An Emersonian Interlude

Harold Bloom is already influencing my buying, as is evidenced by the fact that I purchased a reading copy of Don Quixote simply because I didn't feel like attempting either the Dryden translation in The Great Books of the Western World or whatever inferior version pops up in The Harvard Classics.  Besides [1] Cervantes ($3.75), I found [2] five out of six volumes of Great Religions of Modern Man in hardcover ($.85 each); only Catholicism is missing [3] The Templar Revelation:  Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (I know it's trash, but it was like new for only $.85) [4] Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (both volumes pristine except for the inscription in each at $8.50 apiece) [5] The Cantos of Ezra Pound (new at Borders $15.57) and {6] The Best of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Classics Club editions I used to collect as a child ($1.70).

Of this last I plunged in and read both the Introduction and "The American Scholar", a strange essay that  mightily prefigures Leaves of Grass.  Emerson's optimism regarding the young country's cultural potential (Bloom calls him "the mind of America") is unmistakable, but his faith that the great novels of the next few decades would find their place by describing "the lowest class in the state . . . the near, the low, the common . . . the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life"--in other words, that prose fiction would echo the subject matter of Whitman's poetry--has largely been proven wrong.  Henry James portrayed the American ruling class on European holiday, his disciple Edith Wharton their native Manhattan and New England habitats.  Faulkner chronicled Southern aristocracy in decline, Fitzgerald prep school boys at Princeton and on the French Riviera, Hemingway those same prep school boys in Paris and Spain, or at war in some exotic European locale.  Booth Tarkington's Ambersons were the dynastic family of their town, as were Sinclair Lewis' myriad heroes.  William Dean Howells is a less competent Wharton; Jack London wrote of adventures at sea or in the Frozen North; Melville likewise centered his prose on ships and the men who sailed in them.

Before Steinbeck's magnum opus of 1939, only Twain regularly fulfilled Emerson's prophecy, and even he devolved into theological fairy tales ("The Mysterious Stranger") and parodies on medieval themes ("A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc").  I ignore Crane because his preponderant work is another Hemingwayesque coming of age in time of war tale, and Frank Norris because he is almost never read.  I suppose Willa Cather should be counted, although "O! Pioneers" seems to have more in common with the pluck and luck of Alger and the dynastic hagiographies of Howells than with Huck Finn.  O. Henry, homely enough in his choice of characters and settings, did not write novels, and thus is excused from contention.

But there is much richness here, too, a wealth that must repay multiple rereadings and reconsiderations, which is the very core of great writing and great ideas.  I was struck by the following passage:

"In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.  Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead.  Worse yet, he must accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. . . [He must accept] the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society." (p.15)

Compare this to Schopenhauer in "The Wisdom of Life":

"The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellowmen, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude.  For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,--the less, indeed, other people can be to him.  This is why a high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.  True, if quality of intellect could be made up for by quantity, it might be worth while to live even in the great world; but unfortunately, a hundred fools together will not make one wise man." (p. 20)