for days afterward.

"When through the deep waters I call thee to go,

The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;

For I will be with thee thy troubles to bless,

And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."

Then at the end:

After the discourse was ended and a brief and earnest prayer was offered, the two young girls sang the hymn, "Shall we meet beyond the river?" The services being at an end, the coffin was lowered into the grave.

In between the hymns Adams summarizes the discourse, the standard Christian response to death, made more impressive by the cowboy's plain description and the two hymns which enclose it.

Adam's writing is so subtly effective that we are not sure if he achieves his effects by intuition or design. The funeral description is an example, and another occurs in the second chapter when he makes some summary comments about his side partner Paul Priest, also known as The Rebel.

He was fifteen years my senior at this time, a wonderfully complex nature, hardened by unusual experiences into a character the gamut of whose moods ran from that of a

good-natured fellow to a man of unrelenting severity in anger.

Then, a paragraph later, he quotes a funny story Priest tells him when they return from a spell as night guards on the herd. The curious humor of the story puts the seal on Priest's character, confirming the narrator's summary judgment.

At the end, after the herd is delivered, the remuda is sold to a ranch and the cowboys must part with their horses. There is page of description of what the men have been through with the horses, how much they mean to them, and it closes thus:

Their bones may be bleaching in some coulee by now, but the men who knew them then can never forget them or the part they played in that long drive.

We have lived five months in the company of men we have learned to respect for their skill, knowledge, patience, hard work, and good fellowship; we have seen them struggling with natural forces, in the rain and sun and wind, and in the end their sentiments go out to their horses, just as Wordsworth's went out to a flower.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

These are romantic heroes indeed, denizens of the American imagination, along with Leatherstocking, Huck, Ishmael and Ahab.

This essay owes much to that ardent student of the Old West, H. Leonidas Bass, who gave me The Log of a Cowboy on the centennial of the trail drive twenty-eight years ago, and who made a map of the drive, identifying all the rivers, which I'll send to any reader who asks.

In the next issue: Devices of Belief: E. F. Benson and Dornford Yates. *

"Work as if you were to live 100 Years, Pray as if you were to die To-morrow." --Benjamin Franklin

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My readers will recall, I hope, an essay in this series, "Joseph Conrad and the Quest for Truth," in which I wrote of a new movement in art lasting from the 1890s into the 1930s, a movement which took art very seriously, almost religiously. I also discussed a critical technique (New Criticism) allied to it that offered a way to analyze and understand this art. Problems arise, however, when it is used indiscriminately to analyze work that does not belong to the modern school. There's nothing wrong with close textual analysis per se, the main method of New Criticism, but it will yield less when applied to Wordsworth than to T. S. Eliot, and the animating idea behind the analysis, that the text will reveal profound and subtle ideas about life, can be greatly exaggerated, leading to very fanciful readings.

I have written that little preface to a consideration of the work of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) because he was not a modern writer in the sense that Conrad was, although they were contemporaries. In fact, Hardy gave up novel-writing just a couple of years after Conrad began, and went on to write and publish only poetry -- but I'm getting ahead of my story. Born in humble rural circumstances in the county of Devon, an area rich in folklore that would greatly influence his work, Hardy became an architectural draughtsman, with a yearning to write poetry. Recognizing that he couldn't make a living at that, he tried writing fiction, unsuccessfully at first, but his second novel earned some money, as did the next, and his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was quite successful. Now he was able to give up his architectural job and get married.

Writing novels was a way to make a living, and he was very deferential, especially in the early years, to editorial opinion. Beginning with his fourth novel, his works were serialized, and editors insisted on bowdlerizing them before they appeared in magazines (Hardy would restore the cuts in the book edition), but after all, editors controlled access to his audience. He was always scrupulously professional, delivering copy on schedule, fulfilling promises, doing his best.

The original vein that he worked so well in his best novels was the life of the Dorset countryside, which he immortalized as "Wessex," taking the name from the ancient post-Roman kingdom. Farm laborers are omnipresent as a chorus, while the central figures are somewhat higher in the social scale, e.g., farmers or merchants. The country life and work is not background but is woven into the life of the characters. Hardy was intensely interested in the old customs and folk tales, and they contribute to the density of his work, making the reader feel that the characters are embedded in history, that we see them moving against a tapestry of which they are a part. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd are his only novels with happy endings. The first is slight, a pastoral idyl, but the second is more complex and interesting. The protagonist, Gabriel Oak, naive and impetuous in the beginning, suffers trials that endow him with great patience and good-humored gravity, growing him into a very attractive figure, both to the reader and to the spirited and willful Bathsheba Everdene, who Gabriel eventually wins in a wonderful scene at the end.

The next Wessex novel, The Return of the Native (1878), brings up what I shall call Hardy's metaphysical problem. He had a dour outlook, and he rejected the Christian God, substituting a vague force indifferent to humanity and its concerns. But he had an unfortunate habit, especially in his later novels, of dropping remarks ("'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess") that suggested that he thought the force was not merely indifferent but malign. The notion that the gods are cruelly playing with our lives deprives a novelist's characters of integrity, making them hapless victims. He denied this, claiming that such remarks were only his fanciful way of expressing himself, but that's absurd: an author cannot say things in his own voice in a novel and then dismiss them. In Return, the many crucial coincidences that help to wreck the lives of the characters make them seem like puppets. Some of the characters and scenes are vivid, but everything -- plot, people, conversations -- is heavily melodramatic, as if Hardy's skill as a writer was distorted when the metaphysical pressure was too great. His last novels, Tess of the d'urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1897), suffer from the feeling of supernatural doom, and while the plot of Tess is improbably melodramatic, Jude's is absurd and repellent. Hardy had an unhappy marriage, and this is an anti-marriage tract (anti-Christian, to boot), grim and desolate. He was so annoyed by the harsh critical response that he gave up writing novels and turned to his first love, poetry. Over the next thirty years until his death he published eight volumes of poetry as well as the three-volume verse drama, The Dynasts. He is that unusual case (Sir Walter Scott is the only other I can think of) of a writer equally famous as a novelist and a poet.

The next Wessex novel after Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), is Hardy's masterpiece, a tragedy caused by the character of its protagonist, Michael Henchard. The first scene (as in classic tragedy) contains the seeds of future calamity, and its coarse brutality and underlying sensitivity shadows the book, lurking behind a gesture or a word, building a sense of uneasiness in the reader. Henchard, a skilled farm laborer in search of work, with his wife and very young child, appears at an annual country fair. We know already from their description as they approach the fair, that he is taciturn and she is submissive. They stop at a refreshment tent where he proceeds to get drunk and put up his wife at auction. The scene, fantastic in itself, is made grimly real by Hardy's descriptions of the reactions of the witnesses, who take it as a joke at first, but when a passing sailor makes a bid and actually puts down the cash, ". . . the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid color seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein." Susan throws her wedding ring in Henchard's face and leaves with the sailor, "sobbing bitterly." A sense of shock is apparent in the subdued remarks of the spectators standing at the door wondering about the sailor. Henchard returns "doggedly to his seat," declaring he won't go after her.

The guilty regret just hinted here is enough to endow the scene with tragic foreboding, which unalloyed brutality would never have done. The combination of hasty anger followed by sore guilt is the master motif of Henchards' character, and Hardy's subtle portrayal of it in this initial scene shows his artistry. The others leave and Henchard falls asleep. The next chapter opens with the dawn when Henchard awakens, remembers what he has done, and determines to find Susan and the child. First he goes into an empty church and swears a vow on a Bible not to drink liquor for twenty years. His fruitless search goes on for months, and eventually he gives up and heads for Casterbridge. The next chapter takes place eighteen years later at the same place and time of year and once again Susan and her daughter are approaching the fair. The sailor, Newson, has died (it is supposed) in a shipwreck off Newfoundland, and Susan is seeking Henchard, telling Elizabeth only that he's a "relative by marriage." She speaks to the woman who ran the refreshment tent and learns that Henchard left word with her that he went to Casterbridge. Thither they go in the next chapter to discover Henchard, mayor of the town, at a banquet. They learn that he's a prosperous merchant, a hay and grain dealer. I won't tell more of the plot, but the reader can see that Henchard's initial brutal act is bound to have momentous consequences for a man in his position, especially because he is the same man with the same character: impulsive, uncalculating, fierce in his loyalties and repulsions. The rest of the book is the story of his downfall, brought on entirely by himself, by his greed for love that makes him alienate everyone even as love is within his grasp. When he dies, rejected and broken in spirit, he leaves this statement:

Michael Henchard's Will

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. & that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that nobody is wished to see my dead body. & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remember me. To this I put my name. --Michael Henchard.

It is a characteristic act, defiant but an implicit admission of guilt, and it is very moving.

The Mayor of Casterbridge would not be a tragedy if it were marred by the supernatural determinism of his later novels, nor would it be so impressive if Hardy had not portrayed, with unerring insight, not only Henchard but all the other major characters by showing them in thought and action in and around the town, peopled by the kind of Wessex characters we know so well from other Hardy novels. The town, closely surrounded and permeated by the countryside, pulsates with life, a vibrant milieu in which the characters move and mingle. Hardy is not subtle like Henry James, nor a truth-seeker like Conrad, but he wrote a tragedy which has no equal in English literature since Shakespeare.

A Postscript of Interest

I don't know how far my message reaches, but it is not far enough, because I still see conservatives committing assault and battery on literary culture, as in a recent National Review, where "Ten Great Conservative Novels" are considered, and all are lousy for reasons that regular readers of this column should understand: they are admired for their message, not their writing. I haven't read all ten, but I've read, or tried to read, most of them.

Midcentury, by John Dos Passos. The author made his name with the USA trilogy, but even at his best (in the first volume, The Forty-Second Parallel, when he's drawing on childhood memories) he's not a very good writer. His characters are cardboard because he was more interested in ideas than people. Midcentury is absolutely inert. When Dos Passos was a lefty in the 1920s, and 1930s, his faith burned bright and gave USA whatever life the trilogy had, but no matter how conservatism stimulated his mind, it could not give life to his fiction. I have always admired Dos Passos. When he saw in Spain what the Communists were up to, he repudiated them, taking a lot of flak from the Left (including Hemingway), and wrote a pretty good novel about his disillusion, Adventures of a Young Man. He was a good man, and his memoir, The Best Times, is worth reading. But he was not a first-rate writer, and Midcentury is one of the deadest books I've ever tried to read.

Another one of these prize novels is Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet. He wrote only one good novel, a picaresque affair called The Adventures of Augie March. The rest of his novels suffer from the author's preoccupation with ideas at the expense of characters. It's very simple: if the characters do not live, what they supposedly think is of no interest. Bellow was fascinated by himself and his thoughts, a fatal fixation for any writer.

Walker Percy, another conservative writer revered for his message, is praised here for The Thanatos Syndrome, another novel I tried to read but couldn't because I was immediately put off by what I call conceptual cliches, platitudes, not of language but thought. One, beloved by second-rate writers, is the reversal of expectations. So the character who's conventionally disreputable will turn out to be the hero, the character who seems liberal and sophisticated will wind up a bigot, and the one who seems a bigot will finally be the one with a big heart, etc. Percy was another writer ruined by ideas, because he considered characters only means to an end.

Cormac McCarthy's crudities and vulgarities overwhelm his books. I don't know about his ideas in No Country for Old Men because I couldn't stay with him long enough to find any.

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is the "conservative" book I most detest because it is so trashily written, because it revels in the excrement that two generations of wretched writers have made of our fiction. Every description is a cliche and a sour one, and every occurrence and character is a cliche, mostly disgusting. To read the book is to feel dirty. It directly inspired the creation of this column a few years ago when I saw conservatives falling all over themselves to praise it. Not only is this another case of a writer concerned more with ideas than characters, but Wolfe is a writer who's joined the ranks of the destroyers of culture. *

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." --Thomas Jefferson

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I've written a bit about American history and historiography in this series, mainly in number 18 about Bruce Catton's Civil War books, but to get to the root of things, to the first consciousness of Americanness, we have to go back to the War of Independence, to the year 1776 and two books published in 2004, David McCullough's 1776 and David Hackett Fisher's Washington's Crossing.

The action begins in March with the end of the siege of Boston when the British took to their ships and sailed away to Halifax, while Washington started his troops for Manhattan. Without a navy, without command of the waters around New York, defense of the island was really not feasible, but Washington determined to try, for reasons that are very interesting. Of course, there were the strictly military reasons: resisting the invader, refusing to abandon an important strategic location; but there were significant political reasons: the Continental Congress didn't want the city abandoned, and Washington felt that to surrender New York without a fight would strike a heavy blow against American morale. One of the difficulties American commanders had to cope with from the beginning was the interference of politicians in the details of military affairs. They withheld militias, wanting to keep them for home defense, and they wanted Washington to mount an all-round defense of everywhere, an impossible task. In the last week of December 1776 this problem would be tackled in a way that became characteristically American when the Congress passed a resolution giving Washington absolute command of military affairs for six months, but ultimately accountable to Congress, a solution that became the model for civil/military relations in America. An implicit corollary is that commanding generals, if they are to retain the confidence of their political masters, must be sensitive to the political context of the time. General George MacClellan ignored the pressures on President Lincoln, which is why, after 1862, he sat out the war in Trenton. And General George Patton was superseded in World War II by the second-rate Omar Bradley because he ignored public sensitivities.

Although Washington had some military experience in the French and Indian war, he was facing seasoned professionals in Generals Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis, and by comparison he came off very badly in the New York campaign, from late August to the end of November. His best move was the overnight withdrawal of his army, after the battle of Long Island, from Brooklyn across the East River to Manhattan, but wars are not won by retreats. After nearly having his army bottled up in Manhattan, he managed to escape Howe's clutches and cross to New Jersey, although he lost nearly 3,000 men as prisoners of war when Fort Washington was captured, another blunder. Washington was curiously indecisive at this time, letting General Nathanael Greene persuade him, against his qualms, to garrison the fort when it no longer served any purpose. Losing so many men was a terrible blow at a time when enlistments were expiring and his army was melting away. Another factor was the lack of military intelligence. The New York area was a loyalist stronghold, and the British were better informed about his movements than he was about theirs. But I think the root of his problem was his inexperience at maneuvering large bodies of troops (there were nearly 30,000 troops in the area during the summer), especially these troops. David Hackett Fisher, in Washington's Crossing, is very good on the difficulty Washington had in dealing with an army of free men who came from colonies where their conception of the Cause were so diverse -- and so different from his.

To a Virginia gentleman like Washington, liberty was a hierarchal concept: men of independent means had it, but smaller property owners had less and so on down the line to slaves, who had no liberty at all. Assuming command at Boston, he was disgusted by the "leveling spirit" he met in New Englanders, whose conception of liberty was free men in a community of equally free men. And it took him a while to accept the presence of free Negroes in the ranks of the Marblehead contingent. Fisher shows how Washington learned to accommodate these conflicting ideas and put together an effective army, but it took time and patience. When a court martial convicted some backwoods riflemen from Pennsylvania of mutiny, Washington did not have them shot (as would be done in the British army) -- Americans, especially these borderers whose idea of liberty was intensely individual, would not stand for that -- but instead fined them and appealed to their "honor, reason, pride, and conscience." They apologized and promised to reform.

Howe sent Cornwallis across New Jersey in pursuit of Washington, but he did not press too hard, and all the American troops collected on the west side of the Delaware by December 20. Taking most of his army back to New York, but leaving a handful of garrisons in place, Howe offered amnesty to those taking a loyalty oath, and many did. To New Jerseyans, the War of Independence brought civil war plus the uncertain brutalities of occupation, because the troops, despite strenuous efforts by commanders to prevent it, plundered and raped and murdered civilians, alienating supporters and outraging everyone else. Inevitably, bands of militia staged harassing attacks against the garrisons and their foraging parties, wearing down the troops, especially around Trenton. Washington was already thinking of an attack across the river when his adjutant, Joseph Reed, wrote to urge a bold stroke to revive American spirits and credit, suggesting Trenton as the target.

Washington immediately (December 22) called a council of war, and the rest is history: on the night of Christmas day, three columns of Americans tried to cross the river, but only one, led by Washington, was able to get through the ice, and the next morning, with 2,400 men, he routed 1,400 Hessians, capturing nearly one thousand. After escorting the prisoners across the river to Pennsylvania, he went back to reoccupy Trenton, where on January 2 he fought Cornwallis to a standstill at a fortified position, and then stole away at night to defeat a British force at Princeton, returning afterwards to safety in the mountains of the northwest. The crossing alone was an amazing feat.

To understand the great effect those eight days had on Americans, bear in mind the context: independence had been declared in July and within a few weeks Washington's army suffered one defeat after another, and was finally driven across New Jersey to Pennsylvania, when the Congress hurriedly decamped to Baltimore. The Declaration looked pretty hollow then. As if to herald the turn about to come, Thomas Paine published The American Crisis ("These are the times that try men's souls") on December 19 to instant, tonic effect. There followed the miraculous eight days of marching and fighting, and a tide of the whole year was turned. Whatever happened after that, America would be independent.

David McCullough is a skillful writer of popular books on discrete subjects -- the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, Teddy Roosevelt's early years. He tells the story accurately, honestly, and fluently, and he grasps the importance of that great year in our history, eloquently captured in this quotation from the English historian G. O. Trevelyan:

It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.

To understand in depth what that year tells us about the complex nature of nascent Americanness, however, Fisher's book is the one to read. An historian with a wide breadth of visions, he probes deeply into the problems of the actors, elucidating their thoughts and feelings and motives. Like McCullough, he covers the year from the siege of Boston to the battle of Princeton, but he carries the story forward into the spring of 1777, describing the so-called Forage War, militia raids by New Jersey militia (aided by Washington) against enemy garrisons. The main emphasis, however, is on the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and the book opens with a description and analysis of the famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. It is a brilliant beginning, and the text (well-illustrated) that follows fulfills its promise in depth and breadth.

The events of 1776 are not the beginning of American Exceptionalism, but its fruition. It began with the desire of the Pilgrims and Puritans to separate themselves from those they thought ungodly, and it was strengthened by the Mayflower compact, the agreement for self-governance signed before they landed. They did not know it, but they were already a people apart from the mother country, and subsequent colonial history drove them further and further apart. Great Britain's needs, expressed in orders from the king and his ministers, did not mesh with the needs of those living on the edge of wilderness, and it became harder and harder to bridge the gap, to reconcile opposing desires. Before 1776, very few of the colonists thought of themselves as Americans, but they had been in the process of becoming so for more than 150 years, and in 1776 they suddenly knew who they were, a new people, a new nation, and when they ratified the Constitution in 1787, establishing a radically new form of government, they set the seal on our unique identity.

In these days we need to fortify our sense of the specialness of our country, and these books will do it. *

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The premise of this series of essays is that conservatives can expand their mental horizons, enrich their lives, by reading the kind of books that are rarely written or published today. The goal of life is consciousness and literature is an excellent way to increase it. These essays are not reading lists; they are extended analyses intended to arouse your interest in books. I enjoy writing them because they are a challenge, and I increase my own consciousness by learning more about writers and writing. In this case, for instance, I thought I'd reread a couple of Willa Cather's (1870-1947) books to see if they'd be suitable for the series. I'd read them decades ago and wasn't impressed, but now I'd try one I hadn't read, My Antonia. When I was done I was bowled over, and I saw how unusual her writing was. So I reread her novels, and this is the result, which I hope will inspire my readers to appreciate this fine writer.

Consider American imaginative writers. In the first rank: Melville, Twain, James, Hemingway. In the second rank: Hawthorne, Faulkner, Dreiser, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Norris, Crane, Howells. If you think about their work, they are all dramatic writers. They come to us bearing urgent messages about sensational matters, soul-searching quests, struggles between good and evil, stirring revelations, stories of profound and wrenching truth, tales of the darkest shades and brightest lights. Howells, least dramatic of them all, would have been dramatic if he could, but his imagination was dim. Willa Cather is the great exception. Although there is some drama in her novels, it is the subtle working-out of man's relation to the overpowering presence of place, of the land, that is the theme of her fiction. What "happens" in her books is not very important in itself, and she was not very good at writing a story in the conventional sense. Critics consistently underrated her because they could not really grasp what she was dong; they could only see that by their usual standards she failed.

Now let me tell you what she could do. No other writer has such an acute perception of landscape. Think back for a moment to the seventh essay, "Huck Finn and Friends" in which I discussed Hemingway's great story, Big Two-Hearted River.

The river was there. It swirled against the log spikes of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

His descriptions of the natural world as perceived by a character are instinct with life, unsurpassed, beyond praise, but they are not, nor are they intended to be, portraits of a landscape, of the essence of a whole region. They are artifacts of the character's consciousness, just as Huck's description of the Mississippi at dawn tells us more about Huck than it does about the river. In Cather's best work the landscape is present in itself. What she does is to bring landscape and character together in a moving, satisfactory way with a quiet intensity that gives her books great emotional power.

Her progress can be chartered by the gradual jettisoning of conventional plotting. Her first novel of any distinction, O Pioneers! (1913), is about the lives of immigrants who settled the Nebraska prairies in the last decades of the 19th century, and the beginning, describing the early struggles of Alexandra Bergson with her stupidly conventional brothers and with the land and climate, is good, but then the book jumps ahead to a time when the struggle is over, Alexandra is prosperous, and the prairie becomes nothing more than a backdrop for an absurd plot. Although the book put her on the literary map, it must be judged a failure. Her next novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), is much better, although it, too, is marred in its later part by intrusive plotting. It is the story of Thea Kronborg, a child of Swedish immigrants raised in semi-desert Colorado, who becomes a great opera singer. The book centers on Thea and her development, by no means easy, and the Colorado landscape influences the girl all her life. The early years are the best part of the book, but Thea's artistic struggles are fascinating throughout the book. Cather was an idealist about art, as these quotations show.

. . . what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself -- life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? . . . Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

My Antonia (1918) followed, and this is a triumph, the novel which a first-time reader of Cather should start with, the story of a Czech farm girl growing up on the Nebraskan prairie. Look at this description:

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death -- heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of the day.

The first sentence announces the subject plainly, but the last clause suggests something striking. The next two sentences vividly describe the simple elements of the scene, grass, cornfields, haystacks, a colorful description that begins to stir the reader's feelings. The fourth sentence, with its Biblical reference to the appearance of God to Moses, endows the scene with momentous significance, and the last two sentences with their rich language complete the intimation that the physical world is a manifestation of meaning beyond itself. It looks simple, but it takes great artistry to write so effectively.

At the end of the book the narrator explicitly defines Antonia's significance.

She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. . . . She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

There is a key phrase there whose significance may be missed: "the meaning in common things." That was one of Cather's great gifts, to see those meanings and express them, as in the previous passage about fall afternoons. It is a rare gift for any artist, and it is not appreciated enough.

Five undistinguished books followed, and then in 1927 Death Comes For the Archbishop, her masterpiece, was published. A fictionalized account of the career of Archbishop Lamy, who from 1851-1889 ran the diocese, centered in Santa Fe, that covered the whole southwest, it is essentially plotless. It tells of the trials of the Archbishop and his vicar, traveling hundreds of miles on horseback, dealing with refractory priests, building a cathedral, planting fruit trees, civilizing the area, but as much space is given to the Archbishop's observations of the Indians, to his retelling of miracles observed by Junipero Serra, to his memories of his youth in France, and his friendship with the man who became his vicar, and permeating everything is the presence of the desert landscape of the southwest. Cather's skill is so developed by this time that she does not really describe the scene -- there are no set pieces -- but she creates an unforgettable impression of the landscape by little touches here and there, so you are always aware of where you are: you feel the heat, you note the ever-changing colors of the rocks, you breathe the clear air, you feel the sand as it is blown against you. This is a book in which nothing "happens," but when you are done you know you have been privileged to be in the presence of a man's life, an uncommon man, one of those who have made life sweeter by their presence. The book is very moving.

Willa Cather was a writer with an unusual gift, a quiet voice full of passionate intensity. *

"Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters." --Samuel Adams

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The prophet Jeremiah, active from 625 BC through the fall of Jerusalem in 585, was a shepherd who, in his denunciations ("jeremiads") of unrighteous Israelites, worshipers of pagan idols, traced their apostasy to farming, a way of life richer and more complicated than that of pastoralism. He thought that shepherding offered a return to a state of purity and obedience to the one God. The Rechab family, Jeremiah claimed, embodied the ideal: they didn't build houses or sow fields or plant vineyards, they didn't drink wine (a symbol of cultivation), and they chose to live in tents. This is, so far as I know, the first recorded call for a return to the simple life where one is free to live uncontaminated by the struggles and compromises of ordinary life.

Just a couple of centuries later the Greek poet Theocritis wrote the Idyls, the first pastoral poems, celebrations of the simple shepherd life. So some of the earliest writings in the Western tradition express utopian visions, specifically of a simple life in the past that, if we will it, can be lived again. We call them utopian, because Sir Thomas More called his imaginary ideal society Utopia (in Greek, "nowhere"); and the name has come to mean something inherently unattainable. Fulfillment would suspend the laws of nature: we cannot recall the past, we cannot suspend time, and we cannot simplify life in more than superficial ways. The idea turns up again and again in our literature (As You Like It is Shakespeare's satire of its sentimentalities in the setting of the Forest of Arden). Why should this be so?

The fantasy is characterized by yearning for an imagined past and aversion to the present, contrasting a warm, simple life with the cold complexities of modernism (every present, whether two thousand years ago or today, is regarded as modern by its contemporaries). In the imagined past, or in a contemporary variant, the Beautiful Simple Country Life, people are warm and sincere, living in true community, and relations are direct, uncomplicated by the demands of mundane necessity, whereas in the modern world people are cold and selfish, there is no sense of community, and life seems a complicated muddle. That these notions are silly -- every moment in time is, to those living in it, complex; only the backward glance of nostalgia makes it seem otherwise -- has never prevented people from believing them, if only for a time.

Speaking of time, it is well known that children's sense of it differs from that of adults. Think back to your own childhood and remember how slowly time moved. A week stretched to the horizon, a month was practically forever, and a year was inconceivable. All too soon, however, time begins to accelerate. I recall when it happened to me. I was climbing the stairs in school when I noticed a poster exhorting us to buy war bonds, illustrated by large, vividly colored figures seen in a long perspective -- "1943." I was shocked! I had hardly used up 1942! At the age of ten I had had my first intimation of the variable velocity of time. I think that soon thereafter we begin to create in our minds a nostalgic version of the past. A year later I toured all my childhood haunts, the vacant lots where I had built "huts" out of cardboard boxes, the woods where we used to play Robin Hood, a frankly acknowledged tour of nostalgia since I had outgrown childish things. How uncomplicated the past seemed now!

If time moves with a softly measured tread for children, we all know with what mounting haste it hurries past us in our days and years as we grow older. Now there are whole decades that I seem hardly to have used. And now we know what we could not even guess at the age of ten: that time is the measure of our mortality. Is it any wonder that we create fantasies about the past (and future) that were at first responses to a feeling of time hurrying by?

To summarize: because we are physical organisms living in time, we are reminded by its passing and by our changing perceptions of it, of our mortality. Seeking to evade this knowledge, or at least to console ourselves, we like to imagine a happier past, one that might be revived, untouched by the forces within us and around us that move us forward in the relentless tide of life. That's why its imagined simplicity is contrasted with a complex present.

Although there were occasional futuristic utopias, like Sir Thomas More's, the fantasy did not come to life as a collective ideal until the 19th century, thanks to the Romantic movement, a reaction against Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th Century who, it was thought, overemphasized rationality at the expense of feeling and imagination. We think of it as a literary movement -- Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, et al. -- and the revolutionary expectations in the work of many writers (Coleridge entertained the idea of joining a utopian community in Pennsylvania) are discounted as poetic hyperbole. It is at this time that the fantasies became ideas about how to organize the future, witness the writings of Robert Owen and Fourier, and the many experimental communities like Brook Farm. These fantasies are what I call Romantic Utopianism, not a movement but a trend of thought, a set of affinities among the like-minded, that would come to exert a powerful influence on social thought for more than two centuries (It may be that enough wealth had been created in the Western world at that time to allow individuals and small groups to indulge themselves in this way).

The best way to understand this fantasy is to examine a book which is animated by it, a brilliant, fascinating text wherein the fantasy is enunciated by a writer, superbly articulate, who was wholly captivated by its ideas. Rebecca West (1892-1983) wrote Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1942), a book of over a thousand pages about Yugoslavia based on her travels there in the late 1930s. It is said by people enamored of her vision that this is the book to read about the country, but in fact the reader will learn almost nothing about the place because Miss West was transfixed by Romantic Utopianism, and Yugoslavia was only a screen on which her vision was projected. With a style that is direct and immediate, precise and passionate, she creates the illusion (no small feat) that nothing stands between the reader and what's described. From the first sentence we are in the presence of a sensuously vivid, perceptive sensitivity that makes us seem to feel the heat and cold, smell the flowers, taste the food, see as she does the people, the churches, the streets and houses, the landscape, the rutted roads. It is a tribute to her powers that I have read the book three times and have not skipped a word.

Equally brilliant is Miss West's management of structure, the way the mass of disparate material -- travelogue, ancient and modern history, political analysis, artistic and literary criticism, impassioned polemic -- is put together so as to make all of it interesting, often fascinating, and at the same time that the skill with which it's done enhances the author's authority; we believe, we trust her.

A brief description of the Prologue shows her method. It opens with Miss West speaking to her husband in the train in 1937, but he's asleep, and she thinks:

. . . certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity.

This, despite the fact that she went there for the first time only the year before (1936), and first spoke its name in 1934 when, recovering from an operation, she heard the news of the assassination of Yugoslavia's King in Marseilles. That led her (in 1934) to think of other violent deaths affecting the Balkans: Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1897, Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889, the King of Serbia and his wife in 1903, finally Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The circumstances are described, and the characters and ideas of many of the actors are assessed. The narrative returns to Miss West's hospital bed (in 1934), where she reflects on this series of deaths, frightened because she fears that:

. . . man was going to deliver himself up to pain, was going to serve death instead of life.

Out of hospital, she sees the newsreel film of the assassination in Marseilles, describing it closely. She is so impressed by the King's face (she reads a great deal in faces), seeing in it a "peculiar wisdom" drawn, she thinks, from Yugoslavia, she feels she must learn about the country. Her ignorance is a calamity because:

. . . there proceeds steadily from that place a stream of events which are a source of danger to me.

In 1936 she goes there on a lecture tour. Afterwards, stricken by dengue fever, she stops to rest outside Vienna, and there her husband finds her, weeping over dresses bought from Macedonian peasants which have been ruined, bleached in the convalescent home.

I had not properly protected the work of these women that should have been kept as a testimony, which was a part of what the King had known as he lay dying.

She tries to explain to her husband what Yugoslavia means to her, but it is difficult to express in words; it has to be seen, experienced, and she realizes she has to see it again to fix it in her mind.

In a panic I said, "I must go back to Yugoslavia, this time next year, in the spring, for Easter."

In just twenty-three pages, Miss West has meditated on events from 1889 to 1937, involving the reader in her thoughts, feelings, and memories in such a dramatic way as to make this journey seem of paramount importance. The immediacy of her expression and the depth of her sensibility dictate the pace and shifts in the narrative; we are swept up into her confidence, her imaginative world. A certain intimacy is established, and since this is a book intended to persuade us of some extravagant ideas, winning our allegiance is vital. We are ready for the quest, we can't wait to be on our way.

It should be clear by now that Rebecca West is a romantic who dramatizes her emotions, but this conclusion is possible because I have quoted selectively; when you read the full twenty-three pages you are carried along in the narrative that pulsates with her feelings, and it is very difficult to stand aside, to see the subjective extravagance.

To get to Zagreb, the first stop, we must take the train from Austria, and here we meet a major problem in the book -- Germans. The book was addressed to the looming threat of the time, Nazism and Fascism, so inevitably Germans, like the West's fellow passengers, are portrayed as unlovely people. We do not doubt her observations. We may demur when she says, as she frequently does, that Germans hate all Slavs, but then we recall that the Nazis intended to enslave the Slavs and we let it pass. The problem arises, however, when this attitude distorts her perception of Yugoslavia. As we press through the book, wending our way around the country with side trips into its tangled history, we realize that all the troubles of the Yugoslavs have been caused, according to the author, by outsiders -- Turks in the south, Italians in the west, Bulgarians in the east, and preeminently, the Austrian empire (and now the Germans) in the north -- and we know the account is biased. She does not exactly hide internecine frictions, but she glosses them over, and this inhibits our understanding of Yugoslavia. Despite the constant physical presence of the scene, the Yugoslavia in this book is an imaginative creation. Miss West created it as a message to the West, and the book is the elucidation of the message.

The first part of the book, the West's travels around Croatia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, and Bosnia, is the simplest and most agreeable; the message is there, but it is not so insistently pressed. The narrative seems to ramble in space -- landscape, people, places, and time, excursions into the past prompted by sites (e.g., the history of Dubrovnik), but this is artfully constructed, a deliberately easeful introduction preparing the reader for the reception of future crescendos.

The positive theme, the romance of Yugoslavia --

In Yugoslavia there was an intensity of feeling that was not only of immense and exhilarating force, but had an honorable origin, proceeding from realist passion, from whole belief.

(They) cared for loveliness with the uncorrupted eye of an unmechanized race.

-- has its opposite negations --

Such conversation demanded attention, discrimination, appreciation, all forms of expenditure which we Westerners, being mean, are apt to grudge.

. . . the cityish [Western man] who wears spectacles without shame, as if they were the sign of quality and not a defect, who is overweight and puffy, who can drive a car but knows no other mastery over material, who presses buttons and turns switches without comprehending the result, who makes money when the market goes up and loses it when the market goes down.

-- especially urbanism --

. . . it takes the supreme assault of urban conditions to bring on humanity the curse of a craving for insipidity.

-- even against literacy --

. . . only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered by learning to read.

-- and of course, against capitalism: --

The West . . . is vulgar and superficial and economically sadist.

This is a natural consequence of the utopianism that's part of the romance of Yugoslavia; in the utopian vision, our arrival in the Promised Land is always hindered by enemies who must be vanquished. We are apt to miss the utopianism in this part of the book, passing over occasional remarks -- ". . . the world [must] at last abandon its bad habit and resolve into mercy, justice and truth" -- as momentary hyperbole, just as we may ignore other negative indications of utopian thinking -- "There is no use denying the horrible nature of our human destiny." Her feminist sallies we may also take cum grano -- ". . . man is a hating rather than a loving animal." The author is always making sweeping statements, some so blatantly silly -- ". . . wood, that clean, moral substance." -- that we tend to discount the wilder declarations.

In Sarajevo, the Wests team up with Constantine, a well known Serbian poet and government official with whom the author traveled the year before, and after some expeditions in the area they go on to Belgrade to meet Constantine's wife Gerda, who is German, all too German (she is later apotheosized by the author's husband as the spirit of all that's worst in Germany). Revolted by everything about Yugoslavia that Miss West most prizes, contemptuous of the English in general and the Wests in particular, her presence on their jaunts around Serbia is a constant source of discord and unpleasantness, and when she insists on accompanying them to Macedonia, the Wests are in despair. From a literary point of view, however, as a foil for Miss West, she is a godsend, and the reader feels that if she didn't exist, the author would have had to invent her. Macedonia is the heartland of the romance of Yugoslavia, the place where Miss West's imagination is worked up to its greatest intensity, and without Gerda sneering in the background we might begin to doubt, our allegiance might weaken, but we always recoil from Gerda's crassness to the author's side. Her use of Gerda is the most brilliant stroke in the book.

Throughout there are allusions to a force for life, identified with women, and a force for death, identified with men, and that this is the ultimate explanation, the first cause of all the distinctions made herein, is made clear, almost hysterically so, in Macedonia when she witnesses the slaughter of a black lamb on a rock in a fertility ritual.

I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing . . . this stone, the knife, the filth, the blood, is what many people desire beyond anything else . . .

How the taste for death achieves its triumph is explained a little later when they visit the plain of Kosovo where the Serbs were defeated by the Turks in the 14th century. Constantine recites an ancient ballad about the Serb leader and a gray falcon, the purport of which, in Miss West's interpretation, is that good people, to preserve their goodness, allow themselves to be defeated by evil, the force of death.

They listen to the evil counsel of the gray falcon. They let their throats be cut as if they were black lambs.

This revelation illumines the author's deepest convictions, bringing the issue down to the specific, personal present.

. . . the left-wing people among whom I had lived all my life had in their attitude to foreign politics achieved such a betrayal. They were always right, they never imposed their rightness. . . . Not one of them . . . has ever been a Caesar as well as his kind self; and until there is a kind Caesar every child of woman is born in peril. . . . I should ask myself whether I have done everything possible to carry those principles into effect, and how I can obtain power to make them absolutely victorious.

That some of these ideas were justified, I have no doubt. It is even more obvious now than it was then that the Nazis were bent on a career of death and destruction, and most of the leaders of the countries in the way of that career were suspended in attitudes of fatuous futility, ready for self-immolation. At this point, I want to move beyond the book to discuss the whole set of ideas embodied in it, but before we leave Miss West, I should acknowledge her great achievement. This is a stunning tour de force of remarkable literary grace and polemical power.It is for that very reason, clarity of writing, high sensibility of thought, that we are able to see and analyze its ideas in a way that would be much more difficult with a less articulate writer.

Romantic utopianism is readily identified by its preferences, those things it labels "authentic" (its antipathies are "false," "contrived"), exalting the peasant over the townsman, the countryside over the city, indigenes over Westerners, feeling over thought, sexual license over restraint, charismatic leaders ("kind Caesars"), men who'll use "power . . . for virtuous action," as opposed to workaday politicians, and so on. The utterances of its devotees are characterized by grand simplicities, by sweeping judgments, by stark apocalyptic choices, by exquisitely sensitive discernment (this gets tiresome in the book; in exasperation we want to shout that there are times, and they are not few, when a chair is only a chair, and a man passing in the street is no more than himself).

The essence of Romanticism, its full meaning, is to be found in its ambivalence toward the classic liberalism of the Enlightenment, which was, after all, the party of liberty -- insufficiently so for the Romantics, however, who scorned its bourgeois outlook, its worldly calculations, its cool-headed restraint. And, as one of liberalism's proud landmarks, the U.S. Constitution, demonstrates, it was definitely not utopian. As for liberals, they saw in Romanticism only a literary phenomenon with risque, bohemian overtones, an overheated inspiration to the freedom fighters of 1848 and Garibaldi's Red Shirts.

Romantic utopianism remained a fringe enthusiasm, witness its adherents in the U.S. before World War I -- eccentric radicals, utopian socialists, free love advocates like the Claffin sisters, aging Transcendentalists -- but its influence began to spread after the war, first, because classic liberalism became the reigning political system in the West, and second, because of the widespread postwar disillusionment, self-consciously celebrated by the modernist writers of the 1920s, embodied in these lines by Ezra Pound:

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization. --Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, V

Romantic utopianism has dual attractions: the simplicity of its main assertion, that the world can be a garden of truth, mercy, and justice if we embrace life and forsake nastiness, gives blessed relief from harassing thought about the complexities of human action; its compassion for peasants, psuedo peasants, and indigenes, perceived (falsely) as living simple lives close to the earth, lifts its believers above the Yahoos grubbing in Consumerland; its hypersensitivity is similarly ennobling. It is very difficult not to count oneself among the elect, by Rebecca West's side. And taking sides is very, very important. That's how the stark choices work. If you don't assent to the grand simplicities, you're on the side of beastliness, of death, one with gross urbanites, insensitive clods, the smug Gerdas of the world. This is its negative attraction, and as the Habsburgs and Hohenzollens departed, the ambivalence of romantic utopianism toward classic liberalism gave way to increasing antagonism, finally becoming its primary motive.

Aside from their perennial enthusiasm for the initial stages of revolutions -- the storming of the winter Palace, Castro's entrance into Havana, Uncle Ho surrounded by smiling children, Mao on the Long March -- and the accompanying faith in those kind Caesars, Romantic utopians were never serious fellow travelers; sympathy for Communism was only a way of expressing antagonism to the West, of being more sensitive than those crude servants of death in the Pentagon. I would venture to guess that this was true of nearly all fellow travellers, which explains why the collapse of Communism failed to cause any soul-searching. It was only a stick to beat liberalism with; there are others to hand.

Anyone who attended a liberal arts college in the 1950s, as I did, could see how skepticism about the values of classic liberalism was coloring the thought of the cultural elite of the time. What had been eccentric in Greenwich Village in the 1920s was unthinkingly echoed by my professors thirty years later, staunch liberals all, partisans of Adlai Stevenson, teaching the modernist writers, revelling in their contempt for the hypocritical lies of the West. Pound again:

Came home, home to a lie,

Home to many deceits,

Home to old lies and new infamy;

Usury age-old, age-thick

And liars in public places. Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, IV

How could anyone be surprised by the abject collapse of the universities in the Sixties?

The Sixties represented the triumph of Romantic Utopianism over classic liberalism, as the attractions of its spurious freedoms spread far beyond the cultural elite. Insatiably hostile to the moderate values of classic liberalism -- rational discourse, civility, ordered change, free markets, conventional morality, political realism, respect for religion, anti-utopianism -- Romantic Utopianism created new crusades with which to belabor its enemy. Surveying contemporary movements like Greenism, multicultualism, feminism, sexual libertinism, anticapitalism in all the forms it takes today, what do we see? Grand simplicities, sweeping judgments, exquisite sensibilities, starkly apocalyptic choices (life vs death again), authenticity vs falsity, peasants and indigenes vs citified Westerners, feelings vs thought, and rancorous animus against the West in general. Romantic Utopians, both as leaders and followers, are furiously active in all these destructive movements.

It does not take a moment's thought to see how these stupidities characterize the Obama administration in all its policies, foreign and domestic. The former echoes the 1960s line that America was the cause of all the trouble in the world, and that the lamb could lie down with the tiger if we'd just be loving and trusting and lefty. The hard masculine hydrocarbon industry is to be suppressed as our energy needs are met by solar panels and windmills. As for the economy, hitherto in the hands of greedy businessmen, the government is taking on a distributive role, passing out money in enormous amounts to fulfill all our dreams. Will these policies arouse significant opposition, certainly not by those many citizens, yuppies mostly, still in thrall to the pieties of the 1960s, which, after all, were created by Romantic Utopianism.

The 20th century will be remembered by its disastrous utopias, Nazism and Communism (it is not widely known that Marx's vision of the future was a pastoral utopia in which he would be a shepherd in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a philosopher in the evening). Now the 21st century seems destined to see the United States, the greatest bastion of liberal democracy, ruined by Romantic Utopianism.

If classic liberalism is not dead but has changed its name to conservatism, nevertheless it is fighting for its life, routed from its commanding position by an unorganized movement begun two hundred years ago by a few poets and eccentrics loosely committed to a set of absurd simplistic assertions that can hardly be called ideas. Amazing. All we lack now is the kind Caesar. Or will Obama assume that role? *

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." --G. K. Chesterton

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Somerset Maugham, a very popular writer from the1920s through the1950s, presents the critic with a real problem because, although he had undeniable gifts, his achievement was mediocre. The gifts, a lucid, supple style and a born storyteller's ability to move all the elements -- characters, actions, words -- in one direction to a destined end, are admirable and you keep expecting them to produce a masterpiece, but they invariably disappoint. "Why?" is the question the critic must answer.

The first thing he published, in 1898, was a novel, and he continued to write novels and stories, but from 1907 until the 1930s he was mainly known as a writer of witty drawing-room comedies. His semi-autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage (1915) is of some interest, but the novel as a form was really beyond him. The short story running to about 10,000 words, was his medium; much longer stories are unfocused, and much shorter ones tend to be inconsequential. His aim, as he said, was to tell interesting stories, and he worked to create a style that was clear, simple, and euphonious. No one can read his stories without recognizing these qualities.

Here's the opening of "The Treasure":

Richard Harenger was a happy man. Notwithstanding what the pessimists, from Ecclesiastes onwards, have said, this is not so rare a thing to find in this unhappy world, but Richard Harenger knew it, and that is a very rare thing indeed.

In those two sentences the clarity and simplicity are obvious, and the balance and emphasis of the second sentence is beautifully graceful. There is something else here which Maugham always spoke of when he wrote about his technique: plot. He thought that stories should have a beginning, middle, and end, that they should have a point, and that the material should be so arranged -- the plot -- as to move inexorably to its end. Although we will not know it fully until the last sentence, we are reading a story about the nature of Richard Harenger's happiness, and the announcement here alerts our attention. The clever plotting is furthered, and disguised, by the smooth surface of the story which half-conceals the writer's subtle effects. Note this description of the maid:

. . . she was certainly comely, in another class of life you might almost have said a handsome, woman.

The fastidious, class-based choice of adjectives -- "comely," "handsome" -- tells us how, with the faintest touch of irony, the protagonist's class consciousness pervades his smallest thought, advancing the plot and point of the story.

What happens is that Richard Harenger hires a maid (Pritchard) who turns out to be the treasure of the title, perfect in every way. Then one evening, quite by chance and contrary to their usual behavior, he and Pritchard go to the movies, have supper, go dancing, and wind up in bed together. When he awakes next morning, he's horrified by his behavior: "How idiotic to lose the best parlor maid a man ever had just for an hour's folly. . . . Richard Harenger was a very unhappy man." Then Pritchard comes in as usual, bringing him his letters and the papers, putting out his clothes for the day, selecting a tie and so on, behaving as if nothing had happened.

He knew that never by word nor gesture would she ever refer to the fact that for a moment their relations had been other than those of master and servant. Richard Harenger was a very happy man.

How are we meant to read this story? On the surface -- and remember how smooth it is, giving the impression that surface is everything -- this is an amusing story about how a moment's indiscretion threatens a man's happiness, but it is precisely the harping on happiness/unhappiness that makes us question the surface; we are forced to question the context of the dichotomy. He is unhappy when faced with the consequences of normal human behavior, happy when that is suppressed, replaced by the "master and servant" relationship. In that light, Richard Harenger is a pathetic figure and his characterization as the perfectly appointed gentleman is seen as hollow.

But there are problems with that reading. For one thing, the tone of the whole thing is light and there is no feeling in the story, no emotion at all beyond Harenger's momentary chagrin when he thinks he has spoiled the perfect maid. The absence of feeling is only consistent with the first reading. For another thing, that isn't the way Maugham's mind worked. As he makes clear in The Summing Up, a book about his ideas, and as all his fiction demonstrates, he was an extreme latitudinarian, and he had no strong feelings about anything. He believed, for instance, that people were capable of love, but not for long, and then they might as well move on with no hard feelings. It is very difficult to believe he would have disapproved of Richard Harenger or seen him as a human failure. It remains a light, amusing anecdote neatly finished with some small irony, no more than a shrug of the shoulders.

I've spent a lot of time on "The Treasure" because it tells us, in a small compass, a great deal about the writer. He had a wonderful gift of fluency: he could tell a story beautifully, but then, what kind of story was it? When you finished it, did any residue remain in your mind? He was voluble about the unpredictability of people, about their hidden capacities, but he didn't see very deeply into them, so the characters he created are, like Harenger and Pritchard, very shallow. These are anecdotes, things complete in themselves, finished off with a resounding end. But all good fictions are, like Conrad's Jim, "inscrutable at the heart," and when we finish reading them we are not finished with them at all; they live in our hearts and minds where we turn them over and over again, because good fiction is like life itself -- there is a mystery at its heart.

There are two volumes of his collected stories, The World Over and East and West. The light ones like "The Treasure" are the best. He also wrote some amusing comic satires. When he tried to write weighty stories, the situations he imagines are always melodramatic cliches. He traveled widely, especially in the Pacific and Far East during the 1920s, and many of his stories are set there, with the writer as narrator, staying for a few days with a District Commissioner, say, in a remote station in Borneo, relaxing on the verandah with a cheroot and a gin stengah while the Commissioner tells him a story and the jungle looms in the background. I must say that he manages the role very well, and I'm usually a sucker for it, but sometimes it gets a bit tiresome.

When Maugham defended his writing methods, which ran counter to the canons of the day, his tone was aggrieved, as if he were being persecuted. In The Summing Up, a book about his literary and philosophical ideas, he says again and again that he doesn't care about his critics, an obvious giveaway. Literary people certainly regarded him with contempt, but I doubt if it were for his style; it's much more likely that it was because he made a lot of money writing for magazines and was admired by Philistines. Of course he resented their attitude; in fact resented the whole serious literary world he could never break into, and his insinuations are a little pathetic.

Some people have taken up Maugham as a case of a good writer maligned by fashionable snobs, and I'm sorry to say they're conservatives. The argument is that since the cultural elite, lefties since the 1920s, dislike such a fellow, conservatives must rally round to his support. Unfortunately, no matter how sympathetic we may be, we cannot evade the judgment that he was a second rate writer, and conservatives make themselves look stupid by championing him. Partisanship of this sort is contemptible.

This kind of partisanship is also apparent in the admiration for Flannery O'Connor, a very second-rate writer. Being a devout Catholic and scorning the fashionable literary scene does not, alas, make one a good writer. Her conceptions of the way her characters think, like her plots, are always cliches, and no amount of piety will make her a good writer.

I have not yet answered the question: why, with all his gifts, Maugham is mediocre? He himself attributed his limitations to the absence of love. As he says in The Summing Up:

Though I have been in love a good many times, I have never experienced the bliss of requited love . . . never having felt some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers alone can give.

It is true that homosexual writers often suffer from the limitations he describes, but I don't think it's the whole answer. A clue lies in his remark that he's been in love "a good many times." No one who knows love could say that, and the reason he could never know love, I think, was his point of view, his extreme latitudinarianism. We have considered writers with all kinds of views in this series, and that has never been an issue. Victorians thought a writer had to be moral to be good; Communists that he had to believe in the proletariat; modernists that he couldn't be a conservative; reactionaries that he couldn't be a modernist; postmodernists that he had to be amoral and unintelligible; and so on, but so far we have rejected the idea of an indispensable quality. After studying Somerset Maugham, however, I'm tempted to offer, provisionally, one thing I think a writer must have: a passionate feeling about something. Everything follows from that. *

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" --Mark Twain

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My subject, country magazines since the 1960s, is probably quite unknown to my readers, but since this series is intended to broaden the horizons of conservatives beyond the immediate confines of politics, and since the subject ultimately has a political bearing of some importance, I think it shall be of interest.

In the late 1960s and on through the 1970s there sprang up a number of magazines with names like Wood Heat Quarterly and Farmstead, cheaply printed on newspaper stock, founded by hippie homesteaders, and some of the editors were surprisingly able. Practical articles (e.g. "How to Build a Hen House") predominated, but there were reflective pieces, too. Here are some of the contributions my wife and I made to a monthly, Rural Delivery, in Nova Scotia: Jo Ann, the garden editor, wrote a monthly column about growing flowers and herbs, and some of the things I wrote about were: my teenage years on a farm, signs of the seasons, cutting and storing ice from a pond, how to make a dill pickle crock, and the significance of material objects in our lives. At the same time another columnist wrote about language, one covered forestry, a couple wrote a column about their sheep farm, a Newfoundlander wrote about his life on an island, and they were all well written. RD was better than most country magazines, but it was not unique.

At the same time, a slick upscale magazine, Country Journal, was published in Vermont, catering to a new population, inspired by the general Greenism of the time, that had been taking over the State since the mid 1960s. I've never thought of a better name than the one I gave them at the time, Country Fakes. They came to Vermont to live a nice, clean country life and, in search of its signs and symbols, they turned to Country Journal. It contained practical articles, but they lacked the earnestness of those in the hippie homesteader magazines. As an editor once explained to Jo Ann, "None of our readers are going to do any of these things, but they're entertained by reading about them." Country Journal was a very sharp production, the most sophisticated country magazine I've ever seen. Everything about it -- layout, typography, its whole appearance -- was tasteful, while it retained an overall impression of rustic Vermont solidity. A friend told me that the two owners had worked at Life magazine.

General interest magazines -- Saturday Evening Post, Life, Colliers -- were popular from the 1920s into the 1960s because they appealed to a large and growing homogenous middleclass market, people who, despite regional variations, listened to the same popular music, watched the same movies, and shared a patriotic faith that carried them through World War II. That much of that culture was superficial; that there were stronger currents under the surface is irrelevant to the argument: general interest magazines collapsed with the dissolution of the middleclass consensus in the 1960s, as the audience fragmented. A similar audience shift happened to the country magazines later. The first hippie homesteaders completely disappeared by 1980, leaving their yurts and communes for jobs in Daddy's bank, killing off the hippie homesteader country magazines. A few tried to adapt by becoming slick and dropping the old country articles for lavish photo spreads about home decor or fancy gardens, hoping to capture the interest of the new audience now dominating the countryside, the hybrid of Country Fakes and yuppies, but those magazines failed, too. The Country Journal owners were smart; they sold out at the top of the market, and the magazine immediately began to deteriorate. Passing through the hands of various publishing conglomerates, getting worse and worse, it finally perished in the early 1990s.

Looking back at all those magazines, the most interesting thing about them today is their freedom from ideology. Aside from a generally pro-countryside orientation, they had no axes to grind. A writer could champion "organic" gardening or the use of chemicals, could advocate clear cutting or selective forestry, could preach tractors or workhorses.

The successors to those magazines today are not many, they are all slick, and they are relentlessly ideological. Some are frankly politically left, but all share the same Green ideology and ardently support "organic" farming and all the practices associated with it. While some of the practices are sound, the ideas behind them are not.

Their audience is composed of the spiritual descendants of the first readers of the country magazines of the 1970s, the hippie homesteaders, and like their earlier counterparts, they aspire to the country life but don't do much about it. Satisfaction comes from browsing the pages, soaking up the rays of heartfelt concern for Nature, of a blissful future on the smiling land, etc., etc. It is the old utopian vision, peculiarly American, of the Beautiful Simple Country Life, peddled by gurus since 1790, when J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published Letters From an American Farmer, to the present day when Wendell Berry is the guru. That has always been the mission of these magazines -- to push a vision of an illusory countryside. That it should take on such a rigid, doctrinaire, militant form now is a consequence of the informal alliance with the Greens, who are intent on gaining power, via legislatures, courts, and administrative fiat over our lives. It is a Cause of Great Import, and while they are not consciously directed, there is a clear feeling in these magazines that a struggle is in progress and it's Us against Them.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of country utopianism is revealed in this anecdote. One of the country magazines we wrote for was the Canadian counterpart of Country Journal published in Ontario, Harrowsmith. An editor commissioned us to write an essay telling how to raise an orphan lamb from birth to chops. Such lambs are not uncommon; a ewe may die or have twins or reject one. The nursery rhyme about Mary and the little lamb is such a one. We knew enough by then (the early 1980s) about the audience of such a slick magazine to know they would not relish a description of slaughtering and butchering, so we wrote to the editor about it and he reassured us. Still leery, I hitched the mare to the express wagon and drove three miles to a phone to call the editor, warning him that there'd be a lot of metaphorical blood in the article, but again he brushed off my fears. We had raised many animals, but never sheep, so I did much research and consulted local sheepmen. Jo Ann did the nice bits about Mary's little lamb, and I handled the practical side: how to house and feed the lamb, how to wean it, how to build a manger, and finally, how to kill and skin and cut up the carcass.

In such an essay I try to be absolutely clear, simple, and cogent, and I was proud of it. Even if you knew nothing, you could read that article and do the job from start to finish. They were aghast at Harrowsmith. First we had to cut out all the horrid bits. When the lamb was ready for, uh, slaughter it should be taken to someone who did that sort of thing, and nothing more should be said about it. Then they suggested places in the rest of the piece where it could be tarted up with cute phrases. The point here is the aversion to reality; the countryside must be presented in a sanitized form.

Now my country writing career is again threatened (when we refused to alter the essay, Harrowsmith dumped us), and for the same reason. We write for a slick country magazine, a piously Green, "organic" quarterly edited by a couple, ardent believers in The Beautiful Simple Country Life, happy with my innocuous vignettes of old-fashioned country life. Unfortunately, I'm running out of that sort of thing, and there have been signs that the editors are uneasy with the realistic tones in my recent work. Now they have rejected my latest piece, on predators, saying readers wouldn't stand for it, and I should submit something more "benevolent." So if I describe the shooting of a wildcat that was killing my chickens, it is the same faux pas I committed when I described the slaughter of a lamb; that is, I have told the truth about something squeamish folks would rather not hear about.

I have gone on about this because it illustrates, in an obvious way, the aversion to realism of the countryside branch of Greenism, itself a movement based on lies and fantasies. If we examine this theme, we see that it is the predominant note of the present moment. It is not an exaggeration to point out that the policies, both foreign and domestic, of the present administration are fantasies. To think that posing as guilty penitents before the rulers of Russia or Iran will advance our interests, or to think that virtually nationalizing our economy will restore prosperity -- what are these notions but fantasies, and like the silly ideas of country magazines and the preposterous ones of Greens, they are peculiarly childish and unserious. This is the keynote of our time, the public voice of yuppieism, expounded by a cohort who never grew up.

Conservatives criticize the administration, but the childish nature of their fantasies and even the fantasies themselves, are not seen for what they are: I mean, to criticize the administration's foreign policy as if it were a debatable strategy is absurd -- it is nothing more than juvenile wishfulness. It is, perhaps, too much to expect conservatives to know anything about countryside utopianism, but their ignorance of the dire significance of Greenism is a calamity. Of course, they have been poorly served by conservative publications, which display astonishing ignorance of the subject; they regularly publish articles that accept the theses of global warming and man-made climate change. I have been trying, for more than 20 years, to interest conservative editors in the subject, and I have gotten nowhere (except in these pages). The point is that fantasy is all-pervasive today, not just in the political administration but also in a major movement, Greenism, destructive of the environment, private property, and prosperity, and is a related utopian movement directed at our agricultural economy. If we can recognize these distinct entities for what they are, and if we can see the thematic link between them, we can generate much more effective criticism, especially because conservatives have one advantage: they are realists. Fantasy is attractive so long as it remains a dream; put into practice it is a disaster. We have a great opportunity before us -- to expose the puerile fantasies so prevalent today by the constant criticism of well-informed realism.

And your first act will be to find a magazine that will publish my country essays! *

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." --John Bright